Vodka and Apple Juice

by Jay Martin

  ‘Of course.’

  I put the czajnik on again.

  ***

  Having cleared the hurdle of filling in the form, the Warsaw Uprising Museum’s volunteer program accepted me and I reported for the first meeting with my new supervisor, Gosia. Gosia was a middle-aged woman with mousey blonde hair who, at first impressions, didn’t seem much given to emotion. Except where the heroes of the Uprising were concerned, that was. My first day, she showed me some archival footage from the Uprising – the sixty-three day effort by the Polish Home Army, or underground resistance forces, to liberate the city from its Nazi occupiers. I recognised the former telecommunications building, known as PAST from the acronym of its name in Polish. Grainy footage showed Nazi hand-thrown grenades flying into one of its windows. There was now an excellent restaurant there. Gosia and I sat in silence, watching people running from falling bombs and flying bullets, across a square I walked through almost every day. Women bandaged the wounded in a makeshift hospital in what looked like one of the buildings that was now the university; priests buried the dead in a courtyard, perhaps one like where makeshift bars now popped up.

  She told me something of the footage’s history – that it was mainly because of Americans that it still existed. How, after the war, even talking about the Uprising was banned, and the communists destroyed many of the records that stayed in the country. Most of what survived only did so because it was smuggled out of the country, often to the US. Some of it was still turning up now, she told me – the old insurgents died and their grandchildren found it in dusty suitcases in attics. Her eyes never left the grey and white images.

  ‘I’m sure the Americans would have been proud to know they were playing a part in thwarting their Cold War enemies, even an unwitting one,’ was what I would have liked to say.

  ‘Very interesting that story,’ was what my Polish allowed.

  I could understand almost everything people said to me now. I had a near native ability to upset storekeepers by telling them I had no change. It was taking the next step – expressing something more complicated than immediate needs and wants – that was a struggle. I hoped interacting with Polish people in an office environment would help get me to that next level. And here was my opportunity. I ran my next sentence over in my mind a few times – how often I would come and when – before trying it out. ‘So, I think I come here one morning every week, three hours, maybe Thursday, but day up to you is OK.’ It was more complicated than most things I had the opportunity to talk about during the day, and I was pleased to have been able to express my flexibility if not perfectly, then clearly. I waited for her to accept my generous offer.

  ‘Volunteers have to work at least six hours per week,’ she said. ‘It’s in your agreement.’

  The agreement I had signed without reading it because of the complicated legal Polish. ‘I no reading …’ When I didn’t have time to rehearse – and under pressure to boot – my Polish disintegrated like the PAST building under fire. If only I could run across the square and duck for cover.

  She closed the footage and turned her chair away from me.

  An email formed in my mind.

  Dear Gosia, sorry I decide I not able to come to be volunteer for you. It turn out I be very busy and not able to commit necessary time, but thank you for show me film of Warsaw Uprising, very interesting that film, appreciate it very much.

  I hit the mental delete button. I wasn’t going to give in that easily. I had the reputation of the Anglo-Saxon race – or was that races? – to uphold.

  Instead, I applied myself to the task I’d been given: to look through every copy of the Biuletyn Informacyjny – the daily news bulletins that the insurgents had produced, to find any references to films or photographs that would help date the other footage the museum had. At least that was the task as best as I’d understood it when Gosia had explained it to me in her machine-gun Polish. I was too sick of asking for clarification all the time. While I still hadn’t tackled a whole book, I could read Polish newspapers almost as fluently as I could read English ones these days, even when they dealt with fairly technical political or economic subjects. So as long as I had understood what I had to do, I thought I was capable of it. I reported every Thursday for three hours (having extracted special dispensation), and did what I thought I was supposed to be doing.

  The Uprising was only supposed to last a matter of days. That’s all the Poles imagined it would take for the Soviets, who they knew were about to reach the Praga side of the river, to join their efforts to defeat Nazi Germany. Without arousing the suspicions of the occupiers, the Poles had managed to stash away weapons, food and other supplies – including printing presses, ink, and photographic film. Through an underground information network, the men and women, girls and boys of the Uprising launched an all-out assault on the unsuspecting enemy. All they had to do was hold out until the Red Army joined in. Using the stolen ink and hidden presses, they produced daily bulletins to keep themselves informed of what was happening. A double-sided A3 sheet, put together and distributed through a city under siege. Starting at the beginning, I read every one, cover to cover.

  There was another staff member in the office, Agata, with thick-rimmed glasses, who looked like she was not long out of university. When Gosia left our room, I would turn my seat around towards Agata and say, ‘Aga, I have a question,’ before launching into the things I’d saved up regarding the technicalities of the Uprising I had come across and not understood. ‘What is a “cow bomb”?’, ‘What is a “Spanish horse”?’ ‘What is “W hour”?’ Perhaps they weren’t stupid questions. But I was fed up with feeling stupid for not knowing that a Spanish horse was a particular kind of barricade made of crossed timber, W hour was the exact moment – seventeen hundred hours on the first of August, 1944 – that the Uprising broke out, or that a cow bomb made a mooing sound as it fell, and was especially dangerous because it exploded into thousands of tiny pieces on impact. Not things that would help me in my day-to-day interactions with Poland, I supposed, but all things I needed to know to understand the bulletins. Agata also told me a host of other things I would never have known without her. Like that all the insurgents used code names so they couldn’t betray each other. Pawel was known as Witek. Tomek was known as Wladek. Agnieszka was known as Ewa. I wondered if it had anything to do with how Poles introduced themselves now. As though anything more than a first name were still a state secret.

  The main streets and features of the Old Town, where the battle was principally fought, I knew – the restaurants and shops that were there now, anyway. But Agata could tell me what shops and restaurants were there seventy years ago.

  ‘That street used to go through from here to here,’ she’d explain. ‘It ended at the monument then – there used to be an old warehouse there, and a brewery. They used the basement as an ammunition store. Now it ends here,’ she’d point at the Google Maps page I’d been poring over, trying to understand where something had been. It was as though she’d seen both with her own eyes.

  ‘I don’t even know that word in English. Maybe we don’t even have a term for that,’ I joked to her once.

  ‘But you must. England was also at war,’ she’d said.

  Maybe, but that didn’t mean the language of war had made it to me in Australia.

  A range of other people came and went from the office over the weeks. They didn’t usually introduce themselves to the volunteer in the corner. Perhaps their identities were still classified. And after each had passed my desk in the corridor a number of times, not greeting me, it seemed too late to introduce myself. A woman came in – from another department, maybe? – and offered Agata a piece of cake from a platter. She walked past me with the full plate, into the next room.

  ‘What are Polish people like?’ Aga took her turn at asking me once.

  ‘I find it difficult to … understand them, sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, the language barrier must be very difficult for you.’
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  When Gosia’s footsteps approached, our chatting would stop.

  ‘Did you find anything yet?’ she’d ask me, passing by my desk.

  I’d shake my head, and go back to the bulletins.

  The early editions were full of optimism. The progress of peace talks in Western Europe, how far the Russians were thought to have gotten, updates from the government-in-exile in the UK. They were hopeful, chatty even. As though it would be just a matter of time before they won. Alongside the news, they painted a picture of life in the Uprising. Details of a blood drive, calls for workers to staff various health or sanitation posts, even a lost-and-found section. ‘One woman’s purse, brown leather. Apply to Ewa at …’ I wondered what Ewa’s real name had been.

  I’d pause from reading the files every so often and flick through the thousands of photos in the museum’s electronic system. Images of the men and women and children who were writing the articles, and those about whom they were written. I tried to imagine them, digging the trenches and building the Spanish horses, throwing home-made explosives, staffing the health clinics, and losing their brown leather purses. I’d look up Wikipedia, to fill in other gaps. It told me that Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler had issued a directive at the time that Polish children not be educated above grade four, with teaching to be limited to counting to five hundred only, and writing to be of their names only. Poles were supposed to end up the slaves of the occupying Germans, what was the point of more education?

  How had I never known any of this?

  ‘Aga, I have a question,’ I said once, when Gosia stepped out to a meeting. Aga turned her chair so we could chat over the few metres that separated our desks. ‘In Czas Honoru, all the Nazi soldiers living in Warsaw spoke Polish. In real would they speak Polish, or is that just for the TV?’ Czas Honoru, or Days of Honour in English – was one of Tom’s and my favourite Polish TV series. It was a period drama set in Warsaw during the war – a cross between documentary and soap opera.

  ‘Some would just be for TV, but some of them would have spoken Polish. The ones who’d been here for a long time, or if they grew up near the border.’

  ‘Do you watch that show?’ I said. Aga held her hands up at the room full of photos, films and images of the war around her. I figured she was telling me she had enough of it in her daily life. ‘I like the actor in it very much … Bronek. You know him?’ I quickly googled him to find out his real name. ‘Maciej Zakoscielny?’ I said, wondering if she’d heard of him.

  From her dreamy-eyed response, she clearly had. ‘Polish Brad Pitt,’ she said.

  ‘Mmm. Although Bronek much better name than Maciej. Bronek strong, like man. Very … make decision.’ The name came from the word ‘defend’, and sounded like the word for weapon. ‘Maciej too … soft. Too …’ I wrinkled my nose at my Bronek’s real name. Exaggerated facial features could fill vocabulary gaps, I had learned.

  Gosia’s footsteps fell on the stairs and Aga and I turned back to our computers.

  The insurgents waited in vain. While the British they’d expected support from didn’t come. While the Soviets massed on the right bank of the river, not to help, but to plot against Poland. They were planning to invade, and their first task would have been to identify – and eliminate – those with the courage, intelligence and determination to rise up against an occupying force. It was far more efficient to allow the Nazis to do it for them. In the war I’d known about, there were two sides: those allied with the Nazis, and those allied against the Nazis. In the Polish war, there were three: those plotting against Poland on the Nazi side, those plotting against Poland on the Soviet side, and Poland, in the middle. All alone.

  As I read further, the character of the bulletins started to change. The days they expected the siege to last turned into weeks, and then months. I felt how tired they got. How worn down and hungry. And, as autumn arrived, how cold. The ‘public interest’ stories grew rarer. There was no more reporting of missing wallets, or reminders to save electricity. It was just the facts. No longer was there the sense that it would just be a matter of time. It had become a question of how much longer they could last.

  I flicked through some more of the thousands of photographs on file. The neighbourhood I lived in, when the pockmarks many buildings still bore today were fresh. A couple of young girls, their hair elaborately styled, smiling for the camera. They used sugar syrup for hair product, Aga told me. A baby, being bathed in a silver bowl, in a candlelit basement. Did she make it? Is that baby now one of the babcias who pushes her own grandchildren in prams near our apartment? Or was that her in another photo, being buried in a makeshift grave in a courtyard?

  Another shift over, I donned the layers I’d need to brave the late winter weather outside. ‘Gosia, I find this.’ I held out a copy of one of the articles over her desk. She looked up from her computer. ‘It say about screening for film – talking about the blow up of the PAST building on Zielna Street – where building was that time then. Say that happen two days before, must be right date, because look, this photo we know was that campaign, and that already we know date from here.’ I’d cross-referenced it with other documents and photographic resources.

  She seized it from my hand, the smile on her face growing as she scanned it. ‘But … that’s great! Really excellent!’

  I glowed.

  ‘And all along I thought you didn’t know what you were doing!’ she said.

  I walked out of the office. A chilling wind whipped wet, icy flakes into my face. I pulled my beanie down, and wrapped my scarf another time around my mouth and nose, and closed my eyes. In case it was actually possible for eyeballs to freeze.

  PRZEDWIOSNIE – PRE-SPRING

  I’d had a couple of free hours after book club, so I’d taken myself to Tarabuk to read the newspaper and eat a hot chocolate. Hot chocolate in Poland was more like mousse. Thick, rich, foamy. And Tarabuk was one of my favourite cafés to eat it at – the sort of place I had never thought I would find in Warsaw. Steamy Soviet canteens that smelled of cheap instant coffee and warm liver, yes. Cafés with comfy, mismatched sofas, fresh lemon and ginger tea, vegan quiche and students poring over Chinese textbooks – like this one, like any number of cafés in this district by the University of Warsaw Library – no. Don’t get me wrong: I’d found some of the first kind, too, and poked my head through the curtains. I’d never braved one, though. There was such a thing as too much authenticity.

  It won’t always be this way, pronounced a slogan, painted in bright blue, on one of the walls. I didn’t know what that meant to these young Poles, focused on their future and buying lattes with a vanilla shot for twelve zloty a time, expensive even by Australian standards. Although I knew these days of reading Polish literature over steamy chocolate soup while snow collapsed outside were nothing like any other part of my life was likely to be.

  A check of my phone made me realise it was dark and late, not just dark and early as I’d thought, and Tom was due home soon. If I didn’t race, there would be nothing for him to eat. And I couldn’t be bothered with the fight.

  I threw the paper in my bag, poured myself into my knee-length down jacket, scarf, beanie and gloves, and raced out into the street. I had so little to do, yet it habitually took the whole day. Time was like money: you were always just a little short of it, no matter how much you had. I would have accomplished everything I had to do at home in a fraction of the time it took me here. But when I had all day … it took all day. Even I didn’t really know how. But I knew Tom’s patience for vague excuses about how ‘time had gotten away from me’ had run out.

  Despite my panicked rush, I beat Tom home by a couple of hours. He’d been in Katowice for the day with a business delegation and his train back had been delayed. It was nearly ten when I heard his key in the door. I quickly switched my favourite Polish soap opera – M jak Miłość (L is for Love) – off. He came in and collapsed on the couch. It was twenty-two degrees – as always – in our apartment, but he didn’t even tak
e his winter gear off. His briefcase fell beside him. Very stuck his head out from under the couch and sniffed its edges before disappearing under the couch again.

  Tom’s skin was so pale. There were bags under his closed eyes. His cheeks were puffy. Signs of a life long on free lunches and short on exercise.

  ‘Dinner?’ I said.

  He opened his eyes and I helped him get undressed. He’d left the house at four thirty that morning to get the train down. I hung his outside clothes in the wardrobe, while he changed out of his suit.

  He slumped at the table. I presented him with the meal I’d cooked. When I’d eaten it, it had been nice. Although that had been several hours ago. I poured two glasses of wine and put one in front of him.

  ‘I had book club today,’ I said, filling the silence like I’d filled his glass. ‘We watched a film, called Miś – Teddy Bear. We sometimes do a film instead of reading a book in winter. It’s easier in this weather.’

  ‘Since you couldn’t possibly manage to read a book when it’s cold.’

  I took a swig from my wine glass. ‘It’s by the director Stanislaw Bareja. Made in communist times, but a parody of communism, playing on how ridiculous it was. There’s a scene where some people are trying to get into the airport, but they don’t have a pass, so the security guard won’t let them through. But he’ll sell them a counterfeit pass, and then let them through with that. And in another scene, a woman wants to buy meat, and the butcher doesn’t have any, but he suggests she try the pharmacy, since they have meat at the moment, so she goes to the chemist and gets her sausages.’

  ‘Did it have a bunch of people in it who have done nothing except demand things from me all day?’

  His glass was getting empty. I filled it. ‘So what was Katowice like?’ Katowice was the kind of Polish town people usually went through, not to. Although you might stop if taking black-and-white photos of post-industrial wastelands was your thing.