Vodka and Apple Juice

by Jay Martin

  ‘You wanted twenty grams of cheese? This metric stuff you people have is confusing, but unless my math is off, isn’t that not very much?’ Alex said.

  ‘I actually wanted two hundred grams, but I kept asking for two decagrams – like we’d learned in class – and wondering why this bloody woman wouldn’t give me a reasonable amount of cheese.’ The term ‘decagram’ was commonly used for ten grams. ‘So I guess my math was a little off, too.’

  ‘Australian wine with kangaroos?’ Tom handed a glass to Alex. Tom had taken the chicken and vegetables out of the oven and put them on the table while I’d been chatting to our friendly new arms dealer.

  ‘So what else do you do with yourself, then – when you’re not trying to buy a slice of cheese or learn Polish?’ Alex asked, after he’d tried his kangaroo wine.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘You went to Lublin and London, and you were working at Poznan,’ Tom said.

  ‘Yes, and I joined a Polish literature discussion group,’ I said, omitting the International Women’s Group connection, as we all took seats on the couch. He asked what we were reading.

  ‘The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.’

  ‘Schulz? That doesn’t sound very Polish,’ Tom said.

  ‘That’s an interesting point you raise,’ I said, giving him a summary of our book-club conversation about Schulz. How he was Jewish, wrote in Polish, knew German, but had no knowledge of Hebrew or Yiddish. His hometown, near modern-day Lviv, had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, West Ukrainian People’s Republic, Poland, Soviet Ukraine and Nazi Germany in his lifetime. Yet he considered himself Polish. The coming and goings of empires and borders around him didn’t change that.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind doing some research into my own family history, you know,’ I said. It was mostly English and a bit of German, as far as I knew. Since we were in the area and I had time, why not? Alex took my email address and said he’d send me through some websites.

  The doorbell rang again and I jumped up to let Shannon and Paul in. They’d brought some starters, another bottle of champagne and some serving implements – we were short so I’d asked if she could bring some.

  ‘Thank you!’ I said. Another three kisses, genuine this time.

  William and Victoria were spending Christmas back in the UK, so Shannon and Paul were the only other guests coming.

  ‘Sorry we’re late,’ Paul said, removing his layers and depositing them in the cupboard. ‘We were driving back from town and got distracted by all the pretty lights along Krakowski … Krakowskie Psze …’ Krakowskie Przedmiescie. The Warsaw street name that got us all.

  ‘I know the one you mean,’ I said. The main tourist street was aglow, while the Old Town we’d enjoyed decent coffee in on that first day now had a new attraction: a giant Christmas tree that flashed deep green, red, blue and yellow. Polish people may not have bothered decorating their homes, but they went to town on their city.

  ‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they? Champagne anyone?’ I poured Paul’s bottle into glasses.

  ‘Sounds nice,’ said Tom.

  ‘Hang on, what sounds nice. More champagne, or the lights?’

  ‘Both. Although it was the lights I was referring to.’

  ‘You haven’t seen them yet?’

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  They’d been up for a week and he walked right past them on the way home from work. He must have been very busy.

  I went back to the kitchen for the last dish – dessert. I had been going to make sticky date pudding, but no book-club woman had located golden syrup in Poland. Not even Estonia had found it. So I’d decided to make semolina pudding instead, although I’d ended up not with kaszka manna, which is semolina, but kaszka – which according to the dictionary was ‘groats’. I didn’t know what that was – in Polish or English. Something that made pudding, I hoped. If not, there was ice cream. I had also thought about making fruit cake. Not that I really liked it, but it was tradition. I’d hit the first hurdle straight away: in Poland, there was only one kind of dried grape. I looked up sultanas in my dictionary. Rodzynki, it said. And then I looked up currants. Rodzynki. The same for raisins. It didn’t matter that I had no idea what the difference between these things were. They were, somehow, different. Except in Poland, where a dried grape was a dried grape. I might have persevered – except that you couldn’t get maraschino cherries, or brown sugar either. At that point it was just going to be sultanas and brandy. I gave up.

  I added whatever I’d made to our table, now a three-course mix of Australian, Canadian, American and some adopted Polish traditions.

  ‘Hey, I like your Facebook posts, you know,’ Shannon said. ‘The one about Poznan’s Christmas market really made me want to go there. And the one about how to spot Poles in London was funny.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’ I’d always liked writing, but any creativity and spontaneity I’d once had felt buried under a decade of sentences about ‘service system design reform’ and ‘holistic client-centred social assistance mechanisms’ and other such words that maybe had once meant something but had long since had any life sucked out of them.

  ‘You should try writing something for travel magazines or tourism publications or something.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ said Tom.

  ‘Hey look!’ Paul pointed out the window. We turned our heads to see the chilly winds buffeting a few white flakes against a darkening sky. I raced out onto our tiny balcony, goosebumps rising on my bare arms.

  ‘Tom!’ I called, but he was already there behind me. He put his arms around me and we gazed at the miracle unfolding. The laughter of two Canadians and an American at our first sight of snow followed us out. I held my hands out to catch the flakes, and watched them melt on my fingers.

  After a minute, Tom broke into my reverie. ‘Come on, we need to feed our guests.’

  ‘And we’ll probably get our fill of snow over the next few years, won’t we?’

  We sat in our warm, dry apartment, with good company, glancing at the falling snow from time to time, and I ate from the groaning table until I could no longer breathe. What better cause for celebration could there be than the fact that, from this winter solstice on, if it wasn’t going to get warmer just yet, at least it was going to get lighter?

  ‘Hey, let’s go and see the Christmas lights tomorrow,’ I said to Tom. ‘They’re really special.’

  It had been a pretty crazy start to the Christmas season, but Poznan was now behind us. I’m sure Gabby’s prediction would prove to be right, and things would settle down now. No biggie.

  ***

  The new year arrived, bringing with it an impending visit from the Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon – and the long hours and stress that, I was learning, a ministerial visit meant for Tom.

  So I tried to remain collected when Tom told me his parents were coming to visit us, and not say what I was thinking. Which was: why on earth would anyone come to Poland in February? When it was dark most of the time, there was nothing to see or do and, on top of everything else (literally and figuratively), there was now two metres of snow.

  Actually, I liked snow. I loved how it had transformed the green spaces all around our complex into a winter fun park after falling thickly all night. How kids would toboggan down hills I’d never even noticed before. How dogs would bound through the drifts like Charlie had jumped through ocean waves at home (although dogs at home didn’t leave yellow holes in the sea). I had learned snow doesn’t make any noise when it falls, even though it looks like it should, and you didn’t need an umbrella because it doesn’t make you wet, even though you’d think it would, and I liked kicking up piles of the white, fluffy stuff with my feet as I walked, like I might kick up hot sand along a beach. Shannon had explained to me how to wear my jeans tucked into high boots – to avoid them getting dirty from walking through dog pee-infused fluffiness. Shannon and Paul found our fascination with snow … well … fascinating.

  But the P
olish word for February, luty, is derived from the old Slavic word for ‘bleak’ – without hope. Even the ancient Slavs had found this place trying at this time of the year. Neither Tom nor I had seen the sun in months – and that was probably not helping either of our moods. And now for the next three weeks I was about to be responsible for the only in-laws I planned on having, and in the minimal hours of gloom that passed for daytime at this time of the year I was going to have to navigate icy paths with them and keep them from losing extremities to frostbite.

  ‘They’re not hard work. You’ll find something to do with them.’ Was that a suggestion, or an order?

  He was right on both counts, but my schedule seemed so busy. Trying to learn Polish, trying to meet new friends, looking after everything around the house. And now, two sixty-somethings, who I was supposed to do … what with?

  Go to Krakow for the second time, I decided. Actually it was NATO who decided. Tom was going there anyway with Fitzgibbon, who was meeting other like-minded ministers in the town. Tom’s parents and I probably wouldn’t see much of Tom, but at least we’d all be nearby.

  My charges and I ticked off some of the tourist sights that Piotr, Hannah and their friends had recommended to us last time we’d been here, but their hospitality had prevented us from seeing. We took a tour of the Wawel Castle interior that filled in several hours, and sat and reflected in Saint Mary’s Basilica. Regular stops along the way for hot chocolate as thick as mousse, salty warm goat cheese and grzane wino, warm wine infused with cloves and other spices, all offered welcome respites from the weather outside. I texted a photo to Tom of his parents in the Krakow rynek, impressive even in bleakest February.

  In return, Tom texted me a photo of a defibrillator. Joel Fitzgibbon, it turned out, had required an emergency trip to the hospital after suffering a suspected heart attack. Doctors eventually decided the minister hadn’t had a heart attack, but was suffering from a virus picked up at his earlier stop in Ethiopia. Although Tom nearly needed the defibrillator himself from the stress of the emergency hospital run.

  The minister managed to recover enough to return to the meeting, deliver the address he’d come for, and get on the plane home again. I managed to shuffle my in-laws onto a tourist bus bound for the mountain retreat of Zakopane, a few hours south of Krakow. And Tom, having narrowly escaped a dead defence minister marring his first diplomatic performance assessment, joined us a day later.

  ‘Do we actually ever have to leave?’ he said, hugging me, when he arrived at our pine chalet, with its snow-laden fir trees peeking through every lace-trimmed window. Mental note: send out a thank you to Holland from book club, who’d recommended the place.

  ‘Now is there wine – or can we just go straight to vodka?’ Tom said. I could see the ministerial visit in his slumped shoulders.

  By lunchtime the next day, the four of us were surveying the town from a café on top of one of the local ski slopes. The gentle runs were perfect for two older in-laws and another two people who hadn’t skied in a while and didn’t mind taking it easy. With the added advantage that each run cost us only a few zloty.

  The view over the craggy slopes of the Tatra mountains stretched in every direction, covered in snowy forests and dotted with traditional pine huts just like our own, smoke curling from their chimneys. There wasn’t a breath of wind and we sat outside in our ski gear, trying to wolf down Polish bigos pork stew, kiełbasa in a bun, and (for me) chips before the sub-zero temperatures sucked the comforting heat out of them. It was hard to imagine how it could be more perfect. Until the tinkle of sleigh bells heralded a pony pulling up next to us on the snowy track. Till now, sleighs with jingling bells had been only lines in a song to me. Seeing it in real life for the first time, if a song about what fun it was to ride in a one-horse open sleigh hadn’t already been written, I might have done so there and then.

  A little later on, we hailed a taxi for the base of Kasprowy Wierch, one of the range’s higher peaks, accessible by cable car. Our driver wasn’t at all convinced about this plan. ‘There’ll be nothing to see up there,’ he said a number of times during the five-minute ride, pointing at the thick, white blanket hovering just above us. I explained that my parents-in-law were visiting from Australia, so this was our only chance to see it.

  ‘Do you like jump skiing?’ he asked.

  Jump skiing. Ski jumping? I checked I’d understood what we were talking about, swooshing my hand down an imaginary mountain, and turning it up at the end to fly through the air.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ He swooshed his own hand down his own imaginary run. ‘Ski jumping,’ I repeated the Polish. There was a competition in town that night, he said, suggesting I take them. He gave me a few details; where to get tickets, what time it started, what local bus would take us there.

  ‘He says there’s a ski jumping competition on tonight, and that we should go.’ I translated for the benefit of the others. ‘He says it’s better than it looks on TV,’ I added for no one’s benefit, as none of us knew what ski jumping looked like, in real life or on TV.

  At the top, it was misty, but we were above the clouds; they moved up and down below us, like waves on an ocean beach, hiding and revealing in turn some of the other mountain peaks around us. Icicles blown almost horizontal by fierce mountain winds were glued to every surface: the balustrades preventing us from falling down the mountain, signs warning skiers to slow down, a wooden outdoor café.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, dragging Tom off a hundred metres across the top of the ridge. We trudged through snowdrifts, avoiding the occasional skier who appeared out of the mist before swooshing off down the piste. Unlike the slopes we’d been on the day before, these slopes were for the advanced only – in the best of conditions. And these were far from the best of conditions. We hugged our ski jackets tight around us to try and keep the mountain winds out. They’d frozen everything in their path; if we stayed out here too long, they might do the same to us.

  The ridge wasn’t very wide or long, and it dropped off the end into a cloudy oblivion a couple of hundred metres from the safety and comfort of the cable car station, where I suspected Tom’s parents had taken sanctuary with a cup of tea and slice of apple szarlotka. Either that or they’d fallen off the cliff.

  ‘I can’t find it!’ I called to Tom. The mountain wind was doing its best to whip my words away before they could get to his ears.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Slovakia!’ Kasprowy Wierch was on top of the ridge that marked the border between the two countries.

  He stopped and looked at me for a moment. ‘It must be around here somewhere.’ He ran off the path, along one side. I followed him, laughing.

  We ran in circles, hefting ourselves through snow drifts, racing back and forward as fast as we could in the deep piles of limp snow, the freezing mountain air heaving in and out of our lungs, wiping fluffy flakes from our faces and eyes and feeling them getting into our boots, looking for Slovakia, and trying not to fall off the world.

  PRZEDWIOSNIE – PRE-SPRING

  After a two-month-long hiatus brought on by Poznan, Christmas and Tom’s parents, it was time to go back to Polish class. No one else inclined to learn Polish had arrived in the meantime, so Agnieszka had me all to herself. And despite my new-found ability to locate tea towels, my first day back in her clutches my Polish seemed to have taken a step backward. A giant leap, actually.

  Agnieszka read me a long text, followed by a question from her about my understanding of what had happened, followed by multiple attempts by me to answer it, all of which ended in failure.

  ‘But why don’t you understand this?’ she finally said.

  I fiddled with my pencil and flicked through some notes while she waited for me to enlighten her as to why, some days, I didn’t understand Polish. As though the answer to that question was like knowing the square root of seventy-eight. Or what the Ten Commandments were. I might not know straight away, but if I had a think, it might come to me.

  When I’d f
irst started watching Polish TV, I could just get the odd word here and there. Over time the number of words I knew grew, and the number I didn’t grew fewer, and somewhere along the way I started generally following what was going on. From then on I’d had the TV and radio on constantly, trying to improve further and further. I imagined it was like having been deaf, and regaining your hearing. And my Polish had coped quite well with the real life demands put on it over the winter. But Polish was still two steps forward, one step back. And some days, like today, it simply fell off a snow-capped, icicle-clad cliff.

  I couldn’t follow the text she had just read me. It was something about the war (of course). It had the usual Polish words I didn’t know in it. But it had other things as well. Words like Wehrmacht and Abwehr. I didn’t know what these things were – what they meant. I wasn’t even sure what country we were in. I thought we were in Wroclaw, but it seemed to be in Germany, and I thought Wroclaw when it was in Germany was called Breslau. I thought the teller of the story worked for the Abwehr, and that that was something to do with the nazis. Did that mean he was German? Or could he have been Polish? Did the Poles under Germany have a separate government? Did they even stay Polish when Wroclaw became Breslau? Or did they turn German – and then turn back again? It was simpler in Australia. You moved there. For the first generation, you could be Polish-Australian, or Ethiopian-Australian, or whatever-hyphen-Australian. By the second generation you lost the hyphen and were just Australian.

  It was the same reading the newspaper, which I tried to do every day. But understanding the news wasn’t just about knowing the words for things. If you didn’t understand who the players were, the structures, the EU system, the history, and all the unwritten cultural background, you often didn’t know what the story was about – even if you could translate every word. I’d gone from someone who used to write these stories to someone who had trouble comprehending them.

  ‘Who is telling this story?’ Agnieszka had asked. In some ways, it wasn’t a hard question. But the list of things I would have needed to know in order to answer – but didn’t – was long.