In cold, in darkness, in unceasing terror. In cold, in darkness, in unceasing terror – I, a night animal.

Through the dark days I’m curled up in my burrow, grey as the walls of the hollows concealing me, in dark night I go out for my prey, scrape what’s left of the meat from the skeleton of the dead city, gnaw at its frozen carcass. I flit between concrete rocks, down canyons of streets, I dash lightly across piles of rubble, not leaving a trace, nearly invisible, noiseless and grey, I have a stinger in my pocket, I hunt, and then I return and like a mother I feed the one I loved, I curl up in my burrow, I merge with the walls, with the rags, I curl up beside him, I warm him with what’s left of the heat I still have in my body, I warm him like a mother.

My whole life I’ve loved a bad man.

I warm him and feed him, then I go out again, and he stays, in the dark.

I remember back now and I remember back then, in cold, darkness, terror, how he sat at my place, he sits, a few years earlier, in another world, still in my broth- el on the corner of Pius XI and Koszykowa Streets, after not in fact going to Palestine in 1937, he and that wife of his. After coming back. After the plane turned around.

So he sat at my place, I remember, he sits naked, he sat on the bed, he rested his elbow on his knee, his head on his hands. At first he said nothing. Then he drank. He drinks. Then he cried. Then he bashed his fist into the wall until he broke the bones in his right hand, bloodied the wall, but kept bashing away, too drunk to feel the pain of bones broken not for the first time nor the last, since everything hurt except his body, I don’t know whether to call it the heart, the soul, after all humans don’t have souls, and the heart is only a muscle, but there’s something inside, something that’s not the body but is human, or belongs to a human, or a human belongs to what’s inside, and that’s what was hurting him, and to drown out that pain he broke his metacarpus bashing the wall, I called a doctor, the doctor came, examined his hand, he had to go to the hospital, the doctor x-rayed it, set it, put it in a cast, did everything necessary and before long Jakub went back and went on drinking, with his hand in a cast, and then lost consciousness and lay in bed, naked and unconscious of anything.

I love a bad man, I thought then, looking at his body, at his navy-blue tattoos and muscle thickly overgrown with fat, I loved.

Was this how Mrs. Goebbels thought about her hus-band, for instance, that she loved a bad man? And did she love him? What is love if you love someone so bad?I’m a bad person too, but he doesn’t love me. That’s our set-up, two bad people, me bad, him bad, I love him, but he doesn’t love anyone, he doesn’t even love himself, so maybe that makes me somehow better, that in all my immorality, the whole filth of this non-soul of mine, I still love him, so maybe I’m not completely bad, maybe something human has remained inside me, but not in him anymore, because he doesn’t love anybody. He used to love himself, he loved all those little toys of his, the little pistols, switchblades, and suits, he loved the little expensive leather shoes and the automobiles he decked himself out in, because he wanted to be something more than yet another little Warsaw Jew, a Jewish nobody, shit, human manure, and he didn’t have a not-heart and not-soul inside him to give for some idea, like his brother had given himself for Pales-tine and wanted to die for it, and he died not for Pal-estine, but for nothing, and also because of Jakub, somaybe for Jakub, maybe it was for him he gave his life?

Excerpt translated by Sean Gaspar Bye