A light, persistent rain was falling. The grey sky had deprived the city of its colours, as if there’d been no sun or cheerful Sunday crowds in Saska Kępa a dozen or so hours earlier. Maybe even as if they’d never existed. A pigeon stopped by one of the slowly forming puddles. Its head, motionless for a moment, was reflected in the murky water, and almost instantly I imagined a country whose coat of arms this would be: a two-headed grey pigeon. It would have to be small, like Lichtenstein or Luxembourg, but of course not as prosperous. A churlish little Slavic country with winters, taxes and a cuisine abounding in offal. In my mind, it resembled the Warsaw district of Targówek Fabryczny from 30 years ago, though I hadn’t been there in such a long time that its existence was as uncertain to me as that of this hypothetical country. The prevailing ideology would be deep pigeonism, and on national holidays one of the citizens, named Bogdan or Mieczysław, would chase away birds by waving a pole with a flag bearing the coat of arms, so that the shadow of the moving flock could fall on Dziewanna Street, and on Siarczana and Ciemna Streets. And only after even the smallest alley had been touched by the grey shadow would people start firing cap guns and cork guns and setting off firecrackers and rolling out barrels of beer, and someone would give a speech, but nobody would pay much attention because the cooing would drown out half the words anyway. This country – Targówek Fabryczny – would share a border with the district of Utrata, or Loss, just as it does today, but the latter would be Loss not only in name. It would be home to human and bird cemeteries – alternating rows of small and large gravestones.

I sat down in a café and thought about writing. Old-fashioned writing by hand. About the signals that travel inside the body from the brain to the muscles and tendons in order for words to appear on a page. About how these signals shoot down the median and ulnar nerves at incredible speeds. Just at that moment, and almost as fast, a man marched past the café windows. He marched – that was it exactly. Briskly, with a sort of stiff grace, as if he were a serviceman or a diplomat. He was wearing a torn jean jacket, and his feathery mop of hair bounced with his every springy step. He could be none other than the ambassador of the pigeon country on an ostensibly important but in fact ludicrous mission. I couldn’t see his shoes, but I would’ve bet that they were speckled with bird droppings and that his pockets were overflowing with grain, yellow split peas and the seeds of safflower, whose flowers pretend to be saffron. And as he walked, his pockets sounded like rattles – such was this general’s march. In keeping with the custom of his homeland’s high-ranking officials, he no doubt had these words from Isaiah tattooed in his groin: ‘Like a swallow I chirp; I moan like a dove.’ I was almost ready to follow him, to try to find out what had brought him to these parts, but he disappeared before I had time to make all of this up. Yet a moment later he had turned around and was standing facing the café window. I was so surprised that for a second my thoughts got tangled in a shapeless knot. But he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at a woman farther inside, engrossed in her phone. He gazed at her as if he’d known her years earlier and had just seen her profile by chance as he paraded past with that ceremonial march of his, and suddenly some memory made him stop and turn back. Of course, our Warsaw pigeons immediately began circling around his feet, sensing who he really was.

Translated by Eliza Marciniak