Chapter XII

The Road Home

The months that followed were ones Piotr would later speak of reluctantly. Not because nothing happened then. Rather, because everything that mattered most was happening inside him: during sleepless nights, in sudden surges of fear, in hours spent aimlessly over a book he could not bring himself to read.

After the plans for a house in Szczypiorno fell apart, something inside him broke. It was not one violent collapse, but a slow slide down a wall with nothing to hold on to. The Stoics helped for a while. Their cool wisdom brought order to his thoughts, but it could not restore meaning. Pantheistic reflections blurred the pain, yet along with it they also blurred the outlines of the world.

In the end, he had to return to ordinary life. He found a job at the post office in Jabłonna. He came in each morning, stood behind the counter, sold stamps, accepted money orders, counted out cash, and pressed rubber stamps onto paper. Every day resembled the one before it. There was something soothing in that repetition, but something humiliating as well: a man could function properly, answer politely, perform every task required of him, and still feel as though he were standing beside his own life.

One December afternoon, an elderly woman to whom he was selling stamps studied him more closely for a moment. Then she reached into her bag and handed him a small gingerbread cookie wrapped in a handkerchief.
--- This is for you. You always look so sad --- she said softly.

He felt embarrassed. He thanked her awkwardly, slipped the cookie into his pocket, and for the next hour could feel its shape through the fabric. Nothing changed because of it. The line kept moving, the stamp struck the paper, people asked about letters, money orders, and packages. And yet that small gesture stayed with him longer than many serious conversations.

The money he saved from his postal salary was modest. It was enough to survive on and to sustain the illusion that something could still be planned. Piotr began thinking about leaving. Not about travel, not about sightseeing, not even about emigration in the usual sense. He wanted to disappear from the place where everyone knew everything, commented, judged, or kept silent in a way that hurt more than words.

His underground activity offered him one more hope: perhaps someone abroad would help; perhaps old contacts would prove to be more than a memory of clandestine conversations. He knew it was a fragile calculation. But a man who sees no road ahead begins to believe even in a path drawn with a stick in the sand.

A passport valid for every country in the world remained a dream. He submitted applications to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, pleaded, explained, and appealed. In desperation, he even sent a letter to Jerzy Urban. The replies, when they came, changed nothing. He received only a document permitting travel to a dozen or so socialist countries—a semblance of freedom that felt more like an extension of the cage than a way out of it.

Albania and Yugoslavia, through which he might have imagined a route farther west, remained beyond his reach. After long consideration, he decided to try going through Yugoslavia. He bought a one-week vacation package to Sofia, quit his job at the post office, and left with a single suitcase. He did not know whether he had a plan or merely desperation dressed up as one.

For the first few days, he did what a tourist does when he does not want to look like a fugitive. He walked around the city, looked at unfamiliar signs, and tried to memorize the street layout. Then he went into the mountains outside Sofia and began learning to ski. It soon turned out that he handled skis as uncertainly as he handled his own life: he could get moving, but he did not really know how to stop.

The real test was to come not on the slope, but at the border.
--- You arrived by plane --- the Bulgarian border guard said, examining his papers.
--- Yes, but I'm terribly afraid of flying --- Piotr lied. --- Through Yugoslavia is the shortest overland route back to Poland.
The guard looked at the passport again.
--- Your document doesn't allow that. Go back.

That was all. No shouting, no explanations, no drama. The barrier remained closed, and Piotr stood for a moment with the passport in his hand, as though waiting for someone to take back the last sentence. No one did. He returned by the same road he had come.

He still had several days of vacation left and far too much time. So he decided to keep learning to ski. After two days, he concluded that it was time to try something more difficult. The T-bar lift proved more than he could manage: once it yanked him too hard, another time it knocked him down after a few yards, and on the third attempt Piotr let go of the bar himself, sensing that he was about to cut sideways across the slope. In the end, he chose the chairlift.

At the first station, he realized that the chair did not stop to let a beginner calmly summon his courage. It only slowed down. Not nearly enough. Piotr did not get off. The same thing happened at the second station. Before he managed to decide, he was already moving on, higher and higher, until he reached a place where he had no business being.

At the top he had to jump off. He looked down and immediately understood that the slope was not for him. He put on his skis only briefly, then removed them with relief and began walking downhill, carrying them over his shoulder like evidence of defeat.

The next day he tried lower down. The slope looked gentle and long, but manageable. He started cautiously. He passed one spruce tree, then another that—so it seemed to him—had grown precisely where it should not have. His speed increased. Too late, Piotr remembered that he still did not know how to stop.

At the bottom he saw a large gray building. It was approaching quickly. Only after a moment did he notice an entrance styled like a Western saloon: swinging doors that looked absurd in the middle of a Bulgarian winter. Just before reaching the building, he fell face-first into the snow, but his momentum did not stop. He kept sliding straight toward the entrance. The doors flew open with a crash. Piotr shot inside on his stomach and came to a halt only beneath the bar, in a room full of people.

No one needed to say anything. Neither did he. He put skiing aside for several decades.

On the train back to Poland, an elderly couple sat across from him. As they passed the first Polish stations, the woman, like the one at the post office, took an apple from a basket and silently placed it in his hand. He thanked her, but for a long moment could not bring himself to bite into it. He looked at the fruit resting on his knees and felt that the gesture was disproportionately large beside everything he had just lost.

He returned empty-handed. He had lost his job, his money, and the illusion that leaving was enough to bring something to an end. Nothing had ended. Only the direction of his return had changed.

After he came back, his spine began to trouble him. At first it merely ached; then the pain came more and more often, until at last it organized his days better than any calendar. It was the lingering result of an injury he had suffered several years earlier, when his sister unexpectedly jumped onto his back. Piotr went from doctor to doctor, from referral to referral, from one registration desk to the next. He waited in hallway lines where people sat in their coats, tucked test results under their arms, and spoke in low voices, as though louder words might worsen the diagnosis.

Nothing moved quickly in Poland's communist-era health service. One waited weeks for one examination and months for another. Every doctor added something to a sheet of paper, every nurse sent him to another window, and Piotr grew ever more familiar with the smell of corridors, metal chairs, and wet overcoats.

One morning, while waiting in line at the registration desk, he saw sparrows bathing in a puddle outside the window. They splashed furiously, shook out their wings, and hopped over one another as though the world had been created solely for that small, dirty puddle beside the hospital sidewalk. He watched them so long that when he reached the window, the nurse had to repeat her question three times. For a moment, he had truly forgotten why he was there.

Amid those lines and referrals, he also met a woman whose name he either never remembered or never learned. She was a nurse. She helped move one appointment forward, then arranged a referral he probably would not have received for a long time without her. She made nothing of it. She spoke briefly and matter-of-factly, with the kind of ordinary kindness that needed no grand words.

They met several more times. Their last conversation, longer and calmer than the others, took place in the middle of 1989. Then she vanished from his life as suddenly as she had appeared. He did not know her address, had no reason to look for her, or perhaps lacked the courage. What remained was the memory of someone who, for a time, had treated him not as a number in a line but as a human being.

His spine could not be cured, but another possibility appeared: treatment for his speech. In Toruń there was a hospital unit specializing in speech disorders. The referral, the formalities, the departure—everything moved faster than he expected. Piotr wanted to believe that if his life could not be repaired, perhaps at least his speech could be.

Once there, he discovered that the therapy demanded more than repeating syllables and practicing his breathing. He had to speak in front of people, make mistakes in front of people, and accept his own helplessness without retreating into jokes, anger, or feigned confidence. That was harder for him than the pain in his spine. Pain could be suffered in silence. A stutter could not be hidden once he was told to speak.

After unsuccessful exercises, he withdrew into himself. Sometimes he answered too sharply; sometimes he put on a brave face, as though he had everything under control. In reality, he feared that this road too would end like the others: with a promising beginning, several assurances, and a return to the starting point.

One day he went into town and came upon a flea market. Among old silverware, candlesticks, coverless books, and china with chipped edges, he saw a brass clock. It was almost identical to the one he remembered from his aunt's house. He bought it with his last money. For the next several days, he took the mechanism apart, cleaned the pieces, put them back together, and took it apart again. In that small, patient labor there was something missing from his therapy: a clear cause, a visible effect, a wheel that either turned or did not.

Meanwhile, the country was accelerating. The talks between the opposition and the government, known as the Round Table, inspired hope in some and suspicion in others. Piotr was irritated by how easily people had begun to speak of an agreement with those they had only recently called occupiers. In the circles of SGK "Piast" and the Confederation of Independent Poland, he heard harder voices: one did not negotiate with the communist authorities.

When partially free elections were announced, "Piast" called for a boycott. At the same time, it did not forbid its people from helping with the organizational work, provided they did not vote. Piotr therefore joined an election commission on behalf of the "Solidarity" Citizens' Committee, while two days earlier he had thrown leaflets calling for a boycott from a moving train. The contradiction was obvious. But that time was made of contradictions: hope and distrust, a desire for change and a fear that the change would be sold to someone at a table from which ordinary people had been excluded.

During his stay in Toruń, however, something happened that had nothing to do with either therapy or politics. One day Piotr went for a walk along the city's side streets. He was not looking for anything in particular. He looked at houses, gardens, and nameplates by the gates. On one of them he saw the name: Kilisz.

He stopped. It sounded almost the same as Kiliś, the name from Uncle Kazimierz's stories. For a moment he hesitated over whether to ring the bell. Finally, he did.

A woman opened the door. Piotr awkwardly introduced himself and asked whether the names Kiliś and Kilisz might have a common origin. She did not seem surprised.
--- They're one and the same --- she said. --- In our family, too, people spoke of a journey from Lithuania. One of the brothers fled after some intrigue a girl had devised. She was a strange one... Two others followed him, and the eldest returned to Lithuania. People spoke of the curse too, the way they used to in the old days.

Piotr listened in mounting astonishment. She did not know Uncle Kazik or Chojnacka; she could not have been repeating their words, and yet she was telling the same story. Arranged differently, with different details, but the same story. Lithuania, flight, the girl, the brothers, the curse.

--- So the Chronicle tells the truth --- he whispered.

He said it more to himself than to the woman. In an instant, the family stories ceased to be merely old people's tales that could be put off until later. They became a trail. And if there was a trail, he had to follow it. From that day on, searching for his ancestors was no longer a matter of curiosity. It became a duty.

Several months later came word of the death of Helena Szcześniak, with whom the Korycki family had recently stayed in Koszalin. Piotr immediately regretted not having questioned her. About her childhood, her family, her wartime fate, the people from long ago whose names she might still have remembered. He understood that every such death closed not only one life, but an entire archive to which no one would ever again find the key.

What he remembered most vividly from that visit to Koszalin was a walk along the Baltic shore with her son, Uncle Jerzy, a retired major in the Polish People's Army. They walked for a long time beside the water. The sea was gray, and the wind pushed their words back into their mouths. Piotr spoke favorably of Lech Wałęsa then, as did many who wanted to believe that history had finally found its face. Jerzy listened for a moment, then said curtly:
--- You'll see. A great many people are still going to be surprised.

Piotr remembered those words because he himself was not free of suspicion. In public he defended Wałęsa, but inside he carried an image from the beginning of martial law, when he had gone to Gdańsk seeking help for an exposed member of "Piast." Wałęsa received him at his apartment, but instead of support Piotr heard irony:
--- What could possibly have happened that Wałęsa himself has to intervene?

He received no help. After leaving, he was stopped by two plainclothesmen and interrogated at the police station. He got through it by sticking to a fabricated story. Later, already on the train, he saw a man in a jacket ostentatiously displaying a "Solidarity" pin. The episode proved nothing, but for Piotr it became one of those images that refuse to disappear and, over the years, gather layers of suspicion.

Jerzy's words on the Baltic shore therefore fell on prepared ground. They settled nothing, but confirmed the distrust Piotr already carried within him.

Helena Szcześniak died on February 5, 1990. Few relatives came to the funeral. On the Korycki side there was Jadwiga with her son, as well as the deceased woman's sister, Jadwiga Kamińska. Piotr stood over the grave with the feeling that once again he had asked his questions too late.

In the months that followed, his job at Outpatient Clinic No. 1 on Sowińskiego Street in Legionowo also came to an end. Piotr was officially employed there as a senior assistant, but in practice he performed the duties of an administrative manager: overseeing supplies, equipment, order, and the lower- and mid-level staff.

At first, the work gave him a sense of purpose. After months of helplessness, he at least had a place where something depended on him. He quickly saw, however, that the clinic had its own firmly established way of doing things. Equipment disappeared or was used privately, supplies disappeared without anyone knowing where, and the people who should have reacted preferred not to see too much.

Piotr could not simply overlook it. He reported the matter to his immediate supervisor. It seemed to him the proper thing to do. He had not foreseen that, in a web of petty dependencies, merely telling the truth could become a mistake.

One day the secretary looked into his office.
--- Mr. Korycki, the director would like to see you.

He took off his white coat and left. The administration offices were about half a mile away, in a former single-family house. People said that after the war its owners had been evicted, as had happened in many such houses the new authorities found convenient for their own use. Piotr walked slowly, trying to guess why he had been summoned.

The director wasted no time on preliminaries.
--- The department head claims that you reported a gynecological examination chair being removed from the clinic building.

He understood at once. He had not been called in to clarify the matter, but to establish who had said too much. For a moment he wanted to confirm everything. Then a defensive reflex, stronger than pride, took over.
--- No. I don't know anything about it, and I never reported anything --- he replied.
--- Are you sure?
--- Yes, ma'am. I'm sure. No such conversation took place.

The meeting ended as quickly as it had begun. No one raised a voice. No one threatened him. And yet, after leaving the office, Piotr knew that this job was already ending. Not because anyone had told him so. Certain sentences, once spoken, simply alter the arrangement of corridors, glances, and silences.

Later, standing before the mirror in the office restroom, he suddenly saw not an administrator in a white coat, but the boy who had once run through a meadow after butterflies. The memory came for no reason and hurt in its strangeness. That boy did not yet know that adults could arrange the world in such a way that anyone who told the truth would later have to deny it.

After leaving the clinic, Piotr found himself suspended once again. He had no strength to begin looking immediately for another job. He waited, though he did not know for what. Once more, life had stopped in a place that was neither an ending nor a beginning.

Around that time, Jerzy Skwierczyński, an old acquaintance from pilgrimages and their youth, contacted him. Their paths had parted long before, but Piotr knew that Jerzy had become a priest. For a time he had belonged to the Oblates of St. Joseph, and later he went to the Zhytomyr region, to Bykivka, where he worked among the local Poles.

The letter arrived when Piotr was once again without steady work and was returning more and more often in his thoughts to the seminary. It was no longer the old, clear certainty. Rather, it was a question that returned whenever other roads closed. Perhaps the priesthood after all? Perhaps, where everything personal fell apart so easily, he ought to choose a life without a home of his own?

Jerzy wrote simply:
"Piotr, I invite you to Ukraine. Stay here for a month, work at the parish, and see whether this truly is your vocation."

Those words did not provide an answer, but they opened the way to a test. Piotr could go far from Legionowo, from family tensions, failed jobs, and his own limbo. For a month he could live by the rhythm of a parish, observe a priest's work from the inside, and find out whether this was still his road or merely the memory of an old plan.

Yet the thought of a family would not disappear. It came in simple, stubborn images: a table, children, someone's footsteps in the next room, a home one returned to not because there was nowhere else to go, but because someone was waiting. Piotr still could not say which he wanted more. The priesthood offered meaning and order. A family promised something less tangible, but more his own.

He placed Jerzy's letter on the table like a summons. He did not have to decide his entire life at once. It was enough to go and see. And so he decided to answer.

The road from Legionowo to Bykivka was long not only in miles. Trains, transfers, waiting, the border, unfamiliar stations, people speaking first Polish, then Russian, then Ukrainian—all of it carried him farther from Warsaw and Legionowo than the map suggested.

Bykivka lay in the Zhytomyr region, among plains and villages that had carried the memory of the old Polish Commonwealth through generations. Polish identity there was neither decoration nor a schoolroom slogan. It was something preserved in homes: in prayers, surnames, holy images, graves, a handful of songs, and the stubbornness of people who, despite Russification, Soviet terror, and poverty, still called themselves Poles.

Piotr listened to those stories with an attentiveness he had often lacked toward his own family. There, he understood more clearly what the loss of memory meant. One intimidated or silenced generation, one war, one deportation, one night after which someone failed to return—and an entire family archive could become a handful of broken sentences.

The older residents spoke of the years when the Polish language had to be hidden. Of schools where they were taught someone else's history. Of the 1930s, when the NKVD's Polish Operation took people from their homes and left behind only fear. They did not speak like historians. They spoke briefly, sometimes in half-sentences, sometimes with a single name followed by silence. That silence said more than dates.

Polish inscriptions could still be found in the cemeteries. The elderly spoke cautiously of their ancestors. The young were only beginning to learn that their surnames meant more than they had been told. Piotr looked on with a mixture of emotion and shame. Living on foreign soil and under foreign rule, they had preserved more than he had managed to preserve in his own home.

Father Jerzy Skwierczyński worked there without grand words. He organized the parish, celebrated Mass, traveled to visit people, raised funds, and supervised the construction of a church. Polish nuns helped him in Bykivka and the surrounding area. Their work was quiet, practical, and daily: prepare the children, visit the sick, see to the paperwork, find someone with a brick, a board, a sack of cement, or at least goodwill.

Piotr quickly saw that faith there had nothing comfortable about it. It was intertwined with poverty, memory, and Polish identity. People came to church not because their lives were in order, but precisely because nothing was in order. In that reality, a priest was not merely the man who celebrated the liturgy. He was the person to whom people brought matters that could be taken nowhere else.

Of the people living near the rectory, Mrs. Agnieszka Kwiatkowska came by most often. She was one of those women who did not ask many questions, but immediately saw when someone was hungry, tired, or too thin.
--- But Father, you're so thin --- she would say with concern, though Piotr was not yet a priest.

She brought food: a few potatoes, eggs, a piece of salt pork, something wrapped in a clean cloth. Piotr accepted the gifts with gratitude and embarrassment. He knew that nothing there was given out of abundance. Every slice of bread, every egg, every bowl of soup carried its own weight.

The Zhytomyr region of 1990 was poor and weary. Towns and villages lacked many basic necessities, and daily life demanded resourcefulness. Anyone with a stove, firewood, potatoes, and a patch of garden could feel somewhat safer. Sorrow was often drowned in homemade liquor. Faith endured, perhaps precisely because so little else was certain.

After one Mass, a woman approached Piotr and lightly tugged at the sleeve of his cassock.
--- Father, Father...
She led him a few steps away, as though afraid someone might overhear.
--- I have a matter to discuss. I want to go to confession, but Father Skwierczyński is the only priest here. I don't want to confess to him.

Piotr could not help her. He explained calmly that he was not a priest, that he could not hear confessions, and that she would have to wait for another priest. The woman accepted this without complaint, but her face fell. For her, this was not an organizational inconvenience. She had come carrying something that had weighed on her for a long time, and once again she had to leave with it alone.

Another time, an elderly woman came from a neighboring village. She spoke slowly, struggling to choose her words.
--- Father, I am Polish, but Orthodox... You know how it was here... hard times.
Piotr listened.
--- We never baptized our son. We were afraid. Then the Russians took him into the army. They sent him off to war, and the Afghans killed him. He wasn't baptized. What can I do?

She began to cry. Not loudly. Rather, the way people cry after telling the same story many times to themselves and to God, yet never receiving an answer. Piotr had no ready words for her. He could only stand beside her and feel the cassock on his shoulders growing heavier.

There were lighter matters as well, though they were no less important to the people involved. Mr. and Mrs. Zieliński were worried about their young son. The boy got up at night, walked around the room in his sleep, and sometimes approached the door. His parents feared that one night he would go outside and something terrible would happen.
--- Have you tried hypnosis? --- Piotr asked after the boy's mother told him about the nighttime wandering.
--- And who around here could do such a thing? --- she replied uncertainly. --- Would it help?
--- I don't know. But we can try.
--- How much would it cost?
--- Nothing. We'll see whether I can do it.

The next day they took him to the Zielińskis' home. The boy stood beside his mother, frightened, as though he did not know whether he was going to be examined, punished, or handed over to a stranger. Piotr spoke to him for a long time in a calm voice. He knew the techniques of hypnosis only from books he had picked up along the way, but he was able to inspire trust. He guided the boy into sleep, then brought him out of it just as carefully.

After that visit, the nighttime wandering stopped. The parents brought a basket of food to the rectory. They thanked him as though something momentous had happened. Piotr accepted their gratitude with embarrassment. He did not know whether he had truly helped or whether chance had merely favored him. He did know that, to those people, what mattered was that someone had come, listened, and tried to do something.

His stay in Bykivka showed Piotr more and more clearly that the priesthood was not merely a beautiful idea, an escape from his own unrest, or a way to bring order to his life. It meant facing people every day—people who came with hunger, guilt, fear, illness, the death of a child, a plea for a sacrament he could not give them, or a question with no simple answer.

The turning point came at the pulpit. Father Jerzy decided that Piotr should try saying a few words to the congregation. Perhaps he wanted to encourage him, perhaps to test him, or perhaps he simply believed that otherwise Piotr would never find out whether he was suited to this path.

Piotr stood before the people. He saw the faces of women in headscarves, old men, children clinging to their mothers, young people standing in the back. He was supposed to speak about God, hope, faith, perhaps about the value of holding on. He opened his mouth and suddenly felt that he could go no further. The words lodged in his throat. There was nothing lofty about it. There was silence, the sound of his own breathing, people's eyes, and the old humiliation returning with all its force.

Then he understood that he could not be a priest. Not merely because he had a speech impediment. That obstacle was visible and easy to name, but beneath it lay something deeper. The priesthood required a willingness to speak in public, to accept responsibility through words spoken before others, to remain present beside another person's suffering without fleeing. Piotr was not ready for that.

After that attempt, Uncle Kazik's words returned to him:
--- You will have a family.

Once they had sounded like one of his strange prophecies, half joke, half verdict. Now they sounded different. Not like a command, but like recognition. Piotr felt more and more clearly that he was not searching for a cassock. He was searching for a home.

He thought of his mother and knew he would disappoint her again. Jadwiga would probably have preferred a priest for a son: secure in his role, devoted to God, raised somewhat above ordinary family failures. But Piotr could no longer pretend that his desire for a family was merely weakness or temptation. It was too strong within him.

His thoughts returned to the "Chronicle," to surnames, to Lithuania, to Kazik, to the stories that died along with people. He understood more and more clearly that memory would not survive on its own. It had to pass through children, through a home, through someone who would one day ask: "Who were they?"

Then, for the first time, he formed a simple and resolute sentence within himself:
"I must find a woman who will be the mother of my children."

It did not sound romantic. It was more like the decision of a man who, after many escapes, was beginning to understand that he no longer wanted to disappear. He wanted to stay. He wanted someone to whom he could pass on the names, the stories, the pain, the laughter, the shame, and everything that until then had dissolved into silence.

On the way back from Bykivka, he imagined a table. His wife beside it. Children. At first faceless, like shadows of the future, then gradually more distinct. Among them, Rozalka and Stanisław—names carrying something of the family's continuity. He did not know whether it would truly happen that way. He did not even know whether he would find a woman willing to walk that road with him.

But for the first time in a long while, the future was not shaped like an escape. It was shaped like a home.

Now he had to live.

After returning from Bykivka, Piotr did not immediately become a calm man. His decision not to enter the priesthood closed one road, but did not yet open another. Poland was changing faster than he was. The old underground circles were losing confidence that they could still bring about a political breakthrough on their own terms. Among the people of "Piast," faith in revolution was fading, while life increasingly forced a choice between grand slogans and ordinary daily existence.

At the same time, Piotr once again threw himself into the activities of the Confederation of Independent Poland. After years underground and contacts that existed in a legal gray area, the work was now open, but no simpler. Clandestine hiding places, passwords, and codes gave way to meetings, resolutions, local disputes, posters, office hours, and conversations with people who only recently had been afraid to say aloud what they thought.

Piotr did not leave politics. Rather, he saw with increasing clarity that politics itself was changing form. In the past, one had to carry a package, receive a message, or remain silent under interrogation. Now one had to speak, write, persuade, explain, and argue with people who understood freedom in entirely different ways.

His activity in the KPN gave him contacts, subjects to write about, and a sharper language than the one used in ordinary work. It also taught him that local matters were not trivial. In a town, politics had specific faces, names, apartments, offices, and grievances voiced in hallways or outside a store.

From those experiences, another possibility arose naturally: a local newspaper.

The weekly To i Owo Legionowo was looking for people who could write, walk the streets, talk to residents, and bring back stories. Piotr first went there partly out of curiosity, partly because he needed money, and partly because journalism offered the appearance of motion. He could enter someone's life for an hour, ask questions, take notes, leave, and go somewhere else the next day.

Two weeks after his first contact with the paper, the editors began giving him regular assignments. Before long, he became a full-time reporter. He wrote about local politics, public complaints, disputes, events, and matters that in a small town sometimes grew into major dramas.

During that same period, in the summer of 1990, Piotr became more deeply involved for the first time in the reactivated "Strzelec" Riflemen's Association. The uniform, commands, drills, and clear hierarchy gave him something he lacked elsewhere: order. In "Strzelec," there was no need to analyze his inner state endlessly. There was a task to carry out.

Word of maneuvers organized by the Warsaw district came quickly. Piotr reported to the Association's headquarters on Nowy Świat. About twenty young men gathered in the room. Some wore parts of a uniform, others ordinary clothes, and all were waiting for the appointed commander. He did not appear.

After several phone calls and consultations, someone pointed to Piotr. He was to lead the unit. There was no time to wonder whether he was suited to it. The envelopes containing the orders were opened. The mission was to march from central Warsaw to the Sulejówek area while avoiding a pursuit group.

They set out. The city fell behind them, followed by darker roads and forest. At one point, one of the riflemen suffered a serious injury. Turning the entire unit back would mean the end of the mission; leaving the injured man behind was out of the question. Piotr decided quickly.
--- We're going out to the road. We'll block traffic. We'll stop the first car and send him to the hospital.
They positioned themselves in the roadway. An approaching driver slowed when he saw a group of young men in uniform ahead of him. The commander walked up to the car.
--- We have an injured man. He needs to be taken to the hospital.

It was not a request, though it did not quite sound like a threat either. The driver agreed. They put the injured man into the car, and the rest continued on.

They reached the checkpoint in Sulejówek exhausted but nearly at full strength, minus only the injured man they had sent to the hospital. They did not rest for long. News soon came of the opponent's movements, and they had to reach the railroad station quickly. The situation there looked bad: too much light, too many people, too many eyes.

Piotr proposed a simple plan. One of the less recognizable riflemen would walk normally onto the platform, board the train, and open a door on the far side of the car. The others waited in the shadows. When the train stopped, the door did indeed open. The riflemen leaped inside and lay down on the floor.

The passengers fell silent. For a moment, even the conductor did not know what to say. He did not ask for tickets. The train pulled away, and the unit slipped out of the encirclement in a manner more theatrical than anyone had planned.

Their next order sent them toward the Kampinos Forest. On the way, encouraged by their success, they invented an additional mission: penetrate the guarded airfield at Bemowo, touch the aircraft parked there, and leave without being detected. The idea was risky and unnecessary, but it contained everything that appealed to the young riflemen: courage, bravado, and a touch of audacity.

At night, they slipped across the airfield. They touched the aircraft fuselages as if confirming that the mission had been completed, then withdrew without raising an alarm. From there they continued through Kiełpin toward Kampinos.

When they reached the assembly point, they were dirty, exhausted, and pleased with themselves. They had completed the mission, and the story of the injured man, the train, and the airfield quickly took on a life of its own. For Piotr, however, something else mattered more. For the first time in a long while, he had been in a situation where others waited for his decision—and the decision did not dissolve into hesitation. The praise and first promotions were merely outward signs of something he felt more deeply: in action, he could be someone other than a man uncertain of his own voice.

Beginning in September 1990, Piotr also worked at Preschool No. 12, not far from home. It soon became clear that a male preschool teacher was almost an exotic phenomenon—people even said he was only the second such teacher in the entire province.

The children accepted him more quickly than the adults did. To them, neither his past nor his political involvement nor the fact that he had come from an entirely different world was a problem. He played with them, told stories, organized activities, and knew how to be both firm and approachable. The children gravitated toward him, and their parents viewed it warmly.

Some members of the staff were less enthusiastic about his popularity. Piotr was an outsider in an almost exclusively female environment—too distinctive, too political, too easily able to win the children's attention. He could not pretend he failed to see it, but neither did he know how to defend himself against it.

In 1991, Piotr began building "Strzelec" structures in Legionowo. It still bore little resemblance to a regular military organization. There was enthusiasm, a few uniforms, some equipment, a great deal of improvisation, and the conviction that young people needed something more than the courtyard, school, and television.

In time, a company was formed: two rifle platoons and a junior cadet platoon for the youngest members, those under twelve. The children took it with complete seriousness. A wooden rifle was a rifle, a command was a command, and formation was formation. Piotr saw something more than play in it. They were learning responsibility, discipline, and cooperation—the very things he had sought for so long.

Andrzej Kicman, then mayor of Legionowo, helped them. He placed premises at their disposal on the corner of Jagiellońska Street and 3 Maja Avenue. A children's goods store called "Bąbel" had previously occupied the space, and the name clung to it for a long time, even after toys were replaced by uniforms, maps, belts, backpacks, and the voices of boys reporting for formation.

After his work at the preschool ended, he moved to an elementary school in Tarchomin, but he did not find a lasting place there either. He understood more and more clearly that without a university degree he would keep running into walls: sometimes bureaucratic, sometimes social, sometimes simply financial.

In December 1991 came word of Kazimierz Kiliś's death. Uncle Kazik, the last man who knew the family stories not secondhand but from his own life, had been found dead on his farm. He was lying in one of the outbuildings. No one knew exactly when he had died.

He had lived alone for a long time. Practically the only person who looked in on him was Helena, his foster daughter. Piotr knew that old age in Szczypiorno bore no resemblance to gentle pictures. It was cold and uncomfortable, dependent on fuel, health, neighbors, and whether someone knocked on the door in time.

Shortly before his death, Kazimierz had made one more visit to Legionowo. He sat at the table with Jadwiga and, after a moment of silence, said:
--- I would come live with you...
Jadwiga did not refuse him.
--- Uncle, I would be very glad to have you. But you must ask Helena. If she agrees, you are welcome here.

Did he ask? Did he have time? Did he truly want to move, or was he only checking one last time whether there was still somewhere he could go? Piotr never found out.

What hurt most, however, was something else. The stories were dying with his uncle. What Piotr had managed to hear was only part of a larger whole. Kazimierz had, after all, promised him the "Book"—a mysterious bundle kept as though it were too important to be shown casually. Piotr imagined that one day they would sit down together at the table, spread out the old papers, and his uncle would begin explaining the names, places, dates, and signs that no one else understood anymore.

That day never came.

After Kazimierz's death, the "Book" was not found. It vanished the way things vanish in families that postpone a conversation for too long: someone moves something, someone burns it, someone decides it is useless, someone hides it in a place even they later forget. Perhaps it happened differently. Perhaps it lay somewhere for years. For Piotr, the result was the same.

He lost his uncle, but he also lost his last certainty that a straight road still led into the family's past. From then on, only fragments remained: other people's memories, names on gravestones, unfinished sentences, chance encounters, and questions asked too late.

Meanwhile, at the school in Tarchomin, he grew increasingly convinced that he had to state the matter plainly:
--- Either you recommend me for university studies, or I'm leaving.

There was nothing theatrical in the gesture. It was the frustration of a man who once again saw that commitment alone was not enough. The administration had no intention of taking on any additional obligation. Piotr left.

While he was still working for To i Owo, before his first trip to the Balkans, one assignment took him to a woman who practiced bioenergy healing. Piotr went there in a skeptical frame of mind. It irritated him that gravely ill people paid for a promise of help that no one could honestly measure. The interview was intended as a journalistic piece, perhaps even an exposé.

After the interview, the woman asked him to stay for another moment.
--- Let me see your hand.

He held it out more from politeness than conviction. She passed her hand over it, moved a pendulum, and studied him carefully.
--- You have power too --- she said at last. --- A great deal of power. You should heal people.

Piotr did not know whether to take it seriously or shrug it off. The sentence nevertheless stayed with him. He had already been interested in hypnosis, and in Bykivka he had even seen that suggestion and trust alone could sometimes produce an effect. At that time, however, he did not begin any formal training. The newspaper, politics, and "Strzelec" filled his time, and events would soon carry him much farther away.

The action in which the Legionowo "Strzelec" unit was used not for an exercise but in a real confrontation also belongs to that period, whose exact date can no longer be established. The Confederation of Independent Poland wanted to recover rooms in its headquarters on Nowy Świat. The ground floor of the Branicki building was occupied by Andrzej Lepper's Samoobrona movement. From the KPN's perspective, they were unwanted tenants who paid no rent and had no intention of leaving.

Sergeant Marek Albiniak came from headquarters to Legionowo. During a training session, he drew Piotr aside.
--- Mr. Korycki, can you come to Nowy Świat tomorrow? Perhaps you can find two more riflemen to help.
Piotr looked at him more closely. His tone suggested that this was not merely a matter of moving furniture.
--- Is something going to happen?
--- Tomorrow the building at General Headquarters will have to be secured.
--- I'll provide a platoon.
Albiniak smiled in disbelief.
--- Impossible on such short notice.
--- Impossible? --- Piotr repeated.
--- All right. But remember: you are not taking part in clearing the rooms themselves. Once the right people have done their job, you secure the entrances and windows. Nothing more.
--- How long are we going for?
--- I think the whole day.
--- We'll be ready.

After Albiniak left, Piotr interrupted the training session.
--- Form two ranks, facing me—fall in!
The riflemen formed up quickly.
--- That's all for today. Tomorrow there will be an emergency muster for those selected. Notification will go through the established channels. This will be a test of readiness and training. Tell your parents the exercises may last as long as two days. Bring sandwiches and water. Dismissed!

An hour later, the orders went out by CB radio to the platoon commanders. Of the eleven summoned, nine appeared at the bus terminal. They carried backpacks, food, water, and the particular expression of young men who did not yet know whether they were heading toward an adventure or trouble.

When they reached Nowy Świat, a brawl was already underway inside the building. They heard firecrackers exploding, shots from gas pistols, shouting, and the pounding of people running down the stairs. Men were jumping from the ground-floor windows; someone was yelling, someone cursing, someone trying to force a way through the crowd. The riflemen stood to the side, in accordance with their orders. They were not to take part in removing the occupants.

Only after the main commotion subsided did the order come:
--- Secure the entrances and the ground-floor windows!

Then they moved. Furniture was piled against the doors, and guards were posted at the windows. One window in particular mattered: the restroom window, set high, almost at the level of the first floor. It was difficult to reach from outside, but for that very reason it could serve as an emergency route. Piotr posted a rifleman there with a handheld radio.

Inside, the building quickly became a fortress. Men moved through the corridors carrying gas pistols, clubs, metal pipes, wooden cudgels studded with nails; someone even had an old saber inherited from his grandfather. Bottles of gasoline stood on the windowsills. Teenaged riflemen who had recently been drilling in Legionowo suddenly found themselves in the middle of a political confrontation that looked less and less like an exercise.

The action did not end after one day. The parents had to be told that the "exercises" would last longer. People associated with the other side began gathering outside the building: shaven-headed men, men with mohawks, heavy boots, clubs, and chains. They stood outside shouting threats and sometimes tried to move closer. Police officers in a Nysa van parked nearby observed everything without haste.

One day Piotr received an order:
--- A Silesian platoon of "Strzelec" has to be met at Central Station. They're coming as reinforcements and don't know Warsaw. Go pick them up.

He went. He waited a long time on the platform because the train from Katowice was late. He stood there in uniform, with a sergeant's insignia and a weapon at his belt. Two police officers patrolling the station noticed him immediately.
--- Who is that, and what are we supposed to do about him? --- he heard behind him.
--- I don't know. Better leave him alone.

They walked away. Piotr continued waiting, trying to look as though the presence of an armed man in uniform on a platform at Warsaw Central Station were perfectly ordinary.

When the train finally arrived, only five young men got off. Their commander approached and made a regulation report:
--- Sergeant, Corporal Fiutek reporting with a squad.

They headed toward Nowy Świat. Outside the building, they found that the main entrance was being watched. Piotr decided to go around the back.
--- They're covering the front. We have a window in back. Follow me.

The rifleman on duty at the restroom window understood the plan and lowered a rope. The Silesians climbed up one by one. When Piotr's turn came, a shout sounded from around the corner. They had been spotted.

He knew he was in no shape for such feats. He seized the rope with almost no belief that he would make it in time. Someone above pulled; someone helped him over the sill. A moment later, he was sitting on the restroom floor, breathing hard. Outside the window came the voices of those who had arrived too late.

He did not know how he had managed to get inside. He knew only that he had.

The siege ended on the fourth day. Before the Legionowo unit was withdrawn, Piotr was summoned to the Commandant General's office. Leszek Moczulski received him briefly and without ceremony, but with unmistakable approval.
--- The Chief of Staff has signed your promotion to lieutenant --- he said.

To Piotr, it sounded almost unreal. He remembered returning from Bykivka convinced that he was incapable of speaking publicly. Now he was being promoted for commanding people in a situation where there had been fewer words than decisions. It did not solve his life, but it confirmed something he was beginning to see ever more clearly: when action was required, he could keep from running away.

After the action on Nowy Świat, the uniform ceased to be merely a symbol of drills, discipline, and a youthful organization. It now represented the experience of acting in a situation where one had to decide quickly, accept responsibility for others, and move forward without looking back. Still, this was Poland—not a front line.

In the spring of 1992, war was raging in the Balkans. Until his departure, Piotr had worked for To i Owo while continuing his activity in the Riflemen's Association. Volunteers were leaving Poland to stand with the Croats who had been attacked. Among them were people associated with "Strzelec." Piotr, by then a lieutenant in the Association, learned that several Poles had fallen into Serbian captivity and that a group was being organized in Poland to try to free them. According to the information being passed along, the Croats of Herzeg-Bosnia approved the plan and promised support: a vehicle, a guide, and weapons.

Piotr had only a dozen or so days of military training from the period of martial law and his experience in "Strzelec" exercises. None of it made him a soldier of war. And yet he did not hesitate long. He volunteered with the others.

They reached Zagreb by train. From there they traveled by bus, deeper and deeper into a country where an ordinary map was no longer enough. Someone led them across to the Bosnian side; someone else directed them to the next contact. At last they reached a place where a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a driver, a guide, and several soldiers were in fact waiting. None of them was Croatian. Except for one Austrian, they were Slavs from Slovakia and the Czech lands—men whom war had drawn from different parts of Europe and placed side by side in a situation where trust had to be built faster than knowledge of one another's language.

The operation to free the Poles succeeded. It was brief and tense, more real than all their previous exercises combined. Only during the retreat came a price no one could have foreseen. The guide was sitting in the open rear bed of the jeep. Suddenly he bent forward and whispered:
--- I heard it.

Perhaps he meant the soldier's belief that a man never hears the bullet that kills him. He had heard his. No one else heard anything. It was probably a sniper's shot. He collapsed onto the floor of the vehicle before anyone could react.

The Poles returned home. All except the young lieutenant. Piotr decided to stay.

He reached the area around the Croatian town of Metković, where he was directed to a makeshift recruiting station. An Italian woman in military uniform sat inside. She looked at his Polish insignia and called out in Italian:
--- Oh! Capitano!

To her, a lieutenant was a captain. And so Korycki was promoted before he even reached the front—a strange, shifting front that was never fully marked anywhere. The misunderstanding nevertheless had practical consequences. A small detachment, proudly called a platoon, was placed under his command, and he was sent to a mountainous area northeast of Metković. The order was simple: hold the position.

The unit's composition was as accidental as the war itself. It included volunteers from Herzeg-Bosnia, Croats from Bosnia, and men from neighboring countries, mostly Slavic ones, each with his own story, his own reason for coming, and his own way of taming fear. After several days, they were sent a decrepit tank as artillery support. It looked more like a remnant of a vanished army than a guarantee of safety, but on that front even such a remnant meant a great deal.

Among the soldiers was Dajana, a Croatian woman who often sang the Polish song "Złoty Pierścionek" ("Golden Ring"). At first they spoke about the war, the positions, the shelling, where one could go and where it was better not to raise one's head. Then more and more often they also spoke about life. Time moved differently in war. What would ordinarily take months happened there in a matter of days. Intimacy arose not from mood, but from the knowledge that the next morning might never come.

Dajana did not live to see peace.

The enemy fired on them from a distance, including with artillery. The fire was not always accurate, but it was accurate enough for everyone to know the danger was real. Returning fire with the tank was difficult because the shots came from the direction of a village. Striking the buildings could mean killing civilians. They had to try another way.
--- I need volunteers --- Piotr announced.

The plan was to approach the enemy on its own ground and eliminate the position from which the fire was coming. Volunteers came forward. Dajana was among them.

A few minutes before departure, the soldiers witnessed a scene that under other circumstances might have seemed impossible. There was no priest, no church, no witnesses in their Sunday best. There was war, weapons, haste, and the will of two people who did not want to wait for a world that might never return.

--- I take you, Dajana, to be my wife...

The words were spoken softly, but clearly enough to be remembered. In extraordinary circumstances, the Church permits such a form of marriage. There, between one order and the next, in the shadow of possible death, that truth ceased to be a legal formula. It became a final act of hope.

The volunteers did not return.

When weapons barked again in the distance, Piotr shouted to the tank crewman:
--- Keep firing until they go silent!

The enemy fell silent after three rounds.

The experience marked him more deeply than he later wanted to admit. There was nothing in it of the romantic legend of war. There was fear, chance, the death of the man sitting beside him, and the disappearance of those who only moments earlier had been talking, singing, joking, or marrying without a church because there was no time to wait for normal life.

--- This isn't for me --- he finally told himself.

He took off the uniform. He put his suit back on and made his way to Split on the Adriatic. From there he crossed to Italy by ferry and then returned to Poland. The ferry journey itself had something unreal about it. The ship was blacked out for fear of Serbian shelling, while below deck the television lounge was packed. Santa Barbara was on. People stared at the screen as if the fictional sufferings of characters in an American soap opera could, for a moment, conceal the real war from which they were sailing away.

Piotr had had enough.

After returning to Poland, Piotr did not go back to the newspaper. At least not for a time. He soon devoted himself again to "Strzelec." Andrzej Kicman supported preparations for a summer camp, and in the summer of 1992 tents went up in the forests around Szczypiorno. Fourteen people came from Legionowo and two from Warsaw. For Piotr, it was a return to a familiar place, but in a different role. He did not come as a child listening to the stories of his elders, nor as a son entangled in family expectations. He came as the commander.

The days had their own rhythm. Reveille, formation, drill, map-reading classes, gas masks, digging trenches, exercises in the forest, survival training, some fencing and hand-to-hand combat. Adam Korycki helped with the cooking on a nearby plot of land, but the riflemen also built their own fires, watched the pots, and learned that camp life consisted not only of orders, but also of peeling potatoes, washing mess kits, and carrying water.

One afternoon, while Piotr was preparing dinner, one of the riflemen ran in with a report:
--- Commander, the police are here!

Piotr left the cooking to his father and went to the edge of the camp. A police car stood beside a makeshift barrier made from a birch trunk. Facing it were two teenage sentries with wooden rifles and gleaming bayonets. Their order was simple: let no one in. They carried it out with the solemnity of men defending a fortress.

The officers had come in response to a complaint from a neighboring summer camp. According to the complainants, the riflemen had attacked one of the campers.
--- I know what happened --- Piotr said. --- For three nights, someone threw stones at our tents. Yesterday I posted lookouts. They spotted two boys hanging around the camp again and went after them. They didn't catch them because the boys climbed the fence and escaped back into their camp.

The officers listened to the explanation, drove over to the other camp, and apparently the conversation there was enough. No more stones were thrown.

On another occasion, the unit was assigned to cross the Wkra River. They were to wade through the water in full uniform and surprise an opposing force positioned in a forest clearing. The attack succeeded. Their wet uniforms weighed them down and water sloshed in their boots, but everyone was pleased.

On the way back, after they had crossed the river again, an order rang out:
--- Down!
The riflemen threw themselves onto the sand.
--- Crawl to the top—move!

A bluff several yards high rose before them. In soaked uniforms, coated with sand, they began climbing, yard by yard, until they reached the pine trees. Only there were they allowed to stand. They were breathing heavily, but no one complained. Such moments remained in the memory most vividly, because play ended there and the experience of truly shared exertion began.

After two weeks, they returned to Legionowo different from the people who had arrived. Dirtier, more tired, more confident. Piotr returned with the feeling that Szczypiorno had given him something again. Not the house that had never been built, not the "Book" that had never been found, but a place where he had been able to gather people and lead them through a trial.

During the 1992–1993 school year, Piotr worked as a religion teacher in two military preschools in Legionowo. It seemed that the job might unite several strands of his experience: religion, work with children, and his need for order and discipline. It soon became clear, however, that small children could not be handled like a military unit, or even like older students.

Piotr expected study and knowledge. He treated religious instruction seriously—perhaps too seriously for the children's age. When not everyone received the highest grade on their report cards, parents began to complain. To them, preschool religion classes were supposed to confirm that a child was well behaved, not genuinely test what the child had learned.

Piotr understood that he would not remain there long either. He did not apply for the job the following school year. Another path had proved to be only a passage.

In 1993, the subject of a wedding returned to the Korycki home, though at first it concerned no one in the immediate family. The family was invited to Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki for the wedding of Izabela Zawłocka, Jadwiga Kamińska's granddaughter, who was marrying Piotr Bożek. The ceremony took place in the newly built Church of Saints Peter and Paul.

Almost everyone went. Piotr had to remain in Legionowo because of his responsibilities in the Riflemen's Association. He could not have known that from the wedding he did not attend, a matter would return home that would soon alter the arrangement of the entire family.

Urszula returned captivated by Tadeusz, the groom's brother. The relationship began abruptly, as though both of them had skipped the stage of cautious discovery. Their feelings grew quickly, along with emotion, impatience, and tension. By summer, it was clear that everything was moving toward another wedding—this time Urszula and Tadeusz's.

In August, Piotr gave his sister his larger room so that she and her husband would have somewhere to live after the wedding. He moved into her room himself. He kept only its furnishings, because Urszula had received new furniture when she moved to Legionowo, while he had spent years using whatever had been assigned to him. He made no issue of it. In the family, he had long been accustomed to shifting wherever space happened to remain.

The wedding took place on September 25, 1993. A small, alcohol-free reception was held at the local Garrison Club. Everything had the appearance of a modest, peaceful beginning: the newlyweds, the family table, good wishes, and the hope that life would now become simpler.

It soon became clear, however, that marriage did not solve the problems people brought into it with them. Tadeusz had a problem with alcohol. Urszula believed that a new home, responsibility, and her presence would be enough to draw him away from it. They were not. Pleas, threats, and quarrels returned like the same badly closed chapter.

After several months, Piotr asked his sister cautiously:
--- Perhaps you could suggest hypnosis to him? I know Professor Szulc, who has had considerable success treating addictions.

Urszula agreed to try. She persuaded Tadeusz as well. After several sessions, he stopped drinking. It was not a short-lived effort or a promise kept for only a few weeks. Years passed, then decades, and Tadeusz never returned to the addiction.

Before long, another matter absorbed the entire family: Urszula was expecting a child. Preparations, purchases, conversations, appointments, and the ordinary commotion of a household awaiting someone new all began.

Tadeusz, quiet, shy, and reserved by nature, readily sought support from his brother-in-law in important matters. The childbirth classes were no exception. The three of them went to the first session together: Urszula, Tadeusz, and Piotr. The situation looked so unusual that the couples present joked that the expectant mother apparently did not know who the father was and had brought two candidates just in case. They did not know that one of the men was her own brother.

On the way to the class, Urszula, already pregnant, blithely played on equipment in a Warsaw playground. Piotr watched with amusement, but also with the sudden feeling that an old image had returned. He remembered a scene beside the little lake at Kosewo: the pregnant Marianna calling to Łukasz to run with her. In the family, certain gestures returned years later in different people, as though memory itself were searching for a way to be remembered.

Cezary was born on August 23, 1994, at the hospital on Karowa Street in Warsaw. The old agreement between Piotr and Urszula about raising her first child had, after all, been made not so long before. Yet when the child truly entered the world, no one thought of it anymore. It seemed to belong to another time—a strange, unserious trace of old tensions, loneliness, and dreams that neither of them had yet known how to name.

That did not mean Piotr distanced himself from his nephew. Quite the opposite. He gave the boy his whole heart. He fed him, changed him, bathed him, and put him to sleep. It quickly became clear in the household that he could be relied upon with the baby. Grandfather Adam was usually sent out with the stroller, but Piotr was present in the child's daily care from the beginning.

On September 25, 1994, he became Cezary's godfather. Being with the child felt natural, as though he had long been waiting for precisely this kind of love: ordinary, physical, demanding presence, patience, and hands ready for work. He could love him almost as his own, carry him, hold him close, soothe his crying, and watch a small child draw an entire household around himself.

And yet the boundary was clear. Cezary was his beloved nephew, not his son. The closeness did not weaken Piotr's desire for a child of his own. On the contrary, it made that desire even more concrete. It was no longer only about extending the family memory, about the "Chronicle," the names, and the stories that had to be passed on. It was about a child one lifted into one's arms, a child who had to be fed, changed, bathed, and for whom one was truly responsible.

The year 1995 remained less orderly in Piotr's memory. He was certain of the most important events, though not always of their exact sequence. Three years after his first journey, he returned to the Balkans. Dajana's sister had contacted him, suggesting that the young woman who disappeared during the operation might have survived. Even such uncertain news could not be ignored. He went back once more. The hope proved false. On the contrary, he found traces indicating that Dajana had died. He never told her sister directly. He did not want to extinguish her last light, especially since he had no proof that gave him the right to speak a final word.

Through a chain of circumstances, he again found himself in the middle of the war. Once more in uniform, in the region of Livno Field, he faced the forces of Republika Srpska. He returned home safely and with another promotion. Years later, the Croatian authorities honored foreign volunteers with state decorations. Piotr was among them.

None of that changed what mattered most. The Balkans left a mark on him that could not be covered by a promotion, a medal, or a later story. War finally stripped him of the illusion that a uniform could answer the chaos within him. He could command, he could act, he could remain when the moment of trial came. But by then he knew that this was not what he sought. Not a front line. Not death. Not another adventure that, when it ended, left only silence inside a man.

He was searching for a home.

The same period also brought him back to the words of the bioenergy healer he had met while working for To i Owo. Years later, Piotr could no longer determine with certainty whether he decided to begin his training before his second trip to the Balkans or only after returning. The one certain fact was that considerable time had passed between that interview and his first course.

With support from his godmother and funding from the employment office, he finally enrolled in a bioenergy therapy course offered by the Polish Association of Bioenergy Therapists, "Biopol." He entered a world in which bioenergy therapists, herbalists, dowsers, massage therapists, hypnotists, clairvoyants, and people who described themselves in even stranger ways all operated side by side. Some seemed like serious practitioners; others resembled characters from a carnival tale. Piotr absorbed everything, though he did not accept all of it without reservation.

In time, he was also invited to a Rosicrucian recruitment meeting. He went to Warsaw's Old Town with a mixture of curiosity and caution. The room was ordinary: a desk, two chairs, a calm woman seated across from him. The conversation remained courteous until the question of reincarnation arose.
--- I am a Catholic. I do not believe in reincarnation --- Piotr replied.

The courtesy remained after that sentence, but the conversation was essentially over. The secret world did not open its doors to him.

That did not discourage him. After earning his certificate in bioenergy therapy, he completed a massage course, then a program in herbal medicine affiliated with the Medical Academy. He also met a hypnotherapist and author who introduced him more deeply to the use of suggestion. He read about electroacupuncture, herbs, massage, hypnosis, and anything that might become a profession or at least a way of helping people.

There was something chaotic in the search, but it was not random. Piotr no longer wanted merely to tell other people's stories or move from one institution to another. He wanted a concrete skill in his hands—something with which he could enter an office, bend over another person, and do something that brought relief.

Armed with knowledge and certificates, he set out to find another job. After the courses and diplomas came the ordinary test: he had to find a place where someone would let him actually work with people. The certificates looked good in a folder, but they did not yet provide an office, patients, or money.

A meeting with Dr. Danuta Kulesza, an anesthesiologist from Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, helped. She ran a natural-medicine practice at the "Zielarnia pod Dębami" herbal shop and was one of those people who combined medical training with openness to methods viewed skeptically by conventional medicine. That mattered to Piotr. He was not entering a carnival booth with a pendulum, but a place where herbs, massage, and homeopathy existed alongside someone with a medical degree.

Dr. Kulesza hired him as a bioenergy therapist, massage therapist, and hypnotherapist. It sounded unusual, but after all his previous turns it had one enormous advantage: it was concrete. A patient came in, sat down or lay on the table, explained what was wrong, and Piotr had to do something—listen, touch, massage, calm the person, guide a suggestion, or sometimes simply be, for a moment, someone who did not dismiss suffering with a wave of the hand.

He rode his bicycle from Legionowo to Nowy Dwór. It was more than twelve miles each way. The road was not always comfortable and the weather not always kind, but there was something cleansing in the daily exertion. In the morning he pedaled to work; in the evening he returned tired, his legs aching, sometimes his head filled with other people's stories.

In time, he began to think that perhaps this was what his life would look like: some politics, some work with people, travel between Legionowo and Nowy Dwór, the gradual building of a place of his own. It was not yet stability, but at least it was no longer flight.

Yet the most important thought returned stubbornly: home. Not an abstraction, not the house in Szczypiorno that had never been built, and not the monastic order he had chosen against. A home with a woman and children. Since Bykivka, that desire had not weakened. On the contrary, it had increasingly become the measure of everything he did. Work, money, the office, the miles by bicycle—all of it made sense only if it led toward a life he could share with someone.

--- Piotr, telephone for you! --- Mrs. Marzena from the herbal shop called, pulling him away from a conversation with a patient. Piotr apologized and picked up the receiver.
--- Hello...
--- Hi, do you remember what time we're supposed to be at the Zawadzkis' name-day party? --- It was Wiesiek, a friend from elementary school with whom he always visited their mutual friends.
--- Good thing you called. I would have forgotten. Seven, as always. God, I have to get away from work! But remember the giraffes.

Wiesiek understood. The reference to long-necked animals told him that a stranger could hear their conversation. He said nothing more.

He had no more patients that evening, so he wrapped things up early and headed for Legionowo. At the Zawadzkis', everything usually followed a familiar pattern: the same hour, similar dishes, the same faces, jokes repeated for years, and the atmosphere of people who had known one another so long that nothing needed to be explained.

Ewa Zawadzka greeted them, as always, with a firm handshake. The women from "Piast" often possessed that kind of directness: partly comradely, partly conspiratorial, and a little too hard-edged for an ordinary social gathering. In Ewa, it was combined with temperament. She nudged one person, threw a sharper joke at another, embraced someone, reminded someone else of an old offense. She was in her element.

Her husband sat off to the side, partly hidden behind a fern, a book in his hand. He looked like a man who had long ago understood that at these gatherings it was better not to compete with his wife's force of nature.

At one point Ewa indicated a young woman standing slightly apart.
--- Wiesiek, Piotr, meet Danka. And don't ask anything more.

That last sentence was recommendation enough. It meant: one of ours, from "Piast," from the old affairs, from the circle in which certain questions were not asked immediately.

Danka was tall, slender, and a little shy, though she tried to hide it. There was something contradictory about her. On the one hand, she had an easy, almost boyish manner; on the other, a delicacy and uncertainty showed through beneath her jokes. Every so often she would say something sharp, then quickly add:
--- I was joking.

Piotr noticed her almost immediately. Not because she behaved dramatically. Quite the opposite: she stood slightly outside the main current of the gathering, like someone who wanted to be present yet was prepared to withdraw at any moment. That mixture drew him more strongly than self-confidence would have.

They began to talk. At first, casually, at the table amid other voices. Then more and more often off to the side. Danka did not make matters easy. One moment she answered warmly, the next she escaped into a joke, and then she suddenly closed herself off, as though frightened by what she had just said.

Over the next several days, they met a few times. The gossip began immediately. In that circle, nothing remained private for long. Urszula asked directly about "that girl," friends winked knowingly, someone insinuated something. Piotr brushed them off with half-answers, but he himself felt that the matter was more serious than he wanted to admit.

He knew how to talk to the women from "Piast." He knew their language, jokes, shorthand, and political allusions. But a woman he might imagine as a wife was something different. Friendly teasing and a shared organizational past were not enough here. Every word could mean too much or too little.

One day, when the ordinary question arose of what they should do next, Piotr suggested:
--- Maybe we could go to my family's plot? We'll build a fire, cook something, and talk. We could stay until morning.

He said it cautiously, more to test the boundary than because he truly expected her to agree.
--- Yes, that's a good idea --- Danka replied.

She surprised him.

They reached Szczypiorno at dusk. The summer night was warm but not oppressive. They built a fire, roasted sausage, and talked at length about things both important and utterly unimportant. In such conversations, it is easiest to pretend that nothing is being decided, even though both people know that something is being tested.

After midnight, it grew cooler. The fire burned low, and the conversation broke off more and more often, as though both of them were waiting for the other to name what had been hanging between them for some time. Danka rose from the stump and looked toward the cottage.
--- Shall we go inside?
--- We can, but first I'll put out the fire --- Piotr replied.

He said it calmly, perhaps too calmly. He understood what her question meant. He had no doubt. This was no longer an innocent suggestion that they take shelter from the cold. Danka was ready to go further, or perhaps only at that moment discovered that she was ready.

There were two beds in the cottage. Danka sat on one of them, then half reclined, keeping the conversation going with ordinary sentences that were no longer ordinary. Piotr felt her nearness, her expectation, and the tension growing with every moment of silence.

He was not indifferent. On the contrary, that was precisely why he did not want to take a step whose consequences he could not later bear honestly. Since Bykivka, he had carried within him the decision to have a wife, children, and a home. If Danka was to become someone important, he did not want to begin with a gesture that might shame or hurt both of them the next day. If she was not to become someone important, then all the more he had no right to take from her something that, according to his own conscience, belonged within marriage.

For a while they sat close to one another, yet separated by everything Piotr had failed to say. Perhaps he should have said: "I'm serious about you." Perhaps he should have taken her hand and called his restraint concern rather than coldness. He did not. He remained silent, believing that honesty would defend itself.

It did not.

Danka suddenly rose from the couch.
--- You know, I have to go now.

She said it quickly, almost harshly, as though she wanted to cut off a situation that had slipped beyond her control. Piotr saw embarrassment in her face, perhaps resentment, perhaps fear of the readiness she had felt only minutes before. Or perhaps all of them at once.
--- Are you staying, or should I drive you back to Legionowo? --- she asked.

He already knew that if he went with her, it would look like an attempt to repair something he had not known how to name earlier. If he stayed, he would let her leave convinced that he had rejected her. He chose the latter because it seemed less dishonest.
--- I think I'll stay --- he said.

Danka drove away. He remained alone in the cottage, amid the smell of smoke and the dying fire. Only then did he understand that his silence might have sounded different from what he intended. He had been thinking of seriousness; she might have heard refusal. He had wanted to preserve the possibility of something pure; she might have felt humiliated.

A few days later, a letter arrived. Danka wrote that it would be better if they did not see each other again. She offered little explanation. She did not need to. Piotr understood all too well that not only had nothing happened that night. Precisely because of that, something had ended.

The story with Danka did not close off Piotr's desire for a family. On the contrary, it taught him that honesty alone was not enough if he could not express it in time. A person could try not to hurt someone and hurt her for that very reason. A person could remain silent out of respect and be understood as indifferent.

Thus, when Anna appeared in his life, she was not merely another acquaintance or another attempt to escape loneliness. She met a man who, after many flights, knew more clearly what he was seeking.

Piotr kept the circumstances of their meeting to himself for the rest of his life. He did not want to surrender everything to other people's questions, especially since there was never any shortage of curious people. Something else mattered more: from their first meetings, he sensed that this time it was not a game of omissions, uncertain attempts, and guesses, but something more serious. Anna was not looking for a passing social adventure either. Both of them were already tired of postponing life.

She was not the woman from his old, naive visions of a quiet home behind a white fence. She was short and dark-haired, with a round face, and she walked with a pronounced limp in her left leg. She had lived with it for years, but that did not mean she had ceased to feel it. She had learned to recognize people's looks before they managed to say anything. Sometimes she answered them sharply, sometimes with a joke, and sometimes by withdrawing into herself.

She was not weak, however. Within a few months, she was to become a judge. She had opinions of her own, spoke directly, and was not someone who could easily be pushed aside. There was a great deal of pain in her uncertainty, but beneath that pain lay the strength of a person who had been forced to defend herself for too long.

Piotr did not come to her as someone settled and at peace either. Too many roads behind him had been cut short: the seminary, the underground, Bykivka, "Strzelec," one job after another, one attempt after another to begin again. He could not promise her a comfortable life or a secure future. He could promise something that, after years of wandering, had become ever more important to him: he no longer wanted to run away.

Their relationship was not easy. From the beginning, it carried the tension of two wounded, stubborn people longing for a home, though each understood differently what that home should be. There were clashes, disagreements, moments when it would have been easier to part and decide that this was not right after all. And yet they returned to one another. Not because everything fit, but because both sensed that real life rarely begins with a perfect match. More often, it begins with the decision that despite the differences, one stays.

In the summer of 1995, Piotr suggested that Anna spend several days with him in Szczypiorno. The place that had returned so many times in his life as a landscape of memory, family stories, lost plans, and an unfulfilled home was now to receive someone new. Not as an outsider or guest, but as the woman with whom Piotr was increasingly serious about building a future.

One day they walked through the village holding hands. To Piotr, the gesture was natural, perhaps even obvious. But Anna carried so many old humiliations within her that even such a gesture had to be tested.
--- Aren't you ashamed to walk with me like this, holding my hand? --- she asked suddenly.
--- Why would I be ashamed?
She hesitated, as though the next words cost her more than she wanted to show.
--- Well... with a lame woman like me...
Piotr answered at once. He had not composed the sentence in advance or prepared himself to make any declaration. Perhaps that was why it sounded so true.
--- Anna, this is how we're going to walk for the rest of our lives.

She stopped. In that ordinary sentence, she heard something that could no longer be taken back or turned into a joke.
--- Piotr... Do you want to marry me? Really?
He looked at her and felt that after years of blurred desires, escapes, and failed attempts, the answer could finally be simple.
--- And I hope it will be very soon.

They returned to the plot as different people. Only moments earlier, they had been walking down the road like two people still feeling out the boundary between friendship and engagement. Now they spoke of the wedding, the date, witnesses, and formalities. Christmas, family, guests—words that ordinarily required discussion began arranging themselves, as though they had long been waiting only to be spoken.

Piotr's father was not at the plot. He had mounted his bicycle and ridden off somewhere. They were alone. Then Anna began to cry. Not theatrically, not to force anything. She cried from the sudden release of everything she had been forced to hold inside for years: the fear that someone would be ashamed of her, that she would always have to ask whether she was allowed to walk beside him, that love—if it came at all—would prove to be pity or a passing emotion.

Piotr sat beside her, put his arms around her, stroked her hair, and wiped away her tears. He remembered the night with Danka and the silence that had been meant as honesty but had become incomprehensible. This time, he did not want to leave room for guesses. He did not pull away. He did not explain his feelings from a safe distance. He was simply there with her.

That did not mean everything suddenly became easy. It did not. Differences in temperament, fears, and difficult matters did not vanish because marriage had been mentioned. But for the first time in a long while, the future no longer had the shape of an escape: not abroad, not into another job, not into another attempt to begin from nothing. It had Anna's face as she wept beside him on the plot in Szczypiorno.

Piotr understood then that the road home did not lead to a place once promised by others. It led to the person beside whom one decided to stay.

And he stayed with her.

— End of Chapter XII —