We enjoyed the cool air and I tried to think of something that might impress him. Finally I told him that deep below the surface, crops are connected to each other with white threads. Every time someone digs a hole, they sever dozens of these connections. That’s why we only dig on important occasions, such as births and deaths.

‘It’s like the human brain,’ Karcsi said. ‘An infinite number of connections.’

I asked him where he had seen a human brain. He said he had only learned about it. ‘These city kids learn strange things,’ I thought back at the time. Our only knowledge of the human body came from processing the dreamers.

Once I saw Karcsi eating raw meat. The flesh of a dreamer.

He had cut a piece off during processing and had quickly hidden it in his pocket. When he produced the piece of flesh in the attic where we hid after work I was terrified and angry. He had broken a rule, since nobody is allowed to steal a piece of crop for themselves. Everything must be done communally. I shouted at him but kept my voice down so we wouldn’t be heard, which made me sound hoarse. For a moment I thought that was how I was going to sound as an adult. I was not mistaken.

However, I was curious, just like him. Supposedly consuming the raw flesh of dreamers has a tendency to cause allergic reactions, though of a different kind than the one caused by touching the crop. Sometimes when men get drunk, they eat raw dreamer meat on a dare. Some acquire special powers from it. Robi Ajtós, for example, learned to play the violin, but he could only play a single melody. Some sleep for years. Others learn secret things about strangers or themselves. Some die instantly. In most cases, however, nothing happens.

The piece of flesh rested there in Karcsi’s trembling hands. Bees buzzed quietly nearby. There was a hive somewhere in the attic, but it felt like it was the flesh itself that was buzzing, like a radio tuned to static.

‘If they catch us, we’ll get a beating,’ I whispered to him.

He grinned at me.

‘Then let’s do it quickly,’ he said, putting the meat in his mouth. He didn’t offer me a piece, but I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.

Some months before this he had gotten really ill. Some sort of a fever took hold of him. He was carrying water from the well to boil for the sea crops, and he collapsed midway. He was already running a fever that day, but in the bustle of work nobody noticed, and he didn’t complain. After he collapsed, his eyes rolled back, his hair was soaked in sweat. We lifted him up off the ground and laid him in one of the bathtubs where we were planning to boil water for the crops. We filled the tub with cold water, then later, when his fever lowered a bit, we took him back to his bed at the Halász family’s house. I was told to stay by his side and change the compress on his forehead every once in a while. The adults wanted to get back to work as soon as possible. The processing of the crops cannot be interrupted, or else the whole batch will be ruined.