Before I begin, I want to check back in on that foreign exchange rate that I mentioned in the last essay. The zloty of 1988 was extraordinarily weak — from my research today, I figure that 1000 zloty could buy you an ice cream. So if 1000 zloty is roughly $5, I’d figure that a million zloty would be worth about $5000 in 1988 dollars — and that 250 million zloty insurance valuation is roughly $1.25 million. That was likely a highly inflated number, assuming all of the stamps could be sold at the highest possible price, so the full stamp collection is probably worth less than $1 million. Still, for the time, a massive amount of money.

I called Dekalog 10 Kieslowski’s only comedy in the series, but this requires a little explanation — Kieslowski has an extremely dry sense of humor. He’s not one for jokes, he prefers to create absurd situations that are comic from a distance — but they are played straight, even if the characters are behaving ridiculously (as they do frequently in his most prominent comedy, “Three Colours: White.”)

The brothers’ comic predicament is two fold. First, they had by all accounts an extremely crappy father, one who they barely knew and paid no attention to them. He focused his life instead on building an extremely sophisticated stamp collection. The brothers are now being guilted by the stamp community into “honoring their father” by keeping his collection together.

The other irony is that the brothers have no real interest in the stamps, but the more they are pulled into this community and the built-in drama of stamp commerce, the more they get wrapped up in it, even to the point of planning to purchase more.

That’s apparent in the first scene of this segment. Jerzy returns home. His son says that his mom “was looking for you.” Jerzy assumes at this point that his wife thinks he’s having an affair — why not, everyone else in the Dekalog seems to be having one. He gives his sons Artur’s band’s new album —signed by all the band — and the boy seems really excited by the gift. Jerzy then asks about the zeppelin stamps, and the boy reveals that he traded them for a big pile of (very likely) completely worthless stamps.

This infuriated Jerzy, who has his son take him to find the blond teenaged boy who made the deal with him. Jerzy, who did not seem at all violent up to this point, gets extremely rough with this young man — tweaking his nose to the point that it gets bloody — and forces out of him the name of the stamp vendor who he sold the stamps for about 40,000 zloty (by my calculations, about $200 US 1988.)

The stamp broker seems to be running a very sophisticated operation. He offers to sell the stamps back for 240,000 zloty (or about $1200 US 1988.) Jerzy then says that he would have to return with the police, but the vendor isn’t at all rattled, he requests he call the police right away. He then pulls out a (fake) bill of sale from “someone who is now out of the country” who supposedly sold him the stamps for 168,000 zloty, making his asking price seem reasonable. He then shows Jerzy his stamp dealer license.

We next see Jerzy backstage at one of his brother’s shows. They discuss their various bills and ways that they can cover their father’s debts and perhaps repurchase the zeppelin stamps. Artur mentions possibly selling an amp. He said it cost him $50, so it should go for 70,000 zloty. This is an even worse exchange rate than what I’ve been describing and it should be noted that there was no official dollar to zloty exchange at that time, so who knows, these are all wild guesses. As for the stamps, the brothers sensibly decide at this point not to sell them. Given the crazy people they’d be dealing with in the sales, this seems wise to me.

In the next scene, we see Artur being dropped off by his bandmates. From the street, he can see up into his father’s old apartment and he notices a light on inside along with some shadows. Deciding he needs to take aggressive action, he tears up a very young tree, creating an extremely weak club out of it to carry into battle.

He gets to the room and tries to surprise the assailant — only to discover that it’s just Jerzy inside. He’s been there for hours, looking through the stamps and reading his father’s notes. And now we see that he’s starting to get seduced into the byzantine world of collecting. He’s discovered a series of three stamps, one green, one yellow, one pink, that would be the only of its kind in Poland if collected together. Their father was missing the pink stamp and had extensive notes on its history — who might be the holder, what it might take to acquire it. As the scene comes to an end Artur agrees that the pink stamp would “look good next to the other two.”

This is how acquisitive madness begins.