by Jay Martin
I thanked Tomek and took a sip. ‘Very nice. So you order from bar or you just make from water?’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Do you know how much water Jesus turned into wine?’
I knew the story, but I’d never thought about the details before. ‘A cup? Maybe a jug?’
‘Three hundred litres.’
‘Tomek, can I ask you something? Do you really believe that Jesus did that – that he made water to turn into wine?’ I knew Tomek was Catholic. In Australia I knew few people who were religious who I could ask a question like this.
‘If you believe that Jesus is the son of God, then you believe that that happened. Perhaps it isn’t logical. But it’s faith. Faith defies logic. That is its nature.’
I considered what he’d said. ‘I think you’re wrong, Tomek. That is very logical.’
I tuned into Natalia. ‘I wonder if Juan will come?’ Juan was our missing Spanish representative, who worked at an engineering firm here. No sooner were the words out of my mouth, than he rounded the corner.
‘Cześć!’ he greeted us all.
‘Speak of …’ I paused. ‘Diabeł?’ I tried, not knowing the right word to complete the idiom in Polish. ‘Do you say this, when you talk about someone and he comes?’ I said to Natalia.
‘No, we say the wolf – speak of the wolf and he will appear,’ she said.
‘And in Spanish, it’s the King of Rome,’ Juan said, once he’d kissed everyone three times. All these countries that made up this new Europe. Whether they were more different or more the same seemed a matter of perspective.
Elena and Juan lit up cigarettes at the table as though it was nothing unusual. Although for me it was like we’d gone back to 1983. Time did, indeed, work differently in Poland.
Just then, screams came from the group of Portuguese in the corner. I looked over to see chairs flying, them with water dripping from their hair and clothes. On a balcony above them, the old lady shuffled back inside, an empty bucket in her gnarled hands and, I imagined, a satisfied smile on her face.
We all looked at each other and tried not to laugh.
‘You know, Tomek, they not make a lot noise. If she bothered, maybe she could ask them to be quieter, talk to bar manager or something.’
‘You have to imagine it from her perspective,’ he said. ‘She’s probably lived in that apartment her whole life. She’s seen the war come and go. She’s seen communism come and go. She probably comes here every day to put flowers on this statue of Mary and light the candles. She probably never expected that one day there would be a group of Portuguese students sitting here drinking a beer in the sun. It’s a lot to ask. Of some people.’
I admired her attitude. Although I did a quick calculation of where we were and where her balcony was, just to be on the safe side.
‘You know, I go to London on weekend,’ I said, telling him about my weekend at Gabby’s place. The story ended with how we’d gone for a drink at Gab’s local pub, dating from the 1500s.
Tomek’s eyes widened. ‘A pub from the fifteen hundreds?’
I wrote it with my finger on the table. Numbers were still tricky.
‘English people have pubs from the fifteen hundreds that are still standing today?’ His face showed his incredulousness.
‘But Poles have churches, forts, castles from the fifteen hundreds that still stand today,’ I said.
‘And there is the difference between Slavs and Anglo-Saxons!’ said Tomek.
***
I raced along the street in Saska Kepa, towards ‘my’ Ambassador’s residence, Tom’s last words to me as he’d left for work that morning ringing in my ears. ‘Try not to be late, OK?’ he’d said.
Eight hours later, I was going to fail.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ I said to the Ambassador, puffing, once the maid had shown me in. The Saska Kepa district of Warsaw was on the south of Warsaw’s eastern bank. It was where diplomats and ambassadors had lived when the only alternative was places like Piotr and Hannah’s, not modern apartments like ours. It was mostly grand old European residences and high gates now, and I rarely went there (although the Estonian woman from book club had told us the French food store nearby stocked cooking chocolate). I’d checked the public transport schedule and thought I had allowed plenty of time, but the bus seemed to be going the wrong way. It took me a few stops to work out that it wasn’t the bus that was going the wrong way, but me. And by the time I got out, crossed the street, waited again, and got on the bus going the right way, I was running about fifteen minutes late.
He shooed my apology with a wave of his hand. ‘Think nothing of it, I’m sure you’re still finding your way around.’
‘Yes, even after a year!’ I was relieved that it wasn’t a big deal after all.
On the other side of the entrance hall was a lawn, bordered on one side by fruit trees and on the other by a greenhouse. Yellow and grey birds I didn’t know the names of pecked for worms. Tom was there at an outdoor table, with a large glass of wine and three other guests. I sat myself next to him, and the Ambassador introduced me to Jagoda and Basia, two Polish professors who’d just come back from some guest lecturing at an Australian university, and Harry, a former ambassador, and one of the Ambassador’s ‘very best friends since – oh, too many years to mention’. They exchanged a laughing look. Harry had done a posting in Warsaw in the 1980s, and was revisiting. Spring-loaded heads all round as we set about trying to hang a conversation on this skeleton of snippets about each other.
The maid reappeared – an elderly lady, slightly taller than the Ambassador, and wearing the kind of black-and-white outfit I thought mainly featured in films with thin plot-lines. She took drink orders, and I started to breathe a little easier. I hadn’t ended up being that late. And if we were going to get technical, I had tried not to be late, which is what Tom had asked. I reached out under the table to squeeze Tom’s hand. He didn’t acknowledge the gesture. He just held his still full glass up to the maid to signal he’d like another. I moved my hand back to my lap.
The maid scurried off to attend to the drink orders. There were plenty of places for her to scurry to. The entrance to the Ambassador’s residence opened into an imposing lobby, complete with grand piano, marble statues, colorful artworks, and a staircase with polished balustrades leading to whatever was upstairs – five bedrooms, Tom had said. The building had been every Australian ambassador’s residence since the 1970s. Maybe some of them were still living here?
The Ambassador offered us a tour of the garden and I, together with two professors and an ex-ambassador, followed as he pointed out the garden beds his chef Bartek had sown, with their crops of rhubarb, beans, peas, lettuce and tomatoes, and rows of herbs. Bartek grew them in the warmer months and pickled them for the winter, so there was homegrown produce all year round, the Ambassador explained. Tom stayed on the patio emptying his two wine glasses.
‘How did you find the Australian universities you visited?’ I asked Jagoda.
‘The courses are not very challenging. And the students are also not very serious. Of course,’ she said.
The back of my neck prickled, the Ambassador smiled. I guess that’s why he was an ambassador.
‘Hornets!’ the Ambassador announced. I looked around, concerned that the arrival of a swarm of winged stingers was imminent. ‘We aren’t able to use the front garden at the moment because of a hornet’s nest!’ There followed a lengthy explanation of how the hornets had taken up residence in a corner. Various people had been out to eradicate them, he said, but the insects had proved tenacious. In the meantime, he’d been advised to keep the window closed.
‘In all my years I’ve never lived in conditions like this!’
I supposed many people could say the same.
We returned to the house and were invited into the dining room, with Harry commenting on the lovely gardens and their produce, and Jagoda and Basia things that they had liked about Australia – at least our wide-open spaces, blue skie
s and warm weather had appealed, if not our academic standards. Although Tom’s silent presence at the table spoke the loudest to me.
‘And how has Warsaw changed since the nineteen-eighties?’ I asked Harry.
‘Well, I’ve spent the day in a modern shopping centre with everything you could want. Back then, there was hardly anything available. Furniture, electrical goods, clothes, it was all hard to find. We were protected from a lot of it of course, but still if you were going to London or Paris, everyone would give you their shopping list of food and items like stockings. And we all – locals and diplomats alike – shared one crucial deficit: toilet paper. You had to wait for someone to be going to Berlin or Vienna – somewhere they would drive. Then they would load up their cars with it and bring enough back for everyone. I’m sure you remember, ladies?’ he deferred to the other guests.
‘Oh, of course,’ Basia said. ‘And you may remember all the restaurants with extensive menus, but whatever you’d ask for, they would say nie ma – we don’t have it. They only actually had three or four things.’
‘Oh yes, it was very hard on the wives who had to try to find everything we needed,’ Harry said. ‘It’s part of the reason my wife didn’t come on this part of the trip – she has nothing but bad memories of the place. I left her in Spain enjoying Barcelona!’
My latest trial had been finding fresh coriander. It was one of the items that it was possible to get in Warsaw, but exactly where was unpredictable. I’d tried three supermarkets that often had it – to no avail. Finally I put in a call to Estonia from book club, who suggested a supermarket in a northern suburb. As it turned out, they had a small field of it – obviously whoever bought all the rest of Warsaw’s fresh coriander hadn’t found this place. I tried to imagine my life here if I replaced ‘fresh coriander’ with ‘toilet paper’.
‘I wonder what we will find here when we come back in twenty years?’ I said, looking at Tom.
‘If,’ he said.
If. Of course.
‘Perhaps your wife is not as adventurous as you, Harry,’ Basia said. ‘Would you agree with that, Ambassador?’
‘Oh, I don’t know … Robyn …’
‘Roberta,’ Harry said.
‘Yes, Roberta,’ the Ambassador said. ‘That’s right.’
The maid arrived with our meals. Each plate had a gold Australian government crest.
‘You know,’ the Ambassador said, ‘Bartek has never served me the same meal twice!’ On cue, his chef appeared to tell us not only what we were eating, but which part of the garden the vegetables had come from. Fish with braised marrow glaze, he said. I poked it with my fork. If you had to prepare a different meal every day, I supposed you’d have to get creative.
Basia and Jagoda gushed over the food and wine, while Harry commented on the artwork.
‘And where is that painting from?’ Harry pointed to one bayside beach scene that took up almost a whole wall.
‘Oh, it’s all from Artbank,’ the Ambassador said. The name of the service senior public officials could avail themselves of to decorate their offices and homes elicited another laughing nod between Harry and the Ambassador. We took guesses as to where it might have been painted. Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula region, the Ambassador decided. I thought the trees and shape of the cliffs made that unlikely, but he was the ambassador. We all went along with him.
‘Are you working here, Jay?’ Basia asked.
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘You’ll find yourself something soon enough, I’m sure,’ the Ambassador said. I softened at his concern for me. ‘One of the biggest problems we have in embassies is bored wives.’
I poured myself another glass of wine. I wondered if attempting to drown myself at the table would affect my diplomatic spouse rating. Tom certainly seemed to be giving it a red hot go.
‘What do you do with yourself then?’ Basia asked.
‘Well, I do quite a bit of travelling. It’s so wonderful to be near so many places. I actually went to celebrate the summer solstice in a small town in Lithuania called Kernave, a little out of Vilnius.’ It was about eight hours to the Lithuanian capital by night bus. We must have crossed the old border to the USSR on the way. Once, the line would have been patrolled by men with dogs and machine guns. Now you didn’t even need to bother waking up when you passed over it.
‘And how is Lithuania?’ Basia asked. ‘I’ve never been there.’
‘Vilnius seemed much poorer than Warsaw. I saw old women selling their possessions on the street there, and a lot of beggars, including children. I’ve never seen children begging in Poland.’
‘Does Australia have an embassy in Vilnius these days?’ Jagoda asked the Ambassador.
‘No. These budget cuts are just terrible! They’re closing embassies left, right and centre – some embassies have just three staff members. Can you imagine that?’
I had no idea of the implications of having an embassy with only three staff members. From the way he was talking it seemed it might have been the cause of the children begging on the streets. If only there were some way to cut the costs of running a diplomatic mission, I thought, while the Ambassador’s maid came to take our tax-payer funded plates away and his chef announced dessert: foamed strawberry with cream and crispy toffee.
Jagoda and Basia exchanged a guilty look, before turning to the Ambassador. ‘You know, I have to tell you something,’ said Jagoda. ‘We were so excited about having dinner here tonight that we called all our friends and told them – we are having dinner with the Australian ambassador! They were so jealous!’
The Ambassador gave an ‘oh, it-was-nothing’ smile. Which, since he had neither shopped for, cooked, served, nor paid for any part of the meal, was wholly accurate. There would be nothing foamed at Shannon and Paul’s this Friday. Dzięki Bogu. Thank God.
Dusk fell and Tom and I slid into a taxi home.
‘I’m never doing that again sober.’ Tom broke the silence about halfway across the river. I decided against pointing out that I didn’t think he had.
I reached over and put my hand on his knee. ‘Did you hear the ambo complaining about the hornets? I was almost waiting for him to say, “Don’t they know who I am?” ’
Tom laughed and put his hand on top of mine.
‘And imagine, carrying on about embassies with only three staff!’ I said.
‘No, that’s fair enough, you need at least an ambassador, a second in charge, and a driver,’ Tom said.
I pointed at our taxi driver.
‘Ambassadors can hardly turn up to meetings in taxis.’
Because … more begging children?
‘Are you mad at me because I was late, Tom?’ I said.
He looked out his window. ‘I don’t understand why it’s too much to expect you to turn up on time. How do you think it reflects on me?’
‘It’s not nineteen sixty-three. You’re not getting marked on my behaviour.’
‘Is that what you think? It’s not like you do anything all day.’ He took his hand away.
No, just all the cooking, the shopping, the washing, the bills, organising our social schedule, research and booking holidays, even writing some of his speeches and presentations … I could see, from his perspective, that I got to do whatever I wanted while he went out to work. And yes, I knew that was stressful. But could he not see, from mine, that I took care of everything else so he could just focus on that – which is more than I’d had anyone to do for me? And perhaps he could try having some sympathy for how difficult some of the things I did for him were here, not to mention a bit of appreciation for how I just got on and took care of it all. We were here because he’d quit his perfectly good IT job to find fulfillment as a diplomat, after all.
I looked out my window, and he out of his.
ZLOTA JESIEN – GOLDEN AUTUMN
The trees started to turn from emerald and lime to yellow and gold. Carefree young people transformed into book-lugging students. Pumpkins appeared at the
supermarkets.
And Australian ministers arrived in Poland. Tom took Alan Griffin, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, to Gdansk for the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. He’d barely seen him off when Stephen Smith, the Foreign Affairs Minister, touched down. The two ministerial visits in quick succession more than doubled the crushing workload and anxiety involved in each one, and I’d barely seen Tom for weeks. The eve of Stephen Smith’s arrival, I’d thought Tom hadn’t come home at all. But when I got up in the night, I’d found him on the couch. He’d fallen asleep there. He hadn’t even taken his jacket off.
Every time I thought we’d get a break, some new event would come up or some other ministerial delegation would turn up, generating a new round of frantic activity for Tom. In the three years before we arrived, the embassy had one ministerial visit. In our first year here, Tom had dealt with four, on top of the climate change conference in Poznan. Canberra kept rejecting requests for more staff. ‘Officers at post should expect to conduct some work outside of regular business hours,’ Canberra replied. In other words, Tom should just work longer. And when the hours in his day ran out, there were mine.
Which was how I found myself appointed the official Foreign Minister delegation photographer for the visit. Tom came home and told me the night before Smith was due to arrive. I said that I had no actual photographic skills or experience. Tom said there was no one else. So my day started, like the minister’s, with a six o’clock breakfast meeting. I still hadn’t beaten Tom out of bed, though. He was already gone by the time my alarm went off at five. I had imagined that being unemployed would involve more sleep.
Stephen Smith beat both of us up, though, despite (or perhaps because of?) having flown in the night before from Australia. By the time I arrived he had already handed out a bunch of briefings to the handful of advisors following him, causing them to scurry around and punch things frantically into their Blackberries. Tom arrived from the embassy, I obtained photographic evidence that the minister had, indeed, had a breakfast meeting, and we all took off on the pre-arranged sightseeing program.