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wasn’t unkind, just easy; but it reminded me that I was the prisoner of a rite I no longer felt necessary. I didn’t know at the time that the rite wasn’t solely for my benefit.
    Almost immediately after the war began, the Administration closed the zoo. This was ostensibly to prevent anything that might approximate the Zobov incident: a college student in the capital of our soon-to-be southern neighbor had firebombed a zoo concession stand, killing six people. This was part of the Administration’s security plan, a preemptive defense of the city and its citizens—a defense that relied heavily on the cultivation of panic and a deliberate overestimation of enemy resources. They closed the zoo, the bus system, the newly named National Library.
    Besides interrupting a childhood ritual I was more than ready to put aside, the closing of the zoo was hardly a cause for alarm. Deep down, we all knew, as the Administration did, that the war was being fought almost seven hundred miles away and that a siege of the City was nearly impossible—we had already caught the enemy off guard. We knew that an air strike would never happen because our own paramilitary had taken out the airplane factory and airstrip at Marhan almost six months ago, but the Administration still implemented a curfew and a mandatory lights-out at 10 p.m., just in case. They issued bulletins warning that anyone anywhere could be an informant for the enemy, that it was important to consider the names of your friends and neighbors before you met them at your usual coffeehouse again, and that, in the event of betrayal, you yourself would be held responsible for what you did not report.
    On one hand, life went on. Six or seven kids from my class disappeared almost immediately—without warning, without goodbyes, the way refugees tend to do—but I still trudged to school every morning with a packed lunch. While tanks heading for the border drove down the Boulevard, I sat at the window and practiced sums. Because the war was new and distant, because it was about something my family didn’t want me to trouble myself with and I didn’t particularly care about, there were still art lessons and coffee dates with Zóra, birthday celebrations and shopping trips. My grandfather still taught his seminar and did his hospital rounds and went to the local market every morning, and he still soap-washed apples before peeling them. He also stood in the bread line for six hours at a time, but I wouldn’t know this until later. My mother still carried her projector slides to teach art history at the University, my grandma still tuned in to classic movie hour to watch Clark Gable smirk at Vivien Leigh.
    The distance of the fighting created the illusion of normalcy, but the new rules resulted in an attitude shift that did not suit the Administration’s plans. They were going for structure, control, for panic that produced submission—what they got instead was social looseness and lunacy. To spite the curfew, teenagers parked on the Boulevard, sometimes ten cars deep, and sat drinking on their hoods all night. People would close their shops for lunch and go to the pub and not return until three days later. You’d be on your way to the dentist and see him sitting on someone’s stoop in his undershirt, wine bottle in hand, and then you’d either join him or turn around and go home. It was innocent enough at first—before the looting started some years later, before the paramilitary rose to power—the kind of celebration that happens when people, without acknowledging it, stand together on the brink of disaster.
    The kids of my generation were still a few years away from facing the inflation that would send us to the bakery with our parents’ money piled up in wheelbarrows, or force us to trade shirts in the hallways at school. Those first sixteen months of wartime held almost no reality, and this made them incredible, irresistible, because the fact that something terrible was