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By Root 625 0

dictionary. It was the size of a small brick, and everyone wanted to borrow it. He could have traded it for an exorbitant price – an overcoat, an apple. But instead he came to where I was sleeping on the floor and slid it under me. I woke to feel it digging into my back. In it a note, in English: ‘Do not stop running until you learn every word.’ When I went to thank him, he pushed me off, gently, like an older brother. He said, ‘I want Polish now, only Poland,’ and nodded in the direction of a girl. That glance was my first real stammer of sex, I felt it in him, the angry longing, the insatiable humility of it – insatiable: page 467. I memorized the page numbers of many words – a double assurance they would not be lost. Doubly remembered. A few days later, Piotr and his girl were killed in a raid on the castle, carrying a piece of stone between them. Another boy had been there too and had run off; when he returned to the spot, they were still there. He ran back to the hiding place and told the others, twisting his hands with guilt, ‘dalej tam leżały, dalej tam leżały.’ At night the dead were strewn, scattered, ‘still there, still there,’ sometimes in the darkness without a drop of blood visible, as if the moon itself had struck them down. Each day after that I read one-half of a page of that thick English book – a little memorial I was making. Every word I speak, every English word chipped off that brick of a dictionary – and so I try to take care – remembers him. It's in the drawer beside you, said Lucjan, leaning over to the bedside table and placing the dictionary in Jean's lap. At first Jean, deeply lost in the story, could hardly believe it was true – conjured like a magician's trick – but she held the solid book, with its broken spine and its ordinary, grimy, colourless cover, and felt the small shock of it – as if Lucjan had produced a branch of the burning bush or a stone from Nineveh.

– However, Janina, my point is this. Who is to say that the rebuilt city was worth less or more than the original? Is desire the only determination of value? I don't know. Certainly bread is less important to the man who has just eaten. It is like the disagreeable irony of those German firebombs that succeeded in exposing the walls of the medieval town along Podwale and Brzozowa streets, an archaeological site no one had known about until those bombs exploded.

When the rebuilding of the Old Town was complete, people trembled at the sight. At first we stared into Krakowskie Przedmieście from the periphery, afraid of walking into the mirage and being swallowed up. But after a few had ventured forward and had not vanished, the spectators, all of us, poured into the Old Town. There was numb silence at first, and then a humming and a roar of euphoria. A nervous howling of crying and laughter.

No one could climb the steep steps of the reconstructed Kamienne Schodki Street or walk through the arches on Swietojanska Street or look up at the immaculately copied ironwork clock and the iron dragon and the stone ships engraved on the reconstructed walls and not feel they'd gone mad.

The old streets – every doorway and streetlamp and stoop – was familiar, yet not quite; somehow almost more real than we remembered. Then there were things we didn't remember at all, and we felt some piece of our brains had been knocked out. Everyone wandered the streets the same way, vaguely afraid, as if the dead father or mother, the dead wife or sister might suddenly jump out from behind a doorway. And at the heart of it all, a civic pride, a jubilation, and an unspoken humiliation, our need so open, and so inconsolable.

In Warsaw during the 1950s, people were desperate with hope. They would make the most extravagant claims: ‘For decades, physicists have been trying to figure out – if time can flow both into the future and into the past – why can't a broken eggshell become whole again, why can't shattered glass mend itself? And yet in Warsaw we are achieving exactly this! We haven't yet figured out how to raise the dead or regain lost love, but we're hard