Hot, slightly anxious, almost completely without money.

Money borrowed from people who earn theirs through public relations, stock exchanges in Switzerland and London, corporations, investments and defence contracts. Money produced somewhere inside the vast machinery of finance and war, then passed down to me in small personal loans so I can pay for food, electricity and the occasional Vietnamese chicken balls.

This, too, is part of the libidinal economy we have built.

Missiles, markets, pensions, dividends, guilt, charity.

Weapons are manufactured. Share prices rise. Governments announce new defence spending. Pension funds improve. Someone receives a bonus. Someone lends me three hundred złotys.

Dog eat dog, but with corporate social responsibility.

I walked through Promenada past things I could not buy and people buying them.

Shoes. Clothes. Cosmetics. Telephones. Young men with sculpted beards. Young women with dogs in bags.

Upstairs, I bought Vietnamese chicken in batter with rice and salad. Twenty-eight złotys. Not a fortune, although at the moment every purchase comes with a small internal hearing.

Do you really need this?

Could you have eaten at home?

Is hunger now an indulgence?

I sat down and started eating.

The food court was busy but not crowded. Around me, people ate burgers, sushi, noodles and salads while looking at their telephones.

Then a young Roma woman appeared carrying a small child.

She may have been Romanian. I did not ask to see her documents.

“Manger,” she said. “Manger.”

She was perhaps twenty-five, possibly younger. Her clothes were dirty. The child was crying. Both looked exhausted. She had a striking, gentle face beneath the dirt and the panic of trying to obtain food in a place designed for people who do not have to ask.

She approached me and asked for money or something to eat.

I said I had no cash, only a card.

She pointed towards the food counters.

I imagined chips. Something small. Two or three euros. A brief, efficient act of solidarity requiring almost no disruption to either of our lives.

I said yes.

I had been hungry. I spend money I do not really possess on food and feel guilty eating.

She had less than I did.

The child had done nothing at all to earn hunger.

Fuck it, I thought.

Let them eat.

When I had finished my meal, we walked towards the counters. She picked up a plate and went directly to what appeared to be the most expensive self-service restaurant in the building.

This was not the anticipated portion of chips.

She chose a pork cutlet, potatoes, salad and other things that increased the weight of the plate with alarming speed.

The bill came to thirty-seven złotys.

There is a particular form of moral comedy involved in trying to perform spontaneous generosity on a tightly controlled budget using other people’s money. You begin with the Sermon on the Mount and end by checking the price per hundred grams.

Still, thirty-seven złotys is not a fortune.

We stood near the till waiting to pay.

A Polish woman of roughly the same age as the Roma woman, well dressed and speaking into her telephone, inserted herself into the situation. She addressed the woman, who did not understand her, and then turned to me.

“Are you with her?”

“Yes,” I said, because at that precise moment I was.

“Are you the daddy?”

I said no.

“Daddy?”

She repeated the word as though I had failed a basic language examination.

No.

The disdain on the woman’s face was extraordinary. Not loud or dramatic. Worse than that.

She seemed to regard the Roma woman as improperly present. Someone who had crossed an invisible boundary between the people allowed to purchase food and those permitted only to beg outside.

Perhaps she has never entered a church. I know nothing about her.

But I recognised the posture.

The confidence that poverty must first submit itself for moral examination.

The belief that charity requires a deserving recipient.

It reminded me of others I know talking about charity.

Charity was central to her idea of Catholic piety. She spoke about helping people, giving, supporting good causes, the moral obligation to look beyond oneself.

And perhaps she did all of that.

Yet the money came through the London and Swiss financial markets, through an economy strengthened by defence companies, military contracts and the enormous transfer of public wealth into weapons.

How comic, sad and tragic that charity becomes the small moral theatre staged at the end of a chain whose beginning we prefer not to examine.

A defence company receives a contract.

Its shares rise.

The exchange benefits.

Investors benefit.

Employees are paid.

Someone makes a charitable donation.

Someone speaks tenderly about the poor.

Somewhere else, new poor have been created by bombs dropped from the sky.

This is the libidinal economy: not only the movement of money, but the movement of innocence.

The suffering person appears at the end of the chain and is asked to prove that she deserves lunch.

The young woman took the food.

I paid.

No miracle occurred.

She did not reveal herself to be an angel testing my goodness. I did not become a better person. She may perform the same transaction several times a day. It may be her work. There may be a man nearby organising it. She may have made poor decisions. She may make more.

None of this changes the fact that she and the child were hungry.

On the bike ride home, three drivers nearly hit me. They turned without looking and crossed the bicycle lane.

It brought back another afternoon on Ulica Saska.

I had fallen from the bicycle and was lying in the road.

A bus came towards me.

The driver did not stop to ask whether I was injured. He steered around me. Then car after car did the same. They flowed past my body as though I were a fallen branch, an inconvenient object temporarily reducing the available width of the road.

Many, many cars.

Nobody wanted to interrupt the journey.

The same question, perhaps.

Are you entitled to stop us?

Do you belong in the road?

Perhaps that is what I mean by a libidinal economy: not merely how money moves, but how attention, recognition, shame, affection and obligation move with it.

Who is entitled to receive?

Whose suffering counts?

Who gets thanked?

Who is seen?

Over the last month, I translated seven chapters of a television celebrity’s memoir and was not paid.

I translated several chapters for a woman I cared about and was neither paid or thanked.

I translated other people’s pain.

Then I go home and wonder how to buy food.

There comes a point when generosity without reciprocity stops feeling virtuous.

Perhaps I helped design it.

I offer work before discussing payment.

I wait for people to recognise the value of what I have already given them.

Then I become furious when they accept the gift and continue with their lives.

The Roma woman, at least, made no such promise.

She wanted lunch.

I bought it.

Our relationship was honest.

Perhaps that is what solidarity is.

Not sainthood.

Not charity.

Not absolution purchased with thirty-seven złotys.

Just one person recognising, for a moment, that another person is hungry.

I am tired of this moral economy.

Tired of usefulness without reciprocity. Tired of explaining myself inside an idiom that no longer seems capable of hearing me.

The business idea was good.

I still believe that.

The books are good too.

Perhaps none of them has failed. Not yet. Perhaps there is an entire cohort of people out there waiting to make the move: people tired of corporate English, tired of rehearsed conversations, tired of being corrected rather than heard. People who want language, attention, stories, humour and actual contact.

Perhaps the readers are there as well.

Perhaps the books will find them.

But I cannot wait indefinitely for ‘the market’ to discover that I was right.

The bills are accumulating dangerously. Poland is not offering me an economic way to remain. I have three children here and want to stay close to them. I do not want to disappear from their lives.

But I cannot remain as a beggar.

Not asking for wealth. Not asking for a new SUV, a glass office or a dog in a handbag. Asking to pay the bills, buy food without holding an internal tribunal and occasionally take my children somewhere without first borrowing money.

Perhaps the idioms were always too different.

I never fully accepted the Polish one. I thought I did. Or I thought it was changing, slowly curving towards something closer to the Anglo world I understood: more open, more direct, less hierarchical, more willing to listen, accommodate difference and reward initiative.

It was not.

Poland changed enormously. It became richer, cleaner, more confident, more connected and better dressed.

But beneath the glass buildings and fluent English, something older continued.

A form of passive resistance.

Nothing needs to be explicitly refused. Nobody has to tell you to leave. The meeting is postponed. The payment does not arrive. The credential is questioned. The application disappears. The book comes back. The house does not sell.

Even the dog shit left almost ceremonially on my doorstep begins to look like a message.

Here you are.

This is for you.

Returned books.

Unpaid invoices.

Credentials accepted when useful and questioned when independence follows.

The village must continue as before.

It can extract the useful part of you—the English, the contacts, the interpretation, the foreign legitimacy—and leave the rest outside.

It can extricate the You from you.

Perhaps it was always like this.

I simply confused survival with living.

I survived Poland extremely well. I learned the language, wrote the books, reported the politics, married, divorced, raised children, translated, taught and explained. I learned the history and the jokes. I learned when to speak and, less successfully, when to remain silent.

But survival is not the same as having a life.

I came here by choice. I stayed by choice, until choice became habit, then necessity, then something resembling captivity.

No one owes me a place. Poland is not required to reorganise itself around one ageing British writer who arrived with his own peculiar mixture of talent, ignorance, arrogance, curiosity, damage and hope.

But neither am I required to remain indefinitely at its edge, waiting for permission to become economically real.

Maybe the business will work one day.

Maybe the audience already exists.

I hope so.

But I need to live long enough, and well enough, to meet it.

When the house is sold—or rented, or finally made to produce something rather than merely absorb anxiety—I need to go home.

Not triumphantly. Not as revenge. Not because Britain is kinder, fairer or morally superior. Dogs eat dogs there too. London and Zurich help finance the same wars. Britain has its own class codes, closed networks, humiliations and professionally organised indifference.

But it is my idiom.

If I am going to struggle, I would rather struggle in a language in which my anger, humour and sadness arrive intact.

I would rather be poor without also being foreign.

I would rather argue without first translating the argument.

I would rather return to a landscape in which I possess a voice—not necessarily an important voice, not a celebrated one, but recognisably my own.

These things may not fit neatly together. Reality rarely offers the complete package. There will be trains, flights, rent, timetables, compromises and painful conversations. Going home may prove more difficult and expensive than imagining it.

But I cannot keep postponing life until Poland answers.

It has answered.

Not with one dramatic rejection, but through thirty years of small resistances.

The traffic moving around the body in the road.

The package on the doormat.

The shit outside the door.

The village carrying on.

So now, if I can afford it, I am going home.