by Jay Martin
‘I’m only Anglo-Saxon, you know!’ I wanted to say. To me, Europeans were one big ethnic family. But in Poland, there were more complexities. First, there were Slavs – from słowo, meaning ‘word’: people who spoke one of the Slavic languages, like Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, and who could understand each other to a greater or lesser extent due to the common elements.
Then there were non-Slavs. In that group were Germans. The word for German meant ‘mute’ in Slavic. The early Slavs had come across the early Germanic tribes on the plains and, not sharing a language, decided they were a primitive people who hadn’t even invented talking yet.
Another was the Anglo-Saxons. As Svetlana had intimated and I’d since confirmed, that was me. Although I still wasn’t sure what it really meant. People who understood queueing, perhaps? Whatever else it may have been about, it meant no one expected me to speak Polish. ‘You speak good Polish,’ Polish people had said to me on more than one occasion. Before adding, ‘for an Anglo-Saxon.’ As though only so much could be expected of us.
I wished Jutta or Svetlana had been here now. Mainly to help deflect Agnieszka’s attention, but also they might have been able to help me out. Russians had the same advantage in Polish that a French person had in Spanish or Italian, so Svetlana probably would have followed the story. And Jutta might have known more about the history, and possibly could have filled in the bits I was missing over a coffee after class. Although I could tell Jutta got credit from Agnieszka for her grandparents’ suffering during the war, and Svetlana for her parents’ survival through communism. If I had been an Anglo-Saxon of the British variety, I might have got kudos for something. But my forebears had escaped all of that, fleeing to the sunny climes of the colonies. No one in my family had suffered enough. Not for Agnieszka, anyway.
‘You don’t even have corruption in Australia,’ Agnieszka had said one day.
‘Have!’ I’d said.
‘What kind of corruption do you have?’
I racked my brains to think of an example. ‘This man, he pay government and build too high building.’ I threw my conclusive proof of corruption in Australia on the table.
Agnieszka did not think much of our efforts to be corrupt. I could tell. ‘Everything in Poland is corrupt. Even the little things – getting a driving licence, graduating from university. Did you have to pay a bribe to get your driver’s licence? Or bribe your university lecturers to graduate? No, of course you didn’t.’
I was affronted. Even though I knew it made no sense to be affronted to be told you lived in a country where you didn’t have to bribe the teachers to get a degree.
It wasn’t just Agnieszka, though, who seemed to think Australia was some kind of utopia. I’d been in a taxi a few days earlier, whizzing through the streets. The roads were cracked, the buildings tired, everything grey. Not all of Warsaw looked like Old Town, but parts of the rest of the central city could have been – if not beautiful, then at least interesting; the parts where Soviet-realist facades and wide boulevards reigned supreme, for example. Yet giant advertising billboards and banners hung over them, making them garish, ugly. And unlike our arrival in July, now it was March, and Warsaw was in the grip of something that was called early spring – przedwiośnie. For me, the word meant the scent of flowers floating on a warm breeze. In Warsaw, it just meant more winter.
‘I’m from Australia,’ I told the taxi driver, just to make conversation. Not that he had asked.
‘There are bushfires there now, aren’t there?’ he’d replied. Fires were indeed raging out of control in parts of Australia at the time. Bushfires and shark attacks were the only Australian news stories that made it to Poland. ‘It must be great in Australia. Just like a paradise,’ he continued. Had it always been so frustrating to not be able to string the right words together to ask a taxi driver why he thought a country full of predatory animals and natural disasters was such a great place to live?
I missed having old friends to chat to – the kind you could eat a frozen quiche off your knees with. Not the kind you had to clean up the house and bake for. I’d met some kind, funny people here. But I missed things being easy. Like they had been at Gabby’s, where nothing needed words or explaining. I hadn’t understood how much effort it would take to meet new people. Always having to be on your best behaviour, endless small talk trying to find common ground. Against a backdrop of dark days and miserable faces and never-ending references to war and – was I imagining it? – a slight disdain among Poles that you came from a place that didn’t have corruption, didn’t have bribery, had never been invaded, and life was just much easier.
‘What, exactly, didn’t you understand?’ Agnieszka’s exasperation snapped me back to my present problem.
Where to start.
This language is really hard! I’m doing my best but I don’t know much about German history or World War Two or what an Abwehr is, although I do know some other stuff and in another country people sometimes think I’m actually quite intelligent. And not even a year ago I had an important, well-paid job and now I don’t even know how to do the shopping. And I didn’t realise how stupid that would make me feel. And I didn’t understand how it would be to feel so stupid all the time.
That’s what I wanted to say. But constrained by vocabulary, grammar, confidence, and the exhaustion at having to try so hard at everything, every day, I couldn’t. ‘Nie wiem,’ I mumbled. I don’t know. Making me feel even more stupid.
I sent her an email when I got home that night.
Dear Agnieszka. I going to take break from Polish classes for little while, thank your efforts very much will see you soon, when I come back class again after small break.
It was a polite lie, intended to protect everyone’s feelings.
There had to be a better way to learn Polish.
***
Freed of the responsibility of Polish classes, I no longer had anything I needed to reorganise to go along with Tom when he was invited to the Centre for Australian Studies at Torun’s Nicolaus Copernicus University. Since they had gone to the trouble of having one, we figured it was the least we could do to accept their invitation to visit.
We caught an empty train westward on a cold and rainy day in March, passing the same kind of flat fields as we had on the way to Gdansk, now covered in icy snow. The occasional deer leaped over them, as if for effect. I wished there was a brightness setting on the daylight in Poland. I wouldn’t mind turning it up a notch to see them better.
The embassy had bought Tom a first-class ticket, but we’d paid for mine and just bought second, so we sat together in the lower class. On checking our tickets, the conductor explained to Tom that he could sit in the higher class. I explained that we understood, but he had chosen to sit in second with me. The conductor tried explaining it again. Perhaps he thought I hadn’t understood.
‘Sir, we are Australian!’ I said, using the formal form of you, used with adults you don’t know.
The conductor left, satisfied with that explanation.
Tom was supposed to be learning Polish too. He seemed to have delegated this to me. Along with translating sticky tape and understanding pumpkins.
We were met at the station by Witek, who picked us up in his own small Audi and drove us to the hotel in the centre of town, talking all the way in the curious fashion of someone who had studied English from long-superseded texts.
‘Is that correct?’ he would ask from time to time. ‘Sometimes I commit certain, shall we say, cultural and linguistic gaffes.’ He gave a self-conscious chuckle. I stifled a guffaw.
He dropped us at a red brick hotel near the rynek, and said he would pick us up in half an hour. ‘Perhaps you’d care for a small drink before the talk.’ Tom agreed as though he meant it although, as soon as Witek left, he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, and I went down to reception to fetch some towels for our room.
‘We don’t have any towels! What do you think we are, some kind of super lux hotel?’ The lady behind the
hotel reception threw her plump, pink hands in the air.
I looked around the foyer. Green paint, velvet wallpaper. A tinny TV blared out a Polish soap opera. Even the plastic plants looked dead. No. I had not thought we were in a super lux hotel.
I went back to the room empty-handed. I might have gone for a walk, but a freezing snow/rain had set in. In Polish, there were two terms for this weather: either snow with rain, or rain with snow. The language had degrees of sleet. It needed them at this time of year. So instead I watched the empty streets through the window, and listened to Tom’s gentle snoring. I roused him a few minutes before Witek was due back and we met him in the lobby.
From the way Witek spoke and dressed, I’d expected we might end up taking tea in a rose garden, or perhaps a hunting lodge. Instead, we went to the local shopping centre, a glass, concrete and piped muzak affair, with a view out over Torun’s rynek. A statue of the city’s most famous son, Copernicus, stood in the centre.
‘It’s my shout,’ Witek said. ‘Can I say that?’ he asked me.
I nodded.
‘Ah, excellent. I like to experiment with levels of formality, you know.’ I looked at Copernicus, peering at a globe in his hand, trying to understand the world. Some days I knew how he felt.
I ordered a plate of pierogi ruskie – Russian pierogi. Despite their name, the little doughy dumplings were as Polish as it got; the Russian referred to the type of filling, a mix of cottage cheese and onion.
‘The Russian pierogi, meat is not inside it, do they?’ I checked with the waitress.
The waitress shook her head. ‘Nie ma.’
My pierogi came doused in pork crackling. I sighed and picked out the more obvious chunks.
‘Did you study English at school, Witek?’ I asked him.
‘Not at all, I went to a music high school and studied bassoon.’ Witek explained that in university and even high school under communism, students already knew what job they would be assigned to, and studied to prepare themelves for that vocation. ‘So I was going to join the orchestra, and so I did music. All day, every day. We had to practise, perform, play. But in the end, I was encouraged to give it up by my teachers. I wasn’t the best at it.’
‘It wasn’t what you were best at, I think you mean,’ I said. I didn’t like to correct people’s English, but Witek seemed keen to learn.
‘ “No,” my teachers said to me, “you aren’t the best at this, there is no point in you continuing.” So I was allowed to move to the teaching program and study history instead.’
I wasn’t sure I would have survived Polish school.
‘But when I was growing up, my father had a trove of magazines in the attic.’ He paused. ‘Trove? Can I say that here?’ I had no idea what a trove was, but I nodded in the interest of keeping the story going. ‘A trove of magazines – published by the National Geographic Society. And among them was an English dictionary. I was fascinated by these faraway places, described using familiar letters in unfamiliar patterns. I can still remember now, hiding amongst the dusty tomes, translating articles word by word, finding out about this world. I didn’t know exactly why, but I knew I had to never tell anyone about those magazines. You see, at that time, they could have been used as evidence of something – that we wanted to leave Poland perhaps. It seems crazy now, but they weren’t normal times. So the English language, for me, has always had not just exotic connotations, but a forbidden element.’ I imagined young Witek, hidden away in an attic, poring over his National Geographics for clues about the outside world.
The waitress came to take our plates. I decided to educate Poland about vegetarianism. ‘You say it no have meat in pierogi. But have small meat.’ I pointed at the slimy pieces on the side of the plate.
‘Yes. I thought when you asked that, you meant you wanted to add some,’ she said. And with that, I gave up any further thought of proselytising vegetarianism in Poland.
In the few blocks from the café to the town’s main seat of learning, we saw barely a soul. I started to wonder if this whole town was actually a film set of an old German village rather than a place people lived. Arriving at the campus, Witek asked if we’d like to see the Australian Studies library, and we climbed a flight of stairs to a back room, one wall of which was taken up with faded hardbacks. I glanced across the rows. It was like a time capsule of Australian literature, ending around 1970. Like his National Geographics.
A bell rang, students swapped lecture halls through massive double wooden doors, and Witek showed us to our room, where a Polish expert on Australian Studies was lecturing. The students were covering the Stolen Generation, the history of former government policies that saw officials take Indigenous children from their families by force, as part of a policy to eliminate the Indigenous population.
At the end of the lecture Tom stood to give a talk I’d written for him on some key points around Indigenous policy and issues, focussing on recent government programs such as targeted education and employment strategies to try to redress some of these wrongs. Witek asked if I would like to say anything. I remembered my impoverished explanation to Agnieszka in my first Polish lesson, when she’d asked me about Indigenous people in Australia. I felt some responsibility to do a better job of it now I could do it in English.
‘It’s interesting that you are studying these policies. Perhaps you think that these are things that all Australians learned in school. But we didn’t. I also only learned about these things when I went to university, even though these policies were still in force into the 1970s.’ The image of the statue of Copernicus, standing in his sleet-drenched square, came to me. ‘Perhaps it’s like when Copernicus realised that the earth went round the sun and not the other way around. We can look at these things now – that happened even in my lifetime – and it’s obvious how wrong our thinking was. But it’s not so easy when you are the first person to think that way.’
We finished talking. A dozen hands went up around the room. Witek chose one student.
‘What is Aboriginal people’s religion?’ asked an earnest young man.
‘Aboriginal people don’t really have a single religion. Many Aboriginal people were raised by missionaries, so they are Christians – Catholics and Protestants,’ Tom said.
Witek coughed and interrupted. ‘Aboriginal people are very spiritual people. They sing their traditional Dreamtime songs around the fire while they shape and carve their boomerangs.’ And on it went. In Torun’s Australian studies course, Australian history finished sometime in the last century. Possibly the one before that.
Witek wrapped the class up and invited us back to his office before we left. ‘I’m terribly sorry about that,’ he said, his eyes downcast. ‘Please accept my most humble apologies about the content of the lecture. Of course we understand that it’s all fine now.’
If you thought Indigenous people were all huddling by fires carving boomerangs then I suppose you could also think Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian relationships could be described as ‘fine’. But I couldn’t blame him. If you’d gotten your insights into the world outside Poland from 1960s National Geographics, perhaps you were doomed to have outdated views of the world.
‘Witek,’ I said, ‘how is it, when your knowledge of other places is so limited, and finally the walls come down and you find out what has been on the other side all along?’
‘Limited?’ Witek said. I was on the verge of trying ‘circumscribed’ when he continued. ‘But was our knowledge limited? All of us had family abroad – the UK, the US, Germany. People think that we were uninformed about the outside world, in communist countries. It is not we who were uninformed. We knew what the world outside was like. It was the people in the capitalist countries who were uninformed about us. The capitalist media peddled lies that people believed. The communist media peddled its own lies, of course. But we knew better than to believe them.’
I saw the young Witek again. Dedicating himself to learning a foreign language in a dusty attic, just o
ut of intellectual curiosity. Perhaps it was not so much that Wikek was ignorant of anything published in Australia since 1970, as that by Polish standards, there hadn’t been anything since then of note.
Tom and I returned to the hotel with the dead plastic plants and tinny television. My heart sank when I opened the door to our room and remembered that I hadn’t done anything about the towels. Except that two clean ones had been left on our bed. Someone – presumably the grumpy matron – had given us some of her own. A thought came to me in Witek’s voice: what a fine deed of benevolence.
***
That Friday night we were tucked away in Shannon and Paul’s apartment, full of Indian food and wine. Friday night had become our night to share takeaway, a few bottles of wino, and stories about the week’s ambassadorial, ministerial and Polish trials. It was almost reaching the giddy heights of zero some days now, but the short lift ride and quick sprint across the garden had been doable even in the worst of the weather. How convenient that our assigned apartment had come with such like-minded assigned neighbours.
Shannon and I were arranged on her sofa, me with my feet pulled up under me. You left your shoes outside people’s apartments here in winter, along with the gritty liquid they picked up off the snow-covered streets.
‘How was Torun?’ Shannon asked. I told her a little about it, as well as Wroclaw, which I’d diverted to on the way back instead of coming straight home with Tom. It wasn’t really on the way back, it was actually in the other direction, but I had time, so why not? Although the biting rain/snow hadn’t let up the whole time. I decided to wait until the weather picked up to see any more of Poland.
‘And Polish classes?’
‘Mmm. Polish classes and I are “taking a break”, ’ I said. ‘I think you were right. I could do with less stress in my life. Although I went to the post office today.’ I told Shannon the story, how I’d walked into the empty post office, gone up to the counter, and asked about sending a parcel to Australia. The lady had interrupted me, saying ‘You don’t have a number.’ I looked around at the empty post office and said, ‘No one else here’. She hadn’t even responded. ‘Me want just ask how long for take parcel to go Australia,’ I’d said. She hadn’t responded. I took it there was a ‘no number, no service’ policy and she was sticking to it. I’d gone to get a number – two seconds later, the number flashed up on the screen, I went back to the counter, and gave her the number. ‘So what do you want?’ she asked me, to which I repeated my question. She shrugged. ‘How should I know?’ she replied.
