From the very first time, I was curious about all these F-, C-, or N-words I had heard of so many times and what they were all about, but I couldn’t figure them out myself, so I finally asked a friend who was a native English speaker, and only then did he explain them to me. Personally, the first thing that would come to mind when I heard the N-word would be “nerd,” given the way people often perceived me; for the F-word, it was “facetious,” as occasionally I turn to be; and as for the C-word, definitely “calluses,” as in the name of the place my clan’s roots are.

The last one is actually embedded in my surname, which, if translated into English, would be “of Calluses.” So, if I were born in Britain, I would be called Matthias of Calluses. It reminds me of all the stories my father, when he happened to be sober, told me about the legends of our clan. According to him, the founder of the clan was a knight who showed great courage during the Battle of Grunwald, and as a reward for this, King Władysław Jagiełło gave him as much land as he could travel around on his horse from sunrise to sunset. His mother’s clan was supposed to be of even higher rank.

While still in boarding school, I actually talked about that to a history teacher who sometimes came to night duty in our dormitory. He told me that if the entire population of the village has the same surname, the most likely reason is that in the past, their ancestors were serfs belonging to the noble Modzelewski family. When Poland was partitioned, some noble families granted freedom to their serfs, but the only way to do this was through an act of adoption, so overnight the entire village would become a family adopted by the nobleman. This has the hallmarks of probability, although it does not explain the ownership of fields, meadows, and forests.

I don’t know how much truth is in all these stories my father told me or if perhaps the teacher was right, but when I was visiting my grandparents as a kid, I always liked running down the hills that gave the name to our village, then jumping over the stream and running all the way to our forest. It was all so different from my life in the city. I can’t believe I haven’t been there for over thirty years.