Karcsi was also there at Uncle Rudolf’s wake. He was breaking the rules, of course. He wasn’t a man yet, nor a relative. Wakes are private affairs. Nobody should want their loved ones remembered as one of the walking dead. Anyway, he sneaked in and that was the start of our friendship. Everyone called him Karcsi, but he hated that. He wanted to be called by his full name: Károly. He would frown and mutter curses and expletives against the adults under his breath. His vocabulary evolved quickly and constantly in this regard. I called him Karcsi on purpose to annoy him, but he would put up with it from me.

Karcsi was not born in the village, you could tell by looking at him. The hue of his skin was different from ours, his hair was darker. But mostly it was his eyes, which had a strange gleam in them. When he looked at you it was as if he didn’t see only the surface, but looked beneath it and even saw through the flesh, muscles and bones, right inside you, saw who you really were.

So it was clear Karcsi was not born in a pit. He was born in one of the big cities. He never told me which one, or if he did I don’t remember anymore. The Halász family took him in; they were distant relatives. The Halász family are good people, their daughter now lives across the street from me. She’s married with two children of her own. Back then, when Karcsi and I were friends, she could barely walk. It just shows how easily time slips through your fingers.

He was the first one to tell me that the dead didn’t come back anywhere else.

‘If Mom and Dad came back, there’s no way I would kill them.’

This idea had never occurred to me, that the dead wouldn’t need to be killed. It was a rainy day, I remember that, because we wanted to play in the fields. Instead we were lying on the floor in my room, sweaty from all the hide-and-seek and chasing each other around the house.

‘What would you do with them?’ I asked. I always thought of my parents’ possible death somewhere down the line, imagining how brave I would be if they came back.

That’s why all the men are present at the wake. All of them, not just the relatives. Of course as a kid I couldn’t understand this, but the relatives, especially the children of the deceased, are often unable to kill the dead. They just can’t bring themselves to do it. If my parents came back I don’t think I could have done it either. Fortunately I never had to find out.