Sam Willetts

Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four, the soldierly grey boulevards slippery with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding, the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew whose face was wheel-broken in a crash, and remade so well it was hard to say how she looked wrong. I’d brought two questions here— holding them as if they might slip:who were my mother’s people? Where did they die? In an attic-archive—deep card indexes, ink turned lilac with age—I handed my questions to a love-laborer in a yarmulke; with sad palms and a shake of the head he regretted that any answers now lay probably beyond our reach. So I abandoned questing and went back to tourism; joined the passeggiata, drank black tea, got stickied under sooty lime trees, saw boisterous children, all knees and elbows, skyline-capering on the wall at the river-divide. Beyond their frail silhouettes against the petrol dusk huge cranes were moving, courtly, confident, building another new Warsaw across the Vistula.

Missionary girl reports that Chinese addicts say your heart begs you to stay away