‘Dad said we only call it death because we don’t know what’s on the other side. But there is something, there must be, and here in this life we’re getting ready for that life. That’s why life is like a school.’

‘All right. But how do we get prepared?’

‘By living, I guess.’

I took a bite from the next pie, because I didn’t understand any of this. I tried to fake the expression of someone pondering over very deep issues, and I kept chewing. The pie was really good. Karcsi went on.

‘On the other side they’re preparing too, because they’re about to come here. Come here to live. Father thinks that when you’re born, that’s when you come over here from that other school. And in order to be born here, you have to die there.’

This totally confused me.

‘What other school?’

‘Well . . . the one where the dead are, and those who aren’t born yet. Our world is the noon school, theirs is the midnight school, that’s how Dad explained it.’

‘Midnight school?’

‘Yeah. Only they prepare for life by being dead. And they come across from under the earth. To live. That’s how they’re born here. In the crops.’

I shrugged, I didn’t want to argue about it. Crops are just crops, they’re neither alive nor dead. They’re matter that turns into a different kind of matter, just as fruits are turned into jam.

In my mind I pictured our school at night, with the light of the full moon shining through the windows, the corridor leading into the darkness. I imagined the classrooms as silent crypts with the desks covered in dust. The hands on the wall clock never move, they remain eternally still, always set to zero o’clock in the midnight school.

‘That’s all bullshit,’ I said. I learned that word from him. Bullshit.

‘No. I saw it,’ he said.

Karcsi leaned very close to me. His lips were white from powdered sugar and shiny with grease.

‘The meat worked,’ he said, ‘just not right away. Only in my dream.’

I got scared. I didn’t want him to tell me, but I asked anyway.

‘What did you see in your dream?’

‘I saw Mom and Dad. They came to me in my dream. Not like before when I used to dream about them, but for real. They didn’t look like they used to, and they didn’t talk like they did in life. They didn’t appear to me as people. They appeared to me as their essence.’

I swallowed hard. He went on.

‘They’re on the other side, in the midnight school. They told me how to get across to them. This is the place where I can cross. These lands. These fields. This is where the barrier is the thinnest.’

He seemed much older than his years as he told me all this.

‘Have you seen the place? The . . . school?’ I asked.

‘Only the shadows of it. There are no words to describe it.’