For a long time, I believed one stays alive by understanding
everything. Now I know there are things one must simply endure,
survive.
Children love excitement, challenges, danger. Often they fail
to perceive risks, or else they underestimate them. They do not
avoid danger; they examine it like some mechanism full of secrets
whose moment of activation they do not yet understand. We were
the same. In winter we ventured out onto the barely frozen lake,
whose ice cracked beneath every step as if warning us — or perhaps
luring us onward. We knew it was dangerous, but knowledge
alone was never enough reason to turn back. If the ice gave way
beneath one of us, we pulled him out however we could, then ran
home racing time itself before his wet clothes froze onto his body.
Now it seems as though it was not we who ran, but earlier versions
of ourselves whom no one can ever catch again.
In summer we waded into the murky marsh with its black waters.
I do not know what drew us there; perhaps the fact that it had no
boundaries, only density. We pushed through it waist-deep, later
picking leeches off ourselves on the shore — though we simply
called them bloodsuckers, as if the name alone could strip them of
all strangeness. We felt no disgust toward them; we counted them
instead, as though they were proof we had gone where we should
not have gone.
Stealing melons and fruit from the collective farm fields was almost
a ritual. It was not hunger that drove us, but prohibition. The
appearance of the field guard always set the same scene in motion:
waving his stick, he charged after us while we fled, as though some
ancient story wished to retell itself again and again. The older boys
escaped easily; the younger ones cried because the guard had come
too close. Now I know the fear did not come from the stick, but
from the realization that the world was capable of hunting us down.
I remember other runs as well. “Korea” — that was what they
called the two new streets built after the flood. In the house beside
the lake lived a Romani family. Their eldest boy was violent and
cruel — or rather, unavoidable.
