Continued

A Visit

A Visit Someone was pounding on the eaves all night long. It was my old friend Heniek Kowalskifrom Swietojanska Street. His wonderful, tiny, bald father played at the Operetta. Oh, they allplayed until they went away. And Kuba played cello and collected stamps. Kuba met me in Warsaw just before he left. I was doublyashamed, for myself and for everything else. They all left as well — our beautiful girls, a little older than us. Left aswell. When I used to visit, he practiced violin. Tonight, Heniek pounded the gutter; it was a tarka, a washboard. Once he announced "An Upbeat Song" and everybody laughed. On banjo: Grzegorz Brudko, who hadn't met me. When Heniek argued with his mother, the machine stopped sewing, his father broke in, and Kuba some five years younger, and the gray-haired aunt Estera Kowalska. It was a real Tower of Babel, the raging tongues. I waited for it all to end. It must have been his mother, all night long sewing Heniek's shirt with rain. The old sewing machine wrenched the thread. It was an intermittent knocking of the heart. 73 ...