When did she tell him about the snow on the beach? He wasn’t sure. But it happened here, during one of their first encounters, when she arrived to buy challah at the bakery and then slipped away with him into the nearby alley. That was where she told him about her very first memory. About children playing in the snow, digging with bare hands in search of the sand that had disappeared. About older men and elegant women sitting on green beach chairs in thick robes, trying to tan in the unbearable chill; about seashells that poked out from the white snowflakes, and about mothers shouting at their children not to go barefoot lest they catch a cold. She also told him about herself, the only one who dared to go into the freezing water. She described slowly walking into the sea while chunks of ice floated around her. She told him how she closed her eyes and went deep into the water; she opened them only for a second and saw before her the purest blue she had ever seen in her life.

To this day Sammy still regrets what he said to her back then. “It was probably just a dream,” he determined, and then added with some certainty, “There hasn’t been snow here in years, not to mention a beach.” Since then, she no longer shared the chronicles of her first memory. At first he believed it was only a matter of time before he convinced her to talk about the beach again, but over the years he learned how stubborn she could be. It made no difference how many times he apologized and begged, she persevered in her silence. Even after they came to know each other’s bodies, even after they married, and even decades later, when they moved into a retirement home on the other side of town, she claimed such a memory was too precious to place in the hands of another, even of a loved one.

Then came the Alzheimer’s and ripped out her memories one by one. Their honeymoon in Rome; their evening at the Chinese restaurant; the traffic ticket she received on Highway 2; their son’s death, the taste of pistachio ice cream; Abbott and Costello; the first cigarette they smoked together; the war and the one that followed; her father’s voice; the dog they adopted for three days only to discover it belonged to the neighbors; the trip to David’s Stream in Ein Gedi and the moment she slipped and fell; their two years in Boston; the run-down bathrooms in the Hebrew University dorms; her fear of death; the very specific way she liked her coffee; the opening line of Anna Karenina; the day she met Sammy.