The segment begins with a long shot of Anka in bed. Given all that we have seen in this episode, we can’t be entirely sure that she’s in that bed alone — but she is. She’s awakened by clanking milk bottles. We will learn the significance of those bottles in episode six.

Anka seems panicked as she wakes up and calls for her dad. She doesn’t see him and seems a combination of scared and depressed that he might be gone. But then she hears a sound in the courtyard and sees Michal walking away. She yells to him, yelling dad twice, and then finally daddy, which gets his attention.

We next see Anka running to Michal, wearing just a robe over her nightgown. When she reached him, she reveals the episode’s big surprise — she never read her mother’s letter, she forged her own and recited it to Michal at the airport. At this moment, the watcher walks by carrying his kayak once again.

She asks him what was actually in the letter, once again questioning whether he had prior knowledge of it all, but he responds “I don’t know.” She asks where he was going, and he said to get milk.

Anka then says that she knows what to do with the letter. We next see her pull it from the drawer. She asks Michal if he will help her destroy it, he agrees. Anka sets the lower corner on fire, the letter is engulfed. The letter mostly chars before the flame dies out, but there is a small fragment remaining.

The part of the letter that remains says “I have something important to tell you. Michal is not …” and that’s all she can read. The episode closes with the black and white picture of Anka’s mother with the two men who could be her father around her.

There are three things about the closing of this episode that are important to discuss. First, the published script includes a different letter fragment than the one Anka narrates in the episode. The script’s fragment reads “My darling daugher, I must tell …” This is a very neutral statement, it gives no clue for or against the theory that Michal is the father.

But the fragment in the episode, while not revealing everything, leans toward the conclusion that Anka’s mother wanted to tell her that he’s not her father. We are given no other clue in this episode that the phrase “Michal is not …” could mean something different.

This brings me to the second question of the ending … which letter did Anka actually burn? She tells Michal that she originally opened the fake letter and then burns the real one. But it’s entirely possible that Anka is lying at the end (she’s told enough lies that we should doubt her) and she actually prepared the fake letter just in case she changed her mind and needed a way to back off the stark conclusion.

This interpretation is somewhat challenged by the actual text that is revealed — if Anka wanted to create a fallback, she would be far more likely to create a neutral second letter or something that clears him of the cloud. So I would lean towards her being truthful at the end and burning the real letter.

The final matter to discuss: the deleted scene. The published screenplay ends with one last Anka-Michal conversation, one where Anka and Michal wonder what will happen with their lives from this point on. Michal tries on Anka’s glasses and she remarks “everything looks completely different now.”

MIchal closes the episode with a speech: “There was a bloke called Krzysztof who used to work for me once. Have I ever told you this one? He used to come to work on a bike from Michalina, about forty kilometers away. Every day, he would try to break his previous day’s record. How long did it take you today; we’d ask? Twenty-six minutes and forty seconds, he’d say, or twenty-five minutes and three seconds; and so on. He must have been doing a ton or more. One day he doesn’t turn up at work. Half an hour, an hour goes by, and we’re all wondering what on earth’s happened to him. He finally comes in looking white as a sheet and wearing glasses. God in Heaven, Jesus Christ, he says. What’s up? we ask. Gentlemen, he says, I had no idea how many people there were on the roads, how many cars, how narrow the road was, all those bikes and carts, God forgive me. It turned out he was nearsighted with minus four and a half diopters and never knew it. He sold the bike, bought a suit, and never went near another bike again, right to this very day.”

I’m not sure what to make of this speech, which might account for why it was cut. The bit about seeing clearly seems too on-the-nose for Kieslowski. But the parable doesn’t give us much of a clue about how the father-daughter pairing will fare from now on. Now that they’ve exposed the live wires of their feelings, can they go back to the way they were?

In my experience, we never go back to the ways we once were. Revealing feelings always changes a relationship. And in almost every case, the immediate impact is the most difficult. But over time, as the heat and confusion dissipates, it usually turns out to be for the best, even if we are blissfully unaware of the ways not-knowing can go wrong.

That cyclist may miss the fact that he no longer rides freely and confidently to work each day. But those glasses might have kept him from getting smashed by a bus someday.