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seams without really harming the clothes. Now you can stop worrying and go to sleep.”
    My mother leaves. I’m no longer worried but I still can’t sleep. I relive the entire show in my head. Without knowing it, I’m creating a ceremony that will stay with me for many years. From that night on, as soon as I’m in bed, I call forth dancers, singers, comics, and they perform for me alone. I fall asleep at night to the sound of applause and laughter.

II
    The centre of my life in Dobryd was the marketplace.
    Ochorna, the village where we had lived immediately after our release, had seemed to me then enormously complex and exciting. Now I saw it as small and restricted in comparison to the experiences Dobryd offered. Within Dobryd, the marketplace superimposed itself on everything that had come before and blotted it out.
    In the morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, I would remember that in a little while my aunt and I would go there and I would be filled with a pleasant sense of anticipation. Outside, the streets were already alive with people coming into town to trade. I was impatient to join them and I would rush my aunt through her morning chores so that we could leave as early as possible.
    Ours, I later realized, was characteristic of many other markets that flourished immediately after the war. The people who gathered there came to carry on the ordinary desperate business of life that was typical of those times. To me, however, there was nothing ordinary or sad about what happened here. Each day, as I sat beside my aunt in the little kiosk where she sold some of the extra supplies my mother and Yuri procured for her, what I saw seemed to me exciting, new and completely engrossing.
    All this activity took place on a vast square of ground that still contained the outline of the buildings that had once stood there. As soon as it was cleared of the ruins, the first stalls appeared. These were erected practically overnight, with great ingenuity, from the materials that lay scattered about. Soon the entire square was covered with shops. When all the vacant space was used up the original builders began to lease parts of their kiosks to those who arrived after them.
    The peasants, who had at first stayed away from the town, began to explore the possibilities of trading in the marketplace. Early in the summer they began to come into town with their supplies, which they had kept well-hidden. For the first time since our arrival we saw fresh butter, eggs and vegetables for sale. These were greeted with the kind of excitement that must have welcomed the first merchant traders back from China.
    The square was filled with noise and activity from dawn till dark. Everyone came: civilians, refugees, peasants, soldiers, nuns from a nearby convent, transients making their way west towards Germany or east to Russia, the old, the young, and even the few stray dogs that had survived to return here stubbornly in spite of the harsh reception that met them daily.
    People came for food, clothes, furnishings, entertainment. They came for papers and passports. They bought new identities and acquired convenient new families. They came looking for work, for travel permits, for anything at all. Many of them came and stayed without purpose—a silent crowd of onlookers whose arrivals and departures went without notice. Whatever the need, the market was everyone’s best hope.
    Scraps of information were valued as highly as goods, and people paid dearly to learn facts concerning their friends and relatives. It often turned out that they had been tricked or lied to, but this did not prevent others from taking their place and paying for similar information.
    Sometimes it did happen that people who had given up hope of seeing each other again were reunited among the stalls. Such meetings were of course very rare. Yet everyone who came to the marketplace lived in anticipation of them. Emotions always ran high, and every new arrival