peace, tantalising me like a loose tooth. I set out for it. And after weeks of searching, weeks of questions to suspicious-looking shop attendants who’d tell me there was no such book, that it had never been translated, I got lucky. It was just a few days before camp, in a tiny antykwariat bookshop that specialised in art and history, run by a man who could have been a friend of those men in the bar. He shot me a meaningful, almost amused look, then walked off to a back room and returned with a rustling brown-paper package.
When it was time to pack for the camp, I tore off the cover and glued the pages neatly into another book, burying it deep down at the bottom of my bag.
Our bus arrived at the end of the afternoon, as the sun was getting weaker but hadn’t yet begun to set. The camp lay just outside a village, surrounded by low wooden fences and lined by a little river on one side. The bus stopped in front of the main building, a wide concrete bungalow with a clock on its facade and a set of flags (white and red, hammer and sickle) hanging limply from its front. A short, stout man in a uniform watched us with small, attentive eyes as we climbed out of the bus, slightly dizzy, shaken from the ride.
‘I’m Comrade Leader Belka,’ he boomed, commanding us to line up in front of him. There was something imperious in his voice and something both weary and angry about his manner. It was the same anger and weariness I’d observed in my schoolteachers, those who struggled to believe in the system yet punished others for doing the same. ‘Welcome to the work education camp,’ Belka called out, walking up and down the line we’d formed. ‘I congratulate you for having signed on for this important service.’ Our faces were impassive, but the irony of his words couldn’t have escaped anyone. The camp was obligatory – no one would be allowed to graduate without participating. He continued his speech, extolling the importance of agricultural work, the role of the working classes in our socialist struggle, and the duty, even for ‘intellectuals’ (he grimaced at the word), to contribute to the efforts of the fatherland. Obedience was key, he said.
It was the same spiel we’d heard all our lives, with more or less conviction. I turned my head and looked along the line to find Karolina, but instead my eyes fell on you. I had never seen you before – not consciously, anyway. Yet my mind felt strangely relieved, as if it had recognised someone. You were as tall as me, broad-shouldered, and your eyes were light, contrasting with your dark hair. You were looking at Belka, concentrating, and I took a moment to take you in, unguarded, forgetting myself. As if by instinct, like an animal suddenly aware of being watched, you turned your head towards me, and before I could avert my gaze our eyes met, locked for an infinite, interminable instant in mid-air. A flash of heat travelled from my stomach to my cheeks, my thoughts jumbled like a ball of string. I turned my head as quickly as I could. For the rest of the speech I looked straight at the comrade leader, my mind scrambling for composure, stumbling over itself.
When Belka had finished, we grabbed our bags from the bus and were assigned to the different wooden huts scattered around the camp grounds. I was in one with three other guys, Wojtek, Darek and Filip. They were nice boys, strangely immature and innocent. We shared two bunk beds, a table and two chairs. We went to have dinner in the canteen, served by an army of women in aprons and deflated paper bonnets, standing behind the counter as if someone had left them there many years earlier. A large lady with an immobile face served the tomato soup with rice, while an ageless-looking girl with reddish skin piled on beetroot mash and potatoes. I sat with Karolina and the boys from my hut. They spoke easily, joking and jesting. But I wasn’t really there. I looked around the canteen, across the long tables and through the tangled voices and ringing cutlery, until I spotted you: sitting at a table at the other end of the room, deep in conversation with a girl, your head turned towards her. In the stark white light of the canteen your black