I couldn’t breathe. The night of the flyers, the window, the faces staring up at me. Who’d told them? Had they been following me all along? I couldn’t make a sound. The man looked satisfied.

“We know about your deviancy, about your pederasty.” He said the words clinically, with a detached sort of judgment, the way I imagined he would have said “treason.” All feeling left my body, as if my cells were deserting me. It was as if someone had hurled me into a vortex, with no up and no down, nothing to hold on to. No one had ever said these things to me. Something private, something utterly unspoken yet essential, was being ripped out of me. I couldn’t say anything. Maybe they were baiting me, I thought, maybe I could argue my way out of this. But I was unable to think or maneuver; I was caught in the jaws of something much too powerful, something that paralyzed me from within. Satisfaction flickered across his face—a face that could have been anyone’s, an unremarkable, everyday face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, knowing I could never carry through with this.

His face didn’t change. He looked back at the file. “Does the name Marian Zalewski mean anything to you?”

I shook my head truthfully.

With his eyes on the file, he continued. “Zalewski was caught in the Staromiejski Park in Wrocław over three years ago—April the twenty-third, 1977. Engaging in sodomy with another citizen.” He looked back at me. “He obediently gave to us the names of others like him. All the names he knew. All contained in a statement, signed by him personally. One of them was yours.”

He took something out of the file and handed it to me. It was a photograph, passport-size. It showed the face of an old man I had never seen before, staring straight into the camera. His face was deeply lined and hollow. Dried, emptied of life. And then, in a flash, I recognized him: it was the man from the park bench, from the night I’d run away from home. The man who’d told me his life story, the man whose mouth had relieved my anxiety for one night—and whom I had told my name. Instead of anger, a strange sort of tenderness invaded me. He looked so sad, so forsaken in the photo. Fury awoke in me on his behalf. I could see him being dragged out of the park, into the back of a police van; I could see him sitting in some cold underground office, beaten, blackmailed, made to sign this statement that now lay neatly before a bureaucrat.

“What does this have to do with my passport?” I asked, impatient. “Will you give it to me or not?”

He put down the file slowly and folded his hands over it, retaining his calm.