by Jay Martin
‘Dee, do you know Shannon and Paul? My husband Tom?’ I pointed to everyone in turn.
‘How do you do.’ She turned back to me. ‘The embassy won’t pay! I have told them over and over that the colour scheme they chose simply will not do – it won’t match a single thing I own. I have sent away three sets of painters so far, they keep coming with paint and I keep saying, “No, that is not acceptable.” I don’t understand why it is so difficult to get someone to find a colour I will be happy with. Honestly, it’s just …’
‘How much longer are you in Warsaw for again, Dee?’
‘Another five months!’ Dee was now addressing herself to all four of us. ‘We haven’t even been able to sleep there some nights. So I’ve got my husband to book some work trips – otherwise we would have had to pay for a hotel.’ The list of places they’d stayed to avoid the combined threats of dust and private expenditure rolled out of her mouth. ‘And – oh, you’ll like this, we went to a cute little place outside of Warsaw.’
‘Gdansk or Krakow?’ I asked.
‘Bialowieza.’
Bialowieza? Hang on, I hadn’t been there!
‘Yes, it was lovely, we stayed in an old converted train station!’
A converted train station? That I’d never heard of? In Bialowieza? What the fuck?
‘It was just the quaintest thing. Anyway, if you’ll excuse me.’ She pivoted, leaving me standing as mute as a German tribeswoman on a Slavic plain.
‘International woman?’ Shannon asked, sucking on a chicken drumstick.
I took a deep breath. ‘I’m trying not to complain as much anymore,’ I said.
‘Will you two have anything to talk about?’ Paul said.
I couldn’t have responded – even if I’d had a leg to stand on. Right now, I was struck dumb with Dee having been somewhere I hadn’t.
I pulled myself together when Alex approached with his new ambassadorial couple. ‘Mr Ambassador, Mrs Ambassador, I’d like you to meet some of our good friends here.’ He introduced Tom, Shannon, Paul and me to the fresh US Ambassador to Poland and we shook hands. Greet, shake, excuse, pivot, and they were gone. They did that handshake thing perfectly, those Americans.
‘I always worry they might expect me to say something interesting,’ I said to Tom. I held up my phone to show him my photos, a fuzzy me in the foreground and the President and Prime Minister of Poland in the background. After I’d taken them I’d turned back to see President Komorowski smiling the warm, universal smile of the politician at me. I hadn’t wanted to disappoint him by telling him that I couldn’t vote for him.
‘Good work.’ Tom took a step to leave, before turning back towards me. ‘You always have something interesting to say.’ He kissed my forehead before heading across the room. What had I done right?
Paul and Shannon had gone for more food. I made a halfhearted effort to introduce myself to another woman standing alone, nearby me.
‘Russian Embassy, no English,’ she said.
‘Do you speak Polish?’ I asked her, in Russian.
‘Nyet.’
‘Français?’
‘Non.’
My fingers seemed to be functioning again and I was about to follow the others, when Alex reappeared. He had palmed his ambassadorial couple off and, bored with mingling, had come looking for someone he actually wanted to talk to.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve decided that to choose the new ambassador to Poland, they should just send someone into a shop with no change and see if they can negotiate their way out of that.’
‘Hopefully this one’s more interested in foreign policy than what his tie has on it.’
Alex put a canapé in his mouth and chewed. ‘You know that last ambassador, the one with the baby elephants?’ he said, ‘He also had a map of Poland on the wall of his office. And he put a pin in every place he went to. And by the end of it, you almost couldn’t see anything of the map for all the pins. And the “serious” people at the embassy would grumble about what a waste of time and money it was when they were off doing “real” diplomatic work. But over the years, they realised that people in the remotest corners of Poland were positively disposed towards America, because an ambassador had bothered to go there and shake their hands, and no one had ever done that before.’
The power of the perfect handshake.
‘Point made.’ Diplomatically. ‘And now, I have something to share with you,’ I said, and told him my story.
Which was that, at the very tail end of the eighteenth century, a boy called Hirsch Levinsohn was born in a village near Bydgoszcz, just to the south of Poznan. He grew up, worked as a lace maker, and had several children, including Lewis, who was born in 1828. At the age of twenty, Lewis, together with his sister and their cousin Samuel, left for America. While I couldn’t say for sure why, the timing coincided with the first time that Jewish people from this region had been allowed to hold passports. They travelled to Baltimore, and for a decade lived in a rooming house with other Poles from the same region. Samuel married and had children, some of the descendants of whom today live in New York. Lewis changed his last name to Harrison, married an English immigrant woman, and in 1860 followed the gold rush to Melbourne, Australia. His Australian death certificate gives his occupation as commercial traveller, and that of his father, ‘Harry’, as ‘clergy man’. His son’s name was Samuel – perhaps named after the cousin Lewis had travelled to the US with. And Lewis’s great-great-great-granddaughter was me.
Hirsch was buried in the local cemetery in the village near where he was born. When I’d found that out, I’d been tempted to visit. But the Jewish cemeteries from that region, I learned from some more research, had their headstones torn up during the war, like Brodno had. They now lie under the pavements and roads of Bydgoszcz, reverberating from the footsteps of unsuspecting pedestrians and the tyres of heedless cars. The Polish workers were ordered to erase the names on the stones before they laid them, although according to some reports, they disobeyed this command where they could.
But Lewis had already erased his own name. Before someone else could do it. Perhaps Samuel never knew that his grandfather’s name was Hirsch, not Harry, or that by rights his own name was Levinsohn. My family hadn’t, knowing only that the Harrison line had come from America. Lewis’s past would have remained safely hidden, had Tom and I not ended up here, and had I not had the time and inclination to hunt it out.
Cześć ich pamięci. Honour to the memories of all of the people whose bodies lie interred in untended, unmarked graves, whose headstones were used for paving bricks, and whose DNA lives on throughout the world – and in me – despite everything that was done to try and stop that.
ZIMA – WINTER
A primary school in the back blocks of an outer Warsaw suburb was hosting an Australia Day celebration. They had invited me there to give a presentation on Australia, and judge an Anzac biscuit-making competition. The embassy had been invited, anyway. And I was at the bottom of the embassy pecking order. I knew Anzac biscuits were made of oats, butter and … some other things. I had no idea what gave them their chewy, sticky consistency. Nor why they were called Anzac biscuits, the acronym of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and synonymous with a failed World War One mission. I doubted the boys at the front had had biscuit ovens, after all.
I caught the bus to the edge of the city and trudged through the snow to reach the school, a big red building surrounded by the white forest. I passed a Fiat 126p left in an outside park. Its owner would need to dig it out of the drift that had descended on it. Scraping ice off the windshield in Canberra suddenly didn’t seem so bad. I kicked half-heartedly at some piles of snow, trying to recapture the fascination I’d first felt with it.
The teacher I’d come to meet was called Agnieszka (of course). She showed me into the staffroom and made me a cup of tea. Perhaps twenty teachers were gathered there, around a table chock full of cakes and biscuits. It was the imieniny – name day – for Agnieszka
s. I’d discovered why there seemed to be less name diversity in Poland than I was used to: every Polish person was named after one of several hundred saints, and celebrated their feast day like a birthday – although according to Tomek, a name day was even more special. Perhaps it was the added advantage that you didn’t get any older. With half the Polish women I’d met called Agnieszka (including all of the teachers) and them all off celebrating, I was surprised anything got done in Poland on this day. Perhaps it didn’t.
I’d been given free rein to talk about ‘Australian customs’ for half an hour, and had scribbled a few notes about different celebrations. I didn’t know much about the biscuits, but I was sure I had something to teach them. The bell rang, the children filed in, and I fronted the assembly, a slide behind me with a picture of a koala dressed in a Father Christmas outfit, his fat belly hugged by a red-and-white trim suit.
‘Christmas in Australia is like Christmas in Poland. But a little different,’ my speech started.
I talked for twenty minutes in slow, deliberate English about how we celebrated Christmas, with our barbecues on the beach, cold salads and cricket games, along with decorated fir trees (fake), snow (fake) and reindeer (fake). I put up a photo of a family Christmas from home, the dozen of us sat outside under a veranda, in our T-shirts and shorts, drinking cold beer and eating hot chicken.
Connections to the seasons were so obvious in Poland: the first buds on the trees, the last of the melting snow, the green and then white asparagus; the warm breeze of summer, the tiny truskawki strawberries, the summer solstice and long, white nights; the trees turning vibrant reds and golds, the bitter winds of autumn, pumpkins appearing, pumpkins disappearing, kurki mushrooms by the side of the road; the dank cloud returning, first snows, and the long, long darkness of winter, broken by the winter solstice festival otherwise known as Christmas. It’s why there were six seasons in Polish; when the difference in temperatures ranged from minus thirty to plus thirty, four couldn’t cover it.
We celebrate winter solstice in Australia, too, of course, I explained to those assembled. It’s just that we do it in the middle of summer. Our ancestors had brought stories of fir trees and snow and reindeer, and we repeated them because it was traditional. I wondered if these children really understood that, until now, this had never, ever struck me as odd. Which now struck me as the oddest thing of all.
After a dutiful round of applause, Agnieszka told me that the students had prepared some questions. She pointed at one boy, ten or eleven years old, who pulled out a piece of paper out and read what was written on it.
‘Do you like Polish food?’
‘Yes, Polish food is very nice. I like pierogi. And żurek,’ I said, picking two.
‘Do you speak Polish?’ asked the next conscript. I nodded, and took the opportunity to teach them the ‘proper’ Australian pronunciation of our tallest mountain. They were a bit slow to get that one.
Silence again. I didn’t know whether (a) they didn’t understand English, (b) didn’t speak English, or (c) didn’t find me very interesting. I suspected (d), all of the above.
‘Do you like Warsaw?’ was the next question.
‘Warsaw is a very wonderful city. I like it very much.’ I tried to think of things to add. Something about the walkable local neighbourhoods perhaps, the dramatic and unique architecture, easy public transport, the intelligent, tenacious people who refused to let anything – even Polish winters – stand in their way.
But it was no good. I couldn’t do it. Not today. Because today, Warsaw was the city where my marriage was falling apart. Tom had disappeared again last night. Come home from work, announced he was going out, and left. Anything I said just seemed to make him angrier, so I didn’t try. I’d started calling him at three. His phone rang out half a dozen times. I’d lay in bed, connecting to his voicemail, watching the ceiling and willing him to call me back. About six-thirty, the sound of him trying to get his key in the lock woke me. After a few minutes listening to the fumbling, I went to open the door for him.
‘What are you doing up?’ he’d said, when I’d opened the door. ‘It’s early!’ He stank of cigarettes and scotch.
‘No, Tom, it’s late.’
‘Oh.’ He’d staggered to the bed, fallen onto it and, with the next breath, was snoring. I knew I wouldn’t say anything. At least he was still coming home.
‘Do you like Polish films?’ a young boy asked.
Polish comedy: everyone lives miserable lives and complains incessantly. Polish drama: everyone lives miserable lives and then dies. What’s not to love. I decided against sharing my real opinion.
‘I like Boguslaw Linda,’ I named the local version of Bruce Willis, which I thought might appeal to a primary school boy.
‘Me too. I like Psy.’ Giggles all around.
I managed a half smile. ‘Me too.’ I’d seen half a dozen Boguslaw films. I wasn’t actually sure if I’d seen that one but, also like Bruce Willis, the Linda films I’d seen were all pretty much the same. ‘I saw another Polish film. Miś – Teddy Bear.’ The one about life in communist Poland we’d seen at book club. ‘Did anyone see this film?’ I put up my hand as a model. Almost every hand went up. ‘This film is about communism in Poland. Life for your parents and grandparents. But I think life here now is very different. So, when you watch this film, what do you think about it? Is it strange for you? Is it funny?’ I tried to choose simple words, but I had no idea how much English they spoke. I hoped this wasn’t a bridge too far.
A small girl in the middle row put her hand up.
‘This film very funny,’ she said in English. ‘It not life here in Poland now. But it real life for our parents and for our grandparents. They tell me about this time in Poland. And this make us to be so proud of them. We are so proud of everything they do to survive this war and to make this communism to stop everywhere in the world. We are proud of their …’ she checked a word with the teacher, ‘we are proud of their sacrifice, the sacrifice they do for us and we are proud to live now in free Poland.’
I couldn’t imagine a primary-school-aged child in Australia having such opinions, let alone being able to express them in a foreign language. The bell went.
My Agnieszka and I made our way back to where all the Agnieszkas had been celebrating, to judge the Anzac biscuit competition. The kids were running around the halls and open spaces in the building, their indoor playground. I perused the collection of biscuits that the students had made, now arrayed here. Round and flat, decorated and plain, the colour of wheat and of burned butter. Every possible way the ingredients could be combined, in thirty Polish kitchens by thirty Polish school children.
I looked over the offerings. ‘Well, it should be the colour of toasted oats.’ Agnieszka and I chose some that seemed to fit the bill. ‘Most importantly, they should bend a little, be hard to break – they shouldn’t be brittle.’ The essential qualities of an Anzac biscuit as I knew it. I twisted off a few pieces of a couple. They had done a very good job of getting them just right, I had to say.
Agnieszka asked if I knew why they were called Anzac biscuits. I shook my head.
‘It’s because they were made and sent to the soldiers fighting in the First War. They had to travel by ship for months, so there is nothing in them that will go bad. So there are no eggs, for example. And the oats make them more nutritious as well. The golden syrup makes them soft, not brittle.’
‘Golden syrup?’ I said. ‘But can you buy golden syrup in Poland?’
‘No.’
‘But, Agnieszka, if golden syrup is the major ingredient, and you can’t get golden syrup, how have all these children made Anzac biscuits?’
‘They improvised.’
Of course they did.
I doubted the school would invite another Australian along to teach them anything.
***
My marsh-cutting Australian friend Julie invited Tom and me to an Australia Day barbecue at her place. Unlike just about anywhere else in the
world, Australians were thin on the ground in Poland and they’d had to hustle to get a crowd. They’d invited another couple from Sydney, Sarah and Rafael, (oil and gas, Kuwait, Dallas, Congo – three good reasons not to get into oil and gas) who had just arrived, and another friend Marilyn (banking, London, Paris, London, Hong Kong, London, Geneva; three years).
Bluey was bent over his iPod, shuffling through a thousand Australian music tracks on his play list. Tom stood behind him, behaving undiplomatically.
‘Stop rootin’ me, will ya?’ Bluey said, not turning around.
The four women – me and Julie, Sarah and Marilyn – were standing in the kitchen. Julie was putting the finishing touches on a salad in between making sure everyone’s champagne was topped up.
I switched my gaze from our husbands carrying on in the lounge room to Julie in the kitchen. ‘I didn’t think important people behaved like this,’ I said to Julie.
‘Perhaps they don’t,’ she said.
Bluey and Tom stopped simulating sex and went outside to give Raf a hand barbequing. Since it was minus twenty-five, grilling the steaks and sausages was proving a challenge. Even with the gas bottle on full blast the grill stayed cool enough to touch. At least they hadn’t had to get ice for the drinks, though. Mid-winter Warsaw was a giant walk-in freezer.
‘So, how did you come to be in Warsaw?’ Marilyn said to me. Expat starter for ten. I was about to answer when Dee walked into the kitchen.
My mood plummeted. New Zealanders were near enough to Australian to be invited along to our national day. But it was bad enough I had to put up with Dee on Tom’s work time. Now she was invading my private time as well. Her husband would want to talk work with Tom, too. As if more work was what Tom needed.
What the hell.
‘At home, I held a senior position in government,’ I said. ‘I suppose I’m having what you’d call a career break. I’ve been doing some writing for the Warsaw Insider, studying Polish, and travelling quite a bit around Poland. We’ve got another six months to go. Then it’s back to work for me. I’m not sure what Tom will do. He could use some time off. Maybe I’ll support us for a while.’