He nurtures it as carefully as if it were a second crop. Perhaps it goes with the job, this ability to turn painful or shameful moments or even the memory of some past failure into something that has entertainment value. That is why my lost homeland is something that forces recollection upon me, imposes an obligation to write out of obsession. That homeland, lost for ever, which has left a void that cannot be filled by a substitute, by some ersatz homeland or other, had to be recalled once more and then exorcised, banished on to paper, sheet after sheet and, though shattered, it had to find its reflection in a shard from a broken mirror. The recollection had to be drawn off in a way so carefully measured as to keep a narrator supplied with great cupfuls of it, quenching his thirst for his former self, allowing him to use his own particular perspective to see as great that which was small, to see as small that which was great.
Every sluice gate is opened.
The tramlines of Danzig, the cinemas in the old town and in the working-class districts. In recollection, the image of that Kashubian uncle seems quite different. He was a man who, at the beginning of the war, had been reluctant to be declared a hero for his defence of the Polish post office. When he died, the family said nothing. There was only chatter about blockades, special communiques, continual victories, banal, everyday events drawn out endlessly, and all that remained of these were scraps of words that hung in the air.