Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Arguments over Jurek’s selection resounded through the thin hardboard walls of the hotel late into the night. In the morning he looked pale and withdrawn, and the other fishermen avoided him. After breakfast we went outside. The figure waiting for us there would have attracted attention anywhere. In that setting, and at that time, he was as exotic as a Ghanaian chief in tribal robes. He had on a wide-brimmed grey felt hat with a black band, a black silk vest, baggy white tracksuit trousers, white Reebok running shoes. He had a scrubby beard and shoulder-length hair gathered into a pony-tail, and was leaning against a red Honda jeep – itself a startling sight among the clapped-out Fiats, Ladas and Trabants.

  He and Jurek evidently knew each other. They shook hands in a guarded manner. The newcomer was introduced to me as Janusz Wanicki. He lit a cigarette and began to talk to me in fast, fractured English. He said he was an artist. I looked at the jeep. ‘Not in Poland. You think Polish painter drive Japanese jeep? I live in Finland. You ever been to Finland? Fucking strange country. Finnish people are mad. But rich. So much fucking money.’

  He said he worked as an art conservationist at a museum in a provincial town called Tampere, and supplemented his income by painting portraits of public figures. ‘I paint nearly every bastard in the government. They pay good because the bloody Finns don’t know how to paint.’ I gathered that Janusz had been attached to the Polish team for the fishing championships the year before as fixer and un-official guide. He was now taking a year’s break and had brought his Finnish wife to live in Kraków. ‘My wife Tarja, she like Poland. She love horses, so every day she is riding. I hate fucking horses but I like fishing, so she rides and I go fishing. Is good arrangement.’

  Janusz owned a flat and a house in Kraków and was thinking of buying a house in Zakopane as well. But he was in no hurry. He liked the English; he said it would be good if we went fishing together. Jurek had already arranged for another Kraków fisherman, Andrzej Fox, to accompany me on a trip to the Dunajec, but as there were doubts about Mr Fox’s English, it was agreed that Janusz would come as well. He had the language, and the jeep.

  He picked me up a week later from outside Leszek and Isa Trojanowski’s house in Kraków. Isa, clearly shocked, said there was a girl waiting for me, but it was only Janusz, who had freed his hair from its rubber band. Racing south towards the mountains, we passed immense queues of cars at the few petrol stations. Janusz laughed heartlessly. ‘For this fucking people anything is better than to work,’ he commented. At Leszek’s suggestion I had brought my petrol can with me in the hope of finding the fuel I would need to get to Czechoslovakia. Janusz stopped ahead of one of the queues and marched into the petrol station with my can. ‘Polish people are very generous,’ he said when he came back. ‘If you don’t bullshit them. Or if they don’t know you bullshit them.’

  We met Andrzej Fox at Łopuszna, a village on the upper Dunajec a few miles east of Nowy Targ. He had queued for 13 hours to obtain enough petrol to get his ancient Fiat 126 here from Kraków. He was grey-faced with fatigue, limping badly, and looked about 70, although he was actually in his 50s. As feared, he spoke very little English, and that little cost him dearly. He would squeeze out a few words, his worn face puckered with concentration, then abandon the sentence, blowing out his cheeks in frustration.

  Fishing companions: Janusz Wanicki and Andrzej Fox

  But there was one area of English terminology in which Andrzej moved easily. Little Chap, Wickham’s Fancy, Greenwell’s Glory, Partridge and Orange, Tup’s Indispensable – the names of trout flies were no mystery to him; in Andrzej’s view it was in fly-fishing that Britain had made its major contribution to world culture. He was filled with reverence for the traditions of the chalkstreams of Hampshire and Wiltshire, and he regarded the great authorities – Halford, Skues, Grey of Falloden – as his spiritual leaders.

  Andrzej had an old salmon reel made by Hardy Brothers of Alnwick which had a cracked drum and had not been used in decades. He carried it with him, and loved to slip it from its bag and display it to a fellow enthusiast as if it were a fragment of the True Cross. His holy book was a Hardy catalogue of the 1930s with colour plates illustrating the company’s range of flies, rods, reels and accessories, garnished with testimonials from customers from across the globe, praising the efficacy of Hardy gear in deceiving and subduing mahseer in India, rainbow trout in Lake Taupo and the Tongariro, golden dorado in the Parana, giant tunny off Newfoundland, as well as more mundane species closer to home.

  It had been arranged that Janusz and I would stay in a complex on the edge of the village originally built as a holiday centre for the families of miners or steelworkers or some other privileged category of workers. For some reason – probably to do with his conspicuous lack of money – Andrzej put up at a cheap boarding house elsewhere in Łopuszna. Even though Janusz and I were the only guests in this sepulchral block of wood and concrete, we still had to share a room, which was dominated by a huge Soviet-made television as big as a chest of drawers. When Janusz switched it on, it hummed and whined for some time before conjuring up a picture of nightmarish greens, purples and yellows. Much of the downstairs was occupied by a spacious restaurant which opened only to provide the two of us with an austere breakfast of cold sausage, cheese and stale bread, accompanied by a tureen containing diluted hot milk and flabby noodles. Janusz turned away from it with a shudder; milk and noodles had unhappy associations for him, he said.

  I never managed to extract a coherent account of his past. He had been born somewhere in the Bieszczady, I gathered, and his father had spent some time in prison: ‘It was usual thing, telling people how Communists are bastards.’ He had a brother who was a loyal party member – ‘Fucking shit, he is still Communist, can you believe?’ – and at some stage there had been a Polish wife before the Finnish one. Janusz was deeply nostalgic about his time as an art student in Kraków. He would play, over and over again, a tape recorded at a student concert, a medley of obscene and subversive songs evoking smoke-filled basements, pale faces bent over guitars, voices harsh with cynicism asking what they had done with our world. One song – an account of a rich Italian’s sexual adventures with the simple lasses of Kraków, sung in a drunk, tuneless voice to a crude guitar accompaniment – would make Janusz shout with laughter. ‘My wife Tarja, she hate that fucking song,’ he would say, rewinding the tape.

  Janusz’s attitude to Poland was complicated. He disliked what he saw as expat disloyalty: ‘Many Poles are now abroad and making shit about their country … I hate them.’ But his own exile had nourished a deep sense of anger and disgust at what he found on his return. He railed against the poverty, the dismal hotels and restaurants, the queues, the prevailing down-at-heel shabbiness of everything. He was contemptuous both of the authority of the Church and the explosion of political debate. Freedom was an illusion. What Poland needed was a more authoritarian form of Finland’s materialistic paternalism. What it would get, in Janusz’s opinion, was chaos and corruption.

  He did his best to condescend towards Andrzej. But Andrzej’s view, which he sustained with great determination, was that in the matter that had brought us together – namely fishing – he, Andrzej, was the master and Janusz the pupil. (As a foreigner, I had special status.) Wherever we went in Janusz’s jeep, Andrzej would keep up a flow of fish-related discourse. Since I could understand none of it, I had no difficulty in switching my mind elsewhere, but Janusz would quickly become restive. He would stare in silent exasperation out of the window or attempt to drown Andrzej’s voice with rock music from the cassette player. Sometimes he would listen for a while, then interrupt, or laugh derisively, or try to make some point of his own. But Andrzej always knew too much for him, and would overwhelm him with expertise.

  Andrzej should have been a thumping bore but somehow managed not to be. Once he realised that we shared his enthusiasm for our little adventure, he disarmed us with his passion. He knew every yard of the Dunajec and its delicious tributary, the Białka, a
nd was able to take us places we would never have found on our own.

  The Białka

  The weather remained too hot and thundery for us to do much good on the Dunajec, so we concentrated on the Białka. Andrzej would direct Janusz on to a rough track leading off a country lane through pines and spruce until, with magical suddenness, the stream appeared, and Janusz would jump down and cry out with delight.

  However hot it was, this most giving of little rivers did not let us down. But our last visit was cut short by a furious thunderstorm that turned the water milky and unfishable within half an hour. Janusz decided we needed decent hot food, so we drove to Zakopane and stopped at a szałas, a barn that had been converted into a grill/bar. There was a blazing fire at one end, with rough tables and benches along the walls, and the place was packed with sweating, red-faced Polish holidaymakers. A band of Highland fiddlers in loose shirts, embroidered waistcoats, woollen leggings and leather boots was tuning up. They began to play as our beers arrived, and at once several couples leaped up and began whirling around the floor. One broad-shouldered young man flung his girl this way and that, then abandoned her briefly in order to be sick in the corner and down a tumbler of vodka before returning to grasp her again.

  The climax of the show was a performance by two members of the band of what Janusz – yelling in my ear – informed me was the dance of the robbers. The pair of them half-squatted, hands on hips, elbows thrust out, circling each other, slowly at first, then accelerating to a frenzied finale, urged on by deafening yells and stamping from the largely drunk audience.

  Zakopane the next morning presented a dispiriting spectacle. It was drizzling persistently and the surrounding mountains were hidden by cloud. The town itself was pockmarked with deserted construction sites. Squads of holidaymakers in boots and anoraks wandered up and down the main street. Wet horses munched in their nosebags, the plumes on their harnesses drooping over their ears, while their grooms sat smoking under their little bowl-like black hats, leggings streaked with ash.

  We had come back to meet a celebrated man of Zakopane, the world fly-fishing champion, Władysław Trzebunia – or Trzebunia-Nebies, to give him his full Highland name. Andrzej knew him of old, and Janusz had become friendly with him in Finland. His triumph there had transformed his life. Having previously worked as a bouncer at a bar in Zakopane, Trzebunia had been offered the position of angler-in-residence at a famously exclusive lodge on one of Norway’s most prestigious salmon rivers, where he could earn enough in three months to fund a life of ease back home for the rest of the year. He had the air of a man well aware that he had been blessed with an amazing stroke of luck and determined to make the best of it, but with the grace to be thankful every day of his life.

  He ushered us into his spanking new house, and he, Janusz and Andrzej settled down to talk about fishing. The television was on, showing the Sky Sports channel, a rare novelty anywhere in those innocent times. I watched a report on the county cricket championship in England. Atherton, an occasional leg-spinner, had taken four wickets for Lancashire against Leicestershire. New Zealand were playing Middlesex at Lords. I felt a very long way from home. I didn’t realise then how rapidly the distance was already shrinking.

  The others agreed that we should all fish the Dunajec next day. We drove from Łopuszna to Zakopane to meet Trzebunia, then all the way back through Łopuszna to the river. ‘Two Poles, three fucking opinions,’ Janusz commented as the journey unfolded. The stretch was in the shadow of the Three Crowns, the jagged outcrops just upstream and across from the monastery at Červený Kláštor (where, three weeks later, I found myself fishing the same water from the other side). The river foamed and raced along with an urgency I found slightly alarming. Trzebunia waded straight out, his sturdy legs braced against the current, his rod held high. He forged his way from rock to rock, dropping his weighted nymphs behind each one, only holding his position to play and land a fish, which happened often enough.

  I watched him for a time, marvelling at his technique and concentration and sure-footedness, then wandered upstream looking for somewhere less public and turbulent. I passed Andrzej, who was wading the quick water and looking as if he might be swept away at any moment. He caught a decent grayling and waved precariously at me. Further up I spotted Janusz, who – in a characteristic show of disdain for the regulations – had waded across to Czechoslovak territory. I came to a quieter reach, fringed by a meadow touched with the yellow of buttercups and celandines, where I caught a chub followed by two decent grayling, and felt slightly pleased with myself.

  Back where we had started, I was accosted by a rickety unshaven old man with an errant left eye who smelled strongly of drink. He berated me at length about something, and then turned to Trzebunia, who was wading to the bank. A terrific row flared immediately. Janusz appeared and told me that the ancient was complaining about my having two rods with me, which apparently constituted a serious breach of the rules. Trzebunia was objecting violently to this perceived lack of courtesy to a distinguished visitor. The two of them shouted at each other for a while, then the old man stumbled away. But the strength of his emotion was too much for him, and he turned back to renew the attack.

  By now Janusz was laughing helplessly. ‘The old man is drunk,’ he explained to me eventually. ‘Władysław is calling him a dickhead. He ask Władysław who is the dickhead. You see him hit his chest? He say he have medals and Władysław have no medals. Władysław say they are dickhead medals. That old man is as drunk as four arseholes.’

  That evening I said goodbye to Andrzej Fox. I gave him a dictionary of English flies and he gave me a selection of his own patterns, including one with a stiff, iron-grey hackle that I used to great effect until I lost it up a tree beside the Ilva in Transylvania. We had a final supper in Nowy Targ, during which Andrzej described how he once floated down a stretch of the Dunajec on his back, with his head under water, to ascertain how an insect might look to a trout. He had even collected a handful of mayflies and eaten them, in case they had some special flavour that he could reproduce (he said they tasted of nothing). Andrzej seemed taken aback when Janusz and I burst out laughing. Then he laughed too, and ordered more beer, becoming ever more voluble in the grip of his piscatorial mania.

  On the way back to Kraków, Janusz said: ‘Andrzej is mad. He goes in river to be like fish. He eat fish food. Maybe he thinks he is a fish. But I like him OK.’ He pulled on his cigarette. ‘But he make me want to get drunk like hell.’

  I didn’t guess it but drink was Janusz’s fatal weakness, as it was at that time for so many Poles. On occasions, particularly at weekends, it seemed the whole country was drunk, getting drunk, or nursing a hangover. The drunkenness was gross, brutal and shockingly public. Spirit distilled from almost anything was the cheap, universally available ticket to hilarity and oblivion. Drunks were a major hazard on the roads, weaving and lurching along, clutching their bottles, singing and yelling and falling over. Many were overcome before they reached home and lay down to sleep, the bodies scattered along the verges like casualties of a retreating army.

  These sights filled Jurek Kowalski with shame. They acted as pitiful reminders – as if he needed reminding – of the great lie he had grown up with: the system that promised health and prosperity for all, and heaped degradation on them instead. He told me that he had been called out one evening to a factory near Krosno where one of the workers had been injured in an accident. When he got there he found the whole workforce was drunk. They were singing, shouting, sleeping, fighting and swigging vodka, while the untended machinery clanked and roared.

  Jurek would have an occasional beer, no more. With me, Janusz drank beer only, about the same quantity as me. He was savagely sardonic about Polish alcoholism. ‘On Sunday morning,’ he said, ‘the Polish worker wakes up with bad head from vodka. He feels so bad he beats wife, then he go to Mass to say sorry to God for beating wife, then he go home, drink vodka, sleep, then beat wife again. Then he go to church again, go h
ome, drink and go to bed.’

  On the day I met Janusz for the first time, he, Jurek and I had a late lunch together in the hotel restaurant in Skoczów. At seven o’clock that morning a kiosk in the street outside was already dispensing the first beers and shots of the day, and by mid-afternoon the town was lurching with drunks.

  A youngish couple on the edge of complete alcoholic collapse were slumped at the table next to ours. The man, stubble-chinned, red-eyed, hair matted, filthy and reeking, rolled around in his chair, pushing his glass across the surface of the table with the care of a chess player. His wife – either still short of or beyond the speechlessness phase – began to shout at us as we sat down. Gulping at her glass, she staggered over and pawed at my neck and shoulders, the stench of sweat and spirits billowing from her. Janusz pushed her away. Her husband swayed upright, brandishing his glass. Suddenly rediscovering the power of speech, he said he was unable to finish his drink. Would the gentlemen care to buy it from him? Half-price, a bargain.

  A youth came in, and together he and a waitress herded the pair out of the door. Our food came and we started eating. The lad returned and apologised for his parents’ behaviour. Janusz said not to worry, it wasn’t his fault. His apologies became more effusive. He grinned and laughed, then sat down and asked for a drink. Janusz grabbed him by the collar and shoved him out into the street. He was no more than 14.

  When I came back to Poland I reminded Jurek Kowalski of this scene. He told me that kind of frantic, public drunkenness had become much rarer. The problem of excessive drinking still existed, no doubt, but it had retreated behind closed doors.