I was seated on a sofa in Mira's living room. It was a nicer room than mine. Yellow curtains hung at the windows. Small potted cacti stood on a windowsill. Photographs of the Dead Sea, the ruined mountain fortress of Masada, and the Old City of Jerusalem adorned the walls. In the middle of a colorful rug squatted a low wooden table. Mira had taken a chair on the opposite side of it. She had not offered me anything to drink, and I would have declined had she done so. I desired nothing but answers, and I think she desired nothing but supplying them. I found myself literally at the edge of my seat, and my skin felt as if it were vibrating in anticipation.

"In Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery," Mira said. Her tightly controlled expression and flat tone made it clear that this was a woman who had had much experience with death.

"Dead?" I asked, feeling foolish the instant the word left my lips. The vibration had faded, leaving a bleak void in its place.

A curt nod.

No miracle. In fact, it was worse than that. A mother parts with her only child to save him from the horrors of Nazi Germany. Against all odds that child and the woman who agreed to care for him make it to the shores of the Promised Land, only to be killed on the cusp of safety. Fury welled up inside me, followed by immense sadness. What sort of God allows for something as sacrilegious as that?

"They were murdered," Mira said, and this time there was a current of anger in her tone.

"By the British, you mean."

She shook her head. "Esther and Willie weren't killed by the British. They were murdered on August 26, 1939, in their apartment in Tel Aviv."

I asked her to repeat what she'd just said. She did. Then she told me the rest of the story. She spoke haltingly at first, as if she had to talk herself into uttering each new word in her narration. Once she got into it, though, her speech smoothed and normalized.

"I met her on the Salonika. The ship wasn't much. It was old and patched up, and the engine rattled the whole way from Greece. But it was the best we were able to find. We arrived a little after dawn and began ferrying passengers ashore. We only had two boats, so we had to make several trips back and forth. We had people on the beach with cars ready to drive the new maapilim away. Then the British came."