by Jay Martin
As cats weren’t included in our diplomatic package, my one responsibility was Bardzo. Booking his flight home had been straight forward. Not cheap, mind you – his fare had cost more than our business class flights, and I doubt he got champagne – but not complicated.
The Australian entry permit was a different matter. The schedule of government quarantine requirements ran to several pages, each with their own timeframes – no less than twenty-one days and no more than one hundred for this vaccination, no more than three months and no less than thirty days for this pill. Verification of EU-standard micro-chipping and getting a Polish pet passport were the first steps, then the rabies test, which had to be done six months out and re-verified in Germany. The Australian government didn’t trust Polish laboratories, apparently. It all had me running between vets, Australian quarantine websites and animal freighters trying to get it all sorted; it seemed balanced on a knife edge, with any slip potentially fatal. I’d heard about a single Australian diplomat who had travelled all over the world accompanied only by a small dog. She’d arrived at one posting only to discover that it was going to be virtually impossible to get the dog home from the country she was in. She’d dedicated her three years there to lobbying the host government to put in place the additional laws the Australian authorities needed so that she could bring the pet home. It was a shame that a matter of months wasn’t time to lobby Tom to get relaxed cat importation requirements from Poland put on his work plan, so I resorted to something else I hoped would work: hoping nothing would go wrong.
I’d fill Tom in on my latest successes and obstacles as we’d walk, and then usually Tom and I would head back home for dinner, but tonight we were going to a restaurant. We had something to celebrate: the departure of Tom’s final official visitor, Professor Gareth Evans, who counted former Australian Attorney General and Minister for Foreign Affairs among his myriad titles, accolades and honours. Once touted as a possible head of the UN, he was now heading up the non-government agency International Crisis Group, based in Brussels. He’d been in Warsaw for the day for meetings.
‘So how’d it go with Evans?’ I asked Tom, as we headed up the hill towards one of our favourite places.
‘What the fuck was that?’
‘Hmm?’ I raised my eyebrows.
‘That’s what he said. About his meeting.’
‘That’s really what he said?’
‘ “What the fuck was that, I come all the way from fucking Brussels and I get a ten-minute fucking meeting,” was what he said. Really.’
My eyes widened. ‘And then what?’
‘And then he demanded that I tell him who was responsible for the fucking embarrassment that this whole thing had been.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘Yep.’
‘I thought you didn’t …’
‘Fuck it.’
‘How did he take that?’
‘He was surprised. And then I told him he had a plane to catch, and I opened the door to his car, put him inside, gave him his briefcase, and shut the door. And then he opened the window, leaned out and said …’
I waited to hear what expletives the professor had left in his armoury.
‘Thanks for everything. The visit was very well organised. Good job.’
‘That’s nuts,’ I said.
‘That’s diplomacy.’
In a nutshell.
With every step we took, with every laugh we shared, a little trust between us grew.
‘Look!’ Tom pointed to something in the vestiges of the day’s light. He veered from the path towards a bush and waved me over, to show me what he’d seen: tightly coiled lime green buds, muscling their way out of the tip of a branch. Out of every tip of every branch. Dozens of tiny harbingers of the end of zima, and the arrival of przedwiośnie.
Tom broke into a broad smile, put his arm around me, and we walked up the hill together.
***
One by one, I tied up the threads of my Polish life.
I arranged the last of my events as one of the activities coordinators for the IWG – a role I’d had for a few months and, needless to say, hadn’t gone out of my way to broadcast. I could just imagine the ribbing if Shannon had ever found out. I’d organised a few different things for the group – a university lecturer who came to talk to us about the social history of Warsaw, a behind the scenes tour of the Palace of Culture, guided walks around ‘sites of architectural significance’ in Warsaw, and a trip to a Soviet-style eatery in an outer neighbourhood. The events all got a full house – as did Estonia’s fundraiser for homeless women in rural Poland, which dozens of international women gave their time and money to help out with. A lot of the expat women here, it turned out, were keen for any opportunity to get more involved in this city and country. Particularly one virgin diplomatic wife from Germany, who was determined to learn Polish and had asked me if I could suggest a way to get more practice. ‘I have just the thing,’ I said, and handed the coordinator baton to her.
For my last article for the Insider, Gosia had arranged for me to meet Jurek and Zoltan, two Warsaw Uprising Insurgents. The three of us sat down at the museum’s coffee shop, and Jurek retrieved a crumpled envelope from inside his jacket pocket with a shaky, liver-speckled hand. In what seemed to be a practised move he took a photo out of it, pausing for a fleeting look before pushing it across the table towards me.
‘This is us during the Uprising.’ He pointed to himself and Zoltan. A group of young people on a street, smiling and laughing for the camera. They wore short-sleeved shirts. It must have been in the early stages. ‘This one, she died that October, and him in 1945. We were the only two to survive.’
‘When I finally saw the finished museum, I couldn’t believe it,’ Zoltan said, his eyes shining. ‘We’d waited so long. For so long we hadn’t been able to talk about what happened to us, and then finally, it’s here, this monument.’ For nearly half a century after the Uprising, the Soviet occupiers had forbidden anyone from speaking of it.
‘Yes, the Uprising took three months, the museum took twenty years. Even it had been a terrible museum, it would have been worth it. But it’s a great museum. That’s just a bonus!’ They finished each other’s sentences like an old married couple.
‘My grandson came here a couple of years ago,’ Jurek said. ‘He lives in Canada. He’s eight – you know at that age, they’re hard to get interested in things. But we brought him here, and he watched the film.’ I knew what he was referring to – the footage of the Uprising shown on a loop at the museum, taken from the archival footage Joanna had shown me on that first day. ‘He wanted to stay all day. We couldn’t drag him away. And later my daughter told me he’d gone back to Canada and told his friends that his grandpa killed Hitler. Another time, we told him about Grunwald,’ he said, the Polish battle that had taken place in 1410. ‘ “Did you fight in that one too, Granddad?” he asked!’ Four runny eyes were bright with honour and humour.
Jurek’s bent fingers put the photograph back in its envelope, and the envelope back in an inside pocket, next to his heart. I wondered if there had been a day of his life it had not been there. To me, it was a photograph of people who’d died. To him, it was a photograph of people who’d lived. Aga told me once that some of the insurgents, if they go into a café or restaurant, still sit where they can see the exit. Behaviours as present, and as significant, as the photograph in Jurek’s coat.
‘The young people these days sometimes say to us, we’ve heard enough about the war. Why do you still have to talk about it? But if you had survived a plane crash, wouldn’t you be telling everyone you met that story for the rest of your life? And that is just one moment in time. This was two months. Not a plane disaster, but a historical one.’ His gnarled thumb went to his pocket, perhaps unconsciously. ‘Why do we still have to talk about it? Because we are still alive.’
Yes you are. And because of that, Poland is not dead.
<
br /> ‘Gentlemen,’ I said to the heroes, ‘may I tell your stories, what you have told me?’
‘Yes, tell people! Not just Polish people, they know. Tell the world. They don’t know.’
I promised I would try.
The interview over, it was time to finish up another thing: my spell as a volunteer at the museum. I went up the stairs to thank Gosia for arranging the meeting and to say goodbye.
I walked into her office. For once the photos on her screen weren’t of a city torn up by trenches or burned down by grenades, but of a farmhouse in picturesque woods. She was flicking through them. Her face had the look I thought she reserved for Polish heroes.
‘Very pretty house,’ I said. She and her fiancé had just bought it, she said. I asked her where it was.
‘Oh, a very small place. Siedlce. I’m sure you wouldn’t know it.’
‘Just near to Holy Mountain Grabarka, right?’ I’d been through the town on the way to the Orthodox pilgrimage site, adorned with thousands of crosses left by thankful pilgrims. ‘Very pretty there. I like those wooden houses. We don’t have those in Australia,’ I said. Or Orthodox pilgrimage sites, for that matter.
We watched the photos of a rundown farmhouse together for a bit. Like we’d watched footage of Warsaw burning on the first day.
‘Where in Poland is your husband’s family from?’ she asked.
I looked sideways at her. ‘My husband’s not Polish. He’s Australian. He works for the embassy.’
If a Polish woman had turned up at a workplace in Australia, within the first ten minutes of her being in the office each person in turn would have come to find out where her accent and name were from, ask what she was doing in Australia and if it was really as cold as people said in Poland, and tell them about someone they met once who went to Krakow – or some other spurious connection they could think of. Not only had Gosia never asked what I was doing here, it seemed she had never even wondered.
‘Anyway, I bring you something.’ I pulled out some Anzac biscuits from my bag. Ever since I’d brought golden syrup back from London I’d been making sticky date pudding and Anzac biscuits regardless of the occasion.
She devoured them as I told her the story of the name and the ingredients. ‘Very good,’ she said though a mouthful of sticky oats.
‘A Polish teacher here told me that story about the biscuits, you know. Before I didn’t know it.’
‘Well, you know, I’ve never been to the Orthodox site at Grabarka,’ she said.
We both smiled.
‘So what are Polish people like then?’ she asked. ‘Actually, never mind. A foreigner could never understand Poland.’ She seemed to change her mind before the sentence was even fully out of her oat-filled mouth.
‘Więcej gość w cudzym domu przez godzinę niż gospodarz za dzien ujrzy’. I repeated the saying Agnieszka had told me in the mushrooming village: A guest in the house sees more in an hour than the host in a day.
We both smiled again.
She reached over for a pamphlet on her desk and handed it to me. ‘I made sure these would be ready for you when you came today,’ she said. It was a flyer advertising the exhibition I’d done the translations for. The team members were all named, including me. Gosia stood up and gave me a solid hug, and warm kisses on alternate cheeks. ‘Thank you. For everything you’ve done for us.’
A letter – one that communicated things I couldn’t say – formed in my mind. Dear Gosia, it said, thank you for giving me the chance to be part of this wonderful museum, and the important work you do. I think Poles and Australians are quite different people. Like you and I are quite different. But it is not really surprising, is it? After all, I am descended from generations of people who risked everything to come to the new world in search of fortune – and who, by and large, found it. You are descended from generations of people who’ve been invaded and betrayed by your neighbours for hundreds of years. When you look at it like that, perhaps it is not so surprising that we have been taught by our parents and grandparents to approach the world differently; me open and trusting, you guarded and restrained. And while we in Australia show more interest in strangers, I’m not sure it is always genuine or deep. While if you win the trust of a Polish person, then you will have that forever. I am pleased to have been invited into your home for this short time, anyway. I learned so much while I was there.
‘The pleasure was all mine,’ I said.
Something told me she knew what I meant.
WIOSNA – SPRING
When I’d agreed to give Tom a hand with ‘a bit of filing’, I’d imagined something less daunting than the five piles of papers, each several feet high, I was presented with when I reported for duty. Thousands of individual documents that needed to be recorded, labelled and put into folders.
‘So, they go in here. Somewhere.’ He opened a heavy door to a windowless room in the embassy’s inner sanctum, lined from floor to ceiling on all sides with beige files. He waved in their general direction. ‘And anything from before two thousand needs sentencing,’ he added. I raised my eyebrows. ‘You sentence old files. Close them on the system and destroy the paper copies. Or something.’ He handed me a password for the computer system and thrust an government archives manual my way. It was dated October 2002.
Over the next few weeks, with the help of the reference materials and some common sense, I developed a system – of sorts – for creating new files, closing ones that weren’t needed, and putting away the ones that were there. For eight hours a day, I sifted through documents on missile defence, the Belorussian economy, Polish elections, treaties, UN activities, EU politics, trade in services, agricultural products, chemical weapons, and put everything in some logical (to me) place. The documents on Polish–Australian discussions on an Antarctic treaty tempted me to get everyone involved a map. Finally I came to understand what diplomats do – what Tom had been doing these years, while I was tripping to Ukraine and catching buses to IKEA. Now it was my responsibility to file away the evidence of these years of his life, in a windowless room with a steel door.
It was a fascinating window into the real work of embassies, but it also meant we got to spend more daylight time together. We added a daytime walk in the now-spring air to our nighttime stroll, passing all the cafés, bars and restaurants, the architecture and buildings, the street corners and lanes we now knew so well, telling each other funny, interesting or sometimes sad stories about things we’d done there – reminiscing, before we’d even left. The Pilates classes were making the world of difference too, he said. When he told me the excruciating pain in his lower back was all but gone and he wished he’d done it years ago, I was too grateful to be mad.
I soon came to realise that Tom wasn’t the only diplomat who hadn’t found the time for filing. I separated all the files that dated from before 2000 and boxed them together. A stack of forty boxes came to stand against the wall. Millions of words, written by other diplomats in other times, on economic conditions, old treaties, the development of the EU and Poland’s accession to it. The history of this embassy, of Australia’s relationship with Poland, stretching back as far as 1970.
I closed the files on the computer system and took out the metal pins that had held them in place, along with the cardboard tags on top of the pins. ‘Place tag on top’, the tags read. Then I turned on a portable shredder that I hoped was up to the job and tuned into the information radio station, Tok FM. Although Argument FM would have been more accurate – half the time you couldn’t hear what the station’s guests of the day were saying for all the yelling at each other. And sheet by sheet, I shredded Australia’s diplomatic relationship with Poland over four decades, as Poles bickered in the background. A growing pile of metal pins and ‘place tag on top’ cards, freed from their confines, marked my progress.
I remembered how important all of those words I used to write in my job had seemed at the time. How the pressure to get them perfect felt like it would swallow me whole some days. T
he yelling when I hadn’t – in someone’s view – succeeded. Yet so much of that work would have ended up like these words. Filed away, until someone in another ten (or thirty) years – maybe someone not even born yet – one day came and shredded them. If you needed a reminder of the ephemeral nature of so much of what we call work, there would have been few better than this. No, the things that counted in life weren’t the thin sheets of paper in boxes like these.
‘How you going?’ Tom stuck his head in.
‘Twenty-five boxes down, fifteen to go.’
His head disappeared again, although I could hear him whistling from his office. Letting me know he was there.
I skimmed through the economic and political reporting, but I found myself lingering over the moments from people’s lives that were also captured. A bus crash that killed some young Australian backpackers. Security assessments on apartments in Saska Kepa. An Australian in prison who embassy officials had visited. The notes recorded that he had swallowed a lighter, and requested an operation to remove it. ‘Officer notes prisoner has previously swallowed a spoon’, the file note added. I wondered where that man was now. What he had swallowed since. There was a series of faxes from a former diplomat, trying to get a new pair of glasses from Canberra, and a copy of a handwritten card from an ambassador, responding to a request to be the godparent of a child. ‘I am only here for two years and being a godparent is the responsibility of a lifetime,’ he’d written. Diplomacy wasn’t just about the machinations of governments and UN bodies, but about intimate intersections between people from different countries. Some of which I’d been part of. Some, now, that I was the final witness to.
By the time I hit the 1980s, each document was a snapshot of a Poland that was a stranger to me. One hundred and twenty per cent interest rates, decade-long waits for a telephone line to be put in, and even then calls would only connect sporadically and randomly. Now, free wifi was everywhere. Mostly, though, the boxes were full of petitions for refugee status to come to Australia, typically from high-ranking members of the Polish elite. I sensed genuine sympathy in the file notes former diplomats had written to support them. Maybe my first teacher Agnieszka’s application was in here somewhere. Or that of the crazy jeweller Ola. Were the dreams all of these people had for a better life in Australia fulfilled? I hoped so, and then I shredded them.
