Mother laughs:

"You're not going to reproach them with their intelligence, I hope?"

"It isn't funny. Why are you laughing?"

Mother replies:

"Twins are always a problem. It isn't the end of the world. Everything will sort itself out."

Father says:

"Yes, everything will sort itself out if we separate them. Every individual must have his own life."

A few days later, we start school. We're in different classes. We both sit in the front row.

We are separated from one another by the whole length of the building. This distance between us seems monstrous, the pain is unbearable. It is as if they had taken half our bodies away. We can't keep our balance, we feel dizzy, we fall, we lose consciousness.

We wake up in the ambulance that is taking us to the hospital.

Mother comes to fetch us. She smiles and says:

"You'll be in the same class from tomorrow on."

At home, Father just says to us:

"Fakers!"

Soon he leaves for the front. He's a journalist, a war correspondent.

We go to school for two and a half years. The teachers also leave for the front; they are replaced by women teachers. Later, the school closes because there are too many air raids. We have learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. At Grandmother's we decide to continue our studies without a teacher, by ourselves.

Purchase of Paper, Notebook, and Pencils

At Grandmother's there is no paper, there are no pencils. We go looking for some at a shop called Booksellers and Stationers. We choose a packet of graph paper, two pencils, and a big thick notebook. We place all that on the counter in front of the fat gentleman standing on the other side. We say to him:

"We need these things, but we have no money."

The bookseller says:

"What? But… you have to pay."