When was the decree issued that Cerel women weren’t allowed to have any more babies? I can’t remember. When I was a kid, it seemed like those grim notices were regularly pasted onto walls and the sides of lampposts. They were printed in block letters (hastily printed, I realise now), and slapped up so quickly that some of them would come loose and flap in the breeze, or skeeter off along a windy street. Omens like crows. You read them and saw your future in black and white. Or at least, I avoided reading them, but small groups of Cerels gathered around those posters, reading and murmuring among themselves, not lingering for too long. They read the new decree, then hurried on with bowed heads as if into a gale.

It was Nanna who came home one day with tight lips and told us about the latest decree. The one about Cerel babies. It was Jorzy who filled me in on the details later. I still remember how my brother was so disgusted he could barely speak, though I was too young to understand the whole picture. What did it matter if women didn’t have any more babies? Who needed squawking babies round the place anyway? It was probably a good idea.

Jorzy had hit me. Just like that. Slapped me in the face.

I had reeled back, even though the slap had been light, from the shock of my beloved brother hitting me. “What was that for?” I cried in dismay.

“Because you have to grow up,” rasped Jorzy.

There were tears in my brother’s eyes, and that too was confusing.

I ran to my mother, who took me onto her lap and stroked my hair. Her head turned to the ceiling as she tried to identify and soothe my hurt. “Ah, Leho,” she murmured, “little one.”

Babet was toddling around at that stage – a lump nestled into our mother’s bed at night, sucking her thumb.

“We already have babies,” I muttered furiously.

“Yes, darling,” she sighed into my hair, “but once those babies grow up, then there will be no more.”

I remember looking at Babet curled up so peacefully, like a grub, and trying to imagine a future with no more Cerel babies. And then some kind of faint realisation came to me, more like a ghost than a true understanding. Yet it was enough. I got off my mother’s lap and smoothed a hand over my hair, raised my chin. Jorzy was right: it was time for me to grow up.

15

A night comes when I feel cooped up and antsy, and have to get outside to find some distraction on the city streets. Need to clear my head of everything that’s happening around me. So I trot over to Trabant Street and back to my perch behind the lion.