Book Of Telling Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives

One On my rolltop desk sits a paperweight that I took from my father's study after he died, without telling anyone. A clear plastic square, palm-size, it contains what seems to be a wire model of a leafless tree: a silver trunk the thinness of embroidery thread splits into six gossamer limbs, and these, in turn, fray into lines that could be the crow's-feet around my eyes. At first glance, it's hard to imagine how such an exact replica of a tree could have been constructed on this scale. Picking it up, you find a pinhole in the base at the point where the trunk originates; and you discover that the tree is a channel carved by an electric spark. The fine-spun pattern, elaborate to the vanishing point, is what remains of an event lasting a fraction of a second. I often think that the story I want to tell is the tree left by the explosion that killed my father. At the root of this tree is chance: my father died by chance, and it was purely by accident, years later, that I discovered he had built Israel's first rocket. He had never told me, but then he was secretive. From a chance encounter, I learned that my father had been in a secret group of scientists who had invented weapons during Israel's war of independence; and whose affection for him remained such that, when I tracked them down one memorable summer, they were willing to tell me their story, which is classified and not likely to be fully told for the balance of my lifetime. One by one, my father's secrets were unlocked, after his death, by the same principle of random chance that had killed him; all his mysteries were laid open to that summer's cleansing air and light. Now I've come to a point where I need to tell my father's story as I have slowly pieced it together, from the state secrets of Israel and my own unspoken memories. Looking out the bay window spanning my workroom, I see the flagstone patio, and upon it, in a black pot, the spindly ruins of a tomato plant. It is mid-September. Beyond, in the sunken garden, a bank of coneflowers, bleached petals fringing their brown nubs. The herb island, raised on rocks from the grass, is a tumulus of lemon balm, mosquitoes, and the dense clustered stars of heath aster. The garden and the trees behind it have a backstage atmosphere, an air of laughing exhaustion; only a few roses are still beautiful, and in our woods, the witchy-limbed blue ashes and stout chinquapin oaks ("sweet oaks," my husband calls them) will soon be as leafless as the silver tree in my paperweight. I catch myself in a loud sigh; half contentment, half disbelief that I can call this house, these woods, home. My first permanent home. My first roots, set down in the early autumn of life, not too late, but barely. . . . I'm thinking of how my father kept my existence so secret that most of his friends were unaware he had a child. And to understand that secret, it is myself I will have to unlock. Between thumb and forefinger, I pinch the brass pea that is a knob for the little door under the desk's top. Opening it, I remove from the shelf inside a small photograph, deckle-edged. This was given to me during the fiftieth--but still classified--reunion of the secret scientists. On the back, a note is penciled: "Passover, 1948." I'm translating. The Hebrew reads, Pesah, Tashah. Tashah, literally '48, is also the name of a generation. And here they are: the Science Corps, Hemmed in the Hebrew acronym. In the background, a grayish yellowness so abstract it can only be the dunes of Tel Aviv, 1948. Tel Aviv, Tashah. The spring of the war. In the foreground, a crowd of twenty or so dressed for the holiday: young women in square-shouldered suits, young men in jackets, no hats, unbuttoned collars spread like wings, and all the wings are white. Each face could be covered by two grains of coarse salt. Yet each has a personality. The mustached gent on the far lefMuir, Sharona is the author of 'Book Of Telling Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives', published 2005 under ISBN 9780805242348 and ISBN 0805242341.