When I’d agreed to give Tom a hand with ‘a bit of filing’, I’d imagined something less daunting than the five piles of papers, each several feet high, I was presented with when I reported for duty. Thousands of individual documents that needed to be recorded, labelled and put into folders.
‘So, they go in here. Somewhere.’ He opened a heavy door to a windowless room in the embassy’s inner sanctum, lined from floor to ceiling on all sides with beige files. He waved in their general direction. ‘And anything from before two thousand needs sentencing,’ he added. I raised my eyebrows. ‘You sentence old files. Close them on the system and destroy the paper copies. Or something.’ He handed me a password for the computer system and thrust an government archives manual my way. It was dated October 2002.
Over the next few weeks, with the help of the reference materials and some common sense, I developed a system – of sorts – for creating new files, closing ones that weren’t needed, and putting away the ones that were there. For eight hours a day, I sifted through documents on missile defence, the Belorussian economy, Polish elections, treaties, UN activities, EU politics, trade in services, agricultural products, chemical weapons, and put everything in some logical (to me) place. The documents on Polish–Australian discussions on an Antarctic treaty tempted me to get everyone involved a map. Finally I came to understand what diplomats do – what Tom had been doing these years, while I was tripping to Ukraine and catching buses to IKEA. Now it was my responsibility to file away the evidence of these years of his life, in a windowless room with a steel door.
It was a fascinating window into the real work of embassies, but it also meant we got to spend more daylight time together. We added a daytime walk in the now-spring air to our nighttime stroll, passing all the cafés, bars and restaurants, the architecture and buildings, the street corners and lanes we now knew so well, telling each other funny, interesting or sometimes sad stories about things we’d done there – reminiscing, before we’d even left. The Pilates classes were making the world of difference too, he said. When he told me the excruciating pain in his lower back was all but gone and he wished he’d done it years ago, I was too grateful to be mad.
I soon came to realise that Tom wasn’t the only diplomat who hadn’t found the time for filing. I separated all the files that dated from before 2000 and boxed them together. A stack of forty boxes came to stand against the wall. Millions of words, written by other diplomats in other times, on economic conditions, old treaties, the development of the EU and Poland’s accession to it. The history of this embassy, of Australia’s relationship with Poland, stretching back as far as 1970.
I closed the files on the computer system and took out the metal pins that had held them in place, along with the cardboard tags on top of the pins. ‘Place tag on top’, the tags read. Then I turned on a portable shredder that I hoped was up to the job and tuned into the information radio station, Tok FM. Although Argument FM would have been more accurate – half the time you couldn’t hear what the station’s guests of the day were saying for all the yelling at each other. And sheet by sheet, I shredded Australia’s diplomatic relationship with Poland over four decades, as Poles bickered in the background. A growing pile of metal pins and ‘place tag on top’ cards, freed from their confines, marked my progress.
I remembered how important all of those words I used to write in my job had seemed at the time. How the pressure to get them perfect felt like it would swallow me whole some days. The yelling when I hadn’t – in someone’s view – succeeded. Yet so much of that work would have ended up like these words. Filed away, until someone in another ten (or thirty) years – maybe someone not even born yet – one day came and shredded them. If you needed a reminder of the ephemeral nature of so much of what we call work, there would have been few better than this. No, the things that counted in life weren’t the thin sheets of paper in boxes like these.
‘How you going?’ Tom stuck his head in.
‘Twenty-five boxes down, fifteen to go.’
His head disappeared again, although I could hear him whistling from his office. Letting me know he was there.
I skimmed through the economic and political reporting, but I found myself lingering over the moments from people’s lives that were also captured. A bus crash that killed some young Australian backpackers. Security assessments on apartments in Saska Kepa. An Australian in prison who embassy officials had visited. The notes recorded that he had swallowed a lighter, and requested an operation to remove it. ‘Officer notes prisoner has previously swallowed a spoon’, the file note added. I wondered where that man was now. What he had swallowed since. There was a series of faxes from a former diplomat, trying to get a new pair of glasses from Canberra, and a copy of a handwritten card from an ambassador, responding to a request to be the godparent of a child. ‘I am only here for two years and being a godparent is the responsibility of a lifetime,’ he’d written. Diplomacy wasn’t just about the machinations of governments and UN bodies, but about intimate intersections between people from different countries. Some of which I’d been part of. Some, now, that I was the final witness to.
By the time I hit the 1980s, each document was a snapshot of a Poland that was a stranger to me. One hundred and twenty per cent interest rates, decade-long waits for a telephone line to be put in, and even then calls would only connect sporadically and randomly. Now, free wifi was everywhere. Mostly, though, the boxes were full of petitions for refugee status to come to Australia, typically from high-ranking members of the Polish elite. I sensed genuine sympathy in the file notes former diplomats had written to support them. Maybe my first teacher Agnieszka’s application was in here somewhere. Or that of the crazy jeweller Ola. Were the dreams all of these people had for a better life in Australia fulfilled? I hoped so, and then I shredded them.
I took off another tag. ‘Place tag on top’ it read, like all the others. In pencil, someone had added: ‘Come the revolution, all tags will be free’. It must have been one of the former diplomats. One of the ones who’d lived in the old apartments in Saska Kepa. Perhaps the one who had visited the spoon-swallowing prisoner. Someone in the grip of their own third Polish winter, perhaps. Or one of their spouses, like me, brought in to cull and shred. I imagined them, one day, writing this, filing it, never imagining anyone would see it again. I took the tag and pinned it to the noticeboard in Tom’s office. A down payment on a revolution.
The shredder went hungry as I reached the boxes containing the 1989 Solidarity movement reporting and the first post-communist elections in 1990. I was too enthralled not to read every page. The rise of Solidarność, the shipyard strikes, and then the predictions of Tom’s predecessors about what this new era for Poland might look like. This snapshot of a relationship between two countries – written, I sensed, by Australians who fervently wanted it to work. It had only survived this far because no one had bothered to file anything for decades. I took the tag off the file, pulled the metal pin out, and put the first of the thin pages, with their boxy typewriter print, to the shredder blades.
What was I thinking? I pulled it back, and threaded the pin back through the pages. I put the file and a dozen others like it in a separate box, got out the manual, and looked for a reference I thought I’d seen. ‘RTA/NA’ I wrote on the box in heavy black pen, before sealing it and logging it for dispatch with the embassy’s front desk. Return To Australia / National Archives. Someone in Canberra would receive it, catalogue it, and store it somewhere in our vast national memory. Perhaps no one else would ever know it was there. But I would. And that mattered. Some of what we do does matter.
When I was done, I took a last look through the records management procedures, to make sure I’d finished everything. At the back was a memo, detailing the process to get new files. They were all supposed to be approved by Canberra ahead of time, while dispatches to the national archives required prior written permission.
The phone rang. The airfreight company, confirming Bardzo had departed for Australian quarantine. I heaved a sigh of relief. Despite all the planning, ten days ago I’d found myself sitting in the vet’s waiting room, re-reading the quarantine form, a cold dread seeping into me. One of the vaccinations on the list was missing. I would have to start from the beginning again. What was going to be worse: trying to get someone to handle the crazy process for us, or telling Tom that I’d messed up? Neither option was appealing, and by the time it was my turn to see the vet, I was nearly in tears. I held out the pet passport and documents we’d sweated over together and explained the problem. Oh Jesus Maria, how could I have been so stupid?
He checked the forms. ‘Ah, I see. This one here, it is a combined vaccination, so it has these other two in it as well,’ he said.
I took a deep breath. ‘Oh, chicken, thank you,’ I said, using a commonly used substitute for a swear word in Polish that seemed particularly apt here.
‘What else is left? Just the final physical and flea treatment, yes?’ the vet said. He gave me some medications with instructions, filled in the remaining dates in Bardzo’s passport – including those for the following week – and stamped it. Bardzo was ready for transport, more than a week ahead of schedule. I could barely contain my astonishment, not to mention relief, that after this near katastrofa it had all come together. ‘Look, madam, I understand what the authorities are worried about,’ the vet said. ‘But the only time this cat ever goes outside is to come here. There is no possible way he has any of the things that would be of concern. He is not a threat to the environment. It is silly for you to be worrying about this when you have other things to do.’ With that, he sent me on my way.
If there was one thing I’d learned from Poland, it was this: When the rules are stupid, the best thing to do is just ignore them.
I filed my unauthorised files – mentally – under ‘someone else’s problem’, logged off the system, and and went to help Tom pack up for the day. We had a Pilates class to get to.
***
There was just one place that I had to visit before I left Poland: the railway hotel Dee had mentioned. No way was I leaving Poland when she had been somewhere I hadn’t.
We, I mean. There was just one place left we had to visit. From now on, Poland was going to be something we would do together. Better late than never.
We took off north-west on a bright May day, sharing the driving. By mid-afternoon we’d reached the town of Bialowieza, the jumping off point to the national park of the same name that straddled part of the eastern border between Poland and Belorussia, and the only untouched piece of land in Europe. The town was little more than a collection of wooden two-roomed houses along an empty street. Most were solid and proud, the smoke curling from their chimneys settling in the paddocks and throwing everything into soft focus. A few were abandoned, their roofs sagging like swaybacked horses. We were so close to the border – or where the border had landed this time round, anyway – that our phones switched themselves to Minsk time, an hour closer to Moscow. Although since it was the same time in Warsaw as it was in Madrid, that brought the phones in line with the sun. Poland had chosen a time zone based on geo-political aspiration rather than geographical longitude.
Just as Dee had said, one of the hotels in town had been converted from a disused train station. Our bedroom for the night had once been the station’s old water tank. Now, one floor of it was decked out in crimson wall paper, matching velvet drapes, and a wrought iron bed with crisp white linen, while a second floor was given over entirely to a cast iron bath. Fresh towels on the bed were wrapped in a gold bow, as though they were a present – no need to ask a grumpy babcia for her own towel here.
We gave the bath a leisurely try-out before strolling along the grassed-over railway tracks towards the restaurant, for dinner. A gentle waiter showed us photos of the transformation. So perfectly carried out, it was hard to imagine the doors we came in through were not the very ones kings and czars would have opened in search of a hearty meal after a hard day’s shooting, the samovar in the corner not the same one that may have warmed their tea. Yet this quaint, cozy dining room had once been a train station public toilet. I guess whoever restored it knew a Pole.
The waiter returned with an exquisite soup of borowiki and maślaki, followed by potato pancakes with caviar – placki in Polish but blini here, after the Russian. Yet when he came and checked on us part way through, I had to admit there was a problem. Both he and Tom looked concerned. Even Tom had absorbed enough Polish to register a potential issue.
‘You see, I know only two or three words for “delicious” in Polish and none of them are sufficient for how this meal tastes.’
Wyśmienicie, he suggested. I didn’t know the word, but the wy- prefix was equivalent to ex- in English. As in ex-ceed, excellent, ex-ceptional.
‘Yes, perfect, thank you,’ I said.
Tom and I drank white wine from crystal glasses, delivered to us on a silver platter.
‘Na my,’ Tom said. His attempt at toasting to us was hopelessly ungrammatical, but I knew what he was getting at.
‘Na my,’ I repeated.
When I’d searched online for the hotel – googling every combination of ‘Bialowieza’, ‘train station’ and ‘hotel’, nothing had come up. Shannon’s guidebook suggested the Best Western as ‘the place to stay’ in town. I’d had to get the name and contact details off Dee. Apartamenty Carskie, it was called. The Czars’ Apartments. As far as the outside world was concerned, this place may as well not have existed. How tragic. As tragic as it would have been to not have experienced it together.
When the alarm woke us in our haven the next morning before dawn, it wasn’t to photograph ministers of state or deal with demanding delegations, but to be among the animals and birds of the forest as they roused themselves from the night’s repose. We set out along the forest’s pristine trails with two student botanists from Spain, a Czech entomologist and Xenon, our guide, a retired teacher and amateur ornithologist. Our little gang curled through thick, verdant woodlands, the mossy ground helping us sneak up on boar, woodpeckers and hedgehogs, while the speckled sun illuminated more shades of green than I knew existed.
Xenon spoke perfect English, but seemed happy to have me to chat to in Polish. ‘You know, I grew up here, and when I was eleven I discovered a passion for birds,’ he said. ‘Since then, that’s all I’ve been interested in. When I was fifteen, my parents sent me to learn English with a pre-war baron. All I wanted to know was the names of the different birds!’
Tom and I held hands as we walked, and Xenon and I chatted. ‘Do you want me to translate?’ I asked Tom. He shook his head. I squeezed his hand and left him to his forest.
‘The forest is here only by a series of accidents,’ Xenon continued. ‘It was the hunting ground of Polish kings and Russian czars for centuries, and was protected so it would remain stocked with animals. Local villagers caught poaching here were shot.’ Xenon stopped. ‘Madam, your Nicrophorus pterostichus.’ He pointed to a nondescript mound covered in lichens causing the Czech to bound over for a closer look. We crossed boggy patches on trees that lay where they’d fallen, before stepping back onto the dirt trails covered in decaying leaves.
‘My friend was one of those responsible for getting Bialowieza protected,’ Xenon continued. ‘In nineteen twenty-five, he had been a young passionate scientist. The government had been meeting all day with scientists and loggers, trying to decide the future of this forest. The loggers wanted rights to harvest here and the government was considering it. It was late at night, and my friend pushed back his chair, and stormed out of the room. The government understood that if this brilliant young man was willing to risk his career for this, it must be worth it. So they agreed to protect it, and the first Polish national park came into being. Gentlemen!’ he called to the Spaniards. ‘This is the Picea abies you were after.’ The Spaniards snapped photos from all sides. He turned back to me. ‘So you see, the first time round Bialowieza was preserved by enforcing private rights to the exclusion of public rights. And the second, the other way around.’ Whatever your particular proclivity – bugs, birds, social history – Bialowieza had something to offer. He must have recounted these stories hundreds of times, but he retained the passion of someone sharing them for the first time.
I tried to imagine the whole of Europe looking just like this – everything I’d seen, everywhere I’d been, once covered only in this kind of forest. But it was hard to see past the few trees in my immediate vicinity.
‘Is your family from this area of Poland?’ I asked Xenon. ‘My family has always lived by this park – sometimes that’s been Belarussia, Ukraine, Poland. Wherever this park has been, that’s the country we’ve lived in. I think that’s why I like this place. After a day of being in my forest, I realise papers or documents or borders don’t matter. All you have is how you feel.’
Maybe this is what narodowość was. When borders and countries were so changeable, perhaps it was a good thing to carry your nationality inside you.
‘But you know,’ he said, ‘I have a brother in Chicago, and I went to visit him. I love Tom Jones, and he was playing in Las Vegas, so we got front row seats to see him. And you know, where ladies often throw their …’ he cleared his throat, ‘undergarments? Well, I threw my tie on stage. I am a man, but I can appreciate the beauty of a male voice. And do you know, Tom Jones stopped the show. ‘Who are you?’ he asked me. ‘I am Xenon, ornithologist from Poland,’ I said. ‘“In thirty years, no one ever did this before,” he said, and he played rest of the show to me. And after the show, everyone wanted to meet me. I was as famous as Tom Jones!’ I laughed and looked at Tom. I’d tell him that one later. Maybe over the sturgeon we had our eye on for our dinner that night.
The six of us stopped for a break near a wooden shelter. A Spaniard reached out to catch a leaf that fell from the sky. A Czech entomologist swatted a mosquito. Xenon hummed to himself. Each experiencing the forest in our own ways. This accident of history. Just like the one where someone in Canberra had slotted Tom’s name into an empty space in an organisational chart, under the word Warsaw, and I’d ended up returning to this place some of my ancestors had never left.
Tom and I sat down on a mossy bench, breathing cool, oxygen-rich air, dappled sun on our faces, thighs comfortably touching.
It felt so peaceful. But it wasn’t peaceful because of how it was. It was peaceful because of how I was.
Three years ago, I couldn’t wait to leave Canberra. All I could think of was how much more interesting my life would be in Warsaw. I’d learned since, it isn’t living in interesting places and doing interesting things that makes you happy. Heck, it doesn’t even make you interesting.
Now I could see that living an interesting life has nothing to do with where you are, what you’re doing, or the people you meet. It comes from making a choice, every day, to be interested in where you are, what you’re doing, and the people you meet. And if you make an effort to fill your life with people and things that make you want to be where you are, you wouldn’t really need to be anywhere else.
I leaned into Tom. ‘Co cię nie zabije, to cię wzmocni’.
He cocked his head.
‘What does not kill you makes you stronger. Want me to tell you why the cię is in the accusative, not the negative genitive?’
‘I think we both know I’m never going to learn Polish.’
But if I was going to write a Polish textbook, I would call it Polish: It’s really more an attitude than a language. And if you looked at it like that, then I think Tom and I did both learn Polish. In our own ways.
‘I don’t want to go back to Canberra,’ I said.
‘I think we’re both ready to leave.’
‘I agree.’
‘So …’
‘Perth.’ I named the sunny west-coast town we’d left more than a decade earlier, in search of the better career opportunities on the east coast.
‘Perth? What we would we do there?’
‘Spend time with your parents while they’re still around. See if our old friends still like us. Have fish and chips on the beach.’ A few of the things that had been kicking around in my mind.
‘For a job, I mean.’
‘Do you care?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
Tom closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. ‘Listen.’
‘I don’t hear anything?’ I whispered.
Tom nodded.