The End of the Bolster
SARA WHEELER (born Bristol, 1961) is a traveller, journalist and broadcaster. Her books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard (Cherry was one of Captain Scott’s sledgers, and the author of the polar classic THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD). The book she most enjoyed writing, The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, was chosen as Book of the Year 2010 by Michael Palin, Will Self, A. N. Wilson and others. This year Jonathan Cape publish Sara’s Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2010 to celebrate her fiftieth birthday.
In 1981, I purchased a return ticket to Warsaw on LOT airlines. I was twenty, with a year of university behind me. Why Poland? I really can’t remember, except that the country had been in the papers a lot that year. I had been waitressing throughout the holidays and accrued the absurdly small sum to buy, in addition to the plane ticket, a month-long Polish rail pass.
It was already dark when I arrived in Warsaw, but I had the address of a government accommodation office and managed to get there on a tram. There was throughout the Soviet bloc at that time a scheme which arranged for visitors to stay in people’s homes. It was cheap, and I thought it would be a good way of getting to know Poles.
The office had a full-length glass frontage behind which a stuffed eagle moulted kapok. A heavy revolving door scraped through its revolution like an orchestra tuning up. Two gorgons swathed in black behind a Formica desk looked up, briefly. I could see that they found the interruption to their knitting an irritation. A double room, it quickly emerged, was all that was available. I said I’d take it. It was against the rules, snapped Gorgon One, revealing three gold teeth, for a single person to take a double room. She returned to her knitting with a triumphant clack of needles. I said I was prepared to pay double rates. ‘Also illegal,’ chipped in Gorgon Two, anxious not to miss out on the opportunity to ruin someone’s day. In addition, they alleged there was not one hotel room available in the entire city.
I deployed a range of tactics, including tears. No dice. It was dark, I was in a strange city without a word of Polish.
At that moment the revolving door spluttered to tuneless life once more. All three of us looked up. The crones muttered darkly, no doubt about the damnable inconvenience of a second customer. A tall, blond man with marble-blue eyes and a rucksack sauntered athletically into the room.
‘We’ll take the double room,’ I said to the crones.
She looked at her henchwoman. So it was all true.
The blond man put down his rucksack and held out his hand to shake mine. An elastoplast covered his right thumbnail. I knew from the first syllable that he was Australian. It turned out that he had already been on the road in the Eastern bloc for a month, so when I explained the non-accommodation situation, he found it perfectly normal that we should share a room.
We stayed in a high-rise in the industrial suburbs, guests of a saturnine family who had been instructed not to speak to us. (In those days, Poland was still a fomenting sea of suspicion, and people who rented out rooms were rigorously vetted.) So much for meeting Poles. Once we had settled in to our chilly billet, my new friend took up the cylindrical bolster that lay at the head of the double bed and placed it down the middle. ‘No need to worry,’ he said. ‘This is my half,’ and he pointed to the left side of the bed, ‘and that’s yours.’
The Security Services had been busy that year, doing what they most liked to do – shutting up everyone else, brutally if possible. Millions of Poles naturally reacted with anger, and in March Solidarity activists had coordinated an extraordinary general strike unique in the Eastern bloc. Tension had subsided somewhat, but the economy was a carcrash. Even though every food shop was empty, a queue snaked outside, the people waiting for some tiny rationed bit of something to be doled out from behind the counter. A Solidarity poster on the telegraph poles showed a black skull with a crossed knife and fork under it.
As for Teddy, following in the footsteps of so many of his compatriots, he had taken six months out to have a look at the world. His mother was a Pole who had arrived in Western Australia as a twenty-four-year-old refugee. She had married Teddy’s father, a wood-turner from Perth, and they had worked hard and made good. Teddy, who was twenty-four, was the youngest of seven. He turned out to be a fine companion, with a relaxed Antipodean attitude to everything that the Polish system tossed in our path. It seemed natural that we should travel together. Before leaving Warsaw we paid 20p for opera tickets in Teatr Wielki, installing ourselves in the magnificently restored Moniuszko auditorium to listen to a fine coloratura soprano sliding up and down Amina’s arias in La Sonnambula. Afterwards we sat in bars kippered with smoke, downing tiny glasses of vodka. We left the capital to wander through the mildewed rooms of baroque castles, and tore our jeans climbing to hermitages teetering on Gothic outcrops. We visited Teddy’s mother’s birthplace, where I took his photograph, and then travelled to the Tatra Mountains, where we swam in Lake Morskie Oko, climbed Mount Koscielec and ate spicy wild boar sausages. We discovered a new world – or so it seemed to us.
By the time we rode the Coal Trunk Line through the steel belt of Upper Silesia, I was struggling to ignore the fact that I really liked him. I kept telling myself that I’d be betraying the whole mature arrangement if anything happened between us. I had somehow absorbed the idea that travelling occurs in a separate moral universe, outside the confines of normal life. I know differently now.
One day, at the end of our second week together, we took an overnight train to Wroclaw. Early in the morning Teddy procured a cup of acorn coffee from a vendor through the train window and brought it to me, waking me by stroking my arm. When I opened my eyes I felt a rush of emotion. Despite all Poland’s exotic unfamiliarity, I learnt then that the most foreign country is within.
The end, or beginning, came when we visited Chopin’s birthplace, a modest manor in the Mazovian heartland. A group of musicians from the Warsaw Conservatory were giving Chopin piano recitals in the grounds; as we approached they were belting out mazurkas, but when we took our seats a young man began to play the incomparable C-sharp minor Scherzo. The fierce opening octaves uncoiled over forest, glades and the willowed hills behind the fast-flowing Utrata: a perfect setting for the music of an ardent patriot. But Chopin finished the piece at George Sand’s summer house in Nohant, France. He was twenty-nine, consumptive, and guilty at his self-imposed exile in Louis-Philippe’s France. Folded into the devotion, a betrayal. One forgot all that, though, and one even forgot Poland as the genius of the music took hold. The small amphitheatre of chairs gave onto a glade infused with the butterscotch light of late summer, and the intense final harmonies of the Scherzo – a climax of desire and longing – drifted away over the silver beeches. We sat there in the chequered shadow of the trees, Teddy rested his fingers on the nape of my neck, and that was the end of the bolster.
