by Jay Martin
I didn’t think much of that sounded very interesting, so I told them about setting up our apartment instead. With its marble entryway, state-of-the-art kitchen and a bath that I hoped came with an instruction manual, it was nothing like we would have chosen ourselves, but it was ‘where diplomats lived’, Tom had been told by the embassy. Still, we did like its inner-city location, about ten minutes’ walk to Tom’s office or the Old Town rynek where we’d had coffee our first day. Our possessions were still on a ship somewhere between Sydney and the Polish port of Gdansk; I’d been particularly proud of my two-bus transfer to get to IKEA, in an outer suburb, to supplement what we’d managed to stuff into four suitcases with a few vital purchases. Like a laundry basket. Not included, it turned out. It was the first experience of apartment living for either Tom or I – but with two bedrooms, a single open-plan dining room and kitchen, and small separate study, I thought we could make it work.
‘It’s lovely, although a bit small – just one hundred square metres,’ I said.
Svetlana and Jutta burst out laughing. ‘My apartment is forty square metres,’ Jutta said.
‘Mine’s thirty-five,’ Svetlana said.
What did a thirty-five square metre apartment even look like?
I looked around, reminding myself. I was here! In Warsaw! It wasn’t that obvious. The al fresco dining experience was Italian – or Australian, for that matter. The shopping centre, from what I could see, worked like those in any major city: people went in with full wallets, and came out with shopping bags from Hugo Boss, Samsonite, Body Shop, and takeaway containers from Subway and McDonald’s. Although what was inside the bags marked ‘Krakowski Kredens’, ‘Tatuum’ or ‘Empik’ was a mystery to me.
‘This could be a shopping centre anywhere in the world, couldn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yeah, anywhere in the world with one of those.’ Jutta pointed to a giant concrete tower looming over us. The Palace of Culture and Science, according to its sign, or just ‘the Palace’, according to Agnieszka, who’d pointed it out across the way from our classroom during a mercy break. A thirty-storey building straight out of Gotham City, including turrets, concrete lacework and a clock tower. ‘Stalin’s Wedding Cake’, she’d said people also called it, a nod to the man who’d commissioned it, and his particular tastes in architecture.
‘We’ve got six in Moscow. Except they’re bigger,’ Svetlana said.
‘What do you need six for?’ Jutta asked.
‘The communists liked to make things like that.’ Svetlana seemed the pragmatic type.
‘Do you remember much about communism?’ I asked her. She told me about one time she had been lining up for sugar with her grandparents, and been disappointed when they got to the end of the line and there was none left to buy. Not surprised – just disappointed. ‘Poland was very well known, though. We knew it was where jeans came from – from Germany, though Poland, to Russia. You could make ten times the original price on the way through.’
The waitress came to take our plates.
‘Excuse me, that pizza, she call vegetarian, but she have … umm … salami on her?’ I asked.
‘Yes, the vegetarian pizza comes with salami,’ she said, and walked away.
I was obviously going to have to get more specific about my eating habits here.
‘OK, I’m going to go,’ I said, downing the last drop of my coffee. ‘We’re thinking of going to Gdansk before summer ends so I’m going to go and try and get train tickets.’
‘Do you want company? I don’t have anything planned for the afternoon,’ Jutta asked.
‘Thanks. I’m sure I’ll be fine.’
I wondered how my life looked to Jutta and Svetlana. When I was about their age I’d gone travelling in Europe too – exotic places like France, England and Germany, having worked every weekend and school holiday to afford three months away. The future I’d dreamed of for myself then looked like my life in Canberra: a busy, professional job, meetings with important people. Not following someone to another country and looking for vegetables. What did they think of this ‘diplomatic wife’ they were having language classes and coffee with?
Still, we three were the school’s entire complement of foreigners learning Polish, the coordinator had told me, and so this was the only class I could join. It was nice that, from what I could tell from lesson one, we were all at about the same level – of both capability and confusion. Although that meant they’d learned about as much Polish in three weeks as I’d managed in … anyway, that wasn’t important.
We swapped mobile numbers. That made four numbers in my phone – after Tom’s and the embassy.
‘Ok, see you guys again tomorrow!’ I waved them goodbye, and headed towards where I thought Warsaw’s main train station, Warszawa Centralna, was. I guessed you could get tickets in there somewhere? One way to find out. I clutched my bag to my chest as I made my way through the maze of grotty underground tunnels, flanked by neon-lit stores selling kebabs, energy drinks and cheap nylon clothes. Yellow billboards gave destinations and times, which I took down among my scribble of Polish notes from the class. I’d have to sit somewhere and try and make sense of those in a bit.
With the times of the trains I wanted in hand, I headed for the counter marked ‘International’ in English, German and Russian, and stood in the queue. Above the sign a departures board showed places I could buy tickets to from here: Minsk, Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam. Something told me I would be back here again. I ran through the lines I needed in my head, paying particular attention to my dziewięćs and dziesięćs – nines and tens. Or tens and nines – I struggled to tell them apart with their difference of just one consonant. For some reason, Sunday and Monday, niedziela and poniedziałek, tripped me up, too.
My turn, and a lady summoned me to the counter with a bored wave. I figured we could always switch to English, although I was sure she would appreciate my efforts to try in Polish. I launched into my rehearsed lines.
‘Me want two ticket Gdansk, go Saturday come Sunday.’ I stumbled through the times I’d got off the timetables on the station walls, for a date a few weeks away.
‘Shshshshshsh-klasa-shshsh?’ she asked, typing something into a computer without looking up. Klasa, was that? Which class?
‘Two,’ I said. OK! I could do this!
‘Shshshshshsh?’
‘No smoke,’ I tried. I didn’t know if that was what she’d asked but that had been in the textbook lesson on ‘buying train tickets’.
‘Shshshshshsh,’ she said again. Hmm. Perhaps she hadn’t done the same buying train tickets lesson I had.
‘You speak English?’ I asked. She looked at me with disdain. If she did, she wasn’t going to. And I hadn’t earned any points for trying in Polish. With no better ideas, I just repeated my request again – ‘Me want two ticket Gdansk, go Saturday come Sunday’.
‘Shshshshshsh,’ she said, punching something into a keyboard. The ticket machine stamped some text on yellow paper and spat the tickets out. It was definitely on her side. She threw them under the glass, scrawled a figure on a piece of paper and jabbed a painted nail at it. From the guidebook, I’d calculated that it would cost about one hundred zloty each. The figure on the paper was about half of that total. I quickly glanced behind me. A queue was mounting. I didn’t want to hold people up, but I also didn’t want to have to line up again if there was something wrong …
‘Two ticket? Gdansk, Warsaw, Gdansk?’
She jabbed her finger at the figure again. I flicked through the tickets. They seemed to be what I’d asked for. Two tickets, Warsaw–Gdansk–Warsaw, on the dates I’d wanted. I paid, took them and left. I wondered if there was a different way to do this.
I hurried out again into the afternoon sunshine. I looked at my watch. Someone was coming to hook up our satellite package at four, and I had to pick up a few things for dinner before then.
Jutta and Svetlana were probably still around town. Maybe they would like to go for another coffee?
No, I should probably just get home and get my Polish homework done. I’d see them tomorrow. Anyway, they were only going to be here a few more weeks. No point getting too attached.
***
The weather in our first few weeks in Poland had been hit and miss, but it was a hot, blue sky August day the day Tom and I caught our train to Gdansk.
We dumped our stuff at the hotel and had a quick wander through the town. A short stroll was all we’d needed to take in both the post office, the attack on which heralded the start of World War Two, and the shipyards where the fall of communism had commenced. So much history in such a small area, and I’d had no idea either had taken place here – either in Poland or in Gdansk. Tom was able to fill me in on some of the details, like the history of the Solidarity – Solidarność – strikes at the shipyards that had, eventually, led to the restoration of free elections in Poland. We discovered we’d both found the war interesting as children, me tucked up in my bedroom reading The Diary of Anne Frank, him fascinated by airplanes and things that exploded. In our seven years together, we’d never had a reason to talk about the topic before.
I told Tom what Svetlana had told me about her memories of communism, and Poland’s place in the system. ‘I suppose I thought someone her age would know about it from books, like I did. But she remembered it herself,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t as long ago here,’ he said. As though time could work differently in different countries.
By midafternoon, we had made our way a few kilometres further along to the beachside town of Sopot, and settled ourselves on to an empty bit of hot, white sand.
‘Here I was, thinking “Polish beach” was an oxymoron. This is as good as anything we’ve got at home,’ I said. ‘Polish beach’ did seem about as incongruous as ‘Polish coffee’. Yet now that we were here, we could have been at any beach in Australia on any summer day. Any very crowded beach, with slightly murkier water, and everyone speaking Polish, that was.
Polish beaches did come with added entertainment value, though: Polish beach fashions. Anyone older than fifty seemed to simply strip down to their underwear and flop into folding chairs – the men in baggy Y-fronts, the women in enormous knickers and lacy bras that strained under the effort of keeping ample bosoms in check. I wondered if this was accepted behaviour in a country with no beach-going tradition. Or maybe old Poles didn’t give two hoots what was acceptable. Tom and I couldn’t help but have a few giggles at their expense, pointing out the lobster-red shoulders and peeling skin of a few grandmothers – babcias – who were letting it all hang out.
‘And it was so easy getting here,’ said Tom. I think Tom meant how the train up had been new and fast, and he’d spent the three hours napping in comfy velour armchair seats while the flat fields of northern Poland had sped by, rather than my ordeal with the ticket seller. Still, I agreed with his sentiment: it had been well worth it.
‘How did I get to my age without knowing anything about this country?’ I said, looking out over – I checked the map in the guidebook – the Gulf of Danzig. Funny, I’d heard of that name, the German for the town of Gdansk, but not its Polish name.
‘Maybe you were away the day they did Poland in school,’ he said.
Or maybe Poland had been as absent from the Australian school curriculum as it had been from the map over the years this land had come under German and Russian occupation. I jumped up and picked my way through the crowds for another bath in the warm water before flopping back down on my towel, seaweed in my hair.
‘So how’s being a diplomat so far?’ I asked.
Tom had told me a little of his first days on the job. The Australian Embassy in Warsaw was made up of a team of a dozen Polish local staff, the Ambassador, and Tom. Except the Ambassador hadn’t arrived yet, which left Tom alone trying to come to terms with his new role, staff and country. The notes left by Tom’s predecessor outlined an intense upcoming work schedule of ministerial visits and major events. In the interim, scores of ambassadors, Polish officials, university professors and miscellaneous eminent and erudite individuals wanted to meet him, and his calendar filled with breakfast, lunch and dinner appointments. So different to my days, with their Polish classes and coffees with Jutta and Svetlana, and daily schedule of things to find. Although ‘finding things’ had now been augmented with ‘discovering things’, including that you could get an unlimited monthly pass to the public transport here for what was – by Australian standards – virtually nothing. A few times now I’d just picked a bus or tram route and gone to the end of it, to see what was there. Sometimes nothing much, although I’d found some shopping malls, a cinema complex, and a grassy river bank that looked nice for bike riding and picnics. Tom and I had decided to do without a car while we were here, for the first time in our lives. It seemed it was going to be an easy decision to stick to.
Tom took longer to consider my question than I had expected. ‘Actually, so far I feel like a bit of a fraud,’ he finally said. ‘All these clever, interesting people want to take me for lunch and talk to me. They all seem to think I’m someone important. I worry that they’re expecting a diplomat and they just get me.’
‘I’m proud of you, Tom. You know that, don’t you?’
‘You don’t wish I’d just stayed in IT?’
‘I love that you took the risk. Most people wouldn’t have.’
‘Yeah, well, let’s hope it’s a risk that pays off!’ He jumped up. ‘I’m going to get a beer. Do you want one?’
‘Here on the beach?’
He pointed out all the people drinking around us and I gave him a thumbs up. He brought back two red-and-white cans and we quaffed their contents in the warm sun. Obviously it was not just time but liquor-licensing laws that worked differently in Poland. I’m not sure which was more surprising.
We spent the rest of the afternoon reading on the sand, taking turns to bathe in Sopot’s cloudy waters, and appreciating the benefits of an ozone layer that did its job. Had I spent the day like this at home I would have been hospitalised from sunstroke. Here, I was just lightly toasted – from both the sun and the beer.
‘Hey, you know what I worked out the other day?’ I said, as we packed up towels, lotions and my Polish dictionary to go for dinner.
‘What?’
‘The stuff we’ve been eating as jam for breakfast? It’s actually cranberry sauce!’
Tom reached out and took the heavy bag from me. ‘Well, it tastes alright.’
Dinner was pierogi in a local café followed by a few drinks at a beachside vodka bar, and breakfast the next morning was coffee and crepes among thickset Polish families, pink from their sun.
That afternoon, we trudged back to Gdansk Station with our daypacks on our backs, and a successful weekend away under our belts. The station platform was as crowded as the beach had been.
‘What carriage are we?’ Tom asked. I leafed through the tickets. The ones for our journey here had had reference numbers to a carriage, cabin and seats. These ones didn’t seem to.
The train pulled in. Our train up had been new, neat and clean, with a restaurant, bar, and air conditioning. This one had open windows, out of which came the sounds of sweaty, noisy Polish teenagers on the way home from an ocean-side weekend. We struggled aboard with our bags. There were no reserved seats, and it was standing room only. Hence the cheap tickets. So this was what the woman at the ticket counter had been trying to tell me.
Poland. One lesson at a time.
ZLOTA JESIEN – GOLDEN AUTUMN
Summer had been wavering since we got here and on September the first, it officially switched off. The leaves started turning in unison, as if directed by a conductor, and golden autumn – złota jesień as they called this early part of the season in Polish – arrived. Jutta and Svetlana went west and east respectively, back to their student lives. My sturdy walking boots came out, a practical response to streets that were more and more often muddy. And my life as a diplomatic wife began in earnest
, with the arrival of our first invite to an event – a display by a Polish-Australian jewellery artist.
Arriving at the venue, we discovered we’d left the actual invitation on our kitchen table – along with our first round of bank statements, which had somehow found us, despite bearing the address Whoresore Bag. I should have been more patient spelling out those addresses.
Not having the invite presented some issues when we reported at the entry. Tom ran around trying to find a security guard who would talk to him in English. I followed behind him, trying to form the sentences in my head to explain what was going on, in case he failed and it was about to become my problem in Polish. After a few minutes Tom called me over. He had, and it was.
I took a deep breath. ‘We have no ticket it at home, but we like to please come in.’ I was banking on the fact that the guard might be impressed by the fact we were foreign. He looked us up and down. Nothing about us appeared to impress him. He said something in response that I didn’t get. I could often form a half-decent Polish sentence if I had a chance to rehearse. But the response was often a mystery. As it was now. I asked the security man to repeat what he’d said. Tom tapped the pavement with a toe.
‘He says we need tickets.’
‘I know that,’ said Tom. ‘Tell him we want to come in anyway.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘That we’re from the Australian Embassy.’
