The judge was dying. He was doing so elegantly, with the principled modesty he was known for. In his chair beside the open window he sat sheltered from the ocean breeze in a stilled river of sunlight. From outside, the soft clicking of palm fronds. And beyond, the dreamy surf of the Tel Aviv beach, punctuated by the muted sounds of off-duty soldiers playing matkot, their soldier-girlfriends surely chiding them for kicking up sand onto their blankets…all of them sun-browned and deliberately lazy against the possibility of being summoned back to their units at a moment’s notice. The faint sound of wooden paddles connecting with rubber balls on the beach on a Tuesday afternoon: a good sound, a necessary sound, the heartbeat of the nation the judge had helped to shape.

A thin tube supplied oxygen to each of the judge’s nostrils. He breathed so slowly, seated in his cushioned chair, that the motion of his chest was barely detectable.

From the radio, Chopin.

*

Hendrik watched him die. For weeks he had visited every afternoon for this purpose: to sip tea with the man who had once been his brother-in-law. To watch him sit in his chair bathed in sunlight and slowly expire. In Hendrick’s imagination those two delicate tubes were not supplying oxygen to the judge’s weak lungs. Instead, they were allowing oxygen, breath, even life itself to drain from the judge’s body. A slow, transparent process serenely undoing the work accomplished in his mother’s womb by a cord of her flesh and blood eighty-eight years ago.

And who deserved such a peaceful death more than a man so ardent for peace?

Nearly six decades ago, when Judge Daniel Artzi was still named Danek Stern, he and Hendrick had labored together: two infinitesimal dots swept on the surf of the war. In the tense clamor of patriotism filling the city less than a day before Hitler’s planes droned over Warsaw, they’d signed up for the Polish army. But their regiment, a lopsided creature built out of aching bugle calls and a terrible dignity and propelled by a jarring drumbeat, began to disintegrate as soon as it had formed. Shouting, mustached cavalry with sabres thumping at the sides of their long coats paced their noble-necked horses beneath the droning shadows of German bombers. Infantrymen lined up in proud rows as though preparing to tumble in a gale of bullets. Danek and Hendrick heeded the advice of a passing soldier, stripped off their uniforms, and fled. With the Germans advancing there could be no return to Warsaw, where Marte and the girls surely were being herded in discomfort but safety. All knew the stories told by parents and grandparents of the unpleasantness of the last war for the women and children left behind—but there was no going back to aid Marte. The German troops would inevitably be coursing the cities as they had in that war, hunting for men to shoot or conscript. On the dark road where they walked side by side, with no sound other than their boots on the dirt and the dull thudding of bombs in the distance, Danek shared with Hendrick a few small words of sympathy for Marte—words that seemed for the first time to acknowledge that Hendrick, too, had a claim on Danek’s twin sister.