Hoping to overhear something about Grandfather’s condition in the days before his death, I was outside the village doctor’s house, where the health director of the old folk’s home was giving one of his periodic reports to the physicians of the area.‘If only I had been there!’ I wept to Pinness. ‘If only I had been there! I would have saved Uri. I would have killed every one of them.’ My hands clenched and opened, the sweat running down my neck.Pinness told me the whole story after Uri had been made to leave the village. Everyone knew what had happened, but only I heard the old teacher confess that he had been on the water tower that night. When questioned by the Committee members, he had merely said that he was unable to fall asleep, went for a walk, and found my cousin lying senseless by the tower, ‘and started cursing at the top of my voice at those gangsters, those Cossacks, those evildoers’.Pinness asked Uri if he was all right, and failing to get an answer, he hurried to the rose garden by the synagogue, soaked a handkerchief under a tap, and rushed back to wet my cousin’s split lips.
