When I arrived in the flat, it seemed smaller to me than before. The kitchen was to the right, as soon as you entered. It was long and narrow and only big enough to hold my landlady, Pani Kolecka. This was her territory. No matter how scarce the supplies, no matter how harsh the rationing, she was always in there, baking. Somehow, there would always be sugar and flour and something she’d scrape up or exchange. There’d be szarlotka apple tarts or babeczka cakes with cream, or layered gingerbread with plum jam. She baked like her life depended on it, and maybe it did. I had loved her ever since I’d moved in, fresh from Wrocław, referred from the center for student accommodation. I loved her warm voice and her soft presence and her small, childlike face. She seemed so old it almost made her ageless, like a being from another world. Usually she’d sleep on the brown couch in the living room, next to the table where we ate and the cabinet with the collection of rocks her husband had left behind. But in the summer the block heated up like a glasshouse, and sometimes, when I got up at night to go to the bathroom, I’d see her sleeping there on the tiled floor of the kitchen with the door open, large and peaceful, like some creature swept up by the sea.

The door to my room was next to the rock cabinet. It held a foldable bed and a small desk one pushed aside to open the door to the balcony. We were on the seventh floor. All you could see were the tops of the other blocks, like the heads of people standing in front of you in a crowd.

You and I lived on opposite sides of the city: me to the west, you to the east, and separated by the Wisła. A tram connected us, passing through the Old Town and across the river. To the south, always visible, the gigantic Palace of Culture towered over the rest of the city.

I lived where the Ghetto had been, where the Nazis had razed everything to the ground to leave no trace of their crimes. Wola was the name of the neighborhood, “Will” or “Determination” in English. The Party had rebuilt it as part of their socialist dream. A network of identical blocks stood lined up neatly like cardboard boxes, as far as the eye could see. We called this the blokowisko. There were new parks, new trees, and new children, playing obliviously in between the blocks on layers of invisible footprints and the dust of forgotten lives.