He jumped on me and gave me a hug.

He took off his clothes and threw them in. He took one last look around the fields, then jumped into the pit. He looked like an animal that had fallen into a ditch. He lay down on top of his clothes, curled up in a fetal position like the dreamers.

I just stood there watching him. My friend who was about to die.

‘Do it already, it’s fucking cold down here,’ Karcsi urged. ‘We have to be done by the time the sun comes up.’

My teeth were chattering like a machine gun in the movies. I couldn’t make the first move. There’s no way I can do this, I thought. My limbs felt frozen.

‘Come on!’ he said again.

A strange thought came to me. I thought that if I were moving, I would be less cold. I don’t think this thought was my own. I would like to think that it wasn’t. It was the field talking.

I grabbed the spade and covered the hole with Karcsi in it. He never even made a sound.

By the time I finished the sun was already crawling up the sky. The air was warming up, the fields had the nice reddish tone of early morning. I appreciated that red, I have ever since that morning. It felt like nothing had changed, like everything was just the same as before he came to us – like Karcsi never even existed. I flattened the earth above the grave, gathered the tools, and left for home.

His disappearance made no waves in our community. The Halász family thought he had run away, and I could tell they were a little relieved. People discussed Karcsi for a while, not his disappearance, but their memories of him.

There were days when I thought I should dig out the pit again. But what would be the point? One way or another, Karcsi got what he wanted. He had gone to the place where the dead go.

Years later a hunger arose in me. I wanted to see what the rest of the world was like. I wanted to study, like kids in other places do. In our community we’re even encouraged to go out and learn the ways of the world. When I came of age I moved away. I enrolled at a university and started working in a factory to make ends meet. I visited several of the bigger towns, lived in some of them too. I got married after a summer fling, but the flames of passion turned to ashes soon enough, and by the next summer we were already divorced. After the divorce I moved back home. To the village. Most people do return, often with a spouse. Nowhere else feels quite like home.

Then all those seasons passed, seasons of feeding and harvesting and processing, one after the other, until I found myself an old man sitting by the window, looking out on the fields day and night.