Vodka and Apple Juice

by Jay Martin

  I didn’t resist, though, when Magda passed around a plate of makowiec, a poppy-seed cake.

  ‘Foreigners don’t eat our makowiec, Magda,’ Witek’s mother said.

  I assured her I loved the Polish cake. The older lady looked skeptical.

  Witek’s job with a Polish chemical company had taken them out of Poland for most of the 1980s, and their house was filled with paintings, rugs, ceramics and knickknacks from their time away, spent in places like Yugoslavia, Italy and Austria. They showed us a handful of them, telling us the story behind each; where they’d bought it, what it meant to them. Nothing borrowed from Artbank here.

  Now they lived in this cottage by a forest, filled with mementos from a life spent all over the world, their children and grandchildren just down the street – except for one in Australia, should they want to go on a holiday. Although doing so was no mean feat due to the stringent Australian visa requirements for Poles – Agnieszka had told us about the process they’d had to endure to get permission to visit her in Australia, revolving around proving they weren’t planning to stay. Seeing their life here, the fear on Australia’s part seemed ridiculous.

  ‘Did you read the paper today?’ Witek’s mother asked all of us, as we sat around a large kitchen table, before she launched into a commentary on some recent political events. I knew from Agnieszka that the old woman had grown up in Krakow under German occupation, and had brought up her three children by herself after her husband was killed in the war. The rest I could see for myself: how at ninety-seven, she was still so much a part of this family, living among her children, grandchildren, and even some great-grandchildren. I tried to imagine all of the things she’d seen in her life. How today’s world looked though her eyes.

  ‘You still read the paper, madam?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh yes, every day. I vote, so it’s important to keep up with what’s going on,’ she said.

  ‘And so is that your secret? To be very … umm … intelligent when you are old? To read the newspaper every day?’ I said.

  ‘Oh no. The key is … Sudoku!’ Magda, Witek and I laughed. Tom laughed a moment later, after I’d translated.

  Magda announced that it was time to leave and started shepherding us to the door.

  ‘Perhaps you can come and visit to us,’ I said to the grandmother, taking our leave. ‘Although, we live on the sixth floor and there is no lift, you would have to take the stairs.’ Both lies, told in jest.

  ‘I will do what needs to be done,’ the old lady said.

  We re-layered into our down coats, scarves, beanies and mittens in preparation for the ten-metre walk to the car. The bundles of blankets and thermoses of coffee I could see made me suspect Magda and Witek doubted we would understand what ‘rugging up’ meant.

  Once we’d taken off, Magda turned around to face us. ‘So now I can tell you, we are going sledging!’ She bubbled with excitement. ‘What is wrong, you don’t like sledging?’ Her smile faltered when we didn’t respond.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, it’s not that, Magda, we just don’t know what sledging –’

  Which is the point we pulled up at the forest entrance, and saw the sturdy pony waiting for us, seemingly unfazed by the snow reaching up his legs and the chill air that turned his every breath into a frosty plume. Behind him, an open-topped sleigh just big enough for two Australians and two Poles.

  I leapt out of the car and started jumping up and down on the crunchy snow. Partly from excitement, and partly to keep warm.

  The three others got into the back of the sled, while I sat up front with the driver. Witek had piled the blankets he’d brought on top of us all, tucking us in at the edges. A tap of the driver’s reins on the pony’s snowy bum and we were off.

  We slid along a snowy road spread out before us, nestled under our blankets. Every twig of fir, pine, and birch of the forest was heavy with white; there wasn’t a breath of wind to dislodge it. A couple glided by on cross-country skis, two men marched past on snowshoes, a girl on a horse trotted by. On the one hand, I was astounded to find anyone out on a day like today. On the other, if you didn’t get out and do something when the weather was like this, it was going to be a long winter.

  I turned to the driver. ‘It beautiful here. I never see anything like this before in whole world! Are there animals here?’ Perhaps they were tucked under the blanket of snow, like we were under ours of wool.

  He listed the ones that lived here – wild pigs, deer, hares, foxes. I was glad for all the children’s stories I’d read that featured the vocabulary of this forest.

  Behind us, Magda was translating our conversation for Tom. ‘He says there are hares, foxes … ryś … I don’t know this in English.’

  The woman in The Zookeeper’s Wife, one of the first books we’d read for book club, had named her son Ryszard, after her favourite animal.

  ‘Lynx,’ I said. I knew the word in two languages, although I didn’t know what one actually looked like.

  The driver pointed out some tracks to me. ‘That one is a hare. And that one is deer. See?’ Now that he pointed them out, I saw that they were all around us. ‘We will try to look for elk.’

  ‘Elk? But aren’t they …’ I paused over the word I didn’t know, ‘aren’t they sleeping now?’

  ‘No, they don’t winter sleep,’ he replied. Winter sleep. Yes. Perfect.

  Our driver led us down this path and that. He operated at pony pace.

  ‘Do you no get lost ever in forest?’ I asked him.

  He told me how he’d lived here all his life. ‘You know, in the war, the partisans hid there.’ He pointed at a gully. ‘I used to bring them food and supplies sometimes.’ I imagined him, looking around, and seeing not this forest that I saw, but one with hungry, freezing soldiers, hidden behind rocks.

  ‘And hide here against Russians, too?’ I asked.

  ‘Soviets, not Russians,’ he said. ‘I have plenty of Russian friends. It’s the Soviets that were the problem.’

  ‘Yes. Russian also victims of Soviets,’ I agreed.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, the Russians also suffered. Not as much as the Poles, of course.’

  Of course.

  Our driver pulled the pony to a halt and Magda unpacked a thermos, pouring out cups of hot, sweet coffee for us all.

  ‘Witek, Magda, can I ask you something?’ I said, thinking about the houseful of items they’d collected during their years away. ‘Did you ever feel guilty about having escaped communism by going abroad, when things at home were so hard?’

  ‘But were they hard?’ Witek asked.

  ‘But there was nothing to buy in the shops, wasn’t there?’ As Harry and Jagoda and Basia had all agreed, as Svetlana had told me of her grandmother in Russia.

  ‘Nothing in the shops, no, but people always had things on their tables. You didn’t buy things then. You organised them. Especially in the country. You could make liquor – like we still do – and pickle vegetables and so on, and swap them with people who had other things. There was the life we were supposed to live, and then there was the one we did live. They were very different things,’ Witek said.

  Was communism why Poles were so pragmatic, or was it because Poles were pragmatic that they survived communism?

  Madga unwrapped a bar of dark chocolate and passed out squares. Witek opened a hipflask of his cherry liquor, which he’d brought along. I took a draft of the sweet liquid this time. A toasty glow grew from my stomach, warming every muscle and every bone from the inside out.

  The driver flicked his reins and pointed our pony for home. ‘So, why do you speak Polish?’ he asked me.

  ‘Well, I live here …’

  He looked like he was considering this. ‘You know, I didn’t realise a foreigner would ever bother to learn Polish,’ he said. ‘It’s nice. If you didn’t, what would we do? Just sit here and not talk to each other? Next time you do this, though, you should do it with an ognisko,’ he said.

  ‘Ognisko? What is that?’

&nbs
p; ‘You stop and collect some wood and you light a big fire. You can cook something if you want. It’s really nice. If you don’t have the ognisko fire, there’s nothing so interesting here.’

  I would never see this world through his eyes. And he would never see it through mine.

  ***

  A few days later, we welcomed our new house guest. We now had a cat. A loan cat, technically. Anthea had called out of the blue and asked if I could take him for four months. Her husband had bought him for their daughter, but then they’d found out a few days later work was transferring him to Malaysia. ‘How great!’ I’d said, visions of gin and tonics on tropical islands coming to mind when she’d told me.

  Except that Anthea wasn’t going.

  ‘I’ve had enough. I’m going home,’ she said. I remembered how she’d argued that them going home wouldn’t ‘make sense’. So she’d go to Dublin and live in their two-storey house, he’d go to Malaysia and pay for it. Sensible in the expat world.

  The kitten, however, was too young to have the shots he needed to clear quarantine and leave the continent. Anthea had arrived a few days later with a grey ball of fur called Bardzo. They’d wanted to give it a name that said something about their relationship, she explained. Liebe, Amour, Amore, they’d contemplated, running through European versions of the word ‘love’. But they’d wanted a Polish angle as well. Amore sounds like ‘more’, which they translated into Polish as Bardzo. Actually, bardzo meant ‘very’. Tomek and Natalia collapsed with laughter when I told them about the new addition to our family – a cat called Very. I never told Anthea. I hoped the mistranslation wasn’t responsible for the separation.

  So I was at home with the plumber, the cleaner, and a newly acquired fluff ball, when Shannon dropped round for a cuppa. I’d offered to go to her place, but she was trying out a series of nannies for now three-month-old Fee. I suspected our apartment was a good distance for a test run – for the nanny, and for Shannon. I found chocolate biscuits for both of us and put the kettle on. Our new houseguest, Very, hid under the sofa. I hoped all this commotion wasn’t going to cause him to do anything undiplomatic under there.

  The plumber came out from the bathroom. ‘Do you have a shshshsh?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry, one more time please?’ I asked.

  ‘A shshshsh! A shshshsh!’ he repeated the word I didn’t know twice more, the volume escalating with each shhh. I was comforted to find it wasn’t just English speakers who did that. But I may as well have been trying to interpret the static of a wrongly tuned TV set.

  ‘Sir!’ I mounted my hands firmly on my hips. ‘I am trying. But I do not know that word mean! It not help you just to keep saying it louder! You must to explain it different!’

  He made a semi-circular shape with his hands. ‘Like a … a dish,’ he said, using a word I knew.

  I indicated he should follow me into the kitchen, where I offered him a stainless steel mixing bowl.

  ‘Yes, that one will be perfect,’ he said.

  I sat back on the couch, and reached over for a biscuit.

  ‘You know you’ll never win an argument against a Pole.’ Shannon dipped her biscuit in her tea.

  ‘I don’t think they call it arguing. I think they just call it communicating.’

  ‘They seem to be getting along OK.’ Shannon pointed to the plumber and my cleaner, Pani Henryka, who were chatting in the guest bathroom, visible from our position on the couch. Despite the fact that she had made my bed and handwashed my jumpers for a year and a half, I couldn’t bring myself to refer to her as anything but the formal pani, or ‘madam’.

  ‘That’s because they’ve got a common enemy – they’re both complaining about how poorly built the apartment building is.’ A conversation between two Poles who didn’t know each other always went the same way – I could attest, after extensive research in supermarkets, chemists, and buses. First, they would find something they could both complain about. How long something was taking, the traffic, how it was too hot or too cold – or if it was nice, then how it surely would be terrible tomorrow. Eventually, they would find something to disagree about, and then they would fight about that for a while. They’d end up coming round when they found something else they could agree to complain about. Usually that their children never visited them. The art of Polish conversation in one easy lesson. ‘They’ll probably start on me soon,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Pani Henryka thinks I’m much of a wife.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘She told me.’ Pani Henryka had given me a long lecture on how Tom would find himself a Polish girl if I kept going away and leaving him to fend for himself. ‘Yes, Pani Henryka,’ I’d replied.

  ‘You know, I thought I would have more Polish friends here,’ Shannon said. ‘It’s harder than you think, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is. But if you think about it, would we be friends with diplomats at home? Or would we invest in people who are sticking around? It’s like we had this Polish girl who wanted to join our IWG book club – ’

  Shannon gasped. ‘You joined the IWG?’

  I felt like I’d being caught stealing from the church collection plate. ‘Oh yeah. I wasn’t going to tell you that. I just thought I might meet some interesting people there. Or some people, full stop. It was pretty lonely here at first. I was pretty lonely here at first.’

  ‘Really? You always seemed so busy. Always off doing something.’

  ‘I have been. But I’ve actually found it hard, not working. And you just always seemed to be getting on with your studies, and now Fee of course …’

  ‘How interesting do you think accounting is? Never mind a three-month-old.’ She shook her head. ‘Why have we never talked about this before?’

  ‘I guess I’d been looking forward to this for so long that I didn’t want to admit that it’s turned out to be harder than I expected. It seems ungrateful.’

  ‘When so many people would love to be in our position …’

  ‘Exactly. And so much of it is great. But meeting all these new people all the time … it comes easily to Tom. But not so much to me. And Tom doesn’t want to hear me complain about it anymore.’ I took another biscuit.

  So did Shannon. ‘Well, complain to me anytime. I don’t know if I can help, but I’ll always listen.’

  ‘Thanks, Shannon.’ Even hearing that helped.

  ‘So you joined the IWG book club,’ she smiled and shook her head, ‘and a Polish girl wanted to join …’

  ‘Yes. She wanted to join to improve her English. And there was an outcry. “Why does a Polish girl need to join a book club about Poland?” and so on. But she’s ended up bringing a completely different perspective to it. Did you ever hear of the book Snow White and Russian Red?’

  Shannon shook her head.

  ‘It’s by a young girl called Dorota Maslowska. She wrote it when she was eighteen, when she was studying for her final exams, apparently. A nihilistic tale about Polish post-communist youth.’

  ‘Sounds interesting.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. It’s impenetrable. They made a film of it – it’s no better. But the Polish girl, Magda, read it in Polish, and said to us, “Isn’t it funny?” and we all said, “No, it isn’t.” And she said that in Polish it’s hilarious. I have no idea why.’

  The sounds of a mounting row erupted from the bathroom. ‘And you were there for communism and all!’ Pani Henryka yelled at the plumber, which was obviously old Polish people talk for ‘and you should know better’. She yanked her vacuum out of there.

  They’d reached Stage Two.

  Shannon finished her tea. Anglo-Saxons drink a lot of tea, apparently. Tomek could not understand it.

  ‘Hey, I’m doing a commissary run later. Do you need anything?’ I said. The US Embassy had a shop in their building that stocked everything an American away from home would want, directly imported from the US. Dozens of types of breakfast cereals, bread and cakes chock full of preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup, low-fat
everything, steak from American cows – even American brands of dog food, so their pets could do their bit for the American economy. As long as you were with an embassy, you could use it. You could even pay in US dollars. There wasn’t much I hadn’t found in Warsaw these days, but there were a few things that weren’t available elsewhere – thanks to the Commmissary, no longer was Poland a land without vegetarian sausages for me.

  ‘Oh, I do need some jalapeno chillies,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. No tinned soup today?’

  ‘No thanks. Why hasn’t tinned soup made it to Poland anyway?’

  ‘No idea,’ I said. ‘You know what there is in Poland that I’m going to miss when I leave, though? Boil-in-a-bag rice.’ Parcooked rice that came in pre-sealed perforated plastic bags. You put them into boiling water and ten minutes later, you had perfectly cooked rice. I’d never seen anything like it. ‘Do you have that in Canada?’

  ‘Of course! It is the twenty-first century in Canada, you know! Even if it’s not in Australia.’

  The plumber came out and told me the shower was fixed. ‘One twenty with a receipt, one hundred gotówką – for cash,’ he said. It was good to know some things were the same wherever you went. I handed him a note from my wallet, thanked him, and saw him out.

  Pani Henryka came out, holding a brand new white-topped mop. She’d asked me to replace our old one. This had been my third attempt.

  ‘This is not the right kind of mop.’ The mop head flopped about like a stick figure with a shock of white hair.

  ‘What kind of mop you want, Pani Henryka?’

  ‘A normal one!’ She rolled her eyes and throttled the mop some more.

  ‘Pani Henryka, perhaps best thing you buy right kind mop, I pay you,’ I said.

  She pursed her lips and stormed off down the corridor. ‘How am I supposed to mop with this?’ she grumbled, shaking her moppy victim as she went. Bardzo was still under the sofa. I didn’t blame him.

  ‘Actually,’ Shannon said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a walk. Shall we go to the commissary together?’

  ‘No, I’ll be …’ I stopped. If you treat people like you’ll only know them a short time, you probably will. ‘You know what, some company would be lovely. Let’s do that. Got time for another cup first?’