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on.”
    “Am I being accused of something?”
    “Go on with your testimony.”
    “But am I being accused of something?”
    “Not for the moment. You are not accused of anything.”
    “What do you mean for the moment?”
    “Continue your story and you will understand, maybe you will remember.”
    “What is this? A movie? A novel?”
    “Go on, continue we don't have all the time in the world.”
    Ok, I’ll continue. So someone decided to change the course and turn around. The driver told us that he'd been driving in the same direction for three hours and saw nothing, not one house, not one tree, only an endless line of grass. “I haven't even seen this in Scotland”. And without really discussing it, he turned back the way we came. But I didn't see any cars on that way either. When he turned back, the scenery on the same road had changed, the grass suddenly turned into a forest full of trees. We all saw it, or at least that's what I think, and we all got scared, but nobody said anything about it for over an hour, until a bird jumped on the road, well, that wasn't a bird, it was bigger than the bus, it jumped on the road and continued flying. Not everyone saw it because the ones who were asleep woke up when the driver hit the brakes, but the bird was already gone. They all asked what it was, “what is it, what is it”, you could hear them say, but no one answered. After that we were silent for a long time, we were panicked, terrified.
    And in the silence, watching the trees passing, I fell asleep. I slept three or four hours, because when I woke up it was already nighttime. We had been traveling for almost twenty-four hours. I dreamed I was in a hotel and in this hotel I was with my daughter and my wife. They had changed our room while I was out of the hotel and I asked my wife what the new room number was. It was room 899. And I asked what the code was to enter the room, then my daughter came and whispered it in my ear, it's 9696. So I went to the elevator and pressed the button to go up to the eighth floor, but the elevator reached the ninth floor. I got out of the elevator and into another, but it took me to the thirtieth floor. I changed elevators again and this time I went down to the eighth floor. And I went to my room.
    The numbers in this dream intrigued me, but when I woke up I heard the Tadeuz family arguing, it's that family that's right on the border between front and back, the children were front people and the parents back people. They were arguing, and the son said it was better not to mess things up.
    “What do you want,” the son said, “do you want them to throw us in the back?”
    “No,” the mother replied, “we're one family, you can ask them to move the line of the border and that way we could become front people, just that.”
    “And who do we ask?”
    “You can vote and change the line.”
    “That seems simple, but what if they vote for us to become back people, that could happen too, I don't think they like us very much, we are on the border, and then we'd all be worse off.”
    I realized that I wasn't the only clueless person that wasn't sure of the time. Each watch I looked at gave a different time, and then the sun started rising suddenly because I think it was eleven or twelve. My watch showed eleven thirty. And at dawn we found ourselves in front of a wall. The driver stopped abruptly and we all leaped forward. When the back people saw that they were in front, they apologized before anyone could say anything and they went back to their place, we were all scared.
    “Where did this wall come from?”
    “I believe it wasn't here before.”
    “It is the wall of our sins, for having killed Cash.”
    “It's those back ones, they're criminals. How could they kill Cash?”
    The driver had gone forward and had badly hit himself against the glass that did not break. He said his shoulder hurt, but that he was fine. He had a bump on his forehead, but it didn't hurt.
    “What I want to