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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
Five years in the Polish wilderness. Queues for groceries, unfathomable bus timetables, inexplicable traditions and truly bizarre soup – this is Poland in the mid-1990s, where Tom Galvin innocently went as a trainee teacher. Without a word of Polish, he is plunged into a strange and rapidly changing culture, as the country shakes off its troubled and complex past and faces the challenges of being a part of modern Europe. Tom spent five years dealing with long and freezing winters, lack of good food, loneliness and hardship, as he discovered the misery as well as the joy of Polish life. He returned in 2007, to find surprising changes to the country that had been his home for the first years of his working life. An interesting and amusing account of living and working abroad, which documents a unique period of Polish history.
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To Asha, for being there
Acknowledgements
For all the teachers, staff and students in Zespol Szkol Ekonomicznych in Minsk Mazowiecki, a warm and hearty thanks for your hospitality, friendship and humour. I will never forget you. I’d like to extend a special thanks to Stefan Stepniewski, Anna Zimnicka, Malgorzata Grusaczynska and Anna Frelak.
To the APSO group of 1994, it was great to have known you and hope you are all in good places. To the guys – John Joe, Keith, Gearoid and Paul, stay in touch. And to Barry, a late arrival, your help and support with this book was invaluable, sorry you think the title sucks. And to Eamonn Crowley and Padraig Coll for their generosity.
To Rafal and Peter in Radio Polonia for their experience and support and to Magda Sowinska and Nath Espino, formerly of the Warsaw Voice. Without all of their help, none of what I am doing now would have been possible.
To those who have departed – Asha’s father, Jurek, I wish there had been more time. To Fr Andrzej Pyka, a great friend to the Poles in Ireland who will be dearly missed. And Ollie Morgan, a man who helped so many in so many ways, we’ll miss you.
Finally, to all at O’Brien Press for putting their faith in this book, especially Eoin, Michael and Claire.
Contents
A Horse with no Name
Summer 1994. It is late afternoon, the heat lingering from another day of intense sunshine. I never imagined this country could get so hot. But here it is, a brutal, dry heat that stings like an iron and makes everything appear rigid. Clothes hang outside on balconies around the town, stiff as playing cards. Windows gape open, gasping for breath. The playground is a patchwork of dried grass and bald spots, with a swing buckling under the heat.
People move slowly, some on old black bicycles, some on foot, barely kicking up dust on streets of tarmac and old rock. It needs rain. It needs some colour. It even needs some noise.
We pull in through the gates of the school, just myself, a driver and a guide. It is kept well enough, but looks as if it needs a couple of grand for a face-lift. Weeds poke up between cracks in uneven concrete. Window panes look like chapped lips. Even the national flag droops limply from a pole inside the gate, weary and just about retaining its colours.
Standing inside the front door of the school is a small, balding man in his sixties, a cigarette between old fingers and a wide smile like a spade on his face. He shakes hands warmly and brings us inside to his office. He makes coffee in glasses, each glass heaped with two spoonfuls of tar-like granules that should really have passed through a percolator.
The room is in stark contrast to the streets of the town we have wound through. It is bright and spotless, and smells pleasantly of the greenery that invades from every corner. He motions to the seats around a large, well polished table, offering us cigarettes that have no filters. I decline, being on the verge of giving up. Anyway, I am thinking more of my empty stomach, and eye instead the bowl of fruit ripening in the window next to all the plants.
The coffee is strong and has no milk, and as it cools, large, hard flakes begin floating to the top like pieces of loose bark. I battle with the burning glass as the man, who I now realise is the school director, discusses the terms of my contract between nods of the head, smiles and countless filterless cigarettes. He is the type of man that immediately puts a stranger at ease – smiles, a gentle voice, friendly gestures with the hands.
He bellows smoke as he speaks. It comes out of his mouth, and out of his nose. I think at one stage it will start to come out of his ears. If I am trying to quit smoking, I’ve come to the wrong place.
I was going to miss the rest of the group, each and every one of them. We were a mixed bunch, of all ages and with different levels of experience. Some were just out of college, some older, and all of us had very different reasons for being there. For two weeks we had been together at a converted monastery in Lublin, in the southeast of the country, drinking mostly, and making vague attempts at learning smatterings of Polish. Almost every night was spent bunking off to an exclusive club in the nearby city, and every morning we were at our desks in a local school by eight, cracking open bottles of fizzy mineral water, trying to get our tongues around the Polish language and melting in the heat.
The language was a tough one. I knew right then that I was never really going to master it. I got a lot of it into my head, but it rarely got as far as my mouth without a lot of thinking getting in the way. That disturbed me a little, as I had come here to teach a language myself. Some of the group coped better. You could spot them during the lessons – even with the hangovers they had a confidence about themselves, and bit into those foreign words like food they had already tasted. These were the ones who were going to make good teachers. I would have to work at it that bit harder.
There was no competition between anyone though. If anything, we all acted as crutches for each other. Some people were homesick; some were just sick. Some were nervous about teaching and others were nervous about the towns they were going to.
Then the time came for us to split up and go our various ways. A guy called John Joe from Mayo was first, and this seemed fitting, as he had unofficially become something of a group leader, particularly for some of the girls. He was sent to a place not far away called Swidnik, just outside Lublin. In fact, a few days later he was back for a visit, and to give us a rundown on his new home. It was like bloody Ballymun, he said, with blocks as far as the eye could see. He was in one of the blocks, sharing with a bachelor or a divorcee, he hadn’t figured out which yet. I would have dreaded sharing with a stranger, but John Joe relished the company.
Our numbers dwindled daily, and the bonds between us were broken. We grew sad, then bored, and finally just waited our turn. Sitting on a wall in the courtyard of the monastery in the baking sun, the guys bare-chested, the women sweating, we sipped on beers and watched our new pals disappear one by one, like cattle. We wondered where the hell they were being taken and how we would all get to meet up again. All we were left with was a list of addresses that nobody could read and mystifying phone numbers composed of four digits and regional codes.
Then it was my turn, along with a group of others. We visited several schools that day, dropping off colleagues one by one until I was the last one left in the van. I had a bad taste in my mouth. All the places we’d seen were fairly grim – lonely outposts, barely mapped, that had the driver going around in circles as the day wore on. They were mostly villages with one main street, dying as it reached the outskirts, to be swallowed up by flat, endless countryside, fading into the horizon with barely a cow to provide a focal point.
Few of these villages seemed ready to cope with the arrival of a stranger. Bus stops and train stations, even petrol stations, were in the minority. A quick search for bars, general stores and supermarkets was fruitless. These villages seemed lost in time. Motionless and still, they hung there on the cusp of the modern world, some of their inhabitants just about hanging in there with them. But they held a beauty of their own.
Some of the living quarters were also stuck in that weird, grey area between the old and the new. One school had somehow forgotten they were getting a foreign teacher, a girl who smiled bravely as she was led up a flight of bare concrete steps and into a single room by the cleaning lady who had been forced to shoulder the blame. There were no curtains, a couch full of holes for a bed and a bathroom with a toilet the colour of a rotten lung.
The woman ranted and apologised profusely, waving frantically at everything as if with one swish of a magic wand she was going to transform the room into a boudoir fit for a sleeping beauty. Our unfortunate colleague smiled and thanked her. She was tough – she had already told us a lot of stories about a year spent in Bosnia during the war. A shoddy bathroom wasn’t going to kill her.
We felt bad leaving her there alone though, and there was a short burst of hysterical laughter when we returned to the van. Back on the main road, there was barely a sign anywhere to say the place even existed, and I never passed near it again. Now, I can’t even recall its name. But I’ll never forget how it looked.
The tiny village of Sadowne was next. A place not really worth describing, its only significance is its proximity to the former death camp of Treblinka. This was the last stop for Paul, a guy roughly the same age and equally as bewildered as myself. He hesitated before stepping down from the van and onto the courtyard. There stood the school director, a rather solemn-looking man, gasping heavily on a cigarette and beckoning all of us inside to his office. There was no coffee on offer there, just a few abrupt words from the director. His expression tired, he didn’t volunteer any false hopes that Paul would be having a year to remember. He simply recited Paul’s duties as though reading from a shopping list.
From the office we were led to the living quarters, a single room next to a single Russian woman with a single kid. Immediately looking for an escape route, Paul asked the whereabouts of a bus or train station. The director gestured in the direction of the nearby woods and informed Paul that the train station was some distance away and that he could get a lift with him whenever he wanted. Paul looked at the woods, where a desiccated mud trail led between spindly grey trees before disappearing in a series of twists and bends. Where does the train go? To Warsaw. How far is that? About sixty kilometres.
Since I couldn’t yet pronounce the name of the place I was headed for, I didn’t ask if there was a transport link. I simply shook Paul’s hand and left him there, stroking his chin pensively. Then we were back on the road.
The guide now turns to me and goes through the details in English, looking reassuringly pleased. I have Fridays free, if I want, and otherwise work about six teaching hours per day. Although there are a few guys in some of the classes, the school is mostly for girls between the ages of sixteen and early twenties, and there are two other English teachers here that I can work with. I am to focus on improving conversation skills and vocabulary, to generally introduce a more colloquial language into the class than the ‘book’ English the students are used to. After that, it is up to me. I try to look content, because my director does. So I nod firmly and shake hands with him.
I stand at the window of my new home and watch the van drive out through the gate, severing that last link I had with the group. It is starting to get dark now and a lump rises in my throat. My quarters are clean and spacious, but understandably bare. Just me, the hum of the fridge, an old radio the size of a breeze block that the director has left and the fading summer evening sky outside, bloody orange, black at the edges.
I had met a Polish guy in Dublin before I left, who told me that summer evenings are always colourful in Poland. He was right. Deep, warm colours hang before me, over a landscape as flat as a football pitch. The sun looks like a massive, slow-moving balloon, being carried off gradually into the west. At that hour of evening in summer in Poland the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold. It is a comforting warmth that calms the body and soothes the mind. I think after that long day, some of the rough places we have seen and the pang of loneliness that suddenly hits me, if it had been belting down with rain, I would just have turned around and gone home.
Unpacking for a year is an odd feeling. As you pull items out one by one, there is a sense of finality about it. It’s not just a wash bag and a few books. There are things that suggest permanency, that remind you of home. Clothes that smell of home cooking. Towels with the scent of the washing powder your mother uses. Books and magazines with coffee rings on the covers. You stare at them and realise that, like you, they have travelled thousands of miles and won’t see home again for twelve months. These simple objects take on a value that they never previously had.
I have three large bags with me, one of them a lot heavier than it was the night I packed it. I open the zip of this one first and began wrenching out the winter clothes that lie at the top – heavy socks, gloves, a scarf and some ‘long johns’, that were eventually used to polish my boots. Below the clothes I had packed a few books and there, in the middle, lies the cause of the bag’s weight – a statue of Our Lady and a heavy, wooden photo frame. Pictures of my family and friends smile up at me from under a clean piece of glass. Obviously, Ma got to the bag the night before I left, when my luggage was sitting downstairs by the door. Mothers mean well when they do such things. Religious relics are always a favourite, and so are family photographs, but I don’t need to see all that right now.
The statue goes onto the window-ledge in the hall. The photos drive me to bed, feeling like a stranger should feel in a strange land – lonely, isolated and exhilarated, but strangely anonymous. I know nobody and nobody knows me. If I dwell long enough on that fact I will lapse into a state of panic as my mind balloons to encompass the whole of this country – 312,685 square kilometres, and thirty-six million people contained in it. And then me, a tiny, insignificant speck.
Lying there in bed with the room still basking in warmth, I begin to go over the images I had conjured up for myself before arriving, comparing them with what I have seen so far. You don’t expect a thousand volts of culture shock coming to a place like this. It’s not the centre of Africa or the Middle East. It’s still Europe, but it’s a part of Europe that most of us have only peeped at while it was hidden behind the iron curtain. So question marks hang over almost every aspect of life here.
I had been told many things, a lot of them tinged with a type of black humour that didn’t always help. One girl who had spent a year in Warsaw offered me a piece of information by way of reassurance about a month before I left. ‘You can get cornflakes there,’ she had said, her smile fading rather miserably once she realised that cornflakes weren’t high on my list of priorities. I had pictured instead the bowl they were in – a deep, wooden bowl paired off with a spoon cut from cheap tin that made a harsh sound when dropped on a stark kitchen floor. In that bowl I saw a lot of soups, made from thick vegetables and stringy meat, meat that came from an animal that had worked hard all its life. A horse maybe, with a shaggy coat, a massive pair of blinkers and no name, the remainder of his carcass finishing up as glue on the bench of a peasant carpenter.
I had pictured timber houses, smoke gasping out of their chimneys day and night, sitting under the shadow of grey blocks that clawed the landscape like broken umbrellas. I had pictured old men with shattered teeth, young girls with bright blonde hair, packed under scarves decorated with the flowers of spring. Fields that were golden in autumn and steel blue in winter. Cold vodka, warm beds and the sound of men singing in taverns, keeping a beat with the thud of beer tankards on long wooden tables. As I drift off to sleep, I think it is fair to say I have a rather confused image of Poland.
The Town that Lonely Planet Forgot
Hunger has a very discernible presence, despite its being derived from an absence. It is the first thing I notice the next morning, even before the shock of awakening in an alien environment.
It had been a long drive down the day before and there were no stop-offs. The school director had left some cold meat in the fridge, but I had eaten it all, straight from the packets with my fingers. There was also a bowl of fruit sitting on the table in my kitchen, but most of its contents had been given to the guide, who was also famished. The rest was tarnished by the fruit flies that had managed to rally themselves into a strong and determined congregation overnight. I eventually zapped them with a deodorant can and a box of matches as they flew around the centre of the room in a perfect circle.
At least it’s sunny again. I can see the buttery yellow glow on the brown linoleum floor. If a pin dropped on that floor it would sound like lumber crashing on the floor of a forest. The place is as quiet and peaceful as a tomb. There is also a smell in the flat – not altogether unpleasant, just a strange smell, a bit like vinegar. Maybe they used it to clean the windows before I arrived – vinegar with sheets of newspaper, just like my grandmother had done. All homes have their own smells and this one is mine now for the next twelve months. I wish I had taken along something with a pungent scent of home.
I venture into my bathroom, which has no floor. That is, no recognisable floor. A cold, grey platform of rough screed, it is decorated with a bath propped up by four stumpy legs and a large poor-mouth bowl for a neighbour. I don’t like these bowls. They look distressed, as if they’re constantly yawning at you. They also have a shelf that catches everything and leaves it there in the open until you flush. Why, I could never understand.
The walls of the bathroom, as with the rest of the flat, are painted a safe and warm cream colour. In the top corner, over the bathtub, a cast-iron grate with a pattern like a torn stocking offers the only form of ventilation. And from the ceiling, a solitary bulb, butt naked, hangs like a dead man from a length of wire. I make a mental note to get a shade for that light, but never get around to it. I also make a mental note to get more colour into the place – a few posters maybe, paintings, something. If it weren’t for the greenery outside and the flashes of red on the communist-style signs around doorways, the eye would have little colour to distract it.
The hot water is off, because school hasn’t started yet, so I lean into the tub and splash a handful of cold water on my face and chest before gazing into the mirror. One of the greatest afflictions of western man is the fact that he spends most of the day living inside his own head. It’s not a good thing. If you could have been inside mine at this time you would have seen demons. I have lost weight already, which I can’t afford to do. My rib cage is like a washboard, my cheeks like inverted coconut shells. After roughly a quarter-century on the planet, I have only accumulated about ten stone, and I imagine a lot of it is going to be lost in this place. I need to get some food.
I get dressed in clothes that stick in the heat and go out into the main corridor. There are about ten doors on either side, including one into a washroom, and another self-contained flat just like mine at the far end. I wonder who lives there, because someone plainly does. There is a frosted glass window with a large plant just visible inside.
I stroll down the corridor, my footsteps sounding like the clatter of a ball in a squash court. This is just one wing of a very large bu1ilding that will soon be home to hundreds of students. By the looks of the names on the doors – ‘Jarek’, ‘Marek’, ‘Piotr’ and so on – this section is for boys only, which is disappointing, but safe.
On my way out the front door I meet one of the women who showed me round my flat yesterday evening. She must work in the school as a cleaner or cook, or maybe both. She is bubbly and friendly and, having no English, went to great lengths demonstrating how my bed worked – a contraption that isn’t really a bed at all, but a couch that springs into a bed after a series of short, snappy manoeuvres. They use them here instead of beds since beds take up space. She introduces me to her daughter, a gorgeous- looking girl with eyes like a pair of hazelnuts. She smiles, nods politely and extends a hand quickly. She doesn’t speak much English, but her friend, a young guy of maybe seventeen, speaks English pretty well. At least he’s confident, and offers to show me round the town. I ask him about a supermarket and he looks mildly confused, asking me exactly what it is I want. When I tell him I just need a general store he scratches his head before finally setting off, lost somewhat in thought.
The three of us skip down a side road that is collapsing in sand, hopping over grey and red bricks that sit in tidy little piles. Uneven, patchy and sinking at every second step, it looks like Beirut. They are building new footpaths, my companion tells me. And new apartments, and new roads, and a lot of other new things that are needed for a better infrastructure. Next I am told that that not many people will speak English. He tells me not to bother learning Polish. It is too difficult, and even a bold attempt will be a waste of time. He tells me that it is not always sunny here, and not to expect good weather once the summer ends. He also tells me that there is little or nothing to do. He tells me that I will be bored. In fact, he does his best to convince me that I have made a big mistake.
We stop outside a large shop with a charming wooden front and the word ‘Delicatessy’ painted across the top in red, giving it a Hansel-and-Gretel appearance. He insists that I can get everything I want inside, while he waits outside.
The shop is unusually wide but only about six feet deep, since the area for the public is abruptly cut off by an enormous length of counter. Behind this, all the produce is lined up in regimental style on shelves, the customers in front in a stiff and slow-moving queue. Most of them are old, the women in plain dresses, gripping string bags, the men in ill-matching trousers and jackets gripping the edge of the counter. They breathe heavily and wait patiently.
Those at the front of the queue slowly call out items, hesitating and searching the shelves with the tips of their fingers in the hope of finding what they came here for. Once the object is found on the shelf, the assistant, dressed in red apron, turns and stares at it for a moment as if to affirm its existence before moving toward it at the pace of a slug. The item is placed on the counter and the next one called out.
Apart from the voices of the assistants and the customer at the top of the queue, there is little noise. People just gaze and wait, as if the day ahead has little else for them. Some turn to look at me, but it isn’t a look of hostility, it is simply a look. The objects on the shelves are unrecognisable. Even the pictures on the tins make no sense. Chopped meat of some sort. Cucumber perishing in a large jar of pickle.
‘Didn’t get anything?’ my new friend asks when I come out.
‘No. Maybe you can show me to a butcher’s?’
This is no better. The shop is like a small wooden hut and there is a large woman with a knife cutting a great slab of meat between her breasts, surrounded by every insect with a pair of wings.
‘Maybe you fancy a pizza?’
He takes me to the train station about half a mile from my home. The grey and rather drab-looking building sits like crude Lego, the words ‘PKP Minsk Mazowiecki’ in harsh chunky letters across the flat roof. The lettering is redolent of communism, its form direct, imposing and menacing. Even the shape of the station building breaks all laws of aesthetics. It looks like it was just dropped there from the end of a crane.
Directly in front of the station, taxis snooze in the sun, the drivers’ heads gazing up momentarily with each squeak of the station doors. The line is long, the engines cold. The drivers all wear similar shirts of browns, blues and greys, all with their sleeves rolled up. The cars vary. There is the odd Mercedes, shining like a new coin in between cars that I have never seen before. Tiny little battered things like matchboxes wrapped in tinfoil that I later learn are called ‘maluchs’, which actually means ‘tinies’. Few people seem eager to rush to the taxis, so most of the drivers are asleep.
To the left, a small, wooded park hides the bus depot, where groups of kids sit on benches under trees, chomping on hotdogs from nearby kiosks. Like the taxis, the buses don’t seem to be going anywhere. They look old and clapped out, single-deckers with their destinations displayed on cards shoved onto their dashboards.
I am led to the pizza restaurant, but as we sit, I realise it isn’t really a restaurant at all – more of a snack bar, sitting at the end of a long line of similar snack bars, none of which is very inviting. The pizzas are fished out of a freezer, cooked in a microwave, then presented on a plate as if freshly baked. The bottom is soggy, the ingredients strange. Peas, carrots and pickle. But at least it is cooked food.
I buy my two companions Cokes and as I eat I am asked a lot of questions, the answers not coming very freely. I have only been here a day and already I have discovered that curiosity knows no bounds. The same sense of bewilderment stretches from the young to the old; nobody can understand why the hell a ‘rich man from the west’ – as they put it – would want to come to a small town so randomly located in the east of Poland at such a time.
And it is randomly located. If you can cast your mind back to geography class and the reasons why an area is first settled, you’d be hard pressed to recall one that could explain the existence of Minsk Mazowiecki. It is nowhere near the coast. From what I can see, there are no longer any mineral deposits or any natural resources of any kind. On the map of the region it looks like a mistake. On the map of the country it is barely a black dot. In fact, it has a history as a settlement that goes back to the fifteenth century and began its life on the banks of the Srebrna (silver) River. The Srebrna has long since lost both its shimmer and its status as a river, and is now more of a brackish stream. Minsk is really just a satellite town, one of many that have developed along the rail track from Warsaw to Russia.
Little of any historical note seems to stand out. In fact, there is little that stands out at all. The town has a park where grass does its best to grow. In the centre of the park lies the standard cultural centre that all Polish towns have. They are generally called ‘the Palace’ and are used for concerts and meetings. This one also has a restaurant in its basement. There is a church, a few schools, the obligatory army barracks and one or two shopping streets. The stores vary in style from modern brick buildings to old wooden ones that just about hang in there, but at least give some sense of a past. After that, there are a few sprawling residential quarters, again made up of modern blocks and wooden homes.
That is about it. It isn’t exactly ugly, just lacking something, and like a lot of towns near Warsaw really serves a basic function – in this case, giving people somewhere to live. But the most alarming fact of all is that there is no entry for the town in my Lonely Planet guide.
These guides are honest. If a place is good it says it’s good. If a place is a dump then it says so. And destinations both good and bad can contribute to the travel experience. But if a place isn’t mentioned at all then only one conclusion can be drawn – there is, quite frankly, no reason for going there.
As for the timing? Well, I am here precisely because times are hard. Communism is not long toppled and the place is a bit of a mess. Their government asks our government for help. So they get me, and the eighteen others who are right now wandering around similar towns and villages, being asked the same questions.
So, to answer all their questions, I lie. A little. I lie a little because I haven’t figured it all out myself yet. I haven’t had time to think about it. From the application to the interview process was only a matter of weeks. The training flew by and before we knew it we were packing our bags. But I have a feeling that time is something I am going to have plenty of here.
I tell them I want to teach in Poland because I have met some Polish people before and I became very fond of them. I tell them I am tired of hearing about people going to other countries to work. I tell them that I think Poland is an interesting country to visit and that I might learn something from the experience.
They’re not convinced. The young girl throws a vacant stare back at me and fiddles with her straw. The guy just shakes his head and sighs. Both responses amount to the same thing – they just can’t understand what I am doing here.
It had never occurred to me that these people would be gob-smacked at the thought of someone leaving the West to work in the East when thousands are trying to do exactly the opposite. It is as if they find the whole thing cynical or insulting in some way, that there is a certain luxury available to me that I can do such a thing at this stage of my life. It is an aspect of voluntary work that I had never considered. Many people resent charity, and the Polish people are a proud, resilient nation. I will have to think of a better reason for being here, I decide, something that will sound more convincing at least. I made the decision to give a period of my life to help those less fortunate. I want to do some good. And I do genuinely want to devote a couple of years to teaching. The two will work together, I thought. But I will have to do better than that if I am going to convince the Poles. Besides, calling the Polish people ‘less fortunate’ would be a great mistake.
We walk idly round the town for the rest of the afternoon, picking out landmarks and placing them mentally in distances from my home. The young kid, whose name is Jarek, drops the odd interesting remark about the town he lives in, but there is a jaded tone in everything he says. The girl, Agnieszka, smiles mostly and says very little. And I wonder how they fill their days here. What do they do on a long summer holiday in the town? What do they look forward to?
They lead me to another supermarket down on the main road, the road that runs all the way to Russia and rumbles occasionally from the weight of large trucks with foreign stickers on the back. This supermarket, thankfully, is self-service, but it isn’t well stocked. It is also full of half-dressed firemen from the depot across the way, bored with the heat, buying single bottles of beer and flirting with the giggling assistants. Single bottles of beer are a common feature in Poland, where a customer can stroll into a shop and purchase a bottle from the fridge, drink it at the counter, then leave.
When I enter, the giggling ceases and the assistants stare, one following my every move round the shop with her eyes. When I go down towards the back, she leaves her counter quietly and efficiently, as if on wheels, and stands directly behind me, arms folded. In a bit of a panic I grab some cheese, ham, bread, what I presume is soup and as many bottles of beer as I can fit into a bag.
The clatter of these bottles raises the eyebrows of my two new friends when I come out. I thank them, telling them I can find my own way back. They smile politely and I shake hands and walk the other way, the clinkety-clink of the beer bottles one of the only sounds on the quiet streets.
When I get home it is around five o’clock and the main room basks in a deep orange. I load up the fridge with the few bits of food and the myriad bottles and wonder how I can kill the evening off quickly and efficiently. It needs to be murdered because it is going to be a long one.
As the fridge fills up and the light at the back dims, I start to feel a bit guilty. I never fancied the thought of drinking alone before, and so never did. Who do you talk to? How many can you take and when do you stop? And what about the following night when you’re sitting here again with nothing to do? I finally decide not to care. It is going to be a long, lonely night and sleep will not come easily.
So that evening, at the end of my first real day here, I sat down with the windows open and began writing letters to as many friends as I could, each one concluded with a bottle of strong Polish beer, the envelope sealed with stringy spit. Lord knows what I wrote. Writing a long letter is a poor substitute for conversation.
With letters done and the sun setting, I found company in a new acoustic guitar that I had taken with me and which cost what I would probably earn here in a year. I had been playing for years, but I would get to play that guitar so much in Poland that the frets would eventually become like flattened matchsticks.
I wondered what the other Irish guys were up to, whether they had gone down the same route as myself and had stocked up on alcohol to make the opening of this chapter in our lives that bit gentler. For emigration means opening a new chapter. You remove yourself from the norm and anything is possible. Who knew how things would go? You could fall in love with the place and remain for the rest of your days. You could swing the other way and return home after a matter of weeks. Or you could do your time, enjoy it, take the rough with the smooth, work hard and meet as many people as possible. People who, in years to come, when all was in the past, would be nothing more than distant but charming memories, their fates and whereabouts unknown. Some would have been closer to you than others, but all would have contributed in some way to the colourful experience that you would never had known had you stayed in the one place. It was all there ahead of us.
With darkness settled outside, I sat on the couch and went through some of the cassettes I’d put together, not being able to take my CD collection along. Tom Waits became a favourite, with one album in particular, ‘Nighthawks at the Diner’, getting a lot of airing at night with the beers. There were so many stories there, set in the groove of a light jazzy accompaniment that was just so soothing and homely. One track on that album is ‘Better Off Without a Wife’, which I used to quote liberally from without any idea of what Poland had in store for me.
As the music played and a warm breeze floated through the open windows, kicking the curtains up like skirts, I felt good. The light in the fridge grew brighter as it was emptied of bottles and I decided, in my high spirits, that I would work out some good reasons for being there, a reason why I was doing my utmost to get away from a career path at home to come to a small town in Poland to teach in a State school. I thought long and hard, and came up empty-handed. So I gave up thinking.
I didn’t need a reason. I wanted to get away, and could have ended up anywhere. Something took me to this place and that was that. I started to believe in a destiny of sorts, that it was impossible for people to plan on ending up in situations like this and that it wasn’t merely down to a roll of the dice. If chance couldn’t be that random with people’s lives and plans like this aren’t really made, then there must be something or someone else at the controls that had it all worked out for us. I liked that idea, so I went with it. But it still wouldn’t convince the Poles.
Lady in a Glass Case
Day two was a Sunday and I was woken early by bells. It must have been just after dawn. They went on for what seemed a long, long time.
I fell back asleep and the next time I woke it was the rain I was hearing. It came down like something out of the Old Testament, pounding the windows like buckshot, and now I had a blinding headache. Instead of the buttery sun spread out on the lino, a large pool of water crawled from the ground beneath the window before snaking out towards the rug in the centre of the floor. I stood and waded through it barefoot, lifting the soggy curtains slowly from the sill. The windows looked frail, the paint peeling, the wood beneath starting to crumble like a sodden cigarette. If the rain gets in, what’s going to stop the cold when winter falls? Abandoning that thought, I jammed a couple of towels under the frames and got dressed to go foraging for food once more.
Outside, puddles turned to ponds and the sandy pavements became scarred with rivulets, threatening to pull the ground from beneath like a rug. The supermarket on the main road that had yesterday saved my life was closed, so I walked further, halting at a roadside statue of Our Lady in a glass case. I stood under a tree to shelter from the rain, still coming down in buckets. The statue reminded me of the one that now sat in my hallway and I wondered briefly if I was being followed. If I was, then I prayed I would be guided towards food and some solace, because I needed it that morning.
