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By Root 1058 0

walk the streets of Tel Aviv to look at handsome young men. But there were no handsome young men this rainy Saturday morning, either in Zangwill Street or in Zangwill Alley, or in Sokolov Street from which she came to Basle Street, or in Basle Street or anywhere else. Perhaps she thought about the deep shady orchard behind her parents' house in Rovno, or about Ira Steletskaya, the engineer's wife from Rovno who burned herself to death in the abandoned hut belonging to Anton the coachman's son. Or about the Tarbuth gymnasium and the vistas of river and forest. Or the lanes of old Prague and her student days there, and someone about whom apparently my mother never told us, or her sisters, or her best friend, Lilenka. Occasionally someone ran past, in a hurry to get out of the rain. Occasionally a cat went by, and my mother called to it, trying to ask something, to exchange views, or feelings, to ask for some simple feline advice, but every cat she addressed fled from her in a panic as though even from a distance it could smell that she was doomed.

Around midday she returned to her sister's, where they were shocked at her appearance because she was frozen and soaked through and because she jokingly complained that there were no handsome young men in the streets of Tel Aviv: if only she had found some, she might have tried to seduce them, men always looked at her with desire in their eyes, but soon, very soon there would be nothing left to desire. Her sister Haya hurried to run her a hot bath, and my mother got in; she refused to taste a crumb of food because any food made her feel sick; she slept for a couple of hours, and in the late afternoon she dressed, put on the wet raincoat and the boots that were still damp and cold from her morning walk, and went out again as the doctor had ordered to search the streets of Tel Aviv for handsome young men. And this afternoon, because the rain had let up a bit, the streets were not so empty and my mother did not wander aimlessly, she found her way to the corner of Dizengoff Street and JNF Boulevard and from there she walked down Dizengoff Street past the junctions with Gordon Street and Frishman Street with her pretty black handbag hanging from her shoulder, looking at the beautiful shop windows and cafés and getting a glimpse of what Tel Aviv considered as Bohemian life, although to her it all looked tawdry and secondhand, like an imitation of an imitation of something she found pathetic and miserable. It all seemed to deserve and need compassion, but her compassion had run out. Toward evening she went home, refused to eat anything again, drank a cup of black coffee and then another, and sat down to look at some book that fell upside down at her feet when her eyes closed, and for some ten minutes or so Uncle Tsvi and Auntie Haya thought they heard light, irregular snoring. Then she woke up and said she needed to rest, that she had a feeling that the specialist had been quite right when he told her to walk around the town for several hours every day, and she had a feeling that tonight she would fall asleep early and would finally manage to sleep very deeply. By half past eight her sister had made her bed again with fresh sheets, and slid a hot-water bottle under the quilt because the nights were cold and the rain had just started up again and was beating against the shutters. My mother decided to sleep fully dressed, and to make quite sure that she didn't wake up again to spend an agonized night in the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of tea from the vacuum flask that her sister had left by her bedside, waited for it to cool down a little, and when she drank it, she took her sleeping pills. If I had been there with her in that room overlooking the backyard in Haya and Tsvi's apartment at that moment, at half past eight or a quarter to nine on that Saturday evening, I would certainly have tried my hardest to explain to her why she mustn't. And if I did not succeed, I would have done everything possible to stir her compassion, to make her take pity on her only child. I would have