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By Root 1184 0

a stout length of cord. All the rest—dresses, skirts, shoes, underwear, notebooks, stockings, head scarves, neckerchiefs, and even envelopes full of photographs from her childhood—he stuffed into waterproof sacks that he had brought from the National Library. I accompanied him like a puppy from room to room and watched his frenzy of activity; I neither helped nor hindered him. Soundlessly I watched my father furiously pull out the drawer of her bedside table and empty all the contents, cheap jewelry, notebooks, pill boxes, a book, a handkerchief, an eyeshade, and some loose change, into one of his sacks. I did not say a word. And my mother's powder compact and hairbrush and her toilet things and her toothbrush. Everything. I stood hushed and terrified, leaning on the doorpost and watching my father tear her blue dressing gown off the hook in the bathroom with a ripping sound and cram it into one of the sacks. Was this the way Christian neighbors stood and stared, aghast, not knowing their own hearts because of the conflicting emotions, as their Jewish neighbors were taken away by force and crammed into cattle trucks? Where he took the sacks, whether he gave it all away to the poor people in the transit camps or the victims of that winter's floods, he never told me. By evening not a trace of her was left. But a year later, when my father's new wife was settling in, a packet of six plain hairpins appeared that had somehow managed to survive hidden for a whole year in the narrow gap between the bedside table and the side of the closet. My father pursed his lips and threw this away too.

A few weeks after the cleaners came in and the apartment was purged, my father and I gradually went back to holding a sort of daily staff meeting in the kitchen each evening. I began, telling him briefly about my day at school. He told me about an interesting conversation he had had that day, standing between the bookshelves, with Professor Goitein or Doctor Rotenstreich. We exchanged views about the political situation, about Begin and Ben-Gurion or about General Neguib's military coup in Egypt. We hung up a card in the kitchen again and wrote down, in our handwriting that was no longer similar, what we had to buy at the grocer's or the greengrocer's, and that we both had to go to have our hair cut on Monday evening, or to buy a little present for Aunt Lilenka for her new diploma or for Grandma Shlomit, whose age was a closely guarded secret, for her birthday.

After a few more months my father resumed his habit of polishing his shoes till they shone when the electric light hit them, shaving at seven o'clock in the evening, putting on a starched shirt and a silk tie, dampening his hair before he brushed it back, splashing himself with aftershave, and going out "to chat with his friends" or "for a discussion about work."

I was left alone at home, to read, dream, write and rewrite. Or I would go out and roam the wadis, checking the state of the fences around the no-man's-land and minefields along the ceasefire line that divided Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan. As I walked in the dark, I hummed to myself, Ti-da-di-da-di. I no longer aspired "to die or to conquer the mountain." I wanted everything to stop. Or at least I wanted to leave home and leave Jerusalem for good and go and live in a kibbutz: to leave all the books and feelings behind me and live a simple village life, a life of brotherhood and manual labor.

62

MY MOTHER ended her life at her sister's apartment in Ben Yehuda Street, Tel Aviv, in the night between Saturday and Sunday, January 6, 1952. There was a hysterical debate going on in the country at the time about whether Israel should demand and accept reparations from Germany on account of property of Jews murdered during the Hitler period. Some people agreed with David Ben-Gurion that the murderers must not be allowed to inherit the looted Jewish property, and that the monetary value should definitely be repaid in full to Israel to help with the absorption of the survivors. Others, headed by the opposition leader