Beniek’s departure spelled the end of my childhood, and of the childhood of my mind: it was as if everything I’d assumed before had turned out to be false, as if behind every innocuous thing in the world lay something much darker and uglier. Every evening now Granny and Mother would let me into the little room. We’d huddle together by the speaker, silent and serious, leaning forward, listening to the voices from across the Wall, and after the program was over, Granny and Mother would explain something new about our history. How for over a century the country had been divided by Russia and Germany, how it had ceased to exist on the maps. How our culture had survived in the underground, parents teaching children their forbidden language and history, and how the country had finally gained independence after the First Great War. They taught me about the second one too, the side we were never told. How, after years of occupation, the people of Warszawa rose up against the Nazis, how the Soviets arrived, and how, instead of helping the Uprising, they stayed on the other side of the Wisła and waited. They knew they’d win the war, knew the Germans would retreat eventually, so they let them take revenge on the Poles. The Soviets watched on as the city was decimated and its population slaughtered or deported. When the Germans finally left, there were fewer than a thousand survivors in the capital.

I guess you believed what they told us in school, that the Soviets were our liberators. That they were the good ones. Our allies. Sometimes I wish I could have been as light as you. Because I didn’t enjoy those nights in my mother’s room, those terrible truth-spills. They were a ritual, their pull too strong to resist. Even if I didn’t understand it all, I understood enough for anger to collect at the bottom of my stomach. The fact that I couldn’t tell anyone made it all worse. I’d been handed a poisoned gift, powerful truths I could never admit to knowing. Mother had made me swear never to mention anything to anyone, lest they sack her—or worse.

I suppose the scariest thing was the lack of certainty. The fifties were over, and people no longer disappeared for speaking out. But in the sixties—and even later—things were more arbitrary. Almost anything was possible, depending on who happened to denounce you and what they thought they could get from you. Even with my childish intuition I sensed that a single mother was more vulnerable than most.