I was then eleven and a half, and I was in love with a girl from my class, and I wrote a serial story for her, which I would read to her at recess, and all the girls in the class would gather round and listen. While the boys played ball outside? she guesses. Yes, he remembers. She would sit opposite me, this little girl I was in love with, cupping her sweet face in her hand, looking at me with her brown eyes, with the fingers of her other hand playing with her golden hair. What was the story about? she asks and he answers: It was a story about a young woman who escapes with her baby to the forest through the sewage canals, after her husband was murdered in front of her eyes at the entrance to their house, next to their photography studio in Szpitalna street, which was called after the municipal hospital at the end of the street. Through the sewage canals? she wonders. Yes, he confirms. Under the town is a network of sewage canals and catacombs and tunnels dating from the Middle Ages, and she waits for nightfall, and all the time her husband’s body is lying in a pool of blood in the street, in front of their house, and when night comes, she wraps her baby in a blanket, and walks like a shadow along the walls until she reaches a convent, and the Polish abbess of the convent takes her down to a secret tunnel and gives her a flashlight and tells her go straight down the main tunnel until she meets the people who have been living underground for two years, and they will help her, and on the way she encounters an underground burial chamber full of open coffins, containing the skeletons of adults and children.
