CHAPTER VIII

Choices and Fractures

The new home greeted them with the chill of concrete and the sharp smell of paint. The fourth floor of one of dozens of twin apartment blocks: a concrete cell in a hive, where blind chance decided whether you had found the right one. When they stood in the doorway, instead of woods and meadows they saw, through the window, their own reflection—an identical block, with other, equally lost faces flickering in its windows. It was the beginning of life in a labyrinth, where every corridor seemed to lead nowhere.

From the railroad station it was a twenty-minute walk, past enormous lots filled with the leftovers of large-panel construction—the same prefabricated slabs from which the next housing estates were being raised.

The estate grew out of the borderland of sand and mud, and its boundaries were marked only by symbols: torn, rusted wire fences that were less a barrier than an invitation. In those wounds in the landscape, among the ruins of the great concrete panels, a new and wild life was taking shape. Children's kingdoms, where the triumphant running over ruins lasted until dusk. In the shadow of the concrete slabs, packs of dogs and cats prowled—exiles looking, like the people, for shelter from the world and the weather.

The estate, on the unexpectedly named Marysieńki Street, bordered on one side a broad open lot where, according to the plans, a school, a kindergarten, and a playing field were supposed to be built. On the other side, where rubble had lain before, something like a park had been laid out. Farther on, beyond the street, stood two eleven-story towers—still unoccupied, but already exciting to the children. It was enough for an adult to appear on the horizon, and the children would flee screaming up the stairwells, laughing until they could hardly breathe.

Behind the towers, the city ended. Beyond them stretched only the remains of the old single-family houses of Jabłonna—mostly abandoned, slated for demolition. All of it had already been sentenced to death. It was to give way to new blocks of flats.

On the wall of the building at 1 Marysieńki Street someone had painted a huge "18." It helped a little with orientation, though it still often happened that, after climbing to the fourth floor, one had to go back down: the number on the block was right, but the stairwell was not.

On the very first day after arriving in Legionowo, the Koryckis went shopping as a family. Groceries were necessary, of course, but the most important things turned out to be furniture.

They were lucky. The end of the 1970s was no friend to consumers: stores stood empty, goods vanished from shelves, and many products could be bought only with ration cards. Yet somewhere near Zakroczym they came upon a well-stocked store.

They all went, so that each could choose something for his or her own room.

They took almost everything they could: kitchen cabinets, stools, the classic Gierek-era wall unit for the living room, armchairs, a table. Urszula also spotted a smaller, light-colored bookcase and a little desk. There was only no bed—nothing she wanted to sleep on. In the end the decision was made: she would get a double sleeper sofa. After some time, that piece of furniture ended up in Piotr's room, and Urszula was given a new youth-style daybed.

Furnishing Piotr's room went worse. During that trip they managed to buy only a dark wall bed, two chairs, a table that could easily have stood in a dining room, and a light cabinet with two shelves—matching neither in color nor in style.

Three days in the new home passed as if suspended between an old life and a new one. When their parents sent them off to school on the first morning, Piotr and Urszula stood in the doorway of the building like castaways on a foreign planet. During all those days they had not once run into a face from either of their classes in the stairwell. Every departure from home became an expedition into the unknown; every return, a retreat into a concrete hiding place that had not yet had time to become a home. They both ended up at Elementary School No. 3, still housed in an old, prewar building.

The school received them with a roar and a crush of corridors bursting at the seams with strange faces and a din of dialects pressing in from every side. Piotr felt like a grain of sand in a concrete mill, lost among hundreds of others just like him. Even the building seemed to protest the invasion: whenever the pounding of running students sounded overhead, plaster fell from the ceilings, dusting hair and shoulders with fine gray powder. The real horror, however, was the dentist's office. Its very atmosphere was intimidating: sterile, icy, mixed with the smell of old metal and disinfectant. The instruments looked like relics from another age, and the dentist herself, bent over a patient, worked with such indifferent precision that at times she drilled the wrong tooth, no longer distinguishing one child's pain from another's.

While Urszula merged a little more each day with the new crowd, Piotr sank deeper into himself. Strange faces, corridor noise, indifferent looks—all of it rose around him like an invisible wall. His hair, growing down to his shoulders, became not only a youthful fancy but also a curtain behind which he could hide. With bitter envy he watched his sister, fate's favorite, and for the first time asked himself the burning, unfair question: had he made a mistake by being born a boy?

In those first weeks in Legionowo, Piotr understood that he was alone in his struggle with this new reality. His father, Adam, seemed to shrink under the weight of his own resignation. He disappeared for whole days at work, and in the evenings escaped to the neighbors—perhaps to drown his helplessness in other people's conversations about nothing. At home he became a shadow, slipping from room to room without leaving a trace.

His mother, Jadwiga, wore eternal disappointment like a second skin. Her eyes said, "Life should have been different," and every sentence sounded like an accusation against a world that had failed to meet her expectations. Piotr learned to read those unspoken charges in her tightened lips, in the way she threw silverware into the sink. She believed that her husband did not support her in 'building a proper home.' She focused on the children, on duties, on upbringing—and treated it as a sacred mission.

Already in the first grades of elementary school she bought her son a diary. On the first page, with solemn care, she wrote:

"Study, my son, study—for learning is the key to power."

She held to that principle to the end. At home the children had few chores. But schoolwork was a duty. And honesty. And piety.

The problem was that a dissonance had entered that upbringing. His mother spoke of respect—but in everyday conversations she did not shy away from contempt. First toward strangers. Then toward her own husband. Finally toward his family. Piotr often heard: "You take after that crazy woman."

Being compared to his grandmother was the worst form of scolding. If he wanted to deserve his mother's love, he had to despise his grandmother and look down on his father.

In the spring of 1979 Adam received an offer to go deep into Russia for work. Somewhere in Siberia, in the middle of the taiga, he was to take part in building industrial facilities.

He returned to Poland after three months—for Urszula's First Communion. Was he afraid of flying, or did he simply miss his family and friends? No one knew, but he never decided to go back. During those three months the family saved quite a lot in so-called dollar vouchers, though they kept them uselessly until 1990. Then they used them to buy shares in Tonsil—a company that soon went bankrupt. The rest of the money made it possible to order expensive outerwear from a tailor. Adam received a handsome sheepskin-lined coat, while Jadwiga ordered fur coats for herself and her daughter. Piotr received a fur coat too. He wore it once. "Why are you wearing women's clothes?" a classmate asked after seeing him on some outing. The coat never came out of the closet again. After that story, a silence settled over the house and stretched on for weeks. Only then did a chance for something new appear.

Adam's refusal to make another trip also meant leaving his previous job in Warsaw. Meanwhile, at the housing cooperative in Legionowo, the position of building superintendent had just opened up. Two neighboring blocks had been without a caretaker for some time. Adam took the opportunity.

From then on, his work was almost at his doorstep. More than that, several enormous service cellars were placed at his disposal. In the future—and not such a distant future—they would be used for purposes he himself did not yet foresee, purposes some today would call noble.

He stood that day outside the catechism room, pressed against the wall, watching a group of laughing young people. His long hair fell to his shoulders, and his posture betrayed the uncertainty of a boy who did not yet know where he belonged. Sister Kamila noticed him. At first she took him for a shy girl awkwardly trying to win the boys' approval. Only when the lesson began and he sat down in the last row did she realize her mistake. Her look, at first full of surprise, gradually softened, as though in that tall, slender boy with hair falling over his face she recognized someone who—like herself—carried a certain difference within.

Sister Kamila, whose name was in fact Barbara Maj and who belonged to the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family, was a woman of unusual education and deep piety. Even so, more than time spent kneeling, she valued conversation. She preferred being with young people—listening, accompanying, guiding.

She was not merely a catechist. She was an educator. A guide. An adult who was not in a hurry.

Sister Kamila had a gift for gathering around her those who carried within themselves some kind of hunger—for truth, for beauty, or simply for attention. The "Dziupla," renovated by her own hands and by several fathers, became for Piotr something like an ark in a flood of grayness. In the evenings, when the lights went out in the concrete blocks, they gathered in that warm room, smelling of paint and human warmth. They sang songs that could not be sung at school; they spoke about things that could not be spoken of aloud. Sometimes Piotr looked at the faces of his friends in the flicker of candles and saw something being born in some of them, something that later would be called a vocation. In him, something else was being born—the sense that he was not alone.

The long-haired student also began to appear there. School interested him less and less. He spent more and more time reading newspapers and books, studying geography. He had a few classmates, but those were loose acquaintances rather than true friends. The only one he could have called a friend was Janusz Nowakowski, a boy from Szczypiorno. After the move to Legionowo, contact with him had practically ceased. What remained was an emptiness that only Sister Kamila would fill.

In that gray reality, Sister Kamila appeared like a ray of light falling into a crack in the concrete. She did not merely listen—she truly heard. In her presence, Piotr felt for the first time that his thoughts were not only adolescent rebellion, but something worthy of attention. In her silence and concentration he found what home lacked: unconditional acceptance. Her "Dziupla" became a true refuge, where not only vocations were born, but human souls as well.

The year 1980 came.

In the country, reports of social unrest and strikes were heard more and more often. Sister Kamila did not incite rebellion, but neither did she extinguish what the young people were already bringing from their homes. Radio Free Europe was calling for a boycott of the March elections to the Sejm of the Polish People's Republic.

"We All Go to the Ballot Boxes," proclaimed the poster Piotr had made in art class at school. From a socially engaged teacher he received a top grade—a grade that seldom appeared on his report cards at that time.

The next day he took the same work to the building of the local general high school, where a polling place had been set up. Unobserved by anyone, he hung the cardboard in the entryway.

Only first—at the beginning of the slogan—he added one word: "NOT."

"Not All of Us Go to the Ballot Boxes"—that was how his first political leaflet came into being.

His worsening grades at school finally provoked a reaction from his parents and... restrictions.

"I am not taking you with me," Jadwiga Korycka announced in April 1980, as she prepared, as she did every year, for her spring visit to Aunt Marianna Chojnacka. Pleading and lamenting did no good. As promised, she left the apartment alone and headed for the bus stop.

Her son had no intention of giving in. He could not take the bus—he did not even have money for a ticket. He decided to get there another way: on foot and by hitchhiking.

He reached Krubin near Ciechanów not long after his mother, to her great astonishment.

"It is good you came," Aunt Marianna said, bending toward her young relative as soon as Jadwiga went to the bathroom. "I told your mother that the gold chain with the cross is to be for you. A keepsake from me. But remember something else too. Go to Kazik, my brother—the one from Janów. He has the book. He has no children of his own; let him give it to you. And beware of dusk... your mother said..."

Her next words were cut off by Jadwiga's entrance, and the old woman did not want to continue the conversation in her presence. The mention of the chain moved Piotr—he loved his aunt, and he accepted the keepsake with gratitude. What she meant by the book, by dusk, by Uncle Kazik, he did not know. He decided to ask her in the fall, on the next visit. Summer came faster than he expected, and with it the last weeks of school and new anxieties.

The school year was drawing to a close. With it, elementary school was ending. The vacation was coming—the one that would change everything.

Piotr saw it for the first time a few weeks before the report cards were handed out. Urszula, usually lively and full of energy, suddenly froze in front of some movie, as if someone had cut invisible strings inside her. After a moment her body, until then so graceful and obedient, began to tremble, then to make violent, uncontrolled movements. She lay down on the floor and tensed every muscle until her reddened face was covered with a thick layer of sweat.

"She is starting to ksitać[1]," his mother whispered, and that word, sounding like children's slang, suddenly took on a sinister meaning. Piotr knew what it meant. He had seen it in his sister before. He did not understand why his parents pretended not to know—or why they thought it could be cured by beating. He watched Urszula turn into someone unfamiliar, and felt that it was precisely in those moments that he saw her most truly—without masks, without pretending. She was alone with her body, and he could not help her.

The visits to doctors turned into a humiliating pilgrimage from office to office, where Urszula became a medical case instead of a frightened girl. When at last one folk healer correctly named the illness, he sent them to a healer-priest on the outskirts of Warsaw.

"She... ksita," her parents told him, using that household word with embarrassment, as if the real name of the illness were too obscene to pronounce. The priest, bewildered by the strange expression, prescribed herbs that brought no relief. And when helplessness became unbearable, the parents reached for the belt. Piotr watched those executions with a mixture of horror and pity, feeling that something no one understood had taken up residence in their home.

Once again, when he heard his sister crying behind the closed door, he left the apartment. He sat down on the stairwell steps and fixed his eyes on the concrete wall opposite him. He knew he could not go in. He could not stop his parents. And he knew they did not understand either—that what they were doing was not treatment, but shame turned into violence. He sat there until silence settled over the apartment.

The home was becoming more and more sealed inside its own sadness, until at last an invitation appeared that was meant to open the world for Piotr, if only for a while.

At that time Sister Kamila, after one of the last meetings of eighth grade, asked Piotr:

"Would you go to the mountains?"

He did not hesitate for a moment. As soon as he received his parents' permission, he was sitting the very next week on a train to Kraków. Beside him were Sister Kamila, Artur Nowak from the neighboring block, and Beata Dębska.

Beata was a special charge of the nun. She lived in Legionowo, in a huge, almost empty house. She lived there only with her father, who was struggling with serious problems—financial, emotional, and psychological. Once, working in foreign trade, he had earned good money. But after a conflict with the communist authorities, he lost everything overnight: his job, his means of living, and also his wife, who left for Great Britain with their younger son. Beata could not forgive her. She stayed. She cared for her father. Between her and Piotr, a thread of understanding quickly formed—they both carried within themselves the same sense of abandonment.

The four of them set out for Kraków, where they were to change to a train toward Zakopane. But that was not the end of the journey. From there, by bus, they reached Ludźmierz, the town of Tetmajer. Friends of Sister Kamila lent them a house there, as they had done before on similar trips.

The next two weeks became the beginning of Piotr's great love for the Tatra Mountains. Together with the group, he climbed Giewont and Kasprowy Wierch, visited Morskie Oko, and saw other lakes and mountain passes.

But the hikes were not the most important thing. The most important things were the conversations, and that difficult-to-describe mood—quiet, deep, patriotic. Sister Kamila had an extraordinary gift for awakening in young people what had long been asleep.

She led them into a world of dreams and visions. Visions of a free Poland.

Piotr did not yet know that soon every word he spoke would sound like a declaration. He returned to Legionowo with the feeling that he had left something behind. Perhaps childhood. Perhaps fear. Perhaps the beginning of himself. He knew only that from then on he would be searching. And that he would never be the same.