by Jay Martin
Sightseeing with a minister was not like normal sightseeing. For a start, it was conducted at high speed – we were ferried around in a cavalcade of police vehicles that zipped in and out of the traffic, sirens blaring. And the whole thing was choreographed to the last second. Fifteen minutes to see the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army (click click). Fifteen minutes to lay a wreath at the Warsaw Uprising Monument (click click). Back in the police car, sirens on, screech off to Old Town for a twenty-minute film at the Historical Museum of Warsaw, which documented in grainy footage the transformation of 1920s and 1930s Warsaw from a sunny city of mothers pushing prams to one of post-war destruction. We emerged on to the beautiful Old Town Square only to be directed to the storyboard showing what it had looked like at the end of the war: a grey pile of rubble, amidst grey piles of rubble. (Click click.) Warsaw had teamed our itinerary with a shroud of dank, low-hanging cloud that was standard for this time of year. It came between the light overcast of summer and the oppressive overcast of winter.
I documented Smith’s sombre contemplation of Warsaw pre- and post-war as best I could, and snapped a few photos of the flashing lights of the police cavalcade behind my own convoy car for my own records. The minister – a shortish man with grey hair and a serious disposition – didn’t say a word to me the whole time. I put it down to lack of sleep, or jet lag. Or perhaps he was just traumatised by the day’s sightseeing program.
By noon we’d done Warsaw’s highlights (such as they were), and it was time to deposit the minister at his key destination – a private lunch with the (more than a little dishy) Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorksi, at the ministry’s stately offices.
Tom raced over to me. ‘Go grab some lunch, be back here in fifteen minutes.’
‘Do you want anything?’
His phone rang. He answered it, shaking his head.
By the time I got back, the real press had arrived. I took up a spot among them and tried to look like I belonged. Each minister gave a short speech on the importance of Polish– Australian relations. Smith’s was first, translated into Polish as he spoke, then it was Sikorski’s turn. I’d never heard Sikorski speak Polish before, only eloquent and expressive English.
I’d become adept at telling if someone was speaking Polish or English, even when I couldn’t hear them. English made the speaker’s mouth open wide to let all the vowels out. With Polish, all the work was done behind the scenes, somewhere down the back of the throat, and a mouth could remain set in a static grimace. Sikorski’s mouth formed the by-now familiar sounds of Polish, but his jaw was tight, his brow tense, like he really wanted to be speaking English. Watching him speak was like watching someone whose head and mouth were at war. I decided to unfriend him on Facebook. He was so handsome in English, but in Polish he looked just odd.
Poland’s Minister for Labour, Jolanta Fedak, appeared; Smith and Fedak took their places behind a desk, Polish and Australian flags standing to attention behind them, and did what they’d come to do: sign their governments’ joint commitment to a new bilateral agreement on social security. Dozens of cameras clicked into life, as we all collected the political ‘money shot’. I wondered if I should tell them about this thing called email.
Tom approached our minister, letting him know it was time to go. All of a sudden, it was like someone had thrown a rock into the nest of policy ants. In addition to furious Blackberry punching, there was now much pointing of fingers at watches. God, was that really how I used to live my life?
Tom came up to me. ‘Get those photos back to Canberra now, won’t you.’
Tom, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and an intensity of policy advisers swept down the stairs of the ministry building into waiting police cars, and sped off for the airport, sirens wailing. My photos appeared a few hours later on the Foreign Affairs website, under the caption ‘Minister Smith visits Poland’. I wondered if he had any idea what country he’d been in. I doubted he’d ever want to come back.
My phone rang. Tom with another task, I expected. Instead, Paul’s number flashed up.
‘It’s Shannon. She’s coming. I mean the baby … ’
‘What do you need?’
I held my phone to my ear with my shoulder as I jotted down a list of things Paul asked me to bring to the hospital. We had copies of each other’s keys – just in case.
‘Oh, and another thing, her parents need a place to stay for a few weeks, do you think you could find maybe an apartment or something …’
‘Leave it with me, Paul.’ I wasn’t sure about short-stay apartments in Warsaw, but I had my secret weapon: Estonia.
I set about doing something actually important with the day.
***
The next diplomatic event was Norwegian Salmon Day. That sounded like a winner. As much as American Lobster Night, and far more than British Pear Afternoon – other events we’d attended under the guise of ‘representational duties as directed’. Tom and I walked into a large banquet hall in a converted palace, and enacted our usual plan: he went for the wine, I went for the food. Within five minutes I was wandering through the crowd looking for people I knew, with enough grilled salmon on my plate to feed a small village.
‘Hellooo!’ the voice reached me over the noise of the crowd. I groaned inside before I could even turn to confirm my fears.
‘Dee,’ I said.
It was handy that she didn’t have a longer name. It avoided further delay to the commencement of the monologue I had come to expect from a couple of interactions with her now – today about her child’s broken ankle. ‘And the government won’t pay to have her flown back to New Zealand for treatment, they said she could get adequate treatment here! Can you believe that?’
Unbelievable.
‘Honestly, we pay taxes, we don’t get any special treatment being here …’
Actually we did. There were certain Polish taxes we were excluded from, although the details differed from mission to mission. One thing was for sure: we all knew – in minute detail – the concession arrangements that applied to us. The American staff got the most generous treatment. They were exempt from every grosze of the twenty-two percent tax that applied to every purchase in Poland. I’d heard the old American ambassador had ordered an intern who’d brought him a coffee without a receipt back to the café to have a duplicate made up so he could claim the twenty-two percent of the one dollar twenty it had cost. I didn’t know if it were true, but from what I knew of expats, especially diplomats, it didn’t sound far-fetched.
‘… and we can’t even get medical treatment when we need it.’ Dee was still talking. ‘Foreigners get better treatment in our country than we do! Here we are saving the government money by not living there – and something happens and what do we get? Nothing!’
Free accommodation, utilities, tax exemptions, education costs, business-class travel all over the world …
‘Honestly, we would be better off being refugees, they’re entitled to everything!’
‘If you’ll excuse me, Dee,’ I said, pivoting away from her. A little trick I’d picked up from an American political appointee.
‘Oh, I need a lift to book club on Wednesday. Do you think someone can collect me?’ she called out.
I turned back to answer her. ‘The one-eighty bus goes there from your house. You should ask someone where you get off.’
I couldn’t see Tom, but scanning the room I saw Paul, standing under a Norwegian tourism banner featuring blonde teenagers and mountain streams.
‘Cześć!’ I said. All the kissing done, we could start conversing.
‘How’s everything with Shannon and the baby?’ Both very well, he assured me, getting out his phone and flipping through half a dozen photos of tiny Fiona. I’d seen them both that afternoon when I’d dropped up a load of groceries to their apartment, but I figured – rightly – that he’d be up for a bragging opportunity.
‘Cześć!’ Tom said, arriving with a bottle of wine in each hand. He put one down at h
is feet and tore the cork out of the other. ‘Wino, anyone?’ Tom’s active Polish vocabulary consisted of greetings and alcoholic beverages.
‘I thought it was a tasting?’ I said.
‘I told them I was an Australian Embassy wine representative and they gave me a couple of bottles. He poured wine into three tiny plastic cups and passed them out. ‘Oh my God, I think that’s a Lamborghini Diablo!’ Tom caught sight of some car porn in the car park outside and took off for a closer look. A packet of cigarettes had turned up in his hand somewhere along the way.
‘So, I had a very busy expat wife day today,’ I said to Paul. ‘I had to get my hair cut and go to yoga.’
‘Something tells me that’s not the whole story,’ he said.
‘Actually, I did do both of those things. Although I think both were partly to try and block out my traumatic morning at IKEA.’ Paul raised his eyebrows and I sipped Scandinavian wine obtained on spurious grounds. ‘See, for a start you have to go all the way out to Janki, which takes an hour on the bus, and a change in between – for what really should be a twenty-minute trip. And then you get there, and all I want is a few of those little plastic hooks that you can stick on your bathroom wall to hang your hand towels on. But in order to get to them I have to go through the whole store, because I don’t know the Polish for “those little plastic hooks that you can stick on your bathroom wall to hang your hand towels on” and by the time I’ve got to the cash register, somehow the part of my brain that thinks my life is complete without three hanging planters and a free-standing mirror has been sucked away by Swedish design efficiency. And then somehow I come to, standing in the car park, and I realise I will now have to cart it all home on two buses, because I don’t have a car.’
‘You’re sounding more and more like a Pole,’ Paul said.
‘The complaining, you mean?’
‘More saying how long somewhere should take to get to. You know how they talk in terms of how long it should take to get somewhere – if there weren’t traffic, if there were a direct train line, or if there were a four-lane highway. And they plan around those ‘should’ times, even though there is always traffic and there has never been a direct train line. “Oh, sorry I’m late, if there was a four-lane highway here the trip would have taken twenty minutes, but there wasn’t and so it took an hour and a half.” ’
‘You’re mostly right,’ I said.
‘Mostly?’
‘The Pole wouldn’t apologise.’
‘Very true,’ he said. He told me his own experience of Polish service for the day – with Fee’s arrival, he was having to do a lot more things himself. He’d gone to the drycleaner to pick up his own suit, but he hadn’t had any change. ‘So I couldn’t pay, and she wouldn’t give me the suit,’ he said.
I asked him what he’d done.
‘I went and bought something to get some change, of course. What was I supposed to do?’
‘Paul, Paul, Paul.’ I shook my head and tutted.
‘I used to think you and Shannon were exaggerating. Now I think they need to rephrase the old axiom for Poland: in Poland, three things are certain – death, taxes, and that shop assistants won’t have any change.’
‘Well, my life’s all about to change, anyway. I got a job offer!’ I’d had a number of conversations with the insurance firm office manager, and they’d offered me a position in the communications team. The wage was poor by Australian standards, but it would certainly keep me in coffee for the rest of my stay.
‘If it’s what you want, then I’m happy.’
I paused. ‘I have to say, you don’t sound it,’ I said. ‘You and Tom spend all day meeting with academics and heads of foreign states. Shannon’s got Fee now. Victoria left months ago – if she was ever really here. And what do I do? Go shopping and get my hair cut.’
‘And somehow have a more interesting life than any of us along the way. Really, what do diplomats do, at the end of the day? A government does something we don’t approve of, and we give them a letter that “expresses our disapproval”. If it’s a really significant issue, we might “strongly express our disapproval.” And if we want to really bring out the big guns, we “express our disapproval in the strongest terms”. The rest is just smoked salmon.’
‘Mostly right, once again.’ I thought of the recent foreign ministerial visits, the climate change conference, and almost losing a defence minister in Krakow to an African virus. ‘Diplomacy is ninety-five per cent smoked salmon, five per cent terror.’
Some hours later the Norwegians politely but firmly stopped serving us alcohol, and Tom, Paul and I jumped on a tram bound for home. But not before Tom had left a Korean diplomat’s business card under the windscreen wipers of a red Porsche. After four bottles of wine, it had seemed like a great idea.
Some diplomats probably would have ‘expressed their disapproval in strong terms’ at that. I was beginning to think we weren’t like other diplomats.
***
Agnieszka the kind-hearted, my Polish teacher from Canberra, was in Warsaw for a few weeks. She was heading to the country for a few nights to visit some friends of hers and invited me along.
‘So how’s life in Warsaw?’ she said, as soon as we were aboard the mini-bus out of the city.
‘Great!’
‘What about Polish people? What are they like?’
‘Unusually interested in what foreigners think of them,’ I said.
‘Do you think?’
We were heading to Olsztyn, a medium-size regional centre that should have been about three hours north of Warsaw. I kept waiting for the road to deteriorate. Polish people loved to complain about their roads: in the newspapers, in shops, on TV. But this one was a divided highway, two lanes each way. I couldn’t see what the problem was.
Agnieszka’s friend Piotr (the second) picked us up from the bus station and drove us half an hour further to his place. We passed a few tiny villages on the way, each one marked by the Polish city limits road sign, a black-and-white village silhouette, complete with church steeple. The church was so central here that it was part of even a stylised village-scape on a road sign.
I was glad I had something to think about. Piotr attacked the single lane road of sharp bends, blind corners and oncoming cars, children and chickens as though it were a controlled race track. Agnieszka didn’t seem to be feeling the same panic as I was. When we arrived in one piece, I wasn’t so much relieved as surprised. I considered a new theory: maybe it wasn’t Polish roads that were bad, but Polish drivers.
Piotr’s wife was also called Agnieszka (of course). For some reason all forty million Poles seemed to share only half a dozen names between them. Our hosts lived in a rustic house that had been abandoned by its German owners during the war. By the time the communist government had fallen and there was a private property market again that Agnieszka and Piotr could buy it on, the roof had caved in and animals had made homes in the exposed walls. They’d completely restored it since, but kept many of the original features: solid stone walls, low ceilings, timber beams, and a kitchen dominated by an enamel stove that did them for both cooking and heating.
But it was the golden forest around us that beckoned Agnieszka, and she’d barely greeted her old friend before dragging me off for a walk in it, with the family’s five-year-old girl, Mela, joining us.
Tom and I went to Warsaw’s Lazienki Park every chance we got at the moment – or at least, as often as I could coax him away from the PlayStation – to watch squirrels bury nuts under the yellow oaks. Although in truth, you didn’t have to even leave our apartment to appreciate this season. The trees we could see from inside were just as stunning.
Here in the country, nature came into its own – with the added advantage that we could look for mushrooms. Mela’s eagle eyes would spot the patches of fungus, and she’d run towards them and gently inspect them to see whether they were smooth or ridged underneath, already expert in knowing whether or not you could eat them. As Agnieszka and I mean
dered through the crimson forest, our basket filled with the fruits of the little girl’s labour.
Every so often, I’d spot one. ‘This one?’ I’d say to Mela. She’d run over and check, before putting her hands on her tiny hips and shaking her head. I don’t think she’d ever met an adult who knew as little about mushrooms as me.
‘This is called maślak,’ Agnieszka explained to me. ‘It’s buttery and soft, good with pasta. This one is borowik, it’s the noblest of all the mushrooms!’
‘I only need one word for mushroom in English. How can I need more words in Polish?’ And no mushroom I knew looked in any way noble.
She rolled her eyes. ‘Anglo-Saxons don’t understand anything about mushrooms.’ I added that to the list.
We were almost back again when I spied something in the shadow of a tree. ‘This one?’ I asked Mela. It was at least ten centimetres across. Mela ran over, checked, and nodded her head in admiration. She gave me her small knife and I cut it off at the stem like she’d showed me, so another would grow. I posed for a photo with my find. Catch of the day!
‘It’s funny,’ I said to Agnieszka, ‘I’ve never done this before, but it seems so familiar.’ All those stories from my childhood of little girls mushrooming in forests, I guess. ‘Can mushrooming be in your genes?’
‘Maybe if you’re Polish!’
We’d no sooner reached the kitchen with our catch than our host Agnieszka breezed in, unaffected by the clutch of children – Mela and her two brothers – following after her. There were only three of them, but their flailing arms and excited screams took up a lot of room in the small home.
Agnieszka and Piotr apologised for their poor English, before proceeding to speak to me fluently on a range of issues, all while Piotr whipped up a two-course meal with the mushrooms their daughter had collected. Usually I persisted in Polish. Today I decided to just enjoy the conversation.
We sat down to eat a meal of homegrown vegetables and forest-picked mushrooms, in a one-hundred-and-ten-year-old restored country farmhouse, warmed by the heat from the stove that had cooked our meal. How many people must have done just this in this house over its long life? But here I was, probably the first Australian. Maybe the first Australian to have ever been to this tiny town.
