Mourning

At the end of the summer vacation, Fifi went downstairs, dressed in a long blue skirt purchased at Hoffman’s in Allenby Street and a white blouse which the dressmaker Marcela made up from an old blouse of her mother’s. Tilly gave her the honor of being first in line for the skipping rope. Fifi learnt to distinguish between Hannah and Batyaleh, who weren’t even twins, and without her understanding how it happened all the girls wanted to be her best friend. Perhaps they liked her precisely because she was new, like a new exercise book with smooth pages and nothing written in it yet. Haya and Rivka quarreled over her, one bad-mouthing the other, and both of them warned her: “You shouldn’t be friends with Tilly, she’s vulgar.” Fifi decided not to listen to their spiteful slanders against each other.

Only when there was no alternative, like Zephania said, were you permitted to listen to evil tongues, because “Onnes Rahmana patrei,” which was Aramaic and meant that God exempts you from punishment if you are acting under compulsion, but even if you listened, you were strictly forbidden to believe what you heard.

They both lay on the scratchy gray blanket her parents had been given together with the Jewish Agency bed. Bogar, Zephania’s dog, panted next to them, exhausted by the heat, and Zephania touched the yellow patch on his forehead and said that Bogar was already old and he didn’t know what he was going to do with him when he went to the yeshiva, but with God’s help...