The bang was tremendous. Both of us flew out of our skin, and Uri slammed on the brakes. We sat in silence, barely breathing. The road was empty, there was no one around. By some miracle it took us a moment to fully grasp, the glass had not broken. The only mark in it was a divot the size of a fingerprint almost exactly between my eyes. A moment later I saw the rock resting in the recess for the windshield wipers. Had it gone through the glass it might have killed me. I got out of the car, my legs trembling, and took hold of the stone. It filled my palm, and when I closed my fingers around it, it fit perfectly in my fist. Here is the first, I thought. The first stone to mark my grave. The first stone placed like a period at the end of my life. Soon the mourners will come bringing stone after stone to anchor the long sentence that was my life to its final, strangled syllable—
And then, my child, I thought of you. I realized that I didn’t care if the others came. That the only one whose stone I wanted was yours, Dov. The stone that can mean so many things to a Jew, but in your hand could mean only one.
My child. My love and my regret, as you were when I first laid eyes on you, a tiny old man who hadn’t had time to brush off his ancient expression, naked and misshapen in the nurse’s arms. Dr. Bartov, my old friend who broke the rules so that I could be present, turned to me and asked if I wanted to cut the cord, bulging, whitish blue and twisted, so much thicker than I’d ever imagined, more like a rope for tying a boat, and without thinking I agreed. Just like this, he said, he who had done it a thousand times before. So I did, and suddenly it began to dance like a snake in my hands, and blood spurted around the room, splashing the walls like the scene of a heinous crime, and you opened your eyes, I swear you opened your tiny wet eyes, my child, and looked at me, as if to fix in your mind forever the face of the one who had separated you from her. At that moment I was filled with something. It was as if a pressure had blown into me, expanding everything, pushing at the walls from within, as if I were being besieged from the inside, if that’s possible, and I thought I would explode from it all, from love and regret, Dov, love and regret as I never thought possible. In that instant I understood with surprise that I had become your father. The surprise lasted less than a minute because your mother began to hemorrhage, and one nurse gathered you up and hurried you away, while the other pushed me out the door and deposited me in the waiting room, where the men who had not yet seen their children looked at my bloody shoes and trembling lip and began to cough and shake.
I want you to know that I never gave up being your father, Dovik. Sometimes driving to work I found myself talking aloud to you. Pleading, reasoning with you. Or consulting with you about an especially difficult case. Or just telling you about the aphids attacking my tomatoes, or the simple omelet I made for myself one morning before your mother was awake, and ate alone in the bright silence of the kitchen. And when she fell ill, it was you I talked to while I sat in hard plastic chairs waiting for her to emerge from another procedure, another treatment, another test. I made a little scarecrow of you in my head and I talked as if you could hear me. The second time they bombed the number 18 bus I was two blocks away. Blood, so much blood, Dovi. The remains were everywhere. I watched the special Orthodox arrive to collect the splattered dead, to scrape the bits from the sidewalk with tweezers, to go up a ladder to peel a shred of ear from a high branch, to retrieve a child’s thumb from a balcony. Afterwards I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, not even your mother, but I talked to you. True Kindness, that’s what they call themselves, the ones who arrive in their kippot and their Day-Glo