My first day in kindergarten was, like for many, a nightmare. The morning was cold and gloomy, my mother dragged me forcibly by the hand along Gliwice’s Zwycięstwa (Victory) Street to an old tenement house on Barlickiego Street, very close to the place where Josef had climbed up to Karoline through the window, to have it away with her, and then, ultimately, to strangle her. Screaming, I resisted. To no avail. Having been dragged to the first floor and left in the cloakroom in the care of some lady, I did my best to stop crying. I quickly noticed that intense interoception is very helpful here. I watched my physiology, especially my breathing, cutting myself off from the outside and somehow I survived the first moments of absolute terror and sudden uprooting, lined with deep regret and a sense of betrayal. After that, it became better; quite good, even. I grew to like the kindergarten, especially the mornings where the time between getting out of bed and actually waking up was much more vast and fuzzy than ever before. It was not uncommon for me to dream that I was in kindergarten and then, after sitting down to breakfast amidst a murmur that could be regulated by putting my hands to my ears and opening and closing them, I was unsure whether this was actually happening. Sometimes it wasn’t.

Some time earlier, as I found out much later, dramatic events took place in the same rooms of the same building. Homicide by axe, in a nutshell. Patricide and matricide. It had no relationship to anything else, and yet that issue returned several times, in surprising ways. Anyway, the links among events are very unclear.

I formed several friendships in the kindergarten, I remember one in particular, with a friend whose last name was Topór [Axe]. I also had my first crush then, falling for the 16-year-old daughter of one of our kindergarten carers. I didn’t make my feelings known. I felt that that it could only be a beginning of a greater adventure and that there was no need to make haste..

Alojs and Agnes talk, suspended in a vacuum. The emotional turns of this conversation are subtle. The work is going slower for me now, it’s more details-oriented, but it's progressing. I have the impression of working with a fine chisel in a stone that is not too hard, but it is still a stone. Or perhaps climbing a moderately smooth rock. You have to be careful, but you also see your path up laid down for you, and the summit looms somewhere up there.

The Vienna premiere of The Mask took place. The audience came, the ensemble played brilliantly, Agata sang beautifully and poignantly. In any case, I was moved again by the fate of the Girl-Machine. It seems to me, erroneously, perhaps, that the audience and at least some of the performers expressed an element of polite reserve. Perhaps this piece does not work best simply as a point in a programme of a traditional concert, in a line-up of several compositions. Looks like there are going to be at least two more performances in the near future, also with a different cast, so we’ll see...