Vodka and Apple Juice

by Jay Martin

  We finally hit the open road, heading north-east past signs that periodically announced how much further it was to Lithuania. The trees of the forest on either side of us had dropped all of their beautiful leaves, revealing their nakedness.

  And the country roads had revealed the true terror of driving in Poland. I now realised that it wasn’t Agnieszka’s friend Piotr who was a bad driver, it was just that Piotr drove like a Pole. And now avoiding all the other people driving like Poles on the road was Julie’s problem. I braced myself as, for the third or fourth time that day, she initiated a manoeuvre I would, under normal circumstances, have considered crazy – pulling into the middle of a normal two-lane road, into oncoming traffic, trusting that the truck on our side would move over a little onto his road edge, and the car hurtling towards us would move over a little onto their road edge, and there would be enough room in between for us to squeeze through – all at one hundred kilometres an hour. It was either that or be stuck behind a convoy of trucks heading for Vilnius. I sighed with relief – and surprise – when we made it. Again.

  ‘I can see why Tom didn’t want me to do this trip on my own. This is exhausting. Even as a passenger,’ I said.

  ‘He wasn’t interested in coming?’

  ‘Too tired,’ I said, recounting for her a typical week’s social schedule, with its classical concerts, talks by visiting ministers and ambassadors from all over the world, and free tickets to art exhibitions and openings. ‘Some of these events are great, and I feel so honoured to have the opportunity to go. But most of them involve standing around making conversation with people who you don’t really want to talk to who don’t really want to talk to you until you’ve been there long enough for it not to be rude for you to leave. Somehow that’s diplomacy.’

  Gaggles of babcias were standing by the side of the road, with baskets of products. ‘What do they have, do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe late mushrooms? Or I think elderberries are in season.’

  ‘What’s an elderberry?’

  ‘Hang on a sec,’ Jules said, and I braced myself as she pulled out into some more oncoming traffic, veering back in three trucks along. My shoulders stayed around my ears. My central nervous system didn’t consider a Polish road the place to let its guard down.

  ‘So do you have to go along to all these diplomatic things, too?’ Julie asked.

  I shook my head. ‘It’s solidarność, I guess. It’s Tom’s job, he has to go, and we’re supposed to be in this together so I feel I should go. And I’d hardly ever see him if I didn’t. But when he has time off, he doesn’t want to come and spend the day with me going for a drive. He wants to spend it on the couch watching TV and playing computer games.’ With a few bottles of wine and a pack of cigarettes. ‘We went to Berlin for the weekend not long ago. Before that would have been an amazing adventure for us and we would have been so excited to see everything. But we get there and all Tom wants to do is drink and sleep.’ And be mad at me. I shared the gist with her, though I left a few details out.

  A girl stood by the road, in the middle distance.

  ‘Shall we stop and see what she has?’ I said.

  Julie burst out laughing. ‘I don’t think we’re her target market!’ As we got closer, I noticed the girl didn’t have any baskets in front of her. And that she was wearing rather high heels and a tight skirt for a walk in the forest. Similar girls were dotted every couple of hundred metres along this stretch of road, each of them by a dirt track that led off the road. It made us both quiet for a time.

  ‘Do you think they’re Polish?’ I asked after a while.

  ‘Probably Ukrainian or Belorussian. They’re on all the international roads out of Warsaw.’ Once it was jeans that were smuggled across these borders for profit. Now it was women.

  ‘I know it’s ridiculous, complaining about my life,’ I said. ‘“Oh, it was terrible, we had to go to a play and then eat some smoked salmon”. All I have to do is smile and be nice to some people I don’t really like to get by. It’s not so bad.’ Although put like that, diplomacy didn’t sound so very different from what these women were doing.

  We saw a sign for the event, allaying a secret worry that I might have dragged Julie five hours on these roads for nothing – I’d found this event in a Polish guidebook, but the information wasn’t clear and phone calls to the number they gave rang out. We added ourselves to the end of the row of cars arrayed next to some ‘no parking’ signs.

  ‘Should we wear the gumboots now?’ asked Julie.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I guessed the Biebrza wetlands weren’t called wetlands for nothing. I waddled into the crowd of a hundred or so people, milling around kiosks selling barbecued meat and scythe-themed trinkets.

  The grassy plains of the national park stretched out over the horizon, shoulder-high reeds blowing in a chilly wind. A cordoned-off section marked ‘Training Fields’ held a dozen scythe-wielding competitors, swishing to and fro with practised seriousness. They were dressed in practical attire for the job: loose-fitting T-shirts, track pants and gumboots. Most looked to be in their fifties or sixties, although the Slovakian representative bucked both trends; he was in his thirties, and dressed in a black Lycra one piece, with Slovakia emblazoned across the back.

  ‘So they’re the competitors, over there?’ Julie pointed at them.

  ‘I guess.’

  At one souvenir stall, a man was selling models of various birds and animals, the native wildlife that lived in these wetlands, perhaps. ‘So, what is the goal of the competition?’ I asked him. ‘I mean, is it just need to be fastest to do the scything?’ I mimed scything. As though I could really be talking about anything else.

  ‘Yes, you have to be fast, but you know, you also get points for making the line straight, making it deep enough without being too deep. It’s not just who is the fastest,’ he said. I noted the quotes for my article.

  Julie wandered up with a bowl of steaming stew. I peered into it.

  ‘Flaki. Stewed cow stomach,’ Julie said.

  ‘Eugh! How can you do that? I can’t even eat the herring!’ Poles adored their śledź – raw herring marinated in vinegar. Every time I’d tried it I’d gagged.

  ‘Oh, I love the raw herring. You just have to eat it with enough vodka.’

  There were a lot of things vodka was the answer to here.

  The beginning of the finals was announced, and we lined up along with a hundred or so other people. Orange tape strung at waist-height marked out twelve lanes in a pristine field of boggy marsh grass. We squelched over and took up a place at the edge. Two solid men with bellies the result of a lifetime of effort took up position on one side; on the other were a younger couple of men with black felt hats and embroidered braces.

  A gun went off, and the contestants came out, scythes swinging. The crowd around us yelled, and the competitors quickly settled into their rhythms. A folk band played a rousing tune. Grass flew left and right as the scythes swung, leaving in their wake a trail of neatly cut grass.

  ‘Dawaj, dawaj!’ the beer bellies yelled.

  ‘Dawaj, dawaj!’ I yelled.

  ‘Dawaj, dawaj!’ Julie joined in.

  The first of them came in ten minutes later, to rousing applause from the crowd and a crescendo of folk instruments. We kept clapping as the rest of the dozen finalists came over the finish line. Despite Mr Slovakia’s friction resistant outfit, he finished middle of the field.

  The crowd started dispersing, back to the stalls and kiosks. I looked out over the marshes.

  ‘Does it ever seem to you that the Poles want to keep anything that’s really unique about Poland a secret? They’ll let us foreigners have Krakow and Gdansk, but as for muddy marsh mowing, they keep that for themselves,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose I can tell you something now,’ Julie said, looking at me.

  So this is the part where she confessed she hadn’t really wanted to come, I thought.

  ‘I thought we would be doing the scything.’
>
  ‘You thought we’d be doing the scything? And you came anyway?’ I was pretty sure then that our potential friendship was more than just a case of common geographic origins. ‘So that’s why you brought the gumboots?’

  We stood up to our ankles in mud, in a boggy marsh in Poland, bent over laughing. Twelve neat rows cut through the grass lay to one side.

  We just managed to compose ourselves when she said, ‘I figured you would have told me if we’d had to bring our own scythes,’ setting us off again.

  Julie certainly had the right spirit of adventure for Poland. And for me. Thank God I’d joined the IWG and met her.

  ***

  Natalia, the sparky Polish girl from the language exchange group, had invited us – in four languages – to her place for a pre-Christmas gathering. Five of us were there: her, plus Tomek the other Pole, Elena the Russian, new recruit Klaus from Germany, and me.

  Even this many was a stretch in Natalia’s place. Once upon a time, the pre-war building in the centre of town must have been a grand residence. Now it had been broken up, and each room was a separate apartment. A kettle and microwave in one corner served as a kitchen, a computer doubled as a TV, and we perched on her fold-out couch, which was her bed when there weren’t visitors. Everything in Natalia’s place had more than one function. Suddenly IKEA made sense.

  Our second Christmas here. Halfway. The Christmas lights were twinkling in the streets, and the Christmas market had sprung up in Old Town. We had a fir tree and decorations in our apartment. But it didn’t make it feel like Christmas. Too dark. Too cold.

  The days when I was finding grass-cutting ceremonies in a Polish wetland with new friends or discovering mushrooms in far-flung villages, it felt like our precious time was racing by and a part of me wished I could press pause. But then there were days like today, when I had been invited to spend the evening having Christmas drinks with some new friends, and Tom said he’d used up his energy meeting ambassadors and heads of state and couldn’t be bothered coming. So I had to go on my own, and have everyone – again – ask when they would get to meet this husband of mine. Solidarity didn’t work both ways. Days like today, a part of me wished there was some way of hitting fast forward.

  Everyone had brought something Christmassy to eat, and Natalia’s table boasted a mix of Russian, Polish and German traditions. Fish salad, herring, sausages with potato salad, a bean stew. My Anglo-Saxon contribution was an attempt at fruitcake. British store Marks and Spencer now had brown sugar, Estonia had alerted me to a store in Wilanow that had maraschino cherries, I’d brought back some golden syrup from my last trip to the UK, and Shannon had brought me half a dozen different kinds of dried grape from Germany, where they also understood such things. Voila: with a little help from the sorority, fruitcake was achievable.

  I sat down next to Tomek on the fold-out, and pulled some papers out of my bag. I’d found a volunteering program at the Warsaw Uprising Museum, and I wanted some help with the application form. I knew I had to get in before the food came out. I’d lose the Poles at that point.

  ‘So this what I don’t understand, here we have narodowość,’ I said to Tomek. Nationality, it meant.

  ‘Australia,’ Tomek said.

  ‘Agreed. And here, obywatelstwo.’ Citizenship, it translated as.

  ‘Australia,’ Tomek said again.

  ‘Agreed. But what’s the difference?’

  ‘So, you have Australian citizenship. Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I have Australian passport,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes. And you have Australian nationality. Why?’

  ‘Because I have Australian passport.’

  ‘No.’

  I tried a hypothetical: ‘So, Tomek, you move to Australia and you live Australia for few years. Then you get Australian passport. Your obywatelstwo is Australia, right? And your narodowość is Australia.’

  He shook his head. ‘If I filled in this form in Australia, my obywatelstwo can be Australia, but my narodowość is always Polish. You can’t change your narodowość,’ he said. ‘Yes?’

  No, I thought, because forms in Australia didn’t have two spaces. This was about as clear to me as the locative case had been after Agnieszka’s lightning explanation that first day.

  ‘So it mean like, the country where you’re born?’

  Tomek rolled his eyes. I was obviously making this harder than it had to be as far as he was concerned. ‘No. You can have Polish narodowość and be born somewhere else. Like Germany or Ukraine,’ Tomek said.

  I’d established a lot of things this wasn’t about. I didn’t know what it was about. Something about a characteristic you had, regardless of where you lived, regardless of where you were born. If you were Polish, anyway.

  ‘Let’s eat!’ called Natalia. And with that announcement, just as I’d predicted, I’d lost his Polish interest. Just as well. At this rate, it was going to take months to get through this form.

  I filled my plate with as many goodies as I could carry and sat down next to Klaus, our German representative. He was here on a government exchange. He chatted about his week while I forked German potato salad into my mouth.

  ‘Why are we speaking in English today, Klaus?’ I asked.

  He sighed. ‘What’s the point in learning Polish?’ He reeled off a litany of frustrations about working with the Polish government research institute he’d been assigned to. How they didn’t tell him about meetings he needed to be at, how they would criticise every suggestion he made. He’d been reduced to just reading the newspaper at his desk some days. ‘I’m beginning to feel like they invited me just to show they don’t need me. It’s like they can’t point out quickly enough how bad everything is in Poland, until you give them suggestions, and then they can’t tell you quickly enough how everything’s fine and they don’t need your help.’

  ‘You know the joke, don’t you? A German who has no cows looks at his neighbour, who has one. “I wish I had a cow, too,” he says. A Russian who has no cows looks at his neighbour, with his one cow, and says, “I wish I had two cows.” A Pole who has no cows looks at his neighbour, with his cow, and says, “I wish my neighbour’s cow was dead.” ’

  At least that got a laugh out of him.

  ‘Tell them Russia is doing something more advanced than they are,’ I suggested. ‘No – even better, tell them Belarus is. That will make them listen to what you have to say.’

  ‘Jay,’ Natalia said to get my attention, ‘in Australia, do you really sing that song – “Waltzing Matilda”?’

  ‘Sure. Not every day, but …’

  ‘So let’s sing it! How does it start?’

  ‘ “Once a jolly swagman …” ’ I started, Natalia joined in in Polish, and we continued together until the end of the chorus, everyone clapping along.

  ‘But Natalia how do you know that song – in Polish?’

  ‘I’m sure you know some Polish folk tunes. Like this one,’ she started humming, and Tomek joined in the soulful lament. They switched to another one, in another minor key, for a different poignant refrain – as unknown to me as the last.

  ‘Natalia, you overestimate us,’ I said, when the second of the heartrending melodies had ended.

  ‘What is the Australian song about?’ Elena asked.

  ‘A man in the old days steal a sheep. He get caught, police kill him,’ I said.

  ‘Why does it sound so happy?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I said.

  ‘And what are the Polish songs about?’ Klaus asked.

  ‘The farmers are singing about how beautiful their women are and how good life is after the harvest,’ said Natalia.

  The farmers sounded suicidal with happiness.

  ‘But it’s Christmas, we should be singing Christmas songs,’ said Klaus.

  ‘OK, sing a German kerol,’ Elena said.

  ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht …’ Klaus’s deep voice rang out in the small apartment.

  ‘Dremlet vsyo, lish ne spit,�
�� Elena joined in.

  ‘A u żłobka, Matka Święta,’ sang Natalia and Tomek.

  Flakes of snow sailed down from the clouds, past Natalia’s windows.

  ‘Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace,’ we all sang, in our own languages, the simple tune reminding us, perhaps – in a tiny Polish room, sat on a fold-out couch – of what we had and what we shared.

  ZIMA – WINTER

  Between Christmas and the new year, Tom and I got away for a week in the Swiss Alps. Basing ourselves in a mountain retreat not far from Lac Leman, we skied each morning into France for a snack of hot chocolat and crèpes, and skied back into Switzerland for mulled wine and fondue. My excitement at crossing a border on a train was nothing compared to this! The slopes were better than anything we’d ever experienced, too, but they were unremarkable to the locals and we had them virtually to ourselves. It was certainly more relaxing than last Christmas, spent dealing with Poznan and Tom’s parents. Or, for that matter, our mid-summer’s dash over the continent.

  We returned to Warsaw to find that winter had seized the city with even greater enthusiasm than last year. Temperatures were parked in the mid-twenties. Minus, that is, and that was the maximums. So when Agnieszka (the benevolent’s) parents Witek (the second) and Magda invited us to visit their home just north of Warsaw near the Lomianki forest, it was a struggle to rustle up the enthusiasm to leave the house. Especially when we were told to rug up, which seemed to indicate that we would be doing something outside, which seemed ill-advised.

  They greeted us at their door, and we divested ourselves of several kilos of wool and down before entering their home. I accepted Magda’s offer of coffee, although I passed on the homemade cherry liqueur. Ten in the morning was a bit early for me to engage with something that was forty percent alcohol. Although Witek’s ninety-seven-year-old mother appeared, greeted everyone, and downed hers in one.