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Show that a bomb leveled the building to its foundation. How else to account for its complete erasure. One bomb, big enough to incinerate beds and patients, leaving hardly a trace. My imagination was encouraged by the bomb shelter sleeping like a giant in our yard. Into his belly, I imagined the nurses and doctors had run, taking the patients who could . walk and leaving the rest. As I think about the hospital, the memory of fire returns. Just a fragment, so tiny that I can hardly hang on to it long enough to explore its dimensions. A building burning. A building that is familiar to me or to my parents. In my memory, they discuss the disaster over dinner as we pass a casserole or baskets of warm bread. On the following day, we drive to see the charred remains still soaking wet from the efforts of the firefighters. The building is but an outline, blue sky filling the holes left between girders and frame like stained glass. This second ghosted structure rises on the heels of the first, only this one brings with it the possibilitvthat such loss isjiotrestricted to war. When I ask my mother about the fire, she remembers no such thing. No blackened skeleton, no dinner conversation. Then I ask her about the hospital, and she tells me that the three story structure remained, gutted and empty but standing. It was much more than a foundation. We would walk through the hallways, remark on the marble floors, touch with reverence the porcelain fixtures and broken glass. I have no memory of this building. While other children looked out their living room windows to watch the squirrels battle over the bird seed or the garbage truck collect the cans, I watched the military display its constant state of readiness. Every day that my father went to work, he was 46 |
