absorbed the shock that all of this, all of us, everything he has ever known, is temporary?
And so five minutes later, against my wishes, I found myself in the rental car with you, Ronit’s bag filled with little plastic tubs of food on my lap. The interior was black leather. What is this thing? I demanded. A BMW, you said. A German car? I said. You’re driving me home in a German car? You’re such a big shot that you can’t accept a Hyundai like everyone else? It’s not good enough for you? You have to specially pay extra for a car made by the sons of Nazis? Of death camp guards? Haven’t we had enough of black leather? Let me out of this thing, I said, I’d rather walk. Dad, you pleaded, and I heard something in your voice I didn’t recognize. Something hiding there, in the upper registers. Please, you said. Don’t make me beg. It’s been a long day. And you weren’t wrong, so I turned away from you to glare out the window.
WHEN YOU were a boy, I used to take you with me to the shuk on Friday mornings. You remember, Dova’leh? I knew all the merchants and they knew me. They always had something for me to taste. Get some dates, I would tell you while I locked horns with Zegury, the fruit man, over politics. Five minutes later I would look over and you were plucking them between two fingers, one by one, studying each with exotic remove. I would grab the bag containing the little pathetic collection. Like that we’ll starve, I’d say. I’d pick up two, three heaping handfuls and drop them in. I never saw you eat a single one. You claimed they looked like cockroaches. There was an old Arab at the shuk who used to cut people’s profiles out of black paper. The person would take his place on a crate and the Arab would look at him and snip away. You used to wince as you watched, afraid the Arab would cut himself, which he never did. He would snip maniacally, then hand over the paper essence of his subject’s face. To you he was a genius on the level of Picasso. You were mute in his presence. When no one came to sit, the Arab sharpened the scissors on a stone and hummed a long, convoluted passage. One day I had you and Uri with me and when we reached the Arab, feeling proud or magnanimous, I said, Who wants a portrait, boys? Uri leaped up onto the crate. He summoned all his youthful gravitas and struck a pose. The Arab regarded him through lowered lids, snipped, and out came the proud outline of my Uri. All the glory of a potent life could be read in the aquiline nose. He hopped off the seat and took his likeness, utterly delighted. What did he know of disappointment and death? Nothing, as the Arab’s portrait made clear. Nervously, you took your place on the crate where so many had been sized up and reduced to a single unbroken line by the tremendous artist. The Arab began to snip. You sat very still. Then I saw your eyes flutter and drop to the floor where the accumulated clippings had fallen, the scraps of black paper. You looked up again into the Arab’s eyes, opened your mouth, and screamed. You screamed and sobbed and wouldn’t stop for anything. You’re acting crazy, I told you, shaking you by the shoulders, but you carried on. You cried all the way home, lagging three feet behind us. Uri clutched his profile, worriedly glancing back at you. Later your mother put it into a frame for him. I don’t know what became of yours. Maybe the Arab threw it away. Or kept it in case I came back to claim it, since I’d already paid. But I never went back. After that, you stopped coming with me to the shuk. You see, my boy? You see what I was up against?
YOU DROVE me back to our house, your mother’s and mine, only now it was no longer hers. She was spending her first night underground. Even now I can’t think it. Mrs. Kleindorf, it makes me gag, to think of my wife’s lifeless body packed under two meters of earth. But I don’t shy away from it. I don’t comfort myself by imagining that she is sprinkled around me in the atmosphere, or