Kowalski's Marseille ambush site is more than a destination in Viktor Kowalski’s story: it is where flight becomes enlistment, where he briefly acquires the responsibilities of a father, and where news of his daughter’s illness eventually draws him into a trap. The port’s settings recur at sharply different scales—from the dockside bar where he first meets Julie to the apartment corridor where an attack is waiting—making the city a hinge between his past and the danger closing around him.

A port city in Kowalski’s past

Kowalski arrives in the history of the port as a displaced young man shaped by successive losses. He was twelve when Germany invaded Poland and thirteen when his parents were taken away in a dark van. Old enough to understand what his sister was doing at a hotel occupied by German officers, he joined the partisans and killed his first German at fifteen. When the Russians arrived, he left the partisans, who were later executed on a commissar’s orders, and fled west toward Czechoslovakia. Austria and a displaced-persons camp followed; still hungry and speaking only Polish, he regained his strength on American food before escaping south in 1946. He travelled through Italy and into France with another Pole who spoke French.

In Marseille, an attempted break-in became another decisive rupture: when the shop’s proprietor disturbed him, Kowalski killed him and went on the run. His companion advised him to join the French Foreign Legion, and Kowalski signed up the next morning. He reached Sidi-Bel-Abbès before the police investigation in war-scarred Marseille had properly begun; with no immediate suspect, the case was dropped within days. By then, he was already a legionnaire. The city thus stands at the threshold of his military life, not as a place where he settles, but as the place he leaves behind after violence has narrowed his choices.

Julie, JoJo, and the child

During a six-month weapons-training posting near Kowalski's Marseille ambush site, Kowalski met Julie, a bar worker living near the docks. She was having trouble with her pimp; Kowalski struck him once and sent him six metres across the bar, unconscious for ten hours. The blow shattered the man’s lower jaw so badly that his speech remained altered for years. For several months Kowalski acted as Julie’s protector, escorting her after work to her attic in the Vieux Port. Their relationship was driven by lust rather than love, and the pregnancy Julie announced soon made their lack of tenderness unmistakable.

Julie said the child was Kowalski’s and told him she did not want it; she knew an old woman who could end the pregnancy. Kowalski hit her and threatened to kill her if she went through with it. He then sought advice from JoJo Grzybowski, a fellow Pole and former legionnaire whom he had befriended. JoJo agreed with him. In the small hours, the two men, both very drunk, settled on a plan: JoJo and his wife would take the baby. JoJo remembered his promise the next morning, but needed three days to tell his wife. When he finally blurted it out in bed, she was delighted.

Kowalski returned to Algeria, while JoJo and his wife stayed in Marseille and supervised Julie’s pregnancy through a mixture of threats and persuasion. The pimp, whose jaw Kowalski had broken, began hanging around again, but JoJo warned him off; wary of crossing even a limping old legionnaire, the man abandoned his former source of income and looked elsewhere. The intervention gave Julie room to continue the pregnancy and made the couple’s plan more than a drunken pledge.

Julie gave birth in late 1955 to a blue-eyed, golden-haired girl. With Julie’s agreement, JoJo and his wife completed the adoption and named the child Sylvie. They informed Kowalski by letter. In his barrack bed, he was strangely pleased, but told no one: he had learned to expect that anything he admitted to possessing could be taken from him. Marseille therefore becomes the unlikely source of his only private attachment, one he keeps hidden even as it gives him something to leave behind.

The return and the ambush

The city’s connection to Sylvie outlasted Kowalski’s departure. Three years after the adoption, before a long combat mission in the Algerian hills, a chaplain suggested that he make a will. Kowalski had never thought of doing so: he had no possessions he considered his own, spent his accumulated pay during rare leave, and understood his belongings as things that belonged to the Legion. With help, he left his worldly goods to the daughter of JoJo Grzybowski. The will entered his military dossier, which was later recovered from the archives in Paris when his name surfaced in connection with terrorism in Bone and Constantine in 1961. A private provision for a child in Marseille had thus become part of the official record used to trace him.

Years later, a letter from JoJo brought Kowalski news that little Sylvie was seriously ill. He telephoned JoJo to confirm it. The girl had grown weaker and thinner; by the time a doctor diagnosed her illness, she had already been put to bed in the family’s newer, larger flat. JoJo gave Kowalski the address slowly, and Kowalski wrote it down. His urgent question about how long the doctors thought she had was difficult to communicate over the crackling line. The call turned a remembered tie to the city into an immediate destination: he set out for the child whose existence he had kept private.

He reached the city in August, when the heat drained movement from the streets. The address lay on the main road towards Cassis. At the Avenue de la Libération, Kowalski told the taxi driver to let him out so he could walk the rest of the way; the driver’s response made clear his disbelief that anyone would choose to walk in such heat. Kowalski watched the taxi disappear back into town, asked a café waiter for the side street, and found a newer apartment block. He imagined that JoJo and his wife had prospered through their station food business, perhaps even securing the fixed kiosk JoJo’s wife had long wanted. He also thought the neighborhood might be a better place for Sylvie to grow up than the docks. Then the thought of his daughter made him stop at the foot of the steps. JoJo had said she might have only a week, perhaps a fortnight.

Kowalski ran upstairs and found the Grzybowski name beside Flat 23. The door bore the same typed name on a small card. When he pressed the bell, it opened and a pickaxe handle swung down towards his forehead. The blow split his skin but glanced off the bone; doors on either side opened as men surged out, while two more stood in the doorway before him. In the narrow corridor his size gave him little room to fight, and blood ran over his eyes. He charged into Flat 23 to make space. The approach to the family home had become an ambush, turning the city that had given him a daughter into the site where his attempt to reach her was violently intercepted.

The postwar port economy

When Kowalski killed the shopkeeper, the city was still a major entry point for American food supplies, and killings committed over such provisions were not uncommon. That detail places his first recorded murder within the scarcity and disorder of postwar life: the killing sets him fleeing, but the investigation quickly loses momentum when no immediate suspect emerges. The port functions here as a place where violence can disappear into a larger climate of need and instability, before it becomes the point of departure for Kowalski’s life in the Legion.