Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Fishing permit for the Raba

  After a final check of his equipment and possessions, Marek led the way at a sprightly pace upstream, along a path that twisted between willow bushes, giving periodic views of a nice-looking riffly, stony river. We came to his favourite spot, where the water flowed evenly but with good pace and depth past a line of alders. Marek said there had been ‘much activity’ here the previous Sunday. Several fish had taken his fly although he had not succeeded in landing any of them. He waded out up to his knees and began to cast in a mechanical, metronomic fashion. I executed a few casts downstream from him. There was no activity. ‘There is no activity,’ Marek observed. ‘This is strange. Last Sunday there was much activity.’

  After a time he suggested trying somewhere else. As we made our way downstream I spotted two youths casting spinners from the far bank. ‘Poachers,’ barked Marek, and scuttled off across the water in pursuit. The boys disappeared into the bushes. ‘They were poachers,’ he confirmed when he returned. ‘Before –’ referring to the bad old days ‘– they would not have run away. Now they have respect.’ He patted the pocket containing his bailiff’s card.

  At dusk the river, hitherto wholly lacking in activity, suddenly woke up. Rings appeared across the surface as trout sucked in hatching insects, the circles spreading and drifting down the darkening pool. Marek yelled with excitement. I saw him crouching over the water, rod bent, reaching with his net. ‘Forty-two centimetres,’ he crowed, holding up the trout for me to admire. ‘My biggest this year.’

  Not long after, I landed one myself. Marek splashed over to congratulate me. ‘It is a very good fish,’ he said. ‘But not as big as mine.’

  Flights of bats chopped through the gathering darkness, too quick and erratic for the eye to follow. It was too dark to see the rises of the trout, but their sips and slurps were audible. Club rules stated that fishing must stop an hour after sundown, Marek said, so we made our way back to his car. He was overflowing with delight. ‘Great! Great! That was great. My best fish of the season, and you got a fish too. It was smaller than mine but a good fish. I am happy because I know that you are a true fly-fisherman like me.’

  I was happy too.

  There is a photograph of the young Józef Jeleński on the front cover of a book he wrote 30 years or so ago about how to catch Polish trout and grayling. It shows him holding a grayling, which is as handsome as all grayling are but eclipsed in good looks by Jeleński himself. (Not always the case with photographs of fish and men.) His dark, soulful eyes are framed by soft brown hair and a fine, full beard, giving an effect simultaneously manly, rugged and sensitive.

  Time is not kind, to any of us. Now, at 60 or thereabouts, the hair and the beard are grizzled, the face is weathered and lined, the look from the eyes behind the spectacles is a touch weary.

  I didn’t meet Józef when I was in Poland in 1990. At that time he was living in Libya, designing and supervising large-scale construction projects on behalf of the Gaddafi regime. But the fishermen all knew him, or of him. His was the first modern account of the Polish way of fishing rivers like the San and the Dunajec. He was in the Polish team at the world championships in England in 1982, with Jurek Kowalski. I was told that he had taken his fly-tying box to Tripoli. His old friends liked to picture him in the north African sands, fingers tweaking nymphs and sedges into shape as his mind dwelled on the racing waters of home.

  Józef and his wife Dorothy – whom he called Donia – lived at the southern edge of Myślenice, a town of about 10,000 people on the Raba upstream from the reservoir at Dobczyce. On my first evening there I went with them to the supermarket. ‘It will be interesting for you,’ Józef said. ‘Shopping in Poland has changed since you were here before.’

  Dorothy and Józef Jeleński

  It was a characteristic understatement. The food stores I remembered were mean, shabby, depressing places staffed by unsmiling women whose attitudes of listlessness and indifference were in perfect harmony with the displays of produce they watched over. Blocks of grimy shelves were occupied by long, low stacks of jars and tins. Pale, flabby gherkins stood upright in cloudy vinegar. Pickled cabbage and beetroot lay in pink clods against the glass. Tins of frankfurters complemented tins of fish in brine. Where there was a bread counter, it was swept clean within minutes of the shop opening. If you were lucky, you might find a trotter or two, or a slab of tripe, in the chilled meat cabinet.

  Myślenice’s supermarket had been converted from the handsome nineteenth-century brick factory. Now, spread out beneath a high, vaulted roof, there was a scene of abundance, Amalthea’s cornucopia accessible to all with the money to pay for it. Nectarines from Spain blushed beside grapes from South Africa. Strawberries and watermelons from the sunny south vied with pyramids of kiwi fruit. Mounds of tomatoes and artichokes rose opposite green hillsides of salad and dark cucumbers. One cabinet was devoted to French and Italian cheeses; another to the coffees and teas of the world. Walls of wines and beers rose head-high. At the fish counter you could buy fresh salmon from Alaska, smoked salmon from Scotland, bloaters and smoked eel, bass, sea bream, conger, tuna, carp, crayfish, oysters. Along one side stretched the fresh meat section, pigs’ heads and lamb legs and beef sides and every cut above, below, between and behind; and the delicatessen, a celebration in shades of red and russet of the thousand Polish ways with cured pork.

  My jaw dropped, my senses reeled. It was the familiarity of the scene that dumbfounded me. I saw it every week in Waitrose, and thought nothing of it. But that was in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. This was Myślenice, Poland. In a flash the distance between the two seemed to have shrunk almost to nothing. There was a sardonic edge to Józef’s voice. ‘You asked me if people here are still growing food on their land. Why should they grow it when they can buy better food here?’

  He liked the town, he said, and not only because of its supermarket. It was clean and peaceful and hard-working. There were gypsies and Romanians but they worked and caused no trouble. Everyone in Myślenice had a job if they wanted one.

  But despite his professed contentment, an air of slight disappointment hung around Józef like an old jacket. After more than 20 years in Libya and a spell in the United Arab Emirates, he had returned to Poland comparatively flush and sensing opportunities. He had taken up a part-time job teaching civil engineering in Kraków, and there was the promise of lucrative consultancy work as Poland set about rebuilding itself. But Józef’s dream was of a river. He wanted to have one, to enhance and develop it, to turn it into a trout fishery to rival the best in Poland. He had studied the modern scientific methods of rearing trout. In the new economic climate there would be fishermen happy to pay good money for the exceptional service Józef would provide, he felt sure.

  In the beginning all went well. After a tough battle with the Fishing Association, he secured a long lease on the Raba upstream from the reservoir. He bought a plot of land and built a house and a complex of tanks for hatching trout eggs and growing them to a size suitable for stocking the river. In the first years plenty of anglers came, bought tickets from Józef, and caught plenty of fish. Then … disaster. The decision was taken to build a new highway south from Kraków to the main holiday destination in the Tatras, Zakopane, part of it along the upper valley of the Raba.

  The watercourse was brutally channelised to keep it out of the way and under control. Weirs were installed to manage surges of floodwater. Bankside tree cover was felled to make way for concrete embankments. The stream lost its natural pattern of pool and riffle, becoming wide, shallow and exposed, which left fewer and fewer places for trout to find cover and depth to stay out of sight. Water abstraction and a succession of dry, hot summers further sapped its spirit. The fishermen who had flocked there in the early days of Józef’s management went elsewhere.

  His was pretty much a lone voice against the wrecking of the Raba. There was no effective eco lobby, nor anything like our Environment Agency with the muscle to stand against the power o
f the construction and water engineering industries. The Fishing Association, smarting from their own loss of the water, stayed silent. The multiple ironies of the situation were not lost on Józef, although he did not refer directly to them. He owed his prosperity to the construction industry. It had paid for the land, the comfortable house, the little trout farm, the lease on the water. He had met Dorothy when he was lecturing on civil engineering in Kraków; now she had a well-paid job with a company helping to build a new road network in and around Kraków.

  He did not give up. He waged a ceaseless campaign against the authorities and the builders, arguing for a more enlightened approach to environmental protection. No one listened. The new Poland was in too much of a hurry. Money was pouring in from the EU for so-called infrastructure schemes. There was a big pie for greedy fingers to be thrust into. So what if a few streams had to be trashed, a forest or two cut down, an ancient peat bog drained here and there?

  Józef’s disillusion with the fate of the Raba extended to the other rivers of his youth. They had all been ruined, he said, by dams, road-building, housing, water abstraction or over-fishing; the one exception being the San in the far south-east corner of the country, which he said was too far away for him. In fact, he had largely lost interest in fishing itself. One evening we went down to the Raba together, but Józef only wanted to fish near where he could leave the car and his approach was desultory. I saw enough to see that he was, or had been, a master technician; but also that he had lost the hunger and curiosity about water and fish that drive the true angler on.

  Overall he seemed detached from the wider world and its concerns. He expressed contempt for politicians and politics. He watched football on TV (Poland were on their way out of Euro 2008), but without much enthusiasm. He was very friendly towards me, but showed no curiosity about my life or my country. He had been to England several times on business and had fished there quite extensively, but his lasting impression of it seemed to have been formed entirely by two unrelated episodes. The first occurred at the Town Hall in Northampton where the Polish fly-fishing team had attended a civic function to mark the staging of the 1982 world championships, only to find that they were expected to pay for their wine. That was English hospitality. On the second occasion, Józef was taken by a business associate to what was said to be the best restaurant in Knutsford, where he had been served with overcooked lamb with … what was it? Something green and bitter. Mint sauce, I said. Ah, yes, mint sauce. That was English cuisine.

  Not that he was in the least taciturn. He talked at length about the physics of streams, the geomorphology of valleys and streambeds, and the science of aquaculture – subjects on which he had made himself a considerable authority – deviating every now and them into bitter denunciations of the barbarism and stupidity of the destroyers of his river. He focussed his energy almost obsessively on the trout in the tanks that stretched up from the back of his house towards the dark woods overlooking Myślenice. His day was organised around their feeding patterns. Even when not scattering pellets and minced fish to them, he would watch them for extended periods, tugging gently at his wiry beard, following their ceaseless twisting and darting as if searching for some secret code that might reveal something new about the mysteries of the human condition. He claimed to be checking for signs of disease or stress, but there was more to it than that. I asked him if he ever talked to them when no one was about. Józef laughed and denied it. It was just business, he said.

  Dorothy was his second wife, and roughly half his age. I learned in passing that Józef had no children, that his first wife had died, that he had a brother; nothing more about his personal life. His relationship with Dorothy seemed very private, almost fragile. Although she understood some English, she wouldn’t speak it at all, so that my exchanges with her tended to be brief – except when Józef could be bothered to translate – and one-sided. She had a square, freckly face with a downturned mouth that made her habitual expression glum and disapproving. Her smile was rare and sweet, and in the four days I stayed with them I heard her laugh only once. It was at something I said; I wish I could remember what.

  They got up early and had breakfast together soon after six. They had the radio on in the morning and the TV in the evening, and spoke to each other quietly across the voices of strangers as if afraid that someone might be listening. Each day she left for the motorway site at seven, whereupon he would go out to feed the fish. At some point during the day Józef would devote time to their joint project, which was to install a new path from the front door to the gate. It was edged in small concrete blocks with cobbles between, and progressed down the slope at the rate of two or three feet a day. When Dorothy came home in the evening she would grasp a hammer and go out with Józef to inspect his handiwork. She was never satisfied, and would bend to tap the slabs and cobbles, turning at intervals to lecture him. Then, together, they would bend and tap and scrape and discuss where they were going next.

  I liked Józef very much, and Dorothy as far as the language barrier permitted. But I did occasionally feel something of an intruder in their house. His reticence on personal matters did not make for easy conversation. I had expected him to talk about the old days but he didn’t, and he did not have a good word to say about the new days. I had the impression that he made little effort to keep up with the fishing friends of his youth. When I mentioned the name of a well-known Polish angler who had written a book about the recent development of Polish methods, Józef launched into a scathing attack on both man and book. ‘He sent it to me before the publication to ask for my comments and I told him about all the mistakes. But when the book was published all the mistakes were there. He didn’t want to listen.’ Józef shrugged his shoulders dismissively.

  He still had several hundred copies of his own book, which he had secured at cost-price from the publishers. ‘I thought maybe I would sign them and sell and make a profit,’ he said. He pointed upwards. ‘They are still in the attic.’ He laughed.

  Jozef said he had made a mistake in taking on the Raba. At the same time he had been offered the chance to buy a house somewhere in the west of Ireland where there were a thousand lakes and rivers to fish. Instead he had chosen to invest in Poland, a new wife, and trout. His friend had bought the house in Connemara, ridden the Irish property boom and sold up for half a million euros.

  He smiled and went out to feed the fish.

  Chapter 4

  Leszek

  ONE MORNING I took the bus from Myślenice into Kraków to see how it had fared in my absence. To say that it had changed would be like describing Margaret Thatcher as combative, or the two George Bushes as unsympathetic to the principles of Karl Marx.

  You could never forget Kraków’s situation: the old city held in the soft embrace of the Planty gardens, the Wawel and the cathedral raised in splendour above the river, the Wisła, curving its slow, stately way around the southern fringes. The wonder of Kraków would rebuke the darkest barbarism of which we are capable. Even Hitler, ecstatic at the thought of reducing London to rubble, could not bring himself to allow Kraków to be assaulted.

  So I knew where I was at once. But beyond the geography almost nothing was familiar. The city looked, smelled, sounded, felt like a different place.

  In 1990, it had had an innocence about it, as if it had just woken up to find the witch who had pricked its finger replaced by an eager, virile prince. It was a quiet, shabby, unkempt treasure-house, still blinking in amazement at the events of the previous 12 months, uncertain how a girl should respond to forceful masculine advances. The mansions looking out on to the central square, the Rynek, were dilapidated and grimy, their façades and plasterwork nibbled away by the pollution carried on the air from the notorious Nowa Huta steelworks to the east and the other factories ringing the city. The condition of many of the less grand but equally ancient houses was atrocious: the stucco devoured, the brickwork crumbling, roofs riddled with holes. Quite a number had been abandoned altogether, and were propped u
pright by towers of wooden scaffolding. Street after street was defaced by unfinished restoration projects, the buildings rotting behind scaffolding and sheets of torn plastic.

  The city’s commercial life was very restrained. Outside a jewellers in Floriańska Street three matronly ladies were employed as models. Dressed in crisp white blouses and dark skirts, they pirouetted self-consciously with arms outstretched, fingers bright with rings, wrists jangling with bracelets, smiling demurely. A hush prevailed in the covered market in the centre of the Rynek that was hardly disturbed by the traders selling fruit, vegetables, mountain cheeses, leather sandals, clocks, carved walking sticks and sheepskins from the Tatras. There were no bars, except in the international hotels, only tea houses where you were given a cup of barely hot water and a teabag to put in it.

  There were tourists about, but they were comparatively thin on the ground and extremely decorous in their behaviour, as if cowed by the silence of the city and the melancholy that seemed to hang over its cobbled streets and squares. To someone accustomed to the grasping commercialism of the Catholic Church in Italy, the Mariacki in Kraków came as a delicious surprise. No racks of postcards and stalls of ecclesiastical tat, no multilingual telephones or coin slots to activate lights in dark chapels, no flashing and snapping of cameras, no squads of yawning foreigners being manoeuvred about and hectored by officious guides jockeying with each other for the best positions; instead, gloom and dusty quiet, the fantastic spectacle of Wit Stwosz’s limewood altarpiece, the murmur of prayers and the swish of priestly robes, the constant flow of worshippers crossing themselves, bending their heads, giving thanks and praying for guidance.