I met Nigel when I lived in Poland. For a brief time, both he and I were in the Salon, a small group of artsy types who met every other Saturday to share our work. Magda was our host—lean, sexy Magda, with the bobbed black hair and porcelain skin. A politician’s daughter, she lived in Mokotów, an upscale section of Warsaw, in a pre-war apartment. We convened in the living room, where, among the books and plants, we’d talk and smoke and talk: about Paweł’s lithographs or one of my stories or Magda’s latest song. We’d say what was right or wrong with the work, how it could be improved, and if the conversation lapsed into Polish—for example, if Paweł and Ryszek fell into one of their vicious arguments about prosody that seemed to serve as their version of foreplay—then Magda would smack her palms together, shouting, “English, good people, English.”
In other words, it was sweet and innocent. And even if the preciousness of it makes my face glow with a kind of posthumous embarrassment, at the time it was exactly what I needed. I had a powerful ambivalence about my writing, a mixture of hope, sense of failure, and compulsion. There’s nothing more boring than writers writing about writing, so I’ll keep this short: at age thirty, I considered myself a failure. Which was why, when I started writing again in Poland, I told no one about it at first. I treated it like a secret vice, as if I were not writing stories for two...
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