Electric City: A Novel Read Online Free

with, refugees from assorted countries but all from the same war, all Jewish and all homeless, looking for a place to make a living, buy a house, raise a family. They brought a handful of languages with them, but none of Sophie’s generation spoke in the accents of their parents. On the phone and during visits over coffee and cake, she often heard her mother gossiping in Dutch and Hebrew, strains of Yiddish sometimes too. But when they were all gathered together, English was the only vocabulary they had in common.
    “It’s a full moon!” Sophie’s mother announced, clapping her hands as though she had just been awarded a prize. “Let’s go outside and enjoy it.”
    After clumsily stacking the dishes in the sink, Miriam pulled three coats from the hall closet and urged her resistant husband and reluctant daughter out the front door to sit on the steps facing the silent street.Every other house looked abandoned both inside and out. Miriam hugged David with one arm and squeezed Sophie with the other. Instead of a Shabbat melody, her mother sang “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” just one line and nothing else. For a few minutes that seemed to go on and on, they watched their breath make vapors in the silvery dark.

    Hours later, in the darkest part of the night, Sophie woke up in her bedroom, listening for familiar snoring down the hall. The last of the candles had long since burned out. When she parted the curtains and saw that the moon had set, Sophie pulled a thick chenille bathrobe over her flannel nightgown, slid her feet into slippers, and grabbed a wool blanket for extra warmth.
    On the concrete slab making up the back patio, she held her breath to look up, where stars poured in profusion against a vast black bowl. The blanket was big enough to lie in folds on the concrete while also cocooning her shivering body. Sophie stretched out to watch the sky for as long as she could keep her eyes open.
    This is what it’s like in the desert , she thought, or in the middle of the ocean .
    The sky lightened so imperceptibly it was the first time in her life she understood that the stars were always there, and it was only the brightness of the sun that blinded her to the other luminous bodies scattered throughout space. Only when her back was turned, when she looked away from her own bright beacon, could she see how magnificent all those others were—countless suns all around.

    When she finally admitted that it was morning, and tiptoed back indoors, the first thing Sophie noticed was that the old sounds had been restored: the humming from the fridge and the faint but now noticeable buzz of the kitchen lights. She hung up her robe and climbed back into bed, waiting for her parents to awaken too.
    The return of power was reassuring—a recognizable melody running through the house—but it also set off a strange sensation in the pit of her stomach. At first she thought maybe they’d been reminded that life without electricity was still possible, that they could manage perfectly well without it. Maybe they wouldn’t need to feel so plugged in; alongside “living better electrically,” they could rediscover what it was like to be dark for a while.
    Why did it seem weird that the fathers would be heading back to work as they did every ordinary Wednesday, and the mothers making lunches for school? Sophie heard Miriam on the telephone spreading Magda’s news: her husband Daniel was the engineer who figured out that the system put into place to prevent a blackout had instead caused the opposite.
    “He fixed it,” Miriam said to both David and Sophie, pouring orange juice into their glasses. “Just like I said he would.”
    Life was resuming as though nothing at all had gone wrong. But to Sophie everything seemed a little too bright, and yet not quite bright enough.

A LTHOUGH M ARTIN L ONGBOAT lived with his grandmother across the river —that is, on the side of the river supposedly outside the limits of Electric