The Man finds himself in a room named ‘1992.’
“’Go to Poland,’ he said. ‘Adventure,’ he said. ‘History,’ he said. ‘You’ll love it,’ he said.
The brochure looked good.
The Boy, being the Boy, heard something else beneath the words: Leave, but only so that one day I can admire you for leaving.
The father was actually saying: fuck off and leave me alone, finally. Perhaps never come back, that might work too.
So he went.
Then, once he had gone, the game changed – or just revealed itself as a game, The Great Game. The father laughed. Poland? What the fuck are you doing there? Why don’t you get a proper job? Why are you wasting your life?
The answer had been decided before the question.
Sitting in an expat bar in Warsaw, years later, watching football beneath a television bolted to the wall, Bill Shankly – or a man who spoke a lot like him – says it first.
“Your dad sounds like a total cunt.”
The Man laughs.
“No, really,” says Shankly. “Not tragic. Not complicated. A prick. He told you to go, then mocked you for going. Promised you the world, then laughed when you went looking for it. Classic.”
The Man stares at the screen. Some international friendly. England against some nobody. Probably Scotland.
“He always did that,” says the Boy quietly.
“That was the trick. He changed the rules, then laughed when you got them wrong.”
The first false exit: the trick itself.
He had always imagined there was a door somewhere. Back to England. Back home. Back to the life before he got it wrong. If he just stayed in Poland long enough. Suffered enough. If he endured.
The Boy still believes it. One day he will say: you did it. You can come home now.
The Editor nearly chokes laughing.
“He doesn’t care,” he says. “He wanted you gone. That was the whole point. Your mother could have you back. He could play the hurt, abandoned father with a clean conscience and another glass of red wine.”
The Boy starts crying.
Lacan does not look away.
“You remained loyal to the fraud,” he says. “That is your symptom.”
The scene has now moved to room ‘1999’ in the Man’s Central Office of Memories. Six months after his visa has expired, the Man walks into the ministry in Warsaw and announces that he needs a visa.
Even now the Editor cannot believe this.
“Who does that?”
The Man shrugs.
The fingerprints. Mug shots. The big blue stamp across the passport:
DEPORTACJA.
For one glorious second he thinks: thank God.
At last somebody else has decided.
“You wanted to be deported,” says Lacan. “Not because you wanted to leave. You wanted Poland to reject you so you would not have to choose.”
Old Solidarność people his wife worked with find him a lawyer. The decision is reversed.
“You can stay,” says the country, with a sneer.
And so he does.
So he remains where he had always been: publicly displayed in his marginality, like one of Foucault’s lepers placed upon the ship of fools, to be seen, judged and expelled, but without ever actually leaving the port.
Sometimes, after he stayed, he pretended not to speak any Polish. On buses. At press conferences. On 32-hour coach trips to London. In police stations. It gave him the small, childish pleasure of listening to what people said when they thought he was not there.
But there was a problem.
When you do not speak, people treat you as if you don’t speak.
He had tried leaving before. Bonn. Brussels. He always came back. The children. Covid. Ola. Her parents. The old anchors. Or excuses.
Lacan leans back. “You keep waiting for permission to leave,” he says.
“You don’t get to keep the superiority of the critic and the warmth of the adopted son at the same time. Pick a bench in the workshop or catch a train,” says Lacan. M nods in agreement from the subs bench. Outside it is raining again.
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