From her very first visits to the theatre, she recalls a kind of darkness that brings relief. A darkness in which one’s soul – gloomy and worn-down – can dissolve. It ceases to exist. There’s only the world within the illuminated box of the stage, where it both begins and ends. And the story that temporarily releases one from the necessity of living.

She recalls the large marionettes in the puppet theatre to which her mother often took her. And their sluggishness; they were heavy and didn’t pretend otherwise. They flailed their arms in the air like animals knocked onto their backs. Their fists were as large as loaves of bread, but they had faces like gothic Madonnas. They resembled people who desperately wished to live but didn’t know how to go about it. She watched them from the front rows and nearly died of fright, and afterwards she would go with her mother to a pastry shop, where they were served by a friendly man who looked at her with eyes so pure and primordial that ten centuries ago a similar gaze surely peeked out from beneath the Piast fringe on the head of one of the Slavic proto-men living on the shores of Lake Gopło, who cleaned their knives against stones while squatting and delivering sermons on love. He was friendly, yet he evoked something unpleasant for her. Suddenly her spirit took flight, visited impossible worlds, caused her heart to race, and then collapsed like a marionette after its strings are cut.

Everything faded away as soon as she emerged from the theatre’s darkness. She sat on a tall chair in the pink, brightly lit pastry shop and felt as if she’d been carried out into a snowstorm while in the grips of a fever. She didn’t utter a single word; all her feelings were unfolding inwardly, until her mother – a tall, elegant woman – nudged her under the table with the tip of her shoe as if she were a tongue-tied schoolgirl.

One mustn’t wallow in self-pity.

Jaga takes a play script from her handbag and lies down on the sofa. A party streamer is coiled around her left wrist. Pranksters mark their victims’ houses, but they’re not threatening. Or maybe they don’t want to be seen in that way. They’re cheerful people, blessed with an imaginative spirit. They just want to have fun, not harm anyone.

Jaga looks at her hand. She rotates her wrist, and a yellow shimmer glides down the streamer.

She recalls how she used to spend afternoons making puppets for herself: rag dolls, stick puppets, and hand puppets with jaws that snapped open and shut, like Muppets. Sometimes, feeling discouraged, she would instead cast shadows on the dirty kitchen wall with her bare hands: a rabbit, a deer, a goose, a wizard with a huge eye. Around that time, she also got her first period and discovered something more: a living body. How it moves and responds to being touched. She secretly travelled to Kraków and Warsaw – to the theatre. One day, she had an epiphany: it wasn’t the entire performance that thrilled her, but only one specific gesture made by an actress – a horizontal movement of her hand that was simultaneously rapacious and furtive. She was moved by its solemn, ceremonial quality, as if that single gesture could be performed only once in a millennium, and only for her.

For a brief instant, life opened up. It revealed new possibilities.

She used to set her alarm for five o’clock so she could practise and read books before going to school. She was ecstatic and believed that Napoleonic discipline contained the right dose of romanticism. She trained her diction with a cork in her mouth and a stone on her tongue, carefully repeating vowel sounds, but her voice faltered. She began to pay more attention to her appearance, just as people do when they’re in love. Because she was in love. She was dying of love. She had fallen into icy water and resurfaced only after reaching the opposite shore, straight into the heart of the first storm. She failed the entrance exam for theatre school and had to apply for a job in a puppetry workshop. She cried every morning, then made herself some sandwiches. In the afternoons, she took her puppets out for walks. She dreamed of a miracle happening, just like Pinocchio: she longed to turn a piece of wood into living flesh.

Translated by Scotia Gilroy