From Up Late, which was published last month by W. W. Norton.

I was working as a lawyer in Poland for a large firm trying to cash in on the deregulation of the Eastern European markets when I visited the brush shop.

It was on a side street in the shadow of our skyscraper, the first in Warsaw. I didn’t spend much time in the office, especially in the afternoons. I liked to wander past an empty woman’s boutique called Troll, an empty sports shoe store called Athlete’s Foot.

I’d walked past the brush shop—no sign—several times before I entered, ringing the bell on the door. Wooden counter. Wooden floor. Three assistants in shopcoats talking, and continuing to talk. The shop sold only brushes, but brushes of all kinds: toothbrush, bottlebrush, hairbrush, broom. A currier for fur. A shaving brush. A universe of brushes hung on nails on the back wall. The assistants persisted in ignoring me but in a way that was not, it felt, purposeful: their lack of interest was entirely genuine. I decided to buy a dustpan and brush, and I gestured. They could sell me the brush, but they couldn’t sell me a dustpan, no. For the dustpan I would need a pan shop.

When I went home the fever started. I sweated through the sheets and grew delirious and sat up once, convinced there was a large black scorpion on my chest crawling up towards my neck. I screamed and leapt out of bed and kept trying to brush it off my chest.

I sat out on the balcony at night, smoking, wrapped in a duvet. Via Bonifraterska. I’d lived in that street for almost a year before Bartosz mentioned the wall had run down the middle of it, enclosing the ghetto I’d been walking out of every morning.