In Bratislava's historic centre, several large boxes decorated with images of communism, and more still through the peep-holes cut into their surfaces.
Each one commemorating the fall of an ideology, city by city: this one Budapest, this one Warsaw, this one Berlin.
The most striking image was that of Bucharest - thousands of Romanians pouring into the street to celebrate the removal of the hated foot from their windpipe.
During such a great outpouring of joy, it is easy to forgive citizens for not asking themselves what they had left behind, and what surprises were in store for them in the future, for the ecstasy of triumph is all-consuming, at least for a short while.
I am trying to imagine what it must be like to go to sleep, and wake up with everything one is accustomed to suddenly inverted. Was there ever a group of psychiatrists to help stunned Romanians come to terms with their new world? Was there ever a doctor to dispense a metaphorical slap around the face and say: this is not a dream?
How would a person make the necessary transformation from living under one system to its total opposite? One where the new thinking simultaneously says that flawlessness is within one's grasp, and as far away as the stars?
The Bratislava rectangles gave me no clue as to how I might answer these questions. Faces frozen with joy from 20 years ago, trapped in their moment forever. Singular images standing as representations of whole countries, as general principles.
All of it is, of course, history now. The sick and the dead and the damned in their Slovakian obelisks - each one signifying everything and signifying nothing.
I need not write, for I have only a sketchy grasp of that which I am writing about. I know no more about Communism than I do ballistics, for I lived not in their moment. I look at the dead eyes of Romanians through the dead aperture of another person's camera, and I think of history in my own naive and ignorant way.
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