I noted in the first episode of the Dekalog a silent watcher. In that episode, he seemed to be a homeless man. He sat next to the pond with his dog, who then froze to death. At the conclusion of the episode, he had disappeared. Since we did not see who was pulled from the ice, it seemed like a reasonable interpretation that he was one of the two victims.

The watcher returns in this scene of episode two. Here, the doctor is looking through a microscope at some samples taken from Andrzej one month ago, two weeks ago and recently. He asks another doctor what he sees. This junior doctor wishes to interrupt and say that he trained them not to draw conclusions, but the doctor presses for an opinion. The junior doctor states that the illness is progressing. The watcher is also in the room and has a horrified look on his face.

This raises yet another interesting moral detail in the story. A conclusion that the illness is progressing could convince Dorota not to abort her child. If the Watcher is an instrument of God, he does not stand on the side of life, he stands on the side of the Second Commandment and against a conclusion of truth when the doctors do not know for sure. The watcher appears to be the Dekalog’s silent prophet (and I need to note, at the risk of being on the nose, that I’m writing this in a coffee shop and Simon and Garfinkle’s “Sound of Silence” is playing in the background.)

We next go back to Dorota's apartment. She is sitting silently in the early morning, a cigarette burning beside her, and the phone rings. But while she may be anticipating her lover's call, she does not answer it, she lets it go to the machine. A deep male voice tells her from the machine to pick up the phone. The voice actually sounds similar to the doctor's, so there's a displacement again, an expectation that maybe he is giving her the news. But it is her lover calling from his tour, many time zones away. She tells him that while she did get her passport, it doesn't matter anymore. He asks why. She tells him that she's going to have an abortion. He responds that if she has the abortion -- even if her husband passes away -- they cannot be together.

So apparently her moral choice is not fully hers to make, it is heavily influenced by a verbal law he has already laid down. She acknowledges the outcome -- he says that he really wishes they could be together. She tells him that he'll have to find someone else to bring him the musical scores. As she is putting the phone back on the receiver, he tells her that he loves her. She hangs up and looks at a poster of a man, his eyes covered, on a mountain climb -- presumably Andrzej.

We now go back to the doctor's apartment. He looks at the replanted cactus plant -- it seems to be doing much better. He's now at the table again with the cleaning woman. They are drinking instant coffee. He goes back to the story of his family. He calls his wife and informs her that he is coming home from the office. He hears his daughter and son in the background, the baby boy making goo-goo sounds into the phone. And then he arrives how later that day and there is nothing -- no house, no family, just a big crater where they used to be. We never find out who is responsible for the bombing, which is fitting for Polish history, a country that was ping-ponged back and forth between Germany and the Soviet Union for much of the century.

And now we know the doctor's story and his perspective on how fate can intervene to take away what someone holds most precious -- and perhaps a clue as to why he needs a private God to reach some kind of understanding with life. A life, ideally for him, where he has some control over time.