Vodka and Apple Juice

by Jay Martin

  ‘This is lovely, Piotr. You’ve gone to so much trouble.’ I said to the host.

  ‘Do you know the Polish saying, Gość w dom, Bóg w dom?’ he asked me.

  ‘Guest in the house, God in the house?’ I tried a translation out loud.

  The Agnieszkas and Piotr nodded enthusiastically. ‘To a Polish person, a guest is sacred. It’s never a trouble to have a guest. It’s always a pleasure.’

  Agnieszka reeled off another one: ‘Więcej gość w cudzym domu przez godzinę niż gospodarz za dzien ujrzy’.

  I shook my head and looked at my old teacher.

  ‘A guest in a foreign house sees more in an hour than the host sees in a day,’ she enlightened me. I rolled that one round in my mind for a while.

  A few hours later and Agnieszka and I were making ourselves comfortable in the space where a barn had once been, to one side of the house. With a couple of mattresses, thick blankets and a wall full of books, it was a cozy guest room.

  ‘Do you feel homesick for Poland still, Agnieszka – even after all these years in Australia?’ I asked her. It had been twenty years. I fully expected her to say no.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said instead, with an intensity that surprised me. ‘It’s so easy here for me. With my parents and my friends and my language – my many words for mushrooms. Australians always want to ask me where I’m from and how long I’ve been in Australia and what I think of it. It’s OK I guess. But it gets boring. How come Australians always ask you all those things anyway?’

  ‘How come Poles never do?’ I said.

  ‘What about you. Do you feel homesick being away from Australia?’ Agnieszka asked.

  I shook my head. There were a few things I missed about Australia, I supposed. But I didn’t dwell on them. We were only here for three years, after all. I was making the most of it. ‘Being an expat isn’t like being a migrant. It’s just three years. I’ll be back in Australia soon enough,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I nearly forgot, I brought you something!’ She fished a small plastic bag out of her things and gave it to me.

  The drab olive of a eucalyptus branch showed through the plastic. She’d brought me gum leaves! I opened the bag and inhaled their distinctive scent. The smell of the hills I used to walk on after work to the sounds of pink and grey galahs and crimson rosellas. Of the endless lazy hours of the summer holidays of my childhood. Of camping holidays by the ocean. Of a place where things were easy, and people were like me. Where what I could say wasn’t limited by the vocabulary and grammar I had. Where Tom and I had felt like we were on the same team. Not where crazy event after crazy event left us no time to just be together. I wondered if Charlie was still waiting for us to come home, with no idea we never would. All of a sudden a flood of hot, heavy tears were rolling down my face and I was powerless to stop them.

  ‘It’s hard sometimes. Being a guest in someone’s house, isn’t it?’ Agnieszka said.

  JESIEN – AUTUMN

  I didn’t know if a Polish person could understand just what a novelty it was for me to be able to cross a national border in a train. Zagranica. ‘Past the limit’. That’s how you say that you’re in a different country in Polish. In Australia, you say you’re ‘overseas’. Because that’s where you end up if you go ‘past the limit’ of Australia.

  Yet here Tom and I were in Berlin, six hours from Warsaw. The ping from my phone carrier telling me international roaming rates now applied was the only way I knew I had crossed not only into another country, but from what had once been ‘the east’ to a tiny pocket of what had once been ‘the west’. Although, alighting at Berlin Hauptbahnhof, I wondered if the train had not just travelled in space, but in time. It was an engineering triumph of steel and glass, with lifts whizzing up and down. People strode about. You could tell they would be efficient. It was in their gait.

  ‘So where do we go now?’ Tom broke into my thoughts. He had been an exchange student in country Germany when he was in high school, and his host father, Wolfgang, was now living in a nearby town. He was meeting us at one of the station exits. All we had to do was find the right one.

  I’d been to Berlin before precisely as often as Tom – never – and had now been here precisely as long as he had – about sixty seconds. Yet somehow I was supposed to know my way around this parallel universe.

  ‘Let’s try over there.’ I spied what looked like an exit, although it turned out to be another large, clean hall. I looked around, trying to find something that looked like a map and putting on my best impression of a cheery smile.

  Tom detoured to a bench and thumped down on it. ‘Let me know when you’ve found it.’ He closed his eyes.

  What the hell was Tom so shitty about anyway – and why was it my fault? He had been really excited about this trip. I wondered how long he’d sit there waiting if I never came back. So I guessed that meant that – just for a split second – I’d thought about it.

  Thank God for the universal tourist information sign, coupled with the expected German efficiency. A minute later I had the information I needed, and not long after that I was locked in the arms of a sturdy German in his sixties hugging both of us like we were long-lost pals.

  ‘A zo, how wonderful to see you again!’ He took a step back to take a look at Tom.

  Tom’s face lit up. ‘Yes! How long’s it been, Wolfgang, twenty-five years?’ They embraced again. So Tom could make the effort to be pleasant to other people. Just not me.

  Wolfgang took the heavy overnight bag I’d been struggling with and we started to walk, him giving us a rundown of the itinerary as we went. ‘A zo, this is what we will do. We will drive now past the Berlin Wall and then go to eat at a bierhalle, that will be six o’clock, then we will go home and have some schnapps. Tomorrow breakfast will be at nine o’clock, we will do sightseeing and I will take you back to the train to go back again to Warschau.’

  ‘That’s very organised,’ Tom said.

  ‘I am German,’ Wolfgang said. I waited for him to laugh. But he hadn’t made a joke.

  Berlin had put on late autumn weather that Poland would have been proud of. A biting wind razored itself through cracks in my clothing. The trees were as bare of leaves here as in Warsaw, the sky as oppressive. I was happy the proposed itinerary consisted of being driven between indoor venues.

  The day the war ended, the destruction of Berlin must have been as complete as that of Warsaw. Yet the approaches of the two cities to reconstruction couldn’t have been more different. Warsaw’s Old Town rebuilt, brick by brick, until there was no hint it had ever not existed. While in Berlin, a new city had sprung up, almost devoid of traces of what had been here before – from what I could see from the car, anyway. Wolfgang pointed out the former track of the Berlin Wall as we drove past it, parts of which now disappeared under office blocks.

  ‘You know, in the nineteen-nineties, I was living in a cheap apartment in Berlin,’ Wolfgang told us as he drove, ‘a beautiful old building, but very run-down. We residents decided to organise a restoration. There was a saying at the time, “Do you know a Pole?” It meant, “I need something done”. So we all said, “Does anyone know a Pole?” and we got a team of Polish people, and they worked very hard and did a fine job. And at the end, they bring out vodka and we all get drunk together. There is a stereotype that the Germans are good workers. But I think in our culture, it is good to talk about how hard you work. The Poles, they don’t talk. They just work until the job is done. And then they drink vodka.’

  It didn’t surprise me at all that a German would get a Pole in to help them with their restoration work. Perhaps they should have done it more.

  We arrived at the bierhalle exactly on time. Needless to say. From a quick look around, it seemed the meal was going to involve a lot of dead pig and as much apfelwein, deposited at the table by a busty maiden in a pinafore. Wolfgang ordered ciders for us and embraced his as heartily as he’d embraced us some time earlier. I wondered if Germans embraced everything heartily.

&
nbsp; ‘Prost,’ he said.

  ‘Na zdrowie,’ we both replied.

  ‘Have you been to Warsaw?’ I asked Wolfgang.

  ‘Warschau? Nein, nein, although I have been to Posen and Breslau.’

  ‘Ah yes, we’ve been to Poznan, and I’ve been to Wroclaw,’ I said.

  ‘Vrostaff? This is how they call it?’

  Near enough. Well, it was their city. At this point in history, anyway.

  A waiter in breeches came and asked us what we’d like. ‘We will all have pork, yes? We are not any vegetarians, yes?’ Wolfgang chuckled. Being vegetarian was the punch line to a joke in these parts.

  ‘A zo, well …’ His voice trailed off when I gave him the bad news. He obviously had no idea how to solve this problem in English, but conversed with the waiter to see if some solution might be found in German. I hoped it wasn’t going to necessitate an amendment to the schedule. I wasn’t sure what the consequences might be.

  The waiter was able to rustle up a plate of spaetzle dumplings, something between pierogi and gnocchi, alongside the half a pig he brought Tom and Wolfgang. And more apfelwein, of course. I remember asking Tomek from my language group what cider was called in Polish. ‘You know, alcohol made from apples,’ I’d explained. Tomek adopted his usual look for when I said something ridiculous. I’d seen it a few times now. I wondered how the Poles and Germans could be so like-minded on roasted pig and so unlike-minded on fermented fruit.

  Wolfgang and Tom reminisced as the pig disappeared, mouthful by mouthful, into their increasingly bulging stomachs.

  ‘And zo, what do you do in Warsaw?’ Wolfgang asked me.

  Ah, the big question. What did I do all day? Tom had certainly started implying it often enough. When dinner was late, when I forgot to get the drycleaning, or when we ran out of shampoo.

  After my conversation with Paul, I’d run through my reasons for wanting to take the job I’d been offered. I would be as tired as Tom at the end of the week, so it wouldn’t be so bad that it would be all either of us could do to crash on the couch on a Friday night. I had already seen a lot of Poland, I probably wouldn’t be missing out by not seeing much more. I could still fit my writing for the Warsaw Insider – which I adored – in somewhere. Probably. Along with all our ‘life administration’, which would still fall to me because I was the one who spoke any Polish and knew how to get anything done. Tom would pick up his half of the domestic responsibilities, I was sure – even though he was barely keeping his head above water with his workload as it was. But it would all be worth it, wouldn’t it, when people asked me what I did, and I could say, ‘I’m a communications officer for an insurance firm,’ as opposed to, ‘I’m Tom’s wife. He’s with the embassy.’

  I cast my mind forward ten years, to when I was at home, back at work again. ‘You idiot,’ my future self said to this one.

  I loved the freedom not working gave me. That I was able to take off for a week in London or Budapest if I felt like it. Spend my days discussing Polish literature and going to yoga and doing a bit of writing for the Warsaw Insider, long lunches with Shannon and even regular catch-ups with Anthea. Anthea and I may not have had much in common outside of living in Warsaw. But right now, we had that. No, the problem wasn’t that I wanted to go back to work.

  The problem was how I felt about not working. I knew I’d worked solidly for the last fifteen years; I fully expected to for the next twenty. But people here didn’t know that. They lumped me in with the ‘professional wives’, who did nothing else. Or I imagined they did, anyway. I knew I shouldn’t have cared. And why was it such a big deal to me, even if they did? But I couldn’t help it. It bit. Like it did when Polish people made jabs at how easy we had it in Australia. Where we hadn’t, really, had to fight for the standard of living we enjoyed – our three-bedroom houses and en suites. Not like Polish people had, anyway. There is something satisfying about knowing you’ve earned what you have. And maybe about having others acknowledge that too.

  But I’d decided that I wouldn’t take the job. It didn’t resolve the problem of how I felt about not working. But something told me going back to work wouldn’t solve that problem either. My future self nodded, satisfied.

  ‘I work as a writer for a magazine in Warsaw,’ I said, answering Wolfgang’s question. ‘I interview architects and performers and historians and people on the street about things going on in Poland and write about them so foreigners can know and understand a bit more about the country. I’m thinking about doing some volunteer work, too.’

  ‘You are?’ said Tom.

  ‘That sounds very interesting,’ said Wolfgang.

  ‘It is,’ I said.

  ‘A zo, about tomorrow, we will see Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial …’ Wolfgang returned to the schedule he had devised for our hours here.

  ‘Holocaust Memorial? I haven’t heard of that,’ I said. A new memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, only finished in 2005, he explained. I expressed my surprise that Germany was still building monuments to the war. Tom shot me a look.

  ‘Yes, this is a very complicated thing for Germany, of course. When I went to school, we never learned about the war. We were never taught anything about it. At that time, the people who were in power, they had all played a part in it. Even if their part was to be silent. So who could start? What could they teach us without implicating themselves?’

  ‘But I don’t think we need to be talking about that,’ Tom said.

  I told Wolfgang about the new museum they were building in Poland, at Oswiecim – ‘how you call Auschwitz,’ I said. ‘Poland asked donors for one hundred and twenty million euro to build it, and Germany immediately said it would pay half. Do you think Germany will ever be free of this aspect of its history?’

  ‘Every country has its baggage,’ Wolfgang said.

  Hadn’t I been taught that the British had arrived in terra nullius – an empty land? Not about the brutal invasion that I now knew had occurred, and that students at Torun’s Australian Studies Centre knew more about than the average Australian. ‘Yes, every country has its baggage,’ I said.

  Tom pointed to his watch. We were in danger of falling behind schedule. Wolfgang paid the bill and we waddled towards his BMW – a baseline car here.

  ‘I can’t believe you mentioned the war,’ Tom hissed at me as Wolfgang retrieved his car from its spot.

  ‘I think someone had already told him about it,’ I hissed back.

  Maybe it was another Anglo-Saxon thing. Reluctance to talk about the war. People here didn’t seem to share that characteristic.

  A section of autobahn took us towards Wolfgang’s village. The roads were wide and brightly illuminated. I watched the speedometer tick over. One hundred and ten kilometres per hour, one-twenty, one-thirty … The drivers indicated, changed lanes, stopped indicating, and maintained a steady speed; so unlike Polish driving, which seemed to be based on the principle of ‘never let anyone know what you’re thinking’. But even so, we were now going one hundred and sixty and still drivers were overtaking us as though we were barely moving. I tried not to think of all that apfelwein Wolfgang had downed. Tom was leaning back in his seat, eyelids closed and mouth open.

  Two countries, next to each other on the map, and yet so different. ‘How did Polish and German cultures come to be so different, do you think?’ I asked Wolfgang, partly out of interest in his opinion, partly to try to keep him awake.

  ‘We share a lot of history, Poles and Germans. Some good, some not so good. In the end, we’re stuck with each other. We may as well get along.’

  A zo.

  ***

  Julie had turned up at book club. Her freckled skin and practical footwear marked her as Australian before she even opened her mouth. She had two children at the British primary school, and taught English as a foreign language – a handy vocation for a travelling spouse. We’d met up for lunch a couple of times, and then Tom and I had gone around to her place for a drink with her and her husband, B
luey, a senior partner in an international auditing firm. The evening had started as you might have expected for diplomats and business executives; polite conversation over chilled white wine. The only clue we were Australian was the fact that none of us was wearing shoes. By the end of the evening, ‘Would you care for another glass of wine?’ had become ‘Wannanuthabiah?’, Bluey and I were engaged in a fervent discussion about pub rock bands we’d seen in our twenties, and Tom had passed out on the couch. It only struck me that it might have been time to go home when I realised it was light. Time flew when you didn’t have to explain everything all the time. Like why someone with ginger hair would, of course, be called ‘Bluey’.

  I didn’t know Julie that well, but I was keen to go and check out a folk event I’d read about called ‘scything boggy meadows for nature’, which I thought would make an interesting article. I took a punt and called to ask if she was interested in coming along. Practically speaking, she had a car, which would avoid the need to hire a care to get to the out-of-the-way location. ‘I suppose I’ll need gumboots for that,’ she’d responded, confirming she also had something else that would be useful: the right kind of attitude.

  It wasn’t just any boggy marsh grass-cutting championship, I told her as we drove, it was the Eighth Polish (and Sixth International) Hand Scything of Boggy Meadows for Nature Championship. It was being held in the Biebrza National Park, a trip that should have taken about three hours from Warsaw. Julie, who had more experience driving around Poland than me, recommended we allow five.

  Jules was right. We’d not even left Warsaw proper when we hit our first traffic jam. After crawling along for almost half an hour, we came to the source of the hold-up: a roundabout. I never understood how a country that survived nazism and communism could be paralysed by a roundabout. At least one day it was going to be better – we’d passed road project after road project, a new flyover here, on-and-off ramps there. Blue and yellow EU stars twinkled over all of them, signalling the funding source.