City of God by E.L. Doctorow Page A

music and who had told my mother that Sarah had an eye for me, a bit of news that I heard with feigned indifference. In fact every week on Tuesday I went down two blocks to Mrs. Levin’s for my fiddle lesson. The fiddle was kept in her house, though it was mine. Naturally I could never practice. My lesson was also my practice for the lesson. It took place while the men in the carpentry shop next door were still working, so that the sound of the fiddle could not be heard over the noise. At such times Sarah Levin sat in the room, a thin child with pale hair and large eyes that watched me, which I told myself I hated, though of course it made me play smartly.
    Still, most of the time I was alone. I waited for my parents, praying to God they would return from their day’s labor in the city. As they’d come in the door, bringing the cold air with them, perhaps with a bitof smuggled food bartered from the Lithuanians, I would thank God for His beneficence.
    It was in this period of my life I learned from observation of my mother and father what adult love was. That this could be maintained—a presumption of a father’s male powers, a mother’s beauty, her waiting upon him, her reception of him in their bed—when they lived stripped of their lives, enslaved, everything taken from them, I did not understand as something remarkable until years afterward. Now I only accumulated the evidence. The strong attraction between them had nothing to do with me. My mother could not stop looking at her husband. When he was in the room with us she was transfixed. I watched her bosom as she breathed. I noted the thickness of the curve of his forearm under the rolled shirtsleeve. I watched him stand out at the open door and look down the street each way before he permitted them to leave the house. When they readied themselves for work at dawn, he helped my mother with her coat and then she turned and raised the collar of his jacket. Upon each, front and back, was sewn the star of yellow cloth.
    One night I was awakened by what I thought was the wind whistling through the cracks in the attic boards. But it wasn’t the wind, it was screaming. Not from nearby, not from my house—I heard my parents in the room below, the urgent tones of their voices when they thought I couldn’t hear them. I knelt at my window: The sky was alight. My street was quiet, the houses dark, but the sky beyond seemed to be flying upward. I saw the color of flame reflected on my nightshirt and called to my parents. Fire, fire! In moments my mother was with me, leading me back to bed. Shh, she said, it’s all right, we are not on fire, you are safe, go back to sleep. I wrapped myself in the safety of my covers, I folded the pillow over my ears and hummed to myself so as not to hear those screams. It was a terrible sound, though distant, of many screaming voices. I watched the firelight fade on the inside of my eyelids. I fell asleep imagining the screams turning back into the wind, as if drawn up by God, rising to heaven.
    In the morning the word came that the Germans had burned down the hospital. When I say the hospital, you must not imagine the sort of modern high-rise facility we have here. It was a cluster of houses that had been refashioned by opening walls and tying the buildings together with lumber so as to provide three wards of bunk beds, onefor men, one for women, one for children, as well as some examining rooms, a small ill-equipped operating room, and a dispensary. The Germans surrounded the hospital, boarded up the doors and windows and, with over sixty-five people inside, including twenty-three children, set the place on fire. These are numbers indelible in my mind. Sixty-five. Twenty-three. Some of the patients had been ill with typhus and they feared the contagion, the decimation of the labor supply. So this was their solution, to burn everyone alive, including the staff. All the next day smoke rose over the town. The