MargenThe village was split in two by a border that crossed the square right at the fountain. As a boy I jumped from one country to the other for fun: one leg here, one leg there, two languages a metre apart.
We grew up like that, looking at each other over a stripe painted on the ground. Our side never married theirs. Our side never ate in their houses. Nobody remembered why any more.
The day the governments signed the peace and ordered the line erased, workmen came with solvent and took it off in an afternoon. That night we celebrated all together, for the first time, in the square with no border.
The next morning half the neighbours had vanished. The ones from their side. As though the stripe did not separate two countries, but two kinds of dead, and only the fear of crossing it had kept them on this side of the ground.