Chapter XXX

For the first few days, Piotr moved through the house as though the boys might return that evening. The doors to their rooms remained ajar. A single toy lay on a shelf, a sock missed during the packing remained beneath a bed, and an empty backpack sat in a corner. He touched nothing. Not yet.

Those were strange months.

On the one hand, the silence brought relief. No one burst into the bathroom in the morning, no one shouted from downstairs that a glove was missing, and no one left cups on the stairs. On the other hand, that same quiet reminded Piotr that the family had broken apart across two continents. Paweł and Rozalia remained in the house with him, but even their presence felt temporary.

Paweł worked, met friends, went away somewhere, and increasingly saw no reason to tell his father about his plans. He was an adult, with his own money, his own affairs, and his own circle of people. He came home late, took off his shoes, grabbed something from the refrigerator, and disappeared into his room. Sometimes all Piotr heard was the front door closing toward dawn.

Rozalia led a different life. She went to school, practiced soccer, and came home with a bag full of notebooks, athletic clothes, and small things she did not want to leave in the locker room. Yet she and her father were bound by more than shared loneliness. She began helping him at work.

With Jarosław Bucholec's help, Piotr registered Buko Ventures Inc., a house-painting company. The name sounded more impressive than the operation behind it: a used van, ladders, rollers, drop cloths, paint trays, and calls from customers who always wanted the work done faster and cheaper. Registration nevertheless allowed them to accept their own contracts, issue invoices, and negotiate prices without intermediaries.

Estimates were the hardest part. Piotr managed in English at stores, on the street, and in ordinary conversation. But when a homeowner began discussing primer, trim finishes, moisture-resistant paint, repairs after the previous crew, and a guarantee on two coats, the words blurred into a single drone of technical jargon.

That was when Rozalia went with him.

— Ask whether he wants flat or eggshell — Piotr said quietly in Polish as they stood in a customer's living room.

— I already did. He wants eggshell on the walls, semi-gloss on the trim, and ordinary white on the ceiling.

— And two coats?

— Two. But he says one may be enough in the bedrooms if it covers.

Piotr examined the walls against the light, measured the rooms in paces, and calculated the cost of materials in his head. Rozalia stood beside him with a notebook. To the homeowners, she was a teenage girl accompanying her father. In reality, she was the person who made the contract possible.

— Tell him one coat won't cover those dark walls — he instructed her.

— I already told him that repairs after someone else's work cost extra.

— Good.

— I know.

She did more than interpret. When a job was larger, she put on old pants and went with her father for the entire day. She taped the trim, spread drop cloths, stirred paint, and ran a roller from floor to ceiling. Piotr worked from a ladder while she covered the lower sections of the walls. In the empty rooms they heard only the rustle of plastic, the knock of a roller tray, and a radio playing somewhere in the kitchen.

— Don't press so hard — he told her. — You'll leave streaks.

— Then I want a better roller.

— The roller is fine.

— Every professional says the tools are fine when the helper can't make something work.

Piotr glanced down at her from the ladder and smiled to himself. At moments like that, they were a team — not a father who had lost another battle in his marriage and a daughter left between her parents, but two people doing a specific job.

When they came home, they ate something quickly, rested, and then sat down at their computers, each at a separate machine. Rozalia started a game or chatted with friends. Piotr returned to genealogy — to names, dates, and documents in which families endured for centuries despite wars, deaths, and separations. The paradox would not leave him alone: he could reconstruct the lives of people who had died three hundred years earlier, yet he could not understand the woman with whom he had spent most of his adult life.

They spoke little about Małgorzata and the boys. It was not because they did not think of them. Quite the opposite — every memory was too close. They behaved like people who avoid speaking the name of the dead for fear that the pain will return with it.

Five days after arriving in Poland, Tomisław attended a dance class in Janów Podlaski. In a bright room with blue curtains and a small disco ball, the children lined up in rows. The instructor demonstrated the steps, while Tomiś, standing near the front, tried to copy the movements of his arms and legs. Music bounced off the walls, the floor creaked beneath their shoes, and the formation kept falling apart whenever someone confused left with right.

— Left foot! Left! — the instructor called.

Tomisław looked down at his own shoes, then at the other children, and moved in the opposite direction.

— But that was my left — he explained later.

— Yours was left, but everyone was supposed to move right — Małgorzata replied.

A few days later he was already trying breakdancing. He bent low, braced one hand against the floor, and performed movements that looked far more spectacular in his imagination than they did in reality. Krzyś preferred the snow. In Janów he climbed the drifts along the fence, dragged a small shovel, and tumbled into the powder with his brother. The Polish winter was damper, the yards more confined, and the snow turned to mud more quickly, but to the boys it was still snow.

By the end of February, Tomisław was sitting at a long table in the Janów community room among other children, cups, and artwork hung on the walls. Not long before, he had been trying to find his place in a Canadian classroom where almost everything sounded foreign. Now he once again understood every instruction, joke, and adult remark. The return of his native language felt so natural that he could not have named the relief it brought.

Life in Janów arranged itself with surprising speed: school, activities, children's visits, relatives dropping in without warning, shared meals, conversations around the table. From the outside, it might have appeared that Małgorzata had returned to where she belonged. She had the support of her family and knew the streets, stores, and people. She no longer had to translate every sentence or ask how to handle the simplest matter.

In Calgary, on February 21, Rozalia gave her father a birthday card. One side carried a printed English message about a place reserved in her heart for her father. On the other, she had drawn a large flower and written wishes in Polish: health, happiness, joy, time to rest from work, and that "everything would work out."

Piotr read it twice.

— Does Dad like it? — she asked.

— The last line most of all.

— I knew it.

— What did you know?

— That Dad would like it.

He placed the card on the table. Cold light came through the window, and old snow lay across the driveway.

— I don't think Mom is coming back — Rozalia said. It did not sound like a question, but rather a conclusion she had been reaching for many days.

— I don't think she is either — he replied.

He did not tell his daughter everything. Before Małgorzata left — after accusing him of stealing the telephone and announcing the separation — he had decided to examine a reality he had previously refused to see. For years he had taken his wife at her word. When she said there was no money, he accepted it as fact. When she claimed they did not have enough to live on and that he had to leave in search of work, he left. He believed the burden he carried belonged to them both.

After the accusation over the telephone, trust ceased to exist. What remained was the need for proof.

One day, while Małgorzata was at work, he opened her drawers and cupboards. He knew he was crossing a boundary. He did not even try to persuade himself that what he was doing was innocent. He searched deliberately, shifting documents, opening envelopes, and checking folders. In one he found cash. In others, bank statements and information about accounts in Poland.

He sat at the table with a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote down the amounts, added the balances, returned to earlier pages, and checked the dates. By his calculations, Małgorzata had controlled approximately two hundred thousand złotys whose existence she had never disclosed to him. These were not modest savings put aside for an emergency, but enough money to establish a comfortable life in Poland.

Another document struck him even more forcefully. A bank beneficiary designation in the event of Małgorzata's death named neither her husband nor her children, but her sister Krystyna.

Piotr stared at the name for a long time. He remembered every conversation about money they supposedly did not have, every demand that he leave to find work, his guilt over earning too little, and years spent on the edge of what his wife had portrayed as a financial abyss. Meanwhile, the balances had continued to grow.

He did not regard it as ordinary prudence. To him, it was proof that Małgorzata had long been constructing her own security outside the marriage and outside their shared "we."

Now that she was in Poland, everything seemed to form a logical whole. She had money. She had taken the younger sons. Paweł was an adult. She had never built the same closeness with Rozalia that she had with the boys. Why would she return?

— Don't worry — he told his daughter, though he was not certain he was telling the truth. — We'll manage.

Rozalia nodded. Not long afterward, she stood with her team for a group photograph in a red-and-white uniform. She was becoming increasingly confident on the field. She ran hard, did not pull her foot away in a challenge, and could fight for the ball against girls stronger than she was. Piotr watched the practices from beyond the touchline. Every sprint she made was proof that a person could enter a foreign world and find a place within it.

The house still had too many empty rooms. Piotr decided to make use of one and rented it for several weeks to a young man from India. The tenant arrived with two bags, spoke quietly, and spent most of his time away from the house. He paid regularly, which brought a little additional money into the budget.

The presence of a stranger did not remove the emptiness. Conversations in an unfamiliar language occasionally came from one room, someone else's food appeared on a refrigerator shelf, and a second towel hung in the bathroom. The house was more occupied, but no more a family home.

Piotr began sorting through the things Małgorzata had left behind. He opened closets, folded clothes, put small belongings into boxes, and threw some of them away. He worked with the grim precision of a man clearing up after someone who had died or deliberately erased herself from his life.

At the back of one cupboard he found a pack of cigarettes. The brand was unfamiliar, and the cigarettes differed from those he had once smoked. He turned the pack in his hand, read the label, and set it on the counter. For several minutes he paced the room. Then he came back.

It was cold outside. He stood by the door, lit one, and drew too deeply. He coughed, tasted the bitterness, and felt the familiar burn in his lungs.

— Idiot — he said to himself.

He crushed the cigarette in a metal container. A moment later, he took out another.

The addiction returned not as a new temptation, but like someone who knew the way and had merely waited for the door to open again. From then on, it never left Piotr for long.

Despite the distance and everything that had happened, the spouses spoke fairly regularly. At first, their conversations were practical. Małgorzata talked about the boys' school, Tomisław's activities, and her mother's health. Piotr spoke about work, Rozalia, and the cost of maintaining the house.

— Tomiś is taking dance classes — she told him.

— What kind of dance?

— They're trying a little of everything now. Ordinary routines, breakdancing. He likes it.

— And Krzyś?

— He runs through the snow and gets into everything.

— Put them on the phone.

The boys took turns speaking. Tomisław talked about the steps and the other children. Krzyś gave shorter answers and then asked when his father was coming. Each time, Piotr said that he still did not know.

Toward the end of March, Palm Sunday was celebrated in Janów. Małgorzata walked with Krzyś among people carrying colorful Easter palms. Spring sunlight reflected from pale coats, though patches of snow still remained beneath the trees. The boy looked around for people he knew, while women stopped Małgorzata to ask about Canada and whether she had returned for good.

— For now, I'm here — she answered.

That "for now" left a door open, although she did not yet know whether she would want to pass through it.

Easter revealed more clearly than anything before it that the family was living in two parallel worlds.

In Janów, the table was full. The boys, Małgorzata, and relatives sat around Marianna Andrzejuk. There were eggs, bread, cakes, drinks, and several conversations taking place at once. Growing steadily weaker, Marianna sat among the children and watched them with both attention and fatigue. Krzyś stayed close to her. Tomisław ate, listened to the adults, and kept turning toward someone on the other side of the table.

In Calgary, the Easter meal was far more modest. Paweł and Rozalia sat at the table. Piotr placed before them what he had managed to prepare and tried to give the moment a sense of ceremony.

— Mom always made more — Paweł observed.

— Mom is in Poland — Piotr replied.

The sentence hung above the table more heavily than he had intended.

— I know — his son muttered.

Rozalia began talking about a game to break the silence. Piotr followed her lead. It was easier to discuss positioning on the field than to talk about why three people sat at one table while the rest of the family sat at another.

At the beginning of May, snow covered Calgary once again. Rozalia stepped outside in a red jacket and stood on the white sidewalk as though winter had confused the months. The day before, she had been sitting at her computer in shorts, a cup of cola in her hand. In Canada, both the season and the mood could change within a few hours.

His conversations with Małgorzata also began to change.

The first euphoria of returning to Poland had passed. Familiar places no longer gave her a sense of complete independence. The family home had its own rhythm, every relative had an opinion, and Marianna's illness demanded an ever greater presence. Małgorzata spoke of exhaustion, of having no privacy, and of a life that was supposed to be easier but had begun to weigh her down.

Piotr listened cautiously. He did not want to put words in her mouth. Yet he remembered how firmly she had announced that she was taking the boys and how little room she had left him to object.

One day a long silence settled over the line.

— I feel as though I've jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire — Małgorzata finally said. This time there was neither irony nor provocation in her voice.

Piotr leaned against the kitchen counter.

— Then come back. You're my wife, for better or worse.

There was no answer from the other end. Only her breathing and a distant voice somewhere in the room.

— Can you hear me? — he asked.

— I can hear you.

— I said: come back.

— It isn't that simple.

— Leaving wasn't simple either. You still made that decision by yourself.

Małgorzata ended the conversation without making any commitment. Piotr put down the telephone, convinced the subject would die like so many earlier discussions. The following days, however, brought a change. First she asked whether the boys' rooms were still available. Then whether the school would take them back. Finally, she began talking about tickets, luggage, and dates.

Piotr allowed himself to believe that the painful experience had taught her something. He imagined that she would return with a different outlook, that she would understand a marriage could not consist of unilateral decisions, hidden money, and one ultimatum after another. He did not expect a miracle. He expected an acknowledgment of the facts.

He began preparing the house once again. He had not yet thrown away the boxes into which he had packed the things she left behind. Now he opened them, returned clothes to the shelves, checked the bedding, and put the boys' rooms in order. The toy he had previously left untouched went back to its place.

On May 10, Stanisław, the son of Urszula and Tadeusz, was born in Warsaw. Cezary, the newborn's older brother, held the bundled baby with the caution of someone afraid to make too sudden a movement. The news traveled quickly through the family. For a while, every conversation was about the birth, the mother's health, and the tiny boy.

— He must be as small as a doll — Tomisław told his father over the telephone, although he had not been able to see his cousin.

— Everyone was once that small.

— Me too?

— You especially.

— That's not true.

A few days later, Krzyś sat beside Marianna near the window. He held a bouquet of lilacs, while the older woman lay propped against pillows. Illness had taken away her former freedom of movement, but not her interest in her grandson. She pulled him close, touched his cheek, and held him for a long time.

On May 16, the family attended Marta Siedlecka's First Holy Communion. A dozen or more people were arranged in front of the house for a group photograph. The women adjusted their coats, the children shifted from place to place, and someone called for everyone to look at the camera. Tomisław and Krzyś stood among the relatives in their good clothes. Two days before their flight, Janów surrounded them with a tight circle of people, surnames, and family ties.

That same day, thousands of miles away, Rozalia ran onto the field in her red-and-white uniform. Piotr stood at the touchline and shouted when she won the ball.

Rozalia ran hard, went into challenges, and refused to give up possession. On the other side of the ocean, the family was lining up for a commemorative photograph; here, only the whistle, the touchline, and the next play mattered.

— Rozalka, move inside! There's space!

His daughter followed the play as though no airports, telephones, or decisions made by adults existed beyond the field. After the game, she was tired, grass-stained, and pleased.

— They're coming back the day after tomorrow — Piotr said as they walked toward the car.

— I know.

— Are you happy?

Rozalia adjusted the bag on her shoulder.

— About Krzyś, yes.

He asked nothing more. He understood.

On May 17, they held an early birthday celebration for Krzyś. His actual birthday was still some time away, but the following day he was flying to Canada. Cookies, drinks, and a small cake were placed on the table. Children circled around it, adults offered their wishes, and Krzyś accepted his presents with the solemnity of a birthday boy who knew the celebration was being held especially for him.

That evening, Małgorzata took him to Marianna. The room was darker than the rest of the house. The older woman sat or lay propped against pillows, a scarf covering her head. Małgorzata embraced her mother and her son at the same time.

— Will you behave? — Marianna asked.

— I will.

— And will you remember Grandma?

— I'll remember.

— Good.

Krzyś pressed himself against her. The adults knew this was not an ordinary farewell before a journey. Marianna's illness was advancing, and Canada was far away. No one could say whether the boy would ever see his grandmother again.

On May 18, Tomisław stood at Calgary Airport beneath the enormous sign reading "Calgary — Heart of the New West." He wore a baseball cap, a sports jacket, and a backpack. He looked tired after the long journey, but gazed around the terminal like someone returning to a place he had already begun to regard as part of his world.

Małgorzata pushed a large cart piled with suitcases. She smiled, though the strain of the journey showed on her face. Krzyś stayed close beside her.

Piotr saw them from behind the barrier. For several seconds, no one moved. Then the boys ran toward him.

— Dad!

He knelt and wrapped his arms around them both. Krzyś pressed his face against his shoulder. Tomisław said much less, as though maintaining a certain distance. The months in Janów had not passed without changing him. Piotr understood only half of what Krzyś was saying, but it did not matter.

Małgorzata approached more slowly.

— Well, here we are — she said.

— You're here.

They did not kiss at once. First they took charge of the suitcases, adjusted the things on the cart, and checked that nothing had been left behind. Only then did Piotr embrace his wife. The gesture was brief and cautious, more a welcome than a marital embrace.

At home, the boys ran upstairs. They opened doors, inspected their rooms, pulled out toys, and shouted to one another from the upper floor. Krzyś found the toy left on the shelf. Tomisław immediately turned on the computer. Rozalia welcomed her brothers, and Paweł appeared later.

For one evening, the house was full again. Suitcases stood in the kitchen, coats lay on the stairs, water ran in the bathroom, and voices came from the bedrooms. Piotr sat at the table and allowed himself to believe the worst was behind them.

The joy lasted one day.

The following day, a minor remark was enough to expose everything neither spouse had truly worked through. Over the preceding months, Piotr had grown unaccustomed to other people's orders, shifting moods, and the need to explain every decision. Małgorzata, meanwhile, had returned not as someone asking for a new beginning, but as a person convinced she was simply resuming her place.

— After everything that happened, you should have thought some things through — Piotr said. — We can't return to exactly what we had before.

— What exactly do you mean?

— The way you decided to leave. The accusations. Taking the boys. The way you announce every decision instead of discussing it.

Małgorzata looked at him in disbelief, then gave a brief, mocking smile.

— What do you expect from me? Some act of atonement?

— Not atonement. Responsibility.

— I came back, didn't I?

— That doesn't erase what you did.

— Are you starting already?

— You're the one who came back as though nothing had happened.

The argument quickly ceased to concern a single event. Within minutes, old grievances, familiar phrases, and accusations stored by both of them like weapons for the next war had returned. The boys fell silent upstairs. Rozalia closed the door to her room.

The family was together again.

The house once more filled with footsteps, voices, and slamming doors. The silence was gone.

So was the peace.