Nearly everything I know about Eastern European culture is based on what I read and watch. I’ve made one very brief trip to Warsaw that, to be honest, felt a lot like modern day Chicago to me, so I can’t extrapolate much of anything from it. But this segment of “White” is extremely amusing to me because it lines up this film with one of my favorite novels, “Dead Souls” by Nikolai Gogol.

Karol first goes to a money exchange and turns his “nest egg” of Polish currency into American dollars. You apparently don’t make major business deals in Zloty, even if you are dealing with a farmer. Next, he buys the most expensive bottle of vodka available in a shop.

He heads back to that rural locale he pretended to sleep through and identifies a local land owner for a discussion. They get to the end of the vodka bottle. It has clearly been a long, circular negotiation. For those not familiar with Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” it’s based on a gruesome census anomaly from the 19th century. In between each Russia census, serfs remained on the books of landowners even after their death. It was possible to take out loans against the value of these “dead souls.” So the protagonist of the novel has a clever idea to flood a Russian province with sales pitches for these deal souls — a no lose proposition for the small scale landowners.

Except the landowners never make it easy for him — they each have their own baffling reason for not wanting to sell the title to the dead serfs and eventually his plot begins to unravel, based on nothing but the superstitions and folklore of the Russian people. Here, Karol comes face to face with a very Gogol-like character who has explained that he was already thinking of moving in with family and buying a TV with the money.

But now when it comes time to sign the contract, he’s having second thoughts. Why? Because there’s never anything good on TV. Then the landowner has another thought. “Or, I could bury the money in the ground!” Karol doesn’t quite know how to respond to this, but it was enough to get the sale completed for $1000 in cash and another $4000 after the agreement is notarized. Karol says he has to be going, but the landowner convinces him to stay the night — the building is now his, after all, he says.

We then see Karol plotting on a map — there’s clearly more property to be cornered to make the most of his plan. He goes to a payphone, looks up a name and number in the phone book — but of course the phone isn’t working. He steals the page and, in a detail so typical of the Dekalog, he then has trouble getting out of the booth.

He seeks out Mikolaj, who is playing cards with some people. They exchange pleasantries — then Karol asks him if the guy who wanted to die is still interested in going ahead with the plan. Mikolaj says “more than ever.”

The segment ends with Karol spinning his 2 franc piece on a table, then dissolves into another flash forward of Dominique in a Warsaw hotel room. This is Karol’s end goal and he needs to keep reminding himself of it to keep his complicated — and in places very dark — plot moving forward.