doesn’t dare ask, to avoid exposing the fact that I am at the front. I look at him as if he were a stranger. Recently he has aged and his hair has turned white. He works too hard. He worries too much about what goes on around him. Particularly since my brother Avner fell as a British commando.
A strange fellow, my father. For forty-five years he lived in a world of offices and paper. The son of a teacher, he labored for years to build up his own little bank. All of a sudden he decided to emigrate to this place. He claims that he felt the approaching catastrophe in his bones. But I have the suspicion that he had a secret lust for adventure in his veins and found no fulfillment in the bourgeois life he was leading at the time. The money that he brought with him was gone within a few months, because he trusted people too much. Since then he - and my mother too - has had to engage in hard physical work and earns just enough to support us. But still I believe that he is hap-pier today than when he was sitting in an office and shuffling files.
I am a bit envious. He belongs to a generation that got a real edu-cation. That humanistic eduction on the basis of classical culture, that somehow produced better people than we are. They have some-thing, my father and the people of his generation, that is missing in us. Perhaps because they had time. Time to form and to develop themselves at an age when we were already soldiers. Or perhaps because our environment is devoid of culture and we go to schools where not even an attempt is made to educate us.
Since I joined the underground about ten years ago, I have been living an independent life and don’t talk much at home. I hold it against him that he had to break off my schooling at the age of thir-teen. But really I like my parents. And I am ashamed of them, just the same as my comrades.
"Was it really awful where you were?" my father asks. His voice is low and he is not looking at me. He was a soldier in the First World War and has no illusions about the romance of war. I feel that he knows everything and have no desire to lie to him.
"Yes," I say.
He turns a page.
"But now there is a ceasefire," I continue.
"Yes. Thank God!" He says it as if he is trying to convince himself. Deep inside he knows that we will break this ceasefire in order to