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happening elsewhere, and at the same time to us , gave us room to get away with anarchy. Never mind that, three hundred miles away, girls sitting in bomb shelters were getting their periods at the age of seven. In the City, we weren’t just affected by the war; we were entitled to our affectation. When your parents said, get your ass to school , it was all right to say, there’s a war on , and go down to the riverbank instead. When they caught you sneaking into the house at three in the morning, your hair reeking of smoke, the fact that there was a war on prevented them from staving your head in. When they heard from neighbors that your friends had been spotted doing a hundred and twenty on the Boulevard with you hanging none too elegantly out the sunroof, they couldn’t argue with there’s a war on, we might all die anyway . They felt responsible, and we took advantage of their guilt because we didn’t know any better.
    For all its efforts to go on as before, the school system could not prevent the war, however distant, from sliding in: we saw it in the absence of classmates, in the absence of books, in the absence of pig fetuses (which Zóra and I, even then, had eagerly been looking forward to rummaging through). We were supposed to be inducing chemical reactions and doing basic dissection, but we had no chemicals, and our pig fetuses were being held hostage in a lab somewhere across the ever-shifting border. Instead, we made endless circuits with wires and miniature light-bulbs. We left old-money coins out in the rain to rust and then boiled water and salt and baking soda to clean them. We had a few diagrams of dissected frogs, which we were forced to commit to memory. Inexplicably, we also had a cross section of a horse’s foot, preserved in formaldehyde in a rectangular vase, which we sketched and re-sketched until it might be assumed that any one of us could perform crude surgery on a horse with hoof problems. Mostly, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, we read the textbook aloud.
    To make things worse, the conflict had necessitated a rather biased shift of upperclassmen to upper floors; in other words, the older you were, the farther you were from the school basement bomb shelter. So the year we turned fourteen, Zóra and I ended up in a classroom on the concrete roof overlooking the river, a square turret with enormous windows that normally housed the kindergarteners. Everything about that particular rearrangement of space indicated that it had been made quickly: the walls of the classroom were papered with watercolors of princesses, and the windowsill was lined with Styrofoam cups full of earth, from which, we were told, beans would eventually grow. Some even did. There had been family-tree drawings too, but someone had had the presence of mind to take them down, and had left a bare patch of wall under the blackboard. We sat there, drawing that horse’s hoof, saying things like, there’s a war on, at least if they bomb us we’ll go before the little ones do , very nonchalant about it. The turret window of that room afforded us a 360-degree view of the City, from the big hill to the north to the citadel across the river, behind which the woods rose and fell in a green line. You could see smokestacks in the distance, belching streams as thick as tar, and the brick outline of the old neighborhoods. You could see the dome of the basilica on University Hill, the square cross bright and enormous on top. You could see the iron bridges—still standing in our city, all but gone up and down the two rivers, rubble in the water. You could see the rafts on the riverbank, abandoned and rusted over, and then, upriver at the confluence, Carton City, where the gypsies lived, with its wet paper walls, the black smoke of its dungfires.
    Our teacher that year was a small woman who went by the name M. Dobravka. She had nervous hands, and glasses that slid down so often that she had developed a habit of