Chapter 1: YARON

“Yaron, you don’t know what you have until you lose it,” Mr. Stein said to me placing a hand on my shoulder. “Get the most out of life, boy. Do it before the end comes and it’s too late to do something about it.”

Mr. Stein tried to smile at me, but his eyes were full of tears. He patted my shoulder, and I left.

Those words were spoken to me by Abraham Stein, Edith Stein’s husband. He had just lost his wife, and my parents and I were attending her funeral. Mrs. Stein was thirty-four years old and had died of a sudden respiratory infection.

An unexpected death that had left a broken family and two children motherless. Pete, the oldest, went to school with me and could run a mile faster than anyone else. He was very popular. Until that day, when I saw him crying nonstop with his eyes fixed on a pine box, I had envied him.

I was ten years old, and that was my first funeral. I didn’t know Mrs. Stein, but Mr. Stein was an electrician and worked for my father, so I had been forced to put on my Sunday suit and see for the first time, a dead woman lying in an open coffin.

I will never forget Mrs. Stein’s paleness, poorly hidden under a layer of makeup so excessive that all it did was accentuate even more that she was no longer alive.

When I left, my parents stayed inside, comforting Mr. Stein. I went down the stone steps to wait for them, under the shade of the larches. It was summer, and the sun was beating down hard.

As I pondered the sad man’s advice, I saw her. She was kicking the trunk of a tree. She was wearing a colorful patchwork skirt and a red jacket. She had a top hat with a yellow feather that made her stand out like a ray of sunshine in the midst of the mourning that surrounded us. She immediately reminded me of a circus character.

I walked over and looked at her carefully. She was small and didn’t look like a ten-year-old. But I knew she was because she went to my school. I had seen her around but never talked to her because we moved in different circles. I was a straight-A-plus student. She wasn’t. Kids used to make fun of her because of her clothes or her weird ways. She never reacted, or even acknowledged them, and mainly stayed on her own.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was standing next to her and speaking to her for the first time. “What are you dressed up as?”

She turned, looked at her skirt in bewilderment, and shook her head, a little offended. “I’m not dressed up, silly. I want to be a fashion designer. Someday, I’ll leave this city behind and I’ll be famous.”

I didn’t think she’d get very far, but I kept my mouth shut.

Only someone who was as crazy as she looked like would pay for clothes like that.

I sat down on the ground and watched her kick the thick root of the larch tree until she tore off a branch that was growing wild at its base.