by Jay Martin
‘Australia,’ I said.
‘Australian dollars! Good rate! No commission!’
We escaped up the hall’s tower, and basked in the uninterrupted views over the city’s red-tiled roofs and the world-famous Prague Castle, our next destination. Even in the dead of the off-season, the square was full of tourists taking photos of the famous astronomical clock, the old town facades, the cobblestone streets. So many of them would have been planning this for so long – just like I’d planned and saved for that first trip to Europe. And for every one of them here, there were surely hundreds more who would dream of it their whole lives, but never make it. And for the next eighteen months, if I wanted to come to Prague, all I had to do was get up in the morning. I was living other people’s dreams. I was living mine, for that matter. In some ways, anyway.
We descended and started walking towards the castle. One of the book-club women had given me a few suggestions for dinner places. Tom had to be back in Warsaw tomorrow so he only had one day to see the highlights of this magical city. I was staying on a few more days, catching a bus back via some villages to the south. I tried taking his hand, but my hand was too cold outside my pocket, even with gloves on. I put it back inside my coat.
‘Tom,’ I nearly stopped there. Stifling my self was becoming second nature. I decided to press on. ‘Do we need to talk?’
‘Not now.’
I’d tried to raise things – how things were getting between us – a few times. I always hit the same wall. When we were angry with each other, we couldn’t be rational. And when things were calmer, like now, neither of us wanted to ruin it. He may have been paid to deal with international conflicts. But his training didn’t extend to the domestic sphere.
‘It’s just … It’s harder than I thought it would be. Not working. For me,’ I said. Maybe if I made it about me I might be able to get some traction.
‘You turned down a perfectly good job.’ A blunter response than I’d hoped for.
‘What about getting some exercise? That might be good for you. Improve your energy. Your … mood. You could come to yoga classes with me.’
He stopped, held his arms out in front of him, palms to the sky, and closed his eyes. ‘Ommmmm.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘Nope, nothing. But you can’t say I didn’t try.’ He started walking again.
I mashed my irritation at his belittlement of our problems – and my feelings – further down.
‘Perhaps there are some things we could give up – or at least cut down on. It’s great meeting all these new people …’ Having failed with making it about me, and about him, I tried blaming an external party – his work commitments.
‘It’s tiring, though, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is.’ I remembered how enamoured I’d been with Indonesian National Day. A year and a half later, I’d discovered the object of my adoration left its dirty laundry strewn over the floor, never put the top on the toothpaste and couldn’t be roused from televised football. ‘What if we tried to cut down on that?’ I said.
‘Good idea.’ OK, finally we were on the same page.
‘Hello! Souvenirs? Where you from?’ The touts confirmed we were on the tourist track.
‘I tell you what, I’m appreciating our little Warsaw more after being here. I’ll take our own little town square with no Americans, no pushy trinket sellers and no crowds any day.’ I turned to the tout. ‘Z Polski,’ I said. He frowned and disappeared inside his shop, muttering something under his breath.
‘I think you found the secret to getting rid of the pesky shopkeepers,’ Tom said.
Yes, we were making progress on a number of fronts. If saying you weren’t Australian didn’t work, tell them you were Polish.
‘OK, let’s head back and have a quick nap at the hotel,’ he said.
‘Aren’t we going to the castle?’
‘No time now. We’ve got dinner at six with the Asia Pacific Division of the Czech foreign ministry,’ he said.
‘Oh. It’s just that you didn’t …’
‘Didn’t what?’ There was a warning in his tone.
‘Nothing.’
We walked back toward the hotel, more grievances against each other lodged.
WIOSNA – SPRING
On a foggy Saturday morning in April, ninety-six of Poland’s most eminent figures were travelling eastwards in a Polish Air Force Tupolev. The President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, and his wife Maria, military chiefs of staff for Poland’s army, air force and navy, its most senior central banker, head of the National Security Bureau, former President of Poland in exile, its Deputy Foreign Minister, the head of its Olympic Committee, some eighteen members of parliament, senior clergy. Together with air crew, interpreters and media, they were on their way to a memorial service for Polish army officers who had been killed during World War Two by Soviet forces in a town called Katyn, in a Russian forest. Relatives and descendants of those massacred were also on board.
The plane crashed en route. Every one of them was killed.
Television newsreaders cried as they read the headlines. Tom and I sat in our lounge room, in our dressing gowns, and we cried too.
We’d been planning to have lunch in Old Town with a few friends. We cancelled. It didn’t seem right.
On Sunday we went to the Presidential Palace. Overnight a sea of fist-sized glass jars had appeared in red, orange and white, a tiny flame burning in each. They stretched for hundreds of metres. I watched as fathers took their sons’ hands and helped them light them, showing them how to make this mark of respect. Tom and I walked along, holding hands. Each candle was so tiny, but together the heat they produced more than countered the chill of the day.
Monday and Tuesday, I attended the crisis meetings at the embassy. Again it was all hands on deck, including mine. Almost all, anyway.
‘You’ve got it all under control, I take it?’ the Ambassador called Tom to ask.
‘Of course,’ he replied.
Tom returned from one of the emergency briefing sessions that had been set up by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was relaying the hazy details of the funeral arrangements that had emerged so far to me and the other embassy staff: it would be on the coming Sunday, in Krakow, and we had confirmed that our Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, would represent Australia. One of the ambassadors at the briefing had berated the organiser for not being able to provide them with straight answers about what was going on, Tom told us. Tom had gone to comfort the official afterwards. Tom said he looked like he was going to burst into tears.
Our Governor-General was just one of scores of heads of state who were expected. Prince Charles, the presidents of Russia and the USA, Germany’s Chancellor Merkel, Catholic and Jewish leaders, sheiks, VIPs of every kind from all over the world. As with the Poznan climate change conference, our embassy staff again had pulled off a coup and found good hotel rooms for the Governor-General and the Ambassador. Even among a country who understood how to ‘organise’ things, our embassy staff excelled. They’d even found something central for Tom and me, close to where the funeral would be held.
If the volcanic cloud lifted, that was. Between the crash and the funeral, a plume of smoke had started spewing through a gap in the earth’s crust in Iceland, covering Europe, including a mourning Poland, with a cloud of ash. Europe’s air hubs – Heathrow, Frankfurt, Paris, and dozens of others, including Warsaw – were closed. There were daylong waits for train tickets, and freeways all over Europe were clogged. We had no idea how any of it would affect our head of state, who was coming in the Australian Government jet.
On Wednesday, Tom, I and some other embassy staff were once again on a train to Krakow – the embassy staff had organised half a dozen impossible train tickets to go with the impossible hotel rooms. Tom carried one of the last remaining boxes of walkie-talkies left in Warsaw in his luggage. The head of a local telecommunications company – a Dutchman who lived upstairs in our block who Tom had befriended in the course of a lift ride – had
called him to let him know there was a chance the mobile network would be taken down.
We went straight from the train station to check the Governor-General’s room. We made sure there was drinking water in the fridge, flowers on the writing desk, and white linen on the king-sized bed. I took a quick look at the view, straight over Krakow’s UNESCO-listed rynek where the service would be held. I hoped she’d be able to spare a moment to appreciate it. Then we headed to our hotel room. There were cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, stiff, olive eiderdowns, and windows that didn’t quite close. I decided to stop seeing the VIP rooms first from now on.
The Sheraton was hosting the official organising committee functions, and we went there next. Tom’s colleagues – many of them now our friends – were there already. We worked our way around the room, trying to find out who was making what decision – Prince Charles was still coming, said William, although Canada wasn’t, according to Paul. Tom knew everyone, everyone knew him, and they all went out of their way to help him. So this is what all the mingling was about. Tom called the Ambassador to bring him up to speed, and then ran the team through the plans, over and over again. From the moment the Governor-General would arrive to the moment she’d leave, every second was accounted for. I typed and re-typed and rere-typed tiny program booklets that would go to the dozen or so members of her party who would accompany her, as plans emerged and changed. As Canberra woke up I fell asleep to the sound of Tom on the phone, working through detail after detail.
On Thursday, the volcanic ash cloud advanced, as did the chaos in Europe. Ireland pulled out, as did Prince Charles. The VIPs who were going to make it started arriving – black people in flowing white robes and white people in black pillar-box hats thronged together in the hotel’s marble lobby. We waited, holding lengthy discussions in the lobby coffee shop on the interaction of ash and jet engines at different altitudes; some planes could fly through the ash cloud, some couldn’t, and how likely a country was to come depended not just on its will or other commitments, but what type of plane they needed, how far it had to travel, and how high the mountains between it and Poland were. We heard Merkel had left a meeting in southern Europe and was heading here by road. We sat and waited at the Sheraton; checking and re-checking, planning and anticipating.
On Friday, the Ambassador wanted to know what the Russians were doing. Tom spotted a friend from the Russian Embassy on the other side of the bar and went to find out. The Russian President, Medvedev, had arrived, he confirmed to the Ambassador, despite the sizeable mountain ranges in the way. So perhaps whether you came depended not only on your willingness and geography, but also your control of the air force.
I spied Alex at a nearby table, his eyes red-rimmed, leaning in towards the American ambassador. ‘Coffee? Beer? Vodka?’ I texted him, watching as he glanced down, smiled, then looked around for me. He held up one finger and I fetched him a cappuccino from the bar.
Obama isn’t coming, I told Tom on my return, which Tom relayed to our ambassador, along with the fact that our own Governor-General had made it as far as Dubai. Merkel was somewhere in Italy, we had heard.
Tom took another call. ‘That was the Governor-General’s pilot,’ he said, when he hung up. ‘Before he takes off on the last leg, he wants to find out from me if it’s safe to land his plane here.’
‘Isn’t there someone else he can ask?’
‘There’s just me.’ His shoulders drooped.
It was Saturday. One senior lady coming to Poland for a night had absorbed the Australian Embassy team for a week. I imagined what this looked like, multiplied by the millions of things that millions of people all over the country were dealing with. The transport of the former first couple of the Republic of Poland to their final resting place, including a public stoush between two sides of their families over where they should be buried. The service, the seating plan, the ceremony. Security for an event where the most senior representatives of the US, Russia and Germany had been expected, not to mention ten thousand members of the public – allotted seats via a ballot that had been organised and carried out. The arrival of scores of heads of states, the non-arrival of scores of heads of states. A national week of mourning with TV shows and advertising played in black and white. And in the background, a government and unanticipated temporary president trying to keep the country running, while a legal team tried to work out what the Constitution intended by way of succession plans in a situation like this.
Germany officially informed Poland that the Chancellor wasn’t coming. I heard that she had a car accident between Rome and Krakow.
Some hours after we’d fallen into bed late on Saturday night, Tom’s mobile woke both of us.
‘I see,’ he half-whispered to the Governor-General’s pilot in Dubai, and hung up. An aged eiderdown cover rustled as he pulled it back and got up. He went out into the hall to make the calls, telling people who needed to know that her Excellency wasn’t coming.
‘So that’s it, then,’ I said, half waking when he pulled back the olive covers to get into the creaky double bed.
‘It wouldn’t have been any more effort for us if she’d actually turned up now,’ he said.
On Sunday, Krakow hosted the funeral. We’d expected we would watch it on a television in the hotel lobby, but an informal trade in security passes had sprung up among the members of the diplomatic corps; there were plenty going spare now that so many expected VIPs hadn’t arrived, and while each had a name and a position, there mustn’t have been time for photos. I draped ‘Media’ around my neck, while Tom took ‘Security’ and we decided to see where they’d take us. Alex joined us, passing as the American Ambassador to Iraq. Since the American Ambassador to Iraq was here, this made me wonder whose pass he had. I carried a camera, Tom wore sunglasses and the three of us spoke English loudly, in case we were challenged. But no one wanted to make a scene today and we slipped through checkpoints unquestioned.
Twisting and turning through Krakow’s empty lanes, we arrived at the entrance to the church where the funeral was to be held. Relying only on looking like we were supposed to be there, we had somehow ended up in the front row of the VIP area, in the square outside the church. Ahead of the media and the ten thousand people who’d secured a ticket in the ballot, and right beside giant LCD panels that streamed the service live to those outside. Bronislaw Komorowski, leader of the opposition party and interim President of Poland, passed us by on his way into the church, as did the Russian Prime Minister. And, finally, Lech and Maria Kaczynski started their final journeys, not ten metres from us, carried on a Polish army truck that Alex may well have sold them.
The day went off without a hitch, and that evening Tom and I moved into the Governor-General’s suite. The booking was non-refundable, after all. The Ambassador joined his drained staff for dinner. We stayed to the point where the Ambassador berated the waiter for refusing to sell us wine with our food. I tried to explain to our embassy head that there was a prohibition on selling alcohol across the country following the funeral. ‘Tell him I’ll pay for it tomorrow!’ the Ambassador had said. I placed myself between Tom and the Ambassador, pleaded exhaustion on both of our parts, and dragged Tom back to the hotel room.
On the Governor-General’s behalf, we appreciated the view of the square she would never get to see, and took a bath in her tub. Soaking in the warm water together, Tom told me that the body of the President of Poland had been flown back first, without that of his wife, Maria. People were upset to find out that they’d been separated. They should have been kept together, people thought. No matter what. We’d held each other and cried.
How long does it take to organise a complete lockdown of a major regional capital for twenty-four hours, the arrival of scores of heads of state, the heads of all major world religions, elaborate processions, rituals, thousands of public attendees, from go to whoa?
Seven days. If you know a Pole, that is.
A day later, and I was back in Warsaw. I raced along the st
reet for a bus that was just about to pull out onto the road. A lady saw me running and dinged the bell, stopping it. The bus waited and I jumped on, panting, just as the doors squeaked shut behind me. The lady and I exchanged a quick smile. The volcanic ash had started to lift. Was it just me, or had it left behind a nicer, kinder Poland?
I dialled Tom. He picked up on the fourth ring.
‘Thanks for going to work for us today. I appreciate it,’ I said.
‘Thanks for everything you do for us. I appreciate it,’ he said.
Everyone had had a dose of perspective.
LATO – SUMMER
While Russia might not have topped everyone’s list as a summer getaway, the start to lato had been unusually warm and I thought a weekend in cultural Moscow would be a great complement to our plans for two weeks on the Adriatic coast later in the season. I booked us air tickets, and Tom organised for us to stay with one of his colleagues. Free accommodation all over the world was one of the perks of embassy life. Even faint relationships could be called on for a free room, on the understanding that reciprocity could be invoked at any point in the next couple of decades.
All I needed now were our visas. I looked up the internet site, to see what we’d need. Yet the moment I arrived at the Russian Embassy, ten minutes before the office was due to open, I realised I’d started this wrongly. The line of people waiting already numbered at least forty. Except it wasn’t a line, it was a crowd. A mass of Russian visa applicants. Or was that a mess? Some people were sitting on the pavement, some were on benches in the shade. The office was only open for two hours. How was this going to work? The rush when it opened was going to be crazy!
‘I’m last!’ a man called out to me from a patch of shade. ‘You’re behind me.’
A few minutes later, another girl wandered up. ‘Who’s last?’ she called out. I looked around.
I raised my hand and answered, ‘Ja,’ before adding, ‘you’re behind me,’ in the same way the man had. In the same way that the woman in the supermarket had to Shannon and me.
