You lived in Praga, one of the few neighborhoods that had made it almost unscathed through the war, where the Russians had waited and watched the destruction of the city by the Germans, where they had looked on without firing a bullet as the Germans destroyed Wola. As they quietly and clearheadedly decimated the Old Town, the museums, the libraries, the archives, allowing a whole world to burn into oblivion.

In the first weeks back, Warszawa was empty and hot. We walked the bright avenues and bought berries and sunflower heads from the old ladies and ate them at the Saski Gardens near me, by the hill with the white pavilion. We stopped at milk bars. We ate cool chłodnik soup, the sour milk and pink beetroot soothing our throats. We drank fruit kompot, which colored our tongues, and for dessert, noodles with melted butter and raspberry jam. Later, full and content, we’d lie in the high grass near the zoo in Praga and watch the sky through the gaps in the solid branches of the trees above. Our words, our stories, poured forth like springs. I told you about Mother and Granny and even about Father. How he’d left us when I was very young, how I could barely remember him. How I barely wanted to. He’d moved to Kalisz and never visited, and all we saw of him were the meager alimony payments the postman brought every month. Mother always said he’d never wanted children, that he’d wanted her all to himself to love and control.

You listened, really listened, gentle eyes taking me in without judgment, making me feel more heard than I knew I could be. Then you told me about your family in the mountains. About your brothers, whom you had looked up to as a boy and who’d become “nothing,” drunks like so many others, passing out every payday, whose bodies the police picked up from the benches and pavements and left overnight in the sobering cells. You talked about your parents and their work in the sawmill. How ignorant they were of you. “They hardly know what this means,” you said, looking around at the city. “I want to show them. They can be proud of me.” You told me about your job, starting a week from then. “For the Office of Press Control,” you half-whispered, as if pronouncing the name of a god. A shiver ran through me, made me forget it was summer.

“You mean the Office of Censorship,” I said, despising you for a moment. “The ones who ban the books we need the most.”

Irritation flickered across your face. “Don’t be such a square. Everyone’s got to start somewhere. You have a better idea?”

“Let’s go away,” I said, surprised by the boldness of this. But you only looked amused.

“Where would you like to go? Rome, Paris?”

“I’m not joking, Janusz.”