There's an Egg in My Soup (10 page)

The Irish guy walking down the street with his single rose was a great laugh for the students, of course. The thing was about two feet long. I tried to hide it under my coat, but the thorns got me. Tongues wagged after the first time, and some of the kids were even brazen enough to ask me in the class.

‘Tom, are you having dates with a Polish girl?'

Silence descends on the class. They all stare at me.

‘Yes, I am.'

‘Ooooh,' they go in unison. ‘Who is it?'

‘You don't know her.'

‘Is she pretty?'

‘Yes, and I'm going through something of a crisis.'

In time they found out. There were very few places you could take a girl in the town. You could go to the cinema on a Sunday night and sit with half of your students. You could go to the café and sit with half the students. Or you could walk in the park – with half your students.

If you took a girl to your flat, you may as well have branded her a witch. Strictly forbidden, it was a rule we ignored at times, which meant Asha got a roasting and I got the silent treatment in the staff room. A single girl visiting a single man in his home could only mean that he was a man of bad character, and that she was a brazen hussy. Let the pair of them be damned. If Asha came over, she'd dash into the building with her hat down over her face. If the doors were locked, she'd lob a stone at the window and I'd throw down the keys.

Getting back out was tricky too – we had to break into a sprint past the office, past the prying eyes of whoever was on duty. Sometimes it was a young teacher, Bozena, who would smile and wave, or the PE teacher, Tadek, a great character, who would also just give a short wave. At times we weren't so lucky, though, and the word would be on the street by dawn.

It was frustrating, but I didn't care. I would have gone neck-high through the sewers of the town at the time,
because I was star struck. I saw this all as part of the great plan that was written for me.

I turned up most days at the music school where Asha worked as a piano teacher. I would nod politely to the woman who manned the doors and she would allow me to wait in the hall for Miss Zimnicka – I had to use the ‘miss' – to finish work so I could escort her home. I would even go to the train station on the nights she attended college, without ever knowing which train she was on. One came in every half-hour, so I'd wander up, have a look, and if she wasn't on it I'd wander home and wait for the next one. It could be eleven o'clock before she'd come in. I'd walk her home to her door, check that the speaker wasn't humming, give her a peck on the cheek and trundle off through the snow to my flat. There was a glimpse through the window in the hallway of her block, and I would stare out into the night sky, a hopeless romantic.

Christmas Eve is when Polish people have their main meal. The Christmas dinner is served up literally when the first star appears. So you have to starve until it gets dark, basically. Depending on your culinary tastes, you would either love or hate the Christmas meal – beetroot or mushroom soup; ‘pierogi', little flour pouches stuffed with forest mushrooms and cabbage, which are excellent; cabbage stew; fruit ‘kompot'; various salads; those raw herrings again, this time without the vodka;
and the pièce de résistance – carp, a muddy little bastard that lives at the bottoms of ponds.

This poor creature suffers a particularly cruel fate. He is kept alive in a bucket of water right up to the moment he's about to land on the grill, whereupon he is ceremoniously battered with a hammer. I couldn't eat much of it after witnessing that, the frozen blood on the balcony visible the whole way through the meal. Anyway, carp has more bones than a graveyard and a texture like the sole of a Doc Martin boot. Instead, I devoured as many of those pierogi things as I could, hoping a magic mushroom may have found its way inside.

Midnight saw the whole town converge on the church for a mass that even the great man himself would be at pains to endure. Lengthy sermons and fire and brimstone were the order of the day as heads bowed and breasts were struck. However, when the sermon steamed into its fortieth minute, a peasant woman at the front stood up and began roaring at the priest. Nobody could explain to me what the outburst was about, but it shocked the priest into getting on with it. By 1.45, we were back on the streets, which glittered in temperatures of –18°C. I could have murdered a pint and a hot whiskey.

That's possibly a harsh picture, maybe even unjust. And to be very honest, there is more of a benign atmosphere here at Christmas than you might find
elsewhere. It is far more radiant visually because of the snow, but you also feel that the true meaning of Christmas is fully evident and, whether you're a Christian or not, you can't help but feel that the mood is spiritual.

The streets, even the main road east that's otherwise constantly rumbling with traffic, are deathly still, and the only sounds you're likely to hear are church bells. It is a time for family most of all and the Polish people, who are very into their family gatherings, adore the whole occasion. At the main meal they bless each other and grant each other wishes. They sit around together and sing. Everybody helps to make the dinner, which takes hours, and the house is scrubbed from top to bottom.

Spending Christmas with a family I hadn't known previously was very moving. I was, after all, a stranger, yet I was treated as one of their own. A few of the other Irish teachers who had also been invited to the homes of Polish families that year recounted similar feelings. They felt like intruders, but were treated like brothers.

After those few days, it was obvious to Asha's family what was going on between us. Not that it was easy. The phone rang on Christmas Eve and the boyfriend was on the line. Though my Polish was minimal at the time, I could tell who it was. It was an awkward moment in a place where relationships are taken very seriously. I could have been turfed out in the snow. But I wasn't.

As time went on and things grew more serious between myself and Asha, I was a guest almost every evening in their household. Imagine what it must have been like for a family to have a foreign guest over almost every evening for supper. It was never a conscious decision on my part – I would simply pop over to visit, or would be escorting Asha back from work, and would be asked to stay. It showed the nature of hospitality in Poland, done without any fuss and each time with the same degree of warmth. And for the five years I was there, that never changed.

However, on the down side, it has to be said that Christmas in Poland can get boring without the gargle. Aside from the gin-sodden Santa in Warsaw, you would be unlikely to hear the sound of a boozed-up human on the street until New Year's Eve, when the whole town, as if under water for the week, rises to the surface for a bloody big gulp. Then anything goes. Parties ensue that make the ones back home look very tame. So there is a bit of an anomaly there, unusual for such a Christian country. You sort of do your penance before you head down the sinning route. I suppose it amounts to the same thing in the end.

The day after Christmas Day, Stephen's Day, my eyes light up when I hear we're going over to the local hop in the Palace that lies in the centre of the park. Alas, I'm soon informed that it is a minerals-only affair. My mind descends into a state of dread. Students, hundreds of
them, will be there. Being dragged up to dance sober is, well, a sobering affair at the best of times, but being the village idiot in a foreign country goes beyond humiliation.

With the excuse of changing clothes, I rush home and search the flat for anything that might induce a buzz. Finding only a half bottle of cheap wine and some cough syrup, I lash them both back in a rather unhealthy but surprisingly effective cocktail. If I became the village idiot thereafter, at least I did it in style. In fact, I was Lord of the Dance.

The last time I visited Poland for Christmas I bought myself a twenty-four pack of Guinness and a pint glass at the airport and sat guzzling the cans on my own. The family were a bit disgusted at this terrible display of barbarity, but hey, I'm not the one battering a poor carp to death with a hammer on Christmas Eve.

There is a place over in the northeastern part of Poland called Grabarka, located not far from the border with Belarus. Few people travel to the east of Poland unless they have a specific purpose. Nobody travels to Belarus. Ever. I asked about it a few times, enquiring why the Poles never went and whether it was worth visiting. The look of astonishment I received was enough to deter me. There is nothing there to see, I was told. Absolutely nothing.

The towns on this side of Poland are more influenced by Russia, and some are tragic, crumbling reminders of the War and the subsequent occupation, their factories and sprawling rail tracks sitting alongside the shells of once beautiful buildings. You might pop into a train station, a cheerless, grey block, and inside it find old features like a carved bench or a large tiled stove, hints that Poland had its glory days. It is a real shame, and for the people of Poland, it must be simply unforgivable.

Most smaller towns in the east are hard to get to by public transport and, even if you do manage to reach your destination, you'll soon realise that there's nothing to keep you there. However, there are some sights
worth seeing in these out-of-the-way places. Chopin's home, for example, is located in some oddball town on some labyrinthine route out of Warsaw. I aborted two attempts to get there and, after five years, never got to see it at all.

This part of the country is just not ready to deal with visitors. They don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the budget and perhaps they haven't even considered the economic advantages of tourism. Instead, the region relies on basic trade with the Russians for its few bob, and vice versa. Eventually, it will change. But in the meantime, you need the dedication of a pilgrim on his way to Mecca to complete a journey on this side of the world.

Grabarka, the ‘holy mountain', is one of these oddball but well-known sights, located in the middle of nowhere. At least, I thought it was well known, but the truth is that few Polish people seemed aware of its existence. It is a place of worship for the Orthodox community of Poland, who have been coming here on pilgrimages annually since 1710. In that year, a cholera epidemic broke out in the region and decimated the population, the majority of whom were Orthodox. But amidst the despair, a sign of some sort was seen from the mountain and those that reached the top were saved. The mountain thereafter became a place of great sanctity and, as a mark of gratitude, people planted crosses on the top, a tradition which has lasted to this
day. The mountain and surrounding forest now contain up to 20,000 crosses. They vary in size, depending on the gravity of the cross planter's sins. I decided to see this place for myself.

‘Transport is basically by train, the Sycze station being a short walk from the hill. Trains run regularly from/to Siedlce (63km) and semi-regularly from/to Hajnowka (58km). Only one or two buses link Grabarka to Siemiatycze (9km) and it's better not to rely on them at the time of the festival.'

That's what it says in my Lonely Planet guide. After travelling in this region for some time you learn that such wording is about as close as you can get to the truth. At a bus stop, for example, there will be a timetable with the various times of buses. Beside each time, however, there will be a symbol of some sort – an ‘X', a cross, a dollar sign, a number, whatever. Beneath the times there will be a key to each symbol. However, you could have three or four symbols beside one bus, and I am not joking when I say that there could be up to thirty different symbols to decipher altogether. What is really baffling is how the powers-that-be compile the things. You could have a bus that runs on weekdays, not on Saturdays, and only on the first Sunday of every month. You could have a bus that runs only on Tuesdays. You could have a bus that runs on Sundays, unless that Sunday is Easter Sunday. You could have buses that run in winter only, where winter begins on
such a date and ends on such a date. At least all of this makes the timetable so large that it is not hard to find a bus stop.

To make things worse, for a bit of a laugh, kids tear off the key to the symbols. If that's gone and you're in unfamiliar territory, start saying your prayers. It happened to me one evening – the bus I was on began drifting in the wrong direction and I ended up in a hamlet lit by one solitary streetlight and containing one bus stop. Not a shop, bar or phone box was to be seen anywhere. It was the middle of winter, it was getting very late and I honestly thought I'd be found dead the following spring. Thankfully, after almost two hours of waiting in freezing temperatures, a bus came the other way. But during those two hours, not one other person did I see. When you are stranded in such a place, you are truly stranded.

To put you in the picture, Minsk, my town, lies about forty kilometres east of Warsaw. Forty kilometres further east, you come to the capital of the region of Mazowiecki, a town that takes two years of work to pronounce: Siedlce. This town, with a population about twice the size of Minsk, doesn't have an entry in the Lonely Planet either. Considering it is the capital of the region, that doesn't bode well. The reason why lands on you like cold water as soon as you rattle into the place on one of the old iron monsters that serve the local stations here.

There are two types of train in Poland, the first being the Intercity trains which have first-class, second-class and express services. Clean, comfortable and reliable, these serve the major cities nationwide and are a joy to travel on. The second type is the ‘osobisty', a local beast that rumbles along like a cattle cart. A faded orange colour on the outside, with hard, plastic seats on the inside, this machine stops ruggedly at every outpost along the way. This may be merely a platform, with nothing to give away the fact that it's a station save perhaps an old woman huddled on a broken bench. A stretch on one of these rattlers is an experience that can turn the most enthusiastic mind into a dullard. At first sight, most would make the decision not to get on at all. This would probably be a wise move – after dark, at least – since crime is rife on these things.

Pulling in to Siedlce, the only way you know you've arrived somewhere more than a mere platform is by the quantity of tracks jutting in all directions, like the guts of some iron dinosaur torn apart with a claw hammer. Platforms are dark, decaying, concrete slabs that look rusted, if that's possible. They are littered with motionless people, the collars of their coats up around their faces no matter what time of year. Beggars, cripples, limping dogs – poverty hangs in the air like a ghost. The station café is a bit rough, with a large congregation of homeless people, but a glass of their bullet-proof coffee does the job.

The waiting room is no better and the town nondescript, save for a large prison on the main street, so I head quickly to get a ticket to that place called Szycze, sixty-three kilometres away.

The woman at the ticket hatch has never heard of it, and she doesn't have a map. Neither has the information point. Anyway, it doesn't matter, I'm told that I won't be going to wherever Szycze is, since it's most likely on the northeast line and I need to get to Hajnowka first, and that train is gone. It is that simple. So I have to go into the town to find the bus station.

The bus station in Siedlce, about ten minutes' walk from the train station, consists of a small, decaying, one-room building and a line of iron barriers outside for the buses. Checking the timetable, I discover that whoever compiled it flew right past the logic department again. All the buses to where I want to go leave at exactly the same times as the trains. Absurd, pure and simple. I resolve to head for a place called Biala Podlaska, where one of my Irish colleagues lives. If I can't make it to Hajnowka today, at least I'll have a place to stay tonight.

An hour later, the bus to Biala arrives on a thick blanket of fumes, pulling up at one of the iron barriers. A featureless driver snaps the tickets out of people's hands and we all shudder as the engine kicks in. Once out of Siedlce, though, that tightness that grips your chest relaxes as the countryside opens up. It is a
welcome sight. Poland is quite flat and, in keeping with the country's name, derived from the word ‘pola', meaning ‘fields', most of what you see driving through it are precisely fields.

They look vast, peaceful and soothing. They are lonely though, and empty too, save the odd farmer sweeping through them with a scythe, or a cow chained to a stick near a ditch. Many of the fields dip in the centre from stagnant pools formed after heavy spring rain and poor drainage – farmers certainly have their work cut out here with monotonous flooding. Poland needs a better infrastructure badly and the farmers need a hand out. Somehow, though, I get the feeling that it won't happen for a while. There are just too many of them with very little to offer, God bless them. I reckon they'll be swallowed up.

The few pigs and cows they have get them very little at the market, so they keep their grandparents at home instead. ‘It pays more for a farmer to keep his grandparents than four cows. Grandparents don't give milk, but they have regular pensions,' one of the farmers from the Self Defence Farmer's Union said about the situation in rural Poland. People have wondered why nursing homes are a rarity in this country; now they have the answer.

Like the trains, buses tend to differ in quality. Private coach companies have been moving in from abroad, setting up long-distance operations between the major
cities. This fills a gaping hole in the market, but at the cost of the public service, which has no funds to improve itself.

The public buses vary in much the same way as items in a second-hand clothes shop. Old, out-of-date and smelling of wee, they do the job but not with any great elegance. It is amazing how unhygienic a bus seat can be, after about fifty years of peasants' bums.

The very worst thing about the buses, however, is the music. Unlike most public transport systems, in which a driver might travel different routes and on different buses, Polish drivers usually have the one bus for the duration of their careers. They tend to customise it according to their tastes, with stickers, pendants, crosses, pictures of Jesus and the Pope and, of course, their own stereo and music collection. In the majority of cases, the music is a brand known as ‘Disco Polo', a poorly produced imitation of nineties continental disco with a hint of Polish folk thrown in. The result is unsettling.

Disco Polo is heard in virtually every café, shop, bar and restaurant, particularly in eastern Poland and particularly in the countryside. Even a glance at the names of some of the groups is enough to have a red flag waved: Boys, Shazza, Max and Mario, Cassanova and so on. Cheap videos shot at cold, windy beaches on the Baltic; tacky songs such as ‘Sex on the Beach (come on everybody)', ‘Revolution in Paradise' and
‘Tarzan Boy' –
‘Tarzan handsome, Tarzan strong, from the jungle, love me long. Tarzan handsome, Tarzan strong, he looks cute and his hair is long.'

There are a great many talented musicians in this country, but there are few jobs. What jobs there are don't pay. People who play in the army bands or orchestras might have a solid job. But if you live in a village and your dream is to head to the big smoke to get a recording deal or get into a jazz scene, you have a tough road ahead. What do you do? You turn to this Disco Polo, because it will guarantee a good income. Sadly and inexplicably, it has a huge market. This worries me greatly, and should really worry the Poles. The buses of course, act as seed carriers, spreading it throughout the country and beyond. And while the Polish people themselves are very welcome in Ireland, let us pray that none of these buses are allowed to cross our borders.

The following week, on Saturday, at seven o'clock in the morning, I'm ready for my second attempt to find Grabarka. I've done my homework, and have times of the various trains worked out. The only problem is that I don't know how to get back and, with the mention of ‘semi-regular' trains in the guidebook for the return leg, I'm not very confident either. For some reason, the warm spring weather we had been enjoying until recently has been transformed into an ill-fated spate of hail, battered dark skies and a razor for a wind.

Siedlce again, looking even worse in the rain. An hour to kill in the station, then the train out to Grabarka. One of the more disturbing aspects of local train travel in these remote areas is that most of the stations are unmarked. In fact, they're not stations at all, just platforms which interrupt an otherwise unbroken spread of fields and wood. If you're on a line for the first time, you have to count the stops and it would be madness to travel at night if you didn't know where you were going.

At Grabarka station (a bare platform) I get off, noticing that I'm the only one doing so. This is a bad sign. As the train disappears, not a sinner is to be seen and the lonely clank of a cowbell is the only sound to be heard through the wind.

I'm looking for a mountain. But there's only hilly forest on either side of the track, separated by a large clearing of fields on the right. The fields are dotted with wooden houses and the area is split in two by a narrow country road. The sky overhead is like a two-tone slab of marble, white and grey, spilling a shower of rice-grain-sized hail that stings. As I move quickly towards the thick pine forest on my left for shelter, there's a nasty voice telling me that not only am I not going to find this mountain, but I'm not going to find a way home either. There is no bus stop, no station, and no timetable anywhere.

A half-hour later, I'm trudging through the forest on
the left of the track without having met a soul. Stopping to pee up against a tree, I consider just trying to go home and warning people that travel to this place is not to be recommended. I hate giving up though. I'm standing on a slight rise now and stare across at the other side of the track. The sun has come out a little, and I convince myself to explore that part before throwing in the towel.