My Husband Disguised as a Stranger in a Kraków Bar

All the men sit by themselves at small booths that hide the contour of their bodies. Only their pale faces are partly visible because of the cigarette smoke, dark glasses, and casual hand covering a mouth, a left cheek, a sullen forehead. All of them look away, as if they want to be somewhere else. But not him, the man closest to the camera’s eye, the man who looks like my husband disguised as a stranger. He stares straight at me. He knows that I know he knows. Something about his past. Exactly how he got that too-perfect nose, the blue-gray eyes when his family’s gene pool said brown. What is the legend behind why he parts his hair on the left? What is the great mystery behind why his beard grew in red when the hair on his head was blond then brown then ash—growing from baby to boy to man? I imagine a life for him: a professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University, parents dead, nicely furnished upper flat on a side street near the Market Square. And no wife in sight. Not until I snap the picture and his stare matches my own.