Click here for Part I

The thing with broken kids and kids from broken homes, we always recognize each other. What we do with that information is one thing. But there really is an invisible bond, accessible via the subtlest of signals that brings us kids together. Perhaps Babette was broken, too, but that didn’t mean that I would like her (or she me) or that we automatically had to be best friends. With everything else aside, her hatred of my ethnicity was too great for us to ever be friends. 

But Adrian and I worked out for some reason I never thought much about. Five minutes into our meeting after I’d asked his sister if he could come out to play – after I noticed a shy face peeking at Babette and me from the safety of the bike room in the basement while we were busy doing something in the yard – and calling him over I knew in my heart that this little boy would become one of my best friends. At least for a little while. 

I don’t remember how we rekindled our friendship when I came back from the US a year later. Or what made him decide that he and Babette could not be friends (one of the three friends I didn’t lose to her, because she would always muscle in on whatever friend group I had and turn them against me, which – as I learned later – was to tell them about my ethnicity, which proved powerful enough since in that place people really had a chip on their shoulders and implemented what their parents and grandparents had been taught in the state-mandated youth programs). In any case, Adrian and I were pretty tight to the point of never ratting each other out when we broke his parents’ lamp because he threw a tennis ball at me that I failed to catch and pranking each other like when I deliberately tried to make him laugh the first time he did his duty as an altar boy. His mother, like mine, was really big on church and I think really wanted him to become a priest, even though that dream was quickly quashed when he didn’t make it into the German equivalent of a grammar school and instead went to the trade school next to mine. 

My first year in middle school his parents finally bought an apartment in a building almost across the street (we’d played on the construction site as it was being built) and even though I visited him there (at least) once and have a clear memory of what we discussed the friendship kind of petered out after that and we never saw each other again. He really must have run in different circles from mine because the town was quite small and even though I would always run into someone I’d played with in that old neighborhood, I never saw him or even heard his name anywhere. The following year my mother and I moved closer to the center, and even though our schools were practically side by side, I don’t remember seeing him again. 

Until I looked him up many years later to see what he was up to, and to send him a friend request on Facebook if I could find him, because why not. Only to find out that not only had he married a Polish girl, but he actually spoke Polish quite well. And was listed as being from a Polish town, though he had made his main residence in a German city. He also, as it turned out, blocked me after sending my request which made me think that he either didn’t remember me or became one of those Catholics / Poles who don’t believe in a male-female friendship. As an aside, I’ve always been equally close friends with girls as I’ve been with boys and never fared well in environments that kept the two separate. 

But it made me think of how Polish he really was all this time, and probably still is.