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For the first few years after the bombing it worried Rami that he was repeating himself. He sometimes had to tell Smadar’'s story two or three times a day. Once in the morning at a school. Once in the afternoon at the Parents Circle offices. Then again at night in a synagogue or a community hall or a mosque. To pastors. A’'immah. Rabbis. Reporters. Cameramen. Schoolkids. Senators. Visitors from Sweden, Mexico Azerbaijan. The bereaved from Venezuela, Mali, China, Indonesia, Rwanda, who had come to visit the holy places.

On occasion - early on, before he allowed himself to be comfortable in the repetition - he found himself pausing in mid-sentence, wondering if he had just said the same thing twice in the span of minutes, not just a general repetition, but the exact same words in a row, with the same intonation, the same facial expressions, as if somehow he had reduced the story to the mechanical, the rhythm of the everyday. It bothered him to think that the listeners might look at him as a broken- down reel, trapped by the sameness of his grief.

Afterwards he would realise he had left out whole chunks of what he truly wanted to say.

It flushed him with fear that he might appear fraudulent, theatrical, rehearsed. As if his story was a brand, a commercial, bound to repetition. He could feel the heat rise in his face. His palms grew sweaty. On the second or third telling in a day, he found himself pinching the skin on his forearms to jolt himself awake, to make sure he wasn’'t retreading old territory. My name is Rami Elhanan. I am the father of Smadar. I am a seventh-generation Jerusalemite.

He wondered how actors did it. To say the same thing meaning- fully, performance after performance. What sort of discipline did it take? Once a day. Twice on matinee days. How could they, in that end-less repetition, continue to make it real? How could they keep it alive?

But the more he went on - the more the story took on a singular shape - the more he began to realise that it did not matter. There was, he knew, always an end to the run of an actor, but he had no such end. No final curtain call. No ovation. No grand finale for him. No walk out the stage door, overcoat on, collar turned up. No streetlit alleyway. No rain falling on the grey cobbled street. No morning review. No fawning adulation.

What flushed Rami with fear?

A) That people may discover he was lying

B) That he was not telling everything he wanted to say

C) That he might appear like a fraud

D) That he could be cheated