Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  By a nice twist, the talking point in the newspapers now was not Polish drinking but English drinking, specifically the antics of English males on stag weekends in Kraków. Why, I was repeatedly asked, did they drink beer like that? The phenomenon aroused bewilderment among the new generation of Kraków professionals, who favoured caffè latte or a glass of Chilean Merlot over spirit distilled from potato peelings, and who were generally too young to remember much about the old days of alcoholic frenzy. It was Kraków’s misfortune that, in its eagerness to draw in visitors and service their requirements, it had not yet devised a way to keep this particular British export out.

  I came across one of these bands of brothers after arriving in Kraków on the bus from Lesko. There were six blokes, all in jeans, trainers, and black T-shirts bearing the legend STEVE’S STAG DO CRACOW 2008. Nicknames were printed in red: Lex Dangle, Boney Lips, and so on. They loped along the pavement, shoulders swinging, bellies swaying, barging into each other as they rehearsed football moves, oblivious to the stares. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and they seemed to be sober, although not much more attractive for it. No doubt they would be hitting the bars around the Rynek later, ready to give 110 per cent effort to ensure Steve had a send-off to remember the rest of his married life.

  I had to catch the train to Prague that night, but I had a few hours spare to see if I could pick up any remaining trace of Janusz Wanicki. By then I knew what Jurek Kowalski and Józef Jeleński and one or two others had heard, which was that he had died eight or nine years before, in Finland. Of drink, they said, nothing more specific than that. They talked about Janusz fondly, but as if he came from a distant place and time. Jurek told me that when they were all in Finland for the 1989 World Championships, Janusz had been drunk every day. He said Janusz could speak Finnish fluently, but when his wife’s parents – who disapproved of him strongly – came to visit, he would pretend that he couldn’t speak or understand a word. I remembered him telling me about social life in Finland: ‘When Finnish people invite friends for dinner, they come, they say hello, they sit down and eat and don’t say anything, then they say goodbye and go home. Is not easy for Polish person with these fucking strange people.’

  The address I had for him was in a quiet residential street across the river from the Wawel. I’d gone there on my final evening before leaving Poland for Czechoslovakia. It had been a wearyingly long day, devoted to celebrating the First Communion of Leszek Trojanowski’s younger son, Wojtek, then aged ten. The service itself took place at the Capuchin Church, where I stood in the throng at the back while a flock of children – boys in white suits, white shoes, white gloves and white bow-ties; girls in white lace with garlands of white plastic lilies – made their vows in front of a battery of whirring and waving video cameras. Afterwards we went back to Leszek and Isa’s house where breakfast, lunch and tea were served at intervals of two and a half hours, none of the meals accompanied by any alcohol save for one glass of pink Asti Spumante to toast Wojtek’s new status in the world.

  In the evening I’d galloped round to Janusz’s flat, yearning for beer. I described to him the events of the day. He alleged that the children were under orders from the priests to report their parents if alcohol was consumed at First Communion celebrations. ‘And if they are given money for presents, they must give half to the Church.’ He handed me a glass of cool Löwenbräu. ‘The Church has so much fucking power in this country! Too much power. Is why people drink so much, because Church make them feel so bad. Nastrovje.’

  Eighteen years on, I didn’t recognise the building and no one answered when I rang the bell. Finally an elderly woman appeared from next door and summoned a man who spoke some English. He remembered the name Wanicki. Some kind of artist, wasn’t he? He’d moved to a street near the Castle. Agnieszki Street, he thought. I went back across the river and found the street, which was narrow and dark, lined with shops and grimy nineteenth-century houses divided into flats and bedsits. I rang the bells of the flats at number 2, to which I had been directed, but received only blank expressions and shakes of the head.

  To kill time, I wandered back to the river and walked along the embankment among the cyclists, runners and dog-walkers. Chess players sat at chequered tables in the municipal gardens, studying their pieces. In theory I was heading downstream, but there was no perceptible flow in any direction. Rubbish floated in rafts against concrete retaining walls, bobbing gently on the ripples stirred by the breeze.

  Normally the company of almost any river is enough to keep my spirits up. But the thought of what had happened to Janusz, and of the sparkling water we had fished together, and the sight of the inert, dirty Wisła swilling around in its concrete prison, combined to fill me with an ache of sadness. So I left the broken, unwanted river and walked through the Planty gardens to the railway station. There were three English girls in front of me in the queue at the ticket counter, backpacking somewhere. They were discussing the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and knew it all, young as they were. Of course it wasn’t fair to accuse the parents, but they agreed that there was something not right there. And the bottom line was you never left a child on its own, simple as that.

  Quite suddenly the past, a time when three-year-old girls could sleep safely in their beds, seemed a long time ago.

  Epilogue

  Six weeks after I came home from eastern Europe, the American investment bank, Lehman Brothers – crushed under a burden of debt greater than most countries’ GDP – went bankrupt. Other mighty institutions tottered. Some fell. The soothsayers said the global economy was entering a dark valley; some said it was the darkest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

  Prophecies as to the fate of the countries I had just left behind varied from the dire to the apocalyptic. There was a feeling that one or more of them – Hungary was the favoured candidate – could follow Iceland, where the collapse of the banks had precipitated the implosion of the entire economy.

  For their part, the people of eastern Europe looked on in bemusement as those in charge of the advanced industrial economies released unheard-of sums to keep their banks and other institutions from sinking beneath the waves. Time and again they had been lectured by sharp-suited economists from the IMF and the World Bank on the paramount virtues of liberalising trade, balancing budgets, and leaving the private sector to run the business, and the market to decide the winners and losers. Now they were witnessing government intervention on a colossal scale. The figures were beyond comprehension.

  It was no wonder panic was in the air. For the previous ten years or so – roughly half the period since the downfall of the Communist regimes – the countries of the former Soviet Bloc had experienced constant and rapid economic growth. The dismantling of the old command structures combined with a strong, steady flow of investment from the west had released a vast reservoir of talent, energy and ambition, setting countless entrepreneurs on the move. Wages, living standards and consumer spending rose and kept on rising. The promise of convergence with the levels of prosperity in western Europe, which had seemed so remote in 1990, had become an article of belief.

  Now everything seemed at risk. There were forecasts of currencies collapsing, governments defaulting on debts, runs on banks, chaos on stock markets, financial meltdown to be followed by political chaos. The shallow foundations of the new democracies seemed in danger of being swept away, with incalculable consequences for peace and security.

  It did not happen. Nemesis kept its distance. But the impact was severe. Except in Poland, the biggest and least debt-burdened of the economies, growth stalled and recession bit. State spending projects were cancelled, social spending was cut, taxes rose, unemployment soared. In Hungary – where the forint fell by a fifth against the euro, leaving millions of people and hundreds of businesses who had taken out loans and mortgages in foreign currencies facing ruin – the ostensibly socialist government introduced an austerity programme that prompted a seven per cent fall in GDP within a year. T
hroughout the region the squeaking of tightening belts mixed with groans of protest and cries of anger.

  In Târgu Mureş, Grigore Lungu’s furniture company laid off half its workforce. Business in Ukraine – one of its developing markets – was described by Grigore as ‘katastrof’. Exports elsewhere, particularly to Italy, slumped, but the company survived. Gábor and Márta Hegedüs’s marina at Tiszafüred stayed afloat, although unemployment in the town rose above thirty per cent. Márta told me business was down, but not by as much as they had feared. She thought 2010 would be as bad again, but maybe after that things would get better. Peter Bienek reported a steep fall in sales of fishing tackle. Žilina’s dependence on car making had exaggerated the effects of the recession, but he was hopeful that the worst would soon be over. ‘People must still go fishing,’ he said cheerfully.

  In the circumstances it was perhaps not surprising that celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of the overthrow of Communism in eastern Europe were generally subdued. The tone seemed to be set in Poland, where the initial plan for a ceremony in Gdańsk was abandoned after anti-government protests by the few shipyard workers to have survived the withdrawal of state support for ship-building. The event was switched to Kraków, where public wrangling over Russia’s refusal to accept responsibility for the slaughter of Polish army officers at Katyn in 1940 served as a reminder of grievances and tensions going way back beyond the recent history.

  We Europeans were invited – most insistently by the journalists who had witnessed the momentous happenings first-hand – to contemplate this miracle of our time. But the problem with any miracle is recalling the reality that preceded it. When I was in Kraków in 2008 I commented to someone I met on the petrol shortages I had experienced in 1990. ‘What shortages?’ he demanded roughly. I described to him the scenes at fuel stations that I had recorded in my notebooks. He shook his head. There was no crisis, he said. Many problems, for sure, but not that. I was mistaken. It struck me afterwards that he had simply forgotten, as we do.

  To mark the events of 1989 BBC Radio Four ran a daily five-minute archive slot presented by one of those veteran reporters, Sir John Tusa. It was expertly enough done, with lots of music and atmosphere and vivid snatches of interviews and dispatches. But there was also something unreal, remote, almost puzzling about the palpable charges of excitement and optimism crackling in the air as the correspondents described the Wall coming down, the surging streets of Prague, the scenes as East Germans poured through the broken-down barriers into Hungary. Here was Havel in shirtsleeves, Dubček blinking, Wałȩsa with moustache bristling, Gorbachev waving, the Ceauşescus cringing. Other players flitted on stage and off: the Berlin hardman Erich Honecker pushed out of the way; Jaruzelski in his curiously shaded glasses swept aside in Poland; Czechoslovakia’s last Communist leader, Milouš Jakeš, sent packing by velvet revolutionaries. Where were they now, these shadows, and where were the world leaders who looked on and made their solemn pronouncements – Thatcher, George Bush the first, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Kohl, Mitterrand? Dead, senile, retired, left behind in a past which they had helped to shape, but which soon moved on.

  For a few weeks in the autumn and winter of 1989 Europe surrendered itself to elation and hope in a way that had not been seen since VE Day in 1945. But that kind of mass uplift occurs very rarely and by its nature quickly dies away, tending to leave those who were swept up in it a little perplexed as to what came over them. By the time I set off in my little red car at the beginning of May 1990, the dust had settled and other stories had intervened. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in February. There were riots in London against Mrs Thatcher’s poll tax. In Brussels, European Community leaders (it was still the EC then) wrestled with economic union. While I was away the BSE scandal unfolded, an earthquake killed tens of thousands in Iran, the unravelling of the Soviet Union accelerated, West Germany won the football World Cup. Within days of my return Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait and Brian Keenan was released after five years as a hostage in Lebanon. By the end of the year Germany had been reunited and both Thatcher and Gorbachev had been overthrown.

  In the countries I had fished my way through, people were learning to face very uncomfortable realities. Factories and farms were closing as subsidies ran out. Wages stayed low, prices shot up, shops were empty, fuel was unobtainable, queues got longer. The gulf between them and us seemed as deep and wide as ever, even if they were now allowed to shout across it. Politics was a shrill shouting match, and no one believed the promises, least of all those who made them. The Stasi and the Securitate and the other forces of secret police had officially been disbanded, but were lurking on the sidelines. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were still present and visible, threatening who knew what.

  The Europe that has emerged since would have been regarded as a fantasy, an impossibility. Now a generation has come of age – like my Romanian fishing companion, Calin, for whom pre-1989 is another chapter of ancient history. No one pretends that this new Europe is anything other than deeply flawed. The infection of corruption runs deep. The law creaks and grinds with infinite slowness and considerable partiality. Bureaucracy stifles and strangles. Politicians caper and declaim and are found with their fingers in the till. The left may have been routed (only the Czech Republic still has a functioning Communist Party) but the far right keeps feeding hungrily on residual xenophobia and bubbling prejudice. In Hungary the virulently nationalist Jobbik (whose leader urged Jews critical of its attitude to Israel to ‘go and play with their little circumcised tails’) won fifteen per cent of the vote in last year’s European elections. Slovakia’s National Party – which artfully promotes hatred of gypsies and prejudice against the sizeable Hungarian minority – has been part of the ruling coalition since 2006.

  In general the politics is rough, vindictive, tribal and volatile. Swings in public opinion are extreme, as leaders strive to reconcile the impossible expectations of their electorates with harsh economic facts and the stern admonitions of foreign lenders. On the other hand, the new democracies still function. People vote, and their votes are counted and count. The far right is a force in Hungary and Slovakia, but in Romania and Poland it has been in retreat. Nostalgia for the orderliness and full employment of the distant past may still be potent, but none of these countries has seriously flirted with the necessary concomitants: namely one-party rule and the command economy.

  Two decades ago freedom was the word on every lip and the idea in every heart. Freedom has come, and it’s proved itself a complicated and troubling reality. For some – the elderly, pensioners, workers in redundant industries, officials in bloated bureaucracies – it has been hard, often crushingly so. But for the majority, the advent of free markets, free exchange rates, free trade, free movement of labour and freedom from central control has brought a tremendous, astounding transformation in their lives. People are more prosperous, better fed, healthier, warmer, better able to enjoy themselves than their parents or grandparents would have dreamed possible. Within the obvious constraints they can go where they want, say what they like, vote for whom they please, spend their time and money as they see fit.

  So what has been lost?

  Before writing this final part of my book, I read William Blacker’s Along The Enchanted Way, an account of living in Romania between 1996 and 2004. Blacker settled first in a village in Maramureş, in the remote north beyond the Carpathians, and subsequently in Transylvania, where he set up house with a gypsy girl. It is a story of love: for the gypsy girl Marishka and her sister, Natalia, for the country people of Maramureş, for the wild landscapes and customs and beliefs. It is saturated with an intense, nostalgic passion for the old, simple ways, and sadness at their passing. In the village the cherry trees are felled to pay for TVs and washing machines. The young put away their traditional smocks and leggings in favour of jeans and T-shirts, and leave to take jobs in the west. Blacker’s friend Mihai, whose life has spanned the passing of ages, dies. Blacker and his gypsy
girl go their separate ways.

  His regret is the same as that expressed with piercing eloquence by Norman Lewis in Voices of the Old Sea and his other books of travel. It is the regret of the exile, fleeing from his own noisy land in search of remote, pristine places still beyond the confines of our modern world. It is for the loss of peace, beauty and particularity. The Spain Lewis discovered sixty years ago disappeared under concrete and beach parasols. William Blacker’s Maramureş has surrendered its scythes and horse-drawn ploughs, and fashioned its country dances into visitor attractions.

  But implicit in the passion of the exile is the disparity between him and the community that accepts him. He may dress as they do, work with them, learn to speak their language, but he can never be one of them. The reason the sanctuary is special is that its people are poor, cut off from the means that enabled him to find them. They toil with their hands in the fields, not because they choose to, but because they know no other way. Once they have a choice, they seize the conveniences and comforts that the exile has left behind.

  I felt something of the same sadness as Blacker and Lewis when I went back almost twenty years on. I found myself wishing that the restorers had been less thorough in the ancient towns and cities, that the meadows beside the streams I fished had been kept clear of chalets and weekend cottages, that cars had never reached the valleys. Almost everywhere – even the Danube Delta of my imaginings – had been invaded. Almost nowhere was as quiet, as empty, as unspoilt as I remembered.

  But, of course, the only way that could have been avoided would have been if the people who lived there had remained as poor and deprived as they were when I first came. I was able to travel there because I had the car, the time, the dollars. How could I wish to deny all that to them? And further, although I might sigh over the replacement of the rasping of the sharpstone against the scythe blade by the clatter of the mechanical grass-cutter, would I have wanted to embrace the peasant life, bent in the fields under the broiling sun, any more than I would have wanted to return to a medieval evening meal of pottage, and a life expectancy of forty-two?