We’ve entered the final weekend of my Dekalog series. This will be a short essay because there’s very little story to tell in this segment, it just moves the plot

The brothers meet with the stamp broker. He asks them if they’ve become aware of the Austrian Pink Mercury stamp, they nod. He tells them that he knows who has the stamp … but he doesn’t want cash for it, he wants a series of two stamps that another collector has … and that collector will trade those two stamps for one particular rare stamp … and this broker owns that stamp.

Why the brothers would trust this man at this point is a little hard to figure, but the Byzantine nature of the stamp trade in Poland seems comically interesting, so we’ll run with it. The broker asks the brothers to get blood tests and to meet him again to discuss the stamp.

I think we can all see where this is going — he wants a kidney. Not for him, but for his 17 year old daughter (another endangered child in the Kieslowski universe.) Jerzy is a match, so after some hemming and hawing, he agrees to do it.

Artur, meanwhile, decides to step away from his band while all of this drama plays out. They audition a new lead singer, who sounds terrible. Actually, I think the band sounds pretty awful in general, but what do I know about eastern bloc punk?

We next see Artur at the hospital, looking for his brother post operation. He runs into a young blonde nurse who recognizes him as the lead singer of City Death. Artur asks how his brother is, she replies that he will be fine. She asks if she can touch him, and he agrees. She caresses his face … the roaming hands have returned.

That’s all there is to this segment. Two action packed segments to go in my long Dekalog journey. If you expect this stamp junket to turn out well for the brothers, you haven’t really been paying attention, go back to the start and read again.