Summer had been wavering since we got here and on September the first, it officially switched off. The leaves started turning in unison, as if directed by a conductor, and golden autumn – złota jesień as they called this early part of the season in Polish – arrived. Jutta and Svetlana went west and east respectively, back to their student lives. My sturdy walking boots came out, a practical response to streets that were more and more often muddy. And my life as a diplomatic wife began in earnest, with the arrival of our first invite to an event – a display by a Polish-Australian jewellery artist.
Arriving at the venue, we discovered we’d left the actual invitation on our kitchen table – along with our first round of bank statements, which had somehow found us, despite bearing the address Whoresore Bag. I should have been more patient spelling out those addresses.
Not having the invite presented some issues when we reported at the entry. Tom ran around trying to find a security guard who would talk to him in English. I followed behind him, trying to form the sentences in my head to explain what was going on, in case he failed and it was about to become my problem in Polish. After a few minutes Tom called me over. He had, and it was.
I took a deep breath. ‘We have no ticket it at home, but we like to please come in.’ I was banking on the fact that the guard might be impressed by the fact we were foreign. He looked us up and down. Nothing about us appeared to impress him. He said something in response that I didn’t get. I could often form a half-decent Polish sentence if I had a chance to rehearse. But the response was often a mystery. As it was now. I asked the security man to repeat what he’d said. Tom tapped the pavement with a toe.
‘He says we need tickets.’
‘I know that,’ said Tom. ‘Tell him we want to come in anyway.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘That we’re from the Australian Embassy.’
‘I don’t think that’s a reason,’ I said.
Our behaviour had attracted the attention of another security guard, who had now joined us.
‘We no have tickets, we please like to come in.’ I tried again with the new guard. ‘We from Embassy Australia.’ I had almost turned to leave before I’d finished getting the sentence out.
There was a flicker of response. ‘Sorry?’
‘We are from the Australian Embassy,’ I said again, managing to get the whole proper sentence out this time. It was one I’d practised.
They looked us up and down.
‘The Austrian Embassy?’ one said.
‘Aus-TRAL-ian.’ I emphasised the middle syllable that marked the difference between the two countries in both Polish and English.
There was a conversation between them, during the course of which both of them looked skeptical, and both of them looked both of us up and down a few more times. For whatever reason – whether they decided, on balance, that it wasn’t worth starting a diplomatic event over, or that other Australians were unlikely to come and demand entry on the basis of precedent – they stamped our hands and waved us in.
As we wound our way through the exhibitors and kiosks, I saw why they’d looked skeptical. With most of our clothing still on the ship, we had done our best to cobble something together that I thought said ‘diplomats at play’. Maybe in Australia it did. Here, people put a great deal more effort into dressing. All the women had full make-up, stylish shirts and matching jewellery. No one else here – man or woman – was wearing practical footwear. We walked past dozens of stalls, exhibits and kiosks showing necklaces, jewels and stones, staffed by people who must have known I didn’t belong as surely as I did.
Finding our Australian-Polish artist was like looking for a needle in a haystack – an unwelcoming haystack at that – and I was almost tempted to abandon our first diplomatic mission, when we both saw it: a blown-up photo on a giant billboard, showing rock formations the colour of sunsets, deep blue waters, and the pearls of one of its main industries. It couldn’t be anywhere near here; it could only be Broome, Western Australia. We’d spent our honeymoon there.
We had found Ola, our Polish-Australian jewellery artist. Now in her fifties, she had left communist Poland in the 1980s and gone to live in Australia. She’d lived and worked between the two countries since, designing, making and selling jewellery. According to her bio, anyway, which I read while Tom found her and introduced himself. My attempt to remain inconspicuous failed as he called me over to meet her.
‘How fantastic it is to meet you!’ she greeted me with three enthusiastic kisses on alternate cheeks. I fumbled the third one. It seemed one too many. ‘I was just telling Mr Armstrong how fantastic it is that someone from the embassy could make it here today! Here, let me show you my exhibition!’ She grabbed her Mr Armstrong – my Tom – by the elbow and swept him away towards the almost life-sized wall-mounted photos of the Kimberley shore, rugged red rock bordering the deep blue ocean, giving no clue of the thousands of irritated oysters gestating world-class pearls beneath its depths. I followed in their wake.
‘I spent a lot of my time in Sydney, of course, but this is where I felt truly at home. Have you ever been to Broome?’ she warbled.
‘Actually, we spent our –’
‘You must go! It’s fantastic.’
Her attention was diverted by something else she wanted to show us, and she led Tom off towards another corner of the stall. Tom and I glanced at each other. He gave me a quick smile; I rolled my eyes.
‘Photos,’ she announced, digging around in her bag for a small digital camera.
By the time I caught up, Ola was calling out to someone passing by. ‘This is the artistic director of the gallery,’ she introduced us to man with pointed shoes, a striped shirt and a bald head. He gave us a polite smile. And this is Tom and Jay Armstrong.’ I had never changed my name but I let it go. ‘They’re from the Australian Embassy,’ she finished with a huge grin. As though two embassy representatives had been a compulsory item on a treasure hunt.
‘Bardzo miło mi pana poznać,’ I greeted him as I’d learned in my textbook, holding out my hand for the gallery owner to shake. He took it and kissed it. No one had ever kissed my hand before. And I suspected, from the look on his face, that he may never before have kissed the hand of anyone wearing hiking boots.
‘The embassy?’ he checked.
‘Can you take a photo of us?’ Ola said, pressing the camera into his hand. One photo turned into a dozen, of her and us, as the Kimberley sun set in the background. And when there was a break, the gallery owner handed the camera back and got his own out, while Ola got out her mobile and reeled off some rapid-fire Polish into it. Within minutes, an entourage was assembled: artists, jewellers, museum and gallery heads, all lining up to have their photos taken with us. She continued her ring-around to find other people to show us to.
‘Don’t they get we’re just ordinary public servants? And that Canberra’s full of thousands of us?’ I asked Tom during a lull in the craziness.
‘Warsaw’s not.’
Now it was me wondering what on earth these people expected from me – as a diplomatic wife. I didn’t know, but I suspected I was disappointing.
‘It was fantastic to meet you,’ Tom said when Ola’s contact list was exhausted and we could finally take our leave. Ola pressed an invitation for another exhibition she was putting on into his hand as we escaped.
Tom punched the number for a cab into his phone and we stepped out into the muddy streets. However did Polish women navigate these streets in those shoes?
‘Is this really what diplomatic life is going to be like? It’s more how I imagined being a rock star!’ I said to Tom.
‘Either way it’s rather … fantastic.’ He winked at me.
I made a note to myself: if all else fails, tell them you’re Australian.
***
From then on, diplomatic invites arrived thick and fast. The Indonesian Ambassador would welcome the presence of the Australian Ambassador on the occasion of the country’s national day, the next of them announced in elegant, gold-embossed writing. And spouse, someone had scrawled below. Tom wasn’t the Ambassador, who still hadn’t arrived, but we decided the Indonesians could make do.
The fact that I was only the (handwritten) spouse of the representative of the person who they actually wanted there did not douse my excitement at the invitation one iota. Our possessions had arrived – all the boxes we’d packed up in Canberra, their contents now stuffed away in wardrobes and cupboards around the apartment. I still didn’t have much to wear here, though. Warsaw had higher standards than Canberra. Still, I could do a bit better than my first attempt. I ironed a plain pants suit left over from my corporate life and hoped that it would suffice. I even found a pair of decent shoes – if you defined ‘decent’ as ‘uncomfortable’.
I hopped off the tram right outside the five-star hotel, just as the embassy driver dropped Tom there. A quick kiss hello and we linked arms and joined a line of people greeting the hosts.
‘Tom Armstrong, Australian Embassy,’ Tom said when it was his turn.
‘Jay Martin. Tom’s … ah … wife,’ I said, when it was mine.
The Indonesian Ambassador to Poland, a rotund, merry man in a batik shirt, and a woman I presumed was his … ah … wife smiled and shook my hand. Their heads bounced up and down as if they were on springs. Tom took my elbow and guided me away. I was clogging up the important-people conveyer belt.
We proceeded to the hotel’s grand ballroom. Chest-high tables draped in black cloth were dotted around the room, which was bookended by heaving buffets. The throngs thickened there. I joined the crowds, and piled a plate high with noodles and chili prawns, not realising that I’d lost Tom along the way. I retreated with my haul to one of the islands, looking around for my husband in the sea of men in suits and women with big hair in cocktail dresses.
Just then the room hushed, and the speeches commenced – Polish, followed by English. I strained to get as much as I could of the Polish.
‘Shshshshshshsh Indonesia shshshshsh politics shshshshshsh diplomatic relations.’
I smiled at understanding two sequential words. Despite all my efforts so far, Polish still mostly sounded like people telling me to be quiet. A blond waiter handed out free champagne, and the room toasted our mutual desire for long and fruitful ties between these two great nations. I drank to that. Although it didn’t seem too hard to have long and fruitful ties with a country at the other end of the world you had little in common with and nothing to fight over.
I crunched into a spring roll and looked around. What did people talk about at these things? Especially people like me, the invitee twice removed. I’d lost even that tenuous excuse for being here in my rush to get to the buffet. I’d attended dozens of conferences in the past as part of my job, usually representing the minister or the government. People were always seeking me out, keen to get information from me and get me on side. That was before, of course. My old life.
I smiled at a bald man in an ill-fitting suit who’d taken up at my table. He avoided eye contact. I couldn’t decide whether to feel slighted or relieved.
A woman who looked to be about my age and to have dedicated a similar level of effort to preparing for the night parked herself between us.
‘Hannah.’ She held out her hand to me. I wiped spring roll grease off mine with a crumpled paper napkin and held it out in return.
‘Jay,’ I replied, copying her.
‘Miło mi.’ She did in three syllables what I’d taken seven for with the hand-kissing gallery owner.
‘Miło mi.’ I copied her again. Gosh, that was easier!
A man with Hannah struck up a conversation with the bald man, who seemed happy enough to talk to him. But neither I nor she had spoken further. I suspected the introduction – such as it was – was on the verge of expiry. I had no idea how conversation worked here. But I was supposed to be practising Polish, wasn’t I? Here was a perfect opportunity. I took a breath.
‘A skąd pani jest?’ I tried asking where she was from.
‘Ah, mówisz po Polsku!’ she said – you speak Polish! Followed by a flood of fricatives as she told me about what her husband, Piotr, did that had brought them here – something in some kind of ministry or government office, from what I could catch.
‘Me from Australia. Me husband work in embassy. He no Polish, he too Australian,’ I replied. I wasn’t sure about most of what she’d said, so I blathered facts about myself that I knew how to say in Polish and hoped that would pass for conversation. I wondered if Agnieszka had a lesson on diplomatic small talk.
Tom appeared at my side. ‘Me husband.’ I pointed at him. She asked him a question, causing him to admit his lack of Polish, at which point she took up conversing about contemporary politics and emerging global financial issues in English.
‘But you speak excellent English, why didn’t you say?’ I asked her.
‘My Spanish is quite good, but I am ashamed my English is not better,’ she said.
Was I supposed to feel bad about inflicting my Polish on her?
We chatted about her work for a local cultural institution, and discovered a common interest in books and films.
‘I very much like Bruce Chatwin,’ she said, naming the Australian author.
‘Songlines, yes?’ I could name one book by him – I was pretty sure.
‘Yes! I particularly liked that novel, the evocation of the Australian forest and countryside, it leaves a particularly strong impression with you. How did you find it, as an Australian reader?’
I had to admit I’d never actually read it.
‘Oh. Well, it’s worthwhile. And what is your opinion of Polish authors?’
I scanned my brain for anything on Polish authors. Composers or film directors would probably do at a pinch.
‘Singer? Schulz? Reymont? Szymborska?’ she said.
‘Have they been published in English?’
‘They each won a Nobel prize.’
I considered myself quite well educated in Australia. Not so in Poland, it seemed, a country with a conga line of Nobel literature laureates. Did Australia have any? I didn’t even know. I had obviously spent more time researching places to go than things to read about Poland.
The bald man left and Hannah introduced her husband, Piotr, to us, with more finesse than I had Tom to her. Tom and Piotr exchanged handshakes and business cards.
‘So what are Polish people like?’ Hannah said.
‘They seem nice enough,’ I said. Although in truth, even after a couple of months here now, I hadn’t met enough to have much of an opinion.
‘We’re going to Krakow for a wedding in a couple of months. You should come along, we can show you around a bit,’ Piotr said.
‘Yes, you should!’ Hannah said.
‘How lovely! Thank you!’ My head bobbed up and down. Like it was on a spring. It was a kind gesture, but I’m sure it hadn’t been a serious invite. People didn’t invite people they’d just met away for a weekend.
‘If you’ll excuse us, there’s someone Jay needs to meet,’ Tom said, steering me away from them, and towards a grey-haired man in the centre of the room, holding a plate piled as high with spring rolls as mine had been.
‘G’day,’ the man greeted us. Was that an Australian accent? I wrangled the serviette out of my other hand and wiped my fingers so I could shake his hand. I bent down a tad to bring my head in line with his.
‘This is the ambassador,’ Tom said.
‘Which ambassador?’ I asked.
‘Yours,’ said Tom.
Right. ‘Good evening, Ambassador,’ I started again, although it was hard to reconcile the term ‘ambassador’ with the gentleman in front of me with spring roll crumbs stuck to one side of his grey moustache.
Other than an apparent shared interest in fried Asian food, I wasn’t sure what to talk to an ambassador about. Luckily he was happy to talk for both of us, about the other places he’d lived – Chile, France, Ghana, the US, a few Pacific Islands I’d never heard of – and his plans for his time here, which included meeting up with some of the many friends and colleagues he’d met over the years who were now based in the region. I fast-forwarded twenty years. Arriving at our latest post, comparing it to Warsaw and all the other places we had been in the intervening years, making plans to see all the amazing people we had met along the way.
‘You know, a diplomat’s performance review at the end of the year used to include a section on his wife’s performance,’ he said. ‘How well she’d entertained his colleagues, her attendance at functions.’
I laughed. ‘Ah, well, just as well that’s no longer the case,’ I stole a glance at Tom.
‘Anyway, there will be plenty of time for us to catch up. You should be mingling, meeting some new people! It’s the most important skill for a diplomat, you know!’
‘Oh, but I’m not –’
‘I must be going. It’s been lovely to meet you. Good bye.’ My ambassador turned on his heel and walked off.
‘Goodbye,’ we called after him.
‘Oh, let me introduce you to someone else,’ Tom said, pointing me towards a couple about our age. And so I met Shannon, slightly taller than me and with flaming red curls, and her husband Paul, dark and slightly shorter. Paul was with the Canadian Embassy, and they had also not long arrived in Warsaw. We had a relaxed chat – it came naturally when it was in English, and not to an ambassador. It turned out we even lived in the same apartment complex. Tom invited them round for afternoon tea on the weekend.
‘Lovely! I’ll even bake!’ I said.
Tom checked his phone. ‘The driver’s here. Are you ready to go?’
‘Whose driver?’
‘Ours.’
Right. I was. It was exhausting having to think so much about talking. Not to mention that my feet were killing me. I was going to have to navigate some compromise between Polish footwear standards and my arches.
‘So where did Hannah’s husband work?’ I asked, as we made for the covered driveway.
‘He’s normally with the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But he’s on a placement at the office of the President. Kaczynski.’
‘Bless you.’
‘That’s the President.’
Got it. A car with Australian flags fluttering on the bonnet stopped by my side. Tom came around to open the door for me. He greeted the driver by name, and enquired after his son, who’d been unwell, apparently.
‘So how am I doing so far as a diplomatic wife?’ I asked.
‘Taking to it like a duck to water, I’d say.’ We held hands on the back seat while our driver took us home.
So this was what being a diplomat’s wife was all about! Yes, this was more what I’d imagined.
***
Shannon and Paul came around that weekend, as well as another couple, Victoria and William, from the British Embassy. As promised, I baked. As a bitter wind rustled amber leaves outside, I handed around the result of my efforts – a soft chocolatey filling and perfectly cooked crust. Not bad for a first attempt. I never would have found the time – or energy – to bake from scratch among the deadlines of my old life. Perhaps I would discover all kinds of hidden talents here.
Tom, William and Paul talked about some upcoming EU meetings and a major set of climate change talks that were due to start shortly in Poznan, while Shannon, Victoria and I chatted – mostly about how we felt about not having a job. Although Victoria had managed to get her employer to give her work she could do remotely for the time being, she was keen to find something permanent. Shannon, meanwhile, had decided to upgrade her accounting qualifications online with a Canadian university.
‘What about you?’ Victoria asked me.
‘I guess I just want to do the things I’d always wished I had time to over those years I spent stressing over work. Travelling, yoga, tennis, maybe a bit of writing. But first off I’m going to learn Polish. I’m doing three hours of classes a day.’
‘I thought you were trying to reduce stress in your life!’ Shannon said.
Victoria told me about a yoga studio she’d found – with classes in English, at fifty zloty a time. I asked her to pass on the details. But I’d already found classes at a local school that were only nineteen zloty, and I was learning all the vocabulary for parts of the body to boot. Maybe the money I was spending on language lessons was paying off in other ways.
When she suggested we have a game of tennis sometime, I was more enthusiastic. ‘I have to do something until I find a proper job,’ Victoria said. ‘And it will save us from the IWG.’
‘The IWG? What’s that?’ I said.
‘International Women’s Group,’ Shannon said.
‘You know, the kind of wives who don’t do anything.’ Victoria rolled her eyes.
Yes, I knew the kind. I’d fled a middle-class suburbia full of them at seventeen and never looked back. I confirmed with an enthusiastic nod to Victoria and Shannon that I was one of them, not one of them. I sprang up and offered my chocolate fondant cake around again.
Since the afternoon of the perfect cake, I’d run into Shannon around the neighbourhood every few days. In the little bread store, the discount clothes shop or the florist. Most commonly, like now, in our local supermarket. I greeted her, kissing each cheek. It was nice having someone to run into. Not to mention someone to discuss the intrigues of Polish supermarkets with.
Because supermarkets in Poland were not the same as at home. They had what seemed like a million varieties of sour cream, and a sausage section with walls of porky options. But I didn’t eat meat and couldn’t understand why you needed more than one or two types of cream. And while they had plenty of fish options, there were none I understood. Flądre, karp, dorszcz – my dictionary could turn these into flounder, carp and cod, but it didn’t help me know how to cook any of them. Just as it didn’t help me understand why the vegetables here barely lasted twenty-four hours before showing signs of extreme distress. Nor why Polish cling film did not – would not – cling, nor why batteries and light globes seemed to only be available sporadically. It was as though wartime rationing had never ended. I’d started stocking up when I saw them.
‘I don’t understand why a major international supermarket chain in the EU can’t deliver me an onion that will last until dinnertime,’ I said to Shannon. Polish vegetable fragility was one of the reasons Shannon and I ran into each other so often. Supermarket shopping had become something we did most days, rather than once a week.
‘I know. Or why you have to weigh your fruit and vegetables before you take them to the check-out,’ she said. In Polish stores you had to weigh fruit and vegetables at a separate place, and then take them, tagged and priced, to the cashier. ‘I never remember. I ended up leaving kilos of vegetables at the counter the other day because I’d forgotten to weigh them and get the price sticker. It wasn’t even that I couldn’t have gone and done it. It was just that the check-out girl took such pleasure in the fact that I was obviously so annoyed that I hadn’t, that I decided to get my own back by leaving ten bags of vegetables on her counter!’
‘Except you left without your vegetables …’
‘Yeah. So I guess she won. I tried not to let her know that, though.’
I told Shannon how I’d been trying to find pumpkins and had asked the man in the store if they had any. ‘Nie ma,’ he’d shaken his head, before he added, ‘They’re not in season.’
‘Pumpkins go out of season here?’ Shannon was as incredulous as I had been.
‘You get pumpkins all year round in Canada, right?’
‘It’s the twenty-first century in Canada,’ she said.
Once Jutta and Svetlana had gone, I had sometimes gone days without speaking to anyone else other than Tom. And Agnieszka the exacting, of course. It was nice to have someone to know here, to run into. Especially someone who was going through so many of the same things I was. I’d tried sharing my bewilderment at Polish supermarkets with Tom. ‘It’s a supermarket, what’s so hard?’ he’d said. But the one time I asked him to bring home milk, he came home with kefir – soured milk. Shannon understood only too well – Paul had got mad with her when he’d used handwash instead of moisturiser on his face, not being able to read the labels. He blamed her for putting it in the wrong place in the bathroom.
‘I do feel I’m getting it, though. As though Polish supermarkets are opening their secrets to me. Like Tutankhamun’s tomb,’ I said.
‘I think you’ve spent too long in Polish supermarkets,’ Shannon said.
We both started giggling and I accidentally bumped the girl in front of us. She turned around.
‘Przepraszam,’ I apologised.
‘I’m in front of you,’ she responded curtly, before dumping her basket and ducking out of the queue. The girl returned with a box of tissues two minutes later and re-took her place as though she’d never been away. Shannon and I glared at the back of her head.
A commotion in the next line disturbed us. An old man dressed in rags and with knotted hair was paying for his meagre purchases with a few coins. ‘And have a shower next time before you come in here. You stink!’ The cashier threw his change back at him. The older ladies in the line joined in, all holding their noses.
‘Have you got China tonight?’ I asked Shannon.
‘Yep. And France next week?’
‘I don’t think we got that one,’ I said.
I started rifling through my purse. Polish shop assistants thought nothing of yelling at you for not having the right change. Maybe that was rationed, too? I looked in my wallet – I had hardly any coins. I was never leaving any for a tip again, that was for sure. It was too precious. I sighed. Shannon opened her hand, revealing a fistful, a twinkle in her eye.
‘Got time for a coffee now?’ I said.
‘Of course.’
***
Tom was off to Brussels for a few days. He asked if I wanted to come, but I’d decided instead to see more of Poland. Lublin, I picked, by an exhaustive process: I’d opened the guidebook to the front page, where a dozen places to go were highlighted. Gdansk, tick. Next stop: Lublin.
The guidebook set out a complicated train connection, but Agnieszka pointed me in the direction of minibuses from the Palace that made the 170-kilometre journey directly. In Australia, you could divide the number of kilometres you were travelling by one hundred to work out how long it would take to get somewhere – so roughly two hours. I hadn’t yet worked out what the Polish formula was, but I had four hours to ponder it, as the minibus ambled down the main road linking these two cities, stopping for trucks, chickens, old people on bicycles and roadworks along the way. It certainly would have been quicker to get to Brussels.
But there were worse places to be taking my time than a slow-moving minivan in the Polish countryside in this season. Now I understood why it was called golden autumn. The fields, tiny villages and churches I passed were surrounded by forests exploding in a million shades of gold. Canberra in autumn was pretty, but this was stunning. I imagined the architects of the colourful Warsaw rynek being inspired in their choice of palette by the country’s natural charms.
In between snapping a few photos to show Tom, I reflected on my new life, some three months in.
I had no trouble keeping myself busy. I would get up with Tom in the mornings. Not that I had to, it just seemed like a nice show of solidarność. Then my day began: three hours of Polish class, followed by running around town, looking for coriander and self-raising flour, picking up drycleaning, grabbing a coffee – sometimes with Shannon, sometimes just with a Polish newspaper for company. It was all stuff I’d had to do before, of course. It was stuff that everyone did. But here, things seemed to take more time, and anything I hadn’t done before took planning. And that, three months in, included virtually everything.
Shopping for dinner often involved not just a trip to the store, but a tram trip to Praga on the other side of the river, the closest supermarket of any size. While I knew where the supermarket was, I often couldn’t find what I wanted in it – did I want the twelve, eighteen or thirty-six percent śmietana? At home it was just called cream. And if a box didn’t have a picture on it, I often didn’t know what was in it. I invariably had to lug whatever I’d bought back in a dozen plastic bags – I hadn’t yet stopped shopping as though I could wheel my trolley to the car park and load up the boot.
Before I could make a doctor’s appointment, I had to find a doctor, find out what insurance I had and what cards I would need, and practise saying what I wanted the appointment for in Polish – I was still determined on that point. I managed, too – although it could be painful for both parties, as I’m sure the salesperson who had signed me up for my mobile phone contract could attest. But I’d learned one thing in the process: if I started in Polish, no one would ever switch to English.
And then I’d need to get home and get changed and get to whatever event we’d been invited to that evening. Already, they were starting to blur. China National Day had been a standout for the food (although we’d mixed up Bonifraterska Street and Bonifacego Street and ended up spending nearly an hour in a taxi to go just around the corner from our house). At Thailand, I’d upset a Brazilian diplomat by telling him we didn’t have to pay for our accommodation or bills while we were here. He had to rent an apartment on the private market and pay for it like a normal person. One weekend we’d listened to one of the country’s top string quartets play for a dozen people, including us, in a ballroom inside Warsaw’s Royal Castle. It was probably Chopin – one of Poland’s favourite sons. The music wasn’t really my thing, but I was absorbed by the eighteenth-century ceremonial room, with its mural-covered ceiling and gilded mirrors. The determination and pride evident in the faithful post-war reconstruction made it all the more exquisite. There were cocktail events for arriving diplomats, dinners for ones departing, and various other networking events in between. We were less commonly invited to anything from the EU, although with our embassy in Warsaw being responsible for both Poland and the Czech Republic, we did make the cut for that one – the frequent jaunts to Prague the Ambassador was fond off were obviously paying off.
Tom was sought after at all of these things, people from all over the world bailing him up to talk about everything from arms control to economic indicators, and he would walk out with a brick of new business cards and more invites to more free events. As for me, this schedule of representational duties had forced me back on one of the resolutions I’d made after leaving work, which was to not have a diary anymore. Being unemployed, I would no longer need to ration my time, I’d figured. I caved, and bought a small one that fit in my jacket pocket. It was a compromise between my desire to be less timetabled and my need to remember all of the things I had to be at.
I didn’t have to come to any of these events. Most spouses didn’t, and I could understand why. I was used to briefing ministers and heads of government departments on media strategies or complex social issues. But I’d had no training in making chitchat with them over canapés – or how to respond to the bored look they’d give me when I revealed I was just a wife. Spouses were invited to the events, but not into the conversations.
Still, I was interested in meeting people from different places, and I liked getting to know the group of people who, like us, were on the circuit – Paul and Shannon were often there, William from the UK too, and Piotr, who I’d met with Hannah over spring rolls. The events were also a fertile hunting ground for Polish people to inflict my language skills on. But mostly, this was Tom’s job and he had to go, despite already long days. If I didn’t go too, we wouldn’t spend many of our waking hours together.
Despite it all, I often found myself not tired at the end of the day. It made me realise how tiring working full-time had been. I’d become so used to it I had stopped noticing.
So when Victoria had followed up on her suggestion of some tennis after our first meeting, I’d been happy to dust off my racquet and add a game with her at the local club into the mix – as a result, I now knew how to book a tennis court, and that when I did, I would have to spell out my surname, because people here could no more spell ‘Martin’ without guidance than people at home could spell ‘Nowak’. It had become a semi-regular thing since. The tennis wasn’t Shannon’s cup of tea, but she would sometimes come for a bite to eat afterward, giving the three of us an opportunity to share the little frustrations and successes of our new lives with people who understood. When Shannon told us how helpless she’d felt having to get the embassy to organise her mobile phone plan as the phone company wouldn’t give a non-resident one directly, we empathised. And when Victoria told us how she still made William cook half the time – just on principle – we laughed. And when I told them how much I’d had to struggle to make a doctor’s appointment in Polish, Shannon reminded me that I had succeeded in the end, and I went from feeling deflated to feeling proud. And when I said that my intensive Polish schedule was getting in the way of seeing Poland, Shannon and Victoria pointed out that it wasn’t work and I didn’t need to apply for leave. They were right! I emailed Agnieszka and told her I wasn’t coming to class, I was going on a road trip.
Arriving, I went to the tourist office which, in response to my request for something ‘cheap and with character’, sent me to the local nunnery. I dumped my small bag in the sparse room, tried not to be put off by the bloody crucifix above my lumpy single bed, and headed out to see the sights of the provincial capital.
The tourist office had suggested a visit to the Chapel of the Holy Trinity at Lublin Castle; as a steady drizzle was setting in, an indoor destination seemed a sensible idea. I made my way in and was immediately transported by the vibrant frescoes that adorned every interior surface. Originally painted in the fifteenth century, they had only survived because they’d been plastered over some time in the nineteenth. In the twentieth, they were rediscovered and restored. I ranged my eyes over the stories of Jesus’ life, in bright panels: Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, being nailed to the cross between two thieves, finally ascending to heaven. Stories some unknown artists in fifteenth century Poland had painted, and a woman from twenty-first century Australia could understand, despite all the space and time between us.
Venturing back out into the late afternoon, I chose a café that was open and ordered a vegetarian soup and a cappuccino.
‘She is vegetarian, this soup, yes?’
‘One hundred percent,’ the young server responded. It arrived with globs of pork in it. I pretended it hadn’t and ate around them.
It wasn’t a very Polish meal. It wasn’t very Italian either – the cappuccino came in a packet, with hot water at the side. I felt sixty million Italians shudder. But the bill came to less than ten zloty, which was a bargain – by Australian or Warsaw standards – and anyway there wasn’t a lot of choice. The tourist season was over, a chill wind had picked up as soon as the sun had dipped below the horizon, and people eating out in Lublin numbered pretty much me. I wrapped my jacket and scarf more tightly around me.
A road sign indicated we were just about there. I looked at my watch. Just gone lunch time. At home, I would have cleared three ministerial briefings. Here, I’d watched a little of south-east Poland in the autumn go by. What a superior way this was to spend a morning.