Rozdział XXV

In March 2005, the apartment on Sowińskiego Street in Legionowo awoke each day to the same cramped life. In a single room, the children's games, Piotr's work, school duties, and the constant effort to preserve some semblance of family order all intertwined. Lace curtains covered the windows, a sofa bed occupied much of one wall, and the lives of the younger children unfolded on the rug spread across the middle of the floor. One moment Rozalia and Tomisław would be wrestling; the next they would be laughing and embracing, as though that small space were their entire kingdom.

Paweł spent longer and longer at the computer. The desk sagged beneath the monitor, keyboard, compact discs, and papers, while his bicycle stood beside it, almost wedged between the furniture. At times the boy tore himself away from the screen to look after Krzyś, while Tomisław and Kacper Bożek played on the floor. In a home where it was difficult to find a single unoccupied corner, the older and younger children were forever under one another's feet, yet it was precisely from that closeness that their everyday bond grew.

Rozalia was already attending Primary School No. 1. Piotr usually took her there and brought her home on his bicycle, though at times she made the journey alone. In March, during a school ceremony, she stood in a navy-blue outfit among boys in white shirts, against a background of paper tulips, ladybugs, and spring decorations. A month later, on a class trip to Łowicz, she listened to a guide in front of a wooden house painted blue. By the end of June, she was sitting in the first desk by the window, her chin resting on her hand as she waited for the end-of-year ceremony. Behind her, the pupils' parents and relatives crowded together while the teacher addressed a class that would soon scatter for the summer holidays.

Photographs preserved such moments: faces, gestures, curtains, school decorations, children's clothes. They did not preserve voices, reasons, or what had happened a moment before. The sight of his growing children led Piotr's thoughts ever more often toward the missing book. In keeping with the centuries-old command of his ancestors, he had told no one about it. The secret belonged to him and was to remain a secret until he found the manuscript or decided that the time had come to pass it on to his successor. Yet he did not want the memory of his immediate family to dissolve in the same way as the details of old stories.

—Gosia, we have albums with hundreds of photographs—he said one day.—But years later, you look at a picture and often no longer know what truly happened then. Perhaps we ought to begin writing it all down.

To his surprise, Małgorzata did not reject the idea. For a time they considered what a family chronicle should look like. At last she brought home from Warsaw a large, beautifully bound volume resembling a photographic album. Its faintly beige pages were thick, clean, and still wholly unfamiliar. They waited for the first sentences, as though those words would determine whether ordinary days could resist oblivion.

They sat down at the table at Easter in 2005. Małgorzata took up a pen and wrote on the first page:

"We begin writing this book at Easter, in the Year of Our Lord 2005..."

Beneath it she placed words Piotr knew from Mickiewicz and, at the same time, from the original missing book:

"There are truths the sage tells all mankind,
There are truths he whispers to his nation;
There are truths he confides to the friends of his house;
And there are truths he can reveal to no one."

That was the end of their writing together. Małgorzata never wished to return to it. The book remained almost empty, and its first page became a testament to an intention that had never been turned into a family custom. Sometimes it was enough to open it and see not so much the beginning of a chronicle as the silence of all the pages that followed.

At the same time, Piotr was looking for additional work. On one of the notice poles in Legionowo, he saw an announcement that another local weekly newspaper was about to be launched. The telephone number written on the sheet of paper looked like a chance to begin again. He did not want to return to "To i Owo." He was ashamed of the way he had parted from the editorial office more than ten years earlier.

When he left for the war in the Balkans, Paweł Kozera, his friend and the newspaper's publisher, gave him a war correspondent's press card. He did not, however, know the true reason for Piotr's departure. Piotr could not and would not reveal it. When he returned to Poland months later, he could not simply walk into his former editorial office and behave as though nothing had happened. He knew Kozera had every right to feel used.

Only in 2004 did he finally bring himself to visit Kozera's office. He offered no justification and no lengthy account. He had come to say a single word:

—I'm sorry.

The apology was accepted, but the meeting went no further. Kozera did not offer him a job, and Piotr could not bring himself to ask for one. He left with the feeling that he had settled an old debt, yet had not recovered the place he had once abandoned.

Now he called the number from the announcement. It turned out that the newspaper did not yet exist. Mr. and Mrs. Kędzierski were still assembling a staff, ideas, and material. Piotr quickly became involved in the preparations. Among his suggestions, they accepted the title. Although it was to be a weekly, they called it "Gazeta Powiatowa." Within a few weeks, the editorial office was operating at full speed.

For Piotr, it was a return to local journalism, but the work also opened doors for the family to places they would probably never have reached without his reporting assignments. Rozalia became his most faithful companion on those journeys. She even received a press photographer's identification card of her own. It was not merely a family joke: she carried a camera, watched her father, and took pictures with genuine enthusiasm, as though she had understood from the beginning that an event endured longer when someone managed to capture it.

On May 1, the wind stirred the sails and rippled the waters of the Zegrze Reservoir. On a pier near Nieporęt, Rozalia stood beside her grandfather Adam and her cousin Cezary Bożek. Adam rested one hand on the metal railing; boats rocked behind them, and the girl looked straight into the lens. That same day in Białobrzegi, she lay on the grass beside her father amid the clamor of a festival. In the evening, after a concert by Golec uOrkiestra, she stood with Czarek in a crowd of adults and returned home with the autograph of one of the famous musicians. A day of reporting became an adventure for her, inseparable from the time she spent with her father.

Several weeks later, she sat in his study on a swivel chair with headphones over her ears. Heavy golden curtains hung behind her, monitors stood on either side, and keyboards, cables, and papers were piled on the table. It was not the orderly office of a man secluded from his home, but a section of the apartment claimed by work. The children entered without knocking, peered at the screen, and took possession of the chair whenever their father vacated it.

In June, the family outings came one after another. In Nieporęt, Rozalia drove a red go-kart, intent on the steering wheel and the unevenly laid-out course. A little later, she was sitting with Paweł and Czarek on a pier amid a forest of masts. The following day, during a match in Wólka Radzymińska, she found herself on the field among adult players for several minutes. She was the only child there. The ball came to rest at her foot, and the men standing nearby waited for her pass. She did not appear intimidated.

That same weekend, she rode across the reservoir in a motorboat. Dark glasses covered her eyes, and a white, foaming wake lengthened behind the stern. Paweł stood at the helm of another boat, proud and intent, as though he had been entrusted with far more than momentary control over the vessel's course. Several days later, the whole family rested on a sandy shore: Małgorzata sat with the children on a blanket, Tomisław ate from a plastic container, and Paweł watched over his younger siblings. Afterward they boarded an excursion boat. In one photograph, Małgorzata sat between Tomisław and Paweł; in another, on the opposite side of the deck, were Piotr, Rozalia, and both boys. For a moment, water, sunlight, and wind enlarged the family's world, which ordinarily had to fit inside a single cramped apartment.

The boundary between work and leisure became almost invisible. Piotr came to gather material, speak with people, and take notes; meanwhile, the children ran along the waterfront, watched competitions, or waited until it was time to set out again. Those days were busy, noisy, and full of light. In July, Rozalia bathed at Dębe, standing waist-deep in calm water, while Paweł once again went out onto the reservoir. The photographs from that summer formed a story of a family venturing ever more often beyond the walls of the apartment on Sowińskiego Street.

Toward the end of July, something happened that, from Piotr's point of view, was almost epoch-making. Jadwiga offered her son money to buy the first car he had ever owned. He had held a driver's license since the age of seventeen, yet through all the years that followed he had never possessed a car of his own. The family of six traveled by public transportation or depended on the help of others. Every longer journey required counting transfers, tickets, departure times, and the number of hands needed to keep watch over the children.

On July 30, Adam and Jadwiga left for a vacation in Greece with their daughter's family. In the meantime, Piotr and Małgorzata began looking for a car. Through Robert Zarański, the son-in-law of Krystyna Sołoduszkiewicz, they settled on a red Opel. The car was in Gdańsk, so on August 8 Piotr set out to collect it with Rozalia.

The next day they stood beside the car on Nałkowska Street. Rain was falling, darkening the red paint. The Opel still bore Gdańsk license plates; it was neither new nor particularly impressive, but Piotr regarded it as something that would alter the rules of daily life. Rozalia took the passenger seat. When they set off, he was driving his own car for the first time—not a borrowed vehicle, not a friend's, but one whose keys he would keep.

Several days later, he collected Adam and Jadwiga from Warsaw's West Railway Station. He arrived in the car purchased with their help. For his parents, it was a tangible gesture of support for their son; for him, it meant crossing a boundary beyond which the family would no longer be wholly dependent on timetables, other people's kindness, and the number of empty seats on a bus. Their first car offered freedom, but also the sense that after so many years, something was finally beginning to fall into place.

The joy did not remain unbroken. On August 11, in Janów Podlaski, the family attended the final farewell to Wiesław Olchwiruk. Three days later, at an event in Legionowo County, Rozalia examined a brightly colored powered hang glider at close range; she even sat in its small cockpit beneath the enormous wing stretched over the grassy field. Three days after that, a photograph showed Tomisław behind the metal rails of a child's hospital bed at the Children's Health Center. The reason for that stay was not preserved in the photograph, but the change of scene was abrupt: from the car, the festival, and the open sky to a hospital ward. That was how life unfolded—passing without warning from freedom into fear.

Rozalia continued to accompany her father to public meetings as well. In September, in the rooms beneath the Church of St. John Cantius in Legionowo, she stood beside Senator Zbigniew Romaszewski. She probably did not understand all the adults' conversations, but she was becoming accustomed to the fact that her father's work led him one day to a waterfront, another day to a playing field, and on yet another to a hall filled with politicians, civic activists, and local residents.

On September 17, shortly after Rozalia's and Tomisław's birthdays, Marianna Andrzejuk came to Legionowo once again. It was not a brief visit. She stayed for a long time—eventually, too long. Another adult had appeared in an apartment that had already struggled to accommodate a family of six.

With a considerable measure of goodwill, her presence could be called help or family support. Yet no one had planned it together beforehand, and kind descriptions did not make the walls any wider. As the weeks passed, the guest ceased to be a guest. They had to share space, the rhythm of the day, and a privacy that had already been scarce. The tension did not need to erupt into open conflict in order to remain constantly suspended in the apartment.

At the beginning of October, Piotr took Rozalia to Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki. He showed her the house at 9 Miła Street, where he had lived with Małgorzata and Paweł in the autumn of 1997. The girl stood in front of the fence; behind her could be seen an ordinary one-story house, a path, and an old gate. To her, it was merely another photograph taken in front of someone else's home. To her father, it was proof that places from the recent past were also beginning to disappear beneath layers of new events, and that children had to be shown those places before they became entirely foreign.

Thus 2005 closed in a peculiar state of division. The family traveled more, owned a car, and Piotr was once again working for the local press. The children were growing and gaining experiences no one had imagined for them a year earlier. At the same time, the chronicle begun at Easter remained empty, while more and more people, possessions, duties, and unspoken grievances accumulated on Sowińskiego Street. In photographs, everything still fit inside a single frame. In daily life, it was becoming increasingly difficult to contain the same things beneath one roof.

In the spring of the following year, Piotr's thoughts returned to the place where he hoped the old book might be found. In May 2006, the whole family, together with Grandfather Adam, went to Szczypiorno to clear an overgrown, neglected plot of land. To the others, it was an ordinary day of tidying. From the outset, Piotr saw something more in it: a chance to be near Uncle Kazik's former house and, if only for a moment, to look for some trace of the manuscript.

His hope faded before it could take the shape of a real plan. His uncle's heirs were in the house. Even in their absence, entering would have been unlawful and difficult besides: the property was well fenced, and the gate was locked. Piotr could do no more than look at the house from outside. He knew that if the book had truly remained there, only a short distance separated him from it—and a boundary he was not permitted to cross.

He showed the house to Rozalia. He told her about their relative and the importance of the place in the family's history. He still said not a word about the missing book. The girl saw an old house and a closed property; she did not know that, for her father, every part of that view might conceal the answer to a question he had carried for years. The secret stood between them, although only one of them knew it existed.

May also brought two family events that turned attention toward the children. On May 13, Paweł took the firefighter's oath in the Volunteer Fire Department in Legionowo. The uniform, the solemn wording of the oath, and the presence of the other firefighters marked another step toward adulthood—through duty, discipline, and belonging to the local community. Two weeks later, on May 28, Rozalia received her First Holy Communion. Within a short span of time, the eldest son and the daughter became the focus of two very different ceremonies, and the family gathered around them once more.

At the same time, "Genealogia Polska" was developing with increasing vigor. The portal, which until recently had been chiefly Piotr's idea and personal passion, was attracting people who were building their own family trees and were willing to work on a common undertaking. Among them were Ewa Walczuk, née Warzyńska, Janusz Kielak, Marian Rybak, Bronisław Lewowicki, Roman Grzybowski, and Ireneusz Łaskarzewski.

Łaskarzewski devoted himself to the work with exceptional enthusiasm and succeeded in organizing a large reunion of his extended family. In mid-June, Piotr and Rozalia attended it. For the father, it was another aspect of his genealogical work; for the daughter, a living lesson that family did not end with the people seen every Sunday or the names recorded in a household album. Behind one surname came more faces, towns, photographs, and stories.

On the way home, they stopped near Goszczanów, where Rozalia's mother's family came from. Piotr wanted his daughter to meet relatives on that side as well. One of the people she met was Teresa Chudzik. In the photograph, they sat together in a garden, their arms around one another amid tall yellow flowers. For the child, kinship was ceasing to be a line on a family tree: it was acquiring a face, a voice, an embrace, and a particular home.

On July 8 came news that pushed every other concern aside for a time. While walking in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, Jadwiga fell on the sidewalk. She fell so badly that she broke her right arm, severely bruised her face, and suffered a head injury with an open wound. A photograph taken afterward left no doubt about the force of the fall: a dark bruise spread around her eye, a wound marked her forehead, and her cheek was visibly swollen. For Piotr, it was a sudden image of his parents' frailty. They continued to help their children and grandchildren, yet more and more often they themselves might be the ones in need of help.

Despite this, in mid-July the Koryckis left for a vacation near Gdańsk. Their own car made it possible to take the whole family without the old restrictions. For several days, they could live according to the rhythm of summer, the road, and shared outings. Piotr put editorial, genealogical, and household concerns out of his mind—though not for long.

The journey home ended on the roadside. They were already fairly close to Legionowo when the engine suddenly died. The car lost momentum, and the independence they had gained the year before stopped with it. The roadside assistance service brought no good news: a lack of oil had caused serious engine damage.

Piotr had held a driver's license since his youth, but he had never owned a car before and knew little about its maintenance. He had failed to recognize the signs of the approaching breakdown. At the same time, he believed that a car purchased through a relative who worked in the automobile trade should have remained reliable far longer. His disappointment did not change the arithmetic: the family was left without a car and with an expensive problem.

Repairing the engine consumed a great deal of money, but giving up the Opel would have meant surrendering the freedom they had only just acquired. They therefore decided to have it rebuilt. The car returned to the family, but from then on its red paint no longer represented independence alone to Piotr. It also reminded him that anything that makes life easier may suddenly demand a price for which the household budget is unprepared.

During the second half of 2006, conversations about money became more frequent. Piotr was still working for "Gazeta Powiatowa." At first, the arrangement had gone very well, but over time the publishers began to feel their financial difficulties ever more acutely. The newspaper continued to appear, articles and photographs were published, yet the writers and photographers received their fees after increasingly long delays.

For Piotr, this was inconvenient, but he did not regard the situation as hopeless. He did eventually receive the overdue money, and therefore assumed that one could still live with such an arrangement. It mattered less to him whether a given week's groceries were paid for from his fees or from Małgorzata's salary, since the money would ultimately return to the shared household budget.

Małgorzata saw matters differently. Late payment was not merely a temporary inconvenience to her, but further evidence of instability. It did not matter to her that the money would arrive eventually. What mattered was that it was not there when bills had to be paid, groceries purchased, and expenses planned for the weeks ahead. What Piotr regarded as a difficulty that could be endured, she saw as a condition that could no longer be accepted.

Małgorzata believed that the family's income was too low to offer any prospect of stability. She returned to the subject regularly, pressing Piotr to find a solution. In her view, remaining in Poland meant continuing to live without financial security. With increasing insistence, she argued that they had to seek a way to emigrate.

At first, their ideas had more in common with desperation than with a realistic plan. Neither of them had ever been on the other side of the Atlantic, yet they tried to imagine a route to Canada and, from there, a way to slip unnoticed across the border into the United States. America, more than any other place, appeared to them as the country where they might at last earn enough to support their large family. The less they knew about the actual conditions of such a journey, the easier it was to move borders on paper and shorten distances.

Piotr did not judge their situation as categorically as his wife did. He had work, he was developing "Genealogia Polska," and he remained attached to the people and places that had shaped his life thus far. He did not believe that everything in Poland was leading them toward a precipice. Yet he could not ignore the repeated conversations or Małgorzata's conviction that their present arrangement had no future. In time, the question ceased to be whether they should leave. More and more often, it became: how could they actually do it?

A year earlier, Piotr had met Jarosław Bucholc, a Pole who had lived in Canada for approximately twenty years. Jarosław ran a Polish-language radio station, also made Polish films available, and needed someone to help record and prepare them. Piotr could write correct Polish copy, edit material, and work on Polish-language resource files for various applications. Skills acquired over years at a computer and in editorial offices could suddenly prove useful thousands of miles from Legionowo.

He asked his new acquaintance to send him an invitation to Canada. This did not yet determine the fate of the entire family. It was, however, the first concrete step—not a fantasy about a border or a conversation held late at night, but a document capable of setting real events in motion. Piotr was to travel alone, look around, take a job, and find out whether the promise of better earnings had any basis in reality.

Meanwhile, the rhythm of the household continued as though nothing were changing. In September, Tomisław began school. Only recently he had run around the apartment in his pajamas after Rozalia; now he had duties and a schedule of his own. During one family gathering in Jabłonna, Rozalia and Czarek fought on the grass with foam swords, striking knightly poses while the adults occupied themselves with their own conversations. The children knew nothing of the weight of the decisions ripening above their heads.

On November 25, Paweł received the sacrament of Confirmation. He stood at the lectern in a dark suit, before the altar and rows of altar servers. Later, the family sat at a table laid with cake, drinks, and plates; Jadwiga, still bearing traces of her summer fall, was there with them. The ceremony marked another stage in the eldest son's passage toward adulthood, but somewhere in the background, between congratulations and conversation, the possibility of Piotr's departure was already growing.

They divided Christmas between their own home and the home of Piotr's parents. Christmas Eve brought the Koryckis and the Bożeks together at one table. Rozalia shared the Christmas wafer with Uncle Tadeusz, Urszula offered her wishes to Jadwiga, and the children waited for the adults to finish their solemn words so they could return to presents and play. In the days that followed, they sat together once again at Adam and Jadwiga's table. The photographs show platters, glasses of fruit compote, holiday clothes, and children bent over their plates. The family could still fit around a single table, though it was becoming increasingly difficult to imagine that this order would remain unchanged.

On New Year's Eve, Krzesisław, Rozalia, and Tomisław put on colorful masks. Krzyś stood in a red shirt, Rozalia in black with a cat mask, and Tomisław in a light-colored outfit with red stripes. They clowned for the camera, unaware that the document their parents had been discussing might soon carry their father to the other side of the world. To them, it was still only another evening in a familiar room.

The invitation from Canada arrived in 2007. On its strength, Piotr obtained a visa allowing him to stay for three months. The journey was meant to be a trial, not a final break with the life they knew. He was to find out whether there truly was a place for him across the ocean and, later—perhaps—for the others. At the time, the word perhaps encompassed almost everything: work, a home, money, separation, and the future of four children.

On April 14, the Koryckis, still together as a complete family, attended the wedding of Rafał and Agnieszka Miareczek—the latter a granddaughter of Helena Pawelska—and afterward celebrated at the reception in Modlin. The hall was bathed in warm orange light. White draperies descended along the stairway, tiny lamps shimmered around a great heart made of flowers, and the guests stood so close together that the successive circles of dancers nearly touched shoulders.

During one of the wedding games, the bride stood at the center of a circle of women. Dresses whirled; someone photographed the scene from above on the stairs, while other guests formed a line beneath the floral heart and waited their turn. Children threaded between adults, tables, and chairs—curious about the ritual one moment and absorbed again in their own play the next. It was crowded, noisy, and bright, as family celebrations can be bright when no one yet wishes to think about what will follow once they are over.

It was one of the last occasions before the departure on which the entire family took part together in an event of that kind. The photographs preserved festive clothes, music transformed into motion, and faces turned toward the newlyweds. They could not preserve time. Not long afterward, Piotr flew to Calgary.

Only days earlier, they had all stood together in the wedding hall amid lights, conversation, and music. Now an ocean lay between him and the apartment on Sowińskiego Street. They did not know whether the three-month journey would remain merely an episode or become the beginning of lasting change. Behind Piotr were the children, the nearly empty chronicle, and a life that, despite all its hardships, had a familiar shape. Ahead lay a city he did not know, work of which he could not be certain, and the question of whether a family's future could be built by beginning with separation. A new era was beginning for the Koryckis.