My father is dead; he died two months ago. At the hospital in New York I was given his clothes, his watch, and the book he’d been reading as he ate alone at the restaurant. I searched his pockets for a note to me, first the pants and then the rain-coat. Finding none, I read the book, about legal theory and Maimonides. I couldn’t make sense of the words. I had not prepared myself for his death. He had not prepared me. My mother died when I was three. We had already dealt with death, in our way we’d agreed to be finished with it. Then, without warning, my father broke our agreement.

A few days after the shiva, Koren brought me the keys to the apartment in Tel Aviv. I hadn’t known there was anything that belonged to my father there. In the five years before he died, he had taught the winter semester in Israel, in the city where he grew up. But I always assumed that he lived in rooms loaned to him by the university, the sort of spare, impersonal place visiting academics are always given, which have everything and nothing: salt in the cupboard, but never olive oil; a knife, but a knife that doesn’t cut. He told me almost nothing about where he lived between January and May. But he was not secretive about it. I knew, for example, that he stayed in the center and commuted to the campus in Ramat Aviv three times a week because he preferred the city, and that the apartment where he stayed was not far from the sea, where he liked to walk in the early morning. When we spoke on the phone, as we often did, and he told me about the concerts he attended, the dishes he had tried cooking, and the book he was writing, I never pictured his surroundings on the other end of the line. And when I tried to recall those conversations, it seemed to me that there was nothing beyond the sound of my father’s voice: it absorbed even the need to imagine.

And yet there was Koren, with the keys to the apartment I hadn’t known of. It was Koren, the executor of my father’s will, who’d taken care of the funeral arrangements; I had only to be present when they lowered him into the ground, to add the first shovel of dirt. The hollow thud it made on the pine casket made my knees buckle. Standing in the cemetery in a dress too heavy for the warm weather, I remembered the one time I’d seen him drunk. He and Koren had sung so loudly it had woken me up: Chad gadya, chad gadya. One little goat, one little goat. The dog came, and bit the cat, that ate the goat, that my father bought for two zuzim. Once my father told me that the Torah contained no mention of the everlasting soul—that the soul as we know it came along only in the Talmud, and, like all technological advances, it made things easier but cut people off from something that had once been native to them. What was he saying? That the invention of the soul made people strangers to death? Or was he instructing me not to think of him as a soul once he was gone?