We would spend the Easter at Wanda and Jan’s place. Festive motives were rather lacking, to be honest. Eggs for breakfast and that was pretty much it. Transcendence, if I may say so, was not within Wanda’s area of interest until the very end of her sober life, while Jan searched for transcendence in his own way, in the shadows, in the underworld, tracing breaches in the Newtonian structure of the world and penetrating ever deeper layers of consciousness altered by alcohol in various concentrations. Nevertheless, it was nice, the atmosphere of revival was somewhat contagious.

There was an ornament hanging on the wall in Jan’s room that I really liked. It was a kind of beaded, circular net, with a medallion with a mini-relief in its centre, depicting something that could be called a flower, or a bonfire with flames around several eukaryotic cells. A womb that contains an organism that is becoming alive.

The medallion fell out of its net once. I may have helped it a little. I was allowed to take it because no one paid particular attention to the ornament.

I am looking for a bridge in the text. Or a place where a breakthrough in form and meaning takes place. Nothing too weighty. Nothing of significant weighty here, actually; just quiet echoes of a past life. 

(transl. Magdalena Małek-Andrzejowska)