Marina found a part-time job for Jean, three afternoons a week, at Mumford's, a children's press she sometimes illustrated for, a tiny publishing house, literally a house, near the university, a working mothers' co-op press, named after a suffragette grandmother of one of the editors, Jo Mumford. Its nickname among the editors was Mum's the Word. Jean's job was to do anything asked of her: type invoices, deliver packages, make photocopies, brew coffee. Marina had told them Jean could cook, so sometimes she did that too, in the tiny kitchen at the back of the bindery. She learned the hand-press and printed small runs of bookmarks, a cult item in the battle for feminist supremacy with the University Press' bookmarks, which featured ironic drawings of dull domestic cuisine – the “baked potato bookmark,” the “boiled egg bookmark.” Mum's the Word countered with their own series of bitingly lacklustre symbols of domesticity – the “kettle bookmark” and the “vacuum cleaner bookmark.”

Walking to the university or to work, city signs now revealed themselves as fonts. She thought about Lucjan marbling endpapers for the bookbinder-on-the-park. She thought about paper, the first sheets that could be manufactured in endless lengths, without seams, rolling off the machine in Frogmore in 1803.

Jean began to imagine a botanical typeface. She began with A and E, astor and eglantine. Avery and Escher. She could not render it herself adequately but could picture it in her mind in fine detail. She thought of asking Marina if she would illustrate a chapbook of Jean's remedies for imaginary afflictions if Jean were to set the type herself, a single copy for Avery, hand-sewn. Marina was illustrating a series of small, hardbound, classic adventure novels – Treasure Island, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Time Machine – each to be followed by a sister volume of the same tale told from the point of view of a female heroine. “Though of course I know the plots,” said Marina, “I keep reading anxiously, in a fever, hoping things will go differently than I remember, each moment hoping for better luck, for a reprieve, hoping I can make a difference with all my hoping …”

Jean sat at her table with her seed books and a map of the city spread open around her, pen in the air, while sorrow moved from heart to head, a creeping paralysis. The wrenching sadness that she had not known Avery's father. Avery as a boy, afraid, in the café in Turin with the patch of gauze on his chin. Every detail and regret accompanied by the fear that her history with Avery was being erased by Lucjan's touch, Lucjan's stories. He'd lent her a book of photographs of Warsaw, comparing views of the same city blocks, before and after the destruction, a single tree or a single wall the only evidence that the photographer had stood in the same spot. She felt Lucjan, and what it was to stand in that place.

It was too cold now for planting, and Jean's plans for the neighbourhoods, for Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy, Little India, Tibet, Jamaica, Armenia, would have to wait for spring.

She had an unexpected ally in her plans for the city: Daub Arbab. Over the months, he had been sending seeds and planting advice from the places he worked. And to Daub, Jean had confided a painful question. She hoped he would find words for her, believed in him since their journey to Ashkeit. And because when she'd returned to the camp from the hospital in Cairo, Daub had said, “You weep for all the daily reasons, you weep because you will never brush your daughter's hair.”

Just as belief is visceral, so was this doubt. It had first formed in her when she stood before the re-erected temple and had felt her personal suffering to be almost un conscionable. What was personal loss in the face of universal devastation – the loss of Nubia, the destruction of cities. Her misery shamed her. And yet, her shame was not correct, she knew it was not. To mourn is to honour. Not to surrender to this keening, to this absence – a dishonouring.

‘Your letter has reached me in Bombay,’ wrote Daub, ‘and tomorrow I begin the long drive, hundreds of kilometres, along a river, the first work for a dam. In the taxi from the airport, the multitudes pressed against the car, hands and faces pushed against the glass, they banged their hands on the bonnet and on the windows, which I'd kept closed, suffocating with the heat and the misery around me, as if I were in an armoured tank. Then guiltily stretching out on the hotel bed.

‘If I had a wife, I would not be here, I would be somewhere close to home, building something harmless, a bridge or a school. But instead I wander, my loneliness sticking like a burr. Why is Avery not with you? If you were my wife, I would be by your side. If love finds you, there is not a single day to be wasted. I watched you walking through the camp, the last weeks before your daughter was born, your horror and sorrow, and I could not understand then, as I do not understand now, Avery's reticence. I believe always it is a matter of taking the one you love in your arms. But I know nothing of marriage and what silences are necessary. As for your inquiry, dear Jean, I have been lying here trying to think what to say to you.

‘Perhaps there is a collective dead. But there is no such thing as a collective death. Each death, each birth, a single death, a single birth. One man's death cannot be set against millions, nor one man's death against another. I beg you not to torment yourself on this point. We were many months in the desert together and I know a little of how your heart works. Please sit quietly as you read this and hear what I say: There is no need to replace your grieving with penance.’

There's too much sand in the cement, Avery had said, and Jean had listened, lying next to him in the dark, at the limit of self-possession, cradling the stillness in her belly. It's not the workers' fault, he had continued, they'd been unsupervised. Cement is not hardened by the air, as most people believe, but by a chemical reaction … And now, in the kitchen on Clarendon, Jean heard Avery's desperation. The cement that would not dry.

Lucjan was working on a series of maps, sized to fit, when folded, into the glovebox of a car. He painted each detail with care, like medieval decoration on an illuminated manuscript. Every trade, he had explained to Jean, has its own map of the city: the rat and cockroach exterminators, the raccoon catchers, the hydro and sewer and road repair workers. There is the mothers' map marked with pet shops and public washrooms and places to collect pinecones, with sidewalk widths and pot-hole depths indicated for carriages, tricycles, and wagon-pulling. The knitters have their own map, with every wool supplier in the city marked. Lucjan made a map of exceptional tree roots, of wind corridors, and water runoff. He made a coffee map (with only one location marked), a sugar map, a chocolate map, a ginkgo tree map, a weeping willow map, a map of bridges, of public drinking fountains, of boulders larger than five feet in diameter. A shoe repair map. A grape arbour map, a map of kite-flying spaces (without overhead wires), a sledding map (hills without roads or fences at the bottom). Then there were the personal maps. The remorse map. The embarrassment map. The arguments map. The disappointment maps (bitter and mild). The map of the dead; the cemeteries built on vertical slopes. And the map he was working on when he met Jean – perhaps the most beautiful of all – a map of invisible things, a thought map, indicating where people had experienced an idea, a fear, a secret hope; some were well known, others private. An intersection where a novel was first imagined, a park where a child was dreamed of. The beach where an architect visualized his skyline. The bench where a painter had a premonition of his own death. “How does one paint what is not there?” asked Jean. “One paints the place exactly as one sees it,” said Lucjan. “Then, one paints it again.”

Lucjan's friend Paweł was a member of the Stray Dogs, a jazz orchestra of old men – old except for Paweł, the youngest by several decades. Lucjan was a silent member; he didn't play an instrument, but he was good at finding unusual things to bang on and, because he understood them, his advice was invaluable; sometimes he was called upon to settle a vote. The cornet, Janusz, was the second youngest and proud of his youth, introducing himself to Jean as “barely seventy years old in my stocking feet.” Some wore an air of permanent, desiccated romance, while the faces of the others, including the leader, “Mr. Snow” himself, contained such ransacked grief one could barely behold them. Mr. Snow – Jan Piletski – had worked with his father in the fish market at Rynkowa Street in Warsaw before the war. From a block away, Lucjan explained to Jean, you could see the long trestle tables, glinting with silver, a shimmering lake hovering in the middle distance. But this was a mirage with a stench. When the wind blew, the reek of fish floated for a quarter-mile in every direction. Once a week, I went with my mother and we always watched a man who used to sit at his easel, painting the wares. His fish were true to life – every shimmering scale – even the stink. Jan's wife, Beata, had referred to the distinctive aroma of the market as the Piletski perfume, and Jan Piletski himself was nicknamed by the Stray Dogs after the herring fisherman in a song from the musical Carousel. Mr. Snow became Jan Piletski's stage name, and this was also in honour of his fish-seller father, who had died in the Uprising.

All the Dogs remembered the days of the Crocodile Club, the Quid Pro Quo, the Czarny Kot – the Black Cat – and the Perskie Oko – the Persian Eye. They still dreamed of the queen of popular song, Hanka Ordonówna, and referred to her long affair with “that old man” Juliusz “My little Quail has Flown” Osterwafor with disdain and jealousy. The Stray Dogs were united in age, in inexpressible misfortune, in exile that defined them so completely it was difficult to imagine for them any other destiny, nor in their synchronized swim of chordal progressions and bent sound. Uniting them too was the knowledge that one's life is never remembered in its vicissitudes and variety but only as a distillation, a reduction of sixty or seventy years into one or two moments, a couple of images. Or as Hors Forzwer – the emcee at Warsaw's Round Club – might have said, from juice to jus. For each of them, the concepts of “music” and “women” were inseparable, as inseparable as “music” and “loneliness.” As ideas, “music” and “women” could not be disentangled, and in fact made an irreducible whole, like a molecule that is defined by its components and, if altered, changes into something unrecognizable. Just as “death” and “life” are meaningless one without the other, so “music,” “women,” “loneliness.” All this was evident in a single note gnarled beyond recognition, in a single chord heavy as a woman's thigh flung across a man's chest in the night. They played a cellarful of abandonment, the guilty look in an offguard moment, the coffee ring hardened into enamel at the bottom of the cup, the nub of a candle burnt down to the china saucer. And yet, there was a kind of solace too, the solace of emerging from the ruins to find that at least you no longer had any hair left to catch fire or that, for the moment, your prosthesis was not aching. “We want our music,” explained Mr. Snow, “to make people long to go home, and,” he boasted, “if the place is even half-cleared out by the time we've finished one set, we're overjoyed. Because for once it will seem better to be home alone in all one's misery than to be out listening to us. That's the kind of happiness we're capable of provoking!”

The Stray Dogs – a.k.a. the Hooligans, the Troublemakers, the Bandits, the Carbon Club (the latter a reference to the final days of the uprising, when Home Army Second Lieutenant Kazimierz Marczewski, who happened also to be an architect and town planner, had stood in the middle of Warsaw while firebombs fell and mines exploded around him, famously sketching plans for the reconstruction of the city on carbon paper) – indulged themselves with strange musical obsessions including Broadway musicals that they mangled into something agonizing, precisely heartbreaking, taking all the sweet hope and earnestness and extracting betrayal and despair with what Lucjan called “emotional acupuncture.” And they played Laura Nyro's “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Kamienny Koniec” – “Stoney End” – because Nyro resembled – was in fact an exact physical replica of – Beata in her youth, whom they all remembered with great feeling. How beautiful she'd been – Jakże była piękna.

“I was born from love – Jestem dzieckiem miłośći” Mr. Snow growled, his voice singeing Jean's ears. “And my poor mother worked the mines – A moja biedna matka pracowała w kopalni … I never wanted to go down the stoney end – do kamiennego końca … Mama, let me start all over, Cradle me again.”

There were of course the zakazane piosenki, the “forbidden songs,” all the classics of the Chmielna Street Orchestra: “A Heart in a Rucksack,” “Autumn Rain,” “Air Raid,” “In the Black Market You'll Survive,” and “I Can't Come to You Today.” And, needless to say, Hanka Ordonówna's signature “Love Forgives Everything,” which Mr. Snow sang with a voice of such rancid sarcasm Jean wanted to stop up her ears before her heart shrivelled. “He is the only person alive,” said Lucjan, “who looks even at a kitten with disapproval.” Mr. Snow sang, “Miłość Ci wszystko wybaczy – Love forgives everything, forgives betrayal and lies” and by the time he reached the final line “Bo miłość, mój miły, to ja – Love, my dear, is me” in his strangulating creak, one felt one would rather die alone in a ditch than fall in love again.

The Stray Dogs took each song apart, dismantling the melody, painstakingly, painfully, sappers dismantling a lie, and then turned each single component around so many times it disintegrated. Then they put it together again from nothing, notes and fragments of notes, bent notes and breaths, squawks on the horns and the reeds' empty lidded beating of keys. By the time the melody reappeared, one was sick with longing for it. “At first,” said Janusz, the cornet, “following Mr. Snow in a piece was like following the tracks of a jackrabbit – I never knew where he'd land. But after a while I could guess where his demented, sentimental mind might take him and one or two times over the years I even beat him there first. You should have seen the grin on his face – as if he'd opened a door and finally found himself home. I think that's the best thing I ever did for a man, taking away that loneliness for a bar or two.”

Paweł (double bass) wore a buttoned-down shirt and a thin houndstooth sportsjacket, Tomasz (trombone) wore a shapeless cardigan that dripped into a pool at his hips; Paweł had long hair, Piotr had no hair. Tadeusz (saxes), who was called Ranger – short for arranger – always wore a plaid flannel shirt, winter and summer. Ranger had been in Canada the longest and had learned his erudite English from a professor of Slavics who considered herself to have had two great insights, first to have married Ranger and then to have divorced him.

The first time Jean heard the Dogs, they were rehearsing at Paweł's café, after hours, a broken-down dirge. It tormented the air with its clockwork irregularity, a mechanical breakdown of stops and starts, notes grinding, grating, surging, limping. It was the music of revellers too old to be staying out all night, too dwindled to walk another step. Impatient and sad. A tonal meagreness. One by one the players dropped away until there was silence. Jean listened, mesmerized, the way one watches a fallen bowl circle round and round on the floor, waiting for the inevitable stillness.

She thought of dangerous rocks cascading intermittently down a slope, of stalled traffic, of conversations that stop and start not lazily, but instead signalling the end of everything.

– At night, said Lucjan, I lay in my melina listening to the stone rain. Pieces of brick or plaster that had been balancing precariously somewhere in the ruined darkness would reach their moment to fall – by wind, gravity, a soldier's boot. Gradually I became accustomed to it, there was no choice except to go mad waiting for the next sound that never came until I was almost asleep and was woken into waiting again. I used to feel how far it was from listening to the rain with my mother in the spring evenings on Freta Street, when I had only the problem of deciding which fairy tale to read before bed, or which dessert to choose that evening, apple cake or poppyseed cake.

– Now I understand, said Jean, what the Stray Dogs play … the stone rain.

The only (erstwhile and unofficial) member of the Stray Dogs who had not known the others from Warsaw was Jan, a Lithuanian from Saskatchewan who, late one summer night on his way home from playing lounge piano in a hotel, had come across Lucjan sitting on a curb contemplating a huge metal bedframe, wondering how he could transport it home. Jan offered to take one end and Lucjan took the other. They sat until daylight in Lucjan's studio drinking iced peppermint tea and vodka. Then Jan took it upon himself to spread green onions on the bottom of a pan and pour Lucjan's last three eggs on top of them. “Thus,” Lucjan told Jean, “are friendships sealed.”

The Stray Dogs met regularly at Lucjan's to settle matters, financial and otherwise. They maintained they met there on the first Thursday of every month, but the day was always changed at the last minute and so far, in ten years, it had never been a Thursday. That was as close to a schedule as they ever came – the Never-Thursday Schedule. “It's important to maintain delusions,” said Lucjan, “for the sake of order.”

Paweł always brought along to these meetings his little white dog with the pointed snout – a white cone ending in a black plug. Jean watched as the dog ate daintily from Paweł's hand. One certainly could not call Paweł his “master,” for in every gesture the man revealed his solicitude. In cold weather the dog wore a dignified navy-blue knitted coat. In summer, Paweł carried a flask of water and he cupped his hand so the dog could drink.

It was this little dog, their mascot, for whom the men named their orchestra, also referring to a certain café in St. Petersburg frequented before the wars by outlawed poets. It was their sad little Soviet joke; another way of hiding; a dilapidated homage; a wave across the abyss. It sat uncomfortably, just the way they preferred things. For a time they considered keeping the name they were known by in Warsaw, the Hooligans, but in the end it made them too sad and they left, like everything else, the name behind.

Lucjan and Jean walked through the darkly glinting, rain-soaked streets to listen to the Stray Dogs at the Door with One Hinge, a club open only on Saturday nights.

– In Warsaw, said Lucjan, kicking along the gutters gleaming with wet leaves, Paweł and Ewa had their own theatre. It was in their flat, a show once a week, and they were raided all the time. That was before such incredible theatre companies as Pomarańczowa Alternatywa, Orange Alternative. Ewa and Paweł were the vanguard, with all their escapades – street theatre with entire plays that lasted only five minutes and dispersed before the police came, or epics that took place in a series of pre-arranged places throughout the city over the course of a day. Now Ewa designs sets for all the small theatres here. Sometimes I paint for her. Some people are outsiders, no matter how long they've lived in a place, and no matter what they achieve, and others simply find the current and step into it no matter where they are; they always know what's being talked about, who's thinking what, where the next thing is coming from. Ewa's like that – an iconoclast supreme. When Warsaw was being rebuilt at top speed, she organized a monthly beauty pageant for the most attractive building, a model of which was crowned the new “Mr. Warsaw” at a ceremony staged every month in their flat.

Ewa enlists not only her husband, Paweł, but all the Dogs to help her. For a production of Godot, we made more than fifty trips to the ravine collecting bags of autumn leaves; for days Paweł drove back and forth from the park to the theatre – a room above a printer's shop – his Volkswagen bug crammed full. Their children helped empty the bags onto the floor of the theatre and they ran about with hair dryers until the leaves were bone-dry and brittle. By the time the play opened, the theatre was waist deep and the whole room trembled with each step. An eternity of leaves from Beckett's two bare trees in the middle of the room. For Brecht's Chalk Circle, Ewa used stones that Paweł, the Dogs, and I hauled from the lake. All the small theatres love Ewa because her sets never cost them a cent.

Lucjan and Jean would start out at 10 or 11 p.m. to meet up with the Stray Dogs, who would be starving after a night's work. Until it became too cold, they liked to picnic on the bourgeois billiard-table lawn of the Rosehill reservoir, with a view of the city in every direction. They'd eat cold potatoes and cheese, sweet bread and sour plums. Ewa and Paweł would come after one of Ewa's plays, with Paweł's little dog, who darted, a firefly, through the dark grass. Platters of food were passed from hand to hand, flasks of tea. The men stretched out and looked at the stars. Jean lay there too, in the green chill of the grass. In the darkness she listened to the stories, the resentments, the regrets … the enticing glance a woman gave, in passing, fifty-five years before, on the train to Wrocław. The cold beer on the boat from Sielce to Bielany The women, the women, the women: the shape of a calf as a fellow passenger reached for her luggage overhead on the boat, how that singer-from-Łódz's buttocks clenched with muscle under her silky dress when she sang the high notes; how many one-minute love affairs these old men had enjoyed, full, not of simple lust, but of complicated passion and promise, and never enacted, not so much as a wink, so there was never the burden of an unhappy ending. Never unrequited, always possible except “under the circumstances.” On this particular subject, the wives had stopped listening to their men thirty years ago and they lay together, their dresses spread out around them or tight across their majestic flesh, talking about one another's children and grandchildren, the toothaches and remedies, the talents and accomplishments.

Jean felt a scarecrow among these women, the Polish harem, just as she had among the Nubian women.

She listened to the men's political close calls, the romantic escapades, the concerts in pigsties and coffee houses across Poland and France, as they worked their way to the sea. All this in the park at midnight, the men and women sprawled and still across the grass, “like the dead,” said Lucjan, “gossiping on a battlefield.” Jean listened with Lucjan's hand finding her; she felt he could touch every point of her at once, with one hand. He wound his thick belt around her waist, pulled it tight and buckled it. He pulled her hair taut until every part of her was aching upwards, her mouth open. All this in the cold night grass. The night was voices and in her submission Jean felt the murmuring of Lucjan's friends on her body.

Lucjan carried a watermelon; he'd painted it to look like a large white cat curled asleep. Jean carried a cappuccino pie – the Sgana Café's specialty – wrapped in ice. They came to a row house on Gertrude Street.

From Ewa and Paweł's front porch, Jean could see right through the narrow house and out again to the tiny back garden. The front hall was crammed with stage props, eccentrically decorated bicycles, children's toys, and oversized sketchbooks leaning against the walls. Even the street was cramped, cars lining both sides, houses split in half, sharing a single porch, a single front yard. Each owner had made his small attempt to distinguish his side of the property according to his superior taste. The houses were at the very limit of what one could make of them, inside and out. Before she had even stepped past the door, Jean felt the pull of a new affection.

Ewa and Paweł's living room was full of children and Dogs. Guests perched on the arms of chairs, in laps, sat cross legged on the floor.

The wall in the hallway was covered in children's paint – butterflies, flowers, a big yellow sun.

– The children paint the wall any way they like, said Ewa. Then every month we paint over it and they can start again.

Ewa disappeared and returned with a tray of tea and cake. She gave it to Paweł, who offered it around.

Jean and Lucjan followed Ewa into the kitchen. Someone said, “It's Lucjan's girl,” and then Jean was surrounded. The women fingered her hair and stroked her arms, they felt her appraisingly, as if she were fabric, or an expensive handbag or a necklace, or a prodigy on display. Jean almost swooned with their scents and their softness and, most of all, their cooing approval. Now she was sitting down at the kitchen table with a glass of wine in her hand and the women's voices a spell around her. She saw Lucjan watching, amused, from across the room.

– Lucjan tells me you recognized him by his work, said Ewa. She laughed. He enjoys what the newspapers like to call ‘local notoriety.’

Jean smiled.

– I enjoy it, said Lucjan, only because no one knows who I am, and I never face my public.

– Not unless someone catches you in the act, said Ewa.

– Yes. He frowned. That's why I only come out to paint at night.

Ewa and Paweł's children, five and seven years old, climbed into Jean's lap and began to have their way with her. Jean sat still as they investigated her attributes, examining her hair, poking with their fingers. They made cherry earrings and hung them from her ears, where they bobbled like plastic marbles.

– Do they want to be doctors or hairdressers? Jean asked, laughing.

– One of each, naturally, said Lucjan from the doorway, taking obvious pleasure in Jean's initiation.

Jean soon learned that at Ewa's parties there was always a project on. Huge rolls of brown paper were unfurled and everyone painted a mural; a sheet was tacked to the wall and a film projected while the Dogs played, sewing together a melody out of silence and the whirring of the projector. Actors gathered in the middle of the living room and, with nothing more than a spoon or a dishtowel, transformed reality – having a Sunday row on a pond or floating in a lifeboat on the North Sea; suddenly they were lovers on a picnic blanket, or thieves, or children on a swing. Jean knew these actors had worked together for a long time, a bodily history among them. She had seen Avery perform loaves and fishes with objects, with stones on the beach, with rulers and wooden blocks, creating bridges, castles, entire cities. But his magic was solitary and intellectual compared with the instantly complex communication between these bodies, the moment continually changing, deepening into humour or sorrow. And sometimes this pathos was intense, and a hole opened, and everyone watching from the edges of the room found their own sorrow pouring into it. Crack! the earth of the scene split open and down everyone tumbled together into the wreckage of memory. And then the actors melted back into the party, and the food and the bottles were passed around again.

Jean's hair was pinned up in a knot, gently unravelling. She had Lucjan's sweater over her shoulders.

– You radiate happiness, said Ranger.

Ranger sat down next to her.

– Does Lucjan talk to you? he asked.

Jean looked at him, startled.

– Yes, Lucjan talks to me.

Ranger stretched out his legs.

– I'm drunk, he said.

He leaned his head on Jean's shoulder.

– What if, Ranger said, the most important, the most meaningful, the most intimate moment of your life was also the most important, the most intimate moment for hundreds of thousands of others? Any man who's lived through a battle, the bombing of a city, a siege, has shared the same private moment with thousands of others. People pretend that's a brotherhood. But what belongs to you? Nothing. Not even the most important moment of your life is your own. Okay, so we understand this. But what about what happens between a man and a woman in the dark, in privacy, in bed? I say there's nothing intimate about that either. You hold her hand in the street, everyone knows what you do at night. You have a child, everyone knows what you did together.

Jean was silent. She felt the damp weight of Ranger's head against her, a terrible sadness. Then she said, in a gentle voice, Do you mean to say that all women and men are alike, that one woman is exactly like another? Or do you mean to tell me that Lucjan has had many women? If so, don't worry, he's told me himself.

– And what do details matter? continued Ranger. Her father, his father, her mother, his mother, the deprived childhood, the happy childhood … Even the particulars of our bodies – at the moment of passion, at that precise moment, she is any body, any body will do.

– Have you never been in love?

– Of course I have. I'm seventy-four years old. But the experience of love – what you feel – it's always the same, no matter who the object of that love is.

Lucjan came with Jean's drink.

– Jean, is he scaring you? Ranger, I wish you wouldn't – that's my job.

Ranger bowed his head and held out his hand for Jean's glass.

– No, said Lucjan quietly. Language is only approximate; it's violence that's precise.

– No, said Ranger, raising his voice. Violence is a howl – the ultimate howl – inarticulate.

– No, said Lucjan. Violence is precise, always exactly to the point.

– It's just a philosophical argument, said Ranger. Have a drink.

– Are you mad? shouted Lucjan.

Lucjan took hold of Ranger's shoulders and was about to shake him. But he looked at Ranger's hopeless face and kissed him on top of the head instead.

– You make me sick, said Lucjan.

– Me too, said Ranger.

Suddenly Ranger turned to Jean.

– Fresh blood, said Ewa, nudging Lucjan.

– What do you say, Jean? You're my last chance.

– I have to think about it.

– Ha, said Ranger.

– No, she means it, said Lucjan.

So they gave her ten minutes' peace. Jean left the din of the party and wandered upstairs to the children's room and sat on a small bed.

Beside her on a little table was a box brimming with metal bottlecaps. There was a stuffed cat and a drawing of a heart with wings floating over the ocean. The heart also had an anchor chain that disappeared into the waves. It made her head ache to think about it.

Violence is a form of speech. Violence is a form of speechlessness. Of course it is.

– You still want to believe in something, said Ranger. You still think there are such qualities as selflessness, or neighbourliness, or even disinterest. You still think someone will step forward with a plan! You still believe a man's beautiful books or beautiful songs are written out of love and not a way to brag of all the women he's had. You still think that love is a blessing and not a disaster. You still believe in a sacred bond sealed during a night of soul-searching love, in tastes, scars, maps, a woman's voice singing of love, the hot kiss of whisky between her legs, a sax solo played by an old Pole in a sweater with a voice like a mistake. You still believe a man will join his life with a woman after a single night. You still believe a man will dream about one woman for the rest of his life. I believe in taking what I want until there is nothing left. I believe in sleeping with a woman for what she can teach you. I believe in the loyalty among men who know they will slip away from the others the first better chance they get. I believe you can only trust someone who has lost everything, who believes in nothing but self-interest. But you, he said, waving his hand across all assembled in Ewa and Paweł's living room, still step into the street with the possibility that something good might happen. You still believe you will be loved, truly loved, past all frailty and misjudgment and betrayal. I've seen a man say goodbye to his wife with a look of such penetrating trust between them you could smell the breakfasts and promises, the sitting up with the sick child, the love-making after the child has fallen asleep, the candy smell of the children's medicine still sticky on their hands – and then that same man drives straight from that bedroom to his lover, who opens her legs like a hallelujah while the wife scrubs the pots from last night's dinner and then sits down at the kitchen table and pays the bills. As soon as a war is over we revive the propaganda of peace – that men do terrible things in extremity, that men are heroic out of nobility of soul rather than out of fear or out of one kind of duty or another, or simply by accident. Men honour promises out of fear – the fear of crossing a line that will rip up their lives. Then we call this fear love or fidelity, or religion or loyalty to principles. There's garbage floating even in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from any land. Men shoot chemicals into a human corpse and put it on display and no one arrests them! When you take away the human body's right to rot into the earth or go into the air, you take away the last holiness. Do you understand me? The last holiness. People picnicked in the ruins. Poles stepped over dead Jews in the street on their way to lunch. We were afraid to open a suitcase in the rubble because it might contain a dead child, the infant a mother carried, the suitcase banging against her legs, all the way from Łódź to Poznań to Kraków to Warsaw, waiting to die herself. Children betrayed their parents to the state. Two filthy words: military occupation.

Ranger stood. Lucjan moved to take his arm and Ranger swerved from his grasp.

– I'm not as drunk as you think.

Ranger picked up his jacket and left.

Ewa began to collect the ashtrays and empty them into the bin. No one said a word. Jean looked at Lucjan, who looked away with a shrug.

– I'm going to bed, said Ewa, climbing the stairs. Throw yourselves out.

Jean took off everything, then pulled Lucjan's sweater over her head; the sleeves hung down to her knees. The wool carried his embrace and his shape. Then she cooked only in the small light of the stove, working alone in the dim kitchen. She would cook something that required slow, long heat, the flavours intensifying. She smelled the herbs on her fingers, his smell in her hair, the eucalyptus scent of her own skin. She watched the kale and onions and mushrooms turn soft and shrink with the heat. Love permeates everything, the world is saturated with it, or is emptied of it. Always this beautiful or this bereft. She crushed the rosemary between her palms, then drew her hands over his sweater so later he would find it. Everything one's body had been – the pockets of shame, of strange pride, scars hidden or known. And then the self that is born only in another's touch – every tip of pleasure, of power and weakness, every crease of doubt and humiliation, every pitiful hope no matter how small.

It was an early Sunday evening in January, snow at the windows. Jean carried a tray with Paweł's Jamaican coffee and thick slices of brown bread, a pot of jam with a spoon sticking out of it. Lucjan was lying on the bed with a book over his face.

– Talk to me, Janina. Tell me about a Sunday you've had, he said from under the book.

Jean poured and set the cup on the floor beside him.

She thought of Avery, a sudden, burning homesickness. What they knew together: black earth and stone trees, swathing forest, a glimpse of stars. The grasses of Kintyre swaying above their heads in a sea of air. Collecting stones from the hard winter sand and building houses from them, the largest up to her waist, the smallest in the middle of the square kitchen table in the cottage they'd rented in this Scotland they loved, their great gasp of cold wind before the heat of the desert. The blankets heaped on the bed, so heavy they could barely roll over in their perfect sleep together. No use to ask Avery if he remembered. She knew he remembered.

– One Sunday, said Jean slowly, an archaeologist suddenly appeared on our houseboat. He was hunting for Canadians; he was from Toronto and was feeling melancholy, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to sit with him on the Nile on a Sunday evening listening to him describe a concert he'd heard by Segovia at Massey Hall.

At Faras, continued Jean, there were archaeologists from Warsaw, and a huge Soviet camp at the dam. Sometimes we saw them at the market in Wadi Halfa. The Russians especially looked bereft. They sat in the shade of the coffee stalls smoking and whistling songs by Yves Montand. The desert was filled with foreigners – from Argentina, Spain, Scandinavia, Mexico, France – and there was brisk trade in the small bitter cigarettes of each country. And wherever the archaeologists were working, the Bedouin shadowed the sites, watching and waiting just off in the distance, never approaching.

– Wait a moment, said Lucjan.

He jumped out of bed and she watched as he moved through the dusk, down the steep stairs and into the kitchen. For a moment the light of the fridge touched the ceiling, then darkness again.

She heard him, scrabbling about trying to feel his way through a stack of record albums. Then a man's voice floated upstairs.

Lucjan stood at the top of the staircase, remembering.

– Yves Montand … There was a time in Warsaw, said Lucjan, when, from every open window, you could hear ‘C'est à l'Aube’ or ‘Les Grands Boulevards’ or ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’ in the street. When Montand sang at the Palace of Culture, thirty-five hundred people listened. Fifteen minutes after he left the stage, people were still shouting for encores. The bureaucracy did not object because Montand was a man of the people; he was the man who stood up and gave a spontaneous concert for eight thousand workers at the Ukhachov auto plant. Khrushchev knew Montand filled every seat in the eighteen-thousand-seat Uljniki Stadium. But in Warsaw, we liked him even despite these things; it was partly because he was singing in a language that was not the language in which we bartered for food or fought over a soup bone, or swore at our mechanic, or begged for a cigarette from the man standing next to us in the prison yard. His language was unpolluted by that ‘h’ in Khatyn, that drop of tainted blood that poisons the whole body. And we liked him even more when he spoke his mind about the squashing of Hungary: ‘I continue to hope, I cease to believe.’ When the Soviets went into Czechoslovakia, he told a reporter: ‘When things stink we have to say so.’ That last commentary was the final straw – overnight, Montand was banned. From the moment the words were out of his mouth, we had to hide our LPs and pretend we'd never heard of him – of Montand! – who up to a minute before was selling by the millions. And that's why my friend Ostap, who'd just woken up from a bender, dis appeared and was never seen again – because he was absent-mindedly humming ‘Quand Tu Dors’ while he was walking down the street. These rules always change overnight and too bad if you're a heavy sleeper. This is just the way the map changes; like a man who decides to part his hair differently one morning: suddenly Mittel Europe is Eastern Europe. Even Mr. Snow respects Montand and the Dogs won't touch him. They listen to his songs and never mutilate them.

Jean watched the shape of Lucjan cross the room toward her, walking through the darkness of Montand's voice.

In the tub, listening. The water of the bath as hot as Lucjan and Jean could bear; soaking in every extreme of love – humiliation, hunger, ignorance, betrayal, loyalty, farce. Jean leaned back against him, her seaweed hair across his face. She felt Lucjan drifting to sleep. Jean imagined the love between Montand and Piaf, when he was very young, the affair that would shape the rest of his life. She imagined what it meant to listen to Montand in Moscow or in Warsaw. Soon Lucjan would get up and put Piaf on the turntable, and they would listen for Montand's shadow in her voice. And then they would listen to Montand again. Hearing all that biography in their voices.

Lucjan slipped his hands into the warmth of Jean's neck and unwound her scarf. He pushed his hands under her beret and loosened between the comb of his fingers her hair, cold as metal, from the winter street. Jean held up her arms and he drew her sweater over her head. Piece by piece, her winter clothes fell to the floor. She no longer knew which parts of her were cold and which were burning hot. She felt the roughness of his sweater and his trousers down all the length of her and it was this roughness that she would always remember – scrubbed in her nakedness by his clothes and his smell.

Night after winter night Jean and Lucjan met this way. Jean knew Lucjan would never have spoken of himself without the vulnerability of skin between them. As if, in a reversal of all she'd known, that vulnerability held them hostage to the deeper pact of words. Lucjan felt in her an acute listening and this above all, Jean decided, was his desire. Very slowly she began to feel the power of this searing, that led each night to her surrender in different ways, and to his words. She knew that this was her particular contract with Lucjan and that if she had not silently agreed she would have lost all the history of him.

She began to understand that this kind of intimacy was, in its own way, a renaming. An explorer reaches land; the discovered place already has a name, but the explorer puts another in its place. This secret renaming of the body by another – this is how the body becomes a map, and this is what the explorer craves, this branding of the skin.

Sometimes Jean came home to a phone message left by Avery in the night, a rambling dissertation on how the roofs of a neighbourhood can create a secondary horizontal plane for building, parallel to the ground, or how concrete can be finished to resemble marble. Sometimes he left for her a piece of music, something he knew she liked, Radu Lupu or Rosalyn Tureck, the sound of the lonely piano worn and battered by its journey through the answering machine. Perhaps twice a week they spoke, usually in early evening, sometimes even having dinner together over the phone. She could not define the content of these conversations. She knew they were a kind of code he meant her to understand, but all she heard was a heart-clenching formality, a courtesy, yet not this exactly; the painful decorum that rises out of the ruins of intimacy, just as intimate.

– A few days ago we had a critique, said Avery, for a train station. One student designed an elaborate complex for ‘freshening up’ after a journey – a boudoir with nooks and banquettes and mirrors, personal sinks and showers. He kept saying that this ‘spa’ would become a destination in itself. ‘It would be immensely convenient,’ he said. ‘The train would take people directly to the showers’; he kept repeating this – ‘the train would take them directly to the showers, directly to the showers …’ He kept on about it until I felt quite sick. All I could think of were the trains from Amsterdam to Treblinka, and finally I said so. The whole class turned to look at me as if I were demented. I thought, Now I've done it, they'll think I'm cracked, obsessed. Finally a young woman asked, ‘What's Treblinka?’ …

Yesterday we were talking about bridges. I said that yes, I suppose a bridge could also be a shopping mall and a parking lot, but why should we disguise a bridge, its function? What is the essence of a melon? It's roundness! Maybe someday we'll breed a square melon, but then it will be something else, a toy, a mockery of a melon, a humiliation. They looked at me again like I had lost my wits. But then someone said seriously, ‘Square melons, why didn't I think of that?’

Jean heard, through the phone, the sound of papers rustling and guessed that Avery had put his head on his desk.

– Today I was thinking, said Avery, that the moment one uses stone in a building, its meaning changes. All that geologic time becomes human time, is imprisoned. And when that stone falls to ruins, even then it is not released: its scale remains mortal.

Avery started out across the marsh. There was no moon, but the ground glowed with snow. The blackness above and the whiteness beneath him made him feel that with each step he might fall over an edge. A marker glowed above the canal. He moved toward it.

He lay down by the ditch and the ground now seemed almost warm to him. There was no one for many miles across the marsh, the nearest farm a pinprick of light. He listened to the water moving under the ice. Shame is not the end of the story, he thought, it is the middle of the story.

With the frozen mud digging into his back, Avery found himself thinking about Georgiana Foyle. He wondered if she were still alive, and if she had chosen where she would be buried, now that her place beside her husband was gone. He thought of Daub Arbab, who, for the first time, Avery realized, reminded him of his father, a seriousness that expressed itself as kindness. He thought that the closest thing he felt to belief of any kind was his love for his wife.

The painter Bonnard, the day before he died, travelled hours to an exhibit of his work so that he could add a single drop of gold paint to the flowers in a painting. His hands were too unsteady, so he asked his son to accompany him, to help hold the brush. Avery felt that even had Bonnard known that these were his last hours, he would still have taken that journey for the sake of a single second of pigment. What a blessed life, to live in such a way that our choices would be the same, even on the last day.

He thought about what his father had said to him while they sat together that afternoon in the hills, after the war: There is only one question that matters. In whose embrace do you wish to be when you die.

The lights were on in Marina's house; she had left them on for Avery's sake; for navigation, to plough the deep.

When Avery came in, Marina was waiting for him.

– You use that marsh like the desert, she said.

For several days Jean had been helping Lucjan knot lengths of thick rope for a sculpture; ten or fifteen knots, each the size of a fist, in each length. She did not know how Lucjan intended to use these pieces of rope, awkward and bulging. They worked with the lamps on, the pale February afternoon light barely passing through the windows.

Often they asked each other to describe a landscape, it was a key to a door between them, a way to tell a story. Now, in Lucjan's winter kitchen, the floor and table laden with lengths of rope, Jean quietly described the desert at sunset.

– The sand turned the colour of skin, and the stone of the temple looked like flesh. The first time I saw the stonecutters slice into Ramses' legs in that light, I flinched, as if I had almost expected the stone to bleed.

She added her coil to the others on the floor, the knots beginning to resemble a mound of stones.

– And these, she said, draping the rope over her lap, are as long as the reins of a camel.

– The closest I've ever come to seeing a camel, said Lucjan, was during the war, though I might as well have been on the other side of the world. I remember someone telling my mother and me that camels had come to Plac Teatralny, camels that kneeled down on the pavement so children could climb up for a ride. ‘And I thought nothing could surprise me now,’ my mother had said … After the war, I found out that, travelling right behind the German army, was the German circus. It was the same in every occupied territory. The big top came to town and gathered up the last coins from the losers …

They continued for a while in silence, the snow falling.

– They say that children find a way. Sometimes, said Lucjan. Not a way out, but a way. Just like bones – they'll mend by themselves but won't set straight. The rubble rats used to play a misery game – to see who could outdo the others: if you lost a brother as well as your mother and father, worse still. And a sister too? Worse still. Lost a part of your own body? Worse even still. There was always a ‘worse still’ – jeszcze straszniejsze.

My stepfather used to get a look on his face, that warning grimace, of someone who knows he's doing wrong but can't figure out what to do instead, and so keeps on, defiantly, as if he were right. Knowing he was wrong gave him a real air of conviction. When we first saw each other again after the war, we looked at each other, trying to understand how we were connected. Everything was said in total silence in those first few seconds. He was only my stepfather – ‘after all’ – w końcu. What had the war done to him? Like an animal in a trap, he had bitten off parts of himself to survive – mercy, generosity, patience, fatherhood. Most of my life had been lived without him. He had never once appeared when I needed him most. I remember staring at the skull-white parting in his thick black hair, and tried to imagine my mother having touched that hair …

A woman could hold Lucjan close for a lifetime and even if his desolation had shrivelled to the size of an atom of paint, that atom would remain, just as wet. Jean had ascribed many meanings to the work she was helping with; it was a giant's rosary, the knots of a prayer shawl, an ancient form of counting. And now she thought, perhaps the worst knot of all: mistrust bound with longing.

– Names were stolen while we slept.

We fell asleep in Breslau and woke in Wrocław. We slept in Danzig and yes, admittedly, we tossed and turned somewhat, yet not so much as to explain waking in Gdansk. When we slipped in between the cold sheets our bed was undeniably in the town of Konigsberg, Falkenberg, Bunzlau, or Marienburg, and yet when we woke and swung our feet over the edge of that same bed, our feet landed still undeniably on a bedside rug in Chojna, Niemodlin, Bolesławiec, or Malbork.

We walked the same street we had always walked, stopped for coffee in the same corner café whose menu had not changed in years, although where once we'd ordered ciasta, now we ordered pirozhnoe, which was served in the very same crockery with the very same glass of water. The coins we left on the marble tabletop were different, the table itself, the same.

Then there were the places that had changed everything but their names. After their obliteration, when the cities were rebuilt, Warsaw became Warsaw, Dresden became Dresden, Berlin, Berlin. One could say, of course, those cities had not completely died but grew again from their dregs, from what remained. But a city need not burn or drown; it can die right before one's eyes, invisibly.

In Warsaw, the Old Town became the idea of the Old Town, a replica. Barmaids wore antique costumes, old-fashioned signs were hung outside shop windows. Slowly the city on the Vistula began to dream its old dreams. Sometimes an idea grows into a city; sometimes a city grows into an idea. In any case, even Stalin could not stop the river from entering people's dreams again, the river with its long memory and its eternal present.

Europe was torn up and resewn. In the morning a woman leaned out her kitchen window and hung her wet washing in her Berlin garden; by afternoon when it was dry, she would have to pass through Checkpoint Charlie to retrieve her husband's shirts.

And what of the dead who'd once been lucky enough to own a grave? Surely, at least, if someone died in Stettin, his ghost had a right to remain there, in that past, and was not expected to haunt Szczecin as well …

The dead have their own maps and wander at will through both Fraustadt and Wschowa, both Mollwitz and Malujowice, both Steinau am Oder and Scinawa; through Zlín and Gottwaldov and Zlín again. Down Prague's Vinohradská Street, Franz Josef Strasse, Marshal Foch Avenue, Hermann Goering Strasse, and Marshal Foch Avenue again, Stalin Street, Lenin Avenue, and at last, once again, without having taken a single step and shimmering only through time, Vinohradská Street.

As for one's birthplace, it depends who's asking.

Over the course of the afternoon the coils of knots grew higher, mute and heavy on the floor under the table.

A soup was simmering on the stove. Ewa had brought a roast chicken to Lucjan earlier in the day and now it was crackling in the oven. The light was nearly gone. Lucjan made the fire and lit candles.

He sat on the floor in the “unconscious” half of the house, leaning against the wall, looking at the tangle of knots, their afternoon's work, from a distance. Jean was reading a textbook quietly at the kitchen table. With false drama, Lucjan whimpered:

– I'm hungry.

Jean looked up from her book.

– What are you reading? asked Lucjan. Is it edible?

– This chapter is about hybrid vigour. But, she smiled, you could say I'm reading about cabbage.

– That's more like it, said Lucjan.

He sat down next to her at the table.

– Did they teach you about the koksagiz widowers at school? When the Germans marched into the Soviet Union, they searched everywhere for rubber plants. Russian women and children were driven into labour camps to harvest the koksagiz fields so even tiny amounts of rubber could be extracted from the roots …

The big high-rise housing development in the southern part of the Muranów district in Warsaw was built on top of what had been the ghetto. There was so much rubble – thirteen feet deep – and we had no machines to clear it. So instead the debris was crushed even further, and the housing built right on top. Then grass was laid down and flowerbeds planted on this terrace of the dead. That's their ‘blood-and-soil garden.’

A few blocks from the School of Architecture, where Avery was working at a desk in the basement, Jean sat with Lucjan and Ranger in the Cinéma Lumière, waiting for the film to start, Les Enfants du Paradis.

Lucjan handed Jean a lumpy bag.

– Baked potatoes with salt, said Lucjan.

Ranger leaned over Lucjan and put his hand into the bag.

– It's long, at least a two-potato film, he told Jean, already peeling off the aluminum foil. I remember going with Mr. Snow and Beata to the Polonia, so hungry we could barely sit still. There was no water and no place to live but, four months after the war, there was a cinema. The Polonia sat like a stage set in the mess of Marszałkowska Street. Many times I lined up to watch a film and then afterwards lined up again down the street to fill my metal pail at the pipe that spurted water out of the ground. People carried containers with them wherever they went. There was always a clatter just before anyone sat down anywhere, people setting down their jars and flasks and pails at their feet.

– The clatter was usually followed by the rustling of newspapers, said Lucjan, as people took their Skarpa Warszawska from their pockets, a weekly magazine, Janina, that kept us up to date on the progress of the rebuilding. After the war so many newspapers sprouted up – right away, five or six daily papers. We couldn't hear enough about how well we were doing – two hundred thousand cubic metres of rubble removed by the horse-drawn carts, sixty kilometres of streets cleared of debris, a thousand buildings cleared of mines …

– Comrades, said Ranger, work has commenced on the market square, on the tin-roof of the palace, on the church on Leszno Street … The library has now opened on Rejtan Street!

Pilgrims converged at the same locations, the same square metres of rubble, each person mourning a different loss. The mourners stood together in the same spot and wept for their various dead – for Jews, Poles, soldiers, civilians, ghetto fighters, Home Army officers – dozens of allegiances buried in the same heap of stones.

– How does a city rebuild itself? said Lucjan. Within days someone sets out pots amid the rubble and opens a florist's shop. A few days after that, someone puts a plank between two bricks and opens a bookshop.

– In London after the bombings, said Jean, willowherb took root and spread throughout the ruins –

– Janina, said Lucjan, this isn't a romance. I'm not talking about wildflowers, I'm talking about commerce – that's how you rebuild a city. You can have all the wildflowers you want, but in the end someone must open up a shop.

Lucjan took Jean's arm in the street. It had started to snow while they were in the cinema, in nineteenth-century Paris, and by the time they reached Amelia Street, all was white and quiet.

They lay in the bath together, watching the snow fall past the kitchen window.

– That's a wretched ending to a film, said Lucjan. A man pushing his way through a crowd to reach the woman he loves and, for all eternity, never catching up to her.

He looked at the piles of rope around them.

– It's almost finished, said Lucjan. When there's too much and it's too heavy to move, it will be done.

This makes me think of my grandfather, my mother's father, who was a cabinet maker. My mother once told me that he'd made a magnificent piece of furniture – the most distinguished desk ever created in the world, fit for an emperor – but the one thing he hadn't considered was the door to the room, which was too small, and they had to cut a bigger hole to fit it through. She said I was to take this as a lesson in humility. She also told me about an enormous, curved display case he'd made for a shop – the wood shone like amber, the top was heavy glass with bevelled edges that looked, my mother said, like the watery edge of ice forming, and inside were wide, shallow, velvet-lined drawers for stockings and lace and silks. Each drawer opened with a tiny brass knob. He'd boasted that it took ten men to lift it. The cabinet had elaborately carved corners – wooden vines trailed thick and lush to the floor. The drawers slid, smooth and soundless, and the shopgirl would pull out the whole drawer so the customer could see the small silk things shining like pools of coloured water on the dark velvet.

This cabinet brought my grandfather many commissions for custom work.

My stepfather's people were from Łódz; they owned a hosiery factory. He had been sent to Warsaw to distribute the family wares. It was for this shop that my grandfather built one of his famous cabinets and that is how he met my mother. She was so young; the milk and cinnamon of her soft skin and thick hair, the sweetness in her face. She was nineteen years old.

I remember a tram stop with a clock next to it where, before the war, my mother and I used to wait. The clock had little lines instead of numbers. It disturbed me so much that there were no numbers on that clock, just anonymous little dashes, as if time meant nothing and simply lurched on endlessly, meaninglessly, anonymously. I used to try to predict when the minute hand would jump forward. I tried to count the seconds, to guess when it would suddenly seize the next little line, but it always got ahead without me. While we waited at that stop for the #14 tram, my mother would comment that it was really a very foolish place to put a clock because it always reminded you how overdue the tram was and how long you'd been waiting and how late you were. I remember the feel of her wool coat against my cheek as I stood beside her, her sure fingers around mine. That little hand on the clock jumping forward without me is the symbol for me of how my mother disappeared …

A wall does not separate; it binds two things together.

In the ghetto, a woman came to visit my mother. She was an old schoolfriend or a relative; I don't remember, yet for my mother the nature of this relationship would surely have been the heart of this story. I do remember her hat – a pie-plate contraption tilting over her ear – which she didn't remove all through tea. I waited for it to fall off and land in her cup. I sat on the chair in the corner next to a little wooden table with my cup of ‘fairy tea’ – hot water and milk. The woman gave my mother some photographs taken when they were children. After she left, my mother and I sat together and looked at them. The season in the photographs was summer, yet outside our window that afternoon it was snowing. I remember thinking about that fact, the first time it occurred to me that weather was preserved in photographs. And because the sun was so bright, there were many shadows. In one photo in particular my mother's shadow was very pronounced beside her and I couldn't keep from looking at it, that shadow lying across the pavement almost as tall as she was. And in another, there was the shadow of someone who had obviously been standing near to her, but who was outside the frame of the picture. I couldn't stop thinking about it afterwards, that my mother had stood next to someone – a quarter of a century before – whose identity I would never know and yet whose shadow was recorded forever.

Photos from those years have a different intensity; it's not because they record a lost world, and not because they are a kind of witnessing – that is the work of any photograph. No. It's because from 1940 it was illegal for any Pole, let alone a Polish Jew, to use a camera. So any photo taken by a Pole from that time and place is a forbidden photo – whether of a public execution or of a woman reading a novel quietly in her bed.

German soldiers, on the other hand, were encouraged to bring their Kine-Exakta or Leica with them to war, to document the conquest. And quite a few of those photos survive in public archives, such as those of Willy Georg, Joachim Goerke, Hauptmann Fleischer, Franz Konrad … Others remain in family albums, photos sent home to parents and sweethearts: the Eiffel tower, ghetto streets, the Parthenon, public hangings, an opera house, a mass grave, gas vans, and other signs of German ‘tourism’ … These photos were sent home, where they were kept next to the family photos of weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties, lakeside holidays. Although there were certainly photojournalists whose job it was to shoot for propaganda, many of the photosoldiers remain anonymous, their snapshots part of the great pile of images that make up the twentieth century …

I used to spend many hours watching from the window in our corner of the ghetto, and, once, I saw an old man put down a wooden box on the pavement and painfully kneel next to it. An instant shoeshine enterprise. At first I thought this was as ill-chosen as setting up a kiosk to sell matches at a fire; who in all the starving city would pay to have their worn-out, barely held-together shoes polished? But incredibly he earned himself some supper that day. And he polished German soldiers' boots – they took a lot of boot-black and they took it for free. It made me hold my breath to see the soldier's boot so close to the old man's head.

The places where people were killed often showed no mark; within moments the bit of pavement looked exactly as before. From my window I kept looking for a trace of the old man's murder, but there was none.

My stepfather eventually found a hiding place for my mother and me – much harder to find someone willing to take both of us. There were holes in the ghetto wall for such transactions and people were killed halfway through, with their head or their feet sticking out. A few days before we were to make the attempt, I sat looking out the window to the street below where my mother was waiting to meet someone to make a trade for food. She was standing in the street because of me, to feed me. That is how my stepfather thought about it afterwards and why he never forgave me … That and the fact that my mother and I always had our heads together, leaning over a book or a drawing, laughing over something so small we could never quite explain it to him … I looked away from the window for a moment – no more than a few seconds – or maybe I was just daydreaming – and when I turned my eyes back again, my mother was gone, simply gone, just like that. I never saw her again. I still feel sure that if I hadn't turned away my eyes just at that moment, nothing would have happened to her.

A simple-minded, childish revelation – that we can die without a trace.

At the bottom of the ravine, a thread caught the light; the river had been peeled of snow and drizzled with water from a tin pail. One of the Dogs each day came to renew its frozen varnish. The gleaming ice of the river looked liquid in the lantern light, even reflecting the lanterns hanging in the trees, as if a spell had been cast upon the water preventing it from freezing. So unnatural was this mirage that Jean held her breath as she watched the first skater place his foot on the surface, as if he might sink in his heavy skates, swallowed without a sound by the river's enchantment.

– Go ahead, say what you're thinking – Breughel's peasants. Jean looked at Lucjan in surprise.

– You mouthed the words, smiled Lucjan.

– It's the deep colours of their jackets against the snow, I think.

Then Jean watched as Ewa appeared in her pink fake-fur coat, her pink scarf, her thin black legs ending in pink skates. Jean laughed.

– A flamingo, said Lucjan, who always seemed to know what she was looking at.

– Is it all right to say I love Ewa although I've only met her twice?

– We all love Ewa, said Lucjan seriously.

Jean saw Ewa pointing and knew she was shouting orders. A board appeared and trestles and in a moment the table was covered with pans of cake and flasks of every size. Jean smiled at the theatricality of the scene – the feast, the enchanted river, the ice-coated branches clattering in the night wind, the lanterns like drops of yellow paint between the trees.

Jean and Lucjan stood at the top of the hill, looking down at the skaters. The scene reminded Jean of Marina's palette, which was so married to texture – patches of woollen scarves, shawls, quilts, dresses, the fur of a wet dog; each colour – soil, night sky, northern lights, ice, figs, black tea, lichen, the bogs of Jura – each lick of paint a distillation of a thought, a feeling.

– In the dark of winter, the Robinson Kruzoes went down to the Vistula with lanterns and shovels. The frozen river was scraped clean to its grey gleam. Bone scraped of its marrow with a spoon. There were enormous skating parties. Street orchestras, children, dogs. Vendors selling coffee sprang up on the banks. Pastries in waxed paper. They even came from the nightclubs when they emptied at two or three in the morning, sobering up under the moon, in the sudden cold. That's where I met my wife, said Lucjan.

I met my husband on a river too, thought Jean. Though it was not frozen. And contained no water. And perhaps was no longer a river.

– A few nights after we met, Władka and I sat on the river-bank. There was a freezing wind. The Vistula was neither solid nor liquid; huge chunks of ice buckled and swayed, bumping open seams of black water, then sealing them shut again. Then we heard a huge cracking sound and right before our eyes the bridge near the Citadel came apart and began hurtling toward us, downstream, huge pieces of it banging against the ice, dipping into the blackness and bubbling up again. In an instant the two banks of the river were separate. Władka said later that ‘if the bridge had not fallen right before our eyes maybe we could have learned to stay together, but with a symbol like that …’ Władka had a very peculiar sense of humour.

One night, years before Władka and the bridge, I was lying in my burrow, listening to the rats. After a while I blew out the candle. But, like tonight in this snow light, it was not quite dark. I could see my hand in front of my face. Was something burning? I got up and looked out. There was a dim haze of light. There was the noise of a crowd growing louder. But there was no smoke. I climbed over the rubble toward the glow. Targowa Street had electricity! Hundreds of people were wandering about, disoriented, like survivors of a crash …

Do you remember when we met, you told me about a church that seemed to grow in size when you went inside? I can tell you a story about a church that moved, all by itself, said Lucjan. I was working with a crew building a road, the East-West Thoroughfare, and someone looked up and noticed the dome of St. Anne's was smiling. We didn't think much about that first crack in the stone, but the next day there were many cracks and they were growing wider and suddenly the whole northeast end of the church wobbled and broke off like a baby tooth. All the crews rushed to reinforce the rest of the church with steel, and we even tried Professor Cebertowicz's electro-osmosis idea, but St. Anne's and the earth continued to move, the belfry bending as much as a centimetre a day. Eventually the earth came to a halt …

Jean and Lucjan began to descend the hill.

– What happened, asked Jean suddenly, to that architect, the one who gave you bread?

When he did not answer, she looked up and felt she had never before seen such cold sorrow in his face.

– People disappeared. Sometimes they came back, but most of the time they didn't. There were reports of stojki – ‘standings’ – for months, with a lightbulb burning an inch in front of the prisoner's open eyes, who was being kept awake with injections. When someone died from torture, they said ‘he fell off the table.’ Ordinary words, banal words a child learns to spell in first grade. ‘The man fell off the table.’ Perhaps that was not his fate precisely, but … Unsuspecting people were trapped in ‘cauldrons’ – anyone who happened to visit a suspect in their apartment was arrested – that's what the Germans did and that's what the Soviets did. He survived the war, but he didn't survive the Soviets.

The Dogs joke about the Thursday-night meeting, but it is an old habit, an old intuition, not to show up where you are expected.

They heard Mr. Snow's voice through the trees.

– Let's listen to Mr. Snow sing, said Lucjan. He has a voice like a hatchet. The Dogs saw and wheeze and when they pass on you can be sure they'll rattle their bones.

If I have learned anything, it is that courage is just another kind of fear. And, Lucjan said, slapping his abdomen, if you are anti-fascist, you must have an anti-fascist belly and not an anti-fascist head. An appetite is more useful than a fever.

Lucjan slung his skates over his shoulder like a hunter carrying home a brace of birds and strode back through the ravine. In the distance, in the darkness, Jean could still hear the sound of blades on the hard ice. The Stray Dogs were almost always there before them and stayed on, almost always, after them. Looking back, Jean saw their breath in the dark. The ravine itself glistened like white breath, enclosed by the snowy embankments, the snow-laden trees, and moonlight that softly circled their faces as they skated across the ice. The air was cracking cold, the ice glinting and hard. She knew there was heat inside their clothes from their swinging legs and arms, and painful cold on their faces and in their lungs.

Jean and Lucjan walked back to Amelia Street, stopping at Quality Bakery, where the ovens baked all night. The smell of bread inhabited College Street, turning the snowfall, thought Jean, to manna.

– You cannot entirely despair, said Lucjan, with your mouth full of bread.

One could walk through the back door of the bakery, step right into the kitchen, and pay cash for loaves that had just been taken out of the oven. The bakers all knew Lucjan and the Stray Dogs. The cake man, Willy, used to play piano with them until he got his job at the bakery and couldn't play nights any more. “The bakery has taken all the walk out of my cake walk,” Willy complained.

Then Jean and Lucjan sat in the small park at the end of Amelia Street, with Lucjan's battered metal flask of tea between them and each with a paper bag in their arms. They scooped out soft-breathing handfuls from long sleeves of bread, Lucjan feeding fingerfuls to Jean. Sometimes, after a whole evening together with Lucjan and the Dogs, this was her first taste of him.

Afterwards, they sat in the tub in the dark, listening. And still Lucjan had not touched her except for the tips of his fingers to her mouth, full of bread. This was a kind of rationing, a valuing of each pleasure. Nothing, especially desire, was wasted.

Lucjan looked at Jean asleep beside him in the winter afternoon light. Her hair was tied back with a twist of cloth, her face smooth and pale.

What did she believe in? What mess of assumptions did she live by, what tangle of half-formed beliefs and untested deductions, from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning or, for that matter, even when she was asleep? What mechanics did she live by? Did she believe in Plato's souls, in Kepler's harmony, in Planck's Constant? In Marxism, in Darwinism; in the gospels, in the Ten Commandments, in Buddhist parables; in Hegel, in the superstition of black cats and Mr. Snow's stories of the Czarny Kot, in crumbs of genetic theory, in who-knows-what family tales and gossip; in the conviction that sprinkled sugar tastes better than salt on porridge? In reincarnation – a little, in atheism – a little in the Holy Trinity – a little. In Husserl, in Occam's Razor, in Greenwich Mean Time, in monogamy, in the atomic theory by which her steam kettle boils each morning for her cup of tea … She believed in humility, he knew, and in the wince of shame that guides us to the right action, though she would call this some-thing else, even perhaps love. This net of assumptions – if Lucjan moved one or two or two hundred of his own assumptions an inch here or there, was he not the same person as she, or her husband, or most members of the human species? Lucjan put his hand on Jean's waist. He watched her breath fill her lungs; as she lay on her side, he saw the curve of her hips, the crease behind her knee, the loose weight of her calf suspended. For this we erect monuments, kill ourselves, open shops, close shops, explode things, wake in the morning …

Jean parked her car at the beginning of the long driveway and walked the last way across the marsh to Marina's house. All was white and blue and black, the snow and sky and winter-wick trees of a clear cold afternoon in March. She carried her grafting satchel, the same canvas backpack she'd used since the days on Hampton Avenue. Now she recalled with longing the expedition to the hardware shop with her father when she was sixteen, to buy her first grafting knife – just the right size for her grip, with a wooden handle – and her first tin of wax, and the small primus. And when she thought ahead to Marina's peach trees, and the simple cleft graft she would make, she also thought of Abu Simbel, the clean slit of the knife into that precious flesh; cambium to cambium, scion to rootstock, and the pang – of both eagerness and regret – of being the one to induce those multiplying cells, just beneath the bark, into union. And of Albertus Magnus, whose seven-hundred-year-old question had startled Jean to attention in a drowsy, overheated, undergraduate classroom almost eight years before: Does a fruit tree have a soul? She thought it was time to read Magnus again, the heart-stopping De Vegetabilibus, a book that imagined, centuries before Darwin, plant varieties developing from their wild ancestors, for Magnus possessed the prescience of all men who dive into a subject without defence, and with their intuition sharpened by humility. If fruit trees have a soul, what does it mean, man's tampering? Now she was at Marina's white house, which was almost the exact white of the snow around it, and Jean thought that, in a storm, one might walk straight into it and perhaps even pass right through those white walls, like a ghost.

She knocked and waited. She stood on the doorstep and kept knocking, until she truly accepted the fact that Marina was not there. Reluctantly, she decided to begin work anyway, having no need of anything except Marina's companionship. Jean walked around to the back of the house to her mother's transplanted garden, enclosed by its white fence, now also lost to the snow. Startled, she then saw Marina and Avery, on lawn chairs piled with blankets, sleeping in the frail light of the low winter sun. She saw, too, Avery's old leather briefcase, stuffed with books, in his lap; he must have come, like her, straight from his car into the garden. Jean stood at the gate. The flowered pattern of Marina's smock, which she was wearing over her coat, rose and fell. Avery's hair, at his shoulders now, moved peacefully in the small breeze. How true their bodies looked together. She thought of Lucjan as a boy with his mother. She thought of the ghetto, the sleeping and the dead lying next to one another on the pavement. She remembered the afternoon she and Avery had left their car on the bank of the road and lay down together in the wet scrub of the Pennines, and fell into the sky. She thought of the eyes of thousands of deer watching young Marina and young William, on the moss of Jura, his coat beneath her head.

Sometimes there was shelter in lying out in the open, sometimes there was none. She thought of the dispossessed making their way on foot back into the ruins of Warsaw, how they must have stopped again and again to lie down beside the road. The people of Faras East climbing from the graveyard to the village one last time. Always, somewhere in the world, people are carrying everything they own and stopping by the side of the road. To sleep, to love, to die. We have always lain this way on the bare earth.

Jean ached to lie down in the snow, next to Avery's chair, with the great warm hills of Marina protecting them both. But she did not dare.

How terrible if they did not want her.

This thought did not arise from shame, but from a deep dispiritedness, the belief that grace is the aberration, something one passes through, like a dream.

After a moment more, she turned away as if she'd been told to and walked back to her car across the marsh.

That night, Lucjan stroked her shoulder until she woke.

– It's one in the morning, he whispered. Let's skate.

She saw something in his face and, without a word, leaned down for her clothes. Lucjan stopped her hand.

– Just this under your coat, he said, handing her his sweater. And your tights, nothing else. I'll keep you warm.

They drove through the white city to the edge of the ravine. Windows of light glowed through the falling snow, there was no interior that did not resemble sanctuary after a journey. By the river Lucjan spread a blanket on the snow and they changed into their skates.

Jean strode, her face pink not with cold but with heat. She was sweating under her coat, the heat building; blood flooding every muscle. Lucjan drew her toward him. He unbuttoned her coat. He drew up her sweater and pulled it over her head.

At first gasp – her skin so hot – the cold air was hardly recognizable as cold. She could not tell if his tongue was hot or cold.

– I want to tell you about a garden, the great hunting park of an Assyrian king, Jean whispered later, in the darkness of Lucjan's kitchen. Fragrant groves of cedar and box, oak and fruit trees, bowers of jasmine and illuru, iris and anemone, camomile and daisy, crocus, poppy, and lily, both wild and cultivated, on the banks of the Tigris. Blossoms swaying in a hot sunlight of scent, great hazy banks of shimmering perfume, a moving wall of scent …

The earliest gardens were walled not to keep out the animals, but to them keep in, so they could not be hunted by strangers. The Persian word for these walled sanctuaries was pairidaeza, the Hebrew, pardes, in the Greek, paradeisos. Jean felt Lucjan's weight begin to pinion her.

The origin of the word ‘paradise’ is simply ‘enclosure.’ And after, Lucjan and Jean in the bath in the darkness, until yes, it was true, one was sick with longing for the melody to return.

– Please tell me about your daughter, said Jean.

Lucjan lay on his back next to her, looking out the small window above the bed.

– First of all, her name is Lena. Second, she is almost twelve years old, almost a woman. Third, I haven't seen her since she was a little girl.

Jean knew that she must wait. A long time passed.

– Władka, Lena's mother, worked with her father on their apple boat. You could smell those fruit barges from five blocks away, the sweet cider smell on the river breeze. The barges, piled high with cherries and peaches and apples, docked at the bottom of Mariensztat Street near the Kierbedz Bridge, bringing all the fruit to town from the riverside villages.

I remember those first water-markets after the war, the first mountain of Vistula apples, hard, sweet, sour, softened by the sun, rotting, fermenting, the bees circling. Władka and her mother baked pastries crammed with fruit and sold them at a stall on the docks.

Władka was so young, even younger than I, and her strong arms when she rolled up the sleeves of her dress, smelled of apples – as white and cold, as wet and sweet – and I could smell apples between her breasts and on her breath and in her hair.

We were married in the Bristol Hotel. 1955. I was twenty-five years old. Władka's parents insisted on the Bristol, with its mirrors and chandeliers, velvet chairs and bossy waiters. When you ordered, the waiters disagreed with you and never brought what you asked for, but what they thought was best. Our wedding feast was stuffed roast duck, ice cream, fruit. I remember very clearly because I hadn't eaten such food in twenty years. I was crazy for Władka – the thought of sleeping with her night after night – but that food made me very sad. Suddenly I knew, really knew, such meals had always existed, even during the war, for some. A great big greed opened up inside me, sitting at that table. A big rage. Every succulent mouthful filled me with despair. I was eating the duck of fury. None of us had any idea if we would ever eat like this again. That food made us all very sad.

Lucjan pulled on his sweater and went downstairs. Jean heard him filling the kettle. Then he began to hunt through the papers on the large table, through notebooks and newspapers on the floor.

– There's a photo of my daughter … If I can find it in this mess. I don't like to keep it one place or even in a frame, to make it a shrine. I like to come across Lena's face when I'm in the middle of something; it's like looking up and finding her sitting in the room with me.

He gave up and returned to the edge of the bed.

– I'll find it later, he said.

And Jean felt humiliation – at her own need to be found.

– You saw it all the time, said Lucjan, people standing in the street, perfectly still, holding a suddenly useless object – his coat, her book – staring at the place where the one they loved had just disappeared. All through those years we stood on the street, arms full of useless things, while the car drove off, while the line marched away, while the train departed, while the door closed.

Jean reached over and put her hand on his. He lifted her hand and put it down gently on the bed between them.

– You wanted me to tell this, he said.

He was right to reproach her; she should not have reached out her hand. What could her touch mean against such facts; nothing. Someone else's touch perhaps, but not hers.

– There are people on this earth who can't even bear to hear the engine of a truck. And the fact that their memories are shared by thousands of others – do you imagine this feels like a brotherhood? It's just as Ranger said … Every happy person, said Lucjan, and every unhappy person knows exactly the same truth: there is only one real chance in a life, and if you fail at that moment, or if someone fails you, the life that was meant to be yours is gone. Every day for the rest of your life you will be eviscerated by that memory.

Jean lay meagrely next to him in the dark.

Soon she realized Lucjan was asleep. His stillness was large and solid, a fallen tree. But she could almost hear his brain, even in sleep, rampage.

On a clear blue morning near the end of March, Jean drove out to Marina's to examine the peach trees. Then she and Marina made lunch together. Jean was peeling carrots and Marina was folding a mixture of egg and onion into a pan, when Marina said,

– I've given Avery a little project.

Jean looked up.

– Nothing expensive, mind. Marina smiled. Something he can plan on a single piece of paper. In fact, that was a condition. If the design can't be folded out of a single piece of paper, he has to start again.

It came alert inside her, an almost forgotten feeling: anticipation.

– Just a small one-or two-room house, a hut, a cabin, he can put it anywhere, but I thought perhaps by the canal. A place to think, to drift. A little project for him to do with his bare hands and his brain, something he can make mistakes with.

And I've thought of something for you too, said Marina.

She steered Jean into the dining room. Fabric, folded in large, flat squares, was piled on the table. Marina began to open and shake them out, one by one, perhaps a dozen designs of such outrageous brightness Jean had to laugh, erratic geometrics or florals eight or ten inches across, clean and alive, poppy red, graphite, mustard, cerulean, cobalt, lime, anemone white, of stiff strong cotton that looked like it could be used for the sails of a fantastical ship.

– I discovered the Marimekko shop in Karelia's, said Marina. It's a revolution. Fabric like this was unimaginable when I was young. Women are wearing these brilliant, preposterous colours and designs and striding about the world. We are going to make you some summer clothes, big, happy, square frocks, loose and cool. With your lovely arms and legs sticking out of them, you are going to look magnificent.

– And would you wear one too? asked Jean. A big, square, loose Marimekko frock?

They looked at each other, and themselves; Jean's shabby turnout – in planting clothes, baggy black leggings, an old shirt of Avery's that hung to her knees and an old sweater of an unidentifiable shade, mud-coloured, also Avery's, with elbows worn through, falling loose from Jean's slight shoulders. Marina's plastic painting apron, her woollen trousers that looked as though they'd been made before the war, which they had been, nicely tailored (for they had been William's) but sagging and paint-stained.

– Marina, said Jean, you're quite insane.

Marina took Jean's hand, almost desperate to see happiness again in Jean's eyes.

– Not quite insane.

A few days later, Jean came again to the marsh and left her car, as she usually did, just off the main road, so she could approach the white house on foot; to take in the sight of it, among the trees, now winter trees of black paint, vertical strokes, thick and thin, at the edge of the fields. She knocked at the back door, then realizing it was unlocked, went in. On the kitchen table was a bowl of soup. Large wads of bread were crammed into the bowl, bloated with broth. At that moment she knew Avery had been there, perhaps was there still; perhaps he had parked his car in the field on the other side of the house. She had never known him once to leave the table without clearing up after himself, out of duty or habit, and certainly not in his mother's house. Jean stood in the doorway and looked at the bowl of soup thick with bread. A child's bowl.

It was her own vulnerability she felt, looking, and not his.

She went back outside.

From the window of her studio, Marina saw Jean and Avery talking together, and past Jean's shoulder, Avery's glove in midair, pointing. And she knew that Avery was beginning to think about that single piece of paper.

Jean sat on the edge of the bed while Lucjan drew.

– I worked as a slave, said Lucjan, building that great Soviet project, the Palace of Culture. I did every sort of job the lowest labourer could pass on to me. Slowly the monstrosity rose, stone by stone; no one could believe the gargantuan proportions, which symbolized, right from the start, the torments inflicted by Stalin. The higher it rose, the more elaborate its decorations and pinnacles, its spiky stalagmites, the greater the depths of submission it represented. I detested this work, which also fascinated me. And it's there that I met Ostap.

I hated everything that surrounded us, but I did not feel contempt for him. There was something about him, in the way he moved his body, the way he met a load head-on as if he respected it, the way he shrugged off another man's comments invisibly, yet not invisibly, with his ears, with his hair. I have never met another man who was so sure of his independence, his inner disdain. I can't describe it adequately – even after all these years I find it difficult to describe this independence he possessed.

Ostap liked to quote Andrei Platonov, although such quoting was not too good for one's health. He would stretch his legs out as if he had all the time in the world and didn't have to leap to his feet again any second, and he would recite: ‘For the mind, everything is in the future; for the heart, everything is in the past.’ ‘Life is short, there is not enough time to forget everything.’

Often, while eating together, this Russian Ostap would take from his shirt pocket a pencil, sharpened to a stub the size of his thumb – ‘short pencils have long memories!’ – and scrawl pictures to teach me the names of objects in Russian. At first they were practical words – truck, stone, hammer – and then he taught me words that were useful in another way – anger, idiot, friend. Instead of throwing away these bits of paper, he mortared them between the stones. There are many words hidden between the stones of the Palace of Culture, enough to tell some kind of story. In this way I also learned fragments of his childhood in St. Petersburg – a cat, a bridge, a flat on Furstadtskaya Street.

In return I used to tell Ostap stories of places in Warsaw I didn't know as a child, stories that I'd heard later among the students, and it was unaccountable but even as I told them, those anecdotes seemed to become part of my own memory – perhaps that is the precise reason I told them – until it was impossible to tell them apart, the memories that belonged to me and the memories that didn't, as if by virtue of collective loss they became collective memory. To keep everything, even what was not mine to keep.

Never has there been a man so loyal to his childhood as Ostap. After everything was taken, even the little tea set he and his sister had played with, the one with Lenin's portrait painted on all the tiny cups and saucers, Ostap made a decision not to forget anything He especially remembered books he'd read as a child, a story about a hedgehog and a tortoise – Slowcoach and Quickfoot – which he compared with the Soviet ‘classics,’ terrifying trains and trucks with their human scowls, robots with squared-off mouths and knob noses, faces made of gears and cogs, not quite human and not quite machine. They reminded me of the trucks grinding down the cleared-out spaces on Freta Street. He showed me one of Tsekhanovsky's flip books, little movies with their shrinking children and machines growing huge or locomotives bearing down on small animals. When he was young he'd read Chukovsky's translations of O. Henry and R. L. Stevenson; Evgenia Evenbach's ‘How Kolka Panki Flew to Brazil and Petka Ershov Didn't Believe Him’ and ‘100,000 Whys.’ He talked about his mother, who was very small, who used to rest her head against his shoulder, even when he was only twelve years old, and who now lay buried in the cemetery on St. Petersburg's Golodni Island.

He and your Marina would have a thing or two to say to each other. He knew all about children's books, he never grew out of them, or perhaps better to say he grew into them, into understanding their secrets. He knew which writers were stopiatnitsa, a member of the 105 club, one who's forbidden to live closer than 105 kilometres from any city … and who was in prison for writing a certain story about a rabbit and a goat. That was during the reign of ‘Queen Krupskaya,’ whose personal campaign was the denouncing of fairy tales as ‘unscientific’ and therefore dangerous to the state. ‘Do rabbits talk? Do goats wear clothes? The anthropomorphism of animals is not realistic, therefore it is a lie. You are lying to our children.’ Perhaps the writer did lie, Ostap agreed. Because he wrote a story in which a stone is able to turn into a man …

Those Russians sent to Warsaw to build the Palace of Culture slept in a big camp by the river. In the months I worked there, fetching and carrying, comrades ‘fell’ regularly to their deaths and were simply left to be buried by the foundations. Such a fall was described as someone having had ‘too much to drink.’

Lucjan stopped talking. Wait a moment, he said as he slid from the bed. Jean heard him going down the stairs and heard the old metal handle of the fridge close tight. She heard banging.

– Don't worry, I'm just crushing ice with a hammer!

He came upstairs carrying a bowl of snow drizzled with vodka. The cold went straight to Jean's brain.

– Is any single part of us inviolable? No. Everything can be carried off, picked away; carrion. Yet, there is something in a man. Not even strong enough to be called intuition, maybe just the smell of your own body. And that is what you base your life on …

Lucjan began to cover Jean's back with the blanket but then, at second thought, instead pulled away the sheet and looked at her.

He twisted the sheet between her buttocks. He saw that she would agree to anything. He let go of the sheet.

– Don't give in to me, he said.

There was another Russian I knew when I worked on the Palace of Culture. At lunch he would smoke with his mouth full of food – I've never seen anyone else do that. He used to lecture the young ones. All women are the same, take what you can before they rob you …

And muzak, do you want to know the origin of muzak, why we can't go out to buy a package of frozen peas without hearing a woman moaning in the supermarket over her lost love, while all we want to do is buy the peas and get out of the shop as fast as we can – why we can't buy our carton of milk or a pair of socks or sit quietly in a café? The origin of muzak is the loudspeakers in the camps, at Buchenwald, all the warbling lovesongs that were shoved in their ears in the lineup, in the infirmary, while the dead drifted in and out …

There is one moment in every lifetime when we are asked for courage we feel in every cell to be beyond us. It is what you do at that moment that determines all that follows. We like to think we are given more than one chance, but it's not true. And our failure is so permanent that we try to convince ourselves it was the right thing, and we rationalize again and again. In our very bones we know this truth; it is so tyrannical, so exacting, we want to deny it in every way. This failure is at the heart of everything we do, every subtle decision we make. And that is why, at the very heart of us, there is nothing we crave more than forgiveness. It is a bottomless desire, this desire for forgiveness.

And I'll tell you something else, said Lucjan, covering Jean with the blankets, this truth attends every death.

Walking for the first time into the replica of the Old Town, said Lucjan, the rebuilt market square – it was humiliating. Your delirium made you ashamed – you knew it was a trick, a brainwashing, and yet you wanted it so badly. Memory was salivating through your brain. The hunger it tried to satisfy. It was dusk and the streetlamps miraculously came on and everything was just the same – the same signs for the shops, the same stonework and archways … I had to stop several times, the fit of strangeness was so intense. I squatted with my back against a wall. It was a brutality, a mockery – at first completely sickening, as if time could be turned back, as if even the truth of our misery could be taken away from us. And yet, the more you walked, the more your feelings changed, the nausea gradually diminished and you began to remember more and more. Childhood memories, memories of youth and love – I watched the faces of people around me, half mad with the confusion of feelings. There was defiance too, of course, a huge song of pride bursting out of everyone, humiliation and pride at the same time. People danced in the street. They drank. At three in the morning the streets were still full of people, and I remember thinking that if we didn't all clear out, the ghosts wouldn't come back, and who was this all for if not for the ghosts?

Jean moved closer beside him.

– Janina, keep your compassion to yourself. Do you want to hear this or not?

He stuffed pillows between them.

– After that I thought maybe it would have been better if we'd just loaded all that rubble onto trucks and dumped it somewhere far away where it couldn't be used for anything again.

– You could have built nothing, said Jean. But … building nothing is hard work too. Perhaps, sometimes, it's harder to build nothing.

– Pah, said Lucjan. You don't understand anything.

He pushed away the pillows.

– You might as well touch me, since you don't hear a thing I say.

– I do understand, said Jean.

– All right, I'm sorry. But do you think a few words will do the trick? Do you think perhaps I haven't thought enough about it?

He threw his drawing book on the floor.

– For six years the Poles ate their fruit and bread. The juice ran down their chins while a hundred metres away people lay dead from hunger – they may as well have spread their starched tablecloths right over the corpses in the streets and had their picnic there.

Jean leaned over and gathered her clothes from the floor.

– I don't know anything, said Jean. You're right, I don't know anything about it.

– I don't want your pity. Not your psychoanalysis. Not even empathy. I want simple, common, fellow feeling. Something real.

She began to dress.

– There's hardly anything to you. From behind you're like a little girl. Just starting out.

He got up and stood beside her.

– Except for here, he said, pushing his hands between her legs. And here, touching her breast. And here, covering her eyes.

He wrapped his thick belt around her waist, twice, and pulled tight and buckled it. He looked at the flesh, the slightest flesh that stood out from the leather and kissed her there and began to draw.

He twisted the belt around her wrists and stretched her arms over her head and pulled her body across the bed.

– Does it hurt?

– No, I could slip out if I wanted to.

– Good.

He drew her with her hands tied behind her back, and with her arms tied and hanging in front of her. The drawings were very close, always the line of raised flesh pinched by the leather.

In one of Marina's paintings, a child's face is severed by the edge of the canvas; only now did Jean understand the meaning of it. The edge, a tourniquet.

– You wouldn't harness an animal so tightly, said Lucjan, because you want work from that animal. Only would you tie a man so tightly, a man whose life is not even worth being worked to death.

She lifted her head to Lucjan. He looked at her as if he were pleading, but it was the contortion of holding back tears.

Afterwards, he showed her the drawings. It was her flesh.

Talk is only a reprieve, Lucjan had said this more than once. No matter how loud we shout, no matter how personal our revelations, history does not hear us.

In Jean, the remnants of two rivers – rendings. The uprooted, the displaced. She remembered what Avery had written in his shadow-book from the desert. Soon, more than sixty million people will have been dispossessed by the subjugation of water, a number almost comparable to migrations caused by war and occupation. While the altered weight of the watersheds changes the very speed of our rotating earth and the angle of its axis.

Unprecedented in history, masses of humanity do not live, nor will they be buried, in the land where they were born. The great migration of the dead. War did this first, thought Jean, and then water.

The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. That is the real homesickness, and that is the proprietorship of the dead. No place proclaims this with more certainty than a grave. In this century of refugees, it is our displacement that binds us.

The sun was already low, a pale crimson seeping from beneath the clouds. Jean's hands were cold, but she did not like to work with gloves. She made the first cut into the bark of one of Marina's peach trees and carefully began the graft. She saw, at the far end of the orchard, the pile of lumber Avery had had delivered, awaiting the realization of his plans: a small house, mostly windows, of proportions that Jean knew would be hidden by the fruit trees, and that would stand within the sound of the canal.

For five thousand years, humans have been grafting one variety of plant to another – the division, the pressing together, the conductive cells that seal the wound. And for more than five hundred thousand years – until evolution, chance, or aggression left Homo sapiens alone on earth – at least two species of hominid had co-existed in North Africa, and in the Middle East, abiding in the same desert.

There is a soul in the fruit tree, thought Jean, and it is born of two.

– Ewa and Paweł, Witold, Piotr – we were part of a group, said Lucjan. We managed to do some useful things. We raised cash for people who had to leave Poland in a hurry, we circulated information. Ewa and Paweł performed their plays at home and in other people's flats. That's when I started the cave paintings – it was one of my jokes – life underground – I painted them as a signal to the others, a wave, just a stupid bit of mischief.

Then I made the Precipice Men – sculptures that I mounted on the roofs of buildings. Ewa and Paweł helped me. We worked at night. First we put one figure on the roof of the building where I lived, and then three more on theirs. I made them from clay, just mud really, reinforced inside with scrap metal. They wouldn't last and that was part of it; and I liked that it was scrap that held them together. I could make them fast, they didn't cost much, and, because of the clay, they were truly lifelike. They peered over the edge at impossible angles. I got the idea from a book of Ewa's, a picture of Palladio's Villa Rotonda. The figures were there for weeks before anyone noticed; nobody looks up. But when people started to spot them I'd stand on the street watching. I liked that moment of surprise. It was a game, a childish game. I would have liked to put some of them on the Palace of Culture but Władka talked me out of it. She said the most disparaging thing anyone has ever said about the silly things I make: the idea isn't worth prison.

Lucjan sat up in bed. He paused.

– Then one evening, an old man waited on the roof of Ewa and Paweł's building in the Muranów. He stepped off the edge. A young man, a student, happened to be looking up and saw one of the figures come to life. The suicide left his suit jacket neatly folded, with a letter in the pocket asking only that the jacket be given to charity.

Jean sat up beside him.

– I can hardly believe what you've just said.

Lucjan covered his face with his hands.

– As soon as I heard someone had jumped, I thought of my stepfather. I thought it was just the thing he would do to himself and to me. But of course, it wasn't my stepfather. Paweł and Ewa knew the man very slightly because he lived in their building. The man's wife had been sick for a long time, and she'd died in their flat. They'd never been apart – not once in fifty years, not even during the war. Paweł believed that I had given him a way to die, in the place where his wife had died.

Death makes a place sacred. You can never remove that sacredness. That apartment tower was built over the ghetto, where some of the worst fighting had been. All the dead trapped in the rubble under those apartments, perhaps my own mother somewhere, all that happened after. We were already in a graveyard.

Jean wrapped her arms around him. Lucjan took her arms away.

– Not long after that, Władka and I had a bad fight, the worst. I'd had a little conversation with Lena, I felt she was old enough to learn one or two things about what we were doing, the politics of non-violent action. She'd wanted to know why I was always doing such crazy things, leaving matryoshka dolls on top of things too high to reach, hanging from streetlamps, second-storey windows, etcetera, and so I explained about ‘friends in high places.’ And she wanted to know why the older students wore radio parts on their lapels like jewellery – and so I explained about ‘resistors,’ and that the first act of subversion is a joke, because humour is always a big signal to the authorities, who never understand this: that the people are dangerously serious. And that the second most important subversive act is to demonstrate affection, because it is something no one can regulate or make illegal.

A few days after that conversation with Lena, Władka said she'd had enough. I moved to Ewa and Paweł's. Soon she was making it very hard for me to see Lena; she would arrange a meeting and then, when I came, they weren't home. She sent Lena to her parents, to her friends. For several months I was crazy, I followed Władka around in the street. The swish of Władka's sleeve against the body of her plastic raincoat – day after day I listened to this irritating sound; it grew in my head to such volume that it outmeasured the calling of the crows, the grinding of the endless trucks dumping their rubble, the planes overhead. Every other sound fell dumb to the overpowering swishing of her plastic sleeve. I watched men and women at the building sites as if their actions and gestures were taking place behind glass – all I heard was that enraging, incessant brush of her raincoat as she walked ahead of me. There is one thing I can say for Władka: she bore this madness too. Following her around like that, I knew I would never want another child. I will never forget that sound and that feeling of being imprisoned out in the open air. We can rebuild cities, but the ruins between husband and wife …

Even before this, with Władka it always came apart the same way. I'd ask a question, a simple question – ‘what would you do in the same circumstance?’ – but really I was probing like a monkey with a stick down a hole, looking for ants. They dribbled off the stick, dripping globs of moral ambiguity – that moment of hesitation, of her not taking the question seriously, or of plain, shocking, moral uncertainty. And each time it sickened me to discover the spot, soft like a bruise, the moral line she was always willing to cross, even though I understood it was out of a very sensible fear. It sickened me with triumph. There it was, proof it was foolish, crazy, to trust her, and how close I'd come to forgetting. That twinge of satisfaction – it was almost a feeling of safety, that inner smirk – while all the time she would go on stroking my hair or reading to me and I would be disgusted by her touch and it was over, right at that moment, for the hundredth time, over.

After a year of this and when they made it easy for the last Jews to leave, I went. Paweł and Ewa were always in trouble, Ewa's cousin Witold, and Piotr – we all left. Later I learned that Władka had been working on making ‘improvements’ for herself and Lena, with a certain Soviet bureaucrat, and that these trysts had been going on for quite a while, even before my little talk with Lena. She might have turned in any of us – me, Paweł, and the others – but she didn't. She wanted me to be grateful – she cost me my daughter but at least didn't cost me the lives of my friends. That's just the sort of bargain Władka liked. Enemies know each other best, she liked to say whenever we argued, because pity never clouds their judgment. It was her way of telling me I was an inconvenience and nothing more, ‘not even worth prison.’

Ewa had a brother, her twin. They deliberately stressed the resemblance, Ewa used to dress like him. It sometimes made me sad, like in those ballads where the girl cuts her hair short and dresses like a boy in order to go off to sea to be with her brother or her lover; there was a desperation in it, in the disguise. And when the police picked him up and he wasn't heard from again, Ewa never knew, she'll never know, if they'd really been looking for her. The truth is, either of them would have sufficed. But Ewa had always taken more risks and she feels, even now, it should have been her.

Once, I spent a whole month's money to phone Lena in Warsaw. While we were talking, Władka came home and told her to hang up. I could hear Władka yelling. Lena said she'd quieten her down. ‘Just a minute,’ said Lena. ‘I'll be right back.’ I called to her to come back to the phone. Then I waited. For twenty minutes all I heard was the dog howling and his chain sliding across the floor. A whole month's money – just to listen to a dog barking across the ocean. That was years ago, that conversation with Mr. Bow-wow. It was the last time I phoned her.

– You've never spoken to your daughter again?

– No.

Jean reached out, but Lucjan took her hand and placed it in her lap.

She turned away. The snow fell, soundless and slow, in the window high above the bed.

Everything we are can be contained in a voice, passing forever into silence. And if there is no one to listen, the parts of us that are only born of such listening never enter this world, not even in a dream. Moonlight cast its white breath on the Nile. Outside the snow continued to fall.

As Jean spoke, Lucjan could see the gauze of starlight on the river the night the boy drowned in her dream, the moment Jean believed her daughter floated from her, without a trace but for this dream of drowning. In her voice, Lucjan saw the hillside where Jean first told her husband he would be a father, and the bare hospital room in Cairo. Her fear of not carrying, her fear of carrying, another child. Her body abandoning Avery's touch.

– Janina, said Lucjan, fearlessness is a kind of despair, do not wish it, it is the opposite of courage …

For a long time they lay together quietly. Every so often the glass bowl on top of the fridge began to vibrate and then stopped. It was warm under the blankets, Lucjan along the length of her.

The absence that had been so deep, since childhood – at last Jean felt it for what it was, for what it had always been – a presence.

Death is the last reach of love, and all this time she had not recognized what had been her mother's task in her, nor her child's; for love always has a task.

From the peace of sleep, Jean opened her eyes. Beside the bed, her clothes, Lucjan's thick cabled grey sweater, the teapot, a drawing of her. She could see, barely in the dimness of dawn, the curve of her waist, the sleeping curve of her across the heavy paper. She remembered what Lucjan had said, one of their first nights together: There is no actual edge to flesh. The line is a way of holding something in our sight. But in truth we draw what isn't there.

She turned to find Lucjan, his eyes open, beside her. He had been waiting for her to wake. He drew his hand through her hair, drew her hair tight against her scalp, a gesture an observer might have mistaken for pure desire. Then, lowering his head to her belly, he slipped his arms beneath her, held her so tightly her breath went shallow. He did not let go, but held her this way, as if he would break her in half, the grip of a most painful rescue.

– Please, Janina, he said, whispering against her. Please get dressed and go home.

His words turned her cold. But he did not let go.

He did not let go, and gradually she felt her longing was not separate from his. The slow, impossible, surrender to what was true. He did not let go, and in this union, his confession of aloneness was as close to love as all that had yet passed between them; as close as love is to the fear of love.

With utmost gentleness, slowly Lucjan enclosed Jean in her underclothes, her thick tights, her sweater-dress, her coat and boots. With each item of clothing, a deepening loss soaked into her.

They stood by the front door, the house in darkness, except for the small light above the stove. Every detail now achingly familiar, a world that was also hers.

He took her arm and quietly they walked north, past the landmarks they had claimed together, through the city, toward Clarendon Avenue. The snow gave light to the ground. When they reached Jean's apartment building, Lucjan said, I only meant to walk you home, but now that we're here, Janina, I would like to stay.

They rode the small lift together and, for the first time, Lucjan lay with Jean in her own bed.

Just before midnight, the following night Jean stood at the front door of her flat on Clarendon. She had been almost immobile with thought, most of the day.

The past does not change, nor our need for it. What must change is the way of telling.

She did not want to disturb Lucjan, but perhaps he was awake too. She would walk there and see. This walking, she realized, was one of his gifts; this city inside the city, any hour of day or night, this walking. The snow from the previous night had melted away and the streets shone wet in the darkness.

There were no lights on in Lucjan's house except for the light in the upper window, his bedroom.

On its own it meant nothing, but Jean, standing at the gate of his house, recognized instantly the single fact that made the truth visible. She understood everything – a recombination of all she'd known – the way history is suddenly illuminated by a single “h.”

She saw – leaning against Lucjan's fence, with its plastic flowers wound around the handlebars – Ewa's bicycle. Jean saw what bound Lucjan to her, and what bound him – with the friendship and loyalty of decades – to those closest to him.

The word love, he had said, is it not always breaking down into other things? Into bitterness, yearning, jealousy – all the parts of the whole. Maybe there's a better word, something too simple to become anything else.

But what word could be so incorruptible? she had asked. What word so infallible?

And Lucjan, to whom words were a moral question, had said: tenderness.

The next morning Jean phoned Lucjan and told him she'd seen Ewa's bicycle at his gate. She heard the anguish in his silence. Then he said:

– Please, Janina, I want you to understand.

And, almost as if his words were from her own mouth, as if all along she had known he would come to speak them, he said:

– Perhaps Ewa can help us.

She walked to Ewa and Paweł's. It was two in the afternoon. The front door was open. Jean looked through the screen door, through the house to the back porch, where she saw Ewa bending over one of her projects. Jean called to her and Ewa looked up.

– Jean, come in … Come out …

Jean walked through the narrow house, past the flowered bicycle in the hallway and a pile of scarves and mittens on the floor. Now the children's wall was a green field with horses. She stepped over a stack of newspapers by the back door.

Ewa was making papier-mâché boulders with newspaper and chicken wire. She wiped her hands on her smock and pulled a chair close beside her. Ewa gestured to the boulder-strewn porch.

– The coast of Denmark, she explained. You're welcome to roll up your sleeves. Just dip the strips of paper into the glue and cover the form. She pointed to a pile of wire shapes. Then she looked into Jean's face.

– Or maybe, she said quietly, it's time for a cup of tea.

Ewa put the kettle on the stove and they sat at the kitchen table.

– You love him, said Ewa.

– Yes, said Jean. Not as my husband, but – for who he is.

Ewa nodded.

– I knew Lucjan before I met Paweł. When I met Paweł, well, it was hard. But even Lucjan saw that Paweł was the man for me.

She looked at Jean.

– How can I explain it to you? she said quietly. We're – uwikłani – entangled; – Paweł, Lucjan, and me. So many times we've saved each other over the years; perhaps it's as simple as that. When Lucjan met you, Paweł and I thought, If it could be anyone, it would be you. Lucjan's brought home women over the years, but none like you. He talks to you. It's your compassion, it's everywhere in you – in your beautiful face, in the way you carry yourself. It's your sadness. And perhaps the fact that you love your husband has a little to do with it.

Sometimes Paweł goes to sit with him, but it's me he needs. It's my hands he needs. I stay with him until he falls asleep … Do I have to have a name for it? It's not a love affair, not a romance we're having, not something psychological, not an arrangement – it's more like … a disaster at sea.

– You're a family, said Jean.

The two women sat with their hands around the fragile, old-fashioned teacups.

– I love Paweł, said Ewa. What would I be without him? And Lucjan belongs with us. How can I explain what bread means to us, what making things means? Those years can't be measured like other years.

Ewa paused.

– We've lived many lifetimes together.

Jean saw past Ewa's costumes, the hairstyles, the feathers and fake fur, to the most adult face.

– Of all of us, Lucjan feels everything the worst. Sometimes he can't bear his loneliness; soul loneliness. I think you understand, said Ewa. She spoke with such contrition, Jean could hardly hear her: We teach each other how to live.