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soles of our feet, the smell of burned flesh when we ran. If the fire hadn’t started, I would never have encountered him. When I returned home that morning I knew hardly any more about him than before we had met. Not much was said during the night, but the fire had burned all the way between our two houses, and that had altered everything.
    At home in the dawn, blue with cold and altered, everyone still asleep. I slowly washed my hands with Grandmother’s lily-of-the-valley soap; the rest of me was so black I would probably never be clean again. Creeping down into the bed between Mama and Aunt Marina, I tried to steal some of their warmth under the blanket without waking them with my ice-cold hands and knees. I wanted to face both of them, couldn’t choose, and lay on my back instead. Mama’s sleep was troubled, and she tossed her head back and forth so that her long hair became more and more tangled on the pillow.
    When the family assembled on the veranda for a very late and silent breakfast, I behaved as if nothing had happened. Papa’s hands were wrapped in clean new bandages. He fumbled and grimaced and swore as his mother and Mama’s sisters had to help him with his coffee and porridge. He looked as though he enjoyed being waited on from two sides, his father teased. No one else said anything, the subject of the fire having been exhausted long before. All that remained was to eat in silence and then to go down and gawk at the devastation.
    I couldn’t tell them that I had met someone who had offered me cigarettes, and had seen the sun rise from another world on the other side of the field. I was hurt that no one had even noticed my absence. But belonging to everyone in a way meant belonging to no one—at night I often wandered around between the beds and any one of them could have thought that I was sleeping with one of the others.
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    Just as the guilty return to the scene of the crime, all the villagers returned to the burned-out field. Perhaps it had all been a nightmare, but no, it looked as though war had rampaged along the field of barley and the railway line. The wind had died down and the sour smell of smoldering vegetation hung stubbornly over the black landscape. No one spoke, as there was nothing to add, except possibly a cautious word of thanks directed obliquely upward, that at least the fire had been halted before it reached the houses.
    The boy who had said he was called Lukas was there as well. He stood slightly aside and hung on his rusty bicycle, with a look I didn’t really comprehend. I glanced back, but didn’t go up to him, stayed with Papa’s brothers and counted charred electricity poles along the embankment. Growing up, I could see, meant not saying all you knew.
    The rain finally came, a day too late. A grime over everything that had burned. The impression that something had threatened the village gave a feeling of solidarity in misfortune, even if it didn’t last.

BOY’S EYES
    W e lived at the edge of the village in a district with no name, where beauty and wilderness began. The sloping fields of grain and the sky, the forest of bats and the power station. And the lake that wasn’t a lake, just as our village wasn’t a proper village in that it didn’t have its own name. It was an unwanted growth or maybe a free zone with its own laws, or lawless, depending on your point of view. We lived at the place where three silver trails ran together—the river, the railway, the highway—where the world began or ended. That also depended on your point of view. Lately I have started to think that nearly everything depends on your point of view.
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    The secret about him I had to keep better than any secret I had kept before. I had never learned the secret about secrets, apart from what I hid under Mama’s wardrobe where she never vacuumed: a worn-out hunting knife, a bottle of Paco Rabanne, the steel guitar strings I