I cast my mind back, searching for the moment in which someone had specifically said that Talia Shamir had died in that raid. It didn't take long to determine that there had been no such moment. Michael had never said it, and neither did Mira. What Mira had done was mournfully say Talia's name right after pointing out the man in the picture who had died in the raid. My mind had simply jumped to the conclusion that Talia had died that night too.
Which, I now saw, was a conclusion I should have rejected the moment I'd learned that the Talia in the picture was Michael's wife. For if his wife had died in that raid, Michael would have seen to her body and not driven Esther and Willie to the Klingers.
So why had Mira said that Michael had sacrificed his family for the Irgun?
Without a conscious decision, I found myself approaching Talia's grave, my shoes crunching on the small stones that proliferated the cemetery. As I neared, the inscription on the bottom of her gravestone came into view.
It was now beyond doubt. Here lay Michael's dead wife. But what snared my attention were the final three words of the inscription.
I had seen no trace of a son in Michael's apartment. It was obvious no child resided there with him. But the inscription told me Michael and Talia had had a son named Judah. Perhaps he was dead, too. Yes. That had to be it.
But there had been no pictures of a child in Michael's apartment. And when I'd talked about the guilt I felt over the deaths of my daughters, Michael had not mentioned that he had also lost a child. Almost as if he didn't want to be reminded that his child had ever existed.
Or didn't want me to know about him.
All of a sudden, a chill spread up my spine, making me shiver and causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand. My heartbeat jumped to a faster, erratic rhythm. In my mind a dark suspicion began whispering that I had been wrong this whole time, that the truth I had been blind to was too awful to contemplate.
I began walking, scanning headstones, searching for the name Judah Shamir. I wanted to see his grave. I wanted to know when he died. If I knew, maybe the whispering in my head would cease. I walked along one row of graves after another, and after a while the names of the dead began to blur, so I would not have been able to tell the name of the man or woman or child whose headstone I had just read. All I knew for sure was that none of them was Judah Shamir.
After what might have been twenty or thirty minutes of fruitless searching, I stopped, wiped the sweat off my brow, and looked around. I had covered but a small section of the cemetery. It would take me hours to go through it all. Perhaps there was a quicker way.
Back in the administration office by the entrance, I found the same clerk still peering at the
I asked him whether they kept a list of all those buried in the cemetery.
"Yes," he said, laying his book on the desk. "By year."
"I'm looking for the grave of Judah Shamir. He died somewhere between 1939 and today."
"You don't know exactly when?"
"No. But I know it was after August 1939."
"Very well," he said, though I could tell he found my request odd.
From an open cabinet, he hauled out a stack of large brown ledgers and piled them on top of other papers on his desk.
"Let's see," he said. "Here's 1939."
He flipped open the ledger and ran his finger along the list of names, finding none named Judah Shamir. 1940 through 1943 yielded nothing as well. In April 1944, he found a listing for a man named Elisha Shamir, sixty-five, and raised his eyes to mine, as if hoping I'd be willing to compromise on that person.
"Not the one I'm looking for," I said. "Mine is Judah Shamir, and he couldn't have been older than twelve."
"Hmmm," he said, and lowered his eyes to the ledger.
Fifteen minutes later, he slammed the cover of the 1949 ledger. "No Judah Shamir is buried here."
"Are those ledgers accurate?" I asked, though I anticipated what his answer would be.
"One hundred percent. I log every burial myself. Perhaps this Judah Shamir is buried in another cemetery in the area."
I asked him for a list of cemeteries and he drew one up for me. I thanked him and left.
Back in Tel Aviv, I rang the hair salon from a café. Mira picked up herself. The joy in her voice when she recognized mine was like a cold stab deep in my belly.
"I can't make it tonight," I said, coming off brusque and businesslike, though I hadn't intended to be so.
"What? Why?"
"Something came up. Something important I need to take care of."
