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By Root 582 0

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