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and my mother’s severity as I was revolted by the horrid taste of black powder on my tongue. I could not understand why they were not moved by my pleas. Years later I realized that their unyielding insistence on this particular ritual was for them a desperate act of self-assurance. Since they had nothing else to give me, it was important for them to believe it worked.
    Sometimes, strange, out-of-place events occurred, or so they seemed to me at the time. Echoes of an unknown world which excited my imagination. Once, in the course of an ordinary day, word spread through our building that ice-cream was being sold. Soon hordes of children came rushing past our window shouting with excitement. Immediately, I wanted to join them, without really understanding what the excitement was all about.
    â€œWait.” My mother grabbed at me. “There’s no use going unless you have something to exchange.” I waited impatiently as she searched through our few belongings.
    Just then Yuri walked in. He had brought us a precious tin of meat as a gift. After a brief conversation, the adults agreed to sacrifice this gift for my first taste of ice-cream. I knew enough about our life to realize that such an exchange was not made lightly. Without explanation I understood the importance of this event and I was deeply impressed.
    It was not safe for me to walk through the town alone with my prize and so Yuri decided to go with me. He held my hand as we followed the noise of the children who were somewhere ahead of us, out of sight. I scarcely noticed the landscape of ruins we passed. It was simply the place where I lived, to be taken for granted.
    We were approaching the centre of the noise. We pushed our way through the crowd to a doorway. Just inside it an old man and a young woman sat beside a wooden barrel wrapped in rags and paper. Yuri handed over our tin of meat while I held out the saucepan I had taken from home. The woman took it from me, bent over the barrel, and filled my pan with a creamy white substance.
    Yuri led me away from the crowd and into a deserted doorway. We sat down inside it. I tasted my precious purchase and I was not disappointed. It lived up to my expectations. Yuri urged me to eat it faster, before it all melted, but nothing on earth would have induced me to rush through this experience. I lingered over each mouthful, rested between them, and Yuri, resigned, leaned back and watched me. Every time I looked up he smiled back at me. “Don’t worry,” he said, “soon there will be ice-cream every day for all children.” I had utter faith in Yuri, but just this once I doubted him. I could not believe that what I was experiencing at the moment could become part of the everyday world as I knew it.
    In the evening, Yuri described our adventure to my mother. When he came to the part where I first tasted the ice-cream, I laughed with them as Yuri’s face mimicked my own. But my interest shifted quickly from his expression to my mother’s. My mother was laughing and I suddenly realized that I had never heard her laugh this way before. She looked different. Younger, prettier. I would have done anything to keep her as she was at that moment. I tried to clown, exaggerating Yuri’s mimicry, turning to any comic gesture that I could invent, but already her face had changed into the familiar set expression that I saw every day. The moment had passed.
    Yuri and my mother were talking of something else, and no one paid any further attention to me for the rest of the evening. But I was not discouraged. The taste of ice-cream and the brief glimpse of my mother behind her mask of worry and grief were such important events to me that I felt myself protected by them from our desperate day-to-day reality.
    Another event, equally strange and wonderful.
    My mother, my aunt, Yuri and I are inside a large tent, filled with people. We are surrounded by soldiers but there are a few women as well in