but I remember little from before the
siege. I do remember cafОs (seen from
below, with huge tables and the legs of
waiters and faces looming down to ask me
if I would like a sweet). Iтm sure my
parents must have been there, but that I
do not remember.
And I remember music. I had my little
violin (although it seemed so large to me
then), and music was not my second
language but my first. I thought in music
before ever I learned words. Even now,
decades later, when I forget myself in
mathematics I cease to think in words, but
think directly in concepts clear and
perfectly harmonic, so that a mathematical
proof is no more than the inevitable
majesty of a crescendo leading to a final,
resolving chord.
I have long since forgotten anything I
knew about the violin. I have not played
since the day, when I was nine, I took
from the rubble of our apartment the
shattered cherry-wood scroll. I kept that
meaningless piece of polished wood for
years, slept with it clutched in my hand
every night until, much later, it was
taken away by a soldier intent on rape.
Probably I would have let him, had he not
been so ignorant as to think my one meager
possession might be a weapon. Coitus is
nothing more than the natural act of the
animal. From songbirds to porpoises, any
male animal will rape an available female
when given a chance. The action is of no
significance except, perhaps, as a chance
to contemplate the impersonal majesty of
the chain of life and the meaninglessness
of any individualтs will within it.
When I was finally taken away from the
city of music, three years later and a
century older, I owned nothing and wanted
nothing. There was nothing of the city
left. As the hoverjet took me away, just
one more in a seemingly endless line of
ragged survivors, only the mountains
remained, hardly scarred by the bomb
