Marek is honestly not sure what he's doing with his life, these last few years, even if it does seem to be working somehow. The army felt like a reasonable place to spend his life in, until it suddenly wasn't, and after that and everything else, he was too politically inconvenient for any decent job he was qualified for. But his maternal uncle died without children and left a small farm in a village he only had vague memories of, somewhere out of the way of all the complicated politics, and that seemed as good a place to be as he was likely to find.
Finding things to do without the structure of army life didn't turn out to be difficult at all. There was the house to restore, and the land to find a use for, and neighbors to help with a diverse range of village problems, and sometimes the school needed an extra hand to keep everyone out of trouble, and occasionally so did the police department, and then there was that runaway boy who jumped out of a moving train at night and it just seemed like a much better idea to let him stay at the farm for a few months than to risk him trying that again...
That, skipping over the next couple of years, is why Henryk, the chief of the two-and-a-half-person police station in the unimportant village of Bobowa, is the person who gets a phone call from the Kraków orphanage. There's a girl they really don't want to keep dealing with, all right, that seems odd and the man's tone seems even more odd, but Henryk doesn't need or want to know the details, it's not like he can't predict Marek will say yes. It's urgent? Why would it possibly-- no, it doesn't matter, yes he can go out and get Marek here before noon so someone can tell him whatever this is all about.
The police station being one of the relatively few places in the village with a phone, it's where Marek ends up for his own call with the orphanage director, which he hopes will provide at least a little more information than the "I don't know, a girl, how can they possibly have much trouble with a girl?" he heard from Henryk.
"Hello, this is Marek Dąbrowski. I was asked to call you about a child you wanted to move somewhere quieter?" He's been in occasional contact with the place for a couple of years now, as a place to temporarily keep the occasional stray kid they couldn't figure out what else to do with. He turned out to be good at that, or at least so they said, and he could hardly be worse than some of the stories he'd heard of the other options. Well, most people were doing the best they could with much less than they needed, and he didn't need very much and so could sometimes do better.
