by Jay Martin
I’d imagined I’d have things in common with the other expats I met here. We’d all be excited about living in Poland and keen to get out and see as much as we could. Maybe the only thing Anthea and I had in common was that we lived in Poland. Although perhaps we didn’t even have that. Her Poland and mine seemed to be quite different places.
Maybe that described Tom and me, too. I’d thought Poland was going to be something we were doing together. It was starting to feel like our Polands were, well, poles apart.
‘Anyway, I just try to support John, look after the house and keep myself busy in my own ways. He’s got so much to worry about already and he doesn’t need to hear me complaining about my life,’ Anthea said.
Maybe Anthea and I had more in common than I’d thought.
Manufaktura loomed into view. Friendly and welcoming. Designed to have the maximum possible positive effect on your psyche – and your propensity to spend. The central rynek that Lodz had lacked, supplied by a multinational firm. As exploitative of the masses as the industrial revolution in its own way. But when exploitation came in such a crinkly, vanilla-scented wrapper, you couldn’t help but want some. It lifted my spirits just seeing it.
‘Shall we go and spend some of our husband’s hard-earned then?’ I said.
I never saw a city that needed a shopping centre like this more than Lodz. I hoped Anthea’s husband was proud.
***
The glorious spring had arrived on the continent, and while Tom did Sweden and Denmark (the international days), I took off for a week to explore hillside Roman ruins near Bratislava, and outdoor baths in Budapest. Tom’s only request was that I be back in time for the next Australian cultural event that the Ambassador had delegated to us, an Australian artist who was visiting from Berlin.
I was, although the morning of the event I wondered if I was going to end up with sole delegated responsibility for the evening.
‘I just really don’t feel like this today,’ Tom had grumbled as we were having brunch at one of our favourite weekend spots.
‘You could say no,’ I said.
‘You don’t say no to an ambassador.’ Conversation closed. Diplomats had to mingle, I guess. I decided to invite Shannon and Paul along. We could all go out afterwards for dinner and the night wouldn’t be a complete write-off.
The event was to be held at a converted vodka factory in Praga. If Warsaw wasn’t yet a polished gem, Praga, its eastern bank, was still waiting to be dug out of the ground. Wire racks stuck out at right angles from the walls of its pre-war apartment buildings to catch falling bricks before they could hit passing pedestrians. Bits of plaster, masonry and tiles hung there in suspended animation. Sometimes the windows were boarded up; sometimes lights showed someone was living there anyway. The four of us pulled up in a taxi at the address we had.
‘What are kurwa people like you kurwa doing in a place like this?’ a man walking by with a pit bull said, liberally seasoning his short sentence with Polish expletives.
‘What was that?’ Tom asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Let’s find this place.’
Was this it? There were no signs or any other hint that anything was on. Three bald men with no necks glared in our direction. We made our way past the henchmen, emerging in a bricked-over exhibition space in a basement.
It was, and once inside we met our latest cultural responsibility: an Australian girl based in Berlin, who was over to set up a temporary exhibition. As much of a crowd as could fit in the small basement thronged around us. Tom went and introduced himself, while Shannon, Paul and I perused her art on the walls. It consisted of a series of sketches of random objects she had found while walking along a road in Melbourne: a five-cent piece. A crumpled Coke can. A piece of wire. Some white balls dangled from the ceiling. It wasn’t clear why. Apparently there was to be a musical accompaniment of some sort. I wondered if that would make the balls hanging from the ceiling make sense.
‘So what is this about?’ Shannon asked.
‘Spending the embassy’s cultural promotion budget, I think,’ I said.
Tom called the room to attention, and announced how proud the embassy was to be able to host this gathering today and how committed it was to strengthening Australian–Polish relations through this event and others like it. Most of the crowd continued talking over him. I fetched Paul and myself a glass of stronger Australian–Polish relations and some water for Shannon.
The artist gave a short speech before she began the performance – in her words, a sound sculpture. She closed her eyes and started some high-pitched squealing to the recorded accompaniment of some Middle Eastern instruments. Most of the people around me continued downing the free wine and chatting. I tried to be polite by listening, but it was taking all of my effort. Paul’s head was cocked to one side. Was it just me, or was this ridiculous? I hoped it didn’t bring Shannon on early.
Tom mingled with a few of those present after whatever it had been was over. I gave him our agreed signal and he nodded. I collected Paul and Shannon, and the three of us went to wait outside for the cab.
‘That was … ’ Shannon said.
‘Mercifully short?’ Paul said.
‘That’s what I like about you, Paul,’ I said. ‘Relentlessly positive.’
Tom appeared.
‘Finally! OK, where are we going for dinner then?’ I asked.
Paul and Tom looked at each other, as if deciding who was going to break it to Shannon and me. Paul must have drawn the short straw.
‘First, we need to drop into the Royal Palace,’ Paul said.
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘Harp recital. Canadian public diplomacy,’ he said. Shannon and I engaged in synchronised groaning. ‘Now now, it’s only fair. We came to yours, now you have to come to ours.’
I’d cut short thermal baths in Budapest for this? ‘How can this be what diplomacy is about?’ I said. ‘Can’t we just go home and order Indian and watch a DVD?’
Not tonight we couldn’t. Polish–Canadian relations needed us. We piled into the taxi.
***
It was late May when Hannah and Piotr invited us to their place for dinner. At six pm we were making our way there, the early evening still bright. I had two reasons to be thankful for the daylight savings that had started in March: not only did it give us another hour of light in the evenings, which took us through till after eight at this time of the year, it kept the sun from coming up for an hour – even the delayed sunrise was now before five. We had discovered why our apartment came with blackout curtains.
We reached their bloki, and an unseen hand buzzed us in to a hallway, decorated in lemon yellow paint that was peeling away from the concrete underneath. A crooked lift jerked its way up to the fifth level. The Polish government had thrown up these buildings to fulfill its social responsibility of housing everyone. With such imperatives, quantity won out over quality. A few seconds later and Piotr greeted us at the door to their apartment.
We squeezed past him in a tiny entry way, planting kisses on each cheek as we went, before emerging into a small living room area, just big enough to hold the four of us. Hannah was in the kitchenette, which was really also in the lounge room, putting the finishing touches on dinner. I handed her the flowers I’d bought, while Tom presented Piotr with a bottle of Australian red (with kangaroo). The three of us sat ourselves around a small table between the bench and the couch.
Piotr gave us a brief tour of the rest of the apartment: a bedroom just big enough for a double bed off the entry way, and a combined shower and toilet by the front door. He hadn’t had to leave his chair to do it. So this was what thirty-five square metres looked like.
‘What happens when you have a fight? How do you get away from each other?’ Tom asked.
‘Yes, there’s not room to be mad with each other for long. But you know, we are lucky – most Polish couples would have their parents living here as well,’ Piotr said.
I thought of our friend
s back home, the same age and with the same kinds of jobs that Hannah and Piotr had. Usually they had three or four bedrooms, at least one with an en suite bathroom.
‘What’s for dinner?’ Tom asked.
‘Hannah’s made pierogi,’ Piotr said, opening the wine. ‘She only needed to take half a day off to do it.’
‘I’m not even sure it will work,’ she said. ‘I tried to think of what to fill them with that is vegetarian, so they are lentil.’
‘And my contribution is an Australian music sound track for the evening,’ Piotr commented, pushing play on a familiar INXS tune.
Piotr’s father had been a diplomat as well, and he’d spent time growing up around the world, including in Japan and China, he told us – explaining his excellent English. Although he hadn’t intended to follow in his father’s footsteps: he’d studied law, along with Japanese, which he also spoke. After a few years working in a corporate legal firm, he’d decided he couldn’t see himself doing that for the rest of his life and applied to join the diplomatic service. The law degree was useful for working on international trade and treaties, while with the Japanese degree he did translations of the transcripts of Japanese anime cartoons for Polish TV.
‘To keep your language skills up?’ Tom had asked, when Piotr told us.
‘No. The diplomatic service in Poland doesn’t pay very well,’ Piotr said.
‘What did you study, Hannah?’ I asked, as AC/DC segued into Savage Garden.
‘Polish language.’ She served up the lentil pierogi, along with traditional pork ones she’d made for the others, and placed some stewed cabbage and carrot on the table in the middle.
‘OK, you can answer all of my questions about Polish then!’ I said, helping myself to the steaming dishes.
‘Oh, oh, I speak Polish!’ Piotr held up his hand. ‘Give me something you don’t understand!’
Where to start. ‘Well, I was watching a film the other day, and I was reading the subtitles, and the English was the quote, “That which does not kill you makes you stronger”, and the Polish was “Co cię nie zabije, to cię wzmocni”. Now, shouldn’t the first pronoun be in the genitive negative – ciebie? But it wasn’t, it was in the nominative cię. Why is that?’
Piotr’s brow furrowed. ‘Umm … hmmm … any others?’
‘I can tell you my favourite sentence,’ Tom said. He took a deep breath. ‘Che she she zhe she che shesh,’ he said, his rendering of the Polish cieszę się, że się cieszysz, meaning ‘I’m pleased that you’re pleased.’ I’d picked it up from a Polish soap opera and taught it to him.
‘Well this one, at least, isn’t so hard,’ said Piotr. ‘Cieszę się się … cieszy że się … OK, who would like more wine?’ he held up the bottle.
‘And to answer your question, Jay, the cię is not in the genitive in this case because it precedes the negative. The genitive ciebie is only used for the negative where it goes after the negation; when it is before it, the accusative cię is used,’ Hannah said.
‘Hannah, are these rules real, or do you just make them up as you go?’ I took another helping of the lentil pierogi.
‘But now,’ Tom said, ‘there is a work issue we need to resolve.’
I tried my best to hide my annoyance that work was going to intrude on our evening.
‘You see,’ Tom continued, ‘I think my wife has a crush on your Minister of Foreign Affairs.’
‘That is not true! Well, maybe just a bit.’ I said, relieved.
Just a few weeks earlier I’d seen Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radoslaw Sikorski debate former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at a public talk at the University of Warsaw. She was a feisty woman with a commanding intelligence. He was a handsome man with a charming smile. I could imagine him traversing the Afghan desert with the mujahideen – as he’d done when he’d been a journalist in the UK. The two parried back and forth in English for forty-five minutes – Albright outlining the key indicators of an ideal democracy, and rating the progress of the Middle East towards these during her time as Secretary of State. I was tempted to ask her how she would rate the progress of the US. But I knew I couldn’t. For once it wasn’t my language skills holding me back, but my status as a member of the Australian diplomatic community. Although Sikorski wryly observed that Poland did not conduct its diplomacy from thirty thousand feet. Obviously that constraint did not extend to the head of the diplomatic corps.
Mind you, there were advantages to being one of the corps – I’d called up to find out about the talk, only to find it was fully booked. I’d mentioned my disappointment to Tom, who came home that night with a personal invitation for me to the VIP section.
‘How did you …’
‘We’re rock stars here. Remember?’
‘Have you read Sikorski’s book, The Polish House?’ I asked Piotr and Hannah. We’d read it at book club – hence my knowledge of the Polish Foreign Minister’s life. In a situation oddly reminiscent of a game of musical chairs, Sikorski had found himself in the UK as a student when martial law was imposed in 1981, and was stranded outside the country for the next twenty-some years. He returned to a post-communist Poland as Minister for Defence. ‘It’s a great story,’ I told them. ‘But the thing I loved about it is the language. He wrote it in English. And just every so often, there is just a sentence, or a phrase, which is put together in such a way that I, as a native speaker, understand English does not work.’
‘But he is not a native speaker, surely that is understandable?’ said Hannah.
‘But that’s the thing, it doesn’t work that way, but when I read it, I thought, it should! He somehow took English and made it better. Maybe this is what happens when you grow up speaking such a complicated language as Polish. You can improve any other language. Or Radek can, anyway,’ I said, using the common diminutive of his name.
‘Minister Sikorski, you mean,’ Tom said.
‘I can say Radek. We’re Facebook friends, you know. Every morning he sends me his thoughts on Polish international and domestic politics and current affairs.’
‘He does?’ Piotr looked surprised.
‘Me and his eight thousand other Facebook followers. But I know he’s thinking of me when he does it.’
‘So it seems you are starting to learn something about Polish authors, then,’ Hannah said.
‘But we have our very own author here,’ Tom winked at me.
The editor of the local monthly ‘what’s on in Warsaw’ magazine, the Warsaw Insider, had taken me to lunch in an expensive restaurant and asked me to write regular features for them, based on some of the articles Shannon had encouraged me to submit. It wasn’t much compared to what they all did, I knew, and the salary would barely pay for my coffee habit, but I’d floated all the way home after the meeting. I’d stayed up past midnight that night planning and researching articles, going to bed in the spare room when I was done so as not to disturb Tom.
I told Hannah and Piotr about some of my first assignments – some restaurant reviews, an article on visiting the Tatra mountains, and where to learn salsa dancing in Poland. I’d called up four different schools that week and, in fumbling Polish, managed to arrange an interview and free trial lesson in each.
‘Have you ever done salsa dancing?’ Hannah asked.
‘I’ve never done any kind of dancing,’ I said. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t what I was going to be best at. But that would just make it all the more interesting.
Hannah cleaned our main plates and brought out plates for dessert. ‘You know, all Piotr had to do was to get ice cream for the dessert. And he forgets. I had to make him to go again to the shop after he got home.’
Piotr admitted his guilt. ‘Yes, well, this is true. But better to be incompetent at home than at work.’
‘Why’s that?’ Tom asked.
‘In diplomacy, it’s a fine line between incompetence and Iraq.’ Piotr got up to fetch the diplomatic ice cream.
‘Hey, Piotr, I’ve caught you out – this
song isn’t Australian,’ Tom said. We all listened for a moment.
‘It’s Lenka. Her father is Czech. That’s why she has a Slavic name. But she grew up in Australia. So that is enough to count as Australian, I think?’
Neither Tom nor I had ever heard of her. I had no idea how Piotr had.
We left their cosy apartment stuffed with great food and conversation in equal measure. It was starting to get warmer now in the evenings. People in light jackets walked their dogs along streets that were starting to feel like home. But this wasn’t home. Not the kind that you know is going to be forever, anyway. Or even for an indeterminate period of time. We had been here a year, we had two more to run. Someone I’d never met had chosen where we were going, when we arrived, and when we would leave. I sat on Tom’s lap on the tram home, even though we were the only passengers, and leant into him.
‘You and Hannah should meet up for coffee some time,’ he said.
‘I suppose.’
He was right. But meeting new people all the time was trying for me. All the coffee dates, introductions, small talk. Then we were just going to leave again …
‘Don’t you feel sometimes, what’s the point of putting all this effort into meeting all these new people? Going to all these national days, having people round for dinner, going to dinner at other people’s places? It’s exhausting, and we’re just going to leave in two years. So why bother?’
‘You know one thing I really regret about our last few months in Canberra? Remember how we got really distracted by the move and stopped seeing people?’
It wasn’t the last few months in Canberra we’d spent like that. It was the last two years. As soon as we’d found out Tom had gotten into the diplomatic service and we would be leaving, we’d stopped investing time or effort in where we were. I could see how easy it would be in, this profession, to spend your whole life like that; not investing in anywhere you were, because you were always going to be somewhere else soon enough. Keeping people at a distance, treating them like they’d only be around a short time. Which seemed to be a good way to make sure they were only around for a short time. And then all of a sudden you would be sixty and …
