I thought the girl I spent my first night with luxuriating in Warsaw had liked me quite a bit, but she failed to show up the second night. Now it’s true she told me her sense of direction wasn’t worth the effort it would take to discern red gooseberries by the niggardly light of a crescent moon, and that furthermore, she was not a native of Warsaw (or even Poland). I also surmise that her desire to come back to my garret after just one night there had been frustrated if she tried to use her father’s compass, for she had taken pains to detail that the compass (which she said she often carried on her person) had been damaged long ago—“during the Gomulka years here in Poland”—even though, she further related, her dad is German and has been in Warsaw only twice in his life so far. However, she went on that even though the loved the compass to high, high heaven, it had never been satisfactorily repaired, and, as we both stretched out straight as boards in bed and admired the shadows of the window blinds made by the lamp on my nightstand (before the two of us got entangled in one another), she had further added, “But where poppa’s dying to go, he doubts any compass in the world will function properly, and that’s the nighttime bright city of Perth in otherwise gray and lusterless Australia.”
Comments are closed.
|
Longer
|