“You know, darling,” said one to his friend, in a stage whisper, with a fur collar around the lapel of his jacket, sounding drunk, “you must read that unpublished Baldwin I told you about. It moved me to tears. If that won’t make you wake up, nothing will.”

The other one—very thin—nodded. “You’ll pass it to me, will you, darling?”

“Yes, but be careful with it, you know it’s not even my copy, it’s hers”—and he pointed at a man in a white silk shirt across the bar, deep in conversation with what looked like one of the actors from the play we had seen, a pretty boy with wavy blond hair and a small, upturned nose.

After this, Karolina came back from the ladies’ and we left. I was determined to take nothing from that place, not one memory, not one conclusion for myself. But like stones thrown into the sky with all one’s might, pieces of that night—the boys and the men who wanted them, the flirtation, the codes of seduction I could only guess at—returned to me with even greater intensity than I had lived them. The law of gravity applies to memories too. And one day, as I sat in the library trying to work, to clear my mind, I remembered the book. I found his name in a catalogue of the foreign literature department. Baldwin. James. There was a list of his works, and only one of them had no official translation: Giovanni’s Room. This had to be it, I thought. I shut the catalogue, tried to forget about it. But the title wouldn’t leave me in peace, tantalizing like a loose tooth. I set out for it. And after weeks of searching, weeks of questions to suspicious-looking shop attendants who’d tell me there was no such book, that it had never been translated, I got lucky. It was just a few days before camp, in a tiny antykwariat bookshop that specialized in art and history, run by a man who could have been a friend of those men in the bar. He shot me a meaningful, almost amused look, then walked off to a back room and returned with a rustling brown-paper package.

When it was time to pack for the camp, I tore off the cover and glued the pages neatly into another book, burying it deep down at the bottom of my bag.