Chapter XXII

The first months of the new century brought yet another move for the Korycki family. At the beginning of 2001, they once again packed books, children's clothes, dishes, and everything that over the course of several months had acquired the appearance of permanence. This time they were moving to 4 Wilanowska Street. For roughly the same amount of money, they managed to rent an apartment with one more room. In their circumstances, it was almost a promotion: a little more space for the children, less crowding, more room to breathe. They were still living in someone else's property, and every piece of furniture might one day have to be carried out the same way it had been carried in, but for the first time in a long while, the temporary nature of their life did not chafe every day.

Things also grew calmer between the two families. Adam and Jadwiga came to see the grandchildren, the Korycki family visited them, and the road to Janów Podlaski did not become overgrown with silence. The visits were frequent, and they took place without the violent reversals of the past. Once again, family life began to be defined by ordinary things: birthdays, holidays, visits, caring for the children, and trips taken together. Resentments and differences in character did not disappear, but they stopped tearing every day apart. Peace did not arrive in the form of some grand reconciliation. It quietly assembled itself out of small gestures and out of the fact that, for a time, no one tried to destroy what had only just begun to work.

The household finances remained the least peaceful part of their life. Małgorzata kept close watch over expenses and still often spoke of shortages, and there was no need to search for reasons to worry. Poland at the turn of the century was struggling with unemployment, steady work was difficult to find, and Piotr had no specialized education that would have opened a straightforward path to a salaried position. Besides, a regular job in Warsaw would not have solved every problem. Commuting costs had to be deducted from a modest wage, while Małgorzata's work meant that someone had to stay with the children. Most often, that someone was Piotr.

His days were therefore divided between home and journalism. He traveled to the Sejm or to one of the government institutions to gather material, conducted interviews, took notes, and returned as quickly as possible because the children were waiting at the apartment. Only then did he sit down to write. At the beginning of the century, sending a completed article to the newsroom was not yet a matter of simply pressing a key. The internet connection could break halfway through the transmission, every minute cost money, and the deadline for closing an issue had no intention of waiting for technology. Sometimes the article had to be dictated over the telephone. Piotr spoke, someone at the other end wrote it down, the children moved around the apartment, and the editor responsible for layout was probably glancing nervously at the clock.

The biweekly Dziś ceased publication without warning, leaving behind a computer, a printer, and yet another question about how the family was to live. His work with Nasz Dziennik lasted little more than a year. The reporter's limited availability may have determined its end, but Piotr suspected another reason as well. The newspaper sent him to the Subcarpathian region to report on the situation at one of the companies, a dispute in which a member of parliament was involved. Someone warned the journalist not to pursue a particular thread because a man connected with the matter allegedly had ties to Freemasons. Piotr disregarded the warning. He trusted the newspaper's principles and believed that if information was important, it should be published. The report never saw the light of day, and not long afterward he learned that his contract would not be renewed. He had no proof that one thing followed from the other. For the family budget, however, the reason made little difference.

The former structures of SGK "Piast" still formally existed. The political system had changed and there was no longer a need for clandestine activity, but the commander had not dissolved the organization or released anyone from the duty of secrecy. Friendships, memories, and occasional favors for friends abroad remained. In Poland, the former activists met once a year at their "parties." They ate, drank, sang old songs, returned to stories they did not have to explain to one another, and continued to dream of a better Poland. An unwritten rule applied: their shared past was not to be used to advance private interests.

Piotr broke that rule only when complaints about the lack of money began to be confirmed by unpaid bills. During one of the gatherings, he asked Wiesiek for help. Wiesiek worked for a company escorting shipments of valuables. The job was dangerous, especially for a man who had not taken part in such operations for years, but the daily rate was tempting. Piotr agreed. For a time, he once again rode as part of a security escort, returning to skills that were supposed to belong to a closed chapter of his life. The money he earned was enough to ease the strain at home for more than a month. Then everything returned to the usual counting.

A more lasting solution was already standing in the apartment: the computer and printer left over from the Dziś newsroom. The Koryckis decided to use them for work that did not require daily commuting or leaving the children without care. Piotr began writing bachelor's theses, master's theses, and sometimes even doctoral dissertations to order. He did not pretend to himself that this was honest work with respect to the universities or the people earning their degrees through their own effort. At the time, however, what mattered more was that bills did not disappear simply because one had moral doubts.

A home workshop took shape. The client supplied the topic. After work, Małgorzata visited libraries and brought home books, sometimes so many that it was difficult to find room for them. Piotr read, took notes, organized the material, and within a few days entered a field about which he had previously known little or nothing. Then he wrote a paper that someone else would take to a seminar and an examination. The work required concentration, but it allowed him to remain at home. Between one chapter and the next, he could feed a child, check why the adjoining room had grown suspiciously quiet, and return to the keyboard. The income could be decent. It offered no certainty, but it made survival possible.

At the same time, he began working with Krzysztof Rac, an activist in the Polish-American organization Pomost in the United States. Piotr created and maintained the Who is Who website for him, presenting Poles who had taken part in the struggle against communism. He also laid out successive issues of the Pomost periodical. To save money, they were printed in Poland and then mailed to the United States. The work was close to his former interests and experience, and it was also one of the few jobs he could do from home. Rac did not limit their contact to professional matters. When Tomisław was born, he sent clothes for the boy from the United States. Only many years later did Piotr learn that Krzysztof had died of cancer.

Before their correspondence ended for good, the money Rac sent more than once saved the Korycki family from falling behind. One day, at an especially difficult moment, Piotr received a message saying that the payment would be delayed. Krzysztof was leaving for a vacation in Mexico and promised to send the amount due after his return. The words arrived at the worst possible time. Rac later fulfilled his obligation, but at that moment Piotr was looking at the unpaid rent and could not contain his bitterness.

At the same time, the internet opened another possibility before him. While conducting genealogical research, he found Edward Kazimierski of Los Angeles, a close relative of the Korycki family. The first letters brought the joy of finding someone who until then had been known only from family stories. The correspondence developed promisingly until Edward wrote that he was about to travel to Mexico with his family. Still thinking about Rac's message, Piotr replied: "Some people go on vacation to Mexico, while others cannot afford to pay the rent." He meant his employer. Edward did not know the context. He took the remark personally and fell silent. He did not reply to the messages that followed and did not want to hear an explanation. One sentence, sent too quickly and to the wrong person, closed a road that had only just opened toward a rediscovered branch of the family.

Such incidents hurt, but they did not set the tone of everyday life on Wilanowska Street. The children mattered most there. Paweł remained increasingly within the world of his mother and her family. Earlier pushed away from any real influence over the boy's upbringing, Piotr gradually stopped fighting for a place he could not regain. It did not mean indifference. It was more the resignation of a man who had been striking a locked door for years and had finally stopped believing that anyone would open it.

It was different with Rozalka. Father and daughter were almost never apart. She accompanied him to work, to meetings, and on long journeys, although other children her age might have found such trips merely exhausting. What mattered to her was being with her father; what mattered to him was having someone beside him to whom he could show the world. They did not need great attractions. A road, a new person, an unfamiliar place, and a story that could be told along the way were enough. Rozalka became his little companion, and he grew so accustomed to her presence that he began taking her almost everywhere.

His bond with Tomisław, called Tomiś at home, developed with greater difficulty. Staś's death had left a barrier within Piotr that he could not simply cast aside with the birth of another son. Even during Małgorzata's pregnancy, he would not allow himself to hope fully. He did not imagine the boy's future or make room for him in his thoughts, as though withholding affection might protect him from another loss. When Tomiś was born, the fear weakened but did not disappear. Piotr cared for him and tried to treat all the children equally, but relatives, and sometimes even strangers, noticed what he himself did not want to accept: his heart turned more clearly toward his daughter. It was not a decision against his son. It was the mark left by the child he had been unable to save.

In the spring of 2001, Małgorzata and Piotr did something that, given their finances, looked like sheer madness. For the first time, they decided to take a real vacation together. Both still had housing savings passbooks—a remnant of the days when the money accumulated in them was supposed eventually to secure a cooperative apartment of one's own. In the new reality, that promise had lost its meaning. The deposits alone could not buy a house or even a small apartment. Since the savings could no longer fulfill their original purpose, they decided to spend them on something they had denied themselves throughout all their years together. They added money they had previously saved and purchased a stay of nearly two weeks in Tunisia.

Rozalka and Tomiś stayed with the Korycki grandparents, Paweł was placed in the care of the Andrzejuk family, and the couple went to Tunis. For the first time in a long while, their days were not determined by children, newsroom deadlines, or bills waiting to be paid. Of the optional excursions, they chose only one—a trip to the Sahara. They watched the landscape grow increasingly foreign to everything they knew from Poland, traveled across the desert, and mounted camels. They spent those days in unusual harmony. For a time, they did not have to be parents organizing the lives of five people or spouses constantly solving the next problem. They could simply be together.

Only on the day before their return did Małgorzata lose her good mood. The change came suddenly and remained unexplained. She did not tell her husband what had upset her, and he could not guess the reason. There was no major quarrel. Only silence hung over the end of a good trip—brief, but sufficient for their return to everyday life to begin before the journey to the airport.

After returning from Tunisia, they once again divided their time among homes and families. From July 16 to 18, they stayed with Jadwiga in Szczypiorno. Małgorzata then took Rozalka and Tomiś to Janów Podlaski, and Piotr and his mother joined them on July 31. At the beginning of the month, Paweł had already left with a group connected with St. John Cantius Parish for Wetlina Kłodzka in the Bieszczady Mountains. The children were increasingly following paths of their own, with their own caregivers and their own vacation memories. The family remained together, although not everyone now had to be in the same place at the same time.

During those calmer months, genealogy occupied more and more space in Piotr's life. His interest in his ancestors had existed for years, but it acquired new meaning once he had founded a family of his own. He wanted to know where his children came from, what names, places, and fates stood behind them. At first, he searched primarily for relatives of his grandfather, Piotr Korycki of Nuna, who had died in 1941. His only sister, Waleriana, had emigrated to the United States earlier. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, through a relative she had found in Gdańsk, Jadwiga tried writing to Waleriana's children. No answer ever came. Years later, Piotr decided to begin the search again.

Before the end of the twentieth century, he created the first website devoted to the Korycki family. The internet was supposed to reach where letters had failed to reach and help locate relatives living in America. Results came slowly and often not at all, but instead of becoming discouraged, Piotr broadened the idea. If he was searching for people lost among emigration, war, and family silence, there had to be thousands of others engaged in the same search. That was how the Genealogia Polska portal began to take shape—not as the private website of a single family, but as a place for everyone who wanted to rebuild knowledge of their ancestors.

While developing the portal, he began working with the well-known genealogist Zygmunt Rola-Stężycki. On August 20, he traveled to Grójec to visit him. Naturally, he took Rozalka. Once again, the girl found herself beside her father in a world that, for her, consisted of travel, unfamiliar surnames, and long conversations among adults, while for him it was becoming an increasingly important part of life. Genealogy was ceasing to be the collection of dates. It connected the living with those whose faces survived only in photographs and allowed meaning to be found in places others passed without a thought.

That same summer, the grandparents' home changed as well. Adam and Jadwiga sold their apartment on Marysieńki Street. They added money and bought two adjoining studio apartments in a new building at 23 Słowackiego Street. The Bożek family moved into one, and the Koryckis into the other. Only a wall separated them—less than ever before. The move had taken place several months earlier, but it was not until August 25 that the family managed to gather for a housewarming party. The new apartment had to be shown, walked through, and commented on; everyone had to sit down at the table and acknowledge that another stage was beginning.

Two weeks later, on September 9, a joint birthday party was held for Rozalka and Tomiś. The godparents of both children came, along with the Korycki grandparents and Grandma Marianna, who stayed longer. The children had their celebration, the adults their own conversations, and the apartment on Wilanowska Street filled with people. At moments like that, cramped quarters were not yet a burden. They were proof that there were people to seat around the table.

On September 21, Piotr took Jadwiga and Rozalka on their first joint genealogical and exploratory trip. They traveled to the area where his mother's family came from. Jadwiga returned to the places where she had lived as a child, to roads that once led to relatives' homes, and to her former school. Rozalka looked at all of it without the burden of memory. To her, they were buildings, fields, and yards. For her grandmother, every turn could open a story, while for Piotr all those stories formed further branches of the tree he was trying to reconstruct. He also showed his daughter the family's first apartments in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki—on Mazowiecka and Miła Streets. That day genealogy left the computer and old documents behind. It became a road they could travel together.

In the fall, the family set out on another journey. On October 6, the Koryckis, the grandparents, and the Bożek family traveled to Sandomierz for the wedding of Kornelia—the granddaughter of Jadwiga Kamińska and daughter of Ewa Warot—to Rafał Semkowicz. The wedding was one of those occasions on which separate branches of a family meet again for a single day around common tables. Piotr, increasingly absorbed in the family's history, could see among the guests not only relatives but a living continuation of the story he was trying to record.

The fall of 2001 also brought a professional change. Thanks to Zofia Kukla, Piotr began working and studying at the Higher Vocational School in Jarosław in the Subcarpathian region. His cooperation with Rector Antoni Jarosz provided him with lodging in rooms intended for lecturers. The trips became a regular part of life. They were long and tiring, but this time the work did not end abruptly with the closing of a newsroom. It was combined with study and opened the possibility of making up for what he had not managed to acquire earlier.

In time, Jarosław also ceased to be merely a place to which Piotr disappeared for several days. He began taking Rozalka with him, and Małgorzata accompanied him once as well. His daughter accepted the successive journeys as a natural part of life with her father. For others, they might have meant hours on a train and unfamiliar rooms; for her, they were shared expeditions. This was precisely what characterized that peaceful period: his duties did not yet separate Piotr from the family, but often gave him an opportunity to take part of it with him.

They spent Christmas on Wilanowska Street. The Korycki grandparents and the Bożek family came with their children. On the second day of Christmas, Urszula invited them to dinner. Nothing happened that demanded a separate entry in the family chronicle—and that was precisely what mattered most. They could sit down, eat, talk, return home, and not begin another war along the way. After years of quarrels, an ordinary Christmas dinner became a greater event than anyone at the table was prepared to admit.

The year 2002 began in the same rhythm. On January 26, the Korycki family went to the eighteenth birthday celebration of Andrzej Sołoduszkiewicz, Krystyna's son. In April, her husband, Jacek, visited them. In the summer, Adam and Jadwiga traveled to Italy with Urszula and her family. They toured Rome and other places and also attended a papal audience. It was a journey the parents took with their daughter, without Piotr, but after their return it became part of the stories shared by the whole family. At the time, someone else's trip did not yet have to signify exclusion or a demonstration. It was simply a trip.

On August 6, Piotr set out with Paweł and Rozalka on a walking pilgrimage to Częstochowa, following the same route their great-grandmother Marianna had traveled years earlier. Paweł, considerably older, knew how to find conveniences for himself; for Rozalka, not yet five, every kilometer was a real test. As long as they were walking through the streets of Warsaw and buses were passing nearby, the solution seemed obvious to her. They could ride. She asked, insisted, and watched for the next stop.

When the pilgrimage moved onto country roads, the possibilities disappeared. The girl again said that she was tired and wanted a ride. Piotr pointed to the empty road.

— Look, there is nothing here—no buses, no cars. No one is going to give us a ride. We have to walk.

She understood. From that moment on, she stopped asking for a ride and even began teasing her much older brother, who sometimes managed to arrange one for himself. She accepted the effort with a child's simplicity: if there was no other road, they had to walk the one that existed.

Unexpectedly, the pilgrimage became an opportunity to meet Father Jerzy Skwierczyński, whom Piotr had not seen for a long time. The priest, who had been working in Ukraine for many years, had come to the pilgrimage with a group of Polish children from the Borderlands.

From the beginning, Małgorzata worried whether such a small child could manage the route, but in the end she yielded to their persuasion and did not keep her daughter at home. On August 9, a long, violent downpour caught the pilgrims. The rain soaked their clothes, everyone was chilled, and Piotr began to worry about Rozalka's health. He called his wife and told her what condition they were in. Had Małgorzata suggested ending the pilgrimage, he probably would have listened. She did not tell them to return, however. Since the mother did not want to stop the journey, the father could not bring himself to make that decision either. They continued.

On August 27, Piotr traveled to Toruń with Jadwiga, Stanisława Wierzbicka, and Stanisława Kielak. The trip was organized by one of the advertising companies that transported people free of charge in order to spend hours persuading them to purchase expensive and usually unnecessary products. No purchase was required. They could therefore listen to the presentation, decline, and take advantage of the free ride. In a family where every expense had been examined from several angles for years, the ability to make use of such an opportunity had a value of its own. Toruń remained Toruń, even if the road there was preceded by a long advertisement for things everyone had previously lived perfectly well without.

In the fall, genealogy once again became more than a record of names. In October, Piotr took the family to meet Great-Grandmother Zofia, who was then living with her daughter Wanda Ziubińska in Warsaw. There was no grand ceremony. It was the children's only meeting with their great-grandmother. What mattered most was that they could see a woman from a generation that would soon survive for them only in photographs and memories. Piotr, who was building family trees on the internet, could for a moment see living representatives of several generations beside one another. No chart could express it so clearly.

They again celebrated Christmas 2002 on Wilanowska Street with the grandparents and the Bożek family. The apartment was full of people, the children made noise, the adults carried on their own conversations, and someone was always having to make room for someone else. They did not own a home and had no certainty about what they would be living on a few months later. The marriage had not suddenly become free of tension, Piotr was still searching for a lasting professional place, and he shared a different bond with each child. Even so, it was then that the family achieved something it had never before managed to preserve for long: balance.

It was not unblemished happiness. It consisted of a lost job, books borrowed from libraries, writing late into the night, a message sent too quickly to a relative, Małgorzata's unspoken sadness before the return from Tunisia, and the constant counting of money. Yet an ordinary day then ended with an ordinary evening. The children fell asleep in the neighboring rooms. In the morning, breakfast had to be made, someone had to be taken somewhere, work had to be reached, books returned, or a bag packed before the next journey. There was no need to save the family from disintegration. It was enough to sustain everyday life.

Only in the perspective of later years would it become clear how much that time had meant. At the time, no one celebrated it as a holiday. It had no name of its own, no decisive date, and no event from which it ought to be counted. It was simply life: cramped, filled with work, sometimes unfair, but shared. The most peaceful life they had yet managed to build.