Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  She did, and rarely left for the rest of her stay except to bring me avocado and Marmite on Vogel’s toast, ‘To build up your strength, my darling.’ Or to fetch red wine, which she swigged straight from the bottle before thrusting the neck at me. It was different. ‘If you want, my darling, Katia will marry you.’ She said this often. It was both exhilarating and terrifying. I had already failed at one marriage and the shock waves from my break-up with Helen were still radiating across the universe like X-rays from the Big Bang. I adored Katia, but what if the relationship evolved into something enduring then fell apart further down the track? It was heartbreaking enough living across the city from Sam and Rosie, just as it had been torture with Shaun before. How would I cope with a child living in Łódź if homesickness pulled Katia back to Poland?

  And there were already signs. She was a gifted pianist. She loved Keith Jarrett’s free-form jazz classic The Köln Concert and could play a little like him. Some nights I woke to find myself alone. When I went looking for her she would be at the piano in the lounge in the dark, naked in spite of the chill, a half-drunk bottle of red wine on the floor beside her, playing Chopin pieces with tears streaming down her face. She did some modelling for the fashion pages of the Evening Post and Sharon Crosbie wrote a terrific piece on her for the Sunday Star-Times, but she was unable to get much acting work and began missing her family terribly. With the Soviet Union fragmenting into its constituent parts and the authoritarian Communist regimes of Eastern Europe facing collapse it was safe for her to return, so she did. From time to time she sent me letters and postcards from Łódź sweetly imploring me not to forget her. ‘I miss you, my darling. I hope you are having a good life.’

  One package included an alluring black-and-white photograph of her in lingerie. It might have been a publicity still taken on a movie set. She was back with her husband Charles and working in films again. She looked gorgeous. I collected it from my Kilbirnie P.O. Box and quickly smuggled it into a bottom drawer in my office desk. I had to. Helen had moved back in.

  She said the children missed me and she was willing to give it one more try. I owned the house on Kotinga Street by now. When Chris and Ruth decided to sell it they very generously gave me first option. With my share of the sale of Emerald Glen I was just able to afford it.

  One of the first things I did when it was mine was get council permission to cut down the tall, aging pines leaning menacingly over the house. It was lucky that I did. A wild storm later that year toppled giant trees like skittles. Every year winter storms send more and more sullen conifers crashing to the ground and a soft green native forest is slowly taking its place. The transformation is transcendent. Sunlight filters through where shadows used to fall. There is more birdsong, and slithers of the inner city are visible through gaps left by retreating trees.

  Carol Hirschfeld always felt there was something tapu about the house. When I cleaned out the basement I found a marble cherub with a broken wing. Was it stolen from a cemetery or did it belong to one of the pregnant nuns? There was no way of knowing, but it was mine now. I cleaned it gently as though I were bathing a child and placed in the back garden, surrounded by the flowers and warmed by the sun. I could be imagining it, but the house felt lighter and happier after this. I restored the broken chook house and we got hens. It was a joy collecting eggs in the morning with Rosie. Projects were Helen’s thing—she was good at them—and we set about renovating the attic rooms, adding bigger windows, a dormer and a skylight.

  For a time things were great. Then they weren’t. The old demons that we both hoped had been exorcised for good returned. We went back for more debilitating, depressing rounds of counselling. Sometimes Helen came into the front room where I was reading, stood in front of me and said accusingly, ‘You have nothing to say to me, do you?’ It’s hard to think of anything when you are put on the spot like that. I could hardly tell her that just before falling asleep I thought often about Carol or Katia. I started falling asleep at night with my right arm hooked over my face—the way you shield your eyes from the sun when you are lying on your back. It was a return to how I fell asleep most of my childhood—using the crook of my elbow to block out the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MORE WALLS, AND BRIDGES

  CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT ON 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Not literally—the wall would not be demolished for months—but psychologically it ceased to exist. This was not through some ringing, Gettysburg Address-like exhortation—as Americans believe happened after President Reagan’s ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall’ speech made two years earlier before the Brandenburg Gate—but rather through poor sentence construction in a press statement from the Central Committee entitled ‘Immediate Granting of Visa for Permanent Exit’, issued at a Ministry of Information press briefing.

  For several years a steady trickle, then a surging stream of East Germans had been crossing the border into the Czechoslovak and Hungarian republics. When this stream grew exponentially into a raging torrent, causing huge problems for the terminally ill regimes in Prague and Budapest, the humiliated East Germans thought easing travel restrictions at all border crossings might relieve the pressure. The foreign press at the briefing wondered if this was a mistake, and the hapless politburo spokesman repeated that private travel and permanent exit from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was now permitted. He wasn’t absolutely sure but it was probably effective immediately, and he stressed it was only a temporary measure.

  While the other journalists present were mulling over exactly what this meant, the Associated Press reported explosively that East Germany was opening its borders. This instantly led to news bulletins around the world. Within hours, thousands of East Berlin citizens who paid close attention to Western media outlets began jamming border crossings into West Berlin, demanding access before the press statement could be rescinded. Border guards and the hated Stasi couldn’t shoot them all, and capitulated to this human tsunami. It was effectively game over for the Honecker regime. Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement had already assumed power in Poland and the Soviet Union, which had problems enough of its own, was in the process of switching off life support for politburos in Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

  Labour’s lateral-thinking and irrepressible Minister of Overseas Trade Mike Moore saw opportunities for New Zealand in this chaos. The man once described by David Lange as behaving like a pinball machine assembled by a colour-blind electrician had been using one of the Defence Ministry’s Boeing 727s to take trade delegations around the word. Mike announced his intention to lead an exploratory trade delegation to Warsaw, East Berlin, Prague and Budapest in the New Year. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, and the Evening Post quickly agreed to send me along.

  Łódź is just over an hour from Warsaw by road and I asked Helen if she would mind if I caught up with Katia and her husband for a drink in the Polish capital. She said icily that I could do what I pleased—it made no difference to her. It was an extremely thoughtless thing to ask when things were already tense at home—so tense in fact it was a huge relief in late February 1990 to join my old mate Barry Soper and the others on the long, noisy and uncomfortable flight to Poland.

  Our aging 727 had the fuel capacity of a two-stroke motor-mower and flooded when the pilot pulled the starter cord too vigorously. We had to stop for gas in Brisbane, Darwin, Changi, Mali, Bahrain and Cairo before arriving in Warsaw three days later on a freezing, overcast afternoon. John le Carré could not have scripted it better.

  On the bus into the city I told Barry about Katia and possibly catching up with her and her husband for a drink—adding that I had sought Helen’s approval first. ‘You’re an idiot!’ he barked. My response was that it didn’t really matter as I hadn’t heard back from Katia and they were highly unlikely to show up in any case.

  We drove through endless, bleak and depressing suburbs to Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue) in the city centre, where two monuments, one to communism and the
other to capitalism, stood opposite each other. The former, the Palace of Culture and Science built in Stalin’s wedding-cake style, grand and ornate in a vulgar, heavy-handed way, loomed oppressively over its surroundings. Locals wanted to live in it because that way they wouldn’t have to look at it. Across the plaza was capitalism’s rejoinder—the gleaming, brand-new, 40-storey Marriott Hotel. Immaculately built, elegantly designed, dripping with chandeliers, fine furnishings, classy watercolours and good restaurants, it was a tourist attraction in its own right. Many Poles came to marvel at what their world could be like. For some the contrast was too painful. I met people who refused invitations to step inside, let alone dine on culinary delights the likes of which they could never afford unless they set aside their life’s savings.

  I had barely settled into my luxury suite when the phone rang. It was Katia. She was in the foyer with her husband. I rounded up Barry and some of the other reporters to act as protective ballast and headed downstairs. She was in high heels and a short skirt and wore a fur coat and scarf—she looked incredible. Her husband was very tall, very handsome and very fierce-looking. If they’d had an honesty session when she returned home she had clearly forgiven him, but I don’t think he’d forgiven her.

  Katia hugged me warmly. Charles crushed my offered hand in a vice-like grip—it was a moment equivalent to boxers touching gloves at the beginning of a grudge bout. Unbidden, an old joke came into my head.

  Question: What is the biggest book in the world?

  Answer: Famous Polish axe murders.

  Katia declared that we must all go to a famous nightclub, and taking my arm swept me out to the forecourt and bundled me into a cab. I suspect she told the driver to go as fast as he possibly could. We accelerated away in a cloud of Trabant smoke while Barry, her husband and the others were still hailing their cabs. We raced through Warsaw being chased by them, all ending up in a noisy, basement nightclub, the Krokodile, where a burly bouncer on the door demanded a million zlotys each in cover charge. Barry immediately got huffy and said he didn’t come down in the last shower and wasn’t going to put up with this shit. Then Pattrick Smellie from The Press, who is good with sums, calculated the exchange rate and said it came to less than five New Zealand dollars each. Inside, Katia somehow managed to position me alongside her at one end of a crowded table, while Barry was stuck at the other end doing his best to make small talk with her husband, who was clearly building into a pathological fury.

  The service was first-class. Barry’s voice was so deep and gruff, everywhere we went people assumed he was a Russian general and snapped into action. The downside was that out in the kitchen there was the very real possibility that chefs and waitresses were lining up to drop their underwear and urinate or worse into the borscht.

  As a healing gesture, I offered Katia and Charles my hotel room for the night, insisting they help themselves to my minibar and catch an early train back to Łódź in the morning. All suites came with two double beds. I would crash with Barry and see them off at dawn.

  In Barry’s room, he whistled softly in the dark. ‘Oh mate, she’s gorgeous.’ Then he giggled. ‘He hates your guts.’

  I sighed. ‘He’s terrifying. Thank God they’re going in the morning.’

  I was in a deep sleep when the phone rang. I snatched it before it woke Barry. It was Katia. I assumed they were leaving for the train, got dressed clumsily in the dark and stumbled down the corridor to my room. Katia opened it, wearing a skimpy hotel bathrobe.

  The room was a shambles. There were empty miniature bottles of alcohol, empty potato-chip packets, salted peanuts and chocolate wrappers everywhere. Her clothing and his had been flung onto a sofa. The mattress from the bed nearest the window was half off. Tangled sheets, pillows and bedding were strewn across the floor. I have never been on the set of a porn movie but I imagine it would smell like my room did at that point.

  I saw that my suitcase had been opened. A Madonna watch that I had bought in Bahrain’s souk and had specially gift-wrapped for Helen’s lovely daughter Emily was now on Katia’s wrist. She was twirling around and waving it excitedly in the air.

  ‘Thank you! Thank you!’

  I smiled wanly.

  A towel around his waist, Charles, sexually sated and fractionally less fractious as a consequence, pointed at me and intoned gravely, ‘You have the eyes of a child!’ He said this over and over again. ‘You have the eyes of a child! You have the eyes of a child!’

  How far away is their fucking train? I thought. Then I caught a glimpse of the bedside clock. Dear God! It was only three-thirty in the morning. Their train didn’t leave for another four hours.

  I couldn’t go back and wake Barry, so I got into the spare bed fully dressed and pretended to be asleep while they quietly had sex again. I think. I didn’t want to check. It was a huge relief when dawn finally came.

  In the corridor as they were leaving, Katia said she needed to use the loo and ducked back into the room. Then I walked with them to the nearby station. The lightening sky was a sepia smudge. Brown haze from lignite-fired power stations hung over the city like a duvet. Noisy trolley buses lumbered past, chased and overtaken by swarms of Polish Fiats and antiquated lorries spewing diesel smoke.

  At the station Charles shook my hand almost fondly and Katia hugged me a final time and they were gone. I skipped with relief back to my suite. In the bathroom mirror Katia had drawn a heart with lipstick and written ‘I love you’ in the centre. She had left her scarf neatly folded on the edge of the hand-basin. It filled the room with her perfume.

  LATER THAT DAY, WALKING PITTED, uneven pavements, I came across kiosks selling soft porn—badly printed publications filled with smudged photos of flaxen-haired, busty girls draped uncomfortably over tractors and ploughs—old men selling coloured pencils and old women selling daffodils. Polish women seemed to come in two types—leggy supermodels and squat grandmothers in headscarves, both sweet and endearing in their own way.

  After the assassination of President Kennedy, Chairman Mao was asked what might have happened to the course of human history if the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had been shot dead instead of JFK. The Great Helmsman paused for a moment before saying he didn’t think Aristotle Onassis would have married Mrs Khrushchev.

  On the walls of various government ministries dissenters had scrawled ‘FACK OOFF’. I had difficulty accepting that much of Warsaw was younger than me. Buildings approximating the grand style of pre-war Warsaw, the beautiful medieval city that retreating Germans in a final act of savagery systematically dynamited to the ground, were built in a rush after the war and already looked more tired and worn than the centuries-old structures they had replaced. Taking advantage of buildings being razed to the ground there were many tiny, pocket-handkerchief parks, bare rectangles of soil surrounded by high-sided mesh fences that looked like cages in a zoo. Seeing mothers inside rocking babies in prams only reinforced that impression. Black-and-white German newsreels record a time when this city was literally an animal cage for most of its inhabitants.

  Certainly that is how the Nazis saw the Poles. Their barbarism went further with Jews. They weren’t any animal; they were vermin. You got some idea of what Warsaw must have suffered when you pressed the button for ‘sites of martyrdom’ on the light-board map in the Palace of Culture and Science and the whole thing lit up like a Times Square Christmas tree. It was the same when you pressed buttons for cemeteries and battlefields. It seemed that every square inch of the city was soaked in blood before the Wehrmacht soaked it in petrol and put a torch to it.

  A short documentary film on the destruction and the later reconstruction of Old Warsaw shown in another museum across town to an audience of teenage British backpackers had them muttering, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’, heartfelt and disbelieving in the dark. The old city square had been rebuilt using red bricks reclaimed from the rubble, but locals told us it was not the same. You can’t re-create in a few years what took seven centuries to build. Katia had wa
rned me: ‘It’s a fucking, fuck, fuck film set. Disneyland! An illusion; like all of fucking, fuck, fuck Poland, a dream!’ Small wonder many Poles we met were apprehensive about German reunification.

  Only a handful of journalists were allowed to accompany Mike Moore to the seaside city of Gdańsk for his meeting with Lech Wałęsa. Leigh Pearson from Radio New Zealand reported later that they could have been twins. Both men were manic and spoke English like it was their second language.

  The rest of us had a whole day to ourselves and organised a trip to Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, a city close to the Russian border. It was a three-and-a-half-hour bus journey south across flat, unfenced, featureless Polish countryside, misty like a van Gogh painting. Our progress was made slow by the horses and carts that farmers insisted on trundling down the centre of the narrow tarseal. The roadside store we stopped at sold cheap vodka and steak tartare crawling with flies, prompting Pattrick Smellie to comment that it was incredible that the entire country didn’t die from bowel cancer. There was nary a hill in sight. If ever a country were designed by God for cavalry and tank warfare, it was this one. Apart from the steak tartare there were no natural defences. Poland was a tempting corridor for armies hell-bent on conquering Russia, as Napoleon and Hitler found to their cost.

  It was early afternoon when we pulled into Lublin, a beautiful medieval city that had once been the seat of the Crown Kingdom of Poland. Home now to a large university, its streets teemed with cheerful, well-dressed students. We expected to drive well beyond it out into open countryside to Majdanek camp but instead found it cheek-by-jowl with the outskirts of town.

  As our bus approached the camp the streets seemed to empty and the sun disappeared behind dark clouds. We parked at the front gates near a great monolithic memorial and stepped out into a bone-piercing cold. I was wearing the Savile Row black woollen coat that John Clarke had found for me in Cuba Street, but it provided scant protection from the freezing wind racing in from the Russian steppes not that far to the northeast of us. How did prisoners cope in their wooden clogs and thin cotton striped pyjamas?