A few days later, I’m sitting on the floor, my head resting on my mother’s lap while she strokes my hair. I’m too old to be babied like this, but Ma seems to like it. I can’t help going over the story in my mind: the Director passing by in his open carriage, the man with the gun. The heroic act – on the part of the gunman. He sacrificed himself. Though if he’d been successful, he might well have been a hero instead of a martyr. And it was also a heroic act on the part of Boss to stop the man. He himself, instead of the Director, could have got shot.

It makes me wonder about the sacrifice my mother has made.

“I remember seeing the Director in a carriage,” I say quietly, “pulled by a big black horse.”

Ma’s hand pauses for a moment, then she resumes her stroking. It’s very pleasant, just like when I was a little boy and ran to her with something hurt and she’d comfort me. Every now and then she stops to untangle a knot in my hair.

“It’s true,” she murmurs, “in the early days of his dictatorship the Director did ride around in an open carriage … waving at the happy people.” A sarcastic tone.

“Was it not so bad back then, in the city?”

She is silent for a few moments, thinking. “To your average person, even Cerels, things were fine. We had food again and life was getting back to normal. Eventually rain came too, and we forgot about the drought.”

Staring straight ahead, I’m looking at the open door and the dim corridor beyond, except I’m seeing that long-ago time. “What went wrong?”

I feel my mother shrug. “There were various opinions.”

“But you,” I have to ask, “you knew something different, didn’t you?”

Her voice, when she answers, holds a mournful note, like the start of autumn. “Yes. Your father and I saw the signs early on. We tried to show people what was happening. We had a small printing press, and put out leaflets. However not many people wanted to believe us.”

In the distance a dog barks. “We could have organised a rebellion, a coup, back then – there was still a chance. There were others who believed the same things as we did. Our friend Hern, for example. But to make a difference, it needed a lot of people to rise up, and we didn’t get the support we needed in time.”

“And then the men started getting taken away.”

“Yes.”

Papa was picked up on the street, on his way home from work. A neighbour told us about it. Then my mother, along with me, was taken to be interrogated.

“And Hern,” I say, “why don’t we see him, if he’s such a good friend?”