The next day I went back to the Bureau. I sat and waited, among rows of others, young and old and ageless, all silent, all torpid, reading or knitting or fiddling with their clothes with unnatural resigned slowness, while the large clock ticked and numbers were called out every now and then by a plaintive voice. My body hurt from the bench. I was hungry. But, bizarrely, I remained calm. The calm, I think, was still a form of shock. If I had let anything out, it all would have overwhelmed me. The fear, the terror of my life alone, was always there, like a clasping, growing abyss, waiting to devour me. I can still feel the tremors of that fear today, its echoes firmly anchored under my fingertips and in that small, weightless space inside my lower belly, just inches above the verge of my crotch.

At the end of the day, my number was called. I walked down the corridor, my footsteps echoing on the stone floor. I knocked on a door, my pulse thumping in my ears. I obeyed the voice that said, “Come in.”

The office was narrow and long and dim. I had to walk half a dozen steps to reach the desk, and I strained my eyes to see the man in a tiny patch of lamplight—a bald man with black-rimmed glasses.

“Take a seat,” he said, his voice formal but not unfriendly. “I’m just finishing something.”

I sat in the chair opposite him. He was bent over some files, absorbed in their contents. His desk was covered in piles of them, neatly stacked blocks of paper. There was only the sound of a clock ticking, slowly, unwillingly.

“So,” the man said, looking up at me, somewhat weary, bags under his eyes behind his glasses. He opened another file, which I assumed was mine. His eyes scurried over it, moving quickly, and second by second his expression hardened. I thought he’d ask me questions about my trip. I had my story ready—that I was going to visit an uncle in Chicago over Christmas and that I’d be back in January. I expected him to ask why I had never gone to visit my family before, how I could possibly afford the trip, and how they could possibly know I wouldn’t defect. I thought he’d launch into the standard lecture about the dangers of the capitalist world, how they were the enemies of socialism, and how I should never speak to foreigners about politics, except to praise the advance and success of socialist Poland. This is what people had said always happened. But none of that happened. Instead, he set down the file after a moment and looked at me with an expression that was impossible to read.

“We know about you, citizen,” he said, with an expectant look. “We know about you.”