An open mic stand-up evening in a St Denis bar. Lacan is halfway through a joke, something involving desire, the Other, the signifier, the mother. Or perhaps the mother-in-law, the Editor says. A cigarette held between his fingers like a Gallic Bill Hicks, the Frenchman is losing the crowd.
Even a along dead Viennese physician is heckling him now.
“Schadenfreude,” Ziggy shouts from what appears now to be a student bar.
The room stops.
Lacan sighs.
Ziggy repeats it, slower this time, with the air of a schoolmaster addressing a gifted but rather tiresome pupil.
“Schad-en-freud-e.”
“The deeply human pleasure of taking someone else’s life and arranging the pieces into a story you can laugh at.”
Psychology students take out their pencil cases and prepare to draw Venn diagrams.
The Boy looks interested.
The Editor nods vigorously.
Freud turns to the Man.
“You know this because you have done it.”
The Man begins, instinctively, to object. To say that he has only ever been perceptive, observant, funny. That he has merely noticed the absurdity of NGO women, self-important editors, the grumpy old busybody in the post office.
But Freud does not let him finish. “You have done it brilliantly,” he says. “Even if you say so yourself.”
The Man brightens despite himself. “Thank you.”
“Not a compliment,” Ziggy shoots back.
The Man stops.
“But at times,” the Viennese doctor says, “you have mistaken humour for truth.”
Lacan smiles thinly, pleased now that someone else is being dismantled.
The Editor looks suddenly uncomfortable.
Because he too has lived off this. The line, the aside, the Devastating One-Liner that converts pain into superiority before the pain can arrive.
Ben and Bill were there, naturally, shandies in hand.
The Man recalls something with a flinch. The History Men. They moved easily through the room, flower pot to flower pot, ambassador to editor to widow of dissident to visiting professor, carrying Poland with them in the approved quantities: two parts anecdote, one historical comparison, one expression of concern, one joke about the current government, a shot of gin, some tonic and a holiday home in Tuscany.
They were not frauds. That was the irritating thing. They knew things, done the work.
The Man disliked them on sight. The Editor quite liked them, but wouldn’t say so. Union rules.
The quartet is standing outside a small theatre in central Warsaw. One of those places where everyone involved believes they are doing something Important.
A poster hangs outside.
THE WARSAW WHODUNNIT
Inside, a headline appears projected above the stage in dripping red letters. Somewhere between tabloid headline and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“Schlock,” Lacan mutters under his breath.
When a British man dies in suspicious circumstances in Warsaw, the worlds of foreign media, espionage and the international arms trade come under the spotlight. A British detective is flown in to assist a Polish counterpart.
A black-comedy-noire-whodunnit-French-farce-Carry-on-up-the-Khyber ensues. A mess, in other words.
“Jesus,” says Lacan, staring at the poster. “First Christopher Walken syndrome. Now this.”
“Christopher Walken syndrome?”
“The compulsive need to return to the same place, the same scene, the same card table. Always Naam.”
“And now,” says Lacan, “he is developing a bad case of Ricky Gervaisitis.”
“Symptoms?”
“A man once quite funny begins to forget the joke is on him.”
“No known cure.”
They go inside.
The play begins with a body.
A British journalist called Jake Harpsonabitdoesnthe has fallen from a great height.
Did he fall? Or was he pushed?
“See what I did there?” the Man says to the Editor, a plastic cup of subsidised craft beer in hand. “Yes,” says the Editor. “Very clever.”
The performance begins.
A police station on Hoża Street.
DI Łapówki sits behind a desk chewing gum. Beside him, his sidekick, Edyta Bujaczka, hard-nosed, no-nonsense. V Precinct Downtown Warsaw.
“OK, we got ourselves a homicide, OK, you know. Yeah, sure thing, OK. We chew gum, yeah.”
The Editor notes the ubiquity of OK. “You can never have too many Oks in a single Polish sentence,” he says. “Another form of fealty to a world that has barely recognised it for a thousand years.”
“This city eats guys like him for breakfast,” Łapówki says.
“You play by the rules too much, Łapówki.”
“What rules?”
“Exactly.”
“Saturday Night Live,” Lacan mutters. “Derivatives again.”
Then comes the British detective. Blowjob of the Yard.
The audience laughs. Edgy, the Editor says. “Well,” Lacan replies “only if it’s the edge of a gaping black hole.”
Blowjob arrives at Chopin Airport in a raincoat too small for him, carrying a packet of Embassy No. 1, non-filtered, and thirty years of disappointment. He has a backstory, of course. His real name is Sasha Petrovsky, son of a Soviet general who defected to Britain in 1975. His cover is a Midlands accent, terrible personal hygiene and an air of boozy incompetence. The cover is now so deep he no longer knows himself. If he ever did.
The actor, Timothy Etonmess, catches sight of himself in an airport mirror.
Belly. Untucked shirt. Tie scrawned around his fat sweaty neck.
“What a fucking mess,” he says in a Brummie accent so broad it sounds less like Birmingham than a man with a minor head injury. “Yam lookin’ bostin’, our kid,” he says quietly to himself.
Deep-fried cover.
“Oh my God,” says Lacan. “It is both cheesy and corny. A very rare achievement.”
“Cheesy corn dogs?” The Boy is hungry. “Easy on the French mustard.”
The Man laughs and almost chokes. Because he remembers.
He remembers Mszana Dolna. Snow outside. Covid. The mountain house. Three months of silence and panic and whisky and writing. He had sat there with a laptop and a grievance and convinced himself he was writing satire.
At first it had been called Our Man in Warszawa.
Then The Warsaw Whodunnit.
It began as a joke. A release. A way of surviving the lockdown, the shrinking world.
The Editor had loved it. But the Editor had by then lost his marbles. His mind had gone much earlier.
The suspects begin to appear. In the play.
Craig’s List, owner of a free newspaper. He sits in a glass office near the station shouting at a nervous assistant called Chamberlain Neville.
“Get in here now!”
“Yes, Mr List?”
“The police are onto us.”
“What have we done?”
List pauses.
“Nothing yet,” he says. “But I want options.”
Paper clips spill from the desk. A Bulgarian temp giggles.
Chamberlain once taught English in Newport Pagnell. Now he sells advertising for a property supplement called Warsaw Prestige Living.
Then after the middle order expats, the Mike Gattings, the Mike Brearleys appear, with their impeccable vowels and starched collars.
Nicholas Rubbinupthewrongway. Bobby Skis. Dicky from the FCO. Nigel Tinfoil. And several chaps with names like Christopher. Gulliver on his travels again in the corner. “Corbyn’s such a nonce,” he says excitedly. But Gully doesn’t know what nonce means.
“Puerile,” Lacan says. “And not that funny.”
The Boy doesn’t think so, though he doesn’t know what puerile means yet.
The assembled sit beneath portraits of dead men in taches and ties.
“Bloody damn blast and buggery,” says Dicky. “It’s been a cunt of a day.”
“Drink, cunt?” says Bobby Skis.
“How’s yer father?”
“Still a cunt? A good cunt though.”
Charming Julie Chipmunk, fresh out of Oxfordington Hockey and Badminton Trials College for Gals, is the Lone Lady in the room. All the men crave her attention, but few are brave enough to talk to her. They stare at their brogues, discussing Milton Friedman, desperate for her to pull out a cigarette so they can compete to light it. They offer her seats on Serious Panels for which she is, well, less than fully qualified.
An Evelyn Waugh novel rewritten by chatgpt.
“Poles?” uncle Bobby Skis goes on. “Becoming more like damn negroids every day. Oh dear. Can’t say that now. Slap from matron.”
Julie admonishes her uncle Bobby softly. “He’s so charming, but completely old skool,” she says. All the gentleman nod excitedly when The Lady speaks. And then immediately stare down at their polished brogues.
When she leaves, the word cunt re-enters the room.
“Notice,” says Lacan quietly, “how the word replaces thought.”
“That’s the point,” says the Man.
“No,” says Lacan. “The point is that you need them to be stupid.”
The Man says nothing.
Because he does.
The foreign correspondent Abby Applemac enters the next scene. Her husband follows. If it isn’t Ruddy Damn “Biggles” Rudek. Cashmere driving gloves and old cars he drives very fast.
“Why,” says Rudek, standing before a mirror in a cardigan that cost more than most people’s rent, “do I look so damn good in this cardigan?”
No one answers.
“And when will Bydgoszcz get its own damn and bloody Waitrose?”
He’d like to use the word cunt, but Abby has long since put the mockers on that illicit joy.
The audience guffaws.
The Man too.
Then stops. Because he recognises the feeling beneath the joke.
Not superiority. Envy. He had wanted to wear the cardigan.
The play continues.
Mandy appears: part minister, part arms dealer, part maître d’. Behind him trails Enoch, a sweating man with fighter-jet cufflinks.
“We must support democracy,” says Enoch solemnly.
“Absolutely,” says Mandy. “At a margin of twelve percent.”
The Polish women journalists appear next.
Beautiful, severe, exhausted. As if Krystyna Janda in Man of Marble had been cloned in a factory somewhere offscreen. All double denim, frantic cigarette smoking, always on edge, on the edge. They smoke on balconies and know where the bodies are buried because they have spent years interviewing the men who buried them. Or are married to them.
One is called Magda. One is called Kasia. One is called Agnieszka, or perhaps they are all called Agnieszka. PAP, TVP World, Polish Radio, IPN. Maria, the venomous nut-holder, is also there, alongside Amy Pullitzerholder.
“Ten minutes in New York or London, they are experts in all things ‘Anglo.’ Including the disdain for those they perceive to be lower down the Anglo ranking order,” the Editor says.
“Borrowed disdain,” Lacan notes. “So much easier to deny.”
“They were just not Serious People. But fuck me, why did they fuck up my work so much,” says the Editor, unusually florid in his deflowering of the English language. “People who corrected my English into Polish-English on the screen, in front of my eyes.” He visibly shivers.
The Man shifts in his seat.
“But you loved them too,” says Lacan.
“No.”
“You wanted them to think you were different.”
The Man watches the actress playing M: black coat, cigarette, half-smile, the permanent air of someone who has somewhere better to be.
The audience laughs as Steven Bannon wanders on stage drinking whisky from a paper cup.
The Man begins to feel something he has not felt while reading or writing for years.
Embarrassment.
Because he can see now what the play is doing.
It is not observing. It is punishing. The names are not jokes. Each one says: I see what you really are.
But hidden beneath that is another sentence, less flattering and much more painful: Why don’t you see me?
The Editor leans forward, excited.
“This is the good bit,” he says. “The merciless bit.”
“Yes,” says Lacan. “The childish bit.”
On stage, Blowjob and Łapówki pull away masks one by one.
Consultant.
Correspondent.
Fixer.
Deputy minister.
NGO strategist.
Cultural attaché.
Each face turns out to be the same face. A faceless face.
The audience loves it.
The Man used to love it too. Because there is an old animal pleasure in seeing more successful people made to look ridiculous.
“It was magnificent, darling,” says the Editor now, appearing in the row behind them. “Savage. Fearless. You finally said what everyone was thinking.”
But the Man knows that the play was by a man standing with his face against the glass insisting he did not want to come in.
“You thought you were writing satire,” says Lacan.
“I was.”
“No,” says Lacan. “You were writing an application.”
“For what?”
“Membership.”
The Man looks at the stage.
There he is again at the back, an extra with no lines, a resentful fox who wanted to be funny because he could not bear to say he was hurt.
Blowjob of the Yard finally opens the dead man’s notebook.
Inside is a manuscript. Or a diary. Or a screenplay. Or perhaps an abandoned self-help guide for foreigners trying to survive Poland.
Blowjob scratches his bollocks and misses his next line.
The audience laughs.
“This,” says Lacan quietly, “is what resentment looks like when it dresses up as form.”
The Man winces. Because he once thought this was courage. Now he sees that it was revenge. And worse: not even successful revenge, because revenge imagines freedom from the people it hates.
The play becomes a hit.
Reviewers call it “savage,” “fearless,” “unflinching.” One writes that it captures “the psychodrama of contemporary Warsaw.” Another calls it “necessary.”
“Max Bialystok, eat your heart out,” one reviewer writes in The Warsaw Nut Review: essential reading for squirrels.
The Man reads these words and feels suddenly, unexpectedly, tired.
“No,” he says quietly. “It isn’t necessary. Barely sufficient to be honest.”
Outside, after the play, they stand by the lake.
The audience spills out smoking and laughing and naming people.
“That was so obviously Rudek.”
“Savage.”
“Fearless.”
“Unflinching.”
The Man listens, but he does not, for once, join in.
The Boy is down by the water fishing. The Editor stands beside him, restless.
They look out across the lake. For a long time the Editor says nothing, then: “I think the Man has run out of people to blame. We may need to invent some new ones.”
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