Vodka and Apple Juice

by Jay Martin

  The evening went on, and we were joined by more and more of their friends, all converging in town for the wedding. People had flown in from the Hague, Geneva and Paris, where they held jobs in EU offices and international firms. I had thought this must be because of Piotr’s line of work, but Hannah told me they were mostly university friends. To a person they spoke flawless English, were warm and welcoming, and passionate about the things we ‘absolutely must do’ in Krakow – the castle, the Cathedral, the square – all ‘much better than Warsaw’s’ according to universal opinion – although they were all from Krakow, and Hannah told me some rivalry between the old and new capitals of Poland may have been at play. Every so often we tried to excuse ourselves, aware we were intruders on their reunion. Our attempts to leave were countered with offers of more hospitality in the cities they lived in. Not only did Polish people issue invitations for a weekend away to people they’d just met, they treated them like long-lost relations when they got there.

  ‘I’ve got a great idea,’ Piotr said. ‘Absinthe!’ Not the potentially hallucinogenic alcohol, it turned out, but a bar near where we were staying. Together with a selection of the wedding guests – including the groom – we wound our way through the streets to our destination, seating ourselves at one of a few candlelit tables in a dark, velvet-lined room, populated with fresh-faced students cradling glasses of tap beer.

  ‘Do you like vodka?’ Piotr asked.

  I was reluctant to admit that I didn’t like his national drink, but I expect it was evident from my expression.

  ‘What type of vodka have you tried?’ he said.

  ‘Um, the one with the red bottle …’

  ‘OK, I see the problem. You’ve never tried Polish vodka. So we will fix that.’

  Were there problems that could be traced to a lack of Polish vodka?

  Piotr brought me a small glass full of clear liquid back from the bar. ‘OK, so this is Zubrowka – Zhu-Broov-ka,’ he sounded it out to make sure I got it. ‘It’s flavoured with a special kind of grass, called bison grass. Żubr, bison. Zubrowka, bison grass vodka. See?’ I agreed that linguistically, that was interesting. ‘Now, down in one. Na zdrowie!’ we all toasted, and Tom and Piotr downed theirs. Despite some resolve, I made it less than halfway.

  ‘Never mind, I can fix that problem, too,’ he said, taking the glass back to the bar and returning with a short drink the colour of amber. I took a sip, bracing myself for some new unpleasant experience.

  ‘It … it’s … apple pie!’ The icy drink tasted just like a freshly baked apple tart, cinnamon and all. I could see it being pulled from the oven and placed lovingly on a kitchen bench.

  ‘Szarlotka. Zubrowka mixed with apple juice. Szarlotka in Polish means ‘apple cake’ – from the French, Charlotte. Like apple charlotte.’

  I took another sip. Then another.

  ‘Szarlotka,’ I said, when Tom next headed for the bar.

  Some time later, Tom and I staggered up the eight – or was it nine? – flights of stairs to our attic apartment. The rain that had come in through the open windows had left an inch of water across the tiled floor. I threw my shoes down in case I needed to ford it during the night and we fell into bed.

  We didn’t manage to do justice to what were apparently Krakow’s myriad attractions the next day. I guess we’d have to come back here again.

  ***

  Four months in, unemployment was still busy. But it was also lonely.

  We met plenty of people at diplomatic events who were happy to shake my hand because of who I was with. But I’d suggested to a Finnish diplomat about my age that perhaps we could have coffee one day. She reacted like she’d been slapped in the face with a wet herring. Tom said it was just because she was Finnish. But I knew that, here, I wasn’t an independent career woman with opinions and autonomy and a job. I was just a wife, and a lot of people who weren’t didn’t find that very interesting. And while I really liked Victoria and Shannon, they were Tom’s colleagues’ partners. I wanted some other friends. Some I’d met on my own. But without a workplace to go to each day, I had no idea how to do that.

  So despite my promise, I decided to check out the International Women’s Group. They did sound a bit ‘wifey’, but who knew, perhaps there would be other wives among them who were like me? I looked them up on the internet. Their website advertised the next monthly meeting, including a guest speaker on choosing new crockery patterns to match your existing settings. On the face of it, they didn’t seem much like me. But they also had small group activities, like quilting, cooking, embroidery, mahjong, French, English for foreigners, and a Polish literature book club, where they read Polish books in translation and discussed them. That last one, at least, sounded promising – and as my conversation with Hannah had attested, it was a weak point. I RSVP’d, and resolved not to tell Victoria or Shannon.

  And so I found myself with six other women, arranged on floral couches in a lounge room in a southern suburb of Warsaw, with a plate of homemade cake, at my first fortnightly IWG book-club meeting. We went round with introductions.

  ‘My husband’s in insurance, and we’ve been to Berlin, Geneva, Moscow, Geneva again,’ said a British woman in her fifties from London who’d been here for several years.

  ‘My husband’s the Dutch ambassador, and we’ve been in Prague, Vienna, London and Lisbon, we just arrived in Poland in the spring,’ said another woman. Protocol seemed to dictate that introductions consisted of naming our husband’s job, and listing the cities it had taken us to. There was a touch of Alcoholics Anonymous about it.

  I remembered nationalities, past postings and spousal professions more than the women’s names. An American with a husband in oil and gas, who’d arrived about six months ago after six years in Aberdeen. Another New Zealand woman whose husband was with the embassy. Warsaw was their seventh posting. Poland was starting to sound like Siberia. Somewhere you got sent.

  Mind you, life in Siberia wasn’t bad. The group organiser, Anthea, from Ireland (Vienna, Hong Kong, Dubai; shopping centre design; two years) was hosting us in her home, a detached house in the southern suburbs. A spacious lounge opened onto a light, modern kitchen; a wall cabinet bulged with crystal and half-drunk bottles of spirits.

  I wondered what would happen if you changed the script. I’m Jay. In Australia, I was a senior executive in a government policy department. It was challenging, although stressful at times. I enjoy playing tennis and eating out. I’m hoping to learn Polish and travel while I’m here. Of course, I didn’t. ‘I’m Australian, my husband’s with the embassy, I’ve been here for four months, this is our first posting.’ I introduced myself, following the format. Even to me, I sounded rather dull.

  An Estonian woman (Saudi Arabia, embassy’s political section, eight months) was leading the group discussion on today’s book, The Zookeeper’s Wife, about the family who had looked after Warsaw’s zoo during the war. Their lives had revolved around the animals, and they tended their charges with warmth, understanding and love. They even named their son after a favorite animal – Ryszard, from ryś, the name for a lynx. When the war broke out, their home and lives gradually emptied of animals and filled instead with a growing menagerie of Jewish families, seeking protection from Nazi occupiers. The book charted the family’s efforts to get its non-human and human charges alike to other countries for safekeeping.

  I’d thought in the most superficial terms about the moral questions posed by war. How far would I have gone to save the lives of others? What – who – might I have sacrificed? But I’d never thought about the practical ones. When war breaks out, what do you do with the animals in the zoo? On a grey and drizzly afternoon, seven expat women balanced cake on their knees inside a home straight out of a magazine spread, and discussed such questions. While people who knew the answers walked around outside.

  As the afternoon wore on, practical war-time questions morphed into current-day ones – the latest restaurant openings and closures, the best foreign lan
guage satellite television packages, whether anyone had found lentils (specialty shop in Zlote Tarasy), baking powder (it’s the small yellow packet, usually with the flours), or tinned soup (no). Normally I would have been more interested in the literature. But my days were still consumed with prosaic issues, and these women had important intelligence.

  Did anyone have other options for learning Polish – other than my one-on-one sessions with Agnieszka the exacting – I asked.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ snorted the Dutch ambassador’s wife. ‘Everyone speaks English.’ Since I inflicted my terrible Polish on everyone I met, I didn’t know if this was true or not, although I had my doubts.

  ‘I don’t think my cleaner does.’

  ‘Oh yes, they all do. They’re all spies,’ London said.

  We had inherited our sixty-something-year-old cleaner from our predecessor. She came three times a week, paid for by the embassy. She was small and terrifying and, I suspect, did not think much of my housekeeping abilities. But I doubted she was a spy. I’d asked Tom to find out from the embassy if we could swap her for the language classes, which we were paying for ourselves. He reported back that that’s not how it worked. Apparently diplomatic wives needed clean houses more than they needed to speak the language of the country they lived in.

  ‘It must be nice to be so close to home. You must get a lot of visitors.’ I tried another tack with London.

  ‘What would I do with visitors here?’ Lemon tart crumbs fell from her mouth.

  I turned to the American with the husband in oil and gas and asked her if she’d travelled much in Poland.

  ‘Yes, Krakow and Gdansk were both lovely,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, we’ve been to both, they were great,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve already done Poland, and you’ve only been here four months! It might be a long three years!’ That was the New Zealand ambassador’s wife, Dee. I moved her down the list of people to get to know.

  I saw this posting as a three-year adventure, an opportunity to experience a part of the world I’d seen little of. It had never occurred to me that anyone would view it any other way. Of course, if it was the third or fifth or tenth time you’d had the opportunity, it might start to look different.

  ‘Does anyone know where you can get Kalamata olives?’ Holland asked. Estonia had the name of a shop, and directions to get there. She was on the ball!

  It wasn’t that late, but daylight savings had ended last month, ripping a precious hour of light out of the afternoon, and it was now dark by four rather than five in the afternoon. I took the opportunity to make my excuses, and Anthea walked me to the door.

  ‘OK, I’m going to race for the bus now,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve only been here a few months and you’re already catching buses?’

  I laughed and asked her how long it had taken her.

  ‘Oh, I’ve never caught a bus.’ She snuck a glance at the remaining women in her lounge room. ‘I’d be interested in seeing a bit more of Poland.’

  ‘OK, let’s go somewhere soon!’ I headed out into the watery remains of the day, hurrying to make it home in time to get dinner on.

  ***

  You could get tickets from Warsaw to London for less than fifty dollars. Or rather, I could get tickets to London for less than fifty dollars! I’d spent five months in my new life now, and it was time for a visit to my old one. I flew to England to visit Gabby, one of my best friends from school who now lived there.

  All of a sudden, I could speak again! I could ask where loos were, where I could grab a cuppa, what the best tube transfer route would be and what kind of ticket I would need. ‘No thanks, just having a browse,’ I could say to an enquiring sales assistant, without having to think about whether I needed oglądać or poglądać for the imperfective aspect of ‘to browse’ (unless I needed the perfective? Was it a one-off action or a process of activity?) and then calculate the present, first-person singular form. By which time, the sales assistant had long gone. Compared to Australia, England was a foreign country. Compared to Poland, I was home.

  I stood in the queue to buy my tube ticket. No one here thought it would be OK to mark their place, go and do something else, and then cut back in. Because in the UK, as in Australia, people understood that queuing was a process, not something you did on the side while going about other business. I didn’t have to run through what I was going to have to say, or practise the numbers to make sure I didn’t get a ticket for the ninth, not the tenth. Something deep inside me relaxed. And it wasn’t until it had that I realised I had been so tense.

  ‘A’right.’ I enjoyed the chance to show off my British vernacular to the man behind the ticket counter when I got to the head of the queue.

  He grunted. I took a second look at him. At his close-cropped blond hair, his flat forehead, his heavy-set shoulders. At his name badge: Adam. Could be …

  ‘Z Polski?’ I asked. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘I live in Warsaw.’ I added.

  ‘Yes, I’m from Poland. I’m going home next week,’ Adam said. Perhaps he had decided living in Warsaw was not the kind of thing anyone would lie about.

  ‘Yeah?’ I requested what I wanted, and was about to ask him how long he’d been here, and how he liked living in the UK.

  ‘Yeah. I hate this fucking country.’

  ‘Dziękuję,’ I said and took my ticket.

  Adam may have been the first Pole I saw in the UK, but he wasn’t the last. I’d heard Polish was the second most commonly spoken language in the UK now. As I made my way from the airport to the tube the evidence was everywhere – the currency exchange ads, flyers for the airport bus service and public announcements were all in English, French, German as they had been when I’d backpacked here years ago, and now Polish. I started playing a game, spotting when I thought someone was Polish and then trying to listen for the giveaway words. I wasn’t wrong once. Poles stood out here, although I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  My game only came to an end when Gabby met me at her tube station and threw her arms around me. I kissed her cheeks twice – and her nose once.

  ‘Sorry, it’s three times in Poland,’ I laughed, and we set off towards her house, the Thames to our right and red double-decker buses passing us by on the left hand side of the road – causing me to be thankful for the ‘look left’ markings at each crossing. We passed a Polski sklep on one corner, its windows offering staples like the daily Wyborcza broadsheet, smoked kiełbasa sausage, and frozen pierogi. On the other side of the road was a Walkabout pub; its Australian flag, the green and gold of our national colours, and ads for Australian beers no one drank at home incongruent with the grey London streetscape. We stopped to pick up some wine from the Barossa Valley, saying ‘See ya!’ to the backpacker from Brisbane working the till as we left. Get tins of soup before I go back to Poland, I noted to myself, passing a Tesco.

  The words tumbled out of both of us the whole way back to her apartment, a one-bedroom in an old row house.

  ‘So how’s Poland?’ she asked. We’d cracked one of the bottles and I’d arranged myself sideways on her sofa, my bare feet dangling over the armrest.

  I gave her a flavour of our experiences so far – the beautiful old town centres, the churches, some of the people I’d met.

  ‘You and Tom must be loving it. You guys love an adventure.’

  Except perhaps there was such a thing as too much adventure. ‘You know, once you’re an adult, let’s face it, eighty percent of your life is pretty boring,’ I said. ‘Washing dishes, making dinner, and watching terrible if somewhat addictive reality TV. And maybe twenty percent is fun and exciting. Going out with friends, having a nice meal, going on holiday down the coast. And maybe one percent is something really new. Starting a new job, going overseas. Except now it seems like that one percent is the eighty percent. Everything’s new and different and exciting. All the time.’

  ‘Sounds just like when I moved to England.’

  ‘England
is just a colder and wetter Australia. Poland is … different.’

  She opened the second bottle, and I continued. ‘I guess I just didn’t realise how powerless being in a different country would make me feel sometimes,’ I said. ‘I’m used to being a functional human being. And now I don’t even know how to buy a pumpkin.’

  ‘A pumpkin?’

  ‘The pumpkin is symbolic. Of … everything I used to know how to do. How to pay bills. How to make a doctor’s appointment. How to use a bankomat.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An ATM. Maybe I should look for a job? What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’d be crazy to work when you have your one chance not to.’

  ‘I know, but you remember all those quizzes we did when we were kids, about what we were going to do when we grew up? I never chose the wife option, did I?’

  ‘You could look at it as choosing the adventure option, you know.’

  ‘I’m still adjusting to life as a diplomat’s wife, I guess. It’s more of an adjustment than I expected.’

  ‘Look, bottom line, you are a capable, competent and fun person, you’re just having three years off, and right now you’re feeling a bit unsettled, but once you settle in, you’ll be fine and have a great time, and if you need a dose of home you can always just come and crash here. No biggie.’

  Yeah, no biggie.

  There was a knock at her door. ‘Hey ho,’ someone called out. Whoever it was made his way to the fridge, grabbed a beer and straddled a backwards-facing seat in the kitchen. ‘I’m Mark.’ He waved his beer at me over the back of the chair. The wide, long vowel gave him away as another Antipodean. He wrenched the top off the beer and took a swig.

  ‘Mark lives across the hall,’ Gabby said, jerking her thumb in the general direction. ‘Jay lives in Poland. She was just saying how England’s just like Australia.’

  ‘Nah, not at all. British people never just drop round to your place. And help themselves to your beer,’ he said.

  ‘That’s true.’ She shot him a look. ‘But I didn’t get that for ages,’ Gabby said. ‘I’d meet people and they’d say, “Oh, you must drop round for a cup of tea sometime”. And so if I was in the neighbourhood, I’d knock on the door and say, “You said to drop round for a cuppa. Is now a good time?” and after a while, I realised it was never a good time, because they hadn’t really meant it.’