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Danny Yatom called me a couple of minutes later. He said Rabin was still alive. But from the details he gave me, I knew it would take a miracle for him to pull through. “Three shots, from close range,” Danny said. “From an /sraeli, a Jew.” Like Rabin, like me too until this had actually happened, it was something Danny was struggling to believe. He said that he’d call me back when he knew anything more. But I had the TV on in the room. Before he did, I watched Eitan Haber announce that Yitzhak Rabin was dead. Although I hadn’t known it until I’d arrived, Yossi Beilin was also in New York, for meetings and a speech of his own. Though he was a Peres protégé, and I was seen as closer to Rabin, the two of us had become friends. We immediately made plans to get the next flight home. But before leaving for the airport, I phoned Leah Rabin. However inadequate I knew it would be in helping her even begin to cope with the loss, I told her that my, and Nava’s, thoughts were with her. That Yitzhak’s death would leave a tremendous hole, in all of us, in every single Israeli. “They shot him,” she kept murmuring. “They shot him. They shot him. They shot him.” I called Peres, too. “Shimon, you have a mountain on your shoulders,” I said. “But your task is to carry on. All of us will be with you, supporting, helping however we can.” It was the saddest flight I’d ever taken. Yossi and I barely spoke. Each of us was deep in thought. I found myself lost in memories of Rabin — from the very first time I’d met him, in the sayeret, to that last, long talk we’d had in his office a couple of days earlier. For some reason, I kept wondering whether, when the shots had been fired, he’d been turning to look behind him. It was an idiosyncrasy he had, whenever he was leaving a meeting or an event — even, as I now recalled vividly, when the two of us were leaving the municipal ceremony in Ofakim. I was behind him as we left. “Ehud,” he said, turning back, “are you there?” It was a senseless detail. It wouldn’t change anything. But I still felt torn up inside thinking about it. After we landed at Ben-Gurion, I went with Nava to the Rabins’ apartment in Ramat Aviv. There were hundreds of people outside, and nearly a hundred crowded inside the flat. Leah looked exhausted, her face ashen. “They shot him,” she said over and over as Nava and I hugged her. “Three shots. In the back. Why?” I said there was no sane answer, but that with Yitzhak’s death, Israel seemed different, the world seemed different, and emptier. Before we left, we added our candles to the forest of flickering memorial lights outside the apartment block. Then, we drove the Kings of Israel Square. Thousands of people were huddled in small groups throughout the plaza, sitting around 279 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028127