And then, her mother continues, Social Services launches into a story about his grandparents. Not the Turkish ones, the ones on the other side, his mother’s parents, who came from Salonica.

An international family, Tamar says.

But all from the same small corner of the world. When his father met his mother, he was delighted to learn that she already knew how to cook all his favorite dishes.

Tamar waits for her mother, who has been off the hook of having to cook for anyone since Tamar’s father died, to say something snide about this, but she doesn’t. Instead she recounts the story Social Services told her, about how his grandparents met as teenagers in Salonica, though it took time for his grandfather to convince his grandmother to love him. How they finally married in 1939, and moved into a small apartment together outside the old walls of the city, and his grandfather began to work in the dry goods store that had been in his grandmother’s family for two hundred years. As he spoke, her mother could practically smell the Aegean lapping in the old port and the fuel of the ships, and could hear the doves cooing in the quiet street where the couple lived. Behind her, the dark puddle also listened, the room was quiet, even Tchernichovsky Street was quiet while Mussolini’s bombs fell on Salonica. But she couldn’t relax with those eyes resting on the back of her neck.

My grandparents lost each other during the war, Social Services told her. Each made it to Israel, each was told that the other was dead, and neither could bear to return to Salonica, where fifty thousand were deported and almost no one survived. And then one day, two weeks before my grandmother was supposed to get remarried to an older man, also a widower from the war, my grandfather saw her in the window of a bus passing in front of him on Allenby Street.

There was a moment of silence in the room. How extraordinary, her mother finally said, what a story! But now I really must ask what your business is here. Surely Social Services has better things to do than send storytellers to pay house calls on elderly women.

Yes, of course, he said with a gentle laugh, I was only telling it because it happens more often than you think. The lost are found, couples and siblings reunited, and, well, as you’ll see—have you really not guessed already? Of course, it’s a perfectly natural response, we can take things as slowly as you’d like.

Take what? her mother demanded, and by now she really was beginning to feel irritated, she tells Tamar. I have no idea what you’re talking about, will you please explain exactly why you’re here?