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and dragged them as they struggled and fought across the yard. He forced them viciously into one of the trucks, while the woman was digging her heels into the dirt, trying to lower herself to the
ground, but the silver-haired man heaved her up as she screamed and shouted, and, with his comrades, pushed her into the second vehicle.
    The door slammed as, beside Owen, the boy tried to stand again, shouting, ‘
Nacistický srá č i!
’ but Owen hauled him down harder.
    ‘You’ll get yourself shot.’
    Then from behind the fence came a ferocious roar of air. Through the gaps between the woven strips of bark they saw flaring jets of flames as two of the men torched the outbuildings, great
projections of dragon-fire issuing from flamethrowers, while another stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, a silhouette against the glowing fireball as the hallway was engulfed. The trucks
started. Voices shouted. Through a truck window the woman was shrieking as the flames broke through the roof of one of the outbuildings, already crackling at the sky. The downstairs windows of the
house splintered as smoke began to issue.
    Owen wrapped his arms around the struggling boy.
    ‘
Nacistický srá č i,
’ he yelled, before they were forced to bury their heads, the heat so intense against the latticed strips of wood that they could hear
the dried crackle of bark on the other side of the fence slowly peeling away.
    It was not that he was lost that concerned him most. Nor was it that he had found himself in a war that he remembered so little about, which now seemed to be consuming
everything and everyone within it. Nor was it that he had ended up in an obscure country that in the past had been nothing more than a strange name in the news broadcasts, or, even, that somehow he
seemed to have wiped several years from his mind. No, what concerned him most was that things he now knew for sure – and knew that he knew – could suddenly be lost again, and then
found, and lost once more, as if they had never been there in the first place. Not things from years past, securely embedded, but things learnt yesterday, or an hour ago, or five minutes. He had to
work hard just to keep them in his head. Like the train wreck. Or the ransacked house. Or the button. Or even the boy.
    Owen was still not sure if he should know him. Or how long they had been together. Or even what his name was – if, indeed, he had asked. All he knew was that he was Czech, and had quite
likely fed him.
    BOY = CZECH = BREAKFAST
    He had found it on the scrap of paper – a formula for remembering.
    He was sitting beside a pool sunk within a sunlit dell, surrounded by boulders and overhanging trees. A small waterfall surged down through a line of rocks littered with broken
branches and coursed some eight or nine feet into the pool. Thin-framed dragonflies motored about like silent biplanes, coming in low to scuff the water and swerving the bomb blasts of droplets
that splashed from the waterfall. Leaves tumbled around him, spiralling whirligigs drifting down.
    He was alone, with no idea of how long he had been there. He thought he might be waiting for someone but he couldn’t think who.
    At the lip of shore between two rocks, where the soil was sandy and beach-like, there were the fresh remnants of a campfire and a wooden chair that he was sitting on, painted white but flaking.
He wondered who had brought it here, clambering with it up and down the steep slopes of the wood. A couple of empty bottles lay about, the labels scraped off, and above him, in a tree, a rusted
paraffin lamp had been squeezed into the fork of two branches.
    He poked idly at the damp ash in the fire and thought about whether he should build a fresh one. Among the remains were charred bits of paper that looked like documents with photographs
attached, each with the same outlined face but the features scraped away.
    Every time he heard a sound he turned to see if someone was coming. Somebody