I thought of the photographer and his courage, imagining how the photo had made it out of the country: a roll of film smuggled into West Germany, in a secret compartment or an emptied tube of toothpaste. Anonymous figures trapped on the wrong side of history, compressed and rolled up inside a stranger’s pocket. No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it.

Little sparks cause fires too.

*  *  *

The morning after I saw you with Hania, I awoke feeling hungover. I remembered the night before and my body burned, like a muscle sore all over. I lay in my bed, the sky gray and thin beyond the roofs of the blocks. My thoughts were like swallows, nosediving, avoiding the ground, flying up and away. I did not know how to stop them.

I got up to go to the bathroom but found Pani Kolecka in the living room sleeping. Something caught my eye, something small and dark. I approached her without making a sound. Blots covered the white duvet near her mouth. The same blots on a handkerchief she was holding in her hand: dark and irreversibly crimson. I had to stop myself from gasping out loud. She was breathing quietly, her white hair untied, spread out on her pillow like a halo. She looked like an ancient child. Fear rang, vibrated, like a church bell inside me. I pulled on my shoes and coat and hurried out into the cool morning. The nearest doctor’s office was at the junction of Freedom and Lenin. I reached it, out of breath, just as they were opening. Already there was a group of people waiting by the door. A burly woman sat at the desk, looking at her schedule through thick glasses in which her eyes seemed tiny and miles away. When it was finally my turn, I told her about Pani Kolecka, my words stumbling over one another, the coughing, the blood.

“Pan Doktor is busy,” she said, without looking up at me. “Earliest appointment is next week.”

I insisted it was an emergency. She looked up at me for a moment, her phlegmatic face almost compassionate.

“In that case try the hospital. But I doubt she’ll get in ahead of people with cut-off limbs and bleeding faces.” Then she bent over her papers again.

“There must be something else you can do.” I felt the moment slipping through my fingers. “Please, can’t you make an exception?”

She raised her eyes toward me again, this time without a trace of empathy. “I told you what to do. Now stop blocking the line for your fellow citizens.”

I stood in the cold morning, on the large Freedom Avenue, the sun far away, not warming, only blinding, throwing its wide light across the pavement onto the throngs of people hurrying to work with downcast faces.