SHARONA BEN-TOY
599
dunes . Now he was with the military research branch of the govern–
ment, among his peers at last. I'd have to forgive him for being happy
to leave the kibbutz that had shared everything with him. And for leav–
ing the first of the women in his life.
I THOUGHT SUDDENLY of a moment when I was eighteen years old and
visiting my father's home in Wayland, Massachusetts. That day, for
some reason, he took both me and his third wife walking through the
woods behind his house. A stranger would have seen nothing disturb–
ing. He might have noticed that the women on either side of the man
didn't match; the wife fragile in linen, with a silver ankh pendant and a
breathless voice; the daughter much taller, in denim, her hair a bouncy
'fro. Nothing foreshadowed the widow who would tell a legal firm that
the father had never loved his daughter. The stranger would have had to
notice how the slight woman never addressed me, or looked in my direc–
tion, even when I stepped past my father and tried to catch her eye, ask–
ing, "Do cooked vegetables have auras too?"
My father stopped before a stand of birches, one tree surrounded by
four others, like a white candelabrum. He walked into the grove and
laid his palm against the big tree's papery bark. I never forgot his
expression; my usually exuberant father looked hungry and alone.
"This is the father," he murmured aloud, "and these are his sons."
It
would be four more years until he spoke of it, but I knew that the
father on his mind was his own, lost to the Nazis. I wanted him to turn
around and see me. I tugged in my heart and felt only a loose end . He
wasn't attached. He was trying to connect himself to a tall, beautiful
plant that held more memories for him than I did. I understood then
that something important was missing from my father.
Avram looked very pleased to have placed a memory into the mind
of the person to whom it properly belonged. That was Avram Pardes: a
keeper of the world's decorum. I looked wistfully into his good eye, in
his old wizard face, and asked him to continue.
The President and the Kindergarten
THE SCIENCE CORPS quickly outgrew the Studio, Avram summarized.
After independence it expanded into the Weizmann Institute at
Rehovot, a village in a sea of dunes. Since the thirties, Rehovot's glory
had been its grapefruit, which appeared in newsreels, thundering down
chutes . They were the product of the Sieff agricultural school. And this
