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was on her way to hospital to donate blood because the mother of a friend of hers had to have surgery. He suggested going straight to the hospital and meeting her there.
    For a full hour a nurse tried unsuccessfully to find a veinin her arm from which to draw blood. And then the man appeared, engulfed in the scent of Spain, lacking the signs of the strain of war that were so evident on the faces of everyone in the hospital. He had lots of veins, he said, and volunteered to donate blood in her place.
    For the next few days they met in the small bedroom with the plywood room divider that Leon had built, making no attempt to be quiet. Every evening the two students flirted and flattered and invited them to the kitchen for a meal, but they demurred in Spanish and stayed locked in her room.
    He went back to Barcelona ten days later and called off his engagement; he wanted to make his own contribution to the war effort by raising her morale. In those days, everyone contributed to the war effort to the best of his ability.
    Only after they were married did he tell her that for a long time he had been mulling over his engagement to that wealthy woman, who took herself far too seriously and was concerned mainly with how she looked and her designer clothes and with inane chatter with her girlfriends in Barcelona cafés. But although he had already fallen in love with her during those summer months they spent together in Israel, he didn’t have the nerve to call off the wedding at the last moment. It was only when she wrote to him about her contribution to the war effort and he arrived in the country he loved so much and was suddenly in mortal danger and could actually feel for himself the awful tension of being in a war zone that he was able to muster the courage to facehis family and inform them that, actually, he didn’t want to marry his fiancée.
    His parents breathed a sigh of relief. It turned out that they hadn’t really liked his choice, but had never dared tell him so.
    But even before he made a formal proposal of marriage, and even before she had gone to spend three months with him in Barcelona, he called her at her sister’s apartment, where she was staying because her brother-in-law had been called up for a long term of service, and informed her that he was coming with his parents to spend Passover at his sister’s new apartment in Jerusalem and was inviting himself to the seder at her parents’ home because he wanted to get to know her family.
    â€œWouldn’t you rather be with your own family for the seder?” she asked, and he assured her that after spending most of his time with them, it was more important for him now to meet her family.
    After some intense consultations with her sister, it was decided that if they were to avoid frightening off the prospective bridegroom right at the beginning, it would be best not to invite him to their parents’ apartment in Haifa, but to conduct the seder at the home of their aunt who lived in Bat-Yam, the excuse being that it is easier to get to Bat-Yam from Jerusalem than to Haifa.
    She remembered that just a few months earlier, Leon had told her how shocked he had been the first time he enteredher parents’ apartment in Hapo’el Street in Haifa, by how stark, not to mention wretched, it had appeared; that same apartment that her parents had succeeded in purchasing after huge effort, mortgaging away their lives to move from downtown Haifa to the Hadar neighborhood on the Carmel.
    Her sister had explained to their father that if they didn’t move house, the little one was liable to turn into a pushtakit , or petty criminal, and there’d be no chance of her ever finding a wealthy husband. Alarmed, the parents hurried off in search of an apartment that would suit their means, and after much effort and crippling loans, they managed to find one in an excruciatingly ugly building on Hapo’el Street. And it was of this very