TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Matthias Nawrat

and lean in, the people behind us pressing against our backs, the room reverberating like a departure lounge.

He asked me whether I would recommend the pierogi I had just begun eating, and I said they weren’t the best I’d ever eaten in my life and perhaps not the best I’d ever eaten in the city either, but theywere still good. And so, once one of the two young waitresses hadworked herway through the crowd tous, he ordered a portion of pierogi. We spoke Polish to one another. It turned out he originated from southern Poland, from a town near Opole, the city my family came from, where I had been born and spent the first ten years of my childhood.

You’ve just come from church then, too? he asked.

No, I wasn’t at church, I said.

Has something happened?

No, I just don’t go to church, I said.

He cast me a concerned glance. For amoment, I felt like a conman who had come here to profit from the church-goers’ feelings of purification and transcendence.

He asked me what I did for a living, and I said I was a writer.

What language do you write in?

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