The Immigrants Read Online Free PDF

Lavette.”
    “Yes, Papa.”
    “You see Lavette?”
    “No, Papa,” Stephan said.
    “Yes, Papa, no, Papa—” He stood up, looking around the crowded kitchen, women nursing babies, children howling, his wife, Maria, stirring an enormous pot on the stove, three men staring dumbly out of a window.
    “Papa,” Stephan said. “They are both dead—Anna and Joseph both.”
    “What!”
    “They were caught in the house and burned. I saw it yesterday.
    The house burned down. There is nothing left.”
    “You see it, you tell me that! How do you know?” he demanded fiercely. “How do you know they dead?”
    “The policeman told me, Papa.”
    “God save me,” he said in Italian, and turned to his wife. “Did you hear that, Maria—did you hear what Stephan said?”
    She stood at the stove dumbly, tears rolling down her cheeks. One of the men at the window, a plasterer by the name of Cambria, burst into a torrent of words. He had been locked in silence. Now he had a chance to say something. He lived three houses from the Lavettes.
    He and his wife and his children ran into the street with the first shock. The Lavette house had burst into flames, like an explosion.
    Lavette, his wife, and his son, Daniel, lived in an apartment on the third floor. They were trapped there, trapped and destroyed.
     
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    “All of them? The boy too?”
    Where else would the boy be at five o’clock in the morning?
    Cambria began to explain how he had looked for a priest, but Cassala could listen to no more, and he fled from the house into the smoky haze that still cov ered the city. The firebreak, where they had blasted dozens of houses to stop the flames, was only half a mile from his home, and here he entered into the gates of hell, a whole city reduced to ashes and blackened timbers and piles of rubble.
    Everywhere, soldiers with fixed bayonets stood guard, and Cassala moved past them apprehensively, for the city was full of stories that the soldiers had killed more people than the earthquake. He was not alone. Hundreds of people were moving slowly on the streets, and families stood in little clusters, looking silently at the blackened ruins that had been their homes.
    His friend, Joseph Lavette, had lived on Howard Street, and there Cassala made his way, but as he picked his way among the ruins, he was unable even to determine which was the house, nor did he know ex actly what he searched for, charred bodies, confirma tion of death, hope of life. And how his memories tor tured him! Joseph Lavette had been like a brother to him, Daniel like his own child.
    After the older Lavette had borrowed five hundred dollars from Cassala to make the down payment on the fishing boat, his grati tude for a loan based on nothing but faith and friend ship impelled him to make his boat a Sunday excursion vessel for the two families.
    Now, making his way down Market Street toward the waterfront, Cassala recalled all the wonderful Sundays sailing on the bay, putting in at some cove to picnic on good bread and salami and ham and pasta and wine. Was it possible that now it was over and done with and finished, just as everything else in this blackened waste land was finished? Yet he went on now, drawn by some faint hope that the boat at least had survived, so that he might look at it and touch something of the old time and the old life.
     
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    The wharf was alive, just as the bay was alive. Over the past three days, the fishermen in their fishing boats, among other boats, had taken more than a hundred thousand people, some fleeing the fire, others driven by their own terror, across the bay into the safety of Oak land; and they were still making the passage back and forth, bringing food and medicine and physicians and government officials into the ruined city, bringing back from Oakland boatloads of those who had fled—just as for months to come, every boat in existence would be called into service to bring