1.

I’m seven or eight years old and it’s winter. My father and I are walking down a
quiet street in the suburbs of Warsaw. I don’t remember how we found ourselves
there or why, but I can see very vividly the glassy sidewalk, snow swept into
piles,and the white roadway. My father is holding my hand; from time to time I run
up and slide on the dark patches of bare ice. Snow lies on the branches of trees
and sticks to fences and iron gates. The day is frosty and windless. The air smells
of coal smoke. It’s the smell of the city’s outskirts in those days, when lumbering
wagons drawn by hulking horses would appear in alleyways. Blackened men in
quilted jackets and caps with earflaps would shovel coal into wicker baskets and
carry it down into cellars. But on that day the street was completely quiet and
deserted. Greyish-yellow smoke rose from chimneys.

2.
It’s January, seven in the morning, and I’ve just woken my daughter for school.
She’s bustling between the bathroom and the kitchen, and I’m sitting in my room
drinking coffee and staring out of the window. The wintry grey light of early morning
brings back all the dawns of my childhood. Many years have gone by; I’m grown up
now, my parents are old, and I’m separated from my family home by decades and
by hundreds of miles, but the light of dawn hasn’t changed in the slightest. I gaze at
it and I can recreate the taste of mornings when I was ten. My daughter repeats my
gestures, repeats my feelings. When she wakes she stretches reluctantly, rolls up
into a ball beneath the quilt and tries to pretend she’s only imagining waking up,
that in a moment she’ll be able to return to the warm embrace of sleep. The coming
day is cold and disagreeable, and so the first waking minutes are better imagined
as a continuation of the safe, cozy night. You have to go down to the bathroom and
the kitchen with half closed eyes so as to preserve the sleepy stillness for as long
as possible. She eats breakfast without speaking and brushes her teeth, and in the
meantime I start the car and wait for it to warm up. I watch the front door of the
house to capture the moment when she emerges, huddled against the onslaught of
the cold wind, and finally sets out to encounter the coming day.

Extracts from Fado by Andrzej Stasiuk (translated by Bill Johnson)

Poland, 2006