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does your practice raise regarding safety and personal space?”
    “I don’t know ... I mean, you can prepare for a fire your whole life, but it will always get you, because you can never think of everything. You know? At least once a year, you’ll leave Kleenex near a heater, and you’ll forget to turn off a stove burner. You can never protect your valuables, because you won’t know what’s important to you until you see its edges curling in a house fire.”
    I found it surprising that nobody, in this room full of pretentiati in training, asked me about my artist name.
    Dorota winked at me.
    I suddenly realized that my invitation to this class was an act of sabotage on the school. I winked back. It was time to have a bit of fun.
    But first, you need to know more about Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
    Husband and wife, environmental artists. They were both born on June 13, 1935, at the same hour. As part of their 1961 honeymoon (which, you might say, lasted decades), they created one of their first Low Art monuments by barricading the docks of Cologne, Germany with an oil-drum simulation of the Berlin Wall, to the bemusement of police and the horror of the art establishment.
    Christo and Jeanne-Claude never flew together, so that if one died in a plane crash, the other could carry on with their work.
    They remodelled Germany more than once. In 1995, they petitioned the 662 parliamentary delegates who had offices in the Berlin Reichstag, writing personalized letters and making phone calls asking for permission to wrap the building in “fireproof” polypropylene fabric. The delegates acquiesced after a seventy-minute debate on the parliament floor, and then Christo and Jeanne-Claude, with the help of hundreds of workers, threw a giant condom over them.
    The German parliamentarians had reason to be nervous. The Reichstag had burned in 1933, and an enraged Hitler, convinced it was an act of arson by the Communist Party, manoeuvred to erase them from government. The Nazis then achieved a majority in the Reichstag, and eventually, single-party rule.
    Maybe those 662 delegates knew that a fire could happen again, at any time.
    All this. These two artists. But why would I reveal my true heroes to this class? I could just whisper their names into Dorota’s ear some other time.
    Dorota raised her hand, drawing a second stern glance from the professor. High Art, it was clear, was under assault.
    “Young lady,” I said.
    “Is your art sexual?”
    “Please explain,” I said, blowing bubbles in my chocolate milk through the extendable straw.
    “Czesław Miłosz once said in an interview that in his poems, ‘You will find a very erotic attitude towards reality, towards simple things: amazement, for instance, for the innumerable and boundless substance of the earth—the scent of pine, the hue of fire, the white frost, the dance of cranes.’ I was wondering if you feel the same way about your art.”
    “Art does not use the language of department-store perfume,” I said. “But seriously, has it never bothered you that Miłosz put history and politics ahead of literary merit?”
    “He had no choice,” Dorota volleyed back. “Do you know what country this is?”
    “The artist always has a choice.”
    “Not when his best friends are being imprisoned and assassinated.”
    “Okay. Good point.”
    The professor took the piece of chalk away from me and was about to call off the class, but strawberry boy raised his hand.
    “Where did you graduate, Mr Wawelski?” he asked sarcastically.
    “Funny you should ask,” I said. “Jagielloski kicked me out a few years ago for a conversation almost exactly like this.” I turned to the professor. “Do you pay cash, or will you be mailing me a cheque?”
    Too bad they’ll never hear my real artist statement, a bone that Christo tossed to a journalist over continental breakfast: “I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will