The focus of the room is the window. The cold and the stillness. The room is like a cave but completely cut off from the outside by the plate glass of the window. At intervals, the children in the playground run across the grass or into the trees further down, as though they are running across the surface of the glass.

Quick, Sister Martina, they’re heading for the mulberry tree.
A row of children with linked arms advance from the pine trees. A picture.

At the bottom of the picture is a big piece of untextured green, a pale yellow-green like a paddock. At the top a dark band, the trees. Dark grey and green and brown with diagonal strokes for branches. At the top of the trees bits of broken-up blue sky and where they meet the grass, children, small details in clusters. Pink and brown with red blazers.

Communists, I know them. Do you know why I left Hungary, do you think I don’t know? They come to the dance in jeans, alright, you think jeans are alright, they were smoking, I know I smoke, they were outside, drinking. Some of them were wearing no shoes, no shoes. .

The children are finishing their lunch and gradually dot the green patch of grass. On the right a circle of girls stand up and are jumping up and down to keep warm. Several girls disappear behind some bushes on the left. Look, they’re the ones, look at them. I know what they’re doing.

The urn is boiling furiously and the glass in the window begins to frost over in parts from the steam. The circle of girls on the right is blurred over and part of the grass and the pine trees.

I am looking out the window through the clear patch. Like back at school myself, staring out the windows past the grass patch at the poplars along the fence, or at the clouds, trying to look at something interesting, with the voice in the background, You could tell that girl every five minutes to put her beret on and she wouldn’t.

The bell rings and the grass patch becomes empty except for one girl down near the pine trees picking up papers. A small pink and red dot. She collects a handful and runs to the bin near the window. As she throws them in, she looks up at the window and smiles, then runs past and up the side of the building.