Fireflies at the Border

The fence went up in 1991 and the fireflies have never once acknowledged it.

They come in the second week of June, out of the long grass on both sides, in numbers that people who have not seen it do not believe when they are told. The valley fills. For about eleven nights the whole floor of it moves.

The fence runs down the middle. Chain-link, three metres, with a strip of cleared ground either side that nothing is allowed to grow on, which is maintained, which is patrolled.

The fireflies cross it approximately four million times a night.

Dragan's grandfather remembered before. Dragan does not; he was two. What he remembers is his grandfather taking him up to the ridge every June from about 1996, when it was still an unwise thing to do, and the two of them sitting on the cold ground watching the valley light up and go dark and light up.

His grandfather did not say anything sentimental about it. He was not that sort of man. What he said, most years, was: "Look at that," and then, later, "Cold. Come on."

The watching became a thing people did.

Not organised — it has never been organised, and there was a period around 2004 when a well-meaning group tried to organise it and everyone hated it and it stopped. It is simply that in the second week of June, on both ridges, on both sides, people come out and sit down.

You can see the other side's cigarettes. That is the detail Dragan has never got used to. Across two kilometres of valley in full dark you cannot see people, but you can see the small orange points where somebody on the far ridge is having a smoke and watching the same thing you are.

In 2009 somebody on the far ridge flashed a torch. Three short.

Nobody on Dragan's ridge knew what it meant, or whether it meant anything. After a minute, an old man near the path flashed back, three short, because what else do you do.

That is now what happens. Every year. Three short, from wherever, and three short back, and then everyone goes back to not saying anything.

It is not a message. Nobody has attached a meaning to it and Dragan hopes very much that nobody ever does, because the moment it means something it will start being about something, and it will be ruined.

For now it means: there are people over there, and there are people over here, and the fireflies are doing this again.

Dragan is fifty-one. He takes his daughter, who is fourteen and brings a coat because he has told her about the cold every year of her life and she has still, twice, been cold.

Last June was a good year. Warm spring, wet May, and the valley came up so thick that his daughter said a word he pretended not to hear.

They sat for two hours.

At some point after eleven a torch went, three short, from somewhere near the far ridge path.

His daughter said, "What's that?"

And Dragan found he could not explain it in any way that would survive being said out loud. That it started by accident. That it means nothing. That everyone does it. That his grandfather, who died in 2003 and never saw it, would have thought it was slightly silly and would have joined in immediately.

So he took out his phone, and put his hand over most of it, and flashed it three times at the dark.

"That," he said.

His daughter thought about this.

Then she took her own phone out, and covered it, and did it too.

The valley went on lighting up and going dark, in complete indifference, on both sides.