P7

P7

After the war Michael  came calling to  Yad Mordechai  to visit Judith before  she  could  exchange  her  Major's  uniform  for clothing more appropriate for a collective farm. He said, "Your father Benjamin will not live forever."

Judith lost her smile. She knew what Michael had come to ask her to do. It was something Judith had dreaded for  years. "I'm not ready to tell him everything," she said soberly.

"No, but you are, I think, ready to tell him something, and that is a vast  improvement." He held  out his  hand. "Come." Then Michael whisked Judith back to St. Catherine's lighthouse on the Isle of Wight in the same manner hy had whisked the girl to the kibbutz twenty-one years prior, as the calendar ticked, but only six years as Judith's life went.

For years after the war her father was only  allowed to work in the lighthouse  weather station,  but now,  as Michael  told her before they left Israel, he was back to living in the lighthouse and maintaining it, as Judith remembered from her childhood. She stopped walking and asked of Michael the question she had asked so many others: "Will you tell me what you really are?"

"You will know  everything about  me," Michael  assured her. I "swear this to you. But only after you have first spoken to your father of your life since you were first taken from him."

Judith stopped in her tracks. "Why must it be so?"

"Have you not discerned by now that I am healing your soul?"

After a pause Judith nodded her head, then she resumed her walk.

Michael said, "Good! Then what I have been doing is working."

Somewhere between the  place where  Judith had  paused and  the front door  of the  lighthouse  Michael  somehow slipped  away. Judith was quite alone when she knocked on the door of what had been her girlhood home. A woman Judith did not know opened the door. "Yes, what is it?"

"Is my — is Benjamin home?" '

"Who are you?"

Judith's father hobbled up behind the woman to see who had come calling. At first, when he  saw the Israeli uniform,  he didn't recognize who it was. Benjamin thought he was in trouble again.