When Belka had finished, we grabbed our bags from the bus and were assigned to the different wooden huts scattered around the campgrounds. I was in one with three other guys, Wojtek, Darek, and Filip. They were nice boys, strangely immature and innocent. We shared two bunk beds, a table, and two chairs. We went to have dinner in the canteen, served by an army of women in aprons and deflated paper bonnets, standing behind the counter as if someone had left them there many years earlier. A large lady with an immobile face served the tomato soup with rice, while an ageless-looking girl with reddish skin piled on beetroot mash and potatoes. I sat with Karolina and the boys from my hut. They spoke easily, joking and jesting. But I wasn’t really there. I looked around the canteen, across the long tables and through the tangled voices and ringing cutlery, until I spotted you: sitting at a table at the other end of the room, deep in conversation with a girl, your head turned toward her. In the stark white light of the canteen your black hair glistened, and there was something strangely focused about you, something light yet unyielding in your eyes that stirred both envy and desire in me. It was as if your presence already overpowered me, like a prophecy I was unable to read.

That night I lay awake in bed, the other guys fast asleep around me, the moon pouring in through the half-open curtain. Sharp memories knocked on the door of my consciousness, and what came to me was an old nightmare, one I had often dreamt as a child, one that had descended upon me with cruel frequency before and after Beniek’s departure.