There's an Egg in My Soup (18 page)

‘It's a sad day, Tom. A sad day,' is what they said on the evening of the last party, and they were right. The reason may be difficult to grasp for people living and growing up in a Western society, where entertainment
and facilities are so readily available the only problem is choice.

But in towns and villages in eastern Poland you don't have a choice. Boredom is as much a part of daily existence as washing, cooking and eating. In between these rites are long, interminable gaps of prolonged tedium, where the mind simply smoulders or descends into apathy. Think of every convenience in your life and try and picture its opposite: in place of your multi-channel television back home, here you get a three-channel vacuum, mostly dedicated to repeats, Brazilian soaps and endless political debates and discussions about the price of pork.

Picture a restaurant with a menu bursting at the sides and replace it with a hot-dog stall, open from ten to six. Picture a pub with a lively unisex clientele and warm music and put in its place a ‘drink bar' with ageing alcoholics and slippery bottles of vodka coated with grease. Your multiplex cinema becomes a screen in a cold hall with maybe one film a week, which doesn't run if enough people don't show up. Then you have a few grocery stores, a butcher, maybe a bookshop, and a bus or train to take you the hell out of there a few times a day. That's a small town or village in eastern Poland. It's changing slowly, of course it is. But at that time there was simply nothing.

Even that last party was a flop. I arrived late and missed my turn with the band and people were
annoyed with me for it. The club had been cleared out, so it was supposed to be an outdoor party, but the weather didn't cooperate. And as the rain came down, there was more than a touch of irony to add to the occasion. That very same night, the only other ‘bar' in the whole place was burned to the ground. Nobody knows what happened, and the bar was a hole anyway – it was really just a little prefab on the side of the road where you could buy cheap bottles of beer and soggy hotdogs. But it was an alternative to a bus shelter or a park bench.

As the people on their way home that night watched their only other alternative crumble into a pile of dying embers, I imagine they knew the taste of irony. Hard, grainy and sour, it probably lingered on a dry tongue for months. The guy I was walking with back to the bus shelter started laughing when he saw the charred carcass.

So there it all came to an end. In my quieter moments, I still miss it. It wasn't just the fun and the camaraderie – I'll admit I liked the attention of having the band and a bit of a regular following in the area. Mostly though, I simply enjoyed the company of the lads. They were a good bunch and we had become great mates. I reckon every last one of them now regrets behaving like a mule. If you actually asked them now what it was they were fighting over, they probably wouldn't know.

Maybe it went back a long time, like I said. Maybe it's just how bands are. Maybe it's how the Poles are in that terrible climate – passionate yet unpredictable, fighting against the knowledge that nothing good will ever last and eventually losing hope. Whatever it was, I wasn't able to understand it. But it upset me a lot. It also upset Janusz to an awful degree. In fact, I was as sorry for him as I was for myself. Even if all we did for him was rekindle some fond memories from days gone by, that was something.

The end of the club and the end of that band meant an end to another chapter for me. You close it and move on and there's no point getting too sentimental about it. I'm a nostalgic bugger though. Coming over to a foreign country and getting that close to people is a hard thing to forget, especially as it finished on a bum note. Something else comes along and eventually these things maintain a distance, but they're never really that far away in the mind. You are always going to miss them.

I stayed in touch with Jarek for some time afterwards, but saw little of the rest of them. Kazik got married and had a kid and one night I arranged to meet him. I remember the night well. A blizzard was raging outside and temperatures were heading for minus fifteen. He called into me and we went to his house together, a small but cozy rented cottage a little way out of town. On the way, he asked if he could borrow money. His
wife was visiting her mother with the kid and wouldn't be home until the next day, but he had no coal to heat the house for them. I gladly loaned him some money, as he was an incredibly reliable chap, and we bought a few beers and a few bags of coal.

When we got to the house the cold was truly unbearable. It was so cold that it was almost painful just sitting there. I had thought that I was used to it by then. Kazik had vodka, which of course gives the impression of warmth, and we drank that until the boiler was fired. We had a good chat then, drank a few beers and more vodka and he played me a tape of the band. One that he had recorded at a gig. Every now and again, he would jump forward on the seat, clenching imaginary drumsticks and shouting, ‘Remember this bit, Tom! Remember! Dah-na-nah-dum! Super.'

 

When APSO brought all of us together for a meeting in the monastery at the end of the fourth year, those who were still in the country as teachers knew what was coming. The project was over. That was that. Four years, they had decided, was enough. It was a sensible thing to do. It was obvious that Poland would very soon emerge as a strong contender for EU membership – in fact, it would only be five years away. It did mean, however, that I would be staying in the country for another year without the support of APSO, living only on a Polish salary, which had not increased all that much. When I came back from the meeting and told Asha what the decision was, we had a joint panic.

There were a few of us holding out for another year, some simply because it had become a reliable job, in a country we had got used to and with long holidays and freedom to boot. I, however, needed the last year to wait for Asha to finish her studies. But at least I had the accommodation, as long as I chose to stay with the school on their terms and if the school still needed me. They did, but we had to pull a lot of strokes to get the Department of Education to agree, and to get the right
documents for a resident permit. All that had been a matter of course when there was cooperation between the two governments. Once that was cut off, a lot of red tape appeared. The school director worked tirelessly to secure me another year there.

I had become worn out from teaching though. I can't quite put my finger on any single event that caused such aversion to something that I had always wanted to do. It was really a combination of several factors that layered up, particularly in the final year. For one, I began to doubt my ability as a teacher. I might have been a reasonably good one initially and my heart was at least in it. But I had lost interest and really had a duty to the students to call it a day. Without the support of APSO, there was also a feeling of isolation, of abandonment, a feeling that the sense of purpose was now gone.

I began to notice something else that went deeper than any of that. I was no longer the new kid in town. I was older. I was going to be thirty. I had actually become a teacher, the asshole that comes around the corner every morning and makes the kids groan.

It's some knock back when things get to that stage. When the new kids in school began calling me ‘sir' or ‘professor' instead of ‘Tom', as I had always been called, I had to have a long, hard think. Vanity. It gets you every time.

Losing the lads in the band as close friends was
something else that I found very hard to cope with. It was great to have such ties with Polish people, and while there were plenty of others that I had become close to, it wasn't the same. The guys had been real buddies and my social life – apart from the odd weekend in Warsaw where the remainder of my Irish friends were – had been non-existent without their company in the last year. I missed that more than I thought I would.

In the final year, I found myself increasingly bored and restless. I went on the beer on the weekends with whoever would come along, purely to kill time, while Asha, studying for her final exams, stuck her head in the books at any opportunity. I was glad she was doing that. She was a real grafter, but it was a long year with very, very little of any consequence happening, other than our engagement in the spring. That delighted Asha's mother, who, God bless her, was probably terrified that I was going to do a runner, even if Asha and I had taken it for granted from the moment I looked into her eyes before devouring the roast chicken on that first night, long, long ago.

Sadly, Asha's father had died early in my third year there, and it was a great pity that he was not going to be around for his first daughter's wedding. Although he spoke no English, we had always managed to enjoy family gatherings when he was present. He was a very lively and kindly old soul, who had helped me get a
bank loan for the stereo. That stereo, as you can imagine, was a Godsend, as I had up to that point only had a tape player. It might seem strange citing that memory, but if he helped a stranger by guaranteeing a loan for him, I'd like to believe there was enough trust there for him to approve of my marrying his daughter. I'm sure there was, but I often thought that I needed some sign of approval, and wondered if it would ever come.

One summer evening, the wedding only weeks away, there was a knock on my door. I opened it to see the director of the boarding block, who told me that there was a foreigner downstairs. He had arrived in Minsk and had been directed to the internat for accommodation as, of course, there was no hotel in the town. Did I want to meet him, she asked.

I was completely taken by surprise, as ridiculous as that sounds. I had discovered, some time ago, that there was another foreigner in the town, a Scottish man, who lived across the railway track and taught in the mechanical school. In five years, I never saw the guy. He must have known about my existence too, but he never sought me out. As to why, I can't say. Maybe the fear of having to meet regularly after an introduction was too great in such a small town. I really don't know.

So, do I want to meet this other new impostor? I shrug, and before I have a chance to answer the director, this guy comes up the stairs and gives me a
wave. A small, fit-looking fella with long hair and a friendly smile, he introduces himself as Howard from Australia, and, just like an Aussie, in he comes.

He enters the hallway, looking around with a craned neck, then into my main room, which at this point is full of all kinds of stuff, as I had travelled quite a bit in the last few years.

‘So this is where it all happens,' he says with a smile.

‘Yeah. So what the hell are you doing here?' I ask him. ‘This is the first time I've ever met another foreigner in this place.'

‘Jesus, mate, I should be asking you that. How long are you here?'

‘Five years.'

‘Five years!' he says with a startled laugh. ‘What have you been doing here for five years?'

I explain to Howard, who is on a solo cycling trip around Eastern Europe and has found himself in Minsk by mistake, that he has entered my story at the final chapter, and is welcome to hang around for a few days to see it come to a close. That evening, I tell him, I have to meet the local priest to officially register for a marriage course. He looks at me, the smile getting wider, the incredulity carved onto his face.

By way of explanation, I take him over to Asha's flat and the three of us go to the restaurant in the local cultural building, where he tries to get vegetarian food. Not a hope. From there we go to the local church and
he waits around outside while we go in to meet the priest.

When we came out, the smile was still on Howard's face, and I swear the guy kept that smile for the three days he spent in the internat resting. He accompanied myself and Asha everywhere for those few days as we tied up all the loose ends and prepared for the official side of marriage. In the evenings we'd go for a quiet beer and a chat, the three of us. It was one of those chance but wonderful meetings, where someone crosses your path so unexpectedly, you love their company, and then they're gone. I don't know which of us was more amused – me for having suddenly met another foreigner after all this time, or him for having come across a guy living in this middle-of-nowhere town, going to the local church to attend marriage courses.

After his three days of recuperation, he got up early one morning and left, and that was the end of him. For a while, Asha and I used to joke about the Aussie who had blown into town and become so intimate with our wedding plans, even though he was a total stranger. I believed I would never hear from him again, but about a year later, I got a letter from Howard at my parents' address, which I had given him. In it he wrote that stumbling upon myself and Asha was one of the more memorable events of his trip across Eastern Europe. He added that he was convinced we were a couple who were made for each other, and wished us both luck and
success for the rest of our lives.

It was a lovely letter, like a seal of approval from someone who had just dropped in for that short but very important time, then vanished again. I lost the letter, so I never got to write back to him. But sometimes these incidents are meant to be fleeting.

A few weeks after Howard left, our wedding day was upon us. I had completed the courses, at which I met several of my students. One of the speakers, a woman who worked as a counsellor, had informed all present that a marriage between an older woman and a younger man will never work, and a marriage between two people of different nationalities will never work either. At the end of the evening I went up with Asha and told her that I was a foreigner. Did we have any chance? ‘No,' she said, adding, ‘I'm right.' I remember little from those marriage courses apart from that, so I was determined to prove the auld bitch wrong.

The priest, a man probably younger than myself, was more endearing. Following the course, all the couples had to pass a test in the church with the priest – reciting various prayers, refuting Satan, that sort of thing. I just nodded away and managed to scrape a pass. God forbid you would stumble at that stage. But between the courses, the tests and that old tramp of a counsellor, I was a bundle of nerves the night before my wedding.

The weather during the build-up hadn't helped either, as far as ensuring sleep and a half-decent complexion
for the relatives. The town had been basking in temperatures that soared into the thirties and, with no breeze at night, there was no respite from the heat. Sleep just wouldn't come. We were plagued by mosquitoes that year and with no air-conditioning, had to leave the windows open. There was no defence from the onslaught of those whiny little bastards. Actually, they were pretty big whiny bastards in Poland, as I recall, and their bites hurt. Someone told me later though, that there was a radio station in Warsaw called Radio Z, which if left on at night keeps the mosquitoes away. That bad, I wondered? No, it broadcasted on the same frequency as a bat's signal, apparently. Since bats fed on mosquitoes, mosquitoes wouldn't enter a room if they believed there were bats in there. I found that a bit of a stretch myself, but I would have tried it nonetheless, if I'd known.

Several of Asha's cousins arrived the night before the wedding and were staying in the internat block, which at this point in the summer was empty of students. One had left a case of beer at the door of my flat. I resisted the temptation to drink the whole thing, but the next morning there was a bang on my door, followed by a raucous request to open up. It was Asha's cousin Robert, a great big friendly fella, who barged in and began cracking open beers, insisting it was a custom to do so on the morning of a wedding. In his hand was a packet of what looked like crisps, which we ate heartily
to accompany the beer. It was actually pigs' ears from Lithuania, where he had come from himself. That was enough. I turfed him out, sat in a cold bath for half an hour, then pulled myself into a suit to go and meet the bus that was coming from Warsaw with family and friends.

A Polish wedding begins in the home of the bride, where parents of both sides gather to wish the couple a successful marriage and have a small toast. It's a nice, intimate way of starting the day and, unlike in Ireland, you get to see the bride one last time before you marry.

Outside Asha's flat, there was a lump in my throat watching all my close friends and family clambering off the bus and staring about them in wonderment. Five years, ye hoors, and you finally come over in such numbers when I've to pay for a wedding. A violin and an accordion player livened the atmosphere with Gypsy music. Heads appeared at every window of the block of flats to watch as our procession made its way up the road to the church.

If you can put nerves onto a scale, getting married would definitely be close to the top, somewhere between execution and root canal treatment. But standing there as people slowly made their way into the cool of the building, with a solitary violin playing the sweetest music I have ever heard, I don't think I have ever known a happier moment.

Like all Polish weddings, it was a long, festive day,
made even more special by the amount of people who had come over from home. We had the reception in an army barracks of all places, since in this country weddings, New Year parties or debs balls are all held in whatever buildings are available in the town. It could be an airport hangar or a factory, but you would never know once inside, as a lot of work goes into decorating them.

If memory serves me right, there were about 150 guests, 150 bottles of vodka, fifty bottles of wine and a few kegs of beer. Food was served continuously throughout the night – pork, salads made from all the usual suspects, herring, tatar, all present. It ended with boiled sausages at 4am. While commenting on the food in Poland, though, the dish that dealt the greatest jolt of astonishment among the Irish guests was the one that had floored me the first year – Zurek, the soup with the boiled egg. They had been served it in a restaurant in Warsaw on their first night, and talked about it continuously until they got on the plane for home. The egg in the soup.

Of course, I eventually grew to understand the import Poles place on the humble egg and how strongly it features in Polish culture. It is a wholesome and potent symbol of life and the universe, of the sun and of rebirth. At Easter it is dyed in many colours, placed in baskets and blessed. You see kids with their families walking with baskets of painted eggs up to the church
and it is a tremendous sight. The painting of the eggs supposedly comes from a legend that Mary, while at the cross, gave eggs to the soldiers, requesting them to be less cruel. When she wept, the tears falling on the eggs resulted in a rainbow of colours. Well and good. As to why it went into the soup, I never really discovered. It probably just happened to be there, so in it went.

The reception went on until 5.30am, at which time, I'm ashamed to say, I was found sitting with the band members, drinking the vodka that had been in such abundance. It was their fault. One of Asha's friends had to help me into a car to go back to my boarding house where I lay, in a drunken diagonal, from one corner of the bed to the other, leaving a triangle wedge for my new wife. I didn't get breakfast in bed. But we'd had a day to remember. We were both exhausted and emotionally, well, I was overwhelmed.