2 September. I get an email from Richard. He has found out about the spare room and wants to talk about the possibility of filling it. I give him a call and try to discourage the idea as best I can, noting the inclement language, the communist legacy, and the proximity of Germany, but with each warning his enthusiasm for migrating appears inexplicably to increase. We’d be two artists in exile, he says outlandishly. You could keep your diary and I could watch you do it and occasionally take a picture of something sad. But what about your teaching commitments in London, Richard? Don’t you have to teach the history of ideas to undergraduates next term? What would happen if you didn’t? Ideas might stop. And what about your friends in London, Richard, there must be one or two, and all the nice parks, and the West End shows and double-decker buses, and the nice cheery phone boxes and the Queen? People give their limbs to live in London, how could you be so ungrateful? How could you turn your back on tea with milk, the cross of St George, the toxic political climate? On steak and kidney pudding, on the rule of law and freedom of speech and venerable institutions like the BBC and Primark? We’ll see, he says, which means I’ve won the argument.
7 September. Richard has moved in. Deep down I’m pleased. He is a good friend: wise and candid and blue and wonderful. I do wonder what the British Embassy in Warsaw will make of his arrival though. I can imagine there being some talk on the matter, a junior ambassador having noticed a spike on the graph, a queer jump in the figures. Is this tit-for-tat migration? says the junior ambassador. Does it carry a threat? Are low-status Englishmen coming here to retaliate, to correct a bias, to steal all the jobs and claim all the benefits? The logic behind the wave is certainly abstruse, the junior ambassador goes on. It makes sense for you and me to be here, Jenkins, because we didn’t have a choice in the matter and they keep us in mansions with servants, but what explains this pair of dropouts pitching up without an ounce of white-collar between them? I say, Jenkins, put the kettle on, let’s get to the bottom of this!
Richard has taken my old room, the small one with two squeaky beds and a pair of motivational posters, which he takes down immediately. He arrived lightly: some socks, pants, a coat and a camera. He’s talking about travelling the country and capturing the Polish soul. Good luck to him.
8 September. I am at work with Kuba, the teenage brainbox who sounds like a Dutch prince when he speaks English. While we get on with our tasks, Kuba teaches me words that will impress my housemates – prysznic (shower), ekstrahuje (extracted), fart (a sudden stroke of luck). Then he teaches me some idiomatic phrases: chodzić na rzęsach, to walk on eyelashes, said when someone is drunk and can’t walk; rzucać grochem o ściane, to throw beans at the wall, said when someone is throwing beans at a wall and/or when a situation is futile; owijać prawdę w bawełnę, to wrap the truth in cotton, said when someone is being only partly honest; prosto z mostu, straight from the bridge, said when someone is being very honest; narobić bigosu, to make bigos, a meat and cabbage stew, said when someone messes something up; wypchaj się sianem, stuff yourself with hay, said when you want someone to leave you alone; bułka z masłem, a roll and butter, said when a situation is straightforward; and czuć miętę do kogoś, to smell mint on someone, said when you are attracted to someone. They are all nice phrases, so much is admitted, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever have occasion to use them.
In the evening there is a DJ from Berlin (are they from anywhere else?). Kuba gets to go home at a reasonable hour because he is a child but I’m forced to stay until 2am. When Anita told me I’d have to work late, I said straight from the bridge that she could stuff herself with hay, but I was throwing beans at a wall. In the event, the shift is a roll with butter: I won’t wrap the truth in cotton, I’m walking on eyelashes by the end of it. As I’m closing up, a flirtatious customer buys me vodka shots and invites me to a festival in the woods (not a Polish idiom), but I don’t smell mint on her so go home to generally make bigos.
18 September. Asia wrote to me a month ago. She’s after English lessons and someone recommended me. We meet at a café. She tells me she used to live in Boston, Lincolnshire, where she worked in a factory. The work was not hard but boring, of course. Enough to scream sometimes. She was treated well, enjoyed the Slavic atmosphere at the factory, didn’t make any English friends but didn’t experience any hostility either, far from it. She shows me pictures of Boston on her phone. We talk about the European shops on East Street and The Folly and Goldfinger. She is pleased I know the place, that I talk of it fondly, that we have it in common. Her plan is to get sufficiently fluent so she can return to Boston and manage the factory. I ask about her studies in Poznań. She sighs, scratches her throat. ‘My heart is in Boston,’ she says, and I think: it’s funny where hearts end up.
20 September. Anita was hit by a car while cycling. She’s on crutches and I’m walking with her to the taxi rank. It might not be the best time to do so, but I say: ‘You do realise, Anita, that if I was able to have a relationship with anyone in Poland, then that person would be you.’ She stops, asks me to repeat myself, listens to me repeating myself, and then says that she didn’t realise that, didn’t realise that at all, says that she was under the impression I’d met someone, months ago, or that I simply wasn’t interested in her, not like that, not anymore, because after she opened up to me, back in the spring, and said that she was fond of me and wanted more and kissed me – which wasn’t easy for her, by the way – I did nothing, nothing, and so she closed herself, called in her feelings, and let me go. I say: ‘I didn’t do nothing. I did something. I did something several times in fact. I bought you that book by Ian McEwan. I gave you that shell. I kissed you, on 16 June, outside the Sheraton Hotel. I wrote to you, answered you, always said yes. I tried to bring you closer, to encourage intimacy, like that time by the river, when we were waiting for the delivery, when I put my hand on your side and you rejected me.’
‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ she says.
‘Really?’ I say.
‘Really,’ she says.
I give this some thought, as much as you can in a matter of seconds, and then laugh quietly and say, ‘You thought I did nothing. I thought you did nothing. We should have talked more. But what now?’ At this she can only sigh, and I know that’s it.
‘I was open to you but now I’m not. I have met somebody. It’s just an ordinary thing but – I don’t know – things have changed. Besides, it’s hard with me. I’ve been made hard.’ I know what she is referring to, or partly. She sighs again, and it’s a nail in a coffin that was ready months ago. ‘Benjamin, being in a relationship with me is like being in a war.’ A taxi pulls up. She gets in it.
‘I’m a good soldier,’ I lie.