There's an Egg in My Soup (16 page)

As I walk past, one of the mob, with a baseball cap on back-to-front, leaps off the bench and lands in a pose, punching the air, then kicking over his head like an excited ballerina. ‘C'mon!' he screams, beating his fists off his singlet-covered chest. ‘C'mon!' he shouts again. He even has an American accent, so either he has an American teacher, or he's been watching too much Gangsta TV.

Meanwhile, just as I reach the far side and turn off into a side street, a large police van enters the square. It passes the BMW that had hung over me like a vulture, passes even the benches with the mobs, the spit and the broken bottles. Passes the singlet-clad gangsta rappa guy, who's still leaping around like a monkey. Then, of all things, it pulls in front of me and blocks my path. The window goes down and two serious-looking coppers with moustaches glare out of the window.

‘ID,' one says, with a stern voice.

I have only had a few jars all night. I'm walking
perfectly straight and am dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I'm about as suspicious as a fish on Good Friday, yet they pull me up and demand I identify myself. I actually smile with the absurdity of it and, turning to point at the mobs on the benches drinking – which has become illegal on the streets of Poland – ask them if I have done something wrong.

Now, the cops here are pretty unpopular. Most of them spend their time trying to catch poor innocent folk at petty crime, because they know they'll get a handover. Cross the road without a green man and they'll stop you and demand a ‘fine'. They stop cars all over the place, telling them they were speeding and must go to the station. Nobody wants to go to the station, so they pay thirty or forty zlotys instead.

I was locked out of my flat one night, because the hall in the building was being used for a wedding. The ‘security guard' was an off-duty copper and he kicked the crap out of a friend and I when we tried to force our way in. He thought we were Russians, he said. Nothing was done. Two policemen in plain clothes visited me and asked various questions, but because I wasn't black and blue all over they didn't seem too concerned. Also, we'd had a few drinks. Once the police hear there is drink involved in any incident, they simply shrug their shoulders and walk away.

The cop in the van now pulls out a pen and notebook and starts asking me questions. Where do I
live, where was I all evening, and so on. Then he asks for my parents' names and address. I begin to explain that I'm not Polish and he says, ‘Just tell me your parents' names and address.' I tell him, then he consults with the other policeman before waving me away. They knew me at this point. Or at least knew of me, after the incident in the boarding block.

In my first year, I was actually put in the van and driven home to prove I wasn't some undesirable scouring the neighbourhood for a good target. I had been walking home with my guitar when they pulled over and jumped out in front of me. I was shocked. Martial law had ended years ago. There was no need to throw people up against walls and demand IDs just because it was after ten o'clock. They opened the case and inspected the guitar, finally putting me into the van as I gave them directions to where I lived. It was Friday night and the boarding block was locked. I opened the door with my key and immediately the woman on duty woke up, running out into the hall to find me with two coppers. One of the policemen went up to her and said, this guy – me – claims to live here.

‘Well, of course he does if he has a key! Are you stupid?'

Nobody would have spoken to them like that a few years earlier.

Trying to find out why the police stopped me and not the mobsters, I ask the kids in school. They shrug. This
is nothing new, they tell me. It is because the cops are afraid. They're too afraid to hold up the thugs and I was an easier target. They were hoping I was drunk and they'd get a fine or a bribe or something.

A young family I knew were completing the construction of a new house and left it unattended for a few days. When they returned, everything – from the sinks, toilets and pipes to the beams – was gone. Not a washer or spare brick left. The louts who ransacked the place, of course, will accept anything from a couple of bottles of vodka to a few miserable zlotys as a price.

They have a lodger there now, who says he's going to dig a pit in the garden – something similar to a bear trap. His brother, he says, is a doctor, and can give him acid that will dissolve bodies like piss on a snowman. Anyone coming over the fence is a dead man. I'm inclined to believe him. He seems pretty serious about protecting himself. He killed a dog in Warsaw not so long ago. A Rottweiler. The owner stood and laughed as the dog – with no muzzle and let off the leash – charged towards him. He warned the owner to call him back, but was ignored. So he broke the dog's neck in an instant. Perhaps a year in the army might be useful after all.

As the level on the thermometer drops, so too does the spirit. Every book has been read and sits exhausted in a clumsy row on a long table, a large jar of water at each end to keep them from collapsing in a heap. I develop the pallor of their pages every year, once the month of October registers on the calendar – a sort of yellowy-white, like an old lightbulb. There isn't enough natural light in this place to grow a weed. Winter chokes the life out of everything.

Despite the number of years that had passed, the Polish winter was something I couldn't get used to. Novelty was replaced by a stale sense of habit, work became tedious and even the students that I once went out with had disappeared, the new ones that bit too young to socialise with. The merits of living alone were growing tiresome and the demerits becoming all too clear. To keep my mind healthy I had to find something to occupy my thoughts.

There was an insignificant little town, a ‘burak' town, called Kaluszyn, sitting roughly ten kilometres away from my own on the dismal road that led to the Russian border. A nondescript, functionless ghost town, nothing
came through here but buses to somewhere else and few people came out permanently but the dead. There was little that stood out, save a redbrick church that had survived the war and a brand spanking new foreign garage that sold imported beer and Red Bull.

This garage was an oasis in a town that drifted off to sleep some time after five every evening. Little else stirred but the wind sweeping in from the Urals. For heavy drinkers, the hatch that serviced customers nightly must surely have seemed like God's great dumb waiter. Once the tiny hotdog and beer bar near the bus stop – for it wasn't really a station, just a muddy car park and a shelter – closed, the garage was the only thing open.

Not that the town was hideously ugly. It certainly had its charm, as many towns in the eastern part of the country do. It wouldn't be surprising to see them on postcards sold to tourists in Warsaw. But they give off an air of stagnation, impossible not to detect after spending any amount of time there.

The demographics of Kaluszyn were similar to any other rural residential area, with several generations living under one roof in many households. Most of the kids that lived there attended the schools in Minsk, while those who had finished either resigned themselves to permanent unemployment, commuted to work in Warsaw or had gone to cities like Gdansk, Poznan or Lodz for third-level studies.

This last group were the lucky ones. For the males it meant avoiding conscription; for females avoiding the premature band of gold that convention often dictated. I wept annually for the girls in my school who went directly from the exam halls to the church, with a seventeen-year-old kid on their arm who was about to enter the army because he couldn't get an education. Marriage for these girls is a stage of life immediately following puberty. They should really pencil it in to the biology prospectus.

It is hard to imagine life in these towns from a Western perspective. Before we went to Poland, we were given a talk by a Polish teacher who lived in a spot not entirely unlike this one. Shaking her head and looking around at us all, she scowled and said, ‘You must understand, there is nothing to do in a lot of towns and villages in Poland. Nothing.'

Of course, that meant little to most of us. A town is a town as far as we were concerned and, unless it's located in the wilderness of Siberia, all towns share the same facilities. But when she said there was nothing to do, she meant there was nothing to do. After five in the evening, a place such as Kaluszyn turned into a ghost town. There was no cinema, although occasionally a film would be shown on a screen erected in the town hall. Even towns with cinemas never guaranteed a screening. The cinema in my town – which at least was a town and not a village – was vital every Sunday. I
would head down no matter what the film. But there were many occasions when not enough people turned up – I think it needed a minimum of fifteen. Then the owner would just shrug and the movie wouldn't be shown. The long walk back to the flat on a Sunday night in winter was devastating.

Besides perhaps from a kiosk near the bus shelter and a small, pathetic café, there would be no real bar. Sports facilities? In my school there was an area to kick a ball around. That was it. Imagine in the middle of winter what it must be like to live in one of these villages. For entertainment, people simply call to each other's homes with bottles of vodka. If you are too young to drink, you get someone older to buy a bottle and find a bench, a bus shelter or a group of trees, where you stay until the drink is finished and you begin to feel the cold.

At this point in time, the late 1990s, the rest of Europe was going through the Ecstasy era. Clubs had taken live music venues out of circulation and anyone I knew back in Ireland of my age was out on pills until seven in the morning. I lost a few friends for a while back then, thinking during short trips back home that I would be going out for a few pints with the guys on a night out. Next thing, their shirts are off and they're standing in front of the DJ box with their hands in the air. I didn't get it. That whole scene passed me by. I only ever got to read about it in
Hot Press,
which I subscribed to
during my time in Poland. Otherwise, I remained clueless. The isolation was very real.

Whatever about finding pills and clubs in Warsaw, the chances of it in Minsk were slim. Anyway, the bulk of drugs in Poland were homemade, mostly derivatives of heroin in some lethal blend or other. In fact, drug production in Poland began in 1975, when a medical student in Gdansk came up with a drug known as ‘kompot', the name of the fruit drink I used to get with lunch in the internat, but obviously not containing the same ingredients. Kompot, or brown sugar as it was also known, was made over a kitchen stove using the husks of poppies that grew in Poland's fields. Apparently, it was three times stronger than heroin in the West. It was highly addictive, and very attractive to a lot of depressed young people from the 1970s onwards. It was also very cheap, and in the 1980s, Warsaw was dubbed ‘little Nepal', with addicts in the country numbering over 100,000.

Drugs certainly didn't have the glamour that made them the poison of choice back home in the 1990s. If you were on drugs in Poland, you were a ‘narcoman', a depressed, hopeless case, because the drugs were just lethal. In time it would change. But I never knew anyone who was on anything stronger than a bit of dope at the time.

The young people of Kaluszyn, however, had done something for themselves. They had made a club and
this club belonged to them – the college students, teenagers and unemployed. They cherished it for all they were worth, since there wasn't one other scrap of property they could meet in. The club was located in the basement of the local primary school, oddly enough. Down where the pipes and furnaces that heated the school were located they had made a bar and a stage. They had got together several couches and a toilet, and there was enough space to fit well over a hundred people. They even had their own sound and lighting equipment. In the winter it was warm, and in the summer you could open up the doors to allow a cool draught sweep through. This was where the kids celebrated New Year's Eve and birthday parties, where they came to chat and mingle on a Saturday night. It was kept safe, clean and free from scumbags, and consequently the parents and police let it be.

One evening I was invited there for a party. I had met a band from this town, who played one night in a new pub that had opened in Minsk – a very welcome addition after three years of cafés. At the time I was playing in pubs in Warsaw, having been a part-time musician for many years. I was enjoying the gigs in Warsaw because it got me out of Minsk, but was tiring of ex-pats screaming for U2 songs on a Saturday night. Anyhow, I was far more interested in playing with a blues band. So I accepted the invitation gladly.

On this particular night, they were having their last
party before ‘Post', or Lent as we know it over here. As with Christmas, during this period it is forbidden to dance, sing or go to clubs. So for the young people, this was the last great hooley for some time and the majority resented the fact. For them, the last night is something of a wake. When it is all over, it's as if you've turned their humour off with a switch. Yet, bizarrely enough, they abide by the rules, which have been set down by the Church.

I had a St Patrick's Day party in this club a few weeks later and not one soul got up off their chair except to visit the toilet. At the end of the night when I put on the Pogues, one young guy went berserk, throwing caution to the wind and dancing around like a clown. But he got a serious reprimand from his peers, and no doubt spent the following afternoon in the confession box. It is a very, very strange thing to watch people in the prime of their youth behaving in such a way; even they couldn't really explain it to me.

‘It's post, Tom. We can't dance,' they'd say with a shrug, before gulping down a quick contraband beer or vodka with a grimace. ‘But it will be over soon.' What they couldn't figure out was how I, as a Catholic, didn't have to adhere by the same rules. I couldn't explain to them why the rules for Irish Catholics are different than those for Polish Catholics.

Poland is renowned for having some of the finest musicians in the world, with jazz and classical music
being the most prominent musical forms. That night in their club, there were guys present who were top musicians in full-time jazz academies in Warsaw. They needed a place to play and this was it, a basement club under a school, the type of club a slightly older Famous Five might construct. The music, however, was like something from the pages of Kerouac. And the fact that there was nobody there of any note to witness it added a certain ephemeral glory to the whole occasion. One by one, musicians took to the stage, backed by the group that I had previously met and who could literally turn their hand to any style. If there was ever a point where I predicted a future for a group of individuals, it was here.

I had yet to come across people with such energy, commitment and talent, and was firmly convinced that within a year or two this tale would have a happy ending. Unfortunately, it all ended very sadly indeed. And I tend to look at what happened with that band as a sort of case study of youth in such circumstances in Poland.

Apart from one member, who was actually a student of mine, they were all in their early to mid-twenties. The band was led by a guy called Jarek, a sensational guitar player who at the time was waiting for a place to turn up in a college somewhere. He was ambitious, perhaps the most ambitious of the group, and above all had his sights firmly set on the road that led out of town. He
was also quite moody, swinging between a cheerful but composed temper and a cantankerous one. I admit in the beginning being unsure about the guy, although that sentiment didn't last, and in fact he became a good friend. He was simply a very motivated young man, very aware that life outside the confines of the town he grew up in had a lot more to offer, if only he got a chance.

Jarek's cousin Pawel, who played bass, was the band's eldest member. He had worked as a hairdresser all his life until he quit and began working in a factory that, from what I could gather, had something to do with upholstery. He never wished to talk about what he did. Nobody else in the band really seemed to know either. To supplement his small income, he played in a ‘wedding' band during the wedding season. It seemed he hated this as much as he hated his day job, but it paid well.

Wedding season is generally in the summer. People get married in droves, with churches churning out one wedding after the other on a Saturday. The parties begin in the late afternoon and continue until sunrise the following morning, most continuing for a day or two afterwards. The music is provided by a wedding band playing Polish folk and that appalling Disco Polo I spoke of earlier. I grew very familiar with weddings. Marriage was a constant topic for many of the girls in school, and the dining area in the internat was also
rented out for wedding receptions during the summer. Having one of those bands beneath your room every Saturday night from dusk until dawn, May to September, is perhaps the worst of my memories that has yet to leave me. But at least I never had to play with them.

Pawel was an instantly likeable chap, though again, he was possessed of moods that swung like a pendulum. He would either greet you with a wide grin and a warm handshake or simply not greet you at all. I soon discovered that, in general, his good moods and warm greetings were accompanied with drink of some sort and his bad moods with a hangover. When he had a wedding he drank like a hoor, the vodka and food being part of the contract. And, believe me, it was not unlike these guys to put away two bottles each over the course of a long night. The next day at rehearsals, he'd be like a bull.

The drummer was a guy called Kazik, the diminutive of Kazikowski, his surname. When I first met him, he was a vibrant, exceptionally friendly young man in his mid-twenties, who was looking to get work in the IT sector. However, when his girlfriend split up with him he literally disappeared – he was found in a hospital about a month later after a marathon drinking binge. At the time, I couldn't comprehend it. I could comprehend even less the attitude of the rest of the band members, who simply dismissed the whole episode with no explanation and a brush of the hand. In time, I learned
that such binging was, if not necessarily accepted, at least tolerated. I must admit that, witnessing more and more of the same myself, I eventually grew as impervious to it as everyone else.

When Kazik finally returned he had his hair cut, his girlfriend and his demeanour back, and not a word was said on the matter. It was as if he had never left at all.

The final member of the band was the younger Pawel, who attended the art section in my school and was sometimes the butt of the group's jokes. A quiet lad of only about seventeen, he was left at the back of the stage as rhythm guitarist, receiving scowls from Jarek at regular intervals if his playing lapsed. I didn't see him lasting long in the band and was actually happy for him because of it. He was a talented artist, who only needed a bit more enthusiasm and encouragement to set him on a path to a decent career. He finally got that and went off to university some time later.