The church bell started to ring, and a flock of swallows chased invisible insects in the fading light. I began to think of what I would do with myself after the summer. Years earlier, the children I’d played with outside our flat had gone to work in factories, in shops, on buses, or in the mines, while I’d gone to the capital to study. Work had seemed like the beginning of the end, university a prolonging of youth. I’d enjoyed it, despite its limitations—we couldn’t read what we wanted and were meant to see the decadence of capitalism in all Western texts, even if most professors barely pretended to care about the Party. But now that my studies were over, I had no idea what would come next. One of my literature professors had taken a liking to me and mentioned something about a possible doctorate. But I suspected he’d try to make me study something foolish, something politically useful, a topic I’d be stuck with for years. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand teaching. Not with a lifetime of lousy pay, not with the simple truths everyone knew, our longing for Western comforts, our hatred for the Soviets, unmentionable or punished with dismissal.

In those days I had no idea where I was going, and the work at the camp seemed to offer little release. The sun was merciless, and my body revolted against the effort, refusing to sweat. As I broke up the earth and pulled on the beets, my thoughts would snap back to you, to the bar where Karolina had taken me, to the void stretching out before me. I fought against them (the thoughts and the beets), fought their stubbornness, their toughness. I fought them, and they fought me, until I tore them out and the next one came. By now I was faster, stronger. I no longer had to kneel in the earth. I stood up like you, bent at the knees and back straight. But it was still a struggle; the real fight was not with the earth or the plants. Slowly, slowly, I found a rhythm. I stopped fighting. I stopped thinking. One day, as I worked away like this, sweat began to release itself. I allowed the union between the earth and my body, I let go, and for the first time in my life I appreciated everything for what it was, observed the miracle of it. The earth for being the earth, my hands for being my hands, the plants for growing out of seeds, and the others around me, everyone, with their own rights and dreams and interior worlds. Sweat poured over me more than ever, drenched my face, swept across the thick of my brows into my eyes, flooded down my neck and down my back like a deluge, and I accepted its gift. It was as if the sweat had washed away the past and all the thoughts and fears of the future and all that remained was now, clean and light and ever-dancing.