Sala Wiskoff, my housemate, asked me what I had seen outside, and I told her nothing, because it was too difficult to find the words. (I still have some soup in my pail; for the first time in quite some time, I have lost my appetite.) At two in the afternoon, the streets here are emptier than they have been the entire year and a half we’ve lived here, emptier than they were on Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah, emptier than at the height of the typhoid epidemic. Those who have a house to hide in are hiding in their houses.
