A Thousand Peaceful Cities

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When Father and Mr. Trąba decided to kill First Secretary Władysław Gomułka, we were in the grip of an unending heat wave, the earth was bursting at the seams, and the anguish of my youth was just beginning.

The morphinistes were living in the attic, and there was no way to bring them under control. The stairway creaked; first came the vanguard of the odors, then the odors themselves: cocoa butter and something else that I couldn’t identify, but which must have been the odor of morphine and immoderation. Every morning — just like everybody else — they went out to sunbathe. They took along baskets of food, drinks, air mattresses, sunshades, bathing suits. Were they really no different from us terrestrials? Quite the opposite! They were radically different. Everyone else went to the real beach; everyone headed for pure radiance, grassy banks, and the babbling current. But they went in the other direction, into the depths of the deepest brush, to the very heart of the drought, right to the fuses of the still inactive machinery of conflagration. In short, everyone else went to the swimming pool or to the banks of the Vistula, but they went to the forests on Buffalo Mountain.

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