An hour

A cemetery we could not read, a clerk who gave us an hour, and a generation recovered.

Three legs

A town that was never flattened, a shield with three armoured legs, and a very calm pigeon.

A fortress never taken, Germans and Russians buried side by side, and a bird in the canal.

A photograph from 1942, a set of brick steps, and two days spent looking for them.

A hot dog, a palace, and several thousand people in a rose garden to hear a piano.

My girlfriend arrives and starts spotting everything I had walked past, beginning with four street signs.

Breakfast, a statue nobody reads, an obelisk that commemorates nothing, and a plaque on a corner.

Back out after lunch, still in Warsaw, reading walls in a city that labels its own copies.

Warsaw on foot. Almost none of it survived, and what is left is there to show you what is not.