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him? Tall, dark hair, glasses?”
    “Yes, I’ve seen him around. I use their fax machine sometimes.”
    “Give him my regards.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Did you take a lot of photos?”
    “Four rolls.”
    “Am I in any of them?”
    “Yes, one.” I didn’t want to look at him, I didn’t want to think about him. He gave up and didn’t speak to me again.
    The buses arrived at the park and by then everyone had to pee. We found bushes and trees. Rafi was using a tree not far from mine. And when I rose and pulled up my underwear I saw that he was looking at me, and not smiling, and not turning away.

    My father met Gitte when they were both sixteen; Gitte’s parents owned a jewelry company with interests in South Africa and the family moved there for a few months. Gitte and my father took violin lessons at the local music academy on the same afternoon, and my father began waiting until Gitte’s lesson was over so he could walk her home. They fell in love, and after she left they exchanged passionate and frequent love letters, until Gitte stopped writing and finally confessed that she had metsomeone else. In fact, so had my father, and he was relieved. He’d met my mother. The two of them tried to escape apartheid by moving to Israel, which later made them laugh at themselves. “From the frying pan into the falafel,” my father used to say.
    My father was an engineer, and he loved to sing classical choral music. He dreamed of joining a choir, but had to content himself with singing in the shower or providing vigorous vocal accompaniment to the Munich Bach Choir in our living room. He seemed particularly inspired when he washed the dishes. Denn alles Fleisch es ist wei Gras, und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. This was fine when I was very little, but he soon became a social liability and I gave him strict instructions to restrain himself when my friends were over. My father was not a demonstrative person; he was shy when he wasn’t singing, and he let my mother run the household and make all the decisions. But we read the newspaper together. From as far back as I can remember he would sit beside me on the carpet, spread the newspaper in front of us, and comment on the stories: “Unabashed corruption,” he’d say. “Shortsightedness, insanity.” He explained things in simple terms so I could understand them, and by first grade I probably knew more about our parliamentary system (and its many defects) than any other seven-year-old in the country.
    His brother was a doctor, and the two of them, my father and his brother, took me to refugee camps when they went to do volunteer work there. My uncle, an energetic man with a good sense of humor, would do the driving. He liked to sing too, though his specialty was drinking songs or folk classics like “Waltzing Matilda.” I would sit in the back and watch the view change from city to town to village and finally to refugee camp.
    No one I knew visited the camps, and I didn’t tell anyone at school that we went, because the one time I mentioned it, there was a big scandal. In third grade we had to write a compositionon the topic “How My Family and I Contribute to the State.” My father suggested I write about our visits to the camps, and I took his advice, though I knew we were both being deviant: he in his suggestion and I in my compliance. I described the poverty, the living conditions, and what we did. My uncle saw patients and distributed medicine (which he stole from the State, but I didn’t mention that), and my father fixed things that were broken. I played with the local children, who competed to have me visit their homes—a dizzying assortment of structures crammed together and piled up like boxes one on top of the other. In these neat little rooms I would stuff myself with sweet baklava and empty my bag of toys on the floor. The Palestinian children spoke Arabic and I spoke Hebrew, but at that age language is malleable. We spent