Here, a writer wonders how to write about a duck.

There is a place in Warsaw where the smiles of the city go to hide. Where the harder veneer, that mask people seem more inclined to wear throughout the rest of the city — especially in the trams and on the busses — can be let go of, dropped, and those who know of this little place can instead come to breathe, to let out those little smiles, all the while recharging with a coffee, a good book, good company.

As Warsaw comes to life this spring, as the sun kisses the cool earth and the color green fades back in over the gray city, within this flowering green rests a gray, quiet crow named Zuzia. She’s taken a nest directly outside of my grandmother’s window, and except for the occasional, brief trip away from it she just sits there, never sleeping, always protecting, watching the world around her and watching Babcia too. It was Babcia — Grandma — who gave Zuzia her name.

Why Zuzia?

“I don’t know. She just looks to me like a Zuzia,” Babcia decided, and that was that.

Not far from the Wisła River in Warsaw, on an avenue called Aleja 3 Maja, or the Avenue of the Third of May, there lives the greatest grandmother in the world. This woman is an artist. Straight away, this is the most important thing to know about her, before even her name. Because art, more than anything, informs who she is. Shape and color, they sustain her. Shape and color through even the more shapeless, colorless times. Shape and Color and Light — yes, these are the better names with which to define her.

Meanwhile, there at the park, the woman on the bench nearby got up to leave. Her dog happily followed, and carried with him his discovered stick. I also followed, getting up to walk around, and sure enough there on a corner was Jankowski, his bust in stone. Surely I must have walked past it, and also through the park, so many times and just never realized.

But this is Warsaw, where one often walks past history, through history, without realizing. But take a closer peek at the plaster there on any building, and one may find a bullet hole. Look up, and one might well see a tablet.

In America, when a person wishes to withdraw money from a bank, the process is fairly quick and simple.

In Poland, nothing is allowed to be quick or very simple.

In the span of that hour, as he eyed the priest and the backs of heads, and a slant of sunshine up on a wall, and the coffin there in between some flowers, his own life shrunk down to these details and that place, then grew out, then shrunk. All of this in his own head of course. For there is where we mostly exist: in our own heads. You, me, everyone. We exist in our heads, or as it is often said, we are each the hero of our own story, and maybe this is always the trouble.

They observe us, and we them. What else have we to do?

Our homes stand close, close and on top of each other. Close enough to hear each other’s music, to catch whiffs of conversation, of cigarettes. Theirs is a weathered communist-era bloc, ours is elegant pre-war. Looking out, we probably ask ourselves the same question: better to be in the nicer place, but with a view of the lesser? Or the other way around?