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By Root 647 0

he will be sixteen in two months. They never say to themselves: we are very young, most of our lives have yet to be lived. They fear, they hope and they believe. They think: I will travel to many places/I will never go anywhere/I will have many great loves/No one will ever choose me/The world will be better for my having lived in it/Nothing I do will come to anything/I will make music of unthought-of purity/I am a fraud and will soon be exposed for the fraud I am/I will be renowned, applauded on the world’s great stages/I will end up selling furniture in White Plains like my father, whom I honor/I will be the wife of a great man, will be the mother of many children who surround me with incalculable love/I will marry a man, as my mother did, who forgets that he once loved me.

Of the things they do not fear, or do not think of fearing (fortunate children, spared what others alive when they are alive have not been spared, what most of the human race has not): physical illness, plague, bodily weakness. No, these are not their fears. Their fears are of the earth’s annihilation by the atom bomb, the mushroom cloud, the threat of which inspires their teachers to send them under their desks for weekly air-raid drills. THEENDOFTHEWORLDTHEENDOFTHEWORLD is a phrase that often spins in their minds, and they are terrified even when they forget that they are terrified. They know quite well what it will mean: the complete disintegration of their flesh and bones. The turning to ash in an instant of everything they love.

And close at hand, like an aunt or uncle living in the next town: the memories of the war. The concentration camps. The words, still whispered to themselves at night when sleep refuses: gas chamber, SS, Hitler, death to the Jews.

So these two children, or only recently no longer children, Adam and Miranda, born in 1948, and so in 1964 sixteen or about to be sixteen. She will not allow her mother to give her a sweet sixteen party; her mother, she knows, is disappointed, but will not (she never does) press her wish.

• • •

Prosperous children, or relatively so in Adam’s case. Miranda is more prosperous than she knows; her mother the beneficiary of one of those unnamed industrial enterprises common to the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father, a chemical engineer, graduate of Williams College, her mother, Smith 1941, who once worked, briefly, before her marriage, in a gallery and dreamed of cataloging English watercolors of the nineteenth century. Despite their real, or relative, prosperity, these young people have their nightmares. The flavor, the weather of their nightmares differ.

Miranda’s are of explosions. Something heavy dropping from a plane. In her frightening dreams, she does not make a picture of the thing dropping from the plane; she makes a picture of the pilot: a Russian in a brown wool uniform with Mongol slits for eyes, a pig snout of a nose, enormous teeth, yellow, wolfish, that tear each night into huge hunks of meat and could tear with equal ease a girl child’s flesh. The dream streets are lines of shooting flame, and people run, their skin crackling, their faces melting to monstrosity. Sirens sound, but they are useless; no one is in charge; the population hurtles toward nothing, anything, searching for anything they love, all lost, fallen into the pits the streets have become or burned to cinders. She is trying to get home to her room, her books, her mother who must be safe, her father who must know what to do, but her brother will not be home because he will be in the streets, trying to protect something, but there is no protection, no one can be safe.

Adam’s nightmares unroll in a different landscape. He rarely reads the newspapers, and when his parents are watching Walter Cronkite he is practicing. But he listens, he listens to his teacher Henry Levi. Henry (Heinrich) Levi, sent alone to New York in 1936 to live with uncles and cousins. In Berlin, his family was musical; his father a violinist for the State Opera, his mother a coach for some of the most famous sopranos of the day. They