Strangers
(Thirty minutes before the war)
a novel by
András Petőcz

SYNOPSIS

 “Lying is something my mother taught me,” says the narrator, an eight-year-old girl, at the beginning of the novel. 
          “But I must tell you that this story is not about lying,” she continues, “My mother taught me to lie in order to survive. That’s all.
I don’t know why I had to stay alive. Everything would be much simpler if I had ended up like Amélie. I wouldn’t have to tell this story now.
Just as I don’t know whether I survived because I really do know how to lie.
And I don’t know whether I lied at all. Obviously I lied. Everyone lies. Adults do it too. With their words, their gestures, their behaviour. Any way they can. Because everyone always wants to survive. Survive something. I wish I knew why.
When Amélie died, I seem to remember she didn’t suffer at all. We suffered. We who saw her death.
Hers and all the others.”

It is not clear from the narrator’s words exactly where and when Strangers takes place. Somewhere in Europe, or on the edge of Europe, but it could be in America or Asia. Perhaps in the twentieth century but it could be in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The only thing we can be certain about is that it is exactly thirty minutes before the war.
At the beginning of the novel the eight-year-old girl, the narrator, now an adult woman, returns to the cemetery of the small town she had left some fifteen years earlier.
For a few hours, she helps the warden of the cemetery to tidy up the graves. 
We do not know anything for certain. Only that there always has to be a few glasses of water, soft drinks or orange juice placed on the graves because – according to the warden, a middle-aged man on crutches – the dead come out of their graves at night and ask for something to drink.
For they are eternally thirsty.
That is all the introduction to the novel tells us. Then the action begins.
The little girl and her mother are fleeing. All the eight- year-old child understands is that they have to flee from a city in a „big country” to a small town near the border.
The little girl does not altogether understand what is happening around her. How could she, for she does not speak the official language of the country very well.
She only speaks the local language.
Her mother scolds her and tells her she has to learn the official language of the state properly.
The little girl also senses that there is some extraordinary situation going on – there are all kinds of soldiers with machine guns and it is they who are keeping order, but they don’t speak the official language of the state very well either; what is more, they cannot even understand the local language but speak a third language.
Anyway, these soldiers are in charge of everyday life.
The little girl and her mother are given shelter at the local parsonage in the border town – the mother gets a job there as housekeeper.
The little girl starts a new life, she is given a new name, everyone calls her Anna, though that is not the name her mother gave her when she was born. We never discover her real name.
She is also given official papers, thanks to the soldiers keeping order in the town.
The mother, who is incidentally a very good-looking, young woman, goes to see the commander of the local army barracks on one of her first days there and from then on he helps them with everything. 
The little girl meets new people in the town. She makes friends with a neighbour, Amélie, who is the same age as herself and lives with her grandmother.
Amélie’s parents are dead.
Once when she is coming home from the barracks with her mother, the little girl hears piano music coming from one of the streets. Later she discovers there is a pianist living there and she makes friends with her. The pianist is just practising Für Elise when the girl and her mother walk by.
The little girl also discovers that there is a very thin girl living in an adobe house opposite the parsonage – probably with her parents. When she asks the parish priest, he says that the adobe house is completely uninhabited.
Then one night soldiers take the dead bodies of the thin girl and her parents from the house opposite.
The little girl witnesses this.
The commander of the army barracks, the bald Yuri, often comes over to see the little girl’s mother in her room at the parsonage to have a good time. On these occasions, the little girl goes to play with her neighbour, Amélie.
The two girls like to play in the cellar.
They discover an entrance to a tunnel in the cellar, an underground passage. Amélie says this passage is so long that it stretches across the border.
 All the girls know is that across the border is the free world where there are no soldiers in charge, where you can travel freely; besides everyone is wealthy because everyone has a car.
There are masses of rats in the underground passage. Once when the children’s torch goes out and they fall over several times, they are even bitten by the rats as they make their escape.
But later on it is this underground passage that will be the key to everything – as the narrator, the eight-year-old girl, says at the end of the novel:
“I have been walking for two hours here under the ground. And if what the parish priest says is true, then war is about to break out in thirty minutes.
If what the parish priest says is true.
There is silence all around me. I am having a rest.
As I rest I watch the rats. Where they go, I will follow.
Because that’s the way to liberation.”

By the time we reach this point in the story, two years have passed. Two terrible years. The little girl is a stranger in this town, but the travelling musicians are strangers too and so are those who cover their faces with a strange, black veil.
What is more, the law enforcers themselves, the soldiers, are strangers too.
And the number of strangers constantly increases.
The little girl survives the attack in which her mother dies but she remains completely alone. We know nothing of her father.
Yet she does not give up.
Then there is the opening of the school year when her best friend Amélie dies too.
It is at that school opening that the little girl learns the meaning of  the word thirst.
Once a teenage boy, one of the travelling musicians visiting the town, kisses the little girl’s hand because he is very taken with the girl’s long, red hair.
By the time the little girl starts out for the free world, all she has left is her long, red hair.