"I'd be delighted," Jeremiah replied, but with a sense of unease.

They settled on an evening. Lazaro Cohen promised to send a car
around to pick him up. Suddenly, then, Lazaro Cohen became
preoccupied. His nostrils twitched, as if he were sniffing for
danger. He furled his brow, cast a glance at his watch.
Abruptly, he asked Jeremiah to excuse him. He was gone after
less than a minute's conversation.

The woman in the scarlet dress was nowhere to be seen. Jeremiah
didn't know her name. He didn't even know what she really looked
like. He had had only a glimpse. So he was at a loss as to how
to inquire about her. If he hadn't been at a loss, he would
still have been embarrassed to ask. What, after all, was the
nature of his interest in her?

He was old. She was young.

Feeling just slightly strained, Jeremiah plunged back into the
familiar business of socializing, pressing this hand, beaming at
that face, appreciating an anecdote, choosing the right story to
tell in response. He was a hit. He almost always was.

One old lady grasped his thumb with her whole hand, squeezed it
hard, as if she meant to milk from it life itself. Her back was
bent. Her neck no longer quite supported the weight of her head,
which drooped forward so that her nose was nearly level with the
line of her shoulders. A slight hump was rising in her back.
Her hair was white, thin and wispy. And yet, although it seemed
virtually unimaginable given present appearances, Jeremiah was
sure that, in her time, she had been beautiful, so that now in
the midst of sorrows and decay dreams and memories mingled to
make a sweet deceitful music to keep her company.

Jeremiah mentioned to Eli Adolfino, himself a lawyer, that he had
agreed to have dinner at the home of Lazaro Cohen. Adolfino was
surprised. Lazaro Cohen's wife had gastric cancer. She was
terminally ill, kept alive only by hyperalimentation. Lazaro
Cohen changed the bags himself, every twelve hours. He had once
been a plump, prosperous looking man. With his wife's illness and
other troubles in the family, he had lost an alarming amount of
weight. Yet, his mind remained as sharp as ever. He managed his
business affairs impeccably. He could always be counted on to
help out with a communal project. He had only one requirement,
which was that his name be kept out of it.

Although Jeremiah wanted to know what the other troubles in the
family were, his tact was automatic. Eli Adolfino had already
told him a lot. To ask more was to presume.

In the days before he was to go to Lazoro Cohen's home for
dinner, Jeremiah found his mind going back again and again to
that evening at Anshe Zedek. Who was the woman in scarlet?† Why
did it seem to make so much difference to him? Why was he so
interested? Why did she turn up in his dreams? Why were his
dreams suddenly so vivid and compelling that he looked forward
each evening to the time when, released from waking, he would be
able to re-enter those charmed provinces?

On the morning of the day he was to go to Lazaro Cohen's,
Jeremiah, normally a sound sleeper, woke in a cold sweat at 3AM.
His heart was pounding and he was breathing fast. He had a
sensation of pressure that was almost pain in his chest. At
first, he was convinced he was having a heart attack. He had
trouble remembering where he was. When he was able to place
himself, the idea that he deserved to die in Argentina came to
him.

Why? How had he sinned? Was it simply that he had not suffered
enough, that he had been too fortunate?

His breathing slowed. The tightness in his chest eased and faded
away. He wiped his brow. He could still feel his heart racing.
It was a warm night. He had been sleeping with the window open.
His hotel overlooked a small park with a statue of a horse and
military rider. The moon cast a pale light. Even though it was
just a few minutes after three, birds were already beginning to
sing. He heard fragments of high bright sound, not a chorus, but
individual voices.

He slept in the nude, with only the sheet to cover him. His
penis was fully erect, throbbing. It tented the sheet up over it
as if it were a pole protuding from his groin. Nothing like this
had happened to him in years. He had once heard it said, he
could not remember when or by whom, that it was written in the
Kabbalah that just prior to his death all a man's passions came
back to visit him so that he could savor for a moment just what
this life was that was about to forsake him and that, in this
moment, a man might gain a glimpse of the true order of the
Creation behind the tumult of ordinary everyday appearances and
events.

He was thirsty and he wanted a glass of water.

Just as he was about to slide out of bed, the dream came back to
him.

He was a small boy. Jerusalem was on fire. The fire raged in
the city and on the surrounding hills, flames dancing up against
the pale distant sky. He was trying to escape alone from the old
city. There was confusion everywhere. It was not modern
Jerusalem, but rather a mixture of the Jerusalems of different
eras, so that people running in panic through the streets and
alleyways wore different garb and spoke different languages. An
invader was at the gate, but different people had different ideas
of who it might be.

Jeremiah was looking for his father, for he meant to save him if
he could.

It was getting hotter and hotter.

He caught sight of a woman dressed all in red. She was slim and
quick and she had jet black hair. He never glimpsed her face.
She beckoned him to follow her. He did, running through the
flames, the panic, the heat. He ran with all his might, until,
in the dream, he felt that his heart would burst within his
chest.

The woman in red turned suddenly through an ancient stone archway
into a courtyard. Under a fig tree in its center lay an old
man. A lion with a tawny mane stood guard over him. At the
sight of the woman, the lion roused himself. He took a threatening
step towards her and let out a tremendous roar, showing his
teeth. The earth shook as the lion roared. The woman in red
caught fire and vanished.

The lion lay down beside the old man and began immediately to
sleep.

The old man was Jeremiah's father, serene in the midst of all
that was going on around him. Jeremiah tried to wake him. There
was no way to do it. He tried to wake the lion. There was no
way to wake the lion. He watched the lion's rib cage. The lion
wasn't breathing. He looked at his father's rib cage. It wasn't
moving.

The woman in red looked down on him from a branch of the fig
tree.

She smiled.

That was when he awakened in terror.

Immediately, he connected the woman in red of his dreams with the
young woman in scarlet whom he'd glimpsed at Anshe Zedek. Why
should a woman whom he'd barely seen make such an impression on
him?

He had no explanation.

What did the dream mean? Dreams had never particularly interested him.† He wasn't sure that they meant anything at all. He had never shared the penchant for trying to unravel hidden meanings. What he had always loved about life was its surface.

And yet the dream was tantalizing. It was convincing from
within, without appeal to reason and argument. It was convincing
without appeal to any law.

When he entered the large living room at Lazaro Cohen's home, a
magnificent structure occupying a walled compound of some fifty
acres at the edge of the city, and was greeted by a young woman
with jet black hair who was unmistakably the same person of whom
he had caught a glimpse that evening at Anshe Zedek, Jeremiah was
virtually struck dumb.

He never had a chance effectively to recover.

Rosa's mother did not appear for dinner. Rosa did not talk.

Lazaro Cohen and Jeremiah discussed the state of world Judaism,
the conditions in Israel.

"Nothing on earth is stable. Nothing on earth is secure," Lazaro
Cohen said. "Even love can fuel the whirlwind."

Jeremiah had the impression Lazaro was referring to his daughter
and found that he was keenly interested. Jeremiah was glad he
had come to Argentina, even though for the moment he had entirely
forgotten about the mission that had brought him from so far
away.

Why didn't Rosa speak?

She'd been forward enough the other night at Anshe Zedek.
Pinchas had been the reticent one. Like many sabras, he had an
instinctual aversion to deviations from the mental norm. This
rankled Jeremiah, creature of the Diaspora that he was, even as
he could not help but admire it. It took so much for granted.

Was Rosa mentally ill, emotionally unbalanced? Or was it that
her mind was on her mother, who might be at this very moment
lying upstairs in agony, hoping against hope for death as
deliverance from pain, that most pressing of all the world's
immediacies?

Plaintive and promising all at the same time, a fantasia of
melancholy gripped Jeremiah.† Even as he ate, he felt inordinately tired.
Vague figures saturated in colors at once intense
and muted, glowing from within like denizens of a sunless deep,
resolved themselves against an indefinite background, then flowed
one into the next, as if each partook of a primitive magma, a
common effort to solve an elemental riddle.

Jeremiah had an intuition of connections lost.
Without a word, Rosa got up after dessert. Her face held for an
instant the trace of an expression, possibly regret, as if she
were sensible of the implicit discourtesy of her silence but, due
to the magnitude of her own personal crisis, powerless to do
anything about it beyond pleading, and obliquely at that,
unspecifiable mitigating circumstances.

Lazaro Cohen sighed after she left the table. It was barely
audible. It seemed to escape him without his being aware of it.
An observer less accustomed to attend to small cues to others'
inner states than Jeremiah might well have missed it.

Lazaro Cohen rose from his chair and invited Jeremiah to follow
him into a mahogany paneled study for cigars and coffee. With a
gesture of his thin right arm, he motioned Jeremiah into a huge
dark leather armchair, cool, yielding and deep. Before Lazaro
sat down, he offered Jeremiah a Havana cigar, Baron de Rothschild
size, from before the days of Fidel. Jeremiah lifted one out
from the humidor, even though he did not normally smoke. This
was, he sensed, a special occasion.

Without relaxing his aura of vigilance, Lazaro Cohen subsided
into a duplicate of the armchair Jeremiah occupied. This one was
older in appearance. Though it still kept its lustre, the
leather had myriad wrinkles, like an aged face that has known
cares beyond counting. This, Jeremiah assumed, was where Lazaro
Cohen sat habitually after dinner and pondered. It was a
beautiful spring evening. The sun was going down, streaming
across the lawn whose green expanse was broken by irregular
golden clusters of naturalized daffodils. Birds were singing.
Away from the western horizon, the sky was as blue and fragile as
a robin's egg.

The matches hissed against the surrounding quiet as they caught
fire. The two men puffed in silence. Jeremiah watched the
pattern of light and shade out the window to avoid intruding on
Lazaro Cohen.

A servant brought espresso. Next to the cup was a small golden
spoon. The aroma of the coffee was dark and fierce. It mingled
with the mahogany color of the wood of the walls, the soft smooth
sombre flavor of the cigar. The gold spoon caught a ray of light
from the window, shone.

"Of course," Lazaro Cohen began, sighing, this time apparently
quite well aware of what he did, "you have noticed that the
atmosphere of this house is poisonous."

Lazaro spoke as a man does when he is struggling to gain the
courage to unburden himself. Jeremiah was a stranger. Yet he
was less surpised by Lazaro's urge to take him into his confidence
than he might have expected himself to be. Who knew what
thoughts Lazaro had thought as he sat in that leather armchair?
Jeremiah had had a relatively easy life. He had never been
seriously tested. Fortune had smiled on him. Fortune had
smiled, too, on Lazaro Cohen. But it was a crooked smile.

"I'm going to ask you a favor. I hope you will feel free to
refuse me. But it is not really in the first instance for
myself that I am going to ask it, so perhaps my request is a
legitimate one," Lazaro continued, not meeting Jeremiah's gaze.

"In order to ask, I have to tell you at least a little bit about
myself and my circumstances, circumstances which have a long
history. As you probably already know, I came here to this
country immediately after the war. I don't know why I survived.
But I did and that was a fact. My entire family was dead, so far
as I knew. My coming here wasn't a question of plan. It was
pure chance. At that time, I wasn't really able to think. When
pain and loss are too close, you can't think. I suppose that I
wanted to leave Europe and all that I had experienced there
behind, as if such a thing were possible. But when one is young
and desperate, one can not help but have illusions. It's through
just those illusions that life makes its demands. I came here to
Argentina simply because a visa was available. I knew nothing
about Argentina. I had to look at a map to see where it was."

He puffed at his cigar. The end glowed red as a brand.

"I was lonelier than I knew. I was possessed with the urge to
make something of myself, not solely for myself, but for the sake
of all those others just like me who would never have the
chance. I thought of myself as a kind of representative of the
dead, a creature of ashes if you will. I didn't see their faces
or hear their voices. That came only many years later. I was
too close to it all, then.† I was possessed by them and I didn't
sleep well. After I had saved a little money, I bought a short
wave radio. When I had trouble falling asleep or a dream woke me
up, I would lie in bed and listen to these disembodied voices
from all around the world. Sometimes I wasn't sure if I was
listening to the voices of the living or the dead, real men and
women or their ghosts.

This habit has stayed with me I prospered. That wasn't
difficult. Work distracted me. Money meant next to nothing to
me. I had had so little. I knew all that I earned could be
wiped out in an instant. So I didn't worry. I simply did what
there was to be done and awaited the outcome. I helped others
out as best I could. I never passed an orphan in the street
without handing out a few coins. I thought often of marrying and
having a family. It seemed an enormous step. I doubted whether
it was an honorable thing to do to bring innocent children into
this world. The project of marriage remained for years a
fantasy, alluring and galling both at the same time."

He shifted his posture in the chair, letting Jeremiah know he was
about to move closer to the core of what he had to say. Jeremiah
rearranged himself, too, stole a glance out the window, as if to
maintain a measure of detachment.

"I met my wife in the wintertime, in July it was. I had stopped
in a cafe for something to eat. It was early in the evening.
Outside, a few flakes of snow were drifting down from a gray
sky. The cafe was nearly empty. In addition to the waiters,
there were not more than three or four other customers besides
myself. The ambiance was very European. A young woman was
sitting at a table just a few feet from mine, all alone. She
sat very still, as if she were brooding or waiting for someone
else. There was something about the quality of her silence, the
quality of her physical stillness that attracted me. Never
before in my life had I approached a young woman alone in public
like this."

Lazaro Cohen shook his head, as if he were seeing it all new
again in his mind's eye and remained just as puzzled as he had
felt all those years ago.

"Why did I approach her then? Who can truly say? Memory's real
job is to falsify the past. Yet, it seems to me I must have
approached her because she seemed already familiar. My heart
pounded in my chest. My hands shook. I hadn't been so frightened
since the early days in the camp. It seemed to me a very
important step I was taking. I was embarrassed because my Spanish
was still contaminated with an accent, a trace of Europe. Her
Spanish was perfect. I remember nothing of what we said to each
other, only that as we talked I found it impossible to gauge her
reaction to me. This made me feel as helpless as a fish out of
water who is powerless to prevent himself from thrashing. She
finished her meal and made a motion as if she were ready to go.
This filled me with terror. I asked her if she could give me an
address, some means by which I might go about contacting her. I
had no experience in these matters. I expected her to refuse
with indignation. Yet I had to ask. To my astonishment, she
took a fountain pen out from her purse and wrote her address down
on a slip of cream colored paper for me. She said she lived with
an aunt. Then she smiled at me and disappeared."

A smile's ghost flickered about Lazaro Cohen's lips, accentuating
by contrast the anguish that was contained in the rest of his
features.

"I was flattered. I was excited. I was on top of the world.
Something had been awakened in me whose existence I had never
previously suspected."

Jeremiah was struck by the parallel between what Lazaro Cohen was
recounting and what had happened to him when his eyes chanced to
fall on Rosa Cohen that night at Anshe Zedek. He was aware that
he and Lazaro Cohen were now sharing between them an excitement
that was almost sexual. Or perhaps it was sexual. As he hung on
Lazaro Cohen's words, Jeremiah felt a stirring in his loins. Out
the window the light was softening and the edges of the shadows
were not so sharp as they had been.

"You see," Lazaro Cohen said very softly, resignation in his
voice, "the worst thing about the camps is something that is
never discussed, because even to hint at it is to feel a certain
sense of self-revulsion, as if one's own skin was disgusting.
Perhaps it shouldn't be discussed. Perhaps not discussing it
mininimizes the damage. I don't know. Some things belong in the
darkness and should be left there."

Jeremiah remained silent.

"The worst thing about the camps," Lazaro Cohen pronounced,
meeting Jeremiah's eyes for just a second before he broke his
gaze away, "is that they were successful. They made us feel
less than human, as if we were the representatives of a dark and
evil force, some wretched ambition against the natural order of
things that had somehow wormed its way into history. We loathed
ourselves every bit as much as we loathed our keepers, if not
more.

"You see, it had to do with the dependence. We were absolutely
dependent on our oppressors. We were dependent on them in the
way babies are dependent on their mothers. We had no recourse.
For whatever reason, they were all we had. They made up our
entire world. We needed them so much more than they needed us.
There was no doubt about it. They looked so much better than we
did. They looked like human beings, however inhuman their
actions were. We knew they had homes and children and families.
We knew they had food. That was the most important thing of all.
They had food. They went to bed at night warm with full bellies.
That made them better than us. We knew it in our bellies.

"We confided part of ourselves to them. In a secret, terribly
urgent and terribly shameful way, when we looked at them, we
didn't only hate and fear and loath them. We also loved them.
We loved them as our last link to what it was to be human, to
stay human and plump.

"I remember once I went to the race track. I owned a share in a
beautiful bay stallion. I forget his name now. It was twenty
years ago. I bought the share because it was the time when Rosa
was crazy about horses. We had five at home even though Rebecca
was frightened of them. She always worried that Rosa would be
thrown and break her neck and be paralyzed from then on. But I
thought we couldn't afford to be so afraid."

Lazaro looked rueful, like a very small child who sticks his
lower lip out and pouts.

"Anyway, I went to place a bet on the horse, not for me, but for
Rosa. I always bet on the horses for Rosa. Whatever she won, I
put in an account for her. I did much better picking horses for
Rosa, I think, then I ever would have done picking them for
myself. This was during one of those times when I couldn't
sleep. It had been going on for three or four months. I was up
most of most nights listening to the radio. I placed the bet and
then walked back out to the track. There he was, that beautiful
bay stallion in the parade to the post, kicking up his back legs
and trying to throw his jockey as if he wasn't afraid of the
devil himself.

"I felt nauseated. I broke out in a cold sweat. Because, in my
mind, I made the connection. This bay stallion looked like one
of the guards at the camp, a young strong fellow with smooth easy
features, full of life and good cheer, visibly thriving every bit
as much as we were visibly dwindling. I don't remember the
horse's name, but I do remember the camp guard's name. They
called him Karl Friederich. He had a devil may care grace, too.

"The camp guards had a soccer pitch. They made it on a green
field just down a hill from where we were kept. We could watch
them playing soccer. I think they knew that. I think it
increased the savor of the game for them. But I remember how
green the grass looked in the evening, how green and distant and
beautiful, as if it were the grass on another planet, each blade
as precious as emeralds because it was inaccessible. I always
rooted for Karl Friederich to score a goal. No, it was more than
rooting. I would stand there, right at the fence and I would
watch and, for those few moments, whether Karl Friederich scored
a goal became the most important thing in my life. It blotted
everything else away, even hunger, as if my spirit floated out of
my body and floated through the barbed wire fences and entered
into Karl Friederich, so that I became him.

"I would have done anything for him. It was love, certainly, but
the most hideous kind of love. We agreed with them. We were
responsible for all troubles, all disappointments, all imperfections.
We wanted a better world and our part in the bettering of the world
was to take all that was wrong, all the hurt and all
the horror into ourselves. We were prepared to cooperate, not
all the time but some of the time. It seemed sometimes that we
were behind the fences because we were not good enough at hating,
try as we might do. This made a crazy kind of sense. Because we
were not ourselves good enough at hating, we deserved to be the
hated and the despised. Only when Rebecca smiled at me that day
in the cafe did I begin to have an inkling of all this and start
to be able to begin to doubt. By the way, after I made the
connection between that beautiful bay stallion and Karl Friederich,
I never went back to the track. It was ruined forever.

Very soon, too, Rosa gave up her interest in horses.

Lazaro puffed again.

"It's a strange story, how I met Rebecca. You see, I lost the
piece of paper. Normally, that wouldn't have been any problem,
because I have a virtually photographic memory. But I couldn't
remember this address. I couldn't remember the aunt's name. I
was bereft. Search as I might, I couldn't recover a trace. I
felt like a man who has let go of the line that keeps him afloat
and now is sure that he will sink. I ate dinner in that same
cafe every evening for the next three months. I asked after the
girl. None of the waiters knew anything about her. Evidently
that was the only time she'd ever been in there. I slept even
less than before. I think this was the closest I have ever come
to being a true madman. It's hope that makes us feel despair. I
lay awake at night trying to remember that address, trying to
imagine what might have become of that slip of paper. I had no
success. I used work to keep myself going, sometimes arriving
there well before dawn. If it hadn't been for work, I don't know
what would have become of me. Finally, after three months of
this, I made myself take myself in hand. I had lost weight and I
looked gaunt and haggard. I stopped going to the cafe. I
stopped thinking about her all the time. Not a day went by when
she didn't cross my mind, but it no longer had the force of an
obsession."

Lazaro bit his lip, as if he needed pain to push down the
feelings that telling this story brought back.

"In this life, there's no rest. We never know what the next day
will bring, for better or for worse. I managed to stop thinking
about her at all after six or nine months. I went back into a
state of numbness. It was one year later, to the day. I
happened to be walking around three in the afternoon no more than
two blocks from that cafe. I saw her coming towards me on the
street. I thought I was dreaming. I thought I had taken leave
of my senses. The possibility that I had gone over the edge
panicked me, so that I don't think that I would have been able to
say anything, if it hadn't been for the fact that I saw her look
up and recognize me. I saw the expression on her face change,
mingle regret with astonishment and embarrassment. In a flash, I
realized what a cruel and self-centered person I was. In all
those hours and days, those weeks and months of being in anguish
over what I had let slip through my fingers, I had never even for
an instant stopped to consider what it might seem like to her
that I had never called, that I had simply ignored her."

Lazaro stopped.

"Would you like some brandy?" he asked Jeremiah.

It was clear to Jeremiah that Lazaro's motive in offering was
that Lazaro himself needed a respite from his narrative, a chance
to gather himself to continue. Jeremiah accepted. Lazaro got up
and opened a cabinet, from which he took a bottle of cognac. He
poured Jeremiah a snifter and then one for himself. It was very
special cognac, smooth and deep. Waiting for Lazaro to resume
speaking, Jeremiah held the glass with the amber liquid up to his
nose. There was a poignant contrast between the luxury of the
surroundings and the demeanor of Lazaro Cohen and his daughter,
the plight of his wife. Would they have been, Jeremiah found
himself wondering, better off without all of this, or did it
simply make no difference at all?

In many ways had not his own father, for all his limitations,
really been a happier man than he was? Something in the aroma of
the cognac brought this question to mind, muted his pride so that
he could consider it without feeling himself dangerously diminished.

"This perception of my own cruelty gave me strength. I grabbed
her arm, much to her surprise, and began to tell her how terribly
sorry I was that I had lost the slip of paper with her name and
address on it. I hoped she would consent to accept my apology, I
said. I had no intention to hurt or slight. I was desperately
glad to have had the remarkably good fortune to run into her
again. Will she come and have a cup of coffee with me, or a
drink, or anything at all, but simply come and sit with me for a
few minutes? I am near tears."

Lazaro Cohen had slipped into the present tense as he came to
this climactic point of his narrative, so vivid was the experience
for him even in the retelling. He took a deep breath and
sipped his cognac. His cigar lay in the ashtray by his side.

"Unlike me, Rebecca was quite calm. If my outburst seemed
unusual to her, she didn't show it in any way. She simply said
that she had wondered why I did not call, but assumed that I had
been busy with other things. She said that she had read of my
success in business and was pleased for me. We went back to the
cafe. We sat and talked. We had dinner. Three months later, we
were married."

Lazaro shrugged his shoulders.

"Those were the old days. We didn't behave like the kids do
now, because we didn't know how. So we were both surprised on
our wedding night. I hadn't told her that I'd been in the
camps. I had simply told her that I was an orphan. She said
she was, too. Neither of us was exactly lying. Neither of us
had wanted to reawaken the horror. A deep shame had kept each of
us from speaking. So we were both stunned when we saw that the
other one had a tattoo on the arm. She was a virgin. I was,
too. We slept together that night and then we lay awake until
the dawn, talking, telling what it had been like, crying in each
other's arms, marveling that we were alive to see the sun come
up and that we should have found each other. I think it must
have been that very night that Rosa was conceived. We wanted
sons, too. We wanted a large family. Ten or twelve children
would have been fine with us. We wanted to repopulate the world,
as if we were repairing the devastation of the flood. Only this
was worse than the flood had been. But Rosa turned out to be the
only child we got, for Rebecca never conceived again. This cast
a pall not only on our lives, but on Rosa's too, because she
meant too much to both of us, more than any child should have to
bear.

She was, in a way, our resurrection. We could not help
ourselves. We were, after all, victims, too. We smothered her.
Not that we didn't love her. We did. We loved her so much that
we always feared for her, feared for the least little thing.
Without knowing it, without in the least suspecting it, we made
it her responsibility to comfort us and prove to us that life was
worth living when we had terrible doubts. This was an invisible
process, something that grew up among the three of us without
anyone willing it. We forced her to dissemble, to counterfeit
for our sakes. She was a vivid little girl, a beauty, and as
quick as they come, too quick, too intuitive for her own good.
She soaked us and all that we had brought with us up like a
sponge. And she seemed always perfectly in possession of
herself, perfectly competent, perfectly attuned."

Lazaro Cohen laughed, not in merriment, but rather in sorrow and
self-deprecation.

"Our ills always have longer histories than we like to think.
Six years ago Rosa fell in love with a nice young man. He was
studying in the United States to be a doctor. He was the son of
one of the leading Jewish families in Buenos Aires. Who could
ask for anything more? Rosa was radiant. We had never seen her
so beautiful. Her mother and I stifled the pangs of parental
sorrow. After all, these were not the first pangs of sorrow
either one of us has ever had to stifle. We resigned ourselves
to losing her and looked forward to having grandchildren. We
even accepted the idea that she would go to live in the United
States while her husband finished his training. We told ourselves
it would be good for her to live away from us. She would
have a chance simply to be young and happy. In our hearts we may
secretly have envied her, but, if we did, we weren't aware of
it."

Lazaro finished his cognac.

"How ironic it is," Lazaro continued, licking his lips, "that
the shepherd should fall asleep just when the wolf prowls
nearest. The wedding was an elegant affair. I asked my friend
Rabbi Raphael Merino to preside, but he was ill. So we did not
offend the social sensibilities of my fellows from Anshe Zedek.
The young couple spent three weeks by the sea. They came back
to bid us good-bye before they left for Boston. Rosa wept and
left. Her mother and I wept, too. But in our hearts we were
pleased that she seemed so radiantly happy. We were proud of
ourselves that we had produced such a wonderful daughter, even
though such pride is not easy for either one of us. It brings
too much fear along with it."

Lazaro's speech was clipped now.

"The first inkling we had that anything was wrong came when Rosa
stopped writing every week. Her reticence hurt us, but we told
ourselves that it was necessary. Then, a note of strain crept
into the letters that we did receive. We tried to tell ourselves
this was simply our imagination at work making troubles where in
fact there were none. We tried to tell ourselves it was simply
our missing her that made us lend the letters such an ominous
tone. We went twice to visit.† Everything seemed all right.
Rosa spoke of wanting to have children. We wondered whether she
might already be pregnant but too shy to tell us. We considered
going back for her husband's graduation from medical school.
Rosa discouraged this, just as he discouraged his parents from
coming."

Lazaro's voice started to shake.

"He began his internship. He was gone one night out of three.
Rosa became uneasy about the school's failure to send him his
diploma. He showed no signs of worry himself and became annoyed
whenever she brought the subject up. She discounted this,
thinking that he was working very hard and had other things on
his mind. So, one morning early in September, she called the
school to see what had happened to the diploma. She was only
trying to help him out by taking care of the bothersome little
chores for which he had no time. They said they had never heard
of her husband. He had never been enrolled at that school. She
called the hospital where he was working. They said they had
never heard of him either. It was all a massive fraud. When
she confronted him, he showed absolutely no remorse. He told her
that her shock and unhappiness were her own fault, because she
would never have experienced them if she had not meddled in his
affairs."

Lazaro stopped. Jeremiah sighed.

"Oy," Jeremiah said.

He looked up. Lazaro Cohen was biting his lip, hard. His eyes
were narrowed. His chin shook. Yet, he was not weeping. The
man's tremendous determination was written all over his face. He
could not, Jeremiah realized, allow himself the luxury of
ordinary human sorrow. That was the measure of the deprivation
he had endured.

Jeremiah looked away. He did not want to violate Lazaro Cohen's
privacy. He had been fooled at first by Lazaro Cohen's manner.
Jeremiah had thought him out-going, self-assured, a man who
judged other men. Now he saw that the man's demeanor was
intended to protect others against what tormented him, the deep
and all too well founded doubts.

Lazaro Cohen drew one sudden spasmodic breath, as close to crying
as one can get without crossing over the border, and then took up
again his story. The hand that did not hold his cigar was
clenched into a fist.

"Without warning, Rosa arrived back in Buenos Aires. She was
pale. She was thin. She looked as if she had not eaten in a
month or more than a month. I can not describe to you how bad
she looked. She looked like she had been horribly mistreated.
I need not tell you the memories looking at her in this condition
brought back to both of us. Of course, we were glad to have her
back. We could not help a certain selfish pleasure. But in such
condition..."

His voice trailed off.

"Her mother was distraught. I was distraught. I was furious.
I was, I would have to say, near to being out of my mind with
rage. I have never killed anyone, but if he had been near, if I
could have gotten my hands on him, I would have killed him. If I
had had the chance to kill him, I think that I would have enjoyed
it. I would have savored the moment. But he was too smart to be
near. I was furious, too, with Rosa's father-in-law. He had
nurtured the viper. I went to see him in his office. He knew
nothing of the whole affair. I raged at him. What he heard from
me was the first he'd heard. He tried to deny it. Then he was
crushed. He said he would check on it himself. He insisted it
was impossible. Yet, even as he insisted, I could see that he
had to struggle with himself, for with what I told him, his worst
fears were confirmed. He had known all along, without knowing
that he knew, that his son was an imposter. Of course, a call to
the United States proved that what I had told him was true. When
I went back to see him the next week, he had aged twenty years.
I felt sorry for him. Not only for him, but for myself. I think
I had an inkling that the boy was a fake, too. You see, there
was absolutely nothing disagreeable about him, nothing contrary.
That's simply unnatural."

It was beginning to get dark. The outside world was slipping
away.

"Rosa didn't eat. Rosa didn't sleep. Rosa wouldn't talk. She
could talk, but she wouldn't. She sat still all day long, lost
in her thoughts. No, it wasn't as she is now. Now she listens.
She attends. And some days she can be just as she was before all
this happened. The spirit was gone. What was left was only the
empty shell of a human being. Neither of us knew what to do
about it. A psychiatrist suggested hospitalization. We refused
that suggestion. We each blamed ourselves and, secretly, each
one of us blamed the other. After what he had done to her, we
weren't going to let anyone else take her from us, no matter how
noble the intentions were that they professed."

Strong emotion left Lazaro Cohen's voice.

"Rebecca started with stomach pains. We ignored them for a
year. We called them sympathy pains. A mother and her only
child are very close. Rosa ate only enough to stay alive, so her
mother's stomach hurt. Rebecca became thin, too. Finally, she
went into the hospital for tests. An ulcer was diagnosed.
Treatment helped only a little bit. She got thinner. Another
eighteen months went by before we put her back in. This time
there was no doubt. It was cancer of the stomach. Rosa insisted
that we fight it. Maybe Rebecca and I went along because we
were prepared to do anything to bring Rosa out of her state of
shock or mourning or whatever it was. It was horrible, the
surgery, the chemotherapy, the pain and, worst of all, the living
on false hope. Now the end of it all is near."

The last was said near a whisper.

"I think my friend Raphael understands something of all this,
something of the pride and the misery that is involved. Perhaps
he wasn't sick at the time of the wedding. Perhaps he sensed
the boy was an impostor. I recall he asked me if I was sure of
him. I said I was. Of course it would have been useless for him
to object. We do what we are intent upon doing without regard
for the future. That's our pride. I want you to take Rosa with
you to see Raphael. Rebecca won't last another week. Rosa has
agreed that she will go. Rebecca wants her to go, too. Rebecca
is saying good-bye to all of us. By now, she hardly seems aware
of me."

Thirteen days later, Jeremiah found himself, much to his own
surprise, perched uncomfortably atop an old bay gelding as it
plodded along a dirt path in the foothills of the Andes 80
kilometers west and north of the town of Calingasta. The bay,
which knew the way by heart, was heading for the establishment
of Rabbi Raphael Merino.

Rapahel Merino had been born in this region of Western Argentina
and then chosen at the age of forty-five to return to it. He had
been living in the same settlement now for seventeen years. Raphael
Merino's father had been an itinerant and near illiterate
Jewish peddler, whose one passion in life was that his son should
become an educated man.

They were a party of eleven horses. Barely forty-eight hours
after Lazaro Cohen had unburdened himself to Jeremiah, Rebecca
Cohen had breathed her last. She was buried the next day in a
private graveside service. Rosa now rode just ahead of Jeremiah.
Pinchas rode near the head of the column. Aryeh rode just
behind Jeremiah.† They were accompanied by three Indian guides
and four pack horses.

This was their second day on horseback. Jeremiah ached in every
muscle, each sinew and joint. Again in the night, under the
clear star frenzied mountain sky, he had dreamed of the woman in
scarlet. He felt guilty that Lazaro Cohen should have entrusted
his daughter to him, when his feelings towards her were so very
impure. Yet, Jeremiah was enjoying the trip. The landscape was
breathtaking. At each turn, there was a new vista of distant
snow-capped peaks. The air was clean and crisp. It was as if
they had wandered into another century. The people they saw were
poor and lean but there was a stoic dignity in their eyes, an
abiding patience you seldom saw in the city. They knew their
destiny was simply to endure under the indifferent gaze of the
far white peaks.

Rosa was no longer silent. She chattered with their guides in
Spanish, kept them all in good spirits. Jeremiah could see Aryeh
becoming hourly more taken with her. Pinchas alone was immune to
her charms. A dark thought crossed Jeremiah's mind. People who
were resolved on suicide often showed a surprising gaiety just
before the end. Might Rosa, now that her mother was dead, be
planning suddenly to throw herself down one of those steep
mountain defiles? If so, there would be no way to save her.
This thought was enough to make Jeremiah's face burn with the
shame of his own helplessness. He did not let himself take his
eyes off her.

Early in the afternoon of the third day, they reached their
destination.† It was a small village of between thirty and forty
small structures nestled in a high narrow valley. As they approached,
they could hear the sound of water running over rock.
The village was called, in one of the Indian languages, Initlopoco.
It was a world all to itself, surrounded by mountains and
sky.

Raphael Merino greeted them with evident pleasure. He spoke
fluent Yiddish, so he and Jeremiah had no trouble communicating.
He had a full head of curly brown hair and looked at least two
decades younger than his years. He had studied in Spain and
France and Italy, so he was a man of the world, in addition to
being a Talmudic scholar of some note. Jeremiah wondered how
Raphael Merino and Lazaro Cohen had crossed paths. They seemed
such improbable friends, such different kinds of wanderers.

The settlement comprised approximately two hundred people, of
whom two-thirds were Jewish and the rest were Indians. Initlopoco
maintained a dispensary for the surrounding area, as well as
a very small clinic, which was staffed by two young doctors from
Leeds in England. Four young men lived in the house of Raphael
Merino and studied with him. Also, there were ten or twelve
unfortunates who were simply charges of the community. This was,
Jeremiah thought, very much what the court of a very minor rabbi
in Eastern Europe must have been like early in this century or in
the one before it.

After a cup of tea, served by Raphael Merino's wife, Jeremiah was
shown to a small guest house, which had no bed, but rather only a
large and beautifully woven hammock of many colors. One of
Raphael Merino's students, a slim, serious looking boy of twelve
or thirteen, explained to Jeremiah how to lie in the hammock so
that he would be comfortable. Jeremiah was dubious, but since he
had little choice, he tried it. Part of the pleasure of the long
nap that followed was the exotic setting.

When Jeremiah awakened, the sun was a ball of red just behind the
peaks of the mountains. It made them glow like molten iron. It
was as if the world was newly forged by an empyrean hand and just
beginning to cool. He ached all over. Yet, he was strangely
content. Never in his wildest dreams would he have been able to
imagine the train of circumstances that led him to this remote
perch in the Andes. An earthenware urn of water and a cloth had
been left for him to use. As he washed, it occurred to him it
was Friday evening. He found himself looking forward to the
Sabbath service with real enthusiasm. In this place, it seemed
an untamed God might lend an ear to the prayer and plaints of
mere mortals.

In accordance with Orthodox custom, in this modest house of
worship with a single window that faced east to Jerusalem, men
and women were separated. The service had a quiet glow. Raphael
Merino had a beautiful voice, so that in each Hebrew word he
found music. He wooed the Sabbath Queen with all the power and
guile of the most assured of tenors. Yet, he did it for the
sheer joy of it, not for the thundering applause of any audience.
Still, he held his congregation rapt.

When the service was over, the moon was a silver toenail in the
sky. Jeremiah and Rosa and Aryeh and Pinchas went to the Rabbi's
house for a simple meal. They had brought flour with them as a
gift. Raphael Merino's wife thanked them for it. Jeremiah
thought he had never tasted such challah in all his life. The
conversation at the table flowed on in two tracks, some in
Yiddish, some in Spanish, with occasional translations back and
forth. Aryeh was seated next to Rosa. Jeremiah noticed that
looks passed back and forth between the two of them. Aryeh was a
married man, with a wife and an infant daughter in Hebron. Yet,
Jeremiah, even if he did feel pangs of jealousy, could not
condemn the younger man. Rosa was simply bewitching.

Could this be the same young woman whom he had suspected of
readying herself to throw herself to her death here in the
mountains?

In the days that followed, Jeremiah had occasion to return to
this question, for Rosa's mood was not always carefree and open.
She spent each morning in private sessions with the Rabbi. It
was evident from her bearing afterwards that serious matters were
under discussion. Her face would be almost devoid of expression
and, if she chanced to encounter Jeremiah, she would barely
acknowledge his presence, so far lost in thought was she. This
must, he thought, have been how she had been at home after the
break-up of her marriage. More than once, Jeremiah was struck by
the resemblance between her face and that of her father as he
recalled it from that night when they had sat and talked into the
early hours of the morning. The similarity was in the intensity.

Raphael Merino gave Jeremiah to understand that Rosa was
struggling to reach a personal decision of great significance.
Although he was no more specific than that, the man inspired
confidence and admiration both. There was a power in him that
was different than Lazaro Cohen's. So, although Jeremiah found
himself beginning to grow impatient after four days in Initlopoco,
he bided his time and rested among the peaks, breathing in
the sharp clear air. He went each afternoon to listen to the
Rabbi discuss scripture and commentary with his young students.
It fascinated him. He felt as if he were looking through a
window at what his father's boyhood had been like. Only here the
community's very life was not threatened, except perhaps by slow
attrition. Yet, the same deep problems were under discussion.

On the sixth day, he was walking across the central square of the
village. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon and the sun
was distinctly past its pinnacle. There wasn't a cloud in the
sky. So Jeremiah was surprised when suddenly a shadow fell upon
him and dimmed the light. He saw it projected on the earth as it
swept past him. It had the shape of an enormous bird. At the
edge of the square, a child pointed into the sky and shouted
excitedly. Barely a hundred feet overhead a condor glided by on
extended wings, was gone within a few seconds, passing up on an
eddy over the nearest peak.

In a dark way, the bird was glorious. He had never seen a condor
before. In all probability, he would never see one again. It
was a natural marvel. Yet the incident left Jeremiah feeling
uneasy, as if he were a marked man. The second Sabbath came and
went. Jeremiah began to think of the world he had left behind.
He had not intended to stay this long in Argentina. He had other
business to take care of. He was scheduled for a trip to Japan
in early December. He needed some time in Jerusalem to take care
of routine matters. It could take months for Rosa and the Rabbi
to resolve whatever knotty problem it was that they were working
on. He noticed that Pinchas looked sullen. Aryeh, by contrast,
showed no sign of discontent.

On the tenth day, Rosa knocked at his door in the middle of the
afternoon. He had not been asleep, just dozing in the hammock,
letting memories parade before his eyes as people who have lived
a certain while will do.

Rosa was embarrassed. She protested that she would come back to
talk with him later. Jeremiah would have none of that.† He
insisted that she come right in. He had a fleeting marginal
thought.

"How often is a man lucky enough to have his beloved come
unbidden into his presence in the middle of the day?"

Rosa allowed herself to be prevailed upon. She seated herself on
a hand hewn wooden stool, while Jeremiah remained reclining in
the hammock. He noticed the expression on her face was different.
It was shy and serious, yet at the same time open. She
had never been more beautiful.

"My father isn't here," Rosa said quietly, "so I've come to ask
you for your blessing."

It was an archaic turn of phrase. Yet it did not trouble
Jeremiah.

"What is it?" he asked her.
"I've decided to stay on here," she said.
"What will you do?"
"I'll work in the dispensary. I have a nurse's training."

Jeremiah wondered what it was she wanted from him. But he had no
idea how to go about asking her, so he simply waited.

Silence stretched out between them, but it was a comfortable
silence, the silence of accord rather than the silence of
discord.

"Do you think," Rosa asked him, "that my father will be able to
forgive me, if I don't go back to him?"

Jeremiah pondered what to say for a few seconds. But then the
words came easily to him.

"He was the one who sent you away, wasn't he?" he asked, rhetorically.

She nodded.

The matter was resolved. Jeremiah had given his blessing.

Raphael Merino asked him to stay for a few minutes after dinner
that night. They had spoken a number of times before, gotten to
the point where each knew quite a bit about the other. Yet, this
night was different. There seemed to be more at stake.

"You will return to the Holy Land, won't you?" Raphael Merino
asked.
"Yes," Jeremiah agreed.
"I want you to take with you the most precious of my possessions," Raphael said.

Jeremiah felt uneasy.

"My father," said Raphael Merino, "was a simple man, a peddler,
devout in his own way, but also practical, compassionate. He
had two dreams. One was that I, his eldest son, become an
educated man. The other was that he might visit the Holy Land.
As so often happens, he had to sacrifice one dream to the other.
He never visited the Holy Land. Perhaps it is because I feel
guilty about what I allowed him to do for me that I have never
visited the Holy Land either. Nor do I think that I will. I
expect to die right here. My wife and I had three children.
They all died very young. They were blameless. But they will
never visit the Holy Land either."

He got up and walked over to a chest of drawers, the one formal
piece of furniture in the room. It must have been, Jeremiah
imagined, a tremendous chore to get the chest up to this height.
It would have had to have been disassembled and carried up in
pieces.

Raphael Merino reached into the top drawer and rummaged around in
it for a few seconds. His shadow, animated by the candle light,
danced around on the wall behind the chest. He found what he was
looking for. It was nothing more than a ragged bag made of some
sort of cotton gingham material. This he handed to Jeremiah. It
took Jeremiah a few seconds to realize that the bag contained a
pair of tefillin.

"Those are my father's tefillin," Raphael Merino said. "He
always wanted to go and pray with them at the Wailing Wall. If I
had a son, I would give them to him. But I do not. So I want
you to take them and pray with them for my father and also for me
at the Wailing Wall, for both of us are to be counted among the
generations of the desert. And if you know a young man of some
virtue who will do them honor, pass them on to him."

It was not a request Jeremiah could refuse.

They left the next day. It made sense to Jeremiah that Rosa
should stay behind. Yet, he felt a pang in his heart at leaving
her. He doubted he would ever see her again. But her enigmatic
image would stay with him until the day of his death. He knew
that she had become a part of him. He did not relish breaking
the news to Lazaro Cohen that his daughter was not returning.
Even so, Jeremiah was in a cheerful frame of mind. His stay at
Initlopoco had refreshed and reinvigorated him. He had come
under the condor's shadow and lived.

A single shot through the head ended Aryeh's life three days
later as they sat eating dinner in a cafe in Mendoza. Pinchas
threw himself over Jeremiah's body. Jeremiah tried to break his
fall by throwing out an arm. As they hit the ground, Jeremiah
felt the bone snap.

The police investigation was completely lackadaisical. It was
designed more to harass Jeremiah and Pinchas than to arrive at
the facts of the murder. Jeremiah spent two days in pain in
police custody before they released him. They weren't satisfied
with his story. They seemed rather pleased that Aryeh was dead.
Only after he was released was he able to get the broken bone
set.

Jeremiah was shaken, for he assumed the bullet must have been
meant for him. His own head had been not more than two feet
away. He had leaned back just as Aryeh leaned forward. It would
have been better, he thought, if he himself had been killed. It
felt him to him as if Aryeh's blood was on his hands. The man
was a hero of two wars, having fought valiantly both in 1967 and
in 1973. Pinchas had no patience with Jeremiah's self recriminations.
He told him curtly they all understood they might be killed at any
moment

Jeremiah was spared seeing Lazaro Cohen, because Lazaro had gone
to Ecuador on business.

When he left Argentina, Jeremiah was convinced he had accomplished nothing.

His pride received a further blow at the hands of Herschel during debriefing.

"Of course," Herschel told him, with the faintest flicker of a
contemptuous smile, "you were only a decoy. It was essential
that you believe that you were something more so that you would
behave with the proper air of self-importance. Aryeh was
supposed to meet a young woman the next day in Vicente Lopez.
She was poisoned."

"Like Kravitz," Jeremiah said, hating at that moment not the
killers of Aryeh and of the unknown young woman, but rather
Herschel himself.

It wasn't until three months later that Jeremiah remembered about
the tefillin. By then, he had been to Japan and back. The cast
had come off his arm. He had spent a week in Paris and a week in
Amsterdam. He had been to Johannesburg for five days. Still his
spirits were low. He could not stop thinking about Aryeh's
death. He had never been that close to real violence before and
the experience had made a rent in his sense of security.

He decided that the least he could do was to honor Raphael
Merino's request. A strange thing happened as he was getting
ready to put the tefillin on. He noticed there was something
else in with the tefillin. Ten large exquisitely cut sparkling
diamonds came spilling out. There was also a small piece of
parchment, on which was inscribed in Hebrew, "Shamir."

The diamonds astounded him. He broke out into a grin. He
remembered that Raphael Merino had described these tefillin as
his most precious possession. Jeremiah went and prayed at the
Wailing Wall in the name of an itinerant peddler he had never
met. As he prayed, a cloud passed overhead, momentarily blotting
the sun out, so that he thought of the condor and its shadow.

He had the diamonds appraised. They totaled forty carats and
were valued, because of their remarkable quality, at $2.9
million.

He went and told Herschel from Mosad about the diamonds.

"It's like the old joke," Jeremiah said, "about the Jew who's
furious with his neighbor. `Why,' he accuses him, did you need
to deceive me? Why did you tell me you were going to Minsk, so,
of course, I would think you were going to Pinsk, when actually
you knew all along you were going to Minsk? Why were you so
cruel to me?"

He beamed at Herschel.

In the following year, on his travels around the world, he told
the story of Raphael Merino's father's tefillin wherever he went.

But the most remarkable was yet to come.

One day in late October, he received a telegram from Peru. It
was signed Rachel Merino. It said she would arrive the following
week in Tel Aviv. It took Jeremiah a few moments before he
concluded that Rachel Merino must be Rosa Cohen.

He went to the airport to meet her. To his surprise, she was
carrying a bundle in her arms. The bundle was a ruddy cheeked
baby boy. He took them both home to his apartment in Jerusalem.
Hannah, his housekeeper was furious with him, because she had not
been warned. But, as usual, once she was finished fussing, she
was able to accommodate and adapt.

Jeremiah was embarrassed at first to ask what he most wanted to
know.† But, after a very few days, his curiosity got the better
of him.

"So the child's father is..."

He couldn't quite bring himself to suggest that the child
belonged to Raphael Merino. Maybe, he thought, it was base
jealousy that stilled his tongue.

"...Aryeh," she said.

She had taken the name Merino out of tact because she knew Aryeh
had a wife and daughter. The child was called Chaim. Jeremiah
meant to take them in only temporarily, until Rosa could make
other arrangements. But five months after they arrived another
telegram came. It said Lazaro Cohen had been found hanging from
the shower in one of the bathrooms of his house. It was a
suicide. Or at least so it seemed on the surface. A story
immediately sprang up that he had been murdered by right wing
anti-Semitic elements. Although Herschel confirmed this version,
Jeremiah still had his doubts. But it was impossible to know.

When the child was three years old, he was playing in a closet in
the apartment. He came across the tefillin of Raphael Merino's
father. He pulled them apart before anyone could stop him. The
piece of parchment with "Shamir," the name of Solomon's magical
worm, inscribed on it came fluttering out. It was Shamir who
could split stone to any shape and hew wood in silence. It was
Shamir who made it possible for Solomon to build the Temple
without using any iron implements or materials tainted by
association with war.

The piece of parchment caught Rosa's eye. That very evening
after dinner she approached Jeremiah.

"I think," she said, "my father went mad with grief after my
mother died, but quietly, as was his way, so, perhaps, no one
around him recognized it. I don't know. Who could blame him if,
at last, he had finally had enough? One of the last letters from
him spoke of a bank account in Lucerne. He gave no number. Nor
has any of the correspondence from the lawyers settling his
estate ever mentioned it. He said only that a clever worm could
split any vault. He may have suspected that, no matter how
careful he was, his letters to me might be read. I was in the
mountains and I didn't think much about it at the time."

She handed Jeremiah a piece of paper. On it she had written a
number: 3004010200.

"Using the system of gematria to relate numbers to letters that
translates to `Shamir.'"

Jeremiah duplicated the translation: shin, 300; mem, 40; yud, 10;
resh, 200.

Although he was skeptical, Rosa insisted. Since he found it
impossible to deny her, in the end, he made the trip to Lucerne.
The account there held $238,000,000

Rosa refused any part of it. She had, she said, more than anyone
needed. She directed Jeremiah to make quiet arrangements for the
administration of the funds for charitable purposes both in the
Holy Land itself and in the Diaspora.

Just as he had prophesied, Jeremiah died in his own bed at the
age of 77. It was only a single week before Chaim Merino's
seventh birthday.