TE19 Iberian Adventure

Gabi Csutak

I hadn’t wanted to move on because I absolutely had to see the red Matchbox car come round again. You could open not only its doors, but its roof too. They’d bought it for me in the end, but its packaging was so perfect I hardly dared touch it. It stood on the shelf unopened for a long time. I dreamt that Áron and I were ’outside’. We were at the foot of a hill made of Danube Pebble sweets which stood in an empty glass tank. We tried to scramble up to the top of the hill, so that we could get out of the tank, but we could only hold on for a moment before the peanuts, rock-hard in their sugar coating, rolled down and spread out over the baseof it. I knewwewere going todie there, and that before we died, we would have to eat all those Danube Pebbles. I kept to the rules, I didn’t speak to anyone, but it was no use. By December, everyone was whispering the secret word when they talked about my parents. They no longer asked me questions when we met on the stairs. They just looked at me askance. Meanwhile, more and more odd things were happening. One morning, I found some cream cheese pastries on the doormat wrapped up in a shawl. On another occasion, ration cards had been pushed under our door. Once, I even discovered two unripe bananas hanging from the door handle in a plastic bag. I had never eaten bananas before, as they were not easy to get hold of even under the table. Four days before Christmas, a small pine tree fell through the door just as I was setting off for school. Somebody had even thought of that but was anxious not to get into trouble on our account.

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