There was a row of restaurants in the Jewish quarter, hung with traditional caricatured portraits of hook-nosed misers clutching coins, believed to attract money to a household. The restaurants claimed to be kosher but were run by gentiles. The Jewish Culture Festival, according to my advisor, though bravely founded during Communism, was presided over by a Polish gentile who spoke with a false Yiddish accent. “Don’t you find that stuff a bit, like, disturbing?” I asked. “Like, fetishizing?”

“What do you mean?” He stopped hard in the grass, the lovely mechanism of his body stilling all at once. “It’s very nice to like Jews, and to support Jews, and to bring across the Jewish culture. Don’t you appreciate it?”

“Well, I’m not really Jewish.” I shifted my shoulders as though redistributing the burden of the sunshine.

He huffed a breath. “So silly! If people care about your culture, that’s a perk! Here I am, every day, giving tours of this park. You’d never have known it was anything if it weren’t for a man like me.”

The light fell across his collarbone, where his puffy coat had slipped open. The skin was so vulnerable there, pulsing.

We settled cross-legged at the base of the monument, which obstructed it for visitors. Except there were no visitors. The monument faced a street dominated by a blocky, mysterious complex with the ominous name of Castorama. A few sad candles lay scattered at the monument’s foot. Pinching blades of grass from the earth, Jakub explained that houses and businesses had been built on top of the concentration camp, whose territory stretched beyond the limits of the park.

“That’s amazing you’re Jewish.” His curls fell loose across his forehead. I had to look away, he was too eager and sweet.

“Marek said I shouldn’t meet you,” I said.

Jakub’s face hardened. Maybe now he’d force a kiss. But, quickly enough, he relaxed back into puppyish cheer. “I know it.”

“He said you two had a romance.”

Jakub laughed. “Oh, Marek. Unrepentant liar.”

“Really? He lied?”

“Of course. Look at his head!”

We giggled together, a rushing release. Poor sturdy, egg-headed Marek. Surely not Jakub’s type at all.

“We did fuck of course,” said Jakub.

I stopped laughing. Jakub had bought into all that cheap swagger, so easy and unearned?

“I thought we might go somewhere.” He waved his hand. “But later, he wasn’t interested.” His voice thickened. “Alas. All is well.”

Maybe Jakub had been younger when the two of them fucked, his youth rendering him as big-eyed and helpless as me: new and anxious in a foreign country. Marek got off on touring a wide-eyed kid around. Now that Jakub was muscular under his baby fat, Marek had lost his ability to wow. “His loss,” I said.