There's an Egg in My Soup (7 page)

The milk was dodgy stuff anyway, causing ripples in the bowels. It failed all the EU hygiene tests when they
were eventually initiated, despite the fact that one farmer proclaimed, ‘What's wrong with it? You can see with the naked eye that it's perfectly all right.'

I ate hamburgers for a while, until I began to feel unwell. At fifty pence for ten I wasn't too surprised. They were made from tails, bones and teeth. I know that's a fact, because a friend of mine worked in an abattoir and told me that whatever was left on the floor at the end of the day went into the burgers. Feeling another animal's tooth in your gob is an experience that lifts your hair by the root.
You're
supposed to be eating
it
.

My suspicions regarding the meat would later be confirmed. In 2003, prior to EU accession, the European Commission warned Poland about standards at meat processing plants. Only sixty-six of the country's 3,300 red meat plants were passed and given permits to export their produce within the rest of Europe. I survived anyway, so I must have been getting my meat from one of those sixty-six.

Thankfully, the chance came after a couple of months to sample a real cooked meal in a Polish restaurant. Teachers' Day had come around. It is a communist tradition to have days held aside to honour anyone and everyone, from teachers and doctors to mothers and their children. It keeps them all happy, giving everyone something to celebrate, and is used as a general distraction from more serious concerns.

Teachers' Day was a pleasant surprise for me that first year, as representatives from all the classes presented me with flowers, chocolates or bottles of beer. It was a fairly moving experience, since I wasn't used to being given flowers. Of course, other teachers got flowers as well, but not all. I realised that day that a teacher's popularity with the kids could be gauged by the amount of flowers they received on Teachers' Day.

As well as receiving flowers from the students and some small financial prizes from the State, it is a custom for teachers to go out together and get lashed. Now, I didn't know the social habits of Poles the first year. I was simply told that there was an evening out for the teachers and that a table was booked in the
local ‘zajazd' for six o'clock. A ‘zajazd' is a type of guesthouse, found more often in the countryside than in larger towns. Warm, comfortable, typically Polish buildings with a bit of character, they serve food and drink all night until the last guest topples. This particular place was located on the edge of town and was fairly popular until the ‘mafia' took over.

The ‘mafia' are really just local thugs. They like to go by the name of ‘mafia', since it adds a sense of import. Usually operating in small gangs, they earn their living in markets, as well as by theft. They are worth keeping away from since they're essentially brain dead, and would be unable to comprehend the existence of a foreigner in their locale. Their reaction to something perplexing would probably be to stab it.

Hearing a table is booked, I decide to avoid food all day, savouring instead the prospect of a fine cooked dinner. Before leaving, I sit with a beer in my flat, picturing festoons of large sausages and steak, dirty big mounds of dumplings, big wads of sour cabbage, gravy thick as porter and tankards of frothy beer, all the trimmings that my imagination had conjured up back in Dublin.

Putting on my best clothes, I arrive after six to find a table of about fifteen teachers gathered around enough vodka to kill an army and barely a morsel of food to mop it up with. The ‘menu', I am told, has been set. My reaction swings from alarm to bitter disappointment,
before finally settling on the primitive urge to escape. Too late. Before I have time to say, ‘I'd murder a bloody burger and fries,' I am planted at the table and a shot of vodka is pushed into the palm of my hand.

It is a general rule in situations of survival to eat anything that swims, walks or flies, as long as it has been cooked. Many vegetarians would be disgusted at that statement, but to be a vegetarian in Poland is a luxury that most people simply can't afford. It is very hard to get fresh fruit and vegetables, especially in winter, and it is also quite expensive. You eat what is put in front of you, whether from the air, the ground or the sea. As long as it's not pink, I'll give it a try.

On this night, for the first course we have raw herring in oil. A hideous-looking scrap, it slips down the throat like a badly bruised banana, to be chased by a two-ounce shot of vodka, as is customary. The result is a rapid wrenching of the gut, together with temporary lockjaw to prevent it from coming back up. The taste itself beggars description.

The second course is ‘tatar', a serious disappointment, having starved all day for it. Tatar, I am told proudly, is a ‘typical delicacy', consisting of raw, minced beef mashed with raw onion and crowned with the yoke of a raw egg. It strikes the fear of God in me. I later learn that God was right to have struck fear in me, as I am told of a man who got a tapeworm from the stuff. I push it away, only to be warned that I will be held
upside down and force-fed by the PE teacher if I don't eat it.

I glance at the PE teacher. He is a nice guy, but big, a sort of gentle giant. He has been mixing the ‘cocktails' all night – cocktails merely being shots of vodka and orange juice, but he calls them cocktails and he looks pretty serious. With the aid of handfuls of bread, bits of cake and straight vodka to kill off any tapeworms, I manage to get through half of the tatar. The remainder goes into the pocket of my suit.

A couple of hours later, a good ten bottles of vodka have been put away. I go and buy another one for the table as a sort of gesture. Nobody gives a shite. It is opened and gone again in twenty minutes.

The pace of the drinking is astounding. I was never a vodka drinker and if I ever drank it, it was with a mixer and sipped. So, if your evening consisted of five vodkas, there would be five bottles of minerals as partners. Here, the mixer is used as a chaser only, and a mouthful at that. A shot is poured and downed in one go, followed by a quick gulp of mineral to wash it back, and so an entirely disparate ratio applies. You could have five shots of vodka in an hour, and only one glass of mixer. Those slugs are eaten as chasers also, and jars of them sit around the table along with the plates of herring and tatar. In fact, between all the raw material here, the table resembles some sort of gruesome science lab.

As the evening continues and the table inevitably breaks up into smaller gatherings, I am left beside the PE teacher, who pours vodka into my glass at regular fifteen-minute intervals. He can't speak English and I can't speak Polish, but the universal tongue between us here is drink. Together we engage in a lengthy dialogue ending in inebriated pickings at scraps of food, cooked or not.

Come midnight, the singing starts. I am in the land of oblivion and holding hands for some reason with the teacher beside me, a young woman who is rocking sideways to the rhythm as she sings. She is a really decent girl who works as duty officer in the internat and to whom I go for domestic assistance the most. It is all a bit of gas but I'm not sure the rocking is a good idea. Suddenly, she leans forward and grabs the bottom of the tablecloth in a rather nugatory attempt to catch a load of herring and raw steak, surfing on a wave of vodka. It is a grim sight and a worse smell, and between the two a dampener descends on the occasion. Curtains then for that party. But at least I can now look the teachers in the eye without the timid smile of the outsider. Having drank and held down the best part of a bottle of vodka as well as a variety of recently deceased animals, I have earned it.

The next day I decide that vodka is a strange drink. I'm not hungover in the traditional sense. No headache; my stomach is numb but holding its own and I can
focus reasonably well. I feel, though, like I'm in another dimension to the rest of the world outside, as if stuck inside a large wooden barrel or the belly of a whale. Sounds take their time getting through. Thoughts seem unable to develop. There is a fog there that doesn't seem like lifting. I am also bled of the volition to do anything except lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. It is akin to the type of punishment you might read about in the Old Testament, where God was a cruel bugger with a dark sense of humour.

The vodka hangover also causes the sufferer to experience negative feelings such as doubt, guilt, inadequacy, fear and forgetfulness. I use the term forgetfulness rather than loss of memory, because there is a distinction. Loss of memory can be permanent, or at least for a prolonged period of time. With forgetfulness, bad experiences come flooding back over the course of the day like slaps in the face. It is as if I had transformed into a werewolf the previous night and have woken up staring at my hands, wondering what the hell I got up to, and knowing that it is only a matter of time before I remember.

And there is something else I've noticed. For the first time since getting here, I am actually terribly depressed and feel completely abandoned. It is Friday, so at least I don't have to get up early and teach. But I am gripped by a very bleak humour, which doesn't actually have a cause, even though I spend the whole morning looking
for one. Nothing is more depressing than not having a reason for being depressed. I have a feeling it is going to happen a lot here. It is the vodka, and this doesn't bode well. From what I have seen so far, bread, vodka and those awful slugs are the Holy Trinity in this country. I will just have to conform.

As for the loneliness, there isn't a lot I can do about it. Because of the poor telecommunications system in the region, correspondence with the other Irish teachers is generally by postcard, stating a date and a place to meet – usually a bar in Warsaw. There is always an anxious moment on Friday mornings, when you stick your head into the staff room to see if there is a card or not.

The phone numbers we have are unreliable at the best of times. Take Paul, in that village of Sadowne. He is so isolated that to contact him I have to go to the post office and hand the girl at the counter the number on a piece of paper, then take a seat. She contacts Warsaw central, who contact the post office in Sadowne, who in turn contact his school. It can take up to half an hour, and then I am suddenly told to go into one of the booths, that the call has come through. More often than not I simply get a voice saying, ‘Paul, nie ma.' What this means is another weekend alone in the flat. I am beginning to hate that phrase.

I was right to worry about winter. It arrived quite suddenly one morning at the end of October, like somebody had just tipped it out of a cardboard box overnight. My first reaction was to look at the thermometer to see how cold it was, then write home to everyone and gather a bit of sympathy, as well as some awe.

‘Lads, it's bloody freezing here. It's so cold in fact that when I have a shower my hair freezes on the way to school.' Then the parcels started arriving. I got a thermal scarf from Ma, a World Cup video from Dad, Marks & Spencer's pre-packed dinners from my aunt in London and a package of magic mushrooms from a friend in Wicklow. I don't know what condition he thought I was in to send me that. But the Marks and Sparks dinners, which I heated in a pot of boiling water, drooling just at the smell of the steam, were a joy.

The novelty of the snow in Poland lasts about a day. After a few fleeting snowball fights and a couple of snowmen, people simply knuckle down to the prospect
of a long winter ahead. It is long and it can be bitterly cold. Temperatures throughout the winter season, which runs roughly from the end of October to any time around March, can range from two or three degrees Celsius on a good day to minus twenty or less. In general, the temperature barely rises above the minus-eight mark.

The worst thing about the cold, however, is the monotony it brings in its wake. It is dark all the time, or at least it seems that way. Everyday chores become a bore as you notice things taking longer. There's a reluctance to get out of bed in the morning when you can sense how cold it is on your toes. Once up you dive for the bath. Getting out of the bath onto the cold screed floor is even more difficult than getting out of bed. There are all the extra layers of clothes to put on. Once outside the warmth of the building, the cold air bites your bones and pierces your lungs. You hesitate to go out at all most days.

The streets are like ice rinks and you have to stare at your feet with every pace. Kids whizz past on homemade sleds and you swear at them like an old man. Balance was never my strong point and I have a feeling I will come to dread walking here in winter. Because you have to visit various shops to buy various things – something I had started getting used to – the daily trip involves lumbering along dark, glassy streets and pavements, from one end of town to the other,
walking like a bloody penguin.

Gradually, and in stark contrast to myself, I begin to notice that the people here are as tough as nails. There are no stoppages. Not unless the temperatures drop to minus forty degrees will the general daily services grind to a halt. Otherwise, there are no excuses for closing schools or being late for work. Poles keep their heads down and get on with their lives.

You hear the evidence at the start of every day when you're tucked up under a bundle of blankets. At five-thirty each morning, out come the ‘scrapers', as I call them. A long piece of wood for a handle, with a thin, square section of plywood on the end, is the tool of their trade. Most people look after the area in front of their own homes, but in a school, hospital or any State institution there are people who get up in the darkness to scrape the snow from the paths and the steps. The noise is incredible and, as it snows later on anyway, it doesn't always do much good. In fact, if it doesn't snow it actually makes things worse, since the thin layer of snow left after the scrapers have done their job becomes smooth from people's boots and as hard as polished marble. Everyone goes on their arse at some stage. I just hope that when I land on mine, I do it in private behind a bush or some place. I couldn't face the humiliation of it in front of the school windows.

I am, however, thankful for at least having the basic utilities to hand. Most people, when you mention
Poland, or any other former communist country, think ‘grim, grey blocks', and conjure a mental picture of a family perched on a wooden bench, clutching a potato each and watching water bubbling in a pot. Which is accurate to a point. Post-war housing policy in Poland followed the Soviet model across the board. There are rustic wooden homes scattered across the countryside, but there was very little housing left in the major cities here after the war. The principle behind the Soviet model was that all housing was public property and a direct tool of the State's social policy. So the construction of private dwellings was forbidden. Private construction firms were also taken over by the State and contracted to build dwellings of standardised design. Low rents ensured that all citizens had a home, although, with concentration in the major urban areas, the rural areas tended to escape direct control. So you would see dismally constructed grey blocks in all the major cities, a clash of blocks and old wooden homes in suburban areas and, finally, the very quaint little wooden homes predominant in rural areas.

Under the communist regime, low rent, fuel, electricity and maintenance were, theoretically at any rate, accounted for, but the homes of peasants who remained ‘free' would not have been well maintained by the State. So a lot of houses still exist in smaller towns and villages with no running water. Early in the morning, in freezing temperatures, you would see
people walking down the street with a metal bucket to their local water pump.

The nearest pump to me was on a muddy laneway that served as a shortcut to the main street. This lane was visible from my window, and one morning I noticed an elderly woman arm-wrestling with the pump, which was stuck solidly beneath at least three inches of ice. In fact, if you weren't aware of the precise location of that pump, you would never have found it. Nothing but a sledgehammer in the arms of a lumberjack was going to free it. After several attempts the woman simply left, swinging an empty bucket. It occurred to me then how important that bucket of water must have been. Think about it – how many times a day do you need to turn on a tap? How much water do you need for drinking, cooking, washing clothes, washing your teeth? How many buckets of water does it take to fill a bath? Well, I'll give you an idea.

During the school ‘winter' holiday, a period of two weeks in February, the hot water was turned off, and unless you made plans to be elsewhere, you had to grin and bear it. One year I didn't leave, and for the two weeks it was back to The Shining again – long, empty corridors, wind whistling through the windows and a few short hours of daylight that passed without notice. But the worst thing was trying to get the flat warm. The school boilers remained stoked up just enough to prevent burst pipes, but it was particularly cold. I
remember one teacher, who had just moved into the internat before the holidays, looking fairly shell-shocked when I met him one evening. He remarked that it was ‘very cold' in the building. If a Pole says it's ‘very cold', then it must really be cold. You never hear Polish people complaining, unless they're seriously bowled over by something. If I had said it to him, I would have turned the air a far deeper shade of blue than it already was.

Getting to sleep wrapped in every item of clothing, hat and all, is easy enough, but waking up is a nightmare. Really unpleasant coldness has a particular presence in the room; there's a taut stillness in the air you're afraid might snap if you move. It feels like the Snow Queen has paid a visit and everything is frozen solid. Even the colour of the air changes – red for hot and blue for cold are uncannily accurate representations. Getting up eventually, I would put on a few more layers of clothing before switching on the radio, the two-ring cooker, the electric heater, the lights and the kettle. Everything was cold to the touch, but once some steam began to rise a certain lease of life would penetrate the sleeping flat. It was then that I would think about the bath and back to that question: How many buckets of water does it take to fill it?

The answer lies not in the capacity of the bath, but in how much water you're prepared to boil. You can have a decent wash in a tub with the water almost up to your
navel, but you won't enjoy it, since you can't lie back. That takes about two hours of to-ing and fro-ing. In the beginning, when several pots have been emptied but are barely visible in the bottom of the bath, the magnitude of the task hits home. To have an enjoyable bath using a pot, a kettle and a two-ring stove, you need at least three hours. It was a great way of passing the time.

So, whenever I saw the inhabitants of the wooden houses clatter down the streets to the pumps with their metal buckets, that's what I thought about. Three hours of waiting. And most of them have large families. Lord knows what goes on there. The good thing is, three hours of steam will warm up your home.

The first year, besides some thermal ‘long johns' and a pair of gloves, I wasn't very prepared for the cold, figuring that buying local was the best way. Even the thermal long johns I'd bought were useless – in school the radiators were pumping, so when you returned home, peeling the long johns from your bum was like prising open a clam.

Eventually, I ventured into Warsaw and bought a new coat, a massive, knee-length item with an interior of wool that was supposedly from a sheep and an exterior of monkey-brown-coloured suede. I thought it was a steal when I purchased it from the mountain folk who sell their wares – leather slippers, goats' cheese and hats with little flaps for your ears – on the corner of one of
the main streets in Warsaw, near a restaurant called the London Steak House. The name of the restaurant stands out in my memory, because I was refused entry by a Victorian-looking butler once I'd put the new coat on. He scanned me from head to toe with the speed of a woodpecker before sticking an arm up and shaking his head. It was probably because the coat had no buttons and made me look like a nomad. I felt a fool then, but only half the fool I felt the following day in school, with the coat tied at the waist with a piece of string.

You imagine that if you dress like the locals you're going to blend in like a chameleon, but it doesn't work like that. People knew who I was wherever I went – in shops, in bars, on trains. Any attempt to look like everyone else only ever had the opposite effect. Anyhow, the coat was designed for ‘Gorali', the mountain folk, and I soon gathered that I was the only person wearing one for hundreds of miles.

Polish people aren't afraid to laugh at you, and they don't bother to wait until you've walked round the corner – an admirable candour, I suppose. So I was faced with a choice between buying another coat and saving face, or getting a few buttons and taking the slagging on the chin. I went for the buttons, because I was broke. The coat had cost about a hundred quid and, while I was quite well-off relative to where I was, I was actually making little and saving nothing.

After several unsuccessful attempts at sewing the
buttons on myself, I began asking people where I could have them done. A tailor, I was told in school. A tailor? Do they still exist? One of the teachers took me down a side road, where a few tailors worked in small shops. It seemed like a simple enough job, but no tailor would touch it, each one pointing out that a mistake would leave an irreparable gaping hole in the delicate suede.

I had already done that, which was probably another reason why they didn't want to tackle it. I had also tried to repair the hole by burning it with a match, figuring it would behave like nylon rope and fuse together. It didn't. So the whole thing was a bit of a mess. Finally, Jarek – the young guy who I'd met on the first day and was a reliable source of information – told me he knew somebody who might do it for me. And so, late one afternoon, we met up and began walking across town to an area I hadn't yet ventured into.

The reason I had never explored this area instantly became obvious. Concrete roads and footpaths gradually faded to broken rubble, eventually turning to channels of icy muck. Ahead lay two massive chimneys that belched smoke, the dark, sombre clouds framing grey blocks that diminished in size to houses as we went, finally shrinking to old wooden huts. It was a desolate part of town, poor and decayed-looking, and it was the first time since my arrival that the depth of poverty here hit home to me.

We hopped down one of the frozen, muddy
roadways. It must have been a mile or more long, for by the time we got to our destination it was just about dark. An old shed that gasped smoke from a lopsided chimney stood near the roadside. Pigs ran around the garden in a festivity of cold muck and in the shed sat a man dressed in about five coats, mending about fifteen more. There was a particularly noxious smell in the place, possibly emanating from a dog that lay beneath the feet of the man, a dog neither alive nor dead but simply extant, like the furniture. A stove was busy in the corner, the only source of heat, and not much at that, while the rest of the room was lost in shadow.

The man, perhaps in his late seventies, grabbed my coat and stuck his finger through the hole that I had made. He shook his head a few times and had a look at the buttons, mumbling to himself and smiling. Finally, he agreed to do the job and said to come back in three days' time.

I was told that he was one of the best tailors in town. And when I went back three days later, alone, the job was done. I went to pay him, but not before shaking an old, dirty and very tired hand. All he asked for was about the equivalent of fifty cent.

The question of poverty was, of course, an issue that had been raised several times before our departure to Poland. We had been told to avoid wearing designer labels in the classroom, to choose articles carefully from magazines so they didn't emphasise wealth and to try
not to make a fuss about the facilities in the schools, which were sure to be below par.

The facilities in my school were a bit wanting, but the place was spotless and well-run. There was one photocopier, and to get access to it you almost needed a retina scan. At times there would be no paper or no toner, so if a lesson relied on material copied for each student you could be left high and dry. After several aborted lessons due to lack of materials, I decided that sending a couple of kids down to the town to copy whatever I needed was the simplest way. To think, I taught for five years without a text book and had to rely on a dodgy photocopier and self-help books for English teachers.