by Jay Martin
‘The place you recommended in Mikolajki was great!’ Paul bellowed at me, over vodka and herring orders being shouted over the bar. Paul and Shannon had spent a few weeks enjoying the Masurian Lake District, making the most of their remaining few months as a one-child family.
‘That tip was Stacey’s – you can thank her for it.’ I gave her a thumbs-up. Stacey had just done a lap of the country’s furthest reaches for a guidebook company that had commissioned completely updated content. Finally, someone would do this country justice.
‘Hey, I made a decision over the week,’ Shannon said. ‘I’m packing in the accounting. I’m going to be a salsa instructor! After …’ she rubbed her bulging tummy.
‘That’s great!’ I said.
Tom pushed his way back into the circle with a round of vodka shots. ‘What’s great?’
‘Shannon’s decided to become a salsa teacher.’
‘A very good decision. Much better than being an accountant.’ Tom distributed the vodkas.
‘Well, we have news too!’ It was Alex this time. ‘Magda is joining me in DC in the summer.’
I’d only met Magda a couple of times, but she was everything I would have expected from a Polish girl: smart, accomplished, and feisty. Na zdrowie. I wished them luck. Particularly Alex. Although he had learned Polish, so he was obviously up for a challenge.
Tom’s replacement, an earnest twenty-three-year-old fresh out of diplomatic training, had already arrived. He was waiting in the wings to move into Tom’s job, our apartment with our cleaner, our lives. We’d invited him along tonight. I’d also offered to take him around and show him the neighbourhood – where to get vegetables that would last more than a day, some of the great little coffee shops that you’d never know existed, where the sports centre was and how to make a booking. He’d declined the offers, saying he was going to stay in and do some reading. He would make an excellent ambassador one day.
Magda came up to me. ‘So after three years here now, you can tell me. What are Polish people like?’
‘Perplexing.’ I summarised the results of my three years of study on the topic. She raised her eyebrows as if my answer wasn’t self-explanatory. ‘Let me give you one example. One time Tom and I were staying in a hotel in Torun, which didn’t provide towels in the room. So I asked the hotel manager for some. And immediately, she started to yell at me. “No, of course I don’t have towels, what do you think this is, some kind of deluxe hotel, we are just a little guest house and we don’t have towels.” OK, they don’t supply towels. I understand that. But then, I went out and came back a little later, and she had put towels on our bed for us. Two of her own. Now, that was actually a very kind thing to do. But if she was a kind person, why was she mean to me at first? And if she was a mean person, why give me a towel?’
Magda sucked the juice from a pork knuckle. ‘You know, perhaps Polish people are not naturally very friendly, very open. We have been through a lot, as you know. Maybe she even felt a bit intimidated, a big important foreign guest in her little guest house. But we know what is right and what is wrong. And that lady, probably when you walked out, she felt bad about how she’d responded. So she would have gone and fetched some of her own towels, because she would have known that how she responded was not very charitable. Especially to a guest. Because in Poland, you know how we treat a guest in the house …’
‘Like God in the house.’
‘Yes.’ I could tell Magda was still waiting for my pronouncement on Polish people. Luckily for me, Tom’s arrival at my side saved me.
A growing crowd crushed us together into a tighter and tighter circle. Forced together with people I would never have come into contact with under any other circumstances, I’d found such camaraderie and closeness. Something precious, forged under abnormal pressure. Like a diamond. All of a sudden, it hit me how little time we had left with them, and how rarely we would see them from now on. I struggled to hold back tears.
Tom touched my cheek.
‘We’ve found all these amazing people, and now we’re going to go and live on the other side of the earth from all of them and who knows when we’ll see any of them again,’ I said to Tom. My throat tightened.
He drew his arms around me. ‘Isn’t it great that, wherever we go in the world now, we’ll be near some of them?’
The tears vanished, I pulled away to face him. ‘So how did I do?’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘My diplomatic wife performance assessment. How’d I go?’
He looked to the ceiling. ‘Let’s just say, I think there may be other careers you’d be better suited for.’
A Polish man with the requisite close-cropped hair and solid build interrupted us with some vodkas he’d bought us for no apparent reason. He pointed at Tom. ‘I met him at the bar. He told me he was a diplomat. Is that true?’
I sniffed the glass. Belvedere. My head was already light from cigarette smoke, herring breath and emotion. The previous vodkas might also have had something to do with it.
‘Actually, he is. But you’re not the first person to ask.’ We drank them together.
Paul arrived with a serve of raw herring. Without thinking, I reached out and took a chunk of it with my fingers. I put it in my mouth and chewed. And then I took another. And another. It was good! Why hadn’t I persevered with this before? Better late than never.
‘Another vodka?’ Alex held out another shot to me.
Of course. In Poland, when the work is done, the vodka comes out.
Some hours later, I tottered to the cloakroom to pick up our coats. The attendant was a wrinkled old man. I imagined all he must have seen in his life. He held out his hand for the ticket, his face expressionless.
I patted my pockets. ‘Oh, I don’t have my ticket, my husband has it,’ I said.
‘And is he dead?’ the elderly man said.
‘No …’
‘Well, it’s probably OK, then.’ I met his eye; saw the glimmer of his mischievous gleam. I burst out laughing.
I don’t think it was funny in English. But in Polish, it was hilarious.
PERTH
It’s been three years since Tom and I left Poland. We’re now settled in Perth, Western Australia. With its relentless blue skies, sprawling dry suburbs and alcohol controls, it’s about as different to Warsaw as it’s possible for a place to be.
And my life is about that different, too. A week after I arrived home I swapped my jeans and down jackets for the latest season’s tailored suit, and I have reported every day since to the sixth floor of an office tower on the main business strip, where I write reports about improving government service effectiveness and draw flow diagrams of process inefficiencies. Turning my head from my computer, I enjoy the sort of views over the Swan River and the Perth hills that make you understand why people call this place paradise. You can see the smoke from the bushfires as they consume the outer suburbs from up there, too.
Before I know it, my three years off seem a distant memory, and I find myself waking up on Monday mornings, counting the weeks to the next public holiday … But then I think to myself: Do I really want Dee’s life? Or even Anthea’s? I jump out of bed and head for the shower. All things considered, I choose this life. I now see, though, that one of the many privileges I have is that choice. It doesn’t mean I have escaped office politics or demanding bosses. But I have another Polish proverb up my sleeve now: Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
As for Tom, he took some well-earned time off. He went fishing with his mates, and cleaned and cooked for us. When I told people he wasn’t working, they would look at me sideways and say things like, ‘So how long are you going to let that go on?’ or ‘How can you afford to have him not work?’ and various other things no one had ever said to or about me when I didn’t work. Tom tells me he never minded picking up my drycleaning and cooking a nice meal for us, and just saw it as a useful contribution to our mutual well-being, rather than a demeaning task. All
things considered, he is a much better wife than me. It’s almost a pity he decided to go back to work.
Few people I meet in Australia are curious about my time in Poland. ‘That must have been interesting,’ they say, when I tell them I lived in Warsaw for three years, before they change the topic. Bathroom renovations, football, and the next barbecue are all popular options. It is unfathomable to many people I meet that, given the opportunity to live in Perth, you wouldn’t. I see their point when, on sticky summer nights Tom and I head down to the beach before dinner for a quick dip in the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean. But now I see these things through the eyes of someone who’s seen other things, too. The joy of fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables arriving on the street corners. Carrying your nationality in your heart – one you know that millions have fought and died for. Boil-in-a-bag rice.
Tom and I have made what some might call heroic efforts to keep up our links with Poland. We’ve travelled an hour to Perth’s Polish club, with its mediocre pierogi, warm vodka, and surprised but welcoming old timers. We listen to Polish radio on the internet, and are watching the latest season of Days of Honour, ordered from Empik over the internet. We’ve accosted Polish-speaking people in the street from time to time – in faltering Polish that has proven to be easier to lose than it was to gain. Either they look at us suspiciously and hurry on, or invite us into their homes and won’t let us leave until the vodka is finished. And I simply can’t stop myself correcting people of Polish descent who do not pronounce their names correctly – there’s a prominent Queensland politician who does not even come close. So perhaps there’s a little Polish babcia in me after all.
None of our expat friends are left in Warsaw. Shannon and Paul went to Bucharest, where two daughters and salsa dancing keep her busy. ‘Everything is worse here,’ she tells me by email. But they’ve found friends there to share their trials and successes with on Friday nights over take-away Indian. Some of them she met when she joined the IWG and volunteered for the organising committee, she confessed to me once. I promised not to tell.
When Bluey’s work cut Julie’s Lisbon posting short and wanted to move them to China, their now high-school age children revolted. The family decided to try life in Melbourne for the first time in more than twenty years. Work as an English teacher is proving harder to get for Julie than she’d expected – she’s not such a rarity in Australia. In our latest skype chat, she tells me she’s started a business doing champagne tastings for corporate executives. ‘You gotta work with what you know,’ she tells me. No wonder she was such a successful expat wife.
We haven’t heard much from Alex and Magda – a quick wedding and the birth of twins for them that spring have taken precedence over correspondence. While Stacey has added ‘raising puppies in Accra’ to ‘real journalism’ on the list of things she’s doing with herself. Being the author of a worthy guidebook to Poland is, however, not on that list. Despite having paid (meagerly) for her to travel the country seeking out the best of its big cities and its remotest corners, the guidebook company didn’t end up printing the update. ‘There aren’t enough tourists in Poland to make it worthwhile,’ her publisher said when they canned the project.
Meanwhile Hannah’s emails from Washington, full of news about her job at the Smithsonian and peppered with words like ‘psyched’ and ‘Beltway’, grow more despondent as her return to Warsaw grows closer. ‘Although it will be nice to escape the terrible weather here at least,’ she says. Something tells me I wouldn’t survive a posting to DC.
I get chatty missives from time to time from Natalia, Elena and Tomek, but underneath I can feel an undercurrent of worry, as rumbles from the east ripple over the border towards them. I don’t follow the details of Eastern European politics as closely as I once did, but one thing’s clear: Once again, powerful people have their eye on these wide brown fields, and history suggests that the people who live on them will not be of any concern.
All of them ask, from time to time, if we’re looking at doing another posting. ‘Maybe one day,’ I reply. For now, I’m enjoying my life in Perth, with a cat called Very, a houseful of Polish memories, good friends – old and new – and an easy stroll to the cafés of Fremantle with our new boxer-cross puppy, Charlie Too (Charlie, for short). That’s where Tom and I can be found most Saturday mornings, with a cappuccino, planning trips to visit other friends in far-flung places, and reminiscing about the years we dined with presidents and couldn’t be bothered going to Rome.
I guess in many ways our life here looks a lot like our old life in Canberra did. That’s good enough for me.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The process of turning three years of my life into these pages was something like working out what to take to Poland. I started with a lot, and in the course of trying to weave a storyline through some of the events, the trips, the people and the moments of those three years – and (hopefully) end up with something that was coherent, logical and interesting – there were a lot of decisions about what to keep, what to throw out, and what to store away, perhaps for another day.
I decided to recount any interactions I had with the named public figures as accurately as my memory allowed, and to present events that are on the public record more or less in the order they happened – to the extent it made sense or was practical to do so. As for the other characters and events of this book, they were inspired by interactions with various people in many contexts over this time. Those I ended up writing as part of this story are composites, representing the sorts of people I came across and the types of things that happened while I was in Warsaw, rather than specific individuals or events. Because of this, all of the characters here have fictional names, professions, and national affiliations. As a result, it should not be inferred that any person who held, in real life, a similar position to one described here bears any relationship to the attributed (or any other) character in this book.
The character who features most, of course, is Poland. Of all the characters I wrote about, she was the one I most wanted to do the most justice to. I’ll leave it for others to judge the extent to which I’ve succeeded, although I hope there can be no doubt that I tried.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
So many people have been so encouraging along the way. Few more so than Fiona Koetsier, who even among the depths of a Polish winter and multiple international moves managed to find the time and enthusiasm for my manuscripts, and from whom I learned that sometimes the best bits have to stay on the cutting room floor. Melita Granger, who – thankfully – cut thousands of words of architectural description from early drafts. Kristin Williams, who has been enthusiastic about multiple writing projects and assured me I was on the right track with this one. Hilary Heuler, who laughed at the right bits and pointed out the right flaws. Sylwia Kozien-Zielinska, because of whose honesty the final work is less funny, more true, and far better. Agnieszka Monod-Gayraud (Le Nart), who gave me my first break at the Warsaw Insider, and Amber Jamieson and the rest of the Crikey crew, who picked me up and ran with me. Asia Dabrowska, who shared her knowledge of Polish culture, history, language and grammar with me, and Lera Quinn, who did similarly with Ukrainian and Russian. Ultimately, nothing can be finished unless it is started, for which credit goes to Liana Christensen, who started as this book’s literary midwife, and ended up its godmother as well – and without whose generous expertise and guidance it would have fallen off the rails in so many ways.
So many Polish people showed me their country and tried to teach me their language, many of whom didn’t even know that’s what was happening. I thank you all.
Sole responsibility for any and all errors remains mine.
Finally, to the wonderful people at Fremantle Press, and to the generous sponsors of the City of Fremantle T.A.G. Hungerford Award – the City of Fremantle, Fremantle Library and the West Australian, who took an unpublished author and made her a published one.
AVAILABLE FROM FREMANTLE PRESS
In 1903, the arti
st Gwendolen Mary John travels from London to France with her companion Dorelia. Surviving on their wits and Gwen’s raw talent, the young women walk from Calais to Paris. In the new century, the world is full of promise: it is time for Gwen to step out from the shadow of her overbearing brother Augustus and seek out the great painter and sculptor Auguste Rodin. It is time to be brave and visible, to love and be loved – and time perhaps to become a hero as the stain of anti-Semitism spreads across Europe.
This novel brings its heroine, Paris and the whole era into sharp focus and vivid life. Sydney Morning Herald
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Black magic, big waves and mad Aussie expats. In Indonesia, Penny is drifting, partying, hanging out – a thousand miles away from claustrophobic Perth and her career-minded boyfriend. But things take a dangerous turn when she goes to work at Shane’s Sumatran Oasis. Caught up in the hostility directed at Shane, and flirting and surfing with the hell-man Matt, Penny soon finds herself swept into a world where two very different cultures must collide.
Particularly sharp in its abstract yet precise evocations of the sensory overload of Indonesia and in its dense, poetic riffs on the almost narcotic pull of chasing waves. Weekend Australian
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