How Old is the Queen of England?
The old dog lumbers beside me, exhaling and inhaling laboriously and tracking my steps with her bowed head turned white with old age. Owls perch on the branches canopying the path, against the indigo background of the darkening sky. They give us sideways glances and emit long whistles like rubber toys. Their eyes are open in wonderment.
It's a familiar route. It begins at the breach in the concrete fence, shortly before sunset, and ends at the exact same place half an hour later. A twilight walk through the park. Except that this neighborhood park, which divides Tel Aviv's last remaining open fields—their fate sealed, they merely await execution by contractor—from the affluent suburbs of the northern city, happens to also be the Kiryat Shaul Regional Cemetery.