headmaster, Monsieur Boulier. They waited in the living room with Madame Boulier and her asthmatic French bulldog, helping themselves to a plate of butter cookies while their father spoke to the headmaster behind the closed door of his study. When the two men finally emerged from the paneled study, the headmaster accompanied them to the boys’ dormitory where Yoav would live, and made a point of drawing the curtains to point out the view of the wooded park. After embracing his son, Weisz accompanied Leah across town to the house of a retired English teacher where she was to live with two older girls. One was the daughter of an American businessman and his Thai wife, and the other the daughter of the man who had once been the royal engineer to the shah. When Leah got her period for the first time, the Iranian girl gave her a pair of her tiny diamond studs. Leah displayed them in a small box on her windowsill along with other souvenirs she had acquired in her travels. That year was the first and, at least until the point when I knew them, the last that Yoav and Leah lived apart.
Without his children, Weisz grew even more restless. He sent Yoav and Leah postcards from Buenos Aires, St. Petersburg, and Kraków. The messages on the backs of the cards, written in handwriting that will die with his generation (shaky, mangled by its forced leaps from language to language, dignified in its illegibility), always ended in the same way: Take care of each other, my loves. Papa. During the holidays, and sometimes even on weekends, Yoav and Leah would take the train to Paris, Chamonix, Basel, or Milan to meet their father, either in an apartment or a hotel. On these journeys they were sometimes mistaken for twins. They traveled in the smoking car, Leah with her head against the window and Yoav resting his chin on his hand as the silhouette of the Alps hurtled past, the butts of their cigarettes, held between long, thin fingers, glowing brighter from time to time in the near dark.
Two years after his children began school in Geneva, nine years after he had fled from it, Weisz suddenly decided to return to the house on Ha’Oren Street. He gave his children no explanation. There were many things they simply didn’t talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to coexist in a family. Though he still traveled, the trips always came to an end with Weisz carrying his small suitcase up the overgrown path to the stone house that his wife had once loved.
As for Yoav and Leah, they enjoyed the new freedom they were allowed at school, but in other ways little changed for them. If anything, being forcefully submerged in school life and living so closely with their peers only underscored their separateness, and entrenched them more deeply in their isolation. They ate lunch alone together, and spent their free time in each other’s company, wandering the city or taking boat rides on the lake during which they lost all sense of time. Sometimes they shared an ice cream at one of the cafés near the water, each staring off in the opposite direction, lost in their own thoughts. They didn’t make many friends. During their second year, one of the boys who lived in the dorm with Yoav, an arrogant Moroccan, tried to cajole Leah to go out with him, and when he was coolly rebuffed, he began to spread a rumor that the siblings were having an incestuous affair. They did what they could to encourage the rumor, making a show of lying in each other’s laps and stroking one another’s hair. The affair became an accepted fact among the student body. Even their teachers began to look at them with a mix of fascination, horror, and envy. At a certain point things reached a boil, and Monsieur Boulier felt it was his duty to inform their father about what was going on between his children. He left a message for Weisz, who promptly returned his call from New York. Boulier cleared his throat, tried to approach from one angle, retreated, approached from another, fell into a coughing fit, asked Weisz to hold, was rescued by his wife, who rushed in with a glass of water and a stern look, a look that restored his sense of necessity, and he returned to