Berlin-Warszawa Express

by Eamon McGrath

  I drank some more and went to Michal’s apartment. He told me that he was going to his girlfriend’s for the night, and I was free to do what I wanted. His apartment was among ten or twelve identical looking buildings in a simple, dense old communist district. These buildings were “Stalin’s gift to the Polish people,” he said, in a deadpan and typically sarcastic eastern-European style.

  Immediately what struck me was how small the place was—it was a shoebox. I imagined every single apartment looking exactly the same, and then I imagined it in the seventies, all those people scurrying like mice in their little boxes. And then there was the view: Warsaw stadium.

  “Well,” Michal said, “I go now. Enjoy yourself. Do what you like. Make yourself comfortable.” I was alone.

  God, I thought, how long has it been since I slept in a bed? I recalled the long line of floors and couches that lay in my waste. And a shower? But when I turned the water on it was shrieking cold. And it just seemed to get worse. After minutes of waiting, the water was eventually so bitterly freezing that it seemed to be at a boil. I saw that gigantic, glowing stadium in the distance and wondered if at night they turn off the hot water to power all those lights. I thought about heating water on the stove, but the kettle was so small it would have taken hours. I realized that everything in the place was either a smaller, more worn down or an archaic version of something I owned back home: his laptop, his kitchenware, his bed. Under the lights of the Warsaw stadium I surrendered to sleep.

  Since I was flying to London to do some shows in England, Michal woke me up with a loud bang at ten a.m. He’d come home to take me downtown to catch the bus that gets you to Modlin Airport. We took the tram to the dead centre of Warsaw and he pointed out the Pałac Kultury i Nauki: “Another gift to the Polish from Josef Stalin.”

  We got off the tram and walked to a parking lot where there was a line of people standing at the door of a coach. I thanked him so much for the hospitality, and he thanked me for the show. The ride to the airport through the Polish countryside was characterized by more grey sky, and the airport itself was a four-gate shack in the middle of a farm field. I was flying Ryanair.

  When I got to the gate and through security, the clerk began weighing people’s bags. When it got to a family of four, also flying to London, a long conversation ended with one child bursting into tears. The mother argued more with the staff and then she burst into tears as well. Then she turned to a garbage can and began throwing out her clothes. In that flurry of disbelief and confusion in that tiny little airport, I thought I must have been in the middle of some strange Kafka novella.

  “They are moving to England,” a man explained. “The father is already there and has been working for months, saving money. Their bags have all their belongings but they’re too big to fit on the plane because of Ryanair’s baggage regulations. So now they have to throw everything away.”

  I nodded.

  That was the first time I had heard about the English opening the borders to the eastern European workforce, but it wouldn’t be the last. In some pubs it was all I would hear men talk about. When that family landed, I wondered if the cost of the clothes they had to buy would have exceeded the outrageous Ryanair baggage fee of two hundred and fifty euros.

  As the plane took off, I thought of the Warsaw cabbie who shrugged off my inability to pay him in his own money, and the cook who ignored my order. I thought of the casual hospitality of Michal giving his entire flat to a complete stranger for the night. I thought of all those Polish music fans in that underground Warsaw cavern. I thought of how someone could live in such an apartment the size of a small Parisian closet with no hot water after ten p.m., I thought about his empty fridge and his computer from 2003 and how everything he owned was just a broken or outdated version of what was cutting edge in Canada. I thought of that tiny grey airport in the middle of nowhere, and of what had become of that family, and of that run-down Poznań factory. And with all of those thoughts, I woke with a pounding in my head, and teeth, on the floor of Fonzie’s apartment.

  Between tours, I’d pick up some under-the-table carpentry work. One of the jobs was a bit-by-bit renovation that we could only do one or two days a week, and in total secrecy, since the owner didn’t have a permit.

  Toward the end of a long two-month stretch of irregular work, and on the eve of another tour, I was sistering a joist on the main floor while another tradesman tiled the bathroom upstairs. He’d gone outside to have a smoke and I followed to get a break from the thick cloud of dust settling on the hardwood floor.

  We had to navigate around furniture, around bicycles, around kitchen utensils and pots and pans that were covered in tarps so as not to be cemented with the dust that was thick in the air. Of course, we started talking about work.

  “I have huge bills to pay,” the guy boasted. “Gotta work every day. Have to clear at least seven grand a month—seven grand—otherwise I’m totally fucked. Got my vehicle, some employees, I got my little girl . . .”

  I told him I was a musician, on my way back to Europe, yet again, for another round of shows.

  “You make any money doing that?” he asked me.

  “Well, it depends . . .” I trailed off. “No, not really, I guess.”

  He finished his smoke, put it out, and leaned on his arms against the railing that circled around the back porch.

  “Why would you do it, then?” He was smirking. “The fuck is the point?”

  I looked at him for just a moment, pausing, trying to figure out what to say. I put my arm up in front of my eyes to block them from the sun. “Isn’t that kind of like me asking you why you’d want to raise your little girl?”

  We walked up the few steps and opened the door to go back into the house.

  “There isn’t a lot of money in having a kid either,” I said, under my breath. “At least that’s what I hear.”

  He wished me luck on the tour as I left for the day, and I went home to pack my bags.

  A few weeks later, on the train crossing the border from Görlitz to Wrocław, I once again experienced the sudden change from the polished and clean architecture of Germany to being surrounded by buildings that were falling apart. The sky plunges immediately into a thick grey. Eventually the signs become an even more lifeless blue, and all the windows you see are broken. After you cross the border, the geography changes into the most remote and uncomforting aspects of the former DDR.

  A man has his head out the window of an old communist shoebox apartment and he’s drinking vodka at eleven a.m., watching black birds fly through the cold Polish sky. Children play soccer on a country field—but there are absolutely no houses around them in any direction. Rows and rows of decrepit garages line the railway on the outskirts of towns. The train I’m on is one lonely car. Passengers gaze forward through the open door of the cab and the front window of the train. I’m the only one staring out the side, at the grey Polish landscape.

  A dirt road about six metres wide, with puddles as big as baseball diamonds, shoots off across a green and yellow farm field. And in the middle of the road, directly in the centre of it, is an old Polish lady. She’s clutching a tiny plastic bag and walking toward the horizon. There’s nothing but green fields around her, not a house or building for miles. Head down, through the puddles, shoes covered in the sandy, rainy muck, she carries on. After just that one glimpse, she begins receding. She gets smaller and smaller; but so do I.

  I imagine she’s never left Poland. That woman in her eighties, still following the road home, through all kinds of tyranny. Unimaginable to a Canadian mind, steadily on her journey goes. Maybe she once touched Josef Stalin’s hand? As a little girl, perhaps she saw the tanks and red parades and lost her siblings and moved from the towering stacks of the city to a farm out here, closer to the German border, to escape it all . . . And then the Wall fell, so she could have gone west, but she stayed. And here she is still, walking along
a dirt path, to wherever it is she’s always been going all these years, without even the faintest or distant idea that I saw her, walking to the edge of the horizon, as though about to fall off the edge of land, into the sky.

  After the show in Wrocław, my second last before returning to Berlin and flying home, I sat down next to a man named Bartek at a table helmed by the promoter and drank a beer and talked.

  “I find it amazing that you come around here,” he said.

  “Well, I love Poland. And it’s not that out of the way from my German dates.”

  He laughed and said, “Maybe by Canadian standards.”

  Bartek had grown up here, in Wrocław, or at least somewhere close by. Everywhere I go in the former Eastern Bloc, I try to get someone to paint an image for me of what it was like to live under communism. I just can’t imagine how it really was. It’s like imagining yourself as someone else: impossible.

  “You will never be able to imagine,” Bartek said. “And you shouldn’t, it’s not your job.”

  Then I asked him for a story.

  I’d heard earlier from someone else on this trip that Czechoslovakia was surprisingly more liberal, that you could buy Jimi Hendrix records there, or other American music—that it was easier to be connected to art there than in other places behind the Iron Curtain.

  “When I was seventeen, in the early nineties, I heard that Guns N’ Roses was playing in Prague.” He slammed a glass of wine. “And since I was leaving Poland, I had to go through all these ministries to get my passport. Days and days I spent, getting the paperwork together and filling it out. As a seventeen-year-old kid, all I wanted in the world was to see Guns N’ Roses. Two days before I had to leave, when I finally had everything in order—all my paperwork, train tickets and concert tickets booked and purchased—I went to the police station to get my passport, and I was . . .”

  Bartek paused.

  “. . . refused. I was heartbroken.”

  He talked of the EU and the euro and how glad he was that he’d outlived all that had come before it. I told him how critical some of my generation was and how disgusted some Europeans were that western-style capitalism had finally broken down its continental borders. He talked of how long Poland had tried to be involved. And at that moment, someone came by with a plate of cheese for the whole table, refilled Bartek’s wine, dropped some chicken wings in front of us, and got me another beer. We thanked her, I thanked the promoter, thanked everyone, and Bartek continued.

  “You see?” he said. “That would never have happened to me when I was growing up.” He gestured at the food and wine that had just arrived. “All these young people take all that for granted. There was no such thing as chicken wings for a Polish person in 1988. I remember my mother taking me to the store and her handing over food vouchers and us getting two pounds of meat for the next however-many days. That was all anyone was allowed to have—and if they were out of food, then you starved, or had to buy it or beg from someone who did have it. Today I think about the people who worked there, who were obviously secretly taking more for themselves, who would’ve been left in jail to rot if they were ever caught stealing state property.”

  I imagined a Poland with an even greyer sky, with even more busted-up and run-down vehicles. With even more graffiti covering the buildings. With even more chewed up sidewalks and skinny babies.

  “And that’s why I laugh when people always talk shit about the EU in Poland,” Bartek said. “We don’t see what our other option is. We have a genetic mistrust of Russia. In my opinion, it is either align yourself to the west or the east—and the east has killed and murdered and imprisoned us for decades. The Russians have this idea that they were our liberators. They are shocked when we try to create a distance between us politically. They claim that they liberated us from the Nazis, when all they did was create a different prison.”

  Bartek told me the story of the invasion of Poland, about how the Nazis marched to Warsaw and flattened it, so not a single building remained. And on the other border, the Bolsheviks rounded up thirty thousand Polish intellectuals, executed them, and burned them in a mass grave, a mountain of human death.

  “That was the Russians that did that to us,” Bartek said, his outstretched finger pointing at the air. “And they say that it’s western propaganda that tells the Polish otherwise. But we were there. All that we could know is the truth.”

  Bartek drank another glass of wine in one go.

  “Fuck,” he said, “I have to work at nine tomorrow.” And then he poured himself another glass and carried on. “For me, as part of the older generation, the EU represents a chance for us to be free of fighting in Europe. For thousands of years there has been war in Europe. European history has been defined by the fighting of war on European soil. It is all we have ever known. The last century was so tragic that everybody had no choice but to admit that this finally needed to end.”

  I asked him about how much Russia had changed, if at all—about how different it is to write about or speak up against the government now.

  “Now, in Russia,” Bartek said, his words starting to quiver, “if you go on the internet and post something about the government, maybe a friend comes up to you and puts his hand on your shoulder and quietly says, ‘I think you’d better leave.’ If you stay, then a few days later, some mysterious men will come to the door of wherever you’re staying and order you to go.”

  Bartek remarked how that was the only place like that in Europe now, how the war had slowly been won, that there were so many holes in the communist system that it was like a sieve made of paper that culture just dripped through and tore to bits.

  “I am not right wing,” he continued intently. “But for me, the EU was such a relief. The terror and sadness from when I was younger has been replaced by all this.” He gestured at the chicken bones and empty glasses at the table, the discarded toothpicks we used to poke and stab at the bits of cheese. “For so long, Poland was something else. Not a normal place. And now, finally, after all that struggle, after generations of being conquered and controlled by someone else, we can finally be something.”

  The next day, I caught a bus back to Berlin, last night’s conversation still playing out in my mind, as though it had happened moments ago. I met up with Exene and Aleksandr and we went to Friedrichstrasse, crossed Checkpoint Charlie, and jumped over that brick line dividing the former cities of West and East Berlin.

  “So, reunification day must just be a huge party here?” I asked, echoing Bartek.

  Aleksandr, a native east Berliner, born and raised in Lichtenberg, laughed. “Yeah,” he said, looking back at me from a few steps ahead. “But for us East Germans, November third is a sad, sad day. That is the day when all the capitalists came and invaded our country.”

  I looked at the old military booth, and at the picture of the East German soldier with his medals of honour, the DDR hammer and sickle, and his robotic, communist smile, and then I looked up at all the neon lights and high-rises that line Friedrichstrasse, the Nike and McDonald’s logos that hang like national flags and political slogans and political identities and propaganda commanding you to spend your money and adopt the ideology of greed.

  At the former crossroads of East and West, these electric banners of victory stand tall and proud over the sidewalk and the countless food and liquor vendors that salivate at the sound of jangling euros in the pockets of passersby and the smacking of the lips of hungry American tourists. It seemed to me Berlin could never be unoccupied.

  That night I was playing my last show of the tour. A few days later I would catch another plane, watch Berlin vanish in the distance, and return home to Toronto—where once again all of this would fade into memory. I loaded up my guitar to the venue, unpacked it, soundchecked, measured a few hours in pints, played the show, and went to meet up with Exene and Aleksandr at a club in Mitte.

  I was done. Another tour finishe
d—a month of life that seemed to race by in twenty minutes. You blink, rub your eyes, clear your throat, think about the ground you’ve covered, about how long you’ve been gone, and about how fast it all seemed to happen to you once you struck that final chord. All you want to do is get offstage and go home, but something in you, a longing, also pulls you back. You know you could find the energy to play another thirty shows, if only you had to.

  When I found Exene and Aleksandr at the club, I was met with the usual pulse of German techno, so powerful and loud that it could alter your heartbeat. A huge crowd was pounding its collective feet against the hardwood at the front of the stage. I headed straight for the bar and bought a round and slammed it. And then I did it again. Vodka shots. And again.

  And then we started dancing, in a big group holler, shouting at the top of our lungs. It was reminiscent of the time we spent at that club by the Spree years earlier: time stood still in that moment, frozen in the heat, and then passed, like exhaling lungs after a drag on a cigarette. There we were, flecks of sand in the suncreen.

  They kept dancing, but I stopped to take it all in: all that had happened, all that was to happen, and all that could have happened. Berlin rubbed its sweaty body against me and I kept going back to the bar, as to an altar.

  Aleksandr was a rickshaw driver and had to work the next morning, biking American tourists around the city, pointing out landmarks and destinations. They’d ask where they could find the best schnitzel, the best burger, tip him well, talk shit about the Democrats, spend their money on the city. Aleksandr laughed about it because in his eyes each one was as stupid as the next. But it was great money.

  So we disappeared into the night, drunkenly stumbling, and Exene stayed behind to keep dancing with her friends. In about three minutes we came upon another späti and I convinced Aleksandr to have another beer and shot of vodka for the U-Bahn ride home.