“Do you believe in it?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

The red-and-white crossing signal dropped with a clatter.

“Downright windy today,” Martin said, even though it wasn’t remotely true.

While Martin and I were on the train, Selma told her sister-in-law Elsbeth over the phone that she had dreamed of an okapi. She made Elsbeth promise to keep her lips sealed. Elsbeth then called the mayor’s wife, actually just to talk over plans for the coming May Festival, but when the mayor’s wife asked, “So, anything new?” the seal on Elsbeth’s lips broke very quickly and in the blink of an eye the entire village knew about Selma’s dream. Word spread so fast that Martin and I were still on the train to school when everyone in the village had heard.

The train ride lasted fifteen minutes, there were no intermediate stops. From our very first train ride, we always played the same game. We stood with our backs to the windows in facing doors; Martin closed his eyes and I looked out the window in the door behind him. In first grade, I had listed for Martin everything I saw during the ride and he tried to learn it all by heart. It worked so well that by second grade I no longer had to list anything, and Martin, with his back to the window and his eyes closed, could recite almost everything I was seeing through the foggy window: “Wire factory,” he would say at the very moment we passed the wire factory. “Now field. Meadow. Crazy Hassel’s farmhouse. Pasture. Forest. Forest. Hunting blind one. Field. Forest. Pasture. Meadow, meadow. Tire factory. Village. Meadow. Field. Hunting blind two. Woodland. Farm. Field. Forest. Hunting blind three. Village.”

In the beginning, Martin made careless mistakes. He would say “meadow” when we were actually passing a field or didn’t call out the landscape fast enough when the train accelerated in the middle of the stretch. But before long he got everything exactly right. He said “field” when I saw a field, he said “farm” when the farm rushed past.

Now, in fourth grade, Martin could recite it all flawlessly, with precisely the right intervals, forward and backward. In winter, when the snow made the fields and pastures indistinguishable, Martin recited what the uneven white surface I saw rushing past actually was: field, forest, pasture, meadow, meadow.