Jadwiga is the city. Her body dissolves in the walls, her consciousness seeps into the cracks, her memory merges with the memories of buildings. She stretches out in them and, by the time night descends, closes hundreds upon hundreds of her window-eyes along with Dresden. But at quarter past ten in the evening, the sky awakens. It awakens, rumbles, lights up—and spews thousands of bombs within a mere quarter of an hour. Startled, Jadwiga pulls away from roof battens catching on fire, from exploding windows. Concealed under the plaster, she streams ever lower; she circulates in cool concrete floors of basements, and feels on her ribs the heavy soles of people huddled together. But the fire creeps after her everywhere, it pursues her from brick to brick, and Jadwiga flees from it for a long time. At last, her nails dig into the damp dirt underneath the city: now she believes she can break free but the walls pull her back in. At this she turns, extends her body to every building on the banks of the river Elbe, and lets the firestorm strip her to the bone. She’s ablaze for days.

When the dome of the Frauenkirche finally topples, Dresden expels her—but the bond between them is still strong and alive, like a throbbing umbilical cord. Jadwiga walks the streets unsteadily, glimpses of soot-covered walls appear through her gauzy body, cracks run along her steps on the pavement. Around her, the living and the dead are merely dark smudges on the backdrop that is the city; she bumps into them, trips over them, it’s a miracle she doesn’t fall victim to the flamethrowers used by Wehrmacht soldiers to cremate bodies that lie on the street. Dresden does not release her for a long while: every time she’s about to find a way out, her senses are confused, and she finds herself in front of the Frauenkirche again. 

Jadwiga is the city—Jadwiga is a thin woman who walks crooked, and carries in her stolen handbag the charred skull of a child.

“Halt! Wer da?”

Jadwiga is startled. She managed to get out of the city after all. A field stretches all around her in the twilight, and in front of a black strip of shrubs, soldiers are standing with machine guns in hand. One of them shouted at her just now. The woman holds her bag tight, doesn’t say a word, doesn’t move. The city begins to fade from her consciousness; now she feels the wind ripping through her thin clothes, and that the cold creeping up through a hole in her shoe is making her feel like she needs to pee even more. 

“Verdammt!” the soldier curses, and waves at her gruffly, beckoning her to come to him, to move. Jadwiga is still finding her way around her body, and as she steps closer, she feels her own bones and those belonging to the man all at once, as he stands with feet slightly apart, holding the machine gun with both hands. He broke his left wrist recently, that’s why his grasp on it is so stiff. The vast space inside his skull is filled with stories. 

“Ich muss Ihre Tasche durchsuchen,” he mutters, bored.

Jadwiga is slow at finding the meaning of these words. She is drawn to the secret of the bones by instinct, but the German language fades in and out of her memory. When she’s finally about to reply, she is afraid that instead of words, the clatter of exploding windows and the sound of sizzling fat escaping from burning bodies might spill from her mouth. In the end, only a woman’s husky voice is heard:

“It’s personal belongings.”

“Show me!”

The woman hugs the worn, burgundy bag tightly to her chest, but the soldier walks up to her and pries her hands off it. At first, he only observes its weight by balancing the handle on three fingers, but then opens it, and as he does, crumpled napkins fall from the bag, their cross-stitched patterns, embroidered with red thread, protruding from bumps and dimples on the fabrics. With a sudden movement, the man grabs a napkin causing small, yellow bones to fall from the folds of the cloth onto the grass. Luckily, some are from chickens, the soldier can probably recognize those.

“For my dog,” Jadwiga explains, for she’s read from the man’s skull that he owns a dachshund.

“Was it left behind?” the soldier looks toward the city, then puts the bag on the ground and doesn’t say a word while the woman crouches down and stuffs the bones back into the rags.

“His name was Blitz,” Jadwiga pronounces the name of the soldier’s dog, then snaps the bag shut in a single move. “Please. I’m hungry. I’m cold.”

As it turns out, there are empty warehouses beyond the field, where survivors from the city have crammed themselves in. The soldier escorts Jadwiga there, while his companions keep watch in the cold.

“All day women and children have been coming,” he grumbles, as he walks alongside the woman. “What kind of monsters would bomb a city full of women and children?”

Jadwiga doesn’t answer, because written in the soldier’s skull are all the horrible things he’s done since the beginning of the war.

In the end, she’s given a space in a blustery corner of a warehouse, on a straw mattress that already has someone lying on it: a small woman under a coarse blanket, with only the top of her blonde head peeking out. Jadwiga turns her back to the woman, hugs her bag to her chest, and quietly waits in the dark for the rest of the city to fade from her body.

Jadwiga is a little girl. Kneeling on a painted bench by the window, she spends the day staring at the garden’s growing puddles from behind a row of blooming geraniums. By the time her mother comes home, the rain stops, and Jadwiga is leaning on the windowsill, watching her mother’s feet spray water as she walks. When she crosses the doorstep, a tremble runs through the cottage walls.

She covered herself with her large scarf in vain: she is completely soaked through. The first grey lock of her dark hair sticks to her right cheek. Jadwiga watches as she kicks off her boots, takes off her wet clothes, spins in front of the table wearing only her shift and underskirt, and places the linen cloth tied on all four ends on it. Others took bread, or a flitch of bacon with them in a bundle like this when traveling—Jadwiga’s mother carried bones home. 

That day she brings a human skull for the first time. It must have spent a long time under the trees: the jaw is missing, the gaps in the scant upper row of teeth are filled with dirt. The forest has left a green stain above the left brow.

Jadwiga is holding onto the painted arm of the bench with both hands.

“Say Jadwiga, where do we find stories?” her mother asks.

“Written into bones,” the little girl answers, just as she has learned. “But I don’t want this one. It’s looking at me! I don’t want to.”

Unmoved, her mother continues the interrogation:

“What’s the use of stories?”

“They make us stronger. They help us gather many lives inside our body, so that we can never fall apart. Mama… why can’t we just do it from birds?”

“You think yourself a bird, you fool?!” replies her mother angrily, and shakes her hair, spraying droplets of water all around.

Jadwiga learns to grind bones in a granite mortar, and consume the stories hidden in them. She fights her initial disgust with shame. She is ashamed of not being good enough for her mother, whose name is also Jadwiga, and who looks just like a bigger, older version of her daughter. They wear matching aprons and matching clothes. By the time Jadwiga grows up, when her mother hides her greying hair under a scarf, they can only be told apart from up close. But nobody lives near the cottage who would mistake them, and the birds can tell the difference.

Jadwiga is a chaffinch. Song thrush. Jay. Crow. Black raven. The consciousness of birds is as light as their bones—not bound by land, nor past. As a crow she circles in the air, as a jay she squawks amongst the trees. She can fly as a bird, but slowly learns that her hunger is only appeased by stories that are locked inside humans. She sucks the dry bones, from which self-deception has long disintegrated, leaving only pure truth. If she wants something, she takes it. She scrapes out the bones with her bare hands. She lives alone deep inside the forest, in her vibrant cottage that breathes along with her at night. And when she feels lonely from time to time, she becomes a bird and flies over villages, lands, taps the windows with her beak. Where she’s welcome, she steals an embrace and kisses for herself, takes what she wants, then flutters away, disappears into the forest, ignoring hateful and desperate calls. From an embrace, she once brings away the seed of life, which takes root inside her. Jadwiga gives birth to a daughter in the forest, and names her Jadwiga too. Now two Jadwigas are living in the vibrant cottage once more, where life is more precious, because it forever balances on the edge of death.

Jadwiga is teaching her daughter. At first, she grinds chicken bone to dust in her mortar, and hides the bitterness of magic under sweet syrup. In time, though, the bad taste is overcome by the joy of knowing, and Jadwiga is now teaching her daughter, bone by bone, about life and death. They are consuming stories, hens are clucking in their garden, a blackbird watches from atop their wild pear tree as the two of them spin around the garden, wearing identical white aprons they had made together, and embroidered with red, cross-stitched patterns.

“Jaga, Jaga, Jadwiga, bone of my bone, eternal story,” Jadwiga sings, and her daughter sings with her.

Jadwiga is the cottage. She stands on poles, deep inside a forest that doesn’t belong to any country. And yet, an important boundary runs under her shingled roof: one that divides life from death. That’s why there are blooming flowers in the left window, and battered bird skulls in the right. Jadwiga listens to the wind whistling through the eaves, while the scampering of mice in the attic tingles her skin, and the woodworms crackling in the beam dig into her flesh. The consciousness of the cottage is heavy, it pulls Jadwiga down below, so her thoughts can merge with the thoughts of the earth. Like this, she rarely thinks of her daughter, who now must be flying somewhere in the image of a bird, because she hasn’t yet learned that only people’s stories can give her true power. You think yourself a bird, you fool, Jadwiga had said to her before she flew away, and with that she planted in her daughter the same seed of resentment her own mother had sown in her. But it feels nice inside the cottage. The poles were living trees once, so their roots branch out and wrap around bones hidden in the ground. Jadwiga listens to her hunger, and takes what’s hers. 

Jadwiga is an old woman. She’s sitting on a bench in front of the cottage, under her shirt her breasts sag to her stomach; she’s sweating in the morning sun. Hens are pecking around her, she’s watching their feet, nothing but skin and tendons and bones, chickens running around on bone legs. She’s waiting for her daughter; she waits for her every day, out in the garden when there’s sun, or sitting by the window fitted with skulls when it rains, although she knows that by the time Jadwiga comes back, she will be carrying another Jadwiga inside her, and with that, her time will be up. She walks with difficulty. Despite all the marrow she has consumed over the decades, in spite of all the stories, her own bones are getting weaker; if she was to trip over the stones inside the hen yard, she imagines she would turn into dust, like a skull under the pestle. A blackbird sings on the pear tree, but on the branches of the old oak crows are sitting, they shoot into the air from time to time, but Jadwiga watches them in vain: she doesn’t recognize her daughter amongst them.

Then, a summer storm dislodges the ladder set against the cottage door, so when Jadwiga steps on, it slips from underneath her, and she falls head first onto the stones inside the hen yard. She lies there with twisted limbs, and the crows are laughing above her. After the birds had cleaned the last sliver of meat, no bones are left: only a big, dark stain under the poles.

Jadwiga wakes with a start in the blustery warehouse on the outskirts of Dresden. She dislikes dreaming about her own death, because it reminds her that her life never truly ends, that she is bound to repeat the same story forever. She dies, is born, she will once again have a mother, and she too will become a mother once more, only to continue the never-ending battle with herself.

Still lying on her side, she stretches her limbs, then, feeling that her bladder is now beyond full, resigns herself to the thought of stumbling to the bathroom, despite the cold. The breathing of the woman lying next to her remains steady, as Jadwiga props herself up and clumsily puts her shoes on. Perhaps she caught a cold when she extended her body down into the cool of Dresden’s basements.

The office belonging to the warehouse has a bathroom, two stalls, and it must be impossible to get in there during the day, but now she only has to wait a couple of minutes before a woman exiting one of the stalls passes her the flashlight—for the electrical grid is still down. Jadwiga finishes quickly, but instead of going back, she crouches down, opens her bag, and pulls from underneath the crumpled napkins the skull she brought with her. She stares into the eye sockets, making sure she sees in them exactly what she saw the first time she held the skull: in the right one there are flames destroying Dresden, but in the left one there’s the forest that doesn’t belong to any country.  

For while Jadwiga kept walking in and out through the gates of life and death, while she was stealing stories, and stories were being told about her, little by little, the world changed. The forest diminished, the number of birds dwindled, and in one of her lives Jadwiga realized that she couldn’t find her way back to her cottage anymore. In the shape of a jay, she followed a pair of glowing steel rails towards the cities, where factory chimneys spat smoke, and people hid the bones of their dead under stones. The story changed: although Jadwiga kept stealing ever more, she has lost the things that were once her birthright.

She searches her bag with trembling hands for the mortar, but then grits her teeth, and steadies herself.

The bathroom of a warehouse is hardly the right place to reabsorb the forest after lifetimes of searching. She still has time, she’s forty-six years old, the usual grey lock having just appeared above her right temple; her bones are healthy and strong, and she only walks crooked when the weight of a whole city is pressing on her shoulders. Her daughter is wandering around the world in the shape of a bird, but has not yet taken another Jadwiga into her womb to seal her mother’s fate. She still has time. She packs the skull back into her bag, turns the flashlight off, places it on a stool in front of the bathroom door, then stepping carefully in the dark, saunters back into the warehouse to her bed. Clutching her bag, she curls up and shuts her eyes.

She becomes aware of a sniffling sound. The woman she’s sharing a bed with is the one sniffling, she’s quietly sobbing next to her in the dark. Jadwiga tries to block the annoying sound from her consciousness. Through the mattress, she feels the woman’s shoulders shaking, then there’s the sniffling again for a long, long time. Jadwiga bites her lip, but she’s unable to hold herself back, and in thought she’s already reaching towards the woman’s bones, to find out her story—but this time, the skull does not let her through, no matter how she tries over and over again. 

Jadwiga feels death like birds of passage feel the Earth’s magnetic field. And yet, when her senses lead her to Dresden, she begins to worry that her magic may have betrayed her. There is a constant influx of refugees from the east, crowds of war prisoners are being rounded up inside the industrial quarter, but the Red Army is still far out. Nobody expects an air raid. It’s February; snippets of sun peep out from under the clouds, sparrows are squeaking on the eaves. On the street, Jadwiga bumps into a blonde little girl from the crowd: her fur-lined jacket is open, and when she looks up, in her left eye there’s a glimpse of the forest that does not belong anywhere.

“What nice eyes you have!” Jadwiga tells her and, looking around, realizes that the little girl has no adult with her, although she looks no more than five years old. “Where is your mother?”

The child defiantly lowers her stare.

“Are you lost?” Jadwiga asks.

She awkwardly reaches out towards the girl, but she backs away and claps: “Shoo, bird!”

Jadwiga is terrified, because even though people told stories about the witch who topped her garden fence with skulls, nobody has ever recognized her before.

“Shoo, bird!” 

The little girl stomps her foot, and if her bones had enough power left in them to turn her into a bird, Jadwiga would not stop until she landed at the very top of the Frauenkirche’s dome. But for now, she just turns around and walks away in a hurry, leaving the child in the crowd. 

 She has never craved the bones of a living person as much as she now wishes to see the forest again, so when night descends, she decides to try and find the little girl by coursing through the city’s walls. But Death really does arrive in Dresden that night and reveals cruel truths, so far concealed by a sense of false serenity.

In the end, Jadwiga finds the child at the foot of an incinerated pyre—but by then, she can only say of the skull with certainty that it belonged to the girl. For a long time she sits, hunched over on the cobblestones, coughing loudly in the smoke, and looking, just looking at the forest rippling in the left eye socket.

Jadwiga is queuing for food inside the warehouse. They brought fresh loaves from the nearby village: everyone gets only a small piece, with half a red onion. There is a small, green shoot right in the middle of the onion, she bites this off first, and it makes her eyes water. In the morning she wanted to take a look at the woman whom she had shared the mattress with, but when she woke up, there was only a folded blanket next to her, and a linen bundle stuffed with clothes. Jadwiga is afraid to leave any of her possessions behind, though she is aware that her place might be taken by evening. Even so, she puts on her coat, tightens her grip on the burgundy bag, and steps outside.

In front of the dead city, there is a lively scene: on the road, next to it, and across the snowy field people are marching; some are carrying bundles, others have no luggage, many have no coat on, and a few are barefoot. They’re fleeing as if Dresden’s flames could reach out at any moment to pull them back in. But now the city is still and soundless, even Jadwiga can barely feel its presence in the earth under her feet. The soldier who has a dachshund named Blitz is shouting at a man with a wheelbarrow: No, you cannot stay here, it’s impossible to house any more people in here, for health reasons, you need to understand. But the man with the wheelbarrow doesn’t understand, and keeps on saying that he must wait for his family here. As she passes him, Jadwiga fights the urge to read the man’s story from his bones.

There’s a small, young woman standing at the crossroads, she runs up to every new arrival:

“Say, have you seen my little girl? Hetti, her name is Hetti.”

Jadwiga watches her from a distance. The woman’s short, blonde hair peeks out from under her hat, her pale cheeks have become flushed from the cold and all the shouting. When people are nice to her, she starts crying, and when they are snappish, she snaps back:

“You’ve left your heart in Dresden!”

 Jadwiga listens to her talk, and no longer needs the woman’s bones to guess her story.

“Say, have you seen my little girl?” the young woman steps in front of her, then suddenly goes quiet, and Jadwiga fears that she may have also seen the bird in her. She doesn’t speak, just furrows her brows. Her eyes are green like her daughter’s, but there is no forest or magic behind them.

“You were the one that slept next to me on the mattress,” she says after a while, but Jadwiga doesn’t answer.

“You haven’t said a word all night,” the woman continues reproachingly, then hesitates. “Do you even speak German?”

“Yes,” Jadwiga replies. Her voice is still husky. “I just had nothing to say.”

The woman softens, smiles.

“But you’re not German. I can hear it. Are you Polish?” she starts guessing. 

Jadwiga nods, although the forest where she was first born never belonged to any country. But she understands Slavic languages best—and birds.

“What’s your name?”

“Jadwiga.”

“Hedwig,” the woman introduces herself. She’s still smiling. “My daughter is also called Hedwig. She looks just like me, but only about this big,” she lowers her downturned palms to her hips. And then she repeats, again, the question Jadwiga heard her ask a few times already, but Hedwig is unstoppable as she tries to hide behind words, away from the fear that lurks inside her skull.

Jadwiga cannot bring herself to lie about having seen the girl, so she replies:

“Let’s look for her together!”

They slush through watery snow and mud as they walk up and down amongst people fleeing the city. Jadwiga’s broken shoe fills with water, making a loud squelching noise as she walks but she doesn’t complain. She’s watching Hedwig from the corner of her eye: looking at her blonde hair, her pale skin, her button nose—not a single one of her features resembles Jadwiga’s, yet on the inside she feels so familiar, that Jadwiga seriously considers it possible that besides the forest, she herself, or even the whole story may have fallen apart. What would it feel like to grow up with a mother who never forces her to use magic, because she herself has none?

“Hetti is afraid of birds,” Hedwig explains. “Before we lost each other in the crowd, she kept telling me that a big black bird was watching her. Please don’t laugh at me Jadwiga, but she even told me that this bird was going to steal something from her!” Hedwig begins to cry, then wipes her tears into her gloves. “Who knows, maybe my daughter really was taken by a black bird.”

Crows are sitting on the poplars along the road, Hedwig shakes her fist at them. They don’t move at all. When Jadwiga looks up, the birds stretch their wings and begin to circle above their heads. What would it feel like to live in a different story?

“Hetti! Hetti!” Hedwig shouts, and runs ahead when a new group of people appears on the horizon.

Jadwiga follows her, shuffling along with a bent back, even though the city’s weight is no longer pressing on her shoulders.

“Hetti! Hetti!” she begins to shout too, but the skull inside her bag stays silent.

Jadwiga takes out the mortar, and places it on the tiled floor of the office bathroom. She pulls out the skull that was hidden in her bag, and holding it in her left palm, spins it around three times using her right hand. After the third spin, it shrinks to the size of a blackbird’s skull—the tiny patch of green shimmers in its left eye socket. It fits easily into the granite mortar. By reabsorbing the forest, she may be able to become a bird again, to fly away and leave the woman who shouts by day and cries at night, without telling her she’s searching for her daughter in vain. 

The pestle makes a small, rattling sound on the tile as she sets it down, and takes the shrunken skull into her hand instead. She spins it on her palm once more, this time in the other direction, until it becomes its original size again. In the left eye socket, the forest grows bigger, but in the right one, fire brightens. Jadwiga curiously reaches out towards the flames that took the child, but before she could pull her hand away, fire licks at two of her fingers. She hisses, and blows on the red skin for a while. Then she gets an idea, and starts rummaging through her bag for bird bones, while balancing the skull on her knee. She swiftly gathers the bones of the chaffinch, the jay, and the raven.

The birds know the forest better than her, so Jadwiga inserts a chaffinch bone in between the green leaves of the left eye socket, and the chaffinch takes flight, disappearing amongst the trees. Hetti, Hetti, Hetti, it fills the forest with song, but finds no trace of the little girl. Then Jadwiga sends the jay, who squawks the child’s name from atop the trees, but its voice soon fades, until only the rustling of leaves can be heard. The raven goes last. Its voice is deep, almost human-like, and through its eyes, Jadwiga is able to see the forest, the cottage, and the pear tree in the garden. But there’s no Hetti sitting in the window lined with geraniums, nor is she looking out o the one fitted with bird skulls, for she has long passed the threshold between life and death, and no bird can bring her back from there. The raven caws on the shingled roof, then flies to the oak trees, disturbing the crows. Jadwiga does not wish to become Jadwiga again, who is only capable of taking, until everything slips through her fingers in the end. She wants a place for herself in another story.

She’s sitting with knees drawn up in the bathroom of a warehouse outside Dresden, staring at the skull she should ingest to regain some of her former power. Instead, Jadwiga carefully inserts her forefinger into the left eye socket, and when she feels the breeze on her skin, she does exactly what she did when she hid herself inside the city: she shrinks her body, and climbs into the skull entirely. 

Jadwiga’s gone. Her burgundy bag has turned on its side, the mortar she left behind will soon be taken by a woman who wishes to own something again, after losing everything in Dresden.

Now Hetti stands in the bathroom. Her bare feet slap against the bathroom tiles, her naked body trembles under the tablecloth covering her, the blistery skin throbs on her two fingers. She cries for her mother.