I started digging too. I thought we’d talk while we worked, but there was no chance. Karcsi worked obsessively, like a machine, piling the dirt up by the side of the hole. I didn’t want to lag behind, so I worked even harder than him. It took less than half an hour before we were up to our waists in the pit, sweating and panting.

Digging had never been so easy. I was hoping it wouldn’t work, that the dirt would be too thickly intertwined with the roots, that it would be full of gravel and stones, that it would be hard like concrete and that by morning we’d collapse from exhaustion while only standing ankle-deep in a ditch. I was wrong. If anything, it got easier and easier with each shovelful.

The horizon glimmered with bluish light, and we were already up to our shoulders in the pit.

‘This will be good enough,’ Karcsi said, throwing his spade out of the hole, then climbing out of it himself.

We sat down for a little while by the freshly made pile. I took out a sandwich and handed it to Karcsi. Ham and cheese. I had brought one for myself too. For a while we just ate quietly.

‘What if you’re wrong?’ I asked him finally. ‘What if it was only a dream? If it was only a dream and they didn’t come back to you?’

He swallowed a mouthful.

‘Then I’m wrong.’

I didn’t ask anything else after that.

Karcsi studied the pile in the lamplight, reaching into it every now and then to pull something out of the dirt.

‘There they are,’ he said.

I leaned closer to see what he was talking about. It was the roots, the thin, white threads that connected everything under the ground. Karcsi was smiling now.

‘It will work,’ he said. ‘I know it will.’

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.