Vodka and Apple Juice

by Jay Martin

  ‘You know, I’ve taken a few visitors there now. Shown them inside it. Pointed out the broken bottles and the homeless people sleeping under the trees. Do you think that’s OK?’ I said.

  ‘What, to go in there?’

  ‘To show it to people like it’s just a tourist attraction. Like Old Town or something.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s a story worth telling?’

  ‘I just don’t know that it’s my story to tell.’

  ‘If you do it respectfully, in the hope that someone, somewhere, is one day outraged enough about it to do something about it, then I think it’s OK. Would you take me one day, to show me?’

  On that basis, I agreed.

  ***

  By late October the bold wind had denuded Warsaw’s trees of their glory, but temperatures were still fighting their way into double figures. I willed these precious days to last, all too aware I was destined to fail.

  Still, Shannon and I decided to take a punt, and go for a picnic at Zelazowa Wola, birthplace of Fryderyk Chopin, while we could still manage to be outside. Polish babcias might have picnicked with grandchildren, snow, sleet or shine, but I was never going to be a Polish babcia. The evidence was overwhelming.

  Poland’s plentiful supply of intelligent, caring nannies that were cheap by Canadian standards meant that Fee’s arrival – just over a year ago now – hadn’t slowed Shannon down a great deal. She’d even taken up salsa dancing in the last few months, showing far more enthusiasm – and doubtless talent – for it than I had. Although some things were proving trickier for Shannon – shopping on public transport with a pram, for example. So now, in addition to keys to each other’s houses, we both had keys to what had effectively become a communal car. Our own little piece of communism. We loaded up our car and took off for the country, past the messy array of florists, fruit and vegetable stalls, and funeral parlours that lined the route west out of town.

  Shannon laughed when I told her our latest news – that we’d negotiated with Anthea to keep Bardzo, the cat.

  ‘Couldn’t let him go?’

  Actually I’d been making arrangements to ship him to Dublin when Tom told me he wanted to keep him – that having the little fluff ball around made him feel calmer. I changed tack and negotiated with her to keep him instead. I was trying to grasp hold of anything that might help keep Tom on track at the moment.

  The sun strobed through planted pine forests on either side of the road. A rare blue sky day in Warsaw at this time of year. Just that was making me feel joyful. Fee napped in the back. We were barely fifty kilometres from Warsaw, but it could have been five hundred. I thought of all the times at home that I’d complain about the odd rainy, overcast day. I’d never thought to be thankful for the days it was like this. I vowed to always appreciate good weather at home, knowing it would just be a matter of time before I didn’t.

  I was so transported by the scenery and the comfortable chitchat with Shannon that I nearly missed it when a man in a black uniform jumped out from by the road and waved us over. I pulled up behind the police car I could now see behind some bushes.

  The policeman sauntered up to the car and peered in. ‘In a hurry, madam?’ he asked.

  ‘Very sorry, sir …’ The policeman barely looked twenty. But with a black uniform that beefed him up like an American football player, not to mention the gun hanging from his belt, I felt suitably intimidated.

  ‘I’m from Australia,’ I added. An oldie but a goodie.

  Not this time. ‘They don’t have speed limits in Australia?’ He asked for my licence and ID.

  Every Polish person over the age of eighteen had to carry an identity card at all times. In lieu of Polish ID cards, people like Shannon and I had diplomatic cards – giving our mission, dates, and diplomatic status. I was asked for it whenever I checked into a hotel, if I made a large credit card purchase, or when dealing with any kind of government function. I told Tomek once that we used our driver’s licences like that. He laughed and told me that it must be harder to get a forged licence in Australia than it was in Poland.

  Shannon turned to me as soon as the policeman had taken it back to his car. ‘That’s surprising,’ she said. I knew exactly what she was referring to. My diplomatic identity card matched the diplomatic plates on the car. They both signalled the same thing: ‘immune’. I would love to say that it never affected my behaviour. But the Polish legal blood alcohol content for driving, of zero point zero two, seemed too low to me, so I just stuck to the higher limit we had in Australia. Given I was exempt from breath-testing, I thought that was restrained. More restrained than Tom had been a few times – and others. I’d seen some, shall we say, inventive driving around town from the blue-plated cars.

  The policeman returned. ‘You are with the Australian Embassy?’ I confirmed that I was. He handed back my documents. ‘Please keep to the speed limit in future,’ he said. I confirmed I would. A polite gesture on my part, since we both knew the laws didn’t actually apply to me.

  ‘No wonder the people who’ve been doing this a while lose perspective,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if they’ve forgotten they’re just normal people doing a job.’

  ‘To them it’s not a job. It’s a way of life,’ Shannon said.

  If you spent enough years being feted as a VIP, having people tell you how clever and amazing you were and never contradicting you – not even having to obey laws – it wasn’t surprising it would affect you. I just wondered if it was inevitable that it would affect us. ‘You know, we went to dinner at our ambo’s house a while ago. He was there with someone he introduced to us as one of his “very best friends”. But he hadn’t known the name of his wife.’

  ‘ “Very best friend” has a different meaning in the diplomatic world.’

  ‘You imagine they must be these really amazing people, don’t you. Diplomats, expats. Like the women at the IWG, who’ve lived all over the world.’

  A flick of one eyebrow expressed Shannon’s dismay at my women’s group membership anew.

  ‘I know, I know, I’ve been just as dismissive of them. Their lives sound amazing on paper, and you meet them and they’re somehow disappointing. But when it comes down to it, most of them – most of us – are just normal people, trying their best to get by.’

  ‘We know that. But they don’t want you to let on. It’s part of their game.’

  ‘What worries me is that I’m not sure if Tom is “we” or “they” anymore. From the way he acts at the moment, it’s like he thinks diplomatic immunity covers liver cirrhosis and lung cancer.’

  ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘Yeah, of course he …’ I gave up. ‘No. No, I don’t think he is fine. I don’t think we are fine.’

  Things had been more stable recently. Tom had been coming home after work and staying home. He was trying to cut down on the smoking and drinking. If he went out, I knew where and who he was with. On the surface, things were normal.

  Except normal wasn’t how it had been before. Because inside me, something had changed. I demanded to know where he was going and when he’d be home. I panicked if he was ten minutes late. I was on edge every time he came in, wondering if this was another night we were going to have a row and he was going to leave again. Suspicion, doubt and misgiving had seeped into our marriage, forcing their way into cracks I didn’t even know had existed and hardening like concrete. I felt them, sitting inside me, threatening to burst my heart apart. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him; I didn’t trust us. What if these feelings never went away?

  ‘Don’t forget I’m here if you need,’ Shannon said.

  ‘Thanks. That means a lot.’ But I didn’t know what to ask for.

  We arrived at our destination, and I parked. A parking space in Poland was defined as somewhere you could fit the car. Slightly chaotic, but very practical.

  It didn’t take us more than twenty minutes to wander through the house Chopin was born in, a thatched four-room cottage adorned with a few mementos: his bi
rth and christening certificates, some musical scores, a piano (of course). I didn’t know much more about Chopin for it. But the cottage was surrounded by manicured lawns bordered by bursts of late autumn colour that lifted my mood.

  ‘You could almost forget you were in Poland here, couldn’t you?’ said Shannon, casting her eye around for the perfect place to park Fiona’s pram and set up the picnic blanket. We settled on a patch of grass off the path, in the priceless fragments of the day’s remaining sun. Shannon started setting out our provisions, Fee tottered about, and I lay on the soft grass, and closed my eyes. Shannon was right. The whole thing was like a game. As made up as a playground one, and with rules just as defined. How did you win, though?

  ‘Proszę pań!’ A Polish voice snapped me back. I looked up to see a guard marching towards us. He reached us, huffing. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Making a picnic?’

  ‘Nie wolno!’ It is not allowed.

  ‘But there no any signs …’

  ‘Of course there aren’t any signs! Why would you need signs to tell you you can’t do something that it’s obvious you can’t do!’ The guard stood, hands on hips, red-faced from the exertion of being angry at us.

  ‘Picnics are nie wolno?’ Shannon was already making moves to pack Fee and our provisions back into the pram.

  The guard’s decision on picnics was going to be final and no correspondence would be entered into. We were back in Poland. We moved to an area with some benches, a little way away. The tinkling sounds of Chopin piano pieces from outdoor speakers followed us, as did our guard, to make sure there were no further picnic transgressions.

  ‘Why have such lovely expanses of grass just to look at?’ Shannon said as we arranged our blanket and food on a wooden bench set up for the purpose. But we really should have known. In parks and gardens in Poland, paths were for walking on and grass was for looking at. The babcias informally kept order when formal grass enforcement personnel weren’t around. There weren’t any signs. You were just supposed to know.

  ‘For all the dogs to shit on?’ Despite their apparent reverence for grass, Polish people thought nothing of letting their dogs crap on it. In Australia no one would go out walking their dog without a plastic bag, as much because of the fear of the social embarrassment of being caught without one as the fine. So maybe there was something to be said for rules – and the cultural pressure to conform to them. But I would say that. I was Anglo-Saxon.

  The sound of more shouting reached us. Two large Polish babcias had set up a blanket on the bank of the garden’s stream. The guard stormed over to them. ‘Nie wolno. NIE WOLNO!’ he was yelling at them.

  One of the women stood up and yelled back at him. He yelled back at her. The other joined in from the blanket, where she continued setting out little dishes of food. The guard took a step back, and the woman a step forward, all three yelling the whole time. Chopin’s piano piece reached an appropriate crescendo. The guard took a few more steps backward, and the woman advanced. Finally the guard threw his hands up in the air and retreated, marching back across the forbidden grass. The woman pursued him, shaking her fists. When she was satisfied she’d seen him off, she returned to the blanket, where her friend had continued to set up their picnic, never missing a beat.

  I chided myself. You might hardly ever win an argument with a Pole. But they’d never respect you if you didn’t show you were willing to fight.

  JESIEN – AUTUMN

  My real journalist friend Stacey was updating a guidebook to Ukraine. Did I want to come along?

  Did I what! In the midst of November, I jumped at the chance to get out of dreary Warsaw. To see somewhere new with a fun new friend, I meant. My – not so subtle – pep talk from Gabby had inspired me to try and be more positive about my last (I totted them up) eight months here.

  An overnight bus later, Stacey and I found ourselves in an apartment building on the outskirts of Lviv, sharing freshly brewed coffee with our two twenty-something hosts Lera and Maryshka, and another guest, New Zealander Sean. While the outside of the building was a step down from Warsaw’s housing for the masses (although a step up from Kaliningrad’s), inside the apartment was comfortable and well-kept. By Polish standards it was even large. Stacey had found the girls on a website dedicated to matching people in need of a temporary couch or spare room with those in possession of one, in exchange for a token payment – or just some good will. Stacey got paid a flat fee for the guidebook update, and anything she spent on expenses came out of her profit, so she needed to economise. But I loved that she was thrifty in ways that helped her get to know her subject. I couldn’t help thinking that, had the authors of the Poland guidebook taken a leaf out of her book, their result might have been a good deal better.

  Stacey complimented the apartment.

  ‘Yes, it’s less Soviet than many others,’ Lera said.

  ‘What makes an apartment more Soviet?’ Stacey asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. Carpet on the walls. Things like that.’ She had a pragmatic approach to explaining Soviet urban design proclivities similar to that of Svetlana, my former Russian classmate.

  ‘Polish pierogi!’ I exclaimed when I saw the bowl of handmade dumplings Lera was taking out of the fridge.

  ‘Ukrainian varenyky, you mean,’ Lera said, putting them in the microwave. ‘Some Germans were staying before you. They wanted to know how to cook them.’

  I asked what was inside.

  ‘Some are pork, some are maslyuk …’ she seemed to be looking for the word in English.

  ‘Maślak?’ I suggested the Polish word. Or pieczarki …’ I said, naming another kind of mushroom.

  ‘Pecheritsya,’ she told me the Ukrainian. ‘My favourite kind are the sweet ones … z makom, we call them.’

  ‘Poppy seeds? Small and black?’ I suggested. Like makowiec in Polish, the poppy seed cake.

  ‘Exactly!’

  I asked her if Ukrainian and Polish speakers could understand each other on subjects other than pierogi. Varenyky, I corrected myself.

  ‘Actually, my Ukrainian is not that good. I speak Russian.’

  ‘Really? In Poland, it’s only the old people who speak Russian.’

  ‘Here, it’s people from the east. Sometimes if I’m speaking Russian, old ladies will come up to me and tell me to speak my own language. It’s not my fault that Russian is my own language.’

  She served out the dumplings. The Poles had never given up their language. I wondered what had made the Ukrainians different. Obviously not their babcias, who sounded similarly hellbent on upholding the moral fabric of the nation.

  I cast about for things I knew about Ukraine. A nuclear disaster in a town called Chernobyl, and Stalinist famines were all that came to mind. It didn’t seem much to build a tourist industry on.

  ‘So what brought you to Ukraine?’ I asked Sean.

  ‘I was keen to see Chernobyl. And just, you know, the whole Stalin thing,’ he said, through a mouthful of varenyky. Showing what I knew about tourism.

  ‘So with all these visitors, you must get to go all over Europe for free holidays!’ Stacey said to Maryshka.

  Maryshka and Lera looked at each other. ‘Oh no, we never go anywhere. We’re single Ukrainian girls in our twenties. It would be impossible for us to get an EU visa.’ Lera used the same tone she’d used to explain wall carpet.

  After finishing off the food, Stacey, Sean, Maryshka and I piled into Lera’s car, and she drove us through Lviv. My first impressions were of a smaller, slightly more rundown version of Warsaw. The cobblestoned central square was faced with pretty pink buildings. But the paint was peeling and the cobblestones uneven. Trolley cars screeched in complaint as they rounded bends. All the ingredients were there for it to be beautiful, but there was a bit of work to do first. Work that had already been done in Warsaw – courtesy of EU grants, as the blue and yellow flags flying over everything being renovated in Poland attested. Lviv was like Poland, but without the EU funding.

&n
bsp; As for the Ukrainian women, though, I couldn’t see anything that needed improving. And even on this chilly day, I could see a lot. They sallied forth in tiny skirts, leggings and thigh-high boots, skin-tight tops revealing unlikely breasts, casting lingering glances at Sean. Although at some point these girls seemed to turn into babcias with crooked noses and facial hair, who wore dark cloaks and head scarves. A little like the cars – all either shiny black BMWs, or rusty Soviet Lada Nivas.

  We parked outside an Orthodox church, and Maryshka led us inside, showing us where Stacey and I could borrow scarves to cover our heads. I considered offering some to the girls out on the street.

  The interior of the church was covered in ornate paintings in crimsons and blues. Incense smoke curled from hanging containers. Grandmothers in black shuffled between racks of burning candles, transporting the flame from one to another on dripping wicks. The kind of ritualism that Protestantism had extinguished from religion. I asked Lera if she was religious.