Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski

The Soviets took their house and hauled them on the same cattle trains that had brought the Jews to the camps a year or two earlier. Granny’s family were forced to leave their land. At the end of the war, the east of Germany became Poland and the east of Poland became the Soviet Union. From one day to the next, the continent’s borders had shifted, redrawn like the chalk lines of the hopscotch we played on the pavement. Everyone – the people who’d lived here before and the people who replaced them – had been forced to leave their home. Our postboxes still said ‘ Briefe’ in German. It hadn’t even been twenty years since any of our families had come to live there. There were hedges and wide courtyards with a little garden for each flat, and cool, damp cellars and dusty attics.

He lived around the corner from us, in our neighborhood in Wrocław, composed of rounded streets and three-story apartment buildings that from the air formed a giant eagle, the symbol of our nation.

I had known him almost all my life, Beniek. He speaks five languages and writes in English. He was born in Germany to Polish parents, and has lived in several countries, including Poland, and currently lives in Paris, France, where he works in high-fashion. Tomasz Jedrowski is a graduate of Cambridge University and Université de Paris. The following is excerpted from Swimming in the Dark, the first novel by Tomasz Jedrowski.

Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski