The whole operation seemed foreign to me, and as we started working, my body felt like a metal construction, heavy and unyielding. I had to kneel in the brown earth to get a grip on the beets, and my mind was agitated. You were in the first row, as if leading us, moving nimbly with your legs bent and your back straight. The workings of your leg muscles showed just underneath the skin, tendons contracting like strings being drawn, veins running down your lower arms and confounding themselves like rivers on a map. Your hands were strong and bulky, with square nails and fingers thick like screwdriver handles. Those aren’t city hands, I remember thinking.

After a while, my body started to ache, but seeing you like that made me push ahead too. The sun grew stronger, throwing its warmth on to our arms and legs and the backs of our heads. As we moved along, sweat started to form—discrete drops at first, here and there, on the forehead and on the tips of our spines, and then, as we continued, little streams trickled, fueled by our movement. I pushed on, feeling the pain in my body, but beyond that, sensing that it had started to give way. I was surprised by the energy that lay beyond the discomfort. The rhythm made me move on, the touch of the earth and the feel of the plants becoming hypnotic. The smell was humid and pungent and fresh. It made me think of Aunt Marysia’s garden outside Wrocław, with its berry bushes and fruit trees and places where one could hide, and beyond its fence nothing but fields. I hadn’t thought of that in ages. Mother would take me there when I was a child, and I’d play for hours by myself, dig and find worms and beetles and hold the soil, have it crumble in between my fingers, try to eat it.

I worked with the earth, forgot myself in it. Farther out, there were other groups, all bent over the beets, breathing with effort, the sky open and wide. We broke for lunch, and afterward we napped in our huts for an hour before going back to work, the sun milder then, our bodies cooler. When we had worked for longer than enough, the comrade leader’s whistle sounded across the field to mark the end of the day. I hurt in places I had never been aware of before and went to bed exhausted, sleeping more deeply than I had since childhood.

I got used to the sight of you, but we never spoke. In the breaks, the group would rest in the shade of a hut by the edge of the field, and you and some other boys smoked, and I chatted with the girls. But not with you. I avoided you, so that you couldn’t avoid me. I didn’t want to be in the field of your power. I envied your lightness and the beauty you carried with such ease.