Two young girls, laughing, their arms around each other one summer Sunday years ago on Margit Island, one blonde, the other with short dark hair (she had cut her hair for swimming). Dora aged five stands in front of them, leaning against her mother, looking solemn, her thumb in her mouth. They are wearing each other’s dresses – she and Julia were always swapping clothes. A time without care, when they believed they could build a whole new world and thought that that was what they were doing. It hurts to go on looking at it. Any memory of Julia is too painful to bear. Into the box. She has got up early, the idea firmly in her head that she must systematically remove all traces of Julia from the apartment, all her photographs, letters, anything she has ever given Eva, even the books in which she had written her name. If nothing remains to remind her of Julia, perhaps she will find some release from the agony of guilt and recrimination that is tormenting her, the inescapable and distressing thought that in some way, unclear but definite, she is responsible for Julia’s death.
