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By Root 282 0

gently and patiently, as though surprised she was so slow on the uptake. She raised her hand and slapped him hard on the cheek and then, to her own amazement, she continued to hit him with both hands, on his head, his shoulders, his back, with fury, as though in a fight with a bitter enemy or teaching a lesson to a recalcitrant mule. Gideon curled up silently under the hail of blows, with his head hunched between his shoulders, waiting for the onslaught to end. Then he looked up at her with wide eyes and asked, "Why do you hate me?" Startled, she hugged him with tears in her eyes, kissed his head and allowed him to stay at home on his own with his kangaroo, and on her return, less than an hour later, she said she was sorry. "It's all right," the child said, "people get angry sometimes." But he redoubled his silence and hardly spoke a word until his mother came to collect him a couple of days later. Neither he nor Gili told her about their quarrel. Before he left, he picked up the rubber bands, the bookend, the salt shaker and the prescription pad from the rug and put them away. He put the kangaroo in its drawer. Gili leaned over and kissed him lovingly on both cheeks; he kissed her politely on her shoulder, with clenched lips.

3

SHE WALKED FASTER, feeling more certain with each step that Gideon had indeed fallen asleep on the back seat and was now locked in the dark bus, parked for the night in front of Mirkin's house. She imagined him, woken by the cold and the sudden silence, trying to get out of the bus, pushing at the closed doors, thumping on the rear window. He had probably forgotten to bring his mobile phone, as usual, just as she had forgotten to take hers when she left home to go and wait for him at the bus stop.

A fine rain had begun to fall, and the breeze had dropped. Crossing the dark clump of pines, she reached the faint streetlamp at the Olive Street exit of the Memorial Garden. Here she almost tripped on an overturned trash can. Carefully avoiding the can, Gili Steiner walked briskly up Olive Street. The shuttered houses were shrouded in a murky mist and the well-kept gardens seemed to be sleeping in the winter chill, surrounded by hedges of privet, myrtle or thuja. Here and there a splendid new villa, built on the ruins of an older house, leaned out over the street, covered in climbing plants. For some years now wealthy city people had been buying up old single-story houses in Tel Ilan, razing them to the ground and replacing them with larger villas adorned with cornices and awnings. Soon, Gili Steiner thought to herself, Tel Ilan would stop being a village and become a holiday resort for the wealthy. She was going to leave her own home to her nephew Gideon, and had already drawn up a will to that effect. She could see Gideon clearly now, wrapped in his warm overcoat, sleeping fitfully on the back seat of the locked bus, parked in front of Mirkin's house.

She shivered in the cold as she crossed the corner of Synagogue Square. The drizzle had stopped now. An empty plastic bag billowed in the breeze and blew past her shoulder like a pale ghost. Walking faster, Gili Steiner turned from Willow Street into Cemetery Road, at the end of which Mirkin lived, across the road from the teacher Rachel Franco and her old father, Pesach Kedem. Once, when he was about twelve, Gideon had turned up alone at his aunt's house in Tel Ilan because he had quarreled with his mother and decided to run away from home. His mother had locked him in his room because he had failed an exam, and he had taken some money from her handbag, escaped by the balcony and come to Tel Ilan. He had a little bag with him, containing socks and underwear and one or two clean shirts, and he asked Gili to take him in. She hugged the boy, made him lunch, gave him the battered kangaroo he had played with when he was little, and then she rang his mother, even though relations between them were frosty. Gideon's mother came the next day and picked the child up without saying a single word to her sister, and Gideon gave in, sadly said goodbye to