While Russia might not have topped everyone’s list as a summer getaway, the start to lato had been unusually warm and I thought a weekend in cultural Moscow would be a great complement to our plans for two weeks on the Adriatic coast later in the season. I booked us air tickets, and Tom organised for us to stay with one of his colleagues. Free accommodation all over the world was one of the perks of embassy life. Even faint relationships could be called on for a free room, on the understanding that reciprocity could be invoked at any point in the next couple of decades.
All I needed now were our visas. I looked up the internet site, to see what we’d need. Yet the moment I arrived at the Russian Embassy, ten minutes before the office was due to open, I realised I’d started this wrongly. The line of people waiting already numbered at least forty. Except it wasn’t a line, it was a crowd. A mass of Russian visa applicants. Or was that a mess? Some people were sitting on the pavement, some were on benches in the shade. The office was only open for two hours. How was this going to work? The rush when it opened was going to be crazy!
‘I’m last!’ a man called out to me from a patch of shade. ‘You’re behind me.’
A few minutes later, another girl wandered up. ‘Who’s last?’ she called out. I looked around.
I raised my hand and answered, ‘Ja,’ before adding, ‘you’re behind me,’ in the same way the man had. In the same way that the woman in the supermarket had to Shannon and me.
Everyone in the crowd knew who they were behind. All you had to do was watch for the person in front of you, and you were free to find a comfortable spot to wait. Or wander off and do something else if it was going to be a while.
I went and found my own shady spot, contemplating the beauty of queuing taken to the level of art. I watched for the person who had been before me to go in, the intercom called ‘next’, and in I went.
Simples.
Inside the Russian Embassy visa office, though, chaos reigned. A small room held five officials behind glass screens. In front of each were a dozen people, yelling at the people behind the glass for, from what I could tell, not giving them a visa to Russia. The applicants waved fistfuls of papers at the functionaries, who in return jabbed fingers at procedural manuals. Most of the officials stood. Perhaps they could yell better that way. Passports, photos and forms were shoved under the glass and shoved back again. Most of the applicants seemed to be Polish, although a contingent of short, round Chechen women in traditional dress was yelling in concert in one corner.
I spent a moment wondering how Slavs ever got anything done.
I stood back and waited for the woman at my allocated window to finish dealing with her feisty Poles and call me for my turn.
I spent a moment wondering how Anglo-Saxons ever got anything done.
I’d found two versions of the forms on the internet. I’d prepared both, just in case, and brought twice as many photos as I needed. Just quietly, I was feeling confident.
The first thing my official did when I presented myself was to shove a third version of the form under the glass at me. It looked like the same information as the other two, but was in a slightly different format. I held up my forms. She jabbed her finger at the one she’d given me. I moved to one side and got started on the new forms – one for Tom, one for me.
Name … address … phone number … What was Tom’s phone number? I wrote the first three numbers, but got it wrong under pressure. I crossed it out and wrote the right numbers.
The woman saw and started yelling at me. I didn’t catch the details, but I got the gist: there was to be no crossing out on forms. She rolled her eyes again and threw me another one, gesturing for me to give back the one I’d ruined.
I filled it out, taking more care this time, until I got to the end. I held it up, pointing to the signature block on Tom’s form. ‘My husband have to sign?’
‘Just sign it for him!’
I hesitated for a moment before signing my name on his form, and writing For Tom Armstrong underneath it.
She took the forms and looked over them. ‘These signatures are the same!’ She’d stood up now. Obviously I now needed more concentrated yelling.
‘I just signed them both …’ The explanation seemed redundant given she was the one who’d just told me to do that.
‘No, sign like him, not like you!’
I asked if she wanted me to do it again. She just threw up her hands again. I obviously wasn’t someone who could be trusted with forms.
‘Come back in a week!’
I took it as a win and got out of there.
***
Summer exploded onto Warsaw and day after long, sunny day it was not just warm but hot – even by Australian standards. Warsaw emptied of residents as they jetted off to Portugal, Morocco and Turkey – places that had been out of bounds for Poles twenty years before and were now on cheap charter routes. Warsaw’s trams and buses – built for temperatures thirty degrees colder, and now stifling inside – trundled along their usual routes, carrying just a few listless, sweaty passengers. Dogs and children alike cooled off in park fountains. The people who were left spent their days drinking beer and eating fries at the kioski that had sprung up again like borowiki in an autumn forest, and sunning themselves in their underwear on grassy patches by the Vistula. The great muddy expanse of water swirled past, casting no judgement. And Gabby came to visit, bringing pre-Warsaw normality, a familiar accent – and sixty metres of British plastic kitchen wrap, which worked just as well as the Australian stuff.
She arrived on the eve of a momentous day: July tenth, when Warsaw would host EuroPride, the annual European festival of gay and lesbian rights. It would be the first one to be held behind the old Iron Curtain, and was going ahead despite a petition that had gathered more than fifty thousand signatures against it.
Tom had an embassy IT problem to deal with, so Gabby and I had the Saturday morning to ourselves, and after a chatty brunch we headed to one of the points the parade would pass, Plac Bankowy. Gabby asked question after question about the buildings, the statues, life here, her camera barely leaving her eye.
‘What is that!’ She clicked a few photos of a tiny yellow Fiat, parked outside an old apartment block.
‘Ah – the Polski Fiat, 126p – “p” is for Polski, of course.’ I’d just written an article about Central European cars of the Soviet era for the Insider. ‘I interviewed someone from the motorisation museum about these old cars, he told me some great stories. Like about one car at the museum that was owned by a Nazi in the Abwehr who drove it to Warsaw,’ I said, as we walked towards the parade.
‘The Abwehr?’ asked Gabby.
‘Yeah, kind of like the Nazi secret service in the war.’
‘Was Poland part of Germany then?’
‘Well, the country was under German and Russian occupation at the time – Warsaw was in the German-occupied part. Anyway, so he parked the car, and while he was inside, a member of the AK stole it.’
‘That would be …’
‘Sorry. Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, under the control of the London-based government-in-exile. So this Nazi officer didn’t care about the car, but there were a lot of very sensitive documents in there, and he hadn’t wanted to tell his superiors in Berlin that he lost them. So he went and found the resistance fighters, and bargained with them to get the papers, in return for a dozen Polish prisoners being held in Pawiak. That was the prison where political prisoners were held at that time. There’s a museum there now. So, you see, that car saved at least ten lives. But would you believe it, later on, that same officer drove back to Warsaw again, in that same car, and the Resistance stole it again!’
‘You sure have learned a lot about Poland since you’ve been here.’
‘And you’ve learned not to ask me anything else!’
I had learned a lot about Poland, particularly from the Warsaw Insider job and volunteering at the museum. But the most helpful thing I’d learned was confidence in my Polish. I knew, now, that if I didn’t catch every word or know every phrase I was going to understand enough to communicate, and could ask for clarification of anything I didn’t get. I could even get half a dozen sentences out without anyone twigging that I wasn’t Polish. And if they did notice I had an accent, they typically thought I was Czech or Slovak. A number of times I’d been out in a café with expat friends and the waitress would give me the Polish menu. It was still hard work to speak, but just knowing I would understand what someone said in response had meant my Polish had come along in leaps and bounds since.
We reached one of the vantage points for the parade and looked around for a good spot to watch it from. I assured Gabby the black police riot vans and police squads that were swarming the area weren’t usual. Today would definitely be the day to be out breaking into people’s houses if you were so inclined; every policeman and woman in Poland must have been here, in addition to young people, old people, children, dogs – and random Australians – all out in the hot sun. We spied a convenient pillar and climbed halfway up it to get a better look over it all. It was the sort of thing you’d never be allowed to do in Australia, where someone worried about their liability insurance would be sure to run up and tell us off.
We heard the parade coming before we saw it. First a drum beat, next some bass, then the higher pitches of the whistles and tambourines, and finally it rounded the corner and we had a perfect view as float after float of smiling, rainbow-costumed people passed by. A few protesters marched along side, carrying ‘Repent Now’ and ‘Stop Homoseksual’ signs. A parader blew bubbles on them.
Some movement to one side caught my attention, and I looked over to see a group of skinheads in tight black T-shirts who had found their way into the square. Ten or so guys who’d – perhaps – been hoping to cause a bit of trouble. Not one but three layers of police had surrounded them, like white blood cells neutralising a bacterial infection. The young men were now lounging on the pavement, their shaved heads growing red, while police officers checked their IDs. Some of them had stripped off and were trying to shade themselves. I got the impression the police were dragging it out so that by the time they’d finished, the parade would be long gone.
‘They must be the dumbest skinheads ever. Police outnumber demonstrators by about ten to one,’ Gabby said.
‘I don’t think there’s a minimum intelligence requirement to be a skinhead.’
They hadn’t actually done anything, of course. But in Poland it was enough to look like the sort of person who might have had the intention of doing something to get yourself the wrong kind of attention. It was – probably partly as a result of this – a city that felt so safe, to me. You might fall off a concrete monument – concern about public liability did have its advantages. But unlike at home, I never worried about walking home in the early hours of the morning here. If there were a group of rowdy drunk people in public, they were almost always foreigners. Usually diplomats I knew. Often the one I was married to.
‘Something to eat? ’ Gabby said, once the parade had passed.
‘I have just the place.’ I called Tom to tell him where we were going, and we made our way to the Palace of Culture. Statues of earnest Soviets holding chisels, lutes and spanners – the pantheon of acceptable Soviet occupations – welcomed us, and we entered the Palace’s bowels, emerging in what had been an old ballroom. It still boasted the chandeliers that had perhaps once lit gatherings of party officials, but was now called Kafe Kulturalna, and came with lime green sofas, free wifi and a pasta menu. Shannon, Paul, Tom and I had been to a Polish slam poetry night here. It left me no wiser about what slam poetry was, although I don’t think the language was the problem.
‘This is great! But how did you discover this place? It doesn’t look like there’s anything here from the outside,’ said Gabby.
‘You just sort of have to know.’ The Polish approach to advertising: never let anyone know anything was happening. I wasn’t sure it was a textbook approach to marketing. But the place was full, as it always was. So clearly it worked in Poland.
We sat down and proceeded to wrestle sufficient attention from one of the flotilla of uninterested staff to order some coffees – and two vodka shots. Well, it was almost four pm. They arrived in glasses made of frozen ice.
‘Fuck, that’s cool!’ Gabby said.
‘Kurwa, you mean.’ I replaced her expletive with the Polish version. We toasted and I downed my vodka before the glass could melt. I liked to think I felt Stalin turn in his grave.
Gabby’s was in danger of disintegrating, however.
‘Not a fan of vodka, I see,’ I said. ‘So, we can fix that problem.’
‘I’m not sure that’s …’
I quickly downed the second icy shot and looked around for a waiter I could annoy by ordering something. It was possible to get served in Polish restaurants, I’d learned. It just required determination. A moment later, a server who’d been unable to avoid my gaze brought us what I’d asked for: a glass of Zoladkowa Gorzka, a spicy, aromatic vodka. ‘Stomach bitters,’ it translated as. Although my experience was that the effect it had on the stomach wasn’t always healthful.
Gabby looked doubtful, but after a tentative sip her face lit up.
‘This is vodka?’ Gabby said.
‘I know!’
‘I don’t know why you complain so much about life in Poland. It seems pretty cool to me,’ Gabby said.
‘I don’t complain about my life here. Do I?’
She shot me a look over her emptying glass.
‘Poland is cool. It’s just that my life here sometimes seems like an endless round of cocktail events with complaining expat wives …’
Gabby burst out laughing. ‘Oh my God. Poor you! Seriously, how hard can it be to have to go to a few cocktail parties? If you don’t want to go then don’t!’
‘I know it doesn’t sound that bad. It’s just that Tom is off meeting ministers and I’m buying washing powder and carrots and it just seems –’
‘Skiing in Switzerland last year wasn’t it? Weekends in Stockholm? And how often does your cleaner come?’
‘What, I can’t have problems because I’m privileged?’
‘The rest of us have the problems and not the privilege! We all have to buy carrots and washing powder you know.’
‘It’s been hard sometimes for me here, that’s all I’m trying to say.’
‘Try living alone in the UK, renting an apartment in London without a secure job, and still being single when you’re thirty-nine. Then tell me how hard it is to be you. I don’t want to be mean, but honestly, all this complaining isn’t like you and I don’t want to listen to it anymore.’
‘Cześć!’ Tom’s arrival interrupted us, and he kissed Gabby on both cheeks. ‘You guys have a good catch-up?’
I picked up the menu. ‘Shall we order now?’
Some pasta – and another round of vodkas – later, the three of us tottered around the corner to Natalia’s apartment, where she was having a birthday party. A dozen or so people were already there by the time we arrived, which was more than a full house in her flat. Last time I’d been here, for Christmas, it had been cold and dark outside. This time it was roasting; the tepid breeze sighing through the open windows offered no respite in the tiny room.
Natalia laughed as we told her about our day’s activities at EuroPride, the protesters and the police presence. ‘Personally, I have no problem. But I don’t think Poland is ready for this yet.’
‘Katastrofa!’ her boyfriend Maciej interjected. Gabby laughed, without needing a translation. ‘How can you be Catholic and support homosexuality?’ Maciej asked Natalia.
‘We aren’t married. You can’t ask gay people to be better Catholics than the rest of us,’ she said.
I left Natalia and Maciej arguing at full force about gay rights, and went to the larger communal kitchen down the hall, where another part of the party was taking place. Tom was already there, sharing shots with a new friend.
‘He says he is a diplomat. Is that really true?’ his new drinking buddy asked me.
I nodded.
‘Kurwa,’ he said.
Gabby wandered into the kitchen behind me. ‘Kurwa,’ she parroted, causing an outburst of laughter from the assembled Poles.
‘Are you Australian too?’ Tom’s new drinking buddy asked her.
She nodded.
‘Kurwa, where have all these kurwa Australians come from?’
Tom’s new Polish friend handed out another round of vodka shots to all of us.
If I met myself here, would I like me? Would I see the difference between me and Dee?
Kurwa, I thought.
I leaned over and hugged Gabby. ‘Thank you for coming,’ I said.
‘Pleasure,’ she said.
We downed our vodkas together.
***
Summer was still in full force a few weeks later, and Tom and I were all set to leave for Moscow, hard-won visas in hand.
Until the heatwave that had wilted Warsaw set the Russian capital alight. While bushfires were familiar territory for me, ones that threatened nuclear power stations weren’t. Even if the country managed to avoid nuclear disaster, the smoke had reduced visibility in the capital to a hundred metres. When it seemed there was no alternative, we cancelled the tickets.
Which left us with an enviable problem: a four-day holiday weekend in August, and nothing planned. Tom lay on the couch next to me as I listed European destinations off Google Maps. ‘Portugal? France? Reykjavik?’ Flights anywhere were around fifty dollars, although finding accommodation at this stage was going to take some doing.
‘Meh,’ he said.
I shook my head, imagining how ‘We could have gone to Rome for the weekend but we couldn’t be bothered’ would sound once we were back in Australia. I ranged the cursor northwards. ‘Kaliningrad?’
‘Where?’
A small part of Russia hugging the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania, once part of the USSR, and now surrounded by the EU. The Russian visa had been a lot of trouble to get, after all. It seemed a waste not to use it. Was it even valid there? One way to find out!
Shannon and Paul were in Malta, so I’d sent out a call to my book club to see if someone else could take Bardzo. America had called me straight away and offered to help. We dropped him off with a bottle of kangaroo-print wine and hormone-filled steak from the commissary for her trouble, and by midmorning we were speeding through Poland’s northern reaches, the temperature climbing to the giddy heights of thirty-two. Mechanical harvesters crisscrossed fields of tall brown grass, dotted with plastic-wrapped hay bales. Each neat village we passed had a platform erected outside for storks to nest in. Some were inhabited by one or two of the giant birds. Every so often one would float overhead on its massive wings. I could see why the local villagers would want to encourage them to come and stay.
Leaving Poland was straightforward. There wasn’t anyone else at the border, and I think the border officers were happy to have something to do. They checked our documents, stamped us out and wished us a safe journey, and I switched over to the driver’s seat. I had an international driving permit from Australia, but Tom didn’t. Our EU licences weren’t valid here.
‘Look!’ I pointed to the huge arch at the border ahead. Russia, it boasted.
‘The gate thing?’
Ah, yes. I knew Cyrillic courtesy of a semester of Russian at university. Tom didn’t. I was getting used to being the only who could speak in Poland. Now add to that the only one who could drive, and the only one who could read.
‘It says “Russia”. ’ I put the car in gear and we drove through the Iron Curtain. Neither phone made a peep.
Our arrival at the other side of the border caused a great deal more activity. Our passports, visas, car ownership papers, licences and insurance documents were passed around between the six officials on duty, eliciting a mix of interest and confusion. ‘Avstralia?’ I heard one of them exclaim in Russian.
A lady in a Russian immigration uniform came over. She asked if I spoke Russian. ‘A little,’ I said. Even that was an exaggeration.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked in accented Polish.
‘Kaliningrad.’ As far as I understood, there was only one major road in this country called Kaliningrad. It went from here to the capital city, which was also called Kaliningrad. So my answer seemed a safe bet. Perhaps she was just checking we hadn’t taken a wrong turn somewhere.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Tourism,’ I said.
‘Turizm?’
‘We’re Australian.’
There was more shuffling of papers and rifling through documents. The border post was deserted except for us. If they weren’t going to let us in, I was hoping the guys on the Polish side hadn’t gone home. I didn’t fancy being stuck in a large field between the EU and Russia on this hot summer’s day.
Finally the woman came back with two forms, written only in Cyrillic. My Russian extended to reading the word ‘Russia’. It did not extend to filling out what I presumed was a customs form.
Sensing my plight, the lady started translating. ‘You have …’ she searched for the word in Polish. ‘Medicine … umm … drug?’
‘Nie. I mean, nyet.’
‘You have …’ she mimed shooting a machine gun. I shook my head again and she ticked no, before ticking all the no boxes. I guess she made a decision that we probably didn’t have any of the other things we were supposed to declare. Or that, since we were travelling on diplomatic passports and thus had immunity from criminal prosecution, it didn’t matter if we did. ‘Signature.’ She pointed at the end. I signed it; once for me, then once forging Tom’s signature. The border official smiled and nodded. I had passed Slavic form filling.
She stamped parts of them and handed them back. ‘If you get stop police, you show this, this, this,’ she said in basic Polish, holding up each document in a way that made me think she thought this was likely.
‘Ponimayu,’ I agreed in Russian. We got back into the car and drove into Russia. I had no real idea what the speed limit was, but I picked something likely and subtracted ten. I didn’t want to rely on the Russian traffic police being as helpful as the immigration officials, nor as mindful of our protected status.
On the Polish side had been productive agricultural fields. On this one was a no-man’s-land of wild grasses – prime farming land given over to a buffer between the former USSR and the current EU. The houses on the Polish side had been clean and tidy; here they were run-down, the gardens overgrown. Even the stork nests on this side looked more haphazard – the platforms were lopsided, twigs and sticks dangled off the edge. The new highway we’d glimpsed from the border lasted only a kilometre or so, before giving way to a narrow potholed road there was little danger of exceeding any speed limit on. I supposed that made it easier for the listless prostitutes dotted along the way to ply their trade.
Kaliningrad didn’t just look poor. Kaliningrad looked unloved.
Less than an hour later we were in the city centre. It was, without a doubt, the ugliest place I’d ever been. Every building seemed to be engaged in a personal vendetta to be more unattractive than its neighbours. Chunks of concrete had fallen out of most of the walls of the bloki that made up the bulk of the city’s architecture. Rust stains oozed from their exposed metal innards. The paving on the roads periodically disintegrated into gaping holes Tom pointed at and I swerved around. The creaks from the suspension made me suspect that our compact German car hadn’t been designed with Kaliningrad in mind.
So this was the USSR. The faraway enemy I’d been aware of all through my childhood. I hadn’t known much about the Russians. They always won the Olympics. My dad said it was because they cheated. And people there weren’t allowed to go to other countries, I’d heard. I asked my mum once how they stopped them. Had they built a wall around them or something? It seemed unlikely, but how else did you keep people in? Of course I hadn’t heard of Berlin then. I knew they had rubles instead of dollars, and it was cold there. In that youes-es-are place. But any day, they were going to invade, raining their atom bombs down on us. I was pretty sure of that.
Now that we were here, it seemed odd to have been so afraid of such a run-down, sorry-looking place. The curtain between us and them was more porous than it once had been, and I suspected staffed by more facilitative officials. But on this side, it was obvious that something still separated what was over here from what was over there.
But there were no exploding nuclear power plants or choking smog, and we wandered through city parks under shady trees, peeked into shopping centres stocked with nylon dresses and plastic shoes, took photos of awful architecture and navigated potholes, all without anyone arresting us. By late afternoon, we’d even made it to the beach – in Kaliningrad’s case, a geographically improbable strip of land called the Curonian Spit, just a couple of hundred metres across in some places, which started in Russia and ended in Lithuania – the border was halfway along.
We arrived there to find the quintessential Australian summer holiday playing out: kids with sandy feet and wet swimming costumes ran between the trees and tents, flicking each other with beach towels; men and women lounged in camp chairs in the shade, drinking beer or juice. I wound down the window to let the hot sea air in, hit by a pang of nostalgia for sweaty car trips before air-conditioning. All my childhood I’d imagined how different life in Russia was from Australia. It turns out we were all running around campsites with bare feet and salt in our hair.
We stopped for a late lunch at a wooden shack overlooking the ocean. Tom sat at a table and I went to see what there was. Or rather, I ran through a list of the four or five things I knew how to ask for in Russian with the waitress, and she nodded or shook her head according to whether or not they had it. If we’d had to rely on reading a whole menu, we would have starved. I ordered some salmon and chips plus a beer and a mineral water in some Polish–Australian version of Russian, and waited to see what we got.
‘Next time I’m bringing a menu decoder,’ I said to Tom, returning to the table.
‘Oh, it’s not that bad,’ he said. Of course, he had brought a menu decoder.
But today his remark didn’t upset me. Things seemed to have gotten better between us. Good, even. Summer was in full swing. The Ambassador had left for an extended stay in Australia. Gabby’s visit – and pep talk – had buoyed me. We were all booked for two weeks in Croatia and Corfu in August, and excited about the things we planned to do when we got there. We sat at a rickety wooden table, looking out over a sandy beach and calming ocean. A little of the distrust and doubt that had frozen inside me melted in the sizzling Russian sun.
One thing that hadn’t helped was the visit from the departmental staff counsellor a few weeks earlier. Every diplomat on posting got at least one visit per posting, and officers and their partners were encouraged to discuss any issues. I’d arranged a one-on-one with him in the restaurant of his five-star hotel, hopeful that he might have some advice. I’d been told it was confidential, but the fear that anything I said might end up affecting Tom’s career still constrained me. So I talked in general terms about ‘work pressures’ and ‘long hours’ and the unexpected difficulties I’d had managing the transition from a dual to single-career family. The psychologist looked at me over the top of his glasses. ‘Have you thought about doing some volunteer work or something? It sounds like you need to keep yourself busy.’ He looked around at the hotel lobby and then back at me. ‘It’s not like this is a hard place to live, is it?’ I wondered what they would write in my end-of-year diplomatic wife report if I hit him. Somehow I didn’t. But it was clear that Tom and I were on our own.
The girl from the beachfront kiosk counter brought us our meal – more or less what I’d hoped for. She put it down, smiled, and said something. I smiled and nodded in return.
‘What was that?’ Tom asked once she’d left.
‘No idea. So, have you seen it yet?’
‘What?’
I pointed to a grey car doing its third lap past us. It had blue Polish diplomatic plates, like our car, the first three numbers of which told you what embassy it belonged to – in this case, Russia. I remembered the code from the day I’d spent sitting in the Russian Embassy carpark, watching Russian diplomatic cars come and go as I’d waited for my turn in the visa queue.
‘They obviously didn’t believe two Australian diplomats would really come here for turizm,’ Tom said. Although I didn’t see why not. Australia and Kaliningrad seemed to be rather like-minded on summer holidays.
The two people in the grey car spent the rest of the day at the beach with us, and later that night we all went to a restaurant converted from an old castle. By coincidence it turned out we were staying in the same hotel, them in the room next door to ours. The second night we upgraded our room to one with air-conditioning, as they did about fifteen minutes later. Perhaps they were hot as well. They didn’t get in our way, and when I went the wrong way down a one-way street nothing happened, so perhaps they were even looking out for us. All in all, I liked to think they had a nice trip to the coast.
Tom and I did. We even seemed to be like-minded again. Maybe it was the hot beach, reminding us of carefree childhoods. Or maybe Mary had heard my prayer? Maybe things had just turned a corner. Or maybe I just wanted to believe they had?