EIGHTEEN YEARS AFTER HE PASSED AWAY

He wasn’t important; the Population Registry lost
his documents, the Ministry of the Interior claimed it couldn’t verify
the information and I had to sign a declaration under oath before his honour, the judge:
I, Yudit Shahar, declare that I am the daughter of he of blessed memory who
was born in 1911 in Turkey with the name Elazar Sabakh, who received
the name Eliezer Sabah in this country in 1929, and chose to live and die
as Eliezer Shahar; and that one zero was erased
from his identity card by mistake by the office; I hereby declare
that he is himself

(I wanted to tell the judge: his eyes were brown and reddened
when he was furious; he was light-skinned; we had the same freckles
on our shoulders; I wanted to say, I didn’t know this man either,
and it is doubtful whether he knew me)

EIGHTEEN YEARS AFTER HE PASSED AWAY