Mihai Wald died in the Jerusalem Mountains

Mija Wald’s death in the Jerusalem mountains on April 2 is the fatal event around which private grief and public history converge. Killed during the war, he leaves Gershom Wald bereaved and Shaltiel Abravanel’s political arguments suspended; years later, the landscape of his final night links his father’s unresolved mourning to Shmuel Ash’s temporary place in the family home.

The death and its setting

Gershom recalls losing his only son in the mountains of Jerusalem on the night of April 2. Mija’s death is not merely reported as a casualty of war: it is the point at which Gershom says his discussions with Shaltiel ended forever. The tragedy extinguishes their dispute, giving a family loss an immediate consequence in the history of their friendship and political disagreement.

The novel later gives the death a precise and desolate landscape. As Shmuel travels by bus through the Sha'ar HaGai area, the road winds among wooded hills where Mija, twelve years earlier, lay bleeding and agonizing among the rocks through the night. He lost consciousness, then died at dawn, abandoned and drained of blood. The spring journey places the remembered death beside Shmuel’s movement away from Jerusalem, making the road a passage through both the present landscape and the family’s past.

A private loss within a public conflict

Mija’s death occurs amid the war that Gershom says made Shaltiel’s hopes for shared Jewish-Arab communities seem impossible to pursue. In retrospect, Gershom recalls that people understood the coming conflict as a struggle for life and death, in which defeat might mean that none of them would survive. That political reality does not resolve the arguments between the two men; Mija’s death ends them by making further discussion impossible.

The loss also fixes the household in an aftermath of war. Gershom says that he, Atalia, and Shaltiel shut themselves inside the house after Mija was killed, as if enclosed in a coffin. During the Jordanian siege of Jerusalem, its thick stone walls protected them from bullets and shells. Atalia was the one who sometimes went out for kerosene, ice, and rationed food. The family’s withdrawal thus carries the consequence of Mija’s death into the daily conditions of their lives.

Memory and aftermath

For Gershom, the death is not a completed past. More than ten years later, he says he has not slept at night: each night, Mija is slaughtered again among the rocks on the wooded slope. His account makes bereavement repetitive, as though the lost son’s final night returns without relief. The memory also accompanies Gershom’s conviction that he himself is already a dead man.

Shmuel encounters this history not only through Gershom’s telling but through the route he takes out of the city. Near Sha'ar HaGai, he recognizes that Mija’s death has indirectly given him a winter in the Wald household, with Mija’s father and wife. He thinks of that winter as a gift he has wasted, despite having abundant free time and solitude. The death therefore reaches beyond mourning: it shapes Shmuel’s sense of what he has received, and failed to make use of, during his stay.

Narrative significance

The novel presents Mija’s death through recollection and later physical passage rather than as an isolated battlefield scene. Gershom’s testimony establishes the date and the family wound; Shmuel’s view from the bus returns the reader to the wooded road and the night-long suffering. The changing frame makes the death at once a political consequence, a father’s recurring trauma, and the absent center of a household in which the living continue to measure their relationships against the person who is gone.