by Jay Martin
Victoria told me about a yoga studio she’d found – with classes in English, at fifty zloty a time. I asked her to pass on the details. But I’d already found classes at a local school that were only nineteen zloty, and I was learning all the vocabulary for parts of the body to boot. Maybe the money I was spending on language lessons was paying off in other ways.
When she suggested we have a game of tennis sometime, I was more enthusiastic. ‘I have to do something until I find a proper job,’ Victoria said. ‘And it will save us from the IWG.’
‘The IWG? What’s that?’ I said.
‘International Women’s Group,’ Shannon said.
‘You know, the kind of wives who don’t do anything.’ Victoria rolled her eyes.
Yes, I knew the kind. I’d fled a middle-class suburbia full of them at seventeen and never looked back. I confirmed with an enthusiastic nod to Victoria and Shannon that I was one of them, not one of them. I sprang up and offered my chocolate fondant cake around again.
Since the afternoon of the perfect cake, I’d run into Shannon around the neighbourhood every few days. In the little bread store, the discount clothes shop or the florist. Most commonly, like now, in our local supermarket. I greeted her, kissing each cheek. It was nice having someone to run into. Not to mention someone to discuss the intrigues of Polish supermarkets with.
Because supermarkets in Poland were not the same as at home. They had what seemed like a million varieties of sour cream, and a sausage section with walls of porky options. But I didn’t eat meat and couldn’t understand why you needed more than one or two types of cream. And while they had plenty of fish options, there were none I understood. Flądre, karp, dorszcz – my dictionary could turn these into flounder, carp and cod, but it didn’t help me know how to cook any of them. Just as it didn’t help me understand why the vegetables here barely lasted twenty-four hours before showing signs of extreme distress. Nor why Polish cling film did not – would not – cling, nor why batteries and light globes seemed to only be available sporadically. It was as though wartime rationing had never ended. I’d started stocking up when I saw them.
‘I don’t understand why a major international supermarket chain in the EU can’t deliver me an onion that will last until dinnertime,’ I said to Shannon. Polish vegetable fragility was one of the reasons Shannon and I ran into each other so often. Supermarket shopping had become something we did most days, rather than once a week.
‘I know. Or why you have to weigh your fruit and vegetables before you take them to the check-out,’ she said. In Polish stores you had to weigh fruit and vegetables at a separate place, and then take them, tagged and priced, to the cashier. ‘I never remember. I ended up leaving kilos of vegetables at the counter the other day because I’d forgotten to weigh them and get the price sticker. It wasn’t even that I couldn’t have gone and done it. It was just that the check-out girl took such pleasure in the fact that I was obviously so annoyed that I hadn’t, that I decided to get my own back by leaving ten bags of vegetables on her counter!’
‘Except you left without your vegetables …’
‘Yeah. So I guess she won. I tried not to let her know that, though.’
I told Shannon how I’d been trying to find pumpkins and had asked the man in the store if they had any. ‘Nie ma,’ he’d shaken his head, before he added, ‘They’re not in season.’
‘Pumpkins go out of season here?’ Shannon was as incredulous as I had been.
‘You get pumpkins all year round in Canada, right?’
‘It’s the twenty-first century in Canada,’ she said.
Once Jutta and Svetlana had gone, I had sometimes gone days without speaking to anyone else other than Tom. And Agnieszka the exacting, of course. It was nice to have someone to know here, to run into. Especially someone who was going through so many of the same things I was. I’d tried sharing my bewilderment at Polish supermarkets with Tom. ‘It’s a supermarket, what’s so hard?’ he’d said. But the one time I asked him to bring home milk, he came home with kefir – soured milk. Shannon understood only too well – Paul had got mad with her when he’d used handwash instead of moisturiser on his face, not being able to read the labels. He blamed her for putting it in the wrong place in the bathroom.
‘I do feel I’m getting it, though. As though Polish supermarkets are opening their secrets to me. Like Tutankhamun’s tomb,’ I said.
‘I think you’ve spent too long in Polish supermarkets,’ Shannon said.
We both started giggling and I accidentally bumped the girl in front of us. She turned around.
‘Przepraszam,’ I apologised.
‘I’m in front of you,’ she responded curtly, before dumping her basket and ducking out of the queue. The girl returned with a box of tissues two minutes later and re-took her place as though she’d never been away. Shannon and I glared at the back of her head.
A commotion in the next line disturbed us. An old man dressed in rags and with knotted hair was paying for his meagre purchases with a few coins. ‘And have a shower next time before you come in here. You stink!’ The cashier threw his change back at him. The older ladies in the line joined in, all holding their noses.
‘Have you got China tonight?’ I asked Shannon.
‘Yep. And France next week?’
‘I don’t think we got that one,’ I said.
I started rifling through my purse. Polish shop assistants thought nothing of yelling at you for not having the right change. Maybe that was rationed, too? I looked in my wallet – I had hardly any coins. I was never leaving any for a tip again, that was for sure. It was too precious. I sighed. Shannon opened her hand, revealing a fistful, a twinkle in her eye.
‘Got time for a coffee now?’ I said.
‘Of course.’
***
Tom was off to Brussels for a few days. He asked if I wanted to come, but I’d decided instead to see more of Poland. Lublin, I picked, by an exhaustive process: I’d opened the guidebook to the front page, where a dozen places to go were highlighted. Gdansk, tick. Next stop: Lublin.
The guidebook set out a complicated train connection, but Agnieszka pointed me in the direction of minibuses from the Palace that made the 170-kilometre journey directly. In Australia, you could divide the number of kilometres you were travelling by one hundred to work out how long it would take to get somewhere – so roughly two hours. I hadn’t yet worked out what the Polish formula was, but I had four hours to ponder it, as the minibus ambled down the main road linking these two cities, stopping for trucks, chickens, old people on bicycles and roadworks along the way. It certainly would have been quicker to get to Brussels.
But there were worse places to be taking my time than a slow-moving minivan in the Polish countryside in this season. Now I understood why it was called golden autumn. The fields, tiny villages and churches I passed were surrounded by forests exploding in a million shades of gold. Canberra in autumn was pretty, but this was stunning. I imagined the architects of the colourful Warsaw rynek being inspired in their choice of palette by the country’s natural charms.
In between snapping a few photos to show Tom, I reflected on my new life, some three months in.
I had no trouble keeping myself busy. I would get up with Tom in the mornings. Not that I had to, it just seemed like a nice show of solidarność. Then my day began: three hours of Polish class, followed by running around town, looking for coriander and self-raising flour, picking up drycleaning, grabbing a coffee – sometimes with Shannon, sometimes just with a Polish newspaper for company. It was all stuff I’d had to do before, of course. It was stuff that everyone did. But here, things seemed to take more time, and anything I hadn’t done before took planning. And that, three months in, included virtually everything.
Shopping for dinner often involved not just a trip to the store, but a tram trip to Praga on the other side of the river, the closest supermarket of any size. While I knew where the supermarket was, I often couldn’t find what I
wanted in it – did I want the twelve, eighteen or thirty-six percent śmietana? At home it was just called cream. And if a box didn’t have a picture on it, I often didn’t know what was in it. I invariably had to lug whatever I’d bought back in a dozen plastic bags – I hadn’t yet stopped shopping as though I could wheel my trolley to the car park and load up the boot.
Before I could make a doctor’s appointment, I had to find a doctor, find out what insurance I had and what cards I would need, and practise saying what I wanted the appointment for in Polish – I was still determined on that point. I managed, too – although it could be painful for both parties, as I’m sure the salesperson who had signed me up for my mobile phone contract could attest. But I’d learned one thing in the process: if I started in Polish, no one would ever switch to English.
And then I’d need to get home and get changed and get to whatever event we’d been invited to that evening. Already, they were starting to blur. China National Day had been a standout for the food (although we’d mixed up Bonifraterska Street and Bonifacego Street and ended up spending nearly an hour in a taxi to go just around the corner from our house). At Thailand, I’d upset a Brazilian diplomat by telling him we didn’t have to pay for our accommodation or bills while we were here. He had to rent an apartment on the private market and pay for it like a normal person. One weekend we’d listened to one of the country’s top string quartets play for a dozen people, including us, in a ballroom inside Warsaw’s Royal Castle. It was probably Chopin – one of Poland’s favourite sons. The music wasn’t really my thing, but I was absorbed by the eighteenth-century ceremonial room, with its mural-covered ceiling and gilded mirrors. The determination and pride evident in the faithful post-war reconstruction made it all the more exquisite. There were cocktail events for arriving diplomats, dinners for ones departing, and various other networking events in between. We were less commonly invited to anything from the EU, although with our embassy in Warsaw being responsible for both Poland and the Czech Republic, we did make the cut for that one – the frequent jaunts to Prague the Ambassador was fond off were obviously paying off.
Tom was sought after at all of these things, people from all over the world bailing him up to talk about everything from arms control to economic indicators, and he would walk out with a brick of new business cards and more invites to more free events. As for me, this schedule of representational duties had forced me back on one of the resolutions I’d made after leaving work, which was to not have a diary anymore. Being unemployed, I would no longer need to ration my time, I’d figured. I caved, and bought a small one that fit in my jacket pocket. It was a compromise between my desire to be less timetabled and my need to remember all of the things I had to be at.
I didn’t have to come to any of these events. Most spouses didn’t, and I could understand why. I was used to briefing ministers and heads of government departments on media strategies or complex social issues. But I’d had no training in making chitchat with them over canapés – or how to respond to the bored look they’d give me when I revealed I was just a wife. Spouses were invited to the events, but not into the conversations.
Still, I was interested in meeting people from different places, and I liked getting to know the group of people who, like us, were on the circuit – Paul and Shannon were often there, William from the UK too, and Piotr, who I’d met with Hannah over spring rolls. The events were also a fertile hunting ground for Polish people to inflict my language skills on. But mostly, this was Tom’s job and he had to go, despite already long days. If I didn’t go too, we wouldn’t spend many of our waking hours together.
Despite it all, I often found myself not tired at the end of the day. It made me realise how tiring working full-time had been. I’d become so used to it I had stopped noticing.
So when Victoria had followed up on her suggestion of some tennis after our first meeting, I’d been happy to dust off my racquet and add a game with her at the local club into the mix – as a result, I now knew how to book a tennis court, and that when I did, I would have to spell out my surname, because people here could no more spell ‘Martin’ without guidance than people at home could spell ‘Nowak’. It had become a semi-regular thing since. The tennis wasn’t Shannon’s cup of tea, but she would sometimes come for a bite to eat afterward, giving the three of us an opportunity to share the little frustrations and successes of our new lives with people who understood. When Shannon told us how helpless she’d felt having to get the embassy to organise her mobile phone plan as the phone company wouldn’t give a non-resident one directly, we empathised. And when Victoria told us how she still made William cook half the time – just on principle – we laughed. And when I told them how much I’d had to struggle to make a doctor’s appointment in Polish, Shannon reminded me that I had succeeded in the end, and I went from feeling deflated to feeling proud. And when I said that my intensive Polish schedule was getting in the way of seeing Poland, Shannon and Victoria pointed out that it wasn’t work and I didn’t need to apply for leave. They were right! I emailed Agnieszka and told her I wasn’t coming to class, I was going on a road trip.
Arriving, I went to the tourist office which, in response to my request for something ‘cheap and with character’, sent me to the local nunnery. I dumped my small bag in the sparse room, tried not to be put off by the bloody crucifix above my lumpy single bed, and headed out to see the sights of the provincial capital.
The tourist office had suggested a visit to the Chapel of the Holy Trinity at Lublin Castle; as a steady drizzle was setting in, an indoor destination seemed a sensible idea. I made my way in and was immediately transported by the vibrant frescoes that adorned every interior surface. Originally painted in the fifteenth century, they had only survived because they’d been plastered over some time in the nineteenth. In the twentieth, they were rediscovered and restored. I ranged my eyes over the stories of Jesus’ life, in bright panels: Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, being nailed to the cross between two thieves, finally ascending to heaven. Stories some unknown artists in fifteenth century Poland had painted, and a woman from twenty-first century Australia could understand, despite all the space and time between us.
Venturing back out into the late afternoon, I chose a café that was open and ordered a vegetarian soup and a cappuccino.
‘She is vegetarian, this soup, yes?’
‘One hundred percent,’ the young server responded. It arrived with globs of pork in it. I pretended it hadn’t and ate around them.
It wasn’t a very Polish meal. It wasn’t very Italian either – the cappuccino came in a packet, with hot water at the side. I felt sixty million Italians shudder. But the bill came to less than ten zloty, which was a bargain – by Australian or Warsaw standards – and anyway there wasn’t a lot of choice. The tourist season was over, a chill wind had picked up as soon as the sun had dipped below the horizon, and people eating out in Lublin numbered pretty much me. I wrapped my jacket and scarf more tightly around me.
A road sign indicated we were just about there. I looked at my watch. Just gone lunch time. At home, I would have cleared three ministerial briefings. Here, I’d watched a little of south-east Poland in the autumn go by. What a superior way this was to spend a morning.
JESIEN – AUTUMN
The colours of golden autumn had dropped from the trees, leaving just the bare branches of jesień against a gloomy sky when Tom and I arrived in Krakow – only to discover the hotel had no record of the reservation I held in my hand. Despite the weather, Krakow, as Poland’s best-known tourist destination, was still fully booked, and finding us alternative accommodation for the night was proving a tough ask. The receptionist was doing her best, and I was trying to be appreciative. Tom’s contribution was to sigh loudly and shoot daggers my way. We’d only just managed to catch the train down here; if it hadn’t been late leaving, we would have missed it. Tom had been delayed by last-minute urgent tasks at work, and hadn’t been able to get away ear
ly as he’d hoped, but I’d missed the text he’d sent telling me to bring his stuff and meet him at the embassy. I told him he should have called. A frown had set on his face and hadn’t left since.
The receptionist finally located something. ‘It’s in Kazimierz. Will that be alright?’
Apparently it was just the next suburb, but wherever it was it seemed there was little choice. We raced out of there, aware we were now running late to meet Piotr and Hannah, the Poles we’d met at Indonesian National Day. We rushed through Krakow under darkening skies, calling them along the way to say there had been a last minute change of plans and giving them our new hotel address, a fifteen-minute walk (or in our case seven-minute frantic dash by taxi) away.
We dragged our baggage up five flights of stairs. Our new room had attic windows, cut into the forty-five degree angled roof. I poked my head through one to get a glimpse of the square.
‘Oh, isn’t it –’
‘Come on, we’re late!’
‘Pretty,’ I said, to no one in particular.
We raced down the stairs to find Piotr and Hannah leaning against the hotel reception counter. We kissed each other three times. ‘So you guys found Kazimierz, then. This is a really cool place to stay!’ They seemed much less stressed about the change of plan than we were. Or than Tom was, anyway.
‘Sometimes we choose the journey, sometimes it chooses us …’ I paraphrased Voltaire.
‘And sometimes your wife just stuffs up the hotel booking,’ Tom said.
Piotr seemed to think it was a joke and laughed. I wondered if diplomacy shouldn’t be one of the traits they should screen for in diplomats.
We were halfway across Krakow’s main square when it started to pour. We ran the last few hundred metres, diving into a basement café, and Hannah and Piotr got the first round. By the time we’d had something to eat and drink, even Tom was in a relaxed and happy mood.
