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her shrink back in the doorway, her laughter, her face beneath her scarf, her hands clapping in thick woollen gloves as he bowed and stepped back, collecting the coins and applause of these people.
    Understanding little of what she felt, Elena Kruszwica became fascinated, enamoured by this man, this wild gypsy creature blown down from the hills into Lodz.
    Her parents asked of her whereabouts, why she took so long to collect the provisions and she, embarrassed, or fearful perhaps, answered with white lies and half-truths that seemed in some way to bring her closer to this crazed genius Kolzac.
    In November of that year she stopped coming. Kolzac played in the streets, the squares, but his music was hollow, performed with the obligation of self-preservation, having somehow lost its magic, its real enchantment. He searched forher, asked of her, and found that she had only been sojourning in Lodz, that her hometown was Tomaszow, a handful of miles south. He walked there at night, running much of the way, his instrument roped to his back, his pockets filled with coarse black bread and a fistful of cheese wrapped in linen, a blanket around his head and shoulders against the bitter, bone-freezing cold.
    He was there as she walked to her piano lesson the following morning, there in the street as she turned the corner, and these people – Elena, a mere teenager, understanding little of life, little of being a woman – and Jozef, knowing nothing of life but the music the old man had taught him – stared at each other for minutes before speaking.
    They believed in one another it seemed, for she never took her lesson that morning, and he never played through the streets of Tomaszow, and for the hours until evening they walked and talked, laughed and sang together in the fields and woods beyond the town.
    Perhaps love, perhaps fascination, perhaps none of these: it did not seem to matter. For three days they were together but for the hours that they slept, Elena telling her parents that she was studying in the house of a friend, and he content to do nothing but be there for her. They spoke of life and love and laughter; they spoke of dreams and aspirations; they spoke of a future yet unrevealed and a past which now seemed to bear no significance to the present. The present was what they had themselves created, and it was within this present that they cared little but for one another. Elena was a girl of passion and spirit, a spirit constrained by the etiquette and protocol of a life to which she believed she did not belong. She sought freedom: freedom from the person she was expected to be, freedom to be whom she chose. Jozef granted her that freedom, granted it without payment of penalty, and this – perhaps above all – was the reason she loved him.
    And then life reached them, and Elena – having no coins, having given all of her laughter and applause – gave everythingelse she had. Beneath the roof of a barn, within a tumbled-down mountain of straw, she lay down for Jozef Kolzac, and Jozef – tears in his eyes, an emotion filling his heart that he had never before experienced – gave his virginity and took hers. He was thirty-five, she was sixteen, and perhaps no greater well-meant love ever breathed or spoke or walked the earth.
    Elena turned seventeen in January of 1937, and it was in this same month that she became aware that her monthly cycle had ceased, became aware of her condition, and ran from her home to Jozef. He understood, took her away, and the pair of them walked, taking assistance offered by itinerant journeymen, wanderers and travelers on horseback or with carts.
    They reached Lublin to the east by February, and here Jozef Kolzac, a father-to-be, fully cognizant of his responsibilities, played for two, bringing money and food to his pregnant Elena where she worked as a maid, a cook and a cleaner for a family related to the town’s mayor.
    And it was in Lublin where her parents found her, where they brought