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By Root 1166 0

stool. Just before the War of Independence the room where my mother was staying had been let to the head of Haganah intelligence, Yigael Yadin, who later, when the state was established, became Major-General Yigael Yadin, deputy chief of staff and head of operations of the newly formed Israeli army, but he continued to rent that room. Consequently the kitchen where my mother sat up that night, and the previous night too, was a historic kitchen, because during the war several informal meetings were held there that crucially shaped the course of the conflict. There is no way of knowing whether my mother thought about this in the course of that night, between one strong coffee and the next, but if she did, it is doubtful that she found it of interest.

***

On Saturday morning she told Haya and Tsvi that she had decided to go for a walk and look at handsome young men, as per the doctor's instructions. She borrowed an umbrella and a pair of lined rubber boots from her sister and went for a walk in the rain. There cannot have been many people in the streets of north Tel Aviv that wet and windy Saturday morning. That morning, January 5,1952, the temperature in Tel Aviv was five or six degrees Celsius. My mother left her sister's apartment in 175 Ben Yehuda Street at eight or eight-thirty. She may have crossed Ben Yehuda Street and turned left, or northward, toward Nordau Boulevard. She hardly encountered any shop windows on her walk, apart from the unlit window of the Tnuva Dairy where a greenish poster was fixed to the inside of the glass with four strips of brown sticky paper, showing a plump village girl against a background of verdant meadows, and above her head, against the bright blue sky, a cheery legend declared: "Milk every morning and milk every night will give you a life of good health and delight." There were still many vacant lots, the remains of the sand dunes, between the buildings in Ben Yehuda Street that winter, full of dead thistles and squills densely covered with white snails as well as scrap iron and rain-soaked rubbish. My mother saw the rows of plastered buildings that already, three or four years after they were erected, showed signs of dilapidation: peeling paint, crumbling plaster turning green with mildew, iron railings rusting in the salt sea air, balconies closed in with hardboard and plywood as in a refugee camp, shop signs that had come off their hinges, trees that were dying in the gardens for want of loving care, run-down storage sheds between the buildings, made of reused planks, corrugated iron, and sheets of tarpaulin. Rows of garbage cans, some of which had been overturned by alley cats, the contents spilling out onto the gray concrete pavement. Washing lines stretched across the street from balcony to balcony. Here and there rain-soaked white and colored underwear whirled helplessly on the lines in the high wind. My mother was very tired that morning, and her head must have been heavy from lack of sleep, hunger, and all the black coffee and sleeping pills, so that she walked slowly like a sleepwalker. She may have left Ben Yehuda Street before she reached Nordau Boulevard and turned right into Belvedere Alley, which despite its name had no view but only low plastered buildings made of concrete blocks, with rusting iron railings, and this alley led her to Motskin Avenue, which was not an avenue at all but a short, wide, empty street, only half built and partly unpaved, and from Motskin Avenue her tired feet took her to Tahon Lane and on to Dizengoff Street, where it began to rain heavily, but she forgot about the umbrella that was hanging on her arm and walked on bareheaded in the rain, with her pretty handbag hanging from her shoulder, and she crossed Dizengoff Street and went wherever her feet carried her, perhaps to Zangwill Street and then on to Zangwill Alley, and now she was really lost, without the faintest idea how to get back to her sister's or why she had to get back, and she did not know why she had come out except to follow the instructions of the specialist who had told her to