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By Root 614 0

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