The combine stopped when we reached the watchtower, and I heard Puju's dad say it was lucky the woods didn't catch fire, Puju handed me a tin cup full of water and told me to drink and to wash off my face, and I said, "Thanks," of course the water was bitter because of the soot, but I drank it anyway, and I thought to myself that it was good after all that Puju had told his dad we were having a war, and then I was just wiping my face with my T-shirt turned inside-out when I heard Prodán's father again start shouting really loud, and right away the others began shouting too, everyone was calling Prodán's name, I looked where they were pointing and saw Prodán climbing slowly up out of the wheat around fifty yards away from us, and then Prodán looked back and saw the combine and the trailer at its back, and he must have seen his dad too because he stood up and started running with a limp toward the woods, and his dad started yelling even louder, telling him to stop, because if he didn't, he'd beat his brains out, he'd skin him alive and turn his back into boot leather, he'd cut his fucking balls right out, and meanwhile Puju's dad started up the combine, and that's how we went after Prodán, it was obvious we'd catch up to him in no time, Prodán looked back while running and finally he stopped and turned toward us and just waited there with his arms hanging down, and you could tell he knew what was going to happen next, and sure enough, his dad then leaped off the trailer and took off after his son, and when he reached him it was like he didn't even stop, no, Mr. Prodán still seemed to be running at full tilt as he gave his son a helluva slap so hard that Prodán fell practically under the combine, but he stood back up right away and stepped back next to his dad, and that's when I noticed that he still had the bayonet with him, he was holding it in his right hand, and his dad told him to apologize, and he socked Prodán with all his might right in the pit of the stomach, and Prodán lurched forward and started heaving, black spit drooled from the edge of his mouth, and his dad again raised his hand, and Prodán stepped back and said, "I apologize," and you could tell he was about to faint, and that is when the bayonet dropped right out of his hand and stuck in the ground with its tip down by his feet, the blade was thick with blood, I saw, and Prodán's dad must have noticed too because he leaned down, pulled the bayonet out of the ground, wiped both sides on his shirtsleeve, and asked, "Where are those goddamn brats, those Frunzas?" Prodán pointed toward the woods and said they ran away, and after wiping the bayonet on his shirtsleeve some more, Prodán's dad looked back at his son and swore that if Prodán ever again laid his hands on those military keepsakes, he'd beat his son till he was bloody, he'd keep pounding away as long as Prodán was still moving. Prodán didn't say a thing back, he just nodded and looked out over his dad's shoulder and stared at the woods as his dad turned away and, I saw, broke into a grin.
10. Africa
BY THEN almost a year had passed since they took Father away, and for more than four months we hadn't heard a thing about him at all, we didn't get any more letters or even those prewritten postcards from the camp letting us know that he was fine and proud of overachieving the benchmark every day, so we didn't know anything about him, and it did no good when I asked Mother why Father wasn't writing to us, she didn't even reply, but then on Saturday, when the mailbox turned up empty once again, her face turned all tense, and as we trudged up the stairwell she broke out in a sudden fit of coughing so violent that she had to grab the railing, and from the way her shoulders shook and how she leaned forward out of my view, I knew she wasn't really coughing but crying, that she was pretending to cough only because she didn't want me to notice the tears, because she didn't want to get me scared, and that is when I knew for sure what she was thinking, that Father had died down there by the Danube Canal, but I also knew that this wasn't true because if something had happened to Father I would have sensed it for sure, if at no other time, then in the morning on my way to school as I looked at the picture I'd taken out of his soldier's ID holder, because in looking at his image I always felt sure that Father was thinking of me by the Danube Canal, and also because when they took him away, he promised that one day he'd return and take me with him to the sea.
Even though I could tell that Mother was crying, I pretended not to notice, I even slapped her on the back a couple of times, as if I really believed that she was only coughing, and by the time we reached the fifth floor she wasn't sobbing anymore, no, she took out a handkerchief and wiped her face and said something had gone down her throat the wrong way but now she was okay, and I said, "All right, but be careful, because your eyes got really watery from all that coughing, plus your mascara smudged, so you should wipe your face," and she nodded and said, "Be a good boy now and go on into your room, do a bit of reading or look at your homework, go on now, don't you try weaseling out of it," not that I had the slightest intention of resisting, because there was a lead soldier in my pocket that I got from someone at school, and I wanted to see if it would really fit the armor I'd hammered out of the tin sheet I found in the garbage dump a week earlier, I really wanted them to be a good match, for I was the only one of the boys who had no genuine commander for the war game we played in the stairwell, Feri's commander had been cast from lead specially by his father, who even helped him paint it, and I had no one to help me. Mother didn't know a thing about this stairwell war game, when the wheat field behind our apartment block burned down on account of the real war game we had out there, she told me I couldn't play any violent games at all, which is why I went into my room without a word just like she said, and I even put my math notebook and my math textbook on my desk, so in case she opened the door she'd see that I was studying hard.