My very first memory – I was three or four. My mother’s girandole earrings (I later learned it was pronounced “jeer-an-dou-lee”), with three green stones dangling at the bottom, the centerpiece slightly lower than the other two. Not Swarovski, but Jablonex, mass-produced behind the Iron Curtain in the neighboring Czech Republic. All year round, Mom kept them locked in a box wrapped in a handkerchief smelling of “Pani Walewska,” a fragrance sold in ultramarine bottles for 5 zloty (also the price of a Shane Nuss chocolate on the black market). She wore them only for New Year’s Eve parties. Dressed in a brocade gown trimmed with lace, with Mary Quant makeup applied to the eyelids but with her nails bitten to the quick, she let me hold them for a few moments before vanishing with a puff of an oh-so-delicate scent like a Communist-era Cinderella. No pumpkin carriage with horse-mice was waiting for her, but an Ikarus bus provided by the steelworks where she worked. The second – the age of unreason. I was six. …