Obadiah believes that through eternity the past can be improved. I preserve the album, added my wife and said to the writer, so that Henkin won't succeed in taking new pictures of Menahem. And then she said to me in Hebrew: They're mourning just as much as we are, Henkin, but they don't have a committee of dead outings and foreign relations, look at them, see how much they miss a son!It's not our son they miss, I said in Hebrew, and she smiled warmly at Renate, who stood a bit embarrassed in a corner, the tray in her hand. No, not the son of your committee, Obadiah Henkin, their son!And then she said in German: See what a little kitchen like ours can hold, and he wants a new kitchen! They put the cakes and the tea and the coffee on the table and there was silence in the room, not an embarrassed silence, but a silence of something pleasant, as if we had returned from a long journey, we drank, we ate crisp, tasty cookies, suddenly my wife stood up, looked at Renate who had lit a cigarette with the gold lighter her husband handed to her, took the cigarette from Renate's hands, a long brown cigarette that burned with a strange pale light, inhaled and swallowed smoke, gave the cigarette back to Renate, hugged her arm, went to the old radio in the corner of the room, a gigantic radio that looked like an abandoned closet that we had bought thirty-five years before in the teachers' canteen and after a long moment some tune started bursting out of the box and my wife started moving to the rhythm of the music.I didn't know if Germanwriter and his wife understood how strange it was to see my wife dancing after so many years, but I couldn't tell them again about the Jewish woman in the forest that Germanwriter aimed a gun at her son's temple, the stories of my son standing against his assailants were finished in me, my wife returned to the Tiberias-Tsemakh Road, maybe she danced to win me, to wipe out in me the thought of Teacher Sarakh whom Trotsky had hugged for three desperate nights.
