At mealtimes I sat with Karolina and Beata, a friend from lectures. She was short and round-faced and busty, quick to laugh and quick to be frightened. She told us she was getting married right after the camp was over, to a guy from the year below.

“You’re not pregnant, are you?” asked Karolina, looking concerned.

“God, no!” cried Beata, blushing a little.

“Because you know you cannot trust condoms,” Karolina said, pretending not to notice Beata’s deepening color. “Some of those old hags in the shops pierce them with the tiniest of needles and sell them on like that. They can’t bear to see us having fun. So really, you need the pill. If you want to, I’ll take you to my doctor. She’s a woman, and she won’t ask if you’re married.”

Beata had turned beetroot-red and shook her head. “We’ve only been going out for six months,” she muttered, looking at her plate. “But the Bureau will give flats to married couples as a priority. I’m sick of living with my parents.”

“Darling, that can take forever,” said Karolina, trying not to sound mean. “Two years or more. But maybe you’ll be lucky.”

While the two of them talked, I watched you on the other side of the hall, sitting with the same girl I’d seen you with the night before. She wore a denim jacket, new and brilliantly blue, something that one could only buy with dollars at the government Pewex stores. I stared at her, transfixed. She wasn’t exactly pretty—not at first sight, with her straight dark hair parted so plainly in the middle. But there was something very cool and self-assured about her, in the way she held her body and smiled at you while you spoke. Next to her sat Maksio Karowski, a bulky guy who was notorious for being the son of a high Party official and for trying to seduce almost every girl (and mostly succeeding).

On some nights, after work, Karolina and Beata and I would walk to the village nearest to the camp. We’d sit on a bench in the square, underneath some fruit trees, facing a wooden church, and we’d watch old couples stroll past, women with flowered kerchiefs covering their hair and men with canes and hats and faces as worn as their shoes. We’d go to the only shop in the village to see whether they had cigarettes or soda (mostly they didn’t). Beata would whisper that this was a sign of the economy collapsing soon, and Karolina would laugh.

“The economy has been collapsing ever since we were born,” she said one evening, her painted lips parting, revealing her large teeth. “Our beloved Party Chairman Gierek has borrowed so much money from the West that even our grandkids won’t be able to pay our debts. But before anything actually happens, I’m the one who’s going to collapse—from countryside-induced boredom.” She lit a city cigarette, took a deep toke, and let the smoke escape through her nostrils.