A Chip Shop in Poznań, page 11
Anita says there’ll be a party in the evening, that a DJ is coming from Berlin, that a famous Polish actor might turn up, that the whole event is being sponsored by an ice cream company, that I’m obligated to wear a T-shirt bearing the company’s witless mascot (an anthropomorphised ice cream), and that there’s a strong chance we’ll be very busy and I won’t enjoy myself. In the event, she’s spot on. Philip and I are flat out for hours. After the third or fourth of these hours, the workload starts to wind me up. I start to involuntarily kick and punch things, and, in delirious snatches, recite passages from a book by Roddy Doyle called The Van, wherein two mates in Dublin open a fish and chip van, grow increasingly sick of it, and then drive the bugger into the Irish Sea. Watching the chip oil froth vengefully, and bits of salt creep into a cut on my left thumb, I fantasise about doing similar, of somehow getting the container back on its wheels and pushing it into the Warta. Not that the party’s guests seem to be having much fun. Their pleasure, if it can be called such, looks like hard work to me. The music is repetitious and so is the behaviour of those that have come to hear it. There is something mindless and robotic about the fun they’re having. Maybe they all have tough jobs, or demanding relationships, next to which any trance-like experience is an indisputable tonic. I remember a Marxist, one of the Frankfurt School, saying that the culture industry is as much a factory as the metal works, wherein popular distractions are confected as nails and screws, as cakes and buns, each conforming to type, each to be gormlessly gobbled over the weekend before returning to work on the Monday. Anyway, less of all that because something’s up with the fryers. They’ve given up behind our backs, called it a day in the middle of a large order, only neither of us noticed, which means that a load of cod and chips have been bobbing around in dirty lukewarm oil, drinking its slick yellow indecency for about ten minutes. It seems that the main power supply has gone off. Philip is in a panic. About two-dozen customers are waiting for their food at the counter and the orders are still coming through. Several of the two-dozen start firing advice at me in Polish – clean the sockets, reset the mains, rinse the fish, give it a whack: they might be saying anything. All I can do is smile and shrug and say, Nic nie wiem, moje panie (I know nothing, ladies), and then point to Philip. Despite knowing of our troubles, the bar staff are still taking food orders, so the gallery at the counter keeps growing. I feel uncomfortable being looked at. If only that girl was here to see it. I argue to close the kitchen. A closed kitchen, I say, is better than a bad one. My superiors disagree. Keep taking orders! Keep taking the money! The whole palaver is a potential parable, the story of a capitalist who kept on taking money for what they could no longer produce, before finally being set upon by unfulfilled customers and slung into the river with a bag of profit hitched to their ankle, to the sound of a DJ from Berlin playing robotically to no one. Oh, boy. Two quid an hour.
We get through it. It takes an intervention from Anita, and about two hours of hard work, but we get through it. Around 1am I draw down the shutter. Seconds later, someone has the cheek to knock on it and call for service. Neither of us moves. They knock again. Philip pulls up the shutter. It’s the famous Polish actor. He and Philip talk in Polish. I ask Philip what the man wants and he says that the man is wondering if it’s too late to eat something. Without thinking twice, I turn from the sink and say, ‘Tak, późno, bardzo’ (Yes, late, very), but Philip is kinder than I am so tells the man it would be our pleasure. As I get on with the order, Philip tells me the actor’s name is Andrzej Chyra. Despite not knowing the guy from Adam, I tell Philip I’ve never liked the guy’s films and like them even less now, which makes him laugh. Anita drops in to take something from the communal locker. As she turns to leave she puts her hand on my lower back for a moment. I can’t help but think about the gesture. Philip puts on ‘Zadok the Priest’ by Handel and we work for another hour then go home.
22 July. I write to Meg Dobson, a friend from university, requesting permission to bring a guest to her wedding. I have Anita in mind. I have Anita in mind because she put herself there. She put herself there by asking, upon learning of the occasion, if she could be my guest. You’d be right to consider this a further twist in an already twisty narrative that I would be wise to draw a line under, and yet before the words had even left her mouth, before her unexpected request had been fully voiced, I was imagining her looking glorious in red, with me on her arm, either arm, in red, at the wedding, in Yorkshire, as my guest, and saying: ‘Yes, Anita, yes.’
38 Imagine a woman sat in a lay-by behind a makeshift stall selling strawberries. Imagine she’s been sat there for days with her strawberries and not a single car has passed. Her strawberries are wilting. She is wilting. Her business is wilting. Imagine this woman staked her late husband’s life insurance pay-out on the stall and the strawberries and the vendor’s licence and the one-way bus ticket to this godforsaken lay-by. Imagine all this and now imagine that, lo and behold, a car pulls up, and out jumps a wholesome family saying things like, ‘Gee could I do with some strawberries,’ and ‘What I wouldn’t do for a couple dozen punnets of strawberries, ma,’ as they approach the stall of the sad and lonely fruit seller. Now imagine the vendor not giving the slightest discernible toss about her sudden, miraculous, biblical change of luck, and you have an idea of Polish customer service. Not Polish hospitality, mind. That is a different matter. If you go to a Pole’s house there’s a chance you’ll never get out. And if you do get out, you’ll have put on a few kilos. No, the sort of behaviour shown by Lucas and the strawberry seller is reserved almost exclusively for the customer.
18
I miss the bus to Auschwitz (Wrocław)
24 July. I look out the window and see broad beans climbing up a wall, old track stacked like forgotten waffle, a neon crucifix above the treeline, no hint of lift or lilt in the land, and then, beyond Leszno, just darkness and my reflection.
At Wrocław station, a pianist plays a nocturne. She has a vagrant at her shoulder, conducting and advising, skipping and dancing at her side. He is a nuisance, surely, but she glides on nonetheless, untouched by his performance, immured by the music. As she plays, her feet shift a skateboard to and fro. At the song’s end, the man finds a coin from somewhere and makes sure the pianist takes it. Some scenes defy photography. Some scenes have to be told.
I move thoughtlessly towards the centre, as if drawn by a centrifugal force designed for tourists. I pass a woman selling flowers in front of a wound-up casino, then a Nespresso emporium, its halls decked with a billion capsules, pointless variations to keep pod lovers competing. I cross the road for a better look at a statue. Bolesław Chrobry is your man on top, your man overall, and I wonder what he did to earn his likeness in stone, and then stop wondering because it says on his plinth that he was king once. I’ll struggle to remember Bolesław Chrobry unless I bastardise his name. I go for Coleslaw Chob.
The Monopol Hotel looks a class above. It boasts of being a Party hangout in the 70s, when blunt functionaries in sharp suits met here to talk shop. The receptionist gives me a form to complete. I’m asked to nominate my social class: working class, intelligentsia, nobility. It would appear the categories are mutually exclusive, that one can’t be a noble peasant, for example, or an intelligent noble. I tick nobility for a laugh, then hand over the form. The rate is 370 zloty for a single. The receptionist enjoys delivering the price, enjoys giving a figure I plainly can’t rise to. Perhaps it makes him feel better, or better off, to be associated with such a sum. I try at the Moon Hostel up the road, but it only accepts groups, a measure against dodgy loners who spend unfit periods watching coffee capsules in the rain.
It’s 10.30pm and I’ve not eaten, so I pause my search and enter a place called Setka on the main ring road. I sit at the bar and consider my options. A flattering photo of each dish is displayed above the bar, doctored or workshopped to curry favour – żurek, pierogi, something that looks like dog food: vague brown chunks and bits of carrot in colourless jelly.39 On my neighbour’s advice I order żeberka (ribs) and a Tyskie beer. Marek is friendly. ‘Have you tried smalec?’ he says. I explain that I’m doing enough damage to my body as things stand, and don’t need to introduce unadulterated fat to my diet. Marek listens to my explanation and then orders two portions. I hope to God that one’s for him to eat now and the other’s to take home and grease his bike wheels with. No such luck. To be fair, the stuff isn’t bad. It has little nuggets of meat in it, not that I bother chewing; I prefer to get the thing down asap, as an oyster. Satisfying some dark sadistic impulse that he was probably born with, Marek then orders me a plate of śledź, of which the less said the better.40
Marek says he knows a vodka bar I’ll like. To get there we cross the old square, which, as Poznań’s, has a striking town hall and perimeter tenements with elaborate façades. Marek says the city was put up in stages by Bohemians, Austrians, Prussians and Poles, then brought down in one fell swoop at the end of the Second World War, during the Battle of Breslau, as the German city was then known.41
Marek was right. I like the bar. Too much perhaps, because it’s getting late and I still don’t have a room. Each time I say this to Marek, he says, ‘The hotels aren’t going anywhere. Let’s have one more.’ With each one more my concern loses weight, so that by the time Marek leaves at 4am to go to work at a casino I’ve reached the conclusion that I’m better off without a hotel, that I’m better off staying here until dawn and then getting on with it. An English banker about my age sits at the table next to mine. He says his name is Charles and is in town on business. I ask him what he thinks of Poland. ‘The women are all seven out of ten – it’s great!’ Charles wants me to know another thing, bless him. ‘And you know another thing – they all find me funny – it’s great!’ When Charles goes out to smoke, I return to the bar to order something to eat. A guy turns to me and asks why he shouldn’t kill me. From the look of him, the question isn’t rhetorical. He’s heard my accent and he’s upset that I’m English. He’s a cage fighter. He has scars all over his face and a shaven head. He reminds me of Begbie from Trainspotting. It’s obvious to both of us that should Begbie wish to, he could significantly reorganise my appearance, or do away with it altogether. He gets a little closer.
‘Why not I kill you? In your country they are killing my people.’
He’s referring to a murder in Essex and a general spike in hate crime since Brexit, both of which I know quite a bit about. I think about challenging his perceptions, then stop thinking about it, reasoning that the last person who challenged this guy’s perceptions probably no longer has perception. ‘Why not I kill you?’ he asks again. I say: ‘Because I like Polish people and I like Poland and I haven’t killed anyone. Now do you want a drink?’ We drink a vodka together, then he pushes me away, but in a nice way. At this moment, I see Charles noisily entering the bar with a couple of girls. I intercept him, believing that if Begbie got so much as a whiff of Charles, all hell might break loose.
I wake on the floor of a flat. The flat belongs to the grandmother of one of the girls that was with Charles. She is Canadian, or Polish-Canadian, studying in Wrocław for a term. Her grandmother is now in a retirement home. The balcony looks over a derelict building used by Spielberg in Schindler’s List. That’s what she says, handing me some tea. I stare at the derelict building, and the pupils playing basketball in the proximate schoolyard, and she says, ‘Charles left his number for you.’ I say, ‘Well you know what you can do with that.’ It is afternoon and she has to take a train so I’m hurried up and then returned to the street.
I am somewhere northwest of the centre. The streets take me to Budapest; they have that city’s lapsed classicism, its dirty good looks. I walk east without purpose, across bridges, past islands, then enter a large civic building, the Ministry of the Interior, or similar. The place is rammed. Long queues are snaking everywhere. I ask a woman what’s up and she explains that everyone here wants to be Polish. Sorry? They are Ukrainians seeking Polish citizenship, she clarifies. The sight of several hundred Ukrainians waiting for a stab at Polishness is beautiful. The scene has colour and severity: it is hopeful, restive, and all too human. The youngest children tear about on scooters, not caring a jot for their official identities. The woman tells me she is entitled to Polish citizenship because she has a Polish grandparent. ‘Poland wants its blood back,’ she says.42
I cross the River Odra then take a right on Oławska Street, which returns me to the main square. Just off the square, heading south, I trip on a pair of golden gnomes. The gnomes are pushing the same boulder in opposite directions. The small sculpture is called Sisyphus. The very sight of its implied futility makes me tired: I take a bed at the next hostel I come to. It’s above a fast-food restaurant on the corner of a street named for Kazimierz the Great, an old monarch who was made tolerant by lust.43
I take a nap then go out for the evening. In a traditional Irish pub on Plac Solny, a guy sits next to me at the bar and orders a vodka made from rye, not potato. The man is from Grimsby. We reel off spiels. I tell him I work in a chip shop and keep a diary. He tells me he oversees a chocolate factory on the edge of town, visits once a month to dip a toe in. Then Willy Wonka has an epiphany. ‘Sod it. You know what? I’m going to throw caution to the wind. I’m due in at seven tomorrow morning but I’m going to take you out for a nightcap. Carpe diem and all that.’ In my experience people who play the carpe diem card tend to do so between the hours of ten and midnight, when there’s barely any diem left to be carped. Willy takes me to a place called Mother’s Kitchen. ‘It’s an institution,’ he says. ‘Everything used to cost 4 zloty, but then Poland joined the EU and now it’s eight. I don’t want to tell you what the rising zloty’s doing to my blood pressure! It used to be peanuts to run a chocolate factory in Poland. I might have to keep going east – Bulgaria, Romania … What’s east of Romania? Anyway, I’m sure they know how to put a biscuit together.’ We eat steak tartare – raw beef and egg, strewn with onion and gherkin and mustard, manoeuvred with bread – and there is more beer and vodka. Willy says Brexit and Polish women are the same: ‘Both bad decisions. Both complicated. Both costly.’ I tell Willy he shouldn’t talk about Brexit like that.
By now it’s three in the morning – time I regained some focus. Walking back to the hostel, I am approached by a girl.
‘You don’t look like you’re from here. Are you English?’
‘Very, darling. How are you?’
‘I love the English language. Are you busy?’
‘Not in a great rush, no.’
‘Could I buy you a beer and speak English with you?’
I smile for about ten seconds. ‘Of course. Of. Course. Lead the way! Carpe diem!’
About three hours later I am naked in what I believe is called a safe room. It is certainly very padded. I can see the shape of two women in their underwear trying repeatedly to get somebody’s debit card to perform. My feet have turned black. What have they done to me? Hang on. Wait. I’m still wearing my socks.
One step back.
Upon entering the language-exchange bar I am presented with a glass of beer and positioned on a sort of chaise longue, where I am joined not by the girl who took a shining to me on the street but her friend, also a keen linguist. I don’t catch the girl’s name but we are getting on well enough so when a waitress asks if I’d like to buy my friend a drink I say, ‘Sure why not, get the girl half a lager.’ I am encouraged to consider something from the cocktail list. While scanning the list for something under ten quid I notice somebody undressing in the corner. When I discover that the cheapest drink on the menu is a vermouth-based cocktail called Mama Told Me Not To Come, costing 350 zloty, or 70 quid, I am all but convinced that something is up – or will be before long, at any rate. I inform the waitress I’m not in a position to treat my friend to a cocktail on account of outstanding student loan, at which point a gentleman resembling Maximus Decimus Meridius appears at the waitress’s shoulder to lend credibility to her suggestion that it’s ever so important that I be a good sport and buy a cocktail. I do what I have to, then get up to leave.
Only I don’t leave. My next memory is being naked on a banquette, peering gormlessly down at my own shortcoming, then spotting a pair of g-strung polyglots trying to hack my HSBC account. British to the core, I try to be a gentleman by lending the girls a hand in the buff. One of the girls – the better student of the two, if I remember, comfortable in all tenses – hands me my bank card and tells me to put on my clothes and wait for her outside. This sounds like a reasonable plan, so I do as I’m told. It is a lovely morning.
Walking back to the hostel, the key exchange goes something like this.
‘What hotel are you staying at, Benjamin?’
‘I’m in a youth hostel actually.’
‘Okay, see you later.’44
I miss the bus to Auschwitz. I’m told not to worry because I can get the next one. It’s the worst thing I’ve waited for.
The town itself seems to carry some of the atmosphere and historical burden of the camp. Fancy living in such a town; just working in a shop or at the petrol station, or running the kiosk next to the museum carpark, where I buy a roll and a coffee, and before which I have a disrespectful cigarette. Everything one does here feels disrespectful, every gesture inappropriate. It feels arrogant and unfair to be alive.
Tickets were sold to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Passengers were told to bring one suitcase weighing no more than twenty kilos – valuables only, efficiently commandeered. They emerged from the cattle carts breathing a sigh of relief. They drank the ditch water greedily, having not drunk a thing for days, and decided that nothing could be worse than that. Selection began immediately. Only those who could be usefully laboured to death were not led directly to the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower blocks to deter panic. At Birkenau – the purpose-built extension to Auschwitz, which was originally a military barracks – a railway runs through the main gates and up to the crematoria. Israeli schoolchildren, draped in light fog and the Star of David, walk its sombre length, kicking stones and talking about lunch. A man – God I could have killed the guy – takes endless photos as we are led around the two camps, honouring some queer instinct to – to what? Some things, surely, aren’t meant to be taken. The shoes. A thousand pairs displayed in a glass case, the shoes of the final intake, a mere week’s worth. Next to the shoes, the suitcases, labelled carefully by their owners so they could be easily reclaimed when that time came. The rollcalls at five in the morning that went pointlessly on for hours in winter, the barely standing prisoners all but naked, the temperature below freezing. Some died on their feet. Others ran for the electric perimeter, knowing they’d be shot. The shorn hair that was spun by those who’d lost it into profitable fabric, the sale and use of which aided the war effort against them. Photographic portraits of the final 5,000 are displayed in one of the workhouses. Their faces. How can I look at one, and be open to its tragedy, and not look at the others? Our guide, a Polish lady in a red hat, whose parents had been arrested by the Nazis while at church (she didn’t elaborate), tells of a visitor who saw the face of their mother among the gallery. The medical experiments of Mengele. We are told about these in detail. Can eye colour be altered without the use of an anaesthetic? Everything bombards you, but odd things anger or confound. The priest who pleaded with a Nazi guard to spare the life of a man about to be shot. It is his life or your life, was the guard’s reply. Then take mine said the priest. The guard did what he was told. Two-hundred calories a day if you were good. Ceaseless punishing labour, most of it pointless, all of it insane. The ugly ruins of one of the crematoria, untouched since its guilty detonation. The scale model of the gas chambers, mocked-up and put in a cabinet to give a clue of the density, hundreds of white plastic bodies, no larger than grains of rice, packed in to form a single gasping mass. Poland lost 20 per cent of its population in the war – Polish Jews, yes, but also Polish homosexuals and teachers and dissidents and children and parents and siblings and clerks and cleaners. Polish gypsies as well, a million of them. And for what? And for what? They should send every schoolchild to the Auschwitz museum, while their morals are responsive, while there’s room for new attitudes, while there’s time for new kindness. It is a compelling, horrible way to learn. I didn’t want to go to Auschwitz because I didn’t want to write about it. (I’m barely writing about it now; I’m merely putting down in useless words my fractured, awful experience.) I thought of the lines in Romeo and Juliet – ‘No words can that woe sound’ – and imagined using them as my excuse. I cry outside the bookshop, for the sheer disgusting cruelty of it all. But what good is crying? What good is anything in the shadow of this place? I say nothing for a day after Auschwitz: a pathetic tribute.
We get through it. It takes an intervention from Anita, and about two hours of hard work, but we get through it. Around 1am I draw down the shutter. Seconds later, someone has the cheek to knock on it and call for service. Neither of us moves. They knock again. Philip pulls up the shutter. It’s the famous Polish actor. He and Philip talk in Polish. I ask Philip what the man wants and he says that the man is wondering if it’s too late to eat something. Without thinking twice, I turn from the sink and say, ‘Tak, późno, bardzo’ (Yes, late, very), but Philip is kinder than I am so tells the man it would be our pleasure. As I get on with the order, Philip tells me the actor’s name is Andrzej Chyra. Despite not knowing the guy from Adam, I tell Philip I’ve never liked the guy’s films and like them even less now, which makes him laugh. Anita drops in to take something from the communal locker. As she turns to leave she puts her hand on my lower back for a moment. I can’t help but think about the gesture. Philip puts on ‘Zadok the Priest’ by Handel and we work for another hour then go home.
22 July. I write to Meg Dobson, a friend from university, requesting permission to bring a guest to her wedding. I have Anita in mind. I have Anita in mind because she put herself there. She put herself there by asking, upon learning of the occasion, if she could be my guest. You’d be right to consider this a further twist in an already twisty narrative that I would be wise to draw a line under, and yet before the words had even left her mouth, before her unexpected request had been fully voiced, I was imagining her looking glorious in red, with me on her arm, either arm, in red, at the wedding, in Yorkshire, as my guest, and saying: ‘Yes, Anita, yes.’
38 Imagine a woman sat in a lay-by behind a makeshift stall selling strawberries. Imagine she’s been sat there for days with her strawberries and not a single car has passed. Her strawberries are wilting. She is wilting. Her business is wilting. Imagine this woman staked her late husband’s life insurance pay-out on the stall and the strawberries and the vendor’s licence and the one-way bus ticket to this godforsaken lay-by. Imagine all this and now imagine that, lo and behold, a car pulls up, and out jumps a wholesome family saying things like, ‘Gee could I do with some strawberries,’ and ‘What I wouldn’t do for a couple dozen punnets of strawberries, ma,’ as they approach the stall of the sad and lonely fruit seller. Now imagine the vendor not giving the slightest discernible toss about her sudden, miraculous, biblical change of luck, and you have an idea of Polish customer service. Not Polish hospitality, mind. That is a different matter. If you go to a Pole’s house there’s a chance you’ll never get out. And if you do get out, you’ll have put on a few kilos. No, the sort of behaviour shown by Lucas and the strawberry seller is reserved almost exclusively for the customer.
18
I miss the bus to Auschwitz (Wrocław)
24 July. I look out the window and see broad beans climbing up a wall, old track stacked like forgotten waffle, a neon crucifix above the treeline, no hint of lift or lilt in the land, and then, beyond Leszno, just darkness and my reflection.
At Wrocław station, a pianist plays a nocturne. She has a vagrant at her shoulder, conducting and advising, skipping and dancing at her side. He is a nuisance, surely, but she glides on nonetheless, untouched by his performance, immured by the music. As she plays, her feet shift a skateboard to and fro. At the song’s end, the man finds a coin from somewhere and makes sure the pianist takes it. Some scenes defy photography. Some scenes have to be told.
I move thoughtlessly towards the centre, as if drawn by a centrifugal force designed for tourists. I pass a woman selling flowers in front of a wound-up casino, then a Nespresso emporium, its halls decked with a billion capsules, pointless variations to keep pod lovers competing. I cross the road for a better look at a statue. Bolesław Chrobry is your man on top, your man overall, and I wonder what he did to earn his likeness in stone, and then stop wondering because it says on his plinth that he was king once. I’ll struggle to remember Bolesław Chrobry unless I bastardise his name. I go for Coleslaw Chob.
The Monopol Hotel looks a class above. It boasts of being a Party hangout in the 70s, when blunt functionaries in sharp suits met here to talk shop. The receptionist gives me a form to complete. I’m asked to nominate my social class: working class, intelligentsia, nobility. It would appear the categories are mutually exclusive, that one can’t be a noble peasant, for example, or an intelligent noble. I tick nobility for a laugh, then hand over the form. The rate is 370 zloty for a single. The receptionist enjoys delivering the price, enjoys giving a figure I plainly can’t rise to. Perhaps it makes him feel better, or better off, to be associated with such a sum. I try at the Moon Hostel up the road, but it only accepts groups, a measure against dodgy loners who spend unfit periods watching coffee capsules in the rain.
It’s 10.30pm and I’ve not eaten, so I pause my search and enter a place called Setka on the main ring road. I sit at the bar and consider my options. A flattering photo of each dish is displayed above the bar, doctored or workshopped to curry favour – żurek, pierogi, something that looks like dog food: vague brown chunks and bits of carrot in colourless jelly.39 On my neighbour’s advice I order żeberka (ribs) and a Tyskie beer. Marek is friendly. ‘Have you tried smalec?’ he says. I explain that I’m doing enough damage to my body as things stand, and don’t need to introduce unadulterated fat to my diet. Marek listens to my explanation and then orders two portions. I hope to God that one’s for him to eat now and the other’s to take home and grease his bike wheels with. No such luck. To be fair, the stuff isn’t bad. It has little nuggets of meat in it, not that I bother chewing; I prefer to get the thing down asap, as an oyster. Satisfying some dark sadistic impulse that he was probably born with, Marek then orders me a plate of śledź, of which the less said the better.40
Marek says he knows a vodka bar I’ll like. To get there we cross the old square, which, as Poznań’s, has a striking town hall and perimeter tenements with elaborate façades. Marek says the city was put up in stages by Bohemians, Austrians, Prussians and Poles, then brought down in one fell swoop at the end of the Second World War, during the Battle of Breslau, as the German city was then known.41
Marek was right. I like the bar. Too much perhaps, because it’s getting late and I still don’t have a room. Each time I say this to Marek, he says, ‘The hotels aren’t going anywhere. Let’s have one more.’ With each one more my concern loses weight, so that by the time Marek leaves at 4am to go to work at a casino I’ve reached the conclusion that I’m better off without a hotel, that I’m better off staying here until dawn and then getting on with it. An English banker about my age sits at the table next to mine. He says his name is Charles and is in town on business. I ask him what he thinks of Poland. ‘The women are all seven out of ten – it’s great!’ Charles wants me to know another thing, bless him. ‘And you know another thing – they all find me funny – it’s great!’ When Charles goes out to smoke, I return to the bar to order something to eat. A guy turns to me and asks why he shouldn’t kill me. From the look of him, the question isn’t rhetorical. He’s heard my accent and he’s upset that I’m English. He’s a cage fighter. He has scars all over his face and a shaven head. He reminds me of Begbie from Trainspotting. It’s obvious to both of us that should Begbie wish to, he could significantly reorganise my appearance, or do away with it altogether. He gets a little closer.
‘Why not I kill you? In your country they are killing my people.’
He’s referring to a murder in Essex and a general spike in hate crime since Brexit, both of which I know quite a bit about. I think about challenging his perceptions, then stop thinking about it, reasoning that the last person who challenged this guy’s perceptions probably no longer has perception. ‘Why not I kill you?’ he asks again. I say: ‘Because I like Polish people and I like Poland and I haven’t killed anyone. Now do you want a drink?’ We drink a vodka together, then he pushes me away, but in a nice way. At this moment, I see Charles noisily entering the bar with a couple of girls. I intercept him, believing that if Begbie got so much as a whiff of Charles, all hell might break loose.
I wake on the floor of a flat. The flat belongs to the grandmother of one of the girls that was with Charles. She is Canadian, or Polish-Canadian, studying in Wrocław for a term. Her grandmother is now in a retirement home. The balcony looks over a derelict building used by Spielberg in Schindler’s List. That’s what she says, handing me some tea. I stare at the derelict building, and the pupils playing basketball in the proximate schoolyard, and she says, ‘Charles left his number for you.’ I say, ‘Well you know what you can do with that.’ It is afternoon and she has to take a train so I’m hurried up and then returned to the street.
I am somewhere northwest of the centre. The streets take me to Budapest; they have that city’s lapsed classicism, its dirty good looks. I walk east without purpose, across bridges, past islands, then enter a large civic building, the Ministry of the Interior, or similar. The place is rammed. Long queues are snaking everywhere. I ask a woman what’s up and she explains that everyone here wants to be Polish. Sorry? They are Ukrainians seeking Polish citizenship, she clarifies. The sight of several hundred Ukrainians waiting for a stab at Polishness is beautiful. The scene has colour and severity: it is hopeful, restive, and all too human. The youngest children tear about on scooters, not caring a jot for their official identities. The woman tells me she is entitled to Polish citizenship because she has a Polish grandparent. ‘Poland wants its blood back,’ she says.42
I cross the River Odra then take a right on Oławska Street, which returns me to the main square. Just off the square, heading south, I trip on a pair of golden gnomes. The gnomes are pushing the same boulder in opposite directions. The small sculpture is called Sisyphus. The very sight of its implied futility makes me tired: I take a bed at the next hostel I come to. It’s above a fast-food restaurant on the corner of a street named for Kazimierz the Great, an old monarch who was made tolerant by lust.43
I take a nap then go out for the evening. In a traditional Irish pub on Plac Solny, a guy sits next to me at the bar and orders a vodka made from rye, not potato. The man is from Grimsby. We reel off spiels. I tell him I work in a chip shop and keep a diary. He tells me he oversees a chocolate factory on the edge of town, visits once a month to dip a toe in. Then Willy Wonka has an epiphany. ‘Sod it. You know what? I’m going to throw caution to the wind. I’m due in at seven tomorrow morning but I’m going to take you out for a nightcap. Carpe diem and all that.’ In my experience people who play the carpe diem card tend to do so between the hours of ten and midnight, when there’s barely any diem left to be carped. Willy takes me to a place called Mother’s Kitchen. ‘It’s an institution,’ he says. ‘Everything used to cost 4 zloty, but then Poland joined the EU and now it’s eight. I don’t want to tell you what the rising zloty’s doing to my blood pressure! It used to be peanuts to run a chocolate factory in Poland. I might have to keep going east – Bulgaria, Romania … What’s east of Romania? Anyway, I’m sure they know how to put a biscuit together.’ We eat steak tartare – raw beef and egg, strewn with onion and gherkin and mustard, manoeuvred with bread – and there is more beer and vodka. Willy says Brexit and Polish women are the same: ‘Both bad decisions. Both complicated. Both costly.’ I tell Willy he shouldn’t talk about Brexit like that.
By now it’s three in the morning – time I regained some focus. Walking back to the hostel, I am approached by a girl.
‘You don’t look like you’re from here. Are you English?’
‘Very, darling. How are you?’
‘I love the English language. Are you busy?’
‘Not in a great rush, no.’
‘Could I buy you a beer and speak English with you?’
I smile for about ten seconds. ‘Of course. Of. Course. Lead the way! Carpe diem!’
About three hours later I am naked in what I believe is called a safe room. It is certainly very padded. I can see the shape of two women in their underwear trying repeatedly to get somebody’s debit card to perform. My feet have turned black. What have they done to me? Hang on. Wait. I’m still wearing my socks.
One step back.
Upon entering the language-exchange bar I am presented with a glass of beer and positioned on a sort of chaise longue, where I am joined not by the girl who took a shining to me on the street but her friend, also a keen linguist. I don’t catch the girl’s name but we are getting on well enough so when a waitress asks if I’d like to buy my friend a drink I say, ‘Sure why not, get the girl half a lager.’ I am encouraged to consider something from the cocktail list. While scanning the list for something under ten quid I notice somebody undressing in the corner. When I discover that the cheapest drink on the menu is a vermouth-based cocktail called Mama Told Me Not To Come, costing 350 zloty, or 70 quid, I am all but convinced that something is up – or will be before long, at any rate. I inform the waitress I’m not in a position to treat my friend to a cocktail on account of outstanding student loan, at which point a gentleman resembling Maximus Decimus Meridius appears at the waitress’s shoulder to lend credibility to her suggestion that it’s ever so important that I be a good sport and buy a cocktail. I do what I have to, then get up to leave.
Only I don’t leave. My next memory is being naked on a banquette, peering gormlessly down at my own shortcoming, then spotting a pair of g-strung polyglots trying to hack my HSBC account. British to the core, I try to be a gentleman by lending the girls a hand in the buff. One of the girls – the better student of the two, if I remember, comfortable in all tenses – hands me my bank card and tells me to put on my clothes and wait for her outside. This sounds like a reasonable plan, so I do as I’m told. It is a lovely morning.
Walking back to the hostel, the key exchange goes something like this.
‘What hotel are you staying at, Benjamin?’
‘I’m in a youth hostel actually.’
‘Okay, see you later.’44
I miss the bus to Auschwitz. I’m told not to worry because I can get the next one. It’s the worst thing I’ve waited for.
The town itself seems to carry some of the atmosphere and historical burden of the camp. Fancy living in such a town; just working in a shop or at the petrol station, or running the kiosk next to the museum carpark, where I buy a roll and a coffee, and before which I have a disrespectful cigarette. Everything one does here feels disrespectful, every gesture inappropriate. It feels arrogant and unfair to be alive.
Tickets were sold to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Passengers were told to bring one suitcase weighing no more than twenty kilos – valuables only, efficiently commandeered. They emerged from the cattle carts breathing a sigh of relief. They drank the ditch water greedily, having not drunk a thing for days, and decided that nothing could be worse than that. Selection began immediately. Only those who could be usefully laboured to death were not led directly to the gas chambers, which were disguised as shower blocks to deter panic. At Birkenau – the purpose-built extension to Auschwitz, which was originally a military barracks – a railway runs through the main gates and up to the crematoria. Israeli schoolchildren, draped in light fog and the Star of David, walk its sombre length, kicking stones and talking about lunch. A man – God I could have killed the guy – takes endless photos as we are led around the two camps, honouring some queer instinct to – to what? Some things, surely, aren’t meant to be taken. The shoes. A thousand pairs displayed in a glass case, the shoes of the final intake, a mere week’s worth. Next to the shoes, the suitcases, labelled carefully by their owners so they could be easily reclaimed when that time came. The rollcalls at five in the morning that went pointlessly on for hours in winter, the barely standing prisoners all but naked, the temperature below freezing. Some died on their feet. Others ran for the electric perimeter, knowing they’d be shot. The shorn hair that was spun by those who’d lost it into profitable fabric, the sale and use of which aided the war effort against them. Photographic portraits of the final 5,000 are displayed in one of the workhouses. Their faces. How can I look at one, and be open to its tragedy, and not look at the others? Our guide, a Polish lady in a red hat, whose parents had been arrested by the Nazis while at church (she didn’t elaborate), tells of a visitor who saw the face of their mother among the gallery. The medical experiments of Mengele. We are told about these in detail. Can eye colour be altered without the use of an anaesthetic? Everything bombards you, but odd things anger or confound. The priest who pleaded with a Nazi guard to spare the life of a man about to be shot. It is his life or your life, was the guard’s reply. Then take mine said the priest. The guard did what he was told. Two-hundred calories a day if you were good. Ceaseless punishing labour, most of it pointless, all of it insane. The ugly ruins of one of the crematoria, untouched since its guilty detonation. The scale model of the gas chambers, mocked-up and put in a cabinet to give a clue of the density, hundreds of white plastic bodies, no larger than grains of rice, packed in to form a single gasping mass. Poland lost 20 per cent of its population in the war – Polish Jews, yes, but also Polish homosexuals and teachers and dissidents and children and parents and siblings and clerks and cleaners. Polish gypsies as well, a million of them. And for what? And for what? They should send every schoolchild to the Auschwitz museum, while their morals are responsive, while there’s room for new attitudes, while there’s time for new kindness. It is a compelling, horrible way to learn. I didn’t want to go to Auschwitz because I didn’t want to write about it. (I’m barely writing about it now; I’m merely putting down in useless words my fractured, awful experience.) I thought of the lines in Romeo and Juliet – ‘No words can that woe sound’ – and imagined using them as my excuse. I cry outside the bookshop, for the sheer disgusting cruelty of it all. But what good is crying? What good is anything in the shadow of this place? I say nothing for a day after Auschwitz: a pathetic tribute.
