“You’re all right?” she asked, cocking her head. I nodded and couldn’t help but smile. I was glad to have her with me. We’d met in first year, and since then she’d become like a sister to me. It was she who’d taught me half of what I cared to know. She had a stack of under-the-counter books, which we read and discussed together. She’d introduced me to Simone de Beauvoir and Miłosz, to the poems of Szymborska and the travel accounts of Kapuściński. Sometimes, she’d compare our country with Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia and declare we needed a similar revolution. I admired her courage to speak her mind.

“Please,” she’d say, and pull her eyebrows together whenever I’d ask if she wasn’t afraid of speaking out. Mother and Granny had fed me stories of terror, of people they knew back in the day disappearing for one critical comment.

“Stalin’s been dead for a long time,” Karolina would say. “We know the system is a farce; they know it’s a farce. And we’re not in East Germany, thank God. Here they’re sleepwalking.”