Our Guide in Warsaw

A couple finds their hired tour guide more sage for hire—like Socrates, an ambulatory pedagogue.

- Bonnie Costello

I saw him first from the back. He was standing alone by the big lobby win-dow, looking out at the rain and mist enveloping Krakowskie Przedmiéscie, the Royal Route. A tall figure with black frock coat and cane, black dress shoes, tousled hair, white collar. I knew him. The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

My husband’s business client had booked us a private tour over the long weekend, and Leon was to be our guide. As we addressed him, he swiveled around and made a different impression—not the young Werther or even the ravaged Chopin. Older, in his fifties perhaps, though still somehow a youth in the sense that he was slightly gawky, untidy, despite his formal attire. Too tall for his clothes, I thought. Not a blond; raven hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones. Yet the resemblance to Friedrich’s wanderer would grow over the three days we spent with him, listening to his views on nature, art, god, and the heart of man. We covered many highlights of Warsaw during our tour, but it was Leon, not the monuments, that held the story, that will always hold the story.

We were annoyed at first to learn that our guide was not a Warsavian. We had paid for local expertise. He was from Minsk, in Belarus, though he had resided here a few years now. And as I learned more about Polish history, its twists and tragedies, its occupations and its accordion borders, I saw just how Polish Leon really was, despite his foreign passport, how much its history had made him. The country had been repeatedly chopped up and devoured by neighbors; colonized, muzzled, enslaved, purged, liberated, obliterated, and reborn over the centuries since its origins around 900 ce. No wonder I mistook its ubiquitous white eagle for a phoenix. Poland, I began to see, was an idea, or maybe an idea of an idea, strengthened in adversity.