Long fingers descend along the wall before the body appears, then the nose, the teeth, the thin moral architecture of the face, Nosferatu arriving down the landing, three steps above the Man, ready in judgment.
“You are destroying family,” Witek says.
Not hello.
Not good morning.
Straight to the charge sheet.
“You broken everything. Everything. You are bad husband. Bad father. Bad man.”
His English worsens as his moral authority rises.
Witek has a key to the house.
“Give me the key,” says the Man.
Witek stares.
“The key,” says the Man again, almost pleasantly. “To my house.”
For a moment Witek looks genuinely shocked.
“This is family house.”
“You think in England family mean nothing.”
“In England,” says the Man, “we usually knock before entering.”
“England,” says Witek, with immense disgust. “England. England.” He waves the word around like a dead rat. “Always England.”
The Boy winces.
“That’s actually not entirely unfair.”
“Quiet,” says the Editor.
The Man points politely to the front door.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he says, as he closes it. “Oh, and pop the spare key through the letter box when you have a moment. There’s a pet.”
Witek ostentatiously avoids a handshake, an unthinkable crime in his own book, almost worse than shoes on in the house.
“Oh, and next time,” the Man adds, “please call before entering my house.”
Witek storms away as if all houses in Poland are his house. His land. His city. My city, my rules.
The morality does not frighten the Man at all.
Hell does not frighten him.
He is there already.
He has heard the speech before, not in these words but in this register: family, family, family, honour, duty, men, responsibility, the old village catechism translated into suburban Warsaw and delivered from the stairs like a verdict.
He thinks of his own father.
Then, with surprising calm, he thinks.
So what? He can fuck right off too. The pious and the unpious just two sides of the same debased coinage.
The Family, as an idea, died years ago, something inside him says, not triumphantly.
Good.
Good riddance.
The strange thing is that the Man knows Witek knew all along this would happen. Not because the Man is especially wicked, or foreign, or degenerate, though Witek rather enjoys all three possibilities, but because the role requires it: the daughter marries the wrong man, the wrong man fails, the family closes ranks, the father-in-law is vindicated, the prodigal daughter is punished for disobedience by being made to watch the prediction come true.
Now Witek can return as the Man Who Was Right.
He can help.
At home his own wife has no bank account, no driving licence, no opinions that have not first passed through church, husband, neighbour or fear, and a cupboard full of Valium. She has spent fifty years accepting truths the Man does not even believe exist: guilt before God, shame before the neighbours, what people will say, what the Pope would think, what the dead would think.
The Man’s world has never contained much that could not be mocked: authority, marriage, patriotism, priests, fathers, himself, particularly himself, because nothing survives the English treatment for long – satire, ridicule, a pin in the balloon, a muttered aside at the back of the room.
“Yes,” says the Boy. “And look how well that worked out.”
A week later, at the Man’s request, they meet in Promenada shopping centre, neutral territory.
“You have house and still cannot manage,” Witek says. “Sink broken. Shower broken. No job. No money. You are fifty-seven.”
A man should fix things.
Earn money. “You think too much,” Witek says.
“That part,” says the Editor quietly, “may also be true.”
“You people,” Witek continues, stabbing the air with a thick finger, “always psychology. Trauma. Depression. Talking. In Poland we work.”
The more animated Witek becomes, the cooler the Man feels.
Englishness as refrigeration system. Shaken, but not stirred.
At home, beside the broken sink, Ola’s mug says KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.
He thinks of Pat’s question.
“Do you want to win the argument, be right, or keep Ola?”
He had laughed at the time because the sentence sounded too neat, too much like something said by a woman in a cardigan, but years later he realises most of his life in Poland has consisted of trying to do all three.
Win, be right And keep the person.
The Boy thinks this unfair. “Why shouldn’t he have all three?”
Lacan interjects, as he does. “Poland has always contained an impossible demand: that it should become something else while remaining itself.”
The family without the suffocation.
The church without the hypocrisy.
M without the withholding.
Poland without Poland.
“You wanted translation without loss,” says the Frenchman.
“And?”
“There is no such thing.”
He thinks suddenly of England, not the English in Kraków vomiting into fountains and shouting for breakfast, but something older, closer to the bone: Jagger, Bowie, Monty Python, Henry VIII, Cromwell slicing off the King’s head, Hume arguing with God.
“English?” says Mike. “David Hume was Scottish.”
“Scottish is just English with worse weather,” says the Man automatically.
But the mirror cracks here too.
Kraków’s Rynek Główny provides the correction.
An autumn weekend, square full of English people behaving as if they have mistaken Poland for Magaluf: Liverpool, Burnley, Essex, Birmingham, bits of the old empire still wandering about.
English is everywhere, but not his English.
This English is barked, slurred, sung.
“Twoooo beers, mate.”
“DO YOU DO BREAKFAST?”
“Tell him, Gaz.”
“I’m tellin’ him.”
“You ain’t tellin’ him.”
None of them is called Gaz.
Behind bars and hotel desks, Polish staff move with a composure so complete it looks almost studied. It is studied. The people who learned English from the outside now speak it better than the people who invented it.
A girl behind a desk explains breakfast times, airport transfers and municipal taxes in English so precise, neutral and faintly disappointed that it sounds less like a second language than a judgment.
The old order flickers.
Pole as European.
Brit as provincial.
The English look awful. Worse: ordinary. Loud, red, needy, perpetually on the edge of some drunken injury.
The Poles look European.
“You see?” Lacan says. “You were never the observer. You were part of the exhibit.”
The Man feels the first real crack.
Because he realises, with a jolt he immediately disguises as irony, that he has spent years imagining himself exempt from this.
Not one of them.
Not one of the football shirts and pink faces and lads’ holidays.
Different. The sort of Englishman who came to Poland not for cheap beer but for History, ideas, borders, women with difficult eyes, the melancholy of Central Europe and perhaps, if things went very well, a little recognition.
The Editor coughs politely.
“Ah yes. The old distinction between yourself and other English people. One of your more durable fictions.”
“But I’m not like them.”
“No,” says the Editor. “That is exactly what they all think.”
The earthquake is not that the English have become ridiculous.
They always were.
The earthquake is that the Man sees the structure in which he too has been living.
The old order depended on watching.
The West watched the East.
The foreign correspondent watched the natives.
The expatriate explained the country back to itself in long melancholy essays.
Now the gaze has shifted.
Or multiplied.
The Poles in Kraków are no longer waiting to be watched by the English. They are watching them back. Watching them badly dressed and sunburnt and pathetic.
“So who is superior now?” asks the Boy.
“No one,” says Lacan.
And then, later, or earlier, because these scenes do not arrive in order but in waves, he is back at the playground in Gocław.
It is smaller than he remembers.
The same climbing frames. The same rubber flooring.
Church nearby.
He had brought the boys here when they were small.
The playground has not changed. Or rather it has changed only by replacing itself with itself.
The faces too. Not the same faces exactly, but versions of the same arrangement, carrying the same expressions somewhere between endurance and mild smugness.
People moving inside forms that are not his. People at home in codes that exhaust him.
People who may be bored, trapped, frightened, satisfied, kind, cruel, ordinary or merely tired.
This is where something finally gives.
Not Poland.
Not M.
Not the family.
Him.
The fantasy cracks.
The fantasy that Poland might become home if only he understood it properly, loved it properly, suffered it properly, entered deeply enough into its language, women, families, rituals, humiliations, winters and silences.
“You thought effort itself created belonging,” says the Editor.
“And doesn’t it?”
“No,” says Lacan.
This is the part that cannot be avoided.
And yet he stayed.
M, then, was not an accident. She was the final form of the dream.
As one person saying: Yes. Here. You are not outside.
“Ah,” says the Editor. “And here comes the danger.”
“What danger?”
“The temptation to turn your emotional exhaustion into civilisational analysis.”
The Man laughs despite himself.
Because there it is again.
The old instinct to convert pain into theory.
The old temptation to become the disappointed foreigner explaining an entire country because one woman could not save him from himself.
“No,” he says quietly. “That’s finished.”
In the mind’s little theatre, M appears again.
Of course she does.
With the husband. The son. The church. The coats. The tears. The priests and holidays and little performances of depth.
Let them have it, the Man thinks.
Then pauses.
No.
Let them be.
That is harder.
Let her be.
A person inside a life he cannot inhabit.
M once told him she liked strong men.
He laughs.
Because this, finally, is not strength.
“It is weakness held up by external scaffolding. It is parrots who know the sounds words make.”
Men driven into smaller and smaller holes by women who demand they be strong.
The Man looks at the phone. There is the old temptation: Now I am fixed, I can just check in with her. Like the alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink for a while and thinks he can have just one beer.
“How you doin’, all ok?”
A small message.
But beneath it: Does she know?
The Boy groans.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“The Gaze,” says Lacan.
Of course.
Not her. Her gaze. The old fantasy that one only fully exists once one has been seen.
The silence arrives, cold and familiar.
He puts the phone down.
Then picks it up again.
Then puts it down.
Outside, Wawer continues.
The church bells mark time that does not require his participation.
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