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We were living in a hotel in Diisseldorf, where there was a memorial plaque fixed to the wall: "As a young poet, Heinrich Heine spent many happy years here." We had to take a photograph of that, of course, with me in front of it. Heine the young poet used to drive me nuts.

When I was still in elementary school, my father would sometimes take me along on his travels. He never stayed away for long, just a day or two. On the train we would eat kosher sausage rolls he had filled himself. But we ate nonkosher sausage as well, and lots of pancakes and pastries. In his opinion, that sort of food was every bit as good as a hot meal. He would meet people in cafes. The weather was hot. I wore my short pants.

My father was bald. People took him for my grandfather. They would ask, "Do you like going out with your grandpa?" We would go into some cafe where the man he had arranged to meet would be sitting. He'd be old and bald too. They would have a few vodkas. I'd get ice cream, never anything but ice cream. They would talk for hours. My father never told me what he talked about with all those bald men. When we had finished in the cafe, we would go to the fairground and eat pork sausage. He said that God didn't care about one pork sausage more or less. God might not, but my mother did. In the evening we'd go to another cafe, where we'd meet yet another old man, the kind who might have played God in a B movie. More vodkas would be drunk. My father would get excited. His hair looked like straw. That was because he let it grow very long to cover the bald spot on his head, and when he got excited it would fall over his eyes. "To better times!" they would shout. My father would thump the table. No one paid any attention to him. They all thumped the table in there. The talk would be about the Majdanek trial. Or maybe about the young poet Heine again, who knows. It was all pretty much the same thing. My mother thought I'd gone with him to sell stamps, but I never saw a single one. I'd ask him if he'd sold any. He'd refuse to say. Not even to my mother. If you pressed him, all he'd say was, "I could tell you a tale or two—any fool could."

For breakfast I would get hot chocolate, something I never got at home. Once we stood for a whole hour in a shopping mall listening to a man playing the accordion.

Another time we went to Brussels. We saw an accident there. An old man with a cane was run over by a truck at a traffic light. It happened very slowly. The driver began to accelerate but didn't see him. My father waved his arms in the air and shouted, "Hey! Hey!" The driver paid no attention to my father and the truck drove right over the old man. We couldn't stay and watch because we were due in a cafe where another old man was waiting for my father. The cafes were always the kind where old men were the only people who ever came, and not too many of them either. Even the waiters were ancient. And the fans turned too slowly to be any use.

Brussels didn't have a fairground. In any case, I was never allowed to go on a roller coaster because my father was too scared to go on one himself. He let me try the shooting, but I was never any good. My father always hit the target. Once he won a teddy bear for me, but what was I supposed to do with a teddy bear? He always took along a plastic shopping bag from the Albert Heijn grocery stores when we went to those cafes. He said, "It's best to carry important things in plastic bags." Sometimes we'd have to wait for the other old men, who always stank of garlic just like my father. I would refuse to sit on their laps, because I wore short pants and their own pants tickled like mad, the same as their cheeks.

Once we had to take some herring to an old man in Diissel-dorf. We got up early to lay in a stock of ten herrings from my father's herring man next to the stock exchange building. It was the kind of day when most people would rather be lying in a tub of ice-cold beer. My father was wearing sunglasses, and later on in the train he joked with two girls who were sitting with us in the compartment. Just past Oberhausen the compartment began to stink of herring. My father had put the herring in the baggage rack. He always carried a small black bottle with a gold top on his travels. It was filled with eau de cologne or something that looked like it. He pulled the black bottle out of his inside pocket and began to sprinkle the walls of the compartment with the cologne, to the great amusement of the girls, who slapped their knees. My father seemed to be enjoying himself, too. Besides the bottle he always brought along a book, the same book each time, an English textbook. It was the most well-thumbed book I have ever seen, and it's a mystery to me why he never lost it, since he lost almost everything else on his travels. He even lost me a few times. Just before Dusseldorf, the air in our compartment became unbearable, despite the cologne. He pulled the chopped onions and the cucumber pickles and the herring out of his bag. He let the girls take a whiff, he sniffed it himself, and then he flung the herring out of the moving train onto the track. That compartment must have reeked like the inside of a herring barrel for days afterwards.

My father told us, "In the old days our family would all eat out of a single pan, and they'd turn out the light before they began so that everyone could start on equal terms. Some days they had to make soup from the smell of last week's meat."

When I was twelve, the travels suddenly stopped, or perhaps I wasn't welcome on them anymore.

After my father died, we did indeed find a safe full of stamps, although not as many as we had expected. We won't have to buy any for the rest of our lives, no matter what country we're in. My mother has forbidden me to use them, though. It seems they may be worth quite a lot. I'll believe that when I see it. He also turned out to be the owner of twenty horses. In Berlin. A riding school for the disabled. Acquired in 1965. It occurred to me that my father probably bought the horses so we could all get some exercise. That was an odd idea, since I couldn't really see my father, my mother, me, or my sister on a horse. My mother was terribly upset. "What am I supposed to do with twenty horses?" she cried. "Aren't the stamps enough?"

We managed to get rid of the riding school. A lawyer fixed it all up. "It had been losing money for years," he told us. "Not a soul went there anymore, not a single solitary soul. It beats me why he hung on to it for so long." We got next to nothing for it. No one wanted the horses. Later it turned out that a lot of them were ponies. It's easier for the disabled to get up onto them or something. I said to my mother, "You could sing a song: 'I still own twenty horses in Berlin.' " I didn't get much of a laugh with that.

In the old days we used to go to Berlin quite often. We had an aunt in an old age home there. We went to see her just about every summer, and we'd stay in the old age home ourselves. A whole summer in an old age home! Summers in Berlin can be hot. The people in that home dropped like flies. In the afternoon we would all go to the cake shop and eat like pigs. Me too. As far as I was concerned we could have stayed in Berlin forever, just for the cakes. Now and again we'd go to Wannsee beach. When my mother wasn't looking, my father and I would get some pork sausage and potato salad from huge tubs. Dripping with fat, but the most delicious I've ever eaten. My aunt would be there, too, with her parasol, because she was afraid of the sun.

We all had to go to Israel, where my sister lives, for my father's funeral. We couldn't bury him in Amsterdam, because my sister wasn't allowed to fly. She was nine months pregnant. The baby was due any minute. So we took the body to her. Via Rome, because it had to be done quickly and there was no direct flight that day.

Finally we arrived at Ben-Gurion airport, having spent all day traveling. My mother never stopped moaning the whole time: "I killed him, I killed him." Until I said, "Shut up, or I'll kill you."

We waited in Arrivals. "Where is my husband's coffin?" my mother asked. "It'll be here in a moment," they said. "You understand—we can't send it down with the ordinary baggage."

We waited with my sister. One hour, two hours. They brought us coffee. Another hour. The whole plane must have been cleared by that time. They brought us more coffee. They called Rome. The coffin was still in Rome. "No panic, nothing's wrong, it's simply been left behind in Rome. That can happen, what with all the transfers. It'll be here on the very next plane."

My mother burst into tears. I thought, Now my sister's going to give birth, right here in Ben-Gurion.

I shouted, "We'll all go to Rome. We'll bury him in Rome. Rome, here we come." All that crying was making me nervous. And my sister's labor pains.

He arrived the next morning. We buried him right away. They hurtled to Jerusalem with him because it was Friday and you're not allowed to bury people on a Saturday.

Then we sat on boxes for a week eating bean soup. That was because my sister's friends were under the mistaken impression that we were crazy about bean soup. You are not allowed to do your own cooking when you are in mourning, but actually I'd rather eat nothing at all than eat bean soup every day.

A week later 1 flew back to Amsterdam, and with my mother's power of attorney in my pocket 1 sold the horses.