by Jay Martin
Shannon laughed. ‘Now imagine you need to find that out and you don’t speak Polish! Hey, I didn’t know Tom smoked.’
‘He doesn’t.’
She gestured towards where Tom stood with Paul on the balcony, sucking tobacco smoke into his lungs. ‘Yes, well he’s had a bit of a rough couple of months. I’ve started planning our summer holiday, to give him – us – something to look forward to,’ I said.
‘Ooh yes, where are you thinking?’ Holiday planning was Shannon and my favourite past-time. After complaining about Polish service, that was.
‘Greece and Turkey sound lovely, but of course we have beaches and warm weather at home. And there are all the great places to the north too – Estonia, Finland, I feel like I should see those while it’s warmer, but it seems a waste of the good weather. What about you guys?’
‘Ireland we’ve always wanted to visit, and the Canary Islands sound nice. We were thinking of north Africa, maybe Morocco or Tunisia. Gosh, listen to us,’ Shannon stopped to laugh. ‘Where shall we jet off to this year? It’s like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, isn’t it?’
‘Although I’m not sure people who are actually rich and famous have to go to Polish post offices.’
It felt like I lived multiple lives in Poland. One life that involved doing the cooking, cleaning, watching TV. The normal things you have to do everywhere. Another life as a foreigner, spent in Polish supermarkets trying to identify food items, finding my way around on buses, and dealing with obstructive post office officials. And then there was my embassy life, where I attended gala events at five-star hotels and was served as much free smoked salmon and champagne as I could consume and then some, and tossed up the merits of Greece and Finland for our next summer holiday. Although while this last one seemed the ultimate indulgence to me, most Polish people could afford trips to such places, all of which were within an hour’s flying time and less than a hundred dollars on budget airlines from here. Tom wasn’t having the same disjointed experience here as I was. He was just a diplomat, 24/7. In the embassy all day, and then in the evening at work events. It’s part of the reason I made such an effort to hang out with other ‘normal’ people we’d met – like Shannon and Paul. I was trying to introduce more of the ‘normal’ back into his life. My normal, that is, not his.
‘Soon enough it’ll just be going to the post office and no flying to London for the weekend. So appreciate it while it lasts,’ Shannon said.
‘Hey, you know I took your advice and sent a few travel pieces and stories in to a couple of magazines,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose anything will come of it, but it’s been fun doing a bit of writing anyway.’
‘What’s that?’ Paul and Tom closed the door to the balcony behind them. Shannon repeated my news – although it wasn’t really news as yet.
Tom leaned over and kissed me. ‘How come you didn’t tell me?’ he asked.
‘Well, since we’re all here, we have news, too,’ Shannon said. The look that passed between Shannon and Paul cemented suspicions I’d harboured since Shannon had started drinking tea instead of wine some weeks earlier.
‘That’s great!’ I said. ‘I’m really pleased for you.’ Tom touched my shoulder, I nodded. We had a routine now, whenever we heard the news from someone else, having had to accept that it would never be us.
Tom threw his arms around Paul. ‘Hey, let’s go to the pub for a celebratory drink!’ he said. ‘Is that OK?’ he asked me.
‘Of course! You should go out and have some fun. It will do you good to let off some steam!’
‘Give me a call at one if I’m not home.’ Tom clapped Paul on the back and they took off, laughing.
I called Tom at one. And two. And three. He didn’t answer the calls. He staggered in at three-thirty. I guess he’d taken my advice.
WIOSNA – SPRING
I imagined snow would melt. It doesn’t. It sinks. Like a giant, disappointing soufflé. It gets progressively more grey and worn around the edges, as it reveals first the taller rocks and then the ground underneath, which then decays to mud. And finally – leaving the best till last – it presents you with a season of frozen dog turds, which proceed to ferment as one.
Welcome to spring in Poland.
We’d added a couple of films to our IWG book-club schedule, having decided that watching a film and eating cake was a pleasant alternative to the streets outside and their defrosting dog crap.
We hadn’t counted on Polish cinema. The first film we watched was Andrzej Wajda’s The Promised Land, the story of three young men – a Pole, a German, and a Jew – who make their fortunes in Lodz during its nineteenth-century boom time. The relationships between the three characters mirror those of the countries, religions and cultures playing out all around them, as they pursue the spoils of capitalism. Spoiler alert: by the end, all the characters are dead – although not before their lives have been ruined. I don’t know that watching it was exactly the ‘pleasant’ experience we’d been after, but the outside world did seem less dispiriting by comparison, at least.
It did spur me on to invite Anthea to come with me to visit Lodz. There was a museum of cinematography that I wanted to visit there – a ‘must-see’ according to the guidebook. With her interest in Polish film, I thought Anthea might like to come. It could be the ‘somewhere’ I’d promised to take her at that first book-club meeting. I shook my head, realising that it was ten months since we’d arrived and half a year since that first book-club meeting already.
A few days later we met at the main roundabout and I led her through Warsaw’s central train station. It did look uninviting to the uninitiated, but it was a convenient place to get a lot of chores done – changing money ahead of a trip to a non-euro country, buying cheap shoes. There was even a McDonald’s down there; in this land of pork, this vegetarian had succumbed to its chips more than once. By the way Anthea hugged her bag to her side and looked nervously towards anyone that came close to us, I suspected she was uninitiated. ‘Ach nach dich taxi?’ someone hissed something at us in German as we emerged from the escalators and into the main hall. ‘Papierosy?’ another said, offering tax-free cigarettes from the east in a Russian accent. I reacted with a Polish mixture of disdain and disinterest I’d picked up from Polish service staff and walked on.
I went to the automated ticket kiosk and bought tickets from the machine – there had been a better way to do this than the international counter – then hurried Anthea along towards our platform, keeping her moving so she wouldn’t have time to dwell on the dirty grey surrounds. I remembered her plush home, where we’d admired cake and taken tea. Or my own comfortable and comforting apartment, for that matter. The inside and outside world of expat Polands were so different.
The train, at least, was a brand spanking new commuter affair – funded by the EU, according to the signage – which made the 130-kilometre trip in a comfortable, quiet, air-conditioned one and a half hours – like it was supposed to.
‘So have you travelled around Poland much?’ I asked her, once we’d chosen some window seats. We had our pick in the otherwise empty carriage. Unless it was August, Poles seemed to stay at home.
‘Yes, we’ve been to both Krakow and Gdansk,’ Anthea said. ‘You?’
‘Let’s see.’ I listed my destinations so far: Krakow (twice), Gdansk, Sopot, Zakopane, Poznan, Lublin, Torun, Wroclaw. Her face remained blank. ‘And we’ve done a bit of travel in the region of course,’ I added, listing a few of the places I’d been outside of Poland. London to see Gabby, and Tom and I had gone to Sweden for a weekend in March, when I’d seen return tickets for thirty-five dollars. The airport bus to central Stockholm had cost us more than the flight. I’d come back via Oslo and Copenhagen. Because … why not?
‘So you do all that with your husband’s work?’ she said.
‘No, he doesn’t actually do that much work travel. And when he does, it’s boring places like Brussels and I go off somewhere else interesting instead. That’s how I ended up in L
ublin,’ I said.
‘Who do you go with?’
‘Just myself usually.’
‘Really?’ She tightened her grip on her handbag. Anthea’s husband worked for an international shopping centre developer. They’d gone from their native Dublin to Vienna, where they were supposed to be for two years. After just a few months that development fell through and they were moved to Hong Kong for a one-year stint. She went to Ireland to have her daughter, expecting to be going home shortly after that, but by the time she got back her husband told her the firm was moving them to Dubai. Anthea agreed as it was only supposed to be for a few months, but it had turned into two years. After that they’d shifted him to Warsaw. ‘They tell us we might move this summer, but …’ she said.
‘It must be exciting, going to all those different places?’
‘I thought two years in Austria sounded like fun. But I feel like I’ve spent the last five years either packing our lives up into boxes or unpacking them again.’ I had a flashback of my own traumatic departure from Canberra. ‘Don’t you get lonely, doing all those things by yourself?’ Anthea asked.
I thought for a moment. ‘No. I guess I’m pretty happy with my own company. We know we’ll be here for three years, and then we’ll go back home, so I’m just trying to make the most of it all.’
‘That would be nice.’ I wasn’t sure if she meant the certainty, going back home, or something else. ‘But you know, one of the shopping centres John designed is down here. He was based down here for the last few months while he was working on it. It would be fun to go and see it.’
‘You didn’t mention that! You never went with him?’
‘I’d just end up sitting in a hotel room waiting for him to get home. I figured I may as well stay in Warsaw. I have all my friends and activities there. Cooking classes and walking group and Polish literature and quilting and things. All the things that keep me busy,’ she said.
‘OK, so my must-see is the Museum of Cinematography, and yours is the shopping centre. A good mix.’
The EU cash had run out before they got to Lodz’s station, I surmised from the collection of semi-derelict concrete rooms and kebab kiosks that met us there. I eyeballed the map and marched us towards our first destination: the Lodz Museum of Cinematography. Or at least I marched us towards where I thought it should be, hoping to instill some confidence in Anthea.
We found the building, paid our five zloty entry fee and went in. The basement level was home to an exhibition of some cartoons by a Czech animator neither of us had ever heard of. Other than that, the sum total of the cinematographic elements seemed to be an old movie camera, and some full-sized movie posters advertising Polish movies we didn’t know. We wandered through the exhibit trying to make sense of any of it, but it was like reading a Polish newspaper. Even if I understood the words, there was nothing here I knew or recognised to hang any kind of connection off.
The first floor housed a series of photographs of Lodz from the air. It wasn’t connected to cinematography in any obvious way we could see, but Anthea and I tried to orient ourselves to it as best we could, pointing out things to each other on the map. The train station we’d come in on, the building we were in.
‘You know one thing about this town,’ I said, standing back. ‘There’s no rynek. Town square,’ I continued when Anthea looked puzzled. ‘There’s no town square here.’ Lodz was a planned city, designed around the needs of industry and mercantilism. No one had bothered designing in a rynek to give it a geographic and civic heart.
‘What was it that the guide book said about this museum?’ Anthea asked.
‘Something like, “If you only have time for one museum in Lodz, make it this one”,’ I said. ‘But, you know, I’m not always convinced about this guidebook.’
Until now, the worst museum I’d seen in Poland was Warsaw’s Museum of Technology. I presumed from its name that it was intended to be a showcase of technical innovation and invention. It was more a showcase of what had been cutting-edge in 1973. Old radios with chunky dials, a twin-tub washing machine and a rusty iron, some space travel paraphernalia that looked like it had come from a black-and-white Doctor Who episode – or a hotel reception in Poznan. Less a museum of technology than a graveyard where technologies had gone to die. We had a new contender. As a museum of cinematography, I wasn’t sure this was even worth the nominal entry fee.
As an example of a lavish townhouse of a wealthy industrialist, though, Anthea and I both agreed it had been worth the trip. Each room featured tall windows, elaborate chandeliers, carved wooden ceilings, floors of marbled tiles arranged in geometric patterns, and dark wallpaper in olive and crimson. I remembered the background noise in the film, The Promised Land; the unrelenting clatter of the wheels of the mill, spinning wool and cotton into fabric. A brutal existence for the workers, and a luxurious one in houses like this for those who got the profits.
It didn’t take long before I felt we’d got our five zloty’s worth. I suggested lunch.
‘What kind of food do you think there might be here?’ Anthea asked.
‘From my experience of regional Polish towns, it’s not too hard to get some average pierogi. Or some OK pizza and chips.’
‘Pizza and chips sounds great.’
‘Let’s do that then.’
We took off down Lodz’s main strip, Piotrkowska Street – Europe’s longest, my guidebook claimed. Bronze stars inlaid into the pavement à la Hollywood Boulevard paid tribute to the town’s substantial legacy to the world of moving pictures, like film directors Kieslowski, Polanski, and Wajda – all graduates of the town’s famous film school.
A few paving stones were where the similarity between this town and anywhere sunny ended on this day. Technically it was spring, but a pall of low-hanging cloud remained over the country. It had been unkind to Warsaw, but it was brutal to Lodz. All around me, the city seemed to be falling apart. The main street and the side streets alike were clad with stony grey plaster that was falling away in chunks to reveal grey concrete underneath. Greyness seeped into Lodz’s very core.
We stepped into a sports bar on Europe’s longest street and ordered some fried food and a couple of Cokes from an uninterested waitress.
‘Isn’t it great that wherever you go, you can always get pizza?’ It was the happiest I’d seen Anthea all day. I didn’t necessarily agree, although I was happy to bask in the cheeriness of the decor and the new spark in my travel companion, and order us some fries and pizza – ‘without any meat’, said in a way that looked like you meant it. It was the key to getting something vegetarian in Poland, I’d worked out.
‘Hey, whatever happened to Jim?’ I asked her, munching on a chip. Jim had caused a commotion among the book-club women – one I’m sure he was unaware of – when Anthea had brought us the news that he’d wanted to join. We all groaned about how a man would take over the group and always want to have his say and we couldn’t complain about our husbands any more. We’d grumbled but in the end acquiesced. He’d turned up to one meeting – where he’d proved to be a polite and thoughtful person. He’d never come again.
‘He went back to the States.’
‘With his wife?’
‘No, she stayed here. I heard they are getting divorced.’
For some reason, men didn’t seem suited to expat spousehood. Or non-working expat spousehood, anyway. I had met a few who had come with their wives to Warsaw and were working – a couple as teachers in the local international schools, one as a writer. If there were others out there who didn’t work, I’d never met them. Perhaps I didn’t have much in common with many of the people I’d met in the International Women’s Group, but I enjoyed talking about books and films with them, and whenever I needed to find a new grocery item someone always knew where to get it – or they were on their way to the UK and offered to pick some up for me. The male spouses didn’t even have that. Now that I thought about it, Jim might have needed us more than anyone.
‘Well, I ho
pe your must-see is better than mine.’ I folded the map so the route to Manufaktura, the shopping centre her husband had designed, was face up. Its name meant ‘Factory’ – a nod to the heritage of this town, and the shell of the building it had been converted from. We paid the bill and headed for it.
‘I know that so many people would love to have my life – being able to go to all these places,’ Anthea said, picking up our earlier conversation as we walked towards her selection. ‘But I’m not really that kind of person. I look at my friends back in Dublin – making a home, having friends who they know aren’t going to leave in a few months, their children going to school with people they’ll go to university with, not ones they’ll never see in three years, going to work every day and learning different things and meeting new people. My friends just see my full-time nanny and me not having to work. But I just want to have a job and have my daughter grow up with her cousins. Instead I’m doing quilting and reading Polish literature and wondering how long it is until I have to pack up our lives again.’
‘Have you and John talked about going back to Ireland?’
‘Of course, but financially it doesn’t make any sense. He makes so much more when he’s away. And we just put on a second storey in Ireland.’
‘But it seems like you’d be happier, you could get a job –’
‘It wouldn’t make sense.’ Her firmest statement of the day.