A few months went by. Instead of Strasbourg, the Lady set off for London.
“They told me this place was swarming with Poles. And it’s true. There are more Poles here than English people. I meet wonderful people, who help me a lot. One of them paid for me to have a hotel room, two nights for thirty pounds each. I’ve got the hotel bill as a memento. Another one gave me a blanket and a nice big pillow. And there’s a doctor who comes by now and then for a chat and brings me something to eat. Dear God, how happy I am to have met them! To begin with, I was scared I’d meet nothing but bums, drunks, and vagrants. ‘Granny’, they call, ‘give us a quid or two for a cider.’ I’m supposed to fund you, am I? When you’re so pickled you’re about to keel over? Like hell I am!”
“Ded” means death
The journey to the doorway takes us fifteen minutes. The most difficult obstacle is the curb. It’s too high. Lady Peron takes very small steps—each one causes her pain. She’s felt this pain since childhood. “I can’t do a thing. Stand still, or lift things—I keep falling over,” she explains. “My legs hurt immediately. And I’ve had it from birth. I was born a cripple. I’ve got one leg an inch and a half shorter and a crooked pelvis. My parents only took me to the doctor in the second year at junior school. An infant would have recovered at once. But as it was, my bones were too old.”
We’re there at last. The Lady paces anxiously from corner to corner. She has to find a niche where it won’t be windy. And she does, right by the entrance. But minutes later, a young black woman from the security team appears and shoos us out of the doorway. “This lady is homeless,” I explain.
“If you don’t go away from here, I’ll have to call the police,” replies the security woman, although she plainly feels stupid saying it. She offers to go and get a sandwich or a mug of tea for the Lady, but there’s no question of letting her sleep in the doorway.
“I am an IN-VA-LID!” explains the Lady. It doesn’t work. “I’ll kill myself. I’ll jump in the river or throw myself under a train!”
Nothing doing. The security woman vanishes. The Lady looks at me in admiration. “You speaky the English very nice. Quickly. But for me it’s better if I don’t understand. Sometimes they just give up—‘I can’t get through to the old girl, so let her sleep there if she must.’”
“Don’t you know any English at all?” I ask.
“I can manage a few words, but not much. I can say “pliss, woter hot.” That means ‘hot water, please.’ “Pliss, woter kold”—that’s ‘cold water, please.’ “Gud monink,” “gud nait,” and “gud bai.” And when they chase me away, I say, “ded.” “Ded” is death. I’ll die here in London—you’ll finish me off. If you won’t let me collect a little money, I’ll die of starvation.”
Pliss geev mi manny
Lady Peron sits on a suitcase. The cart is next to her, and there’s a piece of paper on the ground. “I am homeless and crippled,” it says. “Please help. Thank you very much”—written in English by the Poles at the bus station. She doesn’t like begging. Anyway, is it begging? It’s a request for help. “I don’t go up to people. I’m ashamed to. I just sit here, and if someone wants to make a donation, it’s voluntary. But the police harass me. They take away my sign and say, ‘That’s not legal here!’
“One time I lost my temper. Because there were some fellows at the railroad station dressed in capes, collecting money in a yellow bucket, the sort you fill with herrings. Apparently, some misfortune had befallen them. And I said to the policemen, ‘So when they beg, it’s legal, but when I do, it’s not?’
“The policemen still drove me away, so then I went up to the man with the bucket. ‘If you please,’ I say, ‘pliss geev mi manny.’ Boldly, just like that. But he didn’t respond at all! So I tried again: ‘geev mi manny, am poor.’ That had an effect on him. He gave me a pound.”
The best place to beg is at the entrance to the underground station. Unfortunately, that’s where they drive you away the quickest. “People were very nice and generous there,” says the Lady dreamily. “I got twenty pounds in half an hour. There were black people who went by, and yellow ones too. If I’d stopped there a few hours, I’d have had a hundred pounds!”
The British are afraid of bombs
We cross to the other side of the street, where there’s an emergency exit from the station. The Lady has never slept here before, but why not give it a try? “As long as they don’t wake me up in the morning. Because I like to sleep in until nine or ten.”
There’s a good spot near the bars, but there’s a guy who sometimes sleeps there. “I’m afraid to go near him, because a fellow might suddenly get ideas about sex into his head,” explains the Lady.
But the exit from the station is all right too—it’s sheltered from the wind. I help the Lady to carry her cart up the steps, and at once she starts unpacking her belongings.
“Look, mister, I got myself a nice cart, didn’t I?” she reminds herself. “I used to pull along a suitcase on a sort of luggage trolley. I hired it at the rail station. You put in a pound and pull it along.”
“Was that when you were accused of terrorism?”
“No, that was later on. When I took another trolley. The police took me to the police station, because they’d seen a knife. I used it to butter my bread. They locked me in a cell for six hours. They thought I was a terrorist. They were terrified by the trolley. They thought I had a bomb. They thought I’d leave the trolley, then go away, and a bomb would blow up. They’re terrified of bombs!” She laughs. “If not for the ripiter”—that’s the interpreter—“they’d have locked me up for several years.”
Lady Peron pulls the quilt right up to her nose.
Or maybe Majorca?
Next day we have arranged to meet at the coach station. The Lady has dug her greatest treasures out of the shopping cart to show me. The ticket to Strasbourg, a hotel receipt (thirty pounds for the night plus breakfast), photos of a medic, the cottage outside Pabianice, and some newspaper clippings. She’s been collecting them since she was a little girl.
“I collect articles about floods, and where someone got married or was born. As a reminder that those events took place.”
Among the clippings is the most important one, about Strasbourg. And one about Alicja herself, from Życie Pabianic, Pabianice’s local newspaper. She doesn’t like it, because the journalist ridiculed her journey to Strasbourg.
“But you’ll write seriously about me—won’t you, mister?” she asks me.
“Of course,” I assure her.
“You’ll write that I travel about the world despite being a cripple from birth?”
“Yes.”
“And maybe give an address. In case people want to send me some money, eh?”
But it’s hard to give an address for the Lady. In London she lives in the street, and she’ll only spend a few days in Poland. “There will be four months’ pension money waiting. I’ll get two thousand at once, and I’ll have the money to go to Italy. Or Majorca. That’s just beyond Spain. If I’m going to be homeless and alone, I might as well be somewhere that’s warm. That’s what I’ve been thinking lately.”
The Lady puts on a pair of dark glasses. Not on her eyes but on her hair. “This is how the smart young ladies wear them,” she explains to me. “I’m not a smart young lady, but you have to look nice for a photo.”
I take a few snaps.
Then the Lady asks me to do her a favor. She wants me to nip over to Victoria and buy her a big bag of fries and two piña coladas. “It’s a very light little drink,” she says, smiling.
The fries must be from a particular place—the ones they make there are soft, and the Lady has hardly any teeth. I’m back in half an hour. The Lady looks as if she’s been at a standstill in the meantime. Neither her face, nor the position of her body have budged at all. She’s clearly brilliant at freezing on the spot. She wakes up at my ar
rival.
“Would you please explain, why do they refuse to give me an apartment?” asks the Lady, and gives her own answer. “Because the state is very greedy. If it has a lot, it wants even more. What do they do with all the money? They never have enough. Once they’ve got Europe, they want the entire globe. The rich don’t know what poverty means, and all my life I’ve never known what it means to be rich.”
Suddenly the Lady falls silent, smiles, and takes me by the arm.
“But tell me frankly, mister. Many a healthy person hasn’t seen as much of the world as this cripple from Pabianice.”
III. Negotiations
The handover has to be prepared a long way in advance . . . . These things take months to negotiate. You have to sit down at the table with them once, twice, a third time, to make friends and gain each other’s trust. Without mutual trust none of them would hand over his bear. They’d sooner kill it.
Ukraine: Nothing Bleeps for the Smugglers
I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a six-year-old Passat, and my heart is in my mouth. I’m chain-smoking, nervously looking around me, and sending off my final text messages.
A few days ago I met Marek (not his real name), a young man of my age, from a Polish village on the Ukrainian border. As we drank hooch together, Marek admitted that he takes cars across the border. Not entirely legally. He exploits the fact that in Ukraine the customs duty on used cars from the West is often more than they’re worth, but he knows how to get a car across the border—either without paying any customs duty at all or only paying the minimum. How does he do it? He’ll tell me on the way, because he’s taking me with him.
“Are you up for it, Ed?” asked Marek. “Ed” is short for “editor.”
“Sure I am,” I replied.
And now I’ve got what I deserve.
Marek drives over to fetch me two days later, and now we’re at the border, sitting in the Passat bought by a friend of his in Switzerland for a few thousand euros. I can see a customs officer, a border guard, flags—Poland and the European Union, a bridge with the Bug River below it, and a barrier, the point of no return, getting nearer and nearer.
The driver: Putin won’t let us join
As we sit in a line of cars on the bridge marking the border, the diplomats in Brussels are contemplating how to move that border farther away. In short, how to encourage Ukraine to adopt reforms and ultimately join the EU. Or at least connect up with it for good.
We don’t yet know that very soon President Viktor Yanukovych is going to show the EU the finger, and the Ukrainians are going to mobilize for weeks and weeks of pro-EU demonstrations, which will end with the death of dozens of demonstrators; as a result, Yanukovych will flee from Ukraine.
We don’t yet know that soon after that Vladimir Putin will cut off the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.
But there’s one thing the Ukrainians I speak to know all too well: their entry into the EU isn’t going be along a path strewn with roses.
“We’re never going to join the EU,” says Alexander, a driver approaching the barrier in a van packed with people. His passengers are on their way home from seasonal work in Poland—they’ve been picking strawberries, then raspberries, then potatoes, and lastly apples and plums. “The season’s over, so the people are going home,” says Alexander. “Some of them are still there—they’re taking mushrooms to the purchase point, but that’s just for small change. What about the EU? First and foremost, Putin will never let us join it. For him, Ukraine is part of Russia, and that’s that. He’ll never agree to hand us over to the West,” he says, and the Ukrainians coming home from seasonal labor agree. “Anyway, Donbas, or eastern Ukraine, would be happy to join Russia. They speak Russian there, and to this day they’re still weeping for the USSR, saying what a wonderful country it was, where everyone had a job. But the fact that in the Soviet days, in the 1930s, Stalin starved ten million Ukrainians to death doesn’t interest them anymore!”
“My great-grandmother died during the Great Famine,” says an older man in a cap, nodding. “My name is Alexander Khodukin, and I used to work as a stoker at the cultural center, but now I’m retired. My mother told me that in the 1930s people ate earth and each other to survive. Mothers suffocated their own children so they wouldn’t suffer. Dreadful times. Russia has never apologized for it, and now they’re threatening that if we sign an agreement with the EU, they’ll starve us again as a punishment. They’ll close the border so we won’t be able to buy or sell anything, and they’ll also double or triple the price we pay for gas.”
The priest: the EU is Satan
Father Oleg Azarenkov has a graying beard, hair tied in a ponytail, and an unstylish acrylic sweater. He’s driving an old Lada, and when it comes to joining the EU, he worked out his opinion long ago. “The thought fills me with horror.”
For seventeen years, Father Oleg has been in service at a small wooden church in a village called Bila, not far from the Russian border. For half that time, he has been embroiled in a feud.
“When the orange rabble came to power ten years ago, they told me to share my church with Filaret’s lot,” he complains. “My God, how much grief I’ve had because of them!”
“Filaret’s lot” are those faithful to the Kiev Patriarchate, which is at loggerheads with the Moscow Patriarchate. Their leader is Patriarch Filaret.
The “orange rabble” are the politicians who came to power thanks to the Orange Revolution. But why does Father Oleg from the Moscow Patriarchate call them “the rabble”?
“Witold, what on earth did they think they were doing? They said that every other day I’ll take the service in the church, and the rest of the time their priest will do it. To me, he’s just an ordinary layman. So they came along, broke the locks, put on a new chain, and for several years I had no key to my own church! Luckily, since Yanukovych has been the president, things have calmed down a bit, and at least they’ve given me back the keys. As for the EU, we can’t expect anything good from that direction.”
“But a few weeks ago all Ukraine’s religious leaders signed a letter in support of Ukraine joining the EU,” I say. “It was signed by the patriarch of your church as well as by Filaret, Father.”
“I’ll tell you something, Witold,” says Father Oleg, frowning. “The patriarch has to be a bit of a politician, so he says and signs various things. But we, the ordinary priests, had a meeting in Kiev a year ago to talk about the EU. A lady came from France and told us very nicely about the money they’re going to give us for renovating churches, about the grants we’ll get. And she showed us some slides: from France, Belgium, and Poland. We listened, until one of the older priests got up and said, ‘Your churches may well have been beautifully restored. They may have copper on the roofs and marble on the floors. Our churches are often just made of plywood, and their foundations are collapsing. But our churches are full—yours are empty.’ And we all began to applaud, because it’s the truth. The West has forgotten about God—it’s all too apparent among you Poles. Ever since you joined the EU, your country is richer and richer. Just across the border everything’s nicely paved. But a man who is rich soon forgets about God—he’s too busy wheeling and dealing to increase his wealth. And the man who forgets about God immediately forgets about other people too. Unfortunately, it’s plain to see in your country. Two years ago I drove across Poland to Germany with the little mother . . .”
“With whom?”
“With my wife. On the way, our car broke down. We waved for two hours, but nobody stopped. Nobody wanted to help us, though I was standing by the road in my cassock, wearing my cross. They just pointed at us, as if it were a great show. The only people who stopped to help when they saw that we were in trouble were a Ukrainian couple.”
“That could happen anywhere.”
“That’s nothing. What worries me most is that the EU will attack us with sex—they’ll tell us to change the
law to protect perverts! You’ll be able to go about Kiev like Adam and Eve in paradise. And a man will be able to kiss a man. In the Holy Scriptures it says that sort of behavior heralds the Apocalypse. And do you know the Pochayiv monastery, the most sacred site in western Ukraine? Did you know that people who are possessed by devils go there? And did you know that recently the devil entered a man when he was reading a brochure about that EU of yours? They took him to Pochayiv, and the devil inside him spat at the priests, and said it was on its way to Ukraine, that it was already here. And that the politicians were providing it with a carriage. All evil comes from the West, Witold.”
The smuggler: our guys only take large bribes
The line moves at a sluggish rate; every few minutes we drive forward about thirty feet. This has been going on for more than an hour and will continue for at least twice as long.
Marek is wearing a leather jacket, a turtleneck sweater, and good quality jeans. He also has a Diesel shirt and an expensive-looking watch. He smells sophisticated, of Dior aftershave. He looks like a cross between a petty con man and someone who aspires to a slightly larger world.
“Everything matters on the border, even how you dress,” he explains to me. “Every Ukrainian customs official is a mini psychologist. If you look too rich, they’ll have you give them more of a bribe, because you’ve gotten too big. If you look too poor, they won’t want to talk to you. We have to be careful not to go too far either way. They all know each other here. When one of my pals did well and bought himself a brand-new Audi, the Ukrainians stopped letting him take cars through. And it wasn’t about income but principles.”
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