Elżbieta gets up to leave, she puts on her coat and scarf and thanks Zofia. She asks her if she knows the people to whom she was originally going to be placed back in 1943 — the ones who were accused of collaborating with the gestapo.

Zofia, with hesitatation, says that yes, she knows them — they own a small tailor’s shop across the river. She offers to take her there the next day. But she wants to wait outside. She saw them once after the war and apologized for what happened, but the feelings were still very raw.

Zofia then asks Elżbieta if she would like to stay the night in the spare bedroom. I sensed from this a great deal of loneliness from Zofia, she was happy to have the company. Elżbieta accepts. We see her praying in the room as Zofia closes the door for the night.

We next see Zofia out on her morning run. She runs through the forest on a path that looks like it would be a major risk for an ankle turn on every step. She stops to do some callisthenics at one point. She starts up again, then notices a man on a park platform contorting himself and she decides to get a look.

It’s a strange scene. The man is basically contorted into a human pretzel. Zofia asks him why he does it, he says there’s someone who does it on TV and he wants to be better than him. He tells Zofia that anyone can do it with practice and asks to see her bend backwards. She cannot bend very far — he replies that it must be too late for her. Not sure what this piece added to the episode — I get the sense that this episode came up very short and they were looking for any possible filler, because there’s a lot of it.

When she gets back to the apartment, Zofia fixes her painting again, then sees Elżbieta making breakfast. She had gone out shopping and bought supplies for a “proper breakfast” which contrasted with the two ounces of cottage cheese Zofia had allocated for that morning.

She asks if the room she slept in belonged to her son. Zofia says yes. Elżbieta asks where he is and Zofia replies that he wants to live away from her. She then notices flowers and tries to change the subject — thanking Elżbieta for buying fresh ones.

But Elżbieta presses the question and asks where her son is. She replies that the shortest answer is that he is far away from her. It’s a sad close to the scene, one that reinforces her connection to Elżbieta.

But it also brings back a recurring theme in the Dekalog — the estrangement of — and danger to — children. Episode one had a dead child, episode two a fetus who might be aborted, episode three had children caught up in an affair, episode four a daughter-father relationship threatened by incestuous feelings, episode five a tragic girl’s death that leads to a tragic chain of events, episode six a childlike young man with confusing sexual feelings and episode seven, most dramatically of all, centered on a child’s abduction.

Without the comfort of her own child, Zofia is clinging to the presence of a child she worried that she had sent to her death more than 40 years before.