on me. But days passed and I heard nothing from them. In the end I had no choice but to go home to New York, since by then I’d been thrown out of Oxford. Hurt and angry as I was, I still did everything I could to find them. But I turned up nothing. The only sign that they were still alive somewhere was the box of my belongings that arrived at my parents’ apartment half a year later without a return address.
Eventually I came to accept the strange logic in their departure, a logic I’d been schooled in during my brief time with them. They were prisoners of their father’s, locked within the walls of their own family, and in the end it wasn’t possible for them to belong to anyone else. I’d expected nothing less than their unbroken silence all these years, and never thought I’d see them again—what they did, they did without compromise, free of the complications imposed on the rest of us by indecision, wavering, regret. But though I moved on, and fell in love more than once again, I never stopped thinking about Yoav, or wondering where he was and who he had become.
Then one day in the late summer of 2005, six years after they disappeared, I received a letter from Leah. In it she wrote that in June of 1999, a week after celebrating his seventieth birthday, their father had killed himself in the house on Ha’Oren Street. The maid had found him in his study the following day. On the table next to him was a sealed letter to his children, an empty bottle of sleeping pills, and a bottle of scotch, a drink Leah had never seen him touch in his life. There was also a small booklet from the Hemlock Society. Nothing had been left to chance. Across the room on another table was the small collection of watches that had belonged to Weisz’s own father, which he had kept wound since his father’s arrest in Budapest in 1944. While he was alive, the watches had accompanied Weisz wherever he traveled so that he would be able to wind them on schedule. When the maid arrived, Leah wrote, all of the watches had stopped.
Her letter was written in small, neat script at odds with its loose and haphazard composition. There was little by way of a greeting, as if only months had passed since we’d seen each other rather than six years. After the news about her father’s suicide, the letter went on at some length about a painting that had hung on the wall of his study, the room in which he’d taken his life. It had been there for as long as she remembered, Leah wrote, and yet she knew there was a time when it had not been there, when her father was still searching for it, just as he had searched for and repossessed every other piece of furniture in that room, the same pieces that had sat in his own father’s study in Budapest until the night in 1944 when the Gestapo had arrested his parents. Another person would have considered them lost forever. But that was what set her father apart, what led him into his field and distinguished him in it above all others: Unlike people, he used to say, the inanimate doesn’t simply disappear. The Gestapo confiscated the most valuable items in the apartment, which were many, since Weisz’s family on his mother’s side had been wealthy. These were loaded—along with mountains of jewelry, diamonds, money, watches, paintings, rugs, silverware, china, furniture, linens, porcelains, and even cameras and stamp collections—onto the forty-two car “Gold Train” the SS used to evacuate Jewish possessions as the Soviet troops advanced toward Hungary. What was left behind the neighbors looted. In the years after the War, when Weisz returned to Budapest, the first thing he did was knock on these neighbors’ doors and, as the color washed out of their faces, entered their apartments with a small gang of hired thugs who seized the stolen furniture, carrying it out on their backs. A woman who had grown up and moved away, taking his mother’s vanity table with her, Weisz hunted down in the city’s outskirts; entering her house in the middle of the night, he helped himself to some wine, left the dirty glass on the table, and carried out the vanity himself, all while the woman slept soundly in the other room. Later, in