Tom and I spent two weeks in Croatia and Corfu, sleeping till noon, and spending our waking hours eating grilled vegetables and fish, drinking thick brewed coffee and cheap local wine, and walking on the beach. We had learned a lesson about trying to cram too much into our holidays, and tried to make more time just to relax. Although we’d bussed and ferried through between our two destinations; despite the flight, Tom said he’d much prefer to go overland. In fact, I had gone overland all the way from Warsaw, through the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, meeting Tom in Split on the Dalmatian coast. I was no longer traversing the region on Google Maps but in real life. We returned fatter, browner, and rested.
By mid-September, we were waking again most mornings to overcast skies and a chill breeze. The ambassador was back, and Tom was once again spending long days at the office. All too soon, our memories of the Adriatic coast were as faded as our tans.
At least I had a new friend. Stacey, an American, wrote for the Warsaw Insider like I did, although she did real journalism besides; pieces for US public radio, freelance news stories about current events, as well as guidebooks when funds were low. She was here with her French boyfriend, who worked for an international company, although on local conditions, not expat ones. We’d added each other to our coffee catch-up schedules.
This morning Stacey and I had a specific goal: she was writing a story on a prison program that was putting inmates to work cleaning up old Jewish cemeteries, and she asked if I would help her with interpreting some interviews. And now it was me that had the car that she needed to get there. I was happy to help out. I had been to the Jewish cemetery in Praga and been shocked at how run-down it was.
‘Do you think this is OK to meet prisoners in?’ she said, greeting me at her door. She had on a baggy top, teamed with a loose pair of pants.
I pointed to my own floppy T-shirt and flowing skirt. I’d had exactly the same thought. I had no idea what to expect. I imagined great, hulking men with tattoos and missing teeth who hadn’t seen a female in years.
‘You know you’re lucky to speak Polish,’ Stacey said, once we were driving. ‘I’m limited to who I can find that speaks English. I got the tip on this project from Warsaw’s Chief Rabbi – he’s American.’
‘Maybe. It doesn’t mean life here isn’t frustrating, though. I was trying to talk to someone from the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity for a story – have you heard of it? You know, the red heart-shaped stickers you see everywhere?’
‘Oh yeah, I’ve always wondered what they were!’
‘Turns out, it’s a big charity here. I thought it might be interesting to write about it. So I emailed some questions to the media spokesperson. A week later I hadn’t heard anything, so I followed up with him. He said he’d got the questions, but they were stupid and he wasn’t going to answer them. So I just ended up asking my cleaner. She told me that it was a really big deal when it started, because it was the first big charity event in Poland. Under communism they hadn’t had charity, it was something they associated with the west, and so when they started their own, it felt like a step towards becoming more capitalist, more developed.’
‘So did you have enough to write the story without anything from the organisation?’
‘This is the thing. A few days later, he sent me the answers anyway. If they’re going to be helpful in the end, why start off being so belligerent?’
‘Who knows. I read about some Polish football fans in Poznan. Their team lost, so they went on a riot in the main town square, and destroyed a fountain. The next day they had a whip round and all chipped in ten zloty to fix it up.’
Stacey’s Polish might have been limited, but she followed local events more closely and had more Polish friends than any other foreigner I’d met here. Their last Christmas they’d spent just with Polish people, she told me, enjoying the local traditions – down to the carp living out its last few days in the bathtub, without which no Polish Christmas would be complete. My attempts to learn Polish had helped me meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise. But at the same time I was coming to realise the limitations of communicating in a foreign language also acted as a barrier to really getting to know them. Stacey never felt like she had to do things in Polish. She just got on with it in English.
The final turnoff was about forty-five minutes from where we’d started. It was a typical Polish town on the outskirts of Warsaw. Concrete bloki, ugly power poles. Even though today was warm in the sun, the streets were largely deserted, except for the odd babcia on a bicycle. And the leaves had already started to turn. They knew what was ahead. As did I.
We drove slowly towards the address we had, not quite sure what we’d find. We parked facing the road, in case we needed to make a quick getaway.
Inside the cemetery gates, a dozen young men were clipping grass and bushes that had been left to their own devices for decades. Others were down on their knees, scrubbing mosses and swastikas off headstones ravaged by Mother Nature and human nature alike.
I found the project coordinator and, after some brief introductions, she brought over the two prisoners who had agreed to talk to us about the project. As soon as they left the cemetery grounds they took off their hats, and wiped their brows. They stood before us, caps clasped respectfully in front of them. Eighteen or nineteen years old, handsome and healthy.
‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ I greeted them, using the formal Polish. Polish differentiated between adults you didn’t know, who you used a formal language with, and people you did know, children, or subordinates, who you could be more informal with. Neither Agnieszka had covered etiquette in addressing prisoners, so I stuck with respectful.
‘Good afternoon, madams,’ they replied, nodding at each of us in turn. Their heads bent down, they had to look up to meet our eyes.
I interpreted for them all as best I could, as the woman told us about the program’s origins – a match between the tiny Jewish community left in Poland who wanted help to restore their cemeteries and prisoners with an ability to undertake community work. There had been a program of education and training about Jewish history and culture before the prisoners were allowed to come and work in the cemeteries.
On Stacey’s behalf, I asked one of the prisoners what kinds of things they’d learned in the educational program.
‘We learned about Jewish history and culture, and about the history of anti-Semitism in Poland,’ one said. He talked so softly that I had to lean in to hear.
‘Yes, the level of anti-Semitism in Poland is quite high,’ the other boy said, ‘but Jewish and Polish histories and traditions are very connected. So it’s good to know more about those things. A lot of Polish history is also Jewish history.’
‘And we learned other things, too,’ the first boy said, ‘about how to behave in a Jewish cemetery. Like you should cover your head.’ They held up the hats in their hands.
‘I didn’t know that. Thank you for telling us,’ I said.
Their heads remained bowed.
‘See that train station at the end of the road?’ the supervisor pointed. ‘That’s where the Jewish people from this area were taken from. They were rounded up and put on trains that left from there and taken straight to the gas chambers of Treblinka.’
A train station couldn’t just be a train station in Poland. It had to be a place where miserable, inhuman events had occurred. Scratch the surface and the burden of this country’s history was always there. Even on a bright early autumn day.
We said our thank yous and goodbyes and got back into the car.
‘Even Polish prisoners are intelligent and thoughtful. What is with that?’ Stacey voiced my own thoughts. I got no sense that they were just saying those things because of the supervisor standing there.
‘Hey Stacey, while we were there, I was thinking about something. The Brodno Jewish Cemetery. The one in Praga. Do you know it?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s not that far from you, actually. On the thirty-two tram. Anyway, it’s … what’s a word to describe it? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have the right vocabulary for Poland.’ I described for her what I’d seen when I’d been there. The overgrown grasses, rusted iron fence around the outside, many of the bars looking like they were coming loose. The small guardhouse at the entrance, its door ripped out, with broken windows. Smashed bottles, rubbish and piles of old clothes were strewn around. After a few hundred metres, the silver birches and tangled undergrowth – pretences of a normal park – gave way to piles of headstones, ripped up and stacked together. Like a giant game of dominoes, after all the blocks had fallen. Most were broken from having been thrown on top of others. Moss grew in the shadows left by the inscribed names. I’d read that Jewish headstones were routinely used by the Nazis as paving materials – ground up for mortar, laid down for roads. These ones had been piled up to be taken away, but the war had ended before they could be used. They’d sat there, in those piles, ever since. And in the middle of them all were the coals of campfires, surrounded by broken beer and vodka bottles. For me, it was the ultimate evidence of the holocaust: that of all the thousands of descendants of these people who should have been demanding this be righted, there weren’t any left to do so.
‘You know, I’ve taken a few visitors there now. Shown them inside it. Pointed out the broken bottles and the homeless people sleeping under the trees. Do you think that’s OK?’ I said.
‘What, to go in there?’
‘To show it to people like it’s just a tourist attraction. Like Old Town or something.’
‘You don’t think it’s a story worth telling?’
‘I just don’t know that it’s my story to tell.’
‘If you do it respectfully, in the hope that someone, somewhere, is one day outraged enough about it to do something about it, then I think it’s OK. Would you take me one day, to show me?’
On that basis, I agreed.
***
By late October the bold wind had denuded Warsaw’s trees of their glory, but temperatures were still fighting their way into double figures. I willed these precious days to last, all too aware I was destined to fail.
Still, Shannon and I decided to take a punt, and go for a picnic at Zelazowa Wola, birthplace of Fryderyk Chopin, while we could still manage to be outside. Polish babcias might have picnicked with grandchildren, snow, sleet or shine, but I was never going to be a Polish babcia. The evidence was overwhelming.
Poland’s plentiful supply of intelligent, caring nannies that were cheap by Canadian standards meant that Fee’s arrival – just over a year ago now – hadn’t slowed Shannon down a great deal. She’d even taken up salsa dancing in the last few months, showing far more enthusiasm – and doubtless talent – for it than I had. Although some things were proving trickier for Shannon – shopping on public transport with a pram, for example. So now, in addition to keys to each other’s houses, we both had keys to what had effectively become a communal car. Our own little piece of communism. We loaded up our car and took off for the country, past the messy array of florists, fruit and vegetable stalls, and funeral parlours that lined the route west out of town.
Shannon laughed when I told her our latest news – that we’d negotiated with Anthea to keep Bardzo, the cat.
‘Couldn’t let him go?’
Actually I’d been making arrangements to ship him to Dublin when Tom told me he wanted to keep him – that having the little fluff ball around made him feel calmer. I changed tack and negotiated with her to keep him instead. I was trying to grasp hold of anything that might help keep Tom on track at the moment.
The sun strobed through planted pine forests on either side of the road. A rare blue sky day in Warsaw at this time of year. Just that was making me feel joyful. Fee napped in the back. We were barely fifty kilometres from Warsaw, but it could have been five hundred. I thought of all the times at home that I’d complain about the odd rainy, overcast day. I’d never thought to be thankful for the days it was like this. I vowed to always appreciate good weather at home, knowing it would just be a matter of time before I didn’t.
I was so transported by the scenery and the comfortable chitchat with Shannon that I nearly missed it when a man in a black uniform jumped out from by the road and waved us over. I pulled up behind the police car I could now see behind some bushes.
The policeman sauntered up to the car and peered in. ‘In a hurry, madam?’ he asked.
‘Very sorry, sir …’ The policeman barely looked twenty. But with a black uniform that beefed him up like an American football player, not to mention the gun hanging from his belt, I felt suitably intimidated.
‘I’m from Australia,’ I added. An oldie but a goodie.
Not this time. ‘They don’t have speed limits in Australia?’ He asked for my licence and ID.
Every Polish person over the age of eighteen had to carry an identity card at all times. In lieu of Polish ID cards, people like Shannon and I had diplomatic cards – giving our mission, dates, and diplomatic status. I was asked for it whenever I checked into a hotel, if I made a large credit card purchase, or when dealing with any kind of government function. I told Tomek once that we used our driver’s licences like that. He laughed and told me that it must be harder to get a forged licence in Australia than it was in Poland.
Shannon turned to me as soon as the policeman had taken it back to his car. ‘That’s surprising,’ she said. I knew exactly what she was referring to. My diplomatic identity card matched the diplomatic plates on the car. They both signalled the same thing: ‘immune’. I would love to say that it never affected my behaviour. But the Polish legal blood alcohol content for driving, of zero point zero two, seemed too low to me, so I just stuck to the higher limit we had in Australia. Given I was exempt from breath-testing, I thought that was restrained. More restrained than Tom had been a few times – and others. I’d seen some, shall we say, inventive driving around town from the blue-plated cars.
The policeman returned. ‘You are with the Australian Embassy?’ I confirmed that I was. He handed back my documents. ‘Please keep to the speed limit in future,’ he said. I confirmed I would. A polite gesture on my part, since we both knew the laws didn’t actually apply to me.
‘No wonder the people who’ve been doing this a while lose perspective,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if they’ve forgotten they’re just normal people doing a job.’
‘To them it’s not a job. It’s a way of life,’ Shannon said.
If you spent enough years being feted as a VIP, having people tell you how clever and amazing you were and never contradicting you – not even having to obey laws – it wasn’t surprising it would affect you. I just wondered if it was inevitable that it would affect us. ‘You know, we went to dinner at our ambo’s house a while ago. He was there with someone he introduced to us as one of his “very best friends”. But he hadn’t known the name of his wife.’
‘ “Very best friend” has a different meaning in the diplomatic world.’
‘You imagine they must be these really amazing people, don’t you. Diplomats, expats. Like the women at the IWG, who’ve lived all over the world.’
A flick of one eyebrow expressed Shannon’s dismay at my women’s group membership anew.
‘I know, I know, I’ve been just as dismissive of them. Their lives sound amazing on paper, and you meet them and they’re somehow disappointing. But when it comes down to it, most of them – most of us – are just normal people, trying their best to get by.’
‘We know that. But they don’t want you to let on. It’s part of their game.’
‘What worries me is that I’m not sure if Tom is “we” or “they” anymore. From the way he acts at the moment, it’s like he thinks diplomatic immunity covers liver cirrhosis and lung cancer.’
‘Is he okay?’
‘Yeah, of course he …’ I gave up. ‘No. No, I don’t think he is fine. I don’t think we are fine.’
Things had been more stable recently. Tom had been coming home after work and staying home. He was trying to cut down on the smoking and drinking. If he went out, I knew where and who he was with. On the surface, things were normal.
Except normal wasn’t how it had been before. Because inside me, something had changed. I demanded to know where he was going and when he’d be home. I panicked if he was ten minutes late. I was on edge every time he came in, wondering if this was another night we were going to have a row and he was going to leave again. Suspicion, doubt and misgiving had seeped into our marriage, forcing their way into cracks I didn’t even know had existed and hardening like concrete. I felt them, sitting inside me, threatening to burst my heart apart. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him; I didn’t trust us. What if these feelings never went away?
‘Don’t forget I’m here if you need,’ Shannon said.
‘Thanks. That means a lot.’ But I didn’t know what to ask for.
We arrived at our destination, and I parked. A parking space in Poland was defined as somewhere you could fit the car. Slightly chaotic, but very practical.
It didn’t take us more than twenty minutes to wander through the house Chopin was born in, a thatched four-room cottage adorned with a few mementos: his birth and christening certificates, some musical scores, a piano (of course). I didn’t know much more about Chopin for it. But the cottage was surrounded by manicured lawns bordered by bursts of late autumn colour that lifted my mood.
‘You could almost forget you were in Poland here, couldn’t you?’ said Shannon, casting her eye around for the perfect place to park Fiona’s pram and set up the picnic blanket. We settled on a patch of grass off the path, in the priceless fragments of the day’s remaining sun. Shannon started setting out our provisions, Fee tottered about, and I lay on the soft grass, and closed my eyes. Shannon was right. The whole thing was like a game. As made up as a playground one, and with rules just as defined. How did you win, though?
‘Proszę pań!’ A Polish voice snapped me back. I looked up to see a guard marching towards us. He reached us, huffing. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Making a picnic?’
‘Nie wolno!’ It is not allowed.
‘But there no any signs …’
‘Of course there aren’t any signs! Why would you need signs to tell you you can’t do something that it’s obvious you can’t do!’ The guard stood, hands on hips, red-faced from the exertion of being angry at us.
‘Picnics are nie wolno?’ Shannon was already making moves to pack Fee and our provisions back into the pram.
The guard’s decision on picnics was going to be final and no correspondence would be entered into. We were back in Poland. We moved to an area with some benches, a little way away. The tinkling sounds of Chopin piano pieces from outdoor speakers followed us, as did our guard, to make sure there were no further picnic transgressions.
‘Why have such lovely expanses of grass just to look at?’ Shannon said as we arranged our blanket and food on a wooden bench set up for the purpose. But we really should have known. In parks and gardens in Poland, paths were for walking on and grass was for looking at. The babcias informally kept order when formal grass enforcement personnel weren’t around. There weren’t any signs. You were just supposed to know.
‘For all the dogs to shit on?’ Despite their apparent reverence for grass, Polish people thought nothing of letting their dogs crap on it. In Australia no one would go out walking their dog without a plastic bag, as much because of the fear of the social embarrassment of being caught without one as the fine. So maybe there was something to be said for rules – and the cultural pressure to conform to them. But I would say that. I was Anglo-Saxon.
The sound of more shouting reached us. Two large Polish babcias had set up a blanket on the bank of the garden’s stream. The guard stormed over to them. ‘Nie wolno. NIE WOLNO!’ he was yelling at them.
One of the women stood up and yelled back at him. He yelled back at her. The other joined in from the blanket, where she continued setting out little dishes of food. The guard took a step back, and the woman a step forward, all three yelling the whole time. Chopin’s piano piece reached an appropriate crescendo. The guard took a few more steps backward, and the woman advanced. Finally the guard threw his hands up in the air and retreated, marching back across the forbidden grass. The woman pursued him, shaking her fists. When she was satisfied she’d seen him off, she returned to the blanket, where her friend had continued to set up their picnic, never missing a beat.
I chided myself. You might hardly ever win an argument with a Pole. But they’d never respect you if you didn’t show you were willing to fight.