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door.
    By the time Ram ó n finished the rain had begun to let up. We passed the box of wine around the fire, and Asier rolled one more before we stood and stretched our legs. Asier and I headed up the hill to San Jorge while Daniel and Luken went back down along the cliffs toward the public school in town.
    It wasn’t until the fourth day of the trial, two years later, that I realized the significance of those moments when the four of us split ways, Daniel and Luken returning to the dingy school on Atalde Street next to the public health clinic, and Asier and I back to the looming fortress of San Jorge. I never understood the importance of this divide until it was too late.

 
    7. JONI
    I was still considering Mariana’s question as I steered the old Volkswagen up the final curves of Monte Zorroztu and turned off into the dark fingers of pines that marked the driveway to Colegio San Jorge. Wouldn’t it matter to you, Joni? On the south side of the drive stood a weathered sign bearing the school crest, a red cross over an expanse of peeling white paint. Along the top, in Spanish, read the school motto: “Serve by Teaching, Teach by Serving.” Underneath, in English: “International School of Muriga,” an addendum that was stenciled onto the sign after I, the lone foreign teacher, accepted the teaching position in 1948.
    My window was rolled down to allow in the thin mountain air and to force out the gray smoke from my cigarette. The sounds of the primary school playground came in with the fresh air—high shrieks of pleasure, harshly spoken imperatives, the rattling of chain link from the loners who paced the perimeter of the yard, kicking at the fencing as if testing for a weak spot. As I parked the car I saw the children as Mariana had suggested: not just children but containers of organs playing in the yard, waiting to be harvested. As Dav i d Hermo ran off with Juliana Gorriti’s pencil case I imagined a pink liver hidden under his navy V-neck sweater. Dav i d sprinted to where a group of boys waited, beckoning him to safety behind the soccer goal. Yes, I admitted, Mariana had been right. It would make a difference where the kidney had come from. It would make all the difference.
    Colegio San Jorge was converted to a school from an old Republican army barracks in 1941 after Franco’s forces had rooted out the last of the antifascists in Muriga. Before that, it had been a fortress dating back to the sixteenth century. During my first summer in Muriga I would lie in bed with the woman who taught me to say txirimiri , naked on top of the sheets in the cold-water flat I had rented from Mart í n’s father above what is now the grocery, and she would tell me what it had been like. She told me how the Guardia Civil had rounded up all of the Republicans, Communists, and Anarchists and shot them against the wall of the barracks. Forty-eight men from a town of two thousand, including her father and uncle. And now the children of Muriga, these grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Civil War, throw tennis balls against the ramparts, tuck themselves into the mossy alcoves of a five-hundred-year-old doorway to light the tips of their stolen Lucky Strikes. There’s some comfort to it, that Muriga still exists among the bones and shell casings of its own people, though whenever I attempt to explain this to my Basque friends they wave their hands and say, “You’re an old romantic, Joni. It is only because you are a foreigner. I would say the same, or something similar, if I was with you in California.” They always use the Spanish word for foreigner, extranjero . Stranger.
    By the time I crossed the playground of the primary school, which occupied the western wing of the fortress, the children were no longer lungs or kidneys or livers but were again children. Their black shoes scuffed from kicking at the dirt or at each other, their cheeks flushed with the cool air.
    I left my briefcase on the desk in my small