There's an Egg in My Soup (9 page)

What do you do in a situation like that? I said, okay, let's imagine there never was a light there. Now, is there a possibility of getting a new light? There was a pregnant pause as both studied the fixture. Finally, the electrician gave a more reassuring shrug.

It was left to another electrician, who arrived a few mornings later with a pair of eyes that looked as if they'd been roasted over a grill. He shuffled about the flat flicking switches and cursing until I gave him a beer from the fridge. He smiled, clapped me on the back and said it would be finished by the time I got back from school. True to his word, the light was fixed by the time I got back. All the beer and a full bottle of flavoured vodka were also gone from the fridge. This wasn't stealing though. He considered it to be his bribe or ‘gift', since bribes were rarely in the form of money, but more often chocolate, coffee or vodka. If I had done likewise with the first bunch of guys, the light might very well have existed all along. You live and learn.

It's Christmas in Poland and all through the house, not a creature was drinking, not even a mouse. A little amendment to the traditional rhyme that went through my head after spending my first Christmas away from home. I didn't go home the first year, because I wanted to see what it was like here at Christmas. I had another reason also, which I'll get into shortly.

I had heard all about the Polish Christmas from the kids in school, who seemed to love the idea so much you'd swear they still believed in Santa Claus. But any lingering doubts about the existence of Santa Claus were truly shattered on the streets of Warsaw on a bitterly cold afternoon three days before Christmas Eve. Off one of the main thoroughfares, a twisted drunk Santa stumbled past me, beard hanging off one ear and a pair of eyes like two glowing coals receding into the back of his red hood. He was singing a Polish hymn and in his hand was a bottle of Spiritus.

Spiritus is the staple for winos, a lethal, pure alcoholic concoction that would fuel a combine
harvester. For the benefit of those who can't read, there's a graphic on the front – something like a skull and crossbones. At least it's better than the cherry wine that other diehards drink here. That has a picture of a naked woman on the label and costs the equivalent of about fifty cent. Lord knows what supermarket this Santa had been working in, but he had probably ruined Christmas for hundreds of kids before eventually being turfed out onto the streets to sing his hymns.

That jolly wino was an exception to the rule in a country where traditions are still upheld rigorously, the banning of alcohol featuring regularly. The Polish people simply shrug and accept it, used to the intervention of the Church in affairs of the State. Advent and Lent are periods when it is forbidden to ‘party', while alcohol is banned completely over Christmas until after St Stephen's Day.

In fact, such is the paranoia over alcohol, that beer advertising was eventually banned. However, some clever breweries found a way around this, by manufacturing alcohol-free beer. Suddenly, loads of useless beer began to appear on the shelves. The fact that the ‘new' beer was alcohol-free was very subtly expressed, the small, 33cl bottles lavishly packaged in a six-pack and the lack of alcohol evident only by careful study of the small print on the label.

For a country where alcohol-free beer was not only a new innovation, but a contradiction in terms, it never
occurred to people to study the labels. Even the television ads were understated, with a brief two-word statement whispered at the end of an ad – featuring some young girl swooning over a man with a bottle – to say it was ‘without alcohol'. With the difference in packaging between the real product and the alcohol-free one insignificant, they were still advertising ‘beer' as far as we were concerned.

The local booze-hounds, myself included, all bought the ‘new' beer, of course. It featured a new innovation for Polish society – bottles that you didn't have to bring back. Now that was progress, something definitely worth celebrating.

Depending on how you looked at it, the fact that empty bottles were usually indispensable was either a Godsend or a curse. To buy a half-dozen beers in the store you needed to have a half-dozen empties with you or you were charged a lot more. By the same token, returning a half-dozen empties meant a few bob on their own. Bottles were good business, and were treated as such. For winos, most of the day was spent trawling through bushes and along the sides of railway tracks, where careless folk or other winos had mistakenly discarded their bottles. A good day's pickings could yield several free beers or a few sausages, depending on which you craved more at the time.

For people like myself, forced to maintain an air of
decency when heading to the shops for beer, having to leave the internat with a bag of empty bottles clanging together like bells was an embarrassing and cumbersome experience. But you couldn't throw empty bottles in the bin, and you didn't want a stockpile mounting up under the sink. It all changed one night when I thought I had devised a noiseless way of getting empty bottles out and full ones back in.

The suede coat I had by now grown accustomed to was a monstrosity to look at, but a blessing indeed for its soundproofing. There was no way the human ear could detect the clink of bottles under that coat. On a Friday night, when no trips into the pale of Warsaw had been arranged, off I'd go to the store with three or four bottles down the front of my trousers and one in each of the pockets, the coat providing adequate cover all the while.

One night, however, I was in my pyjamas, but feeling rather restless. It was a Thursday, one of those evenings where you weren't tired but you didn't really feel like doing very much either. So I pulled on a pair of jeans and shoved a few empty bottles down the front. Leaving the pyjama top on, I threw the suede coat over the whole lot and headed off to buy a few beers.

I was only a few yards down the road when I bumped into my director. He had had a few drinks himself, and was delighted to see me. So delighted, in fact, that he decided we should celebrate and invited
me to the local café. I shook my head as vigorously as I could, explaining that I had left the lights on. He waved his hand and began pulling me by the sleeves. I continued that I had left the electric heater on also, figuring that would cause more of a reaction. No, not a thing. As if things weren't bad enough, he elected that the café wasn't a good idea after all, and that we'd go to one of the English teachers' houses instead. There was no going back.

To make things worse, I had been trying to seduce the daughter of this English teacher. It was a ridiculous idea, really. Her mother had been constantly talking about her in the staff room – how her boyfriend was a doctor, how she was studying law and also getting her advanced diploma in piano, how she worked part-time as a music teacher and so on. Eventually, I felt I had to meet her and awaited an opportunity.

One Sunday evening I was invited to dinner. I was already teaching the younger daughter, so I knew two out of the four members of the family. I did my best to look presentable, brought the wine, flowers and chocolates, but I had been away for the weekend with the Irish gang and wasn't in great shape. I took off my shoes, as was customary, and realised I had holes in my socks. And I think I attacked the roast chicken with the vigour of a man starved for weeks, which wasn't far from the truth. The worst thing that happened, however, was that I fell instantly, head over heels, for her daughter,
Asha, from the first handshake.

I knew it was going to happen at some stage. The Polish girls had been gradually wrecking my head. They have a particular beauty and a manner that is infectious. They are tough and direct, but also ridiculously romantic, to the point of being almost naïve. I found Polish girls to be possessed of a magnetism that would draw you in and leave you helpless. I had to stand in front of hundreds of them every day, and most of them weren't much younger than myself. That in itself was a cruelty, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before one of them blew me away. That it had to be a teacher's daughter was particularly unfair. Here I was, a blow-in on a year's contract, who had infiltrated their school as a pseudo-teacher and had no clue as to what the future might hold. There was she, the daughter of a teacher in my school, going out with a doctor and on her way to becoming a lawyer. It really made no sense. Pursuing it was entirely unethical. But bollocks to that.

My decision was mulled over with some of the Irish guys, who made it plain that if I started seeing this girl, I was in for the long haul. Poles seemed serious about relationships, and marriage came early. Girls in school were constantly telling me that they were going to marry their present boyfriends. These were eighteen-year-olds, with their lives ahead of them. I begged them not to, of course. But there seemed to be no stopping them.

The idea of marriage terrified me, though. I left home to pursue wanton hedonism and independence, not to get married, no sir. If I embarked on a relationship with a Polish girl whose mother I had to face in the staff room each morning, then there could only be one destination – the altar of a Polish church.

So, on this evening, only my second or third time to meet Asha, I removed my shoes and coat to reveal four empty beer bottles stuck down the front of my jeans, barely hidden by my pyjamas. The two in the pockets I had managed to lash into the snow en route when the director wasn't looking. From now on, I decided, the empties would remain under the sink until I was able, on a monthly basis and under cover of darkness, to deposit them in the bushes for the winos.

And so it came to pass, at Christmas time, that these new bottles heralded in a whole new way of shopping for booze. Or so we thought. Soon there were riots in the stores, as people protested at having spent a fortune on the fancy new six-packs without even getting a buzz. For the breweries it was a victory. They got their brand on the television and in the magazines regardless.

Eventually, in 2001, the ban was amended – adverts were permitted on radio, television and in cinemas between the hours of 11pm and 6am, but prohibited from videos, youth-oriented magazines, front pages of all magazines and billboards. Also, no ad, regardless of where it appeared, could now feature imagery where
the beer in question was somehow associated with ‘sexual attractiveness', ‘free time' or ‘health'. Only in Poland.

These rather draconian measures imposed by Church and State could have been averted had the PPPPs come to power. The
Polska Partia Przyjaciol Piwa
– literally translated as the Polish Party for Friends of Beer, but more commonly referred to as the Beer Lover's Party – began its political life as a bit of a joke, but soon developed into a party of some standing, albeit short-lived.

Formed in December 1990, the PPPP's manifesto concentrated on freedom of association and expression, intellectual tolerance and a higher standard of living. The beer part entered into the equation since they also wished to promote lively discussion in good pubs with good beer. Their humorous name helped them win votes from a rather disillusioned populace in the 1991 parliamentary elections – they gained an amazing total of sixteen
Sejm
(Senate) seats. However, following a split within the PPPP in 1992 into the Big Beer Party and the Little Beer Party – Polish politics has more splits than a team of gymnasts – the former lost their sense of humour and became the Polish Economic Program, forming a coalition with myriad other parties that I won't even begin to get into. Again, only in Poland.

To be fair, a lot of people don't bother abstaining at Christmas. But in smaller rural towns, you don't have
much of a choice. Shops and bars, where they exist, close up well before Christmas Eve and the place becomes a ghost town. If you do manage to find a store open on or just before Christmas Eve, you'll discover that the shelves have been emptied. It stays that way until well into the new year, all the shops remaining closed for ‘stock-taking'. Stock-taking, when there's actually no stock, is a mystery. More mysterious still is the fact that it takes a full week to count this no stock. So, to survive, you have to harvest as much food as you can to get you through Christmas and into the new year.

I wasn't prepared for any of this the first year and went wombling around the streets just before Christmas Eve, foraging in vain for a bit of jar and some food. The results of my search were too depressing to describe, but I was kindly invited to the home of my saviour, the English teacher, for Christmas – an invitation I accepted gratefully, as otherwise I would have been found dead in mid-January, clinging to the door of an empty fridge.

I also saw this as a good opportunity to get presents in ahead of the doctor in Warsaw. I had, by this stage, the few ‘dates' to my credit and figured a good spell over the Christmas would do the trick.

The dating game was all very old-fashioned. It kind of reminded me of tales of my parents, how they first met up and what they did on dates – sharing a single of chips, sitting and watching the river flow by, that sort of
thing. In the background, of course, always lurked the mother, rather unfairly represented as the ogre figure that had to be dodged, bribed or softened up at all times.

Each date necessitated a flower for the girl and chocolates for the mum. If you wished to go out again, you always met the mother before you took the girl out and after you brought her back if possible. There was a terrible sense of Big Brother on each occasion, particularly when we returned to the flat at the respectable hour of about 10pm. The blocks were all fitted out with prehistoric intercom systems, with a phone inside each flat and a large speaker on the wall next to the door on the outside. This speaker droned and hummed constantly. There was always a suspicion that people inside the block had picked up the phone and were listening in on the Irishman and the Polish girl standing under the porch in the cold, trying to sneak in a snog before going to say goodnight to the mother.

Buying flowers was another new experience for me. A single man buying a single rose can only mean one thing in Poland – that he has a ‘date'. It is very common to see guys – many dressed in suits for the simple evening ahead – walking down the street with a flower early on a Friday evening. You always had to buy flowers in odd numbers. Even numbers are bad luck, which meant you got one or three – usually just the one. Later on the Friday night you'd see the same guys,
only with a girl to accompany the flower. Cafés were full of couples on the weekends, each with a flower, and there were flower shops all over town that made a killing selling single roses.

Romance was very much alive and well in Poland, but it wasn't something I was used to. Any experience I had had up to that point at home usually involved meeting a girl at a party or pub and fumbling somewhere in the corner of the room, the back of your ma's car or a convenient public location. If things went smoothly you might see them again at a house party. And, apart from a couple of serious relationships that ran their course when I was growing up or in college, romance was never really there, even if there was a love of sorts. Taking things slowly certainly wasn't part of it. Slow walks, hand-in-hand, and a short parting kiss was never part of it. But in a Polish town, that's what weekends were about.