The Words Were in Polish

Bedtime, ordinary Tuesday, monitor humming. My wife grabbed my arm in the hallway outside our son's room because through the door came his tiny voice, singing — not in English.

Neither of us speaks anything else. We're monolingual to an embarrassing degree. Our son was four, and the song had structure: verses, a repeating line, a melody in a minor key that neither of us knew. He sang it to his bear the way you sing something worn smooth by repetition, and when we asked, later, where the song came from, he said, 'That's Baba's song for when the soldiers walk past.'

Nobody in either family is called Baba. I recorded it the following night through the door — he sang it most nights that winter — and played it, cringing with apology, to our neighbour Danuta, who is Polish and in her seventies.

She listened once with polite interest and once with none. It was Polish, she said. A lullaby her own grandmother sang — but this version had a middle verse she had only ever heard from her great-aunt, a variant from one particular region, the verse mothers added during the war: quiet now, the lights are out, we are not home tonight. It was never printed anywhere, she said. It lived in kitchens. She asked which grandmother taught him that version, and there was nothing casual in how she asked it.