He wore thick, heavy work boots, tan colored work boots, but they didn’t have any dirt on them. I stared mostly at those work boots, under his black jeans, because I wanted to know what they were for. They looked as if he had just purchased them, but that is impossible, of course, no one sells work boots like that anywhere around here. Here you just get black leather boots and they fall apart. They hurt your feet, and they fall apart right away. At one point, I remember, we were standing on a small rise that looked over the north-western part of the camp next to the pond, and he pulled a cloth wrapped in plastic out of one of the pockets of his coat. He unwrapped the cloth and threw the plastic on the ground, where the breeze picked it up and I was able to trap it with my foot just in time before it blew into the pond, this pond where the ashes of thousands of Jews were dumped, this beautiful, miserable pond between what used to be the horrible barracks and the terrifying crematorium. When I looked back, he was using the cloth to clean one of his boots, which was already clean.

“It’s cold, nigga,” he said, and he pulled a hood up from his jacket, covering his head. He wore something tied around his head, a patterned cloth, like a dishcloth, and he wore sunglasses even though the sky was heavy and gray.

He had friends with him, who stayed ten feet behind. Five of them, pushing each other, talking too loudly, and bursting out into laughter. If I looked at them they would lower their voices, but when I looked away they would return to their jostling and activity. He said nothing. At one point, he turned to one of them and asked for a cellular phone, which was handed to him, and as I looked on in horror he moved in slow circles staring at the phone and then up at the sky. Finally, he closed the phone and threw it to his friend. “Can’t get no motherfuckin service,” he said to him. He looked at me. “Shit’s fucked up.”

If somehow this was not this, if this was the two of us sitting at a table in Kwadrat drinking biers, if this was an evening far enough away from here that I could have washed my face and changed my sweater, then I could say to him, “I know your music. I do not understand all of the words, but sometimes, when I have been in Warsaw, we hear your songs in a discotheque. I like it very much.” But instead I watch in silence as his five idiot friends take turns trying to walk on the murderous train tracks without falling off. My voice drifts to nothing as I futilely explain the singular hell that was the latrines, which still exist, and from which you can practically smell the misery of a life reduced to something no one would ever recognize as life. He rubs his chest through his fat, American jacket filled with feathers. He doesn’t look at me, even with his sunglasses on I can tell that he never looks at me.

At the edge of the camp, I hear him talking to his friends. “Let’s eat, nigga,” he says. And then he steps into the back of a very large, black car, as clean as his magic boots. I rub my eyes with the heel of my hand.