“Is she feeling better?” you asked in a whisper.

I nodded, holding on to you tighter. “Thank you,” I said into your neck. I could feel you smiling against my cheek. I had meant to ask you again how you’d managed it, the doctor, the chicken; I’d planned the questions before coming—about Hania too, especially about her. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I was too happy to see you, too relieved. Too weary to struggle. I let myself fall on the bed. The cold air gave us goose bumps as we undressed. We found warmth beneath your covers. We tested our strengths, wrestled with the urgency of desire, conjured up heat. Our bodies like firestones. You had me, and I had you. But it didn’t feel like the other times, the first times. It felt like we were settling a score, evening something out. Like we needed this, this language, this code, to know where we were, and who. And that we were both still holding on.

Afterward you got up and switched on the radio, sitting on your haunches, turning the tune button. Your arched back defined, your ass resting on your heels. Your tan had faded, I realized, and so had mine. Finally you found a station, a piano concerto, maybe Mozart. You lit a cigarette and came back to bed, the smoke gently floating, caressing the air. I felt weightless, again like one of the leaflets I had released into the air. I closed my eyes.

“Maybe you were right,” I said, feeling you lie down next to me.

“About what?” You blew out your smoke. It mingled with the air above us.

“About needing to stay calm and finding other ways. I was foolish.”

It felt good to say this, to shed conscience like a coat. If only the lightness would last, like another toke, another exhalation. The piano played joyfully, relentlessly. My eyes remained closed.

“You were scared,” you whispered. “But now you know that there’s no need for that.” Your mouth covered mine. The smoke flowed from you to me, down into my lungs, filling me up, making me feel, for one moment, like I would burst.

That Saturday you and I met by the Łazienki Gardens. It was my favorite park in the city and the only place I remember visiting the one time I’d come to Warszawa as a child with Mother and Granny. We’d taken a boat on the lake, fed the swans and the squirrels, had seen the other, complete families—mothers, fathers, and children. We’d visited the white palace on the island of the lake, the same palace that had been part of the king’s pleasure gardens and now served as a distraction for good workers and their families. As we were leaving, climbing up a gentle slope, we’d seen a man stacking blocks of hay under a small thatched roof. “Who is this for?” Mother had asked him. She was so elegant that day; I remember the moss-green hat she wore, the matching gloves. “The deer,” he’d said, and continued working. That had seemed incredible to me, that deer should live in the park, hidden from everyone’s sight.