A Chip Shop in Poznań, page 15
9 October. I am having lunch with Richard at the café on our street. Cucumber soup followed by pierogi. Not a mouth-watering prospect on paper but tasty in the event. I leave Richard to his coffee and pop out to buy some flowers for Anna. You see, I rented out my room while I was away for a few days. It was snapped up by two Portuguese students about to start a term at the university. Anna hadn’t enjoyed the experience so I thought I’d make amends with some flowers from the florist up the street – Kwiaty & Miut. I pick a blue variety and am asked for 80 zloty, so I give half the flowers back and pay 40. On my way back to the flat I enter the café to collect Richard. Several of the café’s staff are on a cigarette break outside. They watch me enter and approach Richard with the flowers. When I say something banal and heartless to Richard like, ‘Do you know how much these bloody things cost?’ they think I’m saying something heartfelt and romantic, for I can see them laughing outside and even parodying the scene. They probably think they’re onto a choice bit of gossip, i.e. the immigrants are in a relationship. On our way out, I make a point of offering one of the flowers to the antagonist, the waiter who camped me up, explaining in Polish that the flower is for him because both are pretty. He has nothing to say but accepts the flower at any rate.
53 As well as Trigger from Only Fools and Horses, I guess I am referring to the paradox of Theseus. How different does a thing have to be before it becomes a new thing?
54 Local pastries stuffed with poppyseed paste. The recipe is legally protected.
55 It is said that a boy becomes a man in Poland when they’ve built a house, grown a tree and had a son. Presumably, a girl becomes a woman in Poland when they’ve seen a boy do these things.
24
The Manchester of Poland (Łódź)
12 October. I go to Łódź because people say I shouldn’t. I take a train. Beyond Poznań the scene opens, or empties, and the frame is full of field and chimney, those laborious opponents, the latter ringed in white and red, the colours of Poland, the colours of England. A cemetery is fully lit with flowers. A farmer is tilling the land with a dog at his side. We pull into a station: two coppers are waiting on the platform. I watch as a passenger is led along the platform and delivered to the coppers, who put him in the back of a van. The whole thing is enjoyed by those on the platform, and by those on the train, who line the corridors to feed off the mellow-drama. It’s something to tell the kids about.
Łódź doesn’t have a central train station. It gets by with two on the edge – Widzew on the eastern front, Kaliska on the western. I’m told this by a fellow passenger when we emerge at the former. She noticed my uncertainty, offered to demystify, then puts me on a bus into town. It takes the bus an hour to work its way in, to build up the courage. An estate of blocks in green and gold, and then a market teeming with flowers and schoolchildren. A portion of the children board the bus then play up as it plods downtown: a boy’s winter hat is plucked and hidden by a coquettish classmate. The boy pretends not to care until his stop is approaching, at which point he grabs the girl by the hair until she relinquishes the hat. The lady who put me on the bus, I remember now, could only laugh when I told her I was here for a holiday.
I get off at the longest street in Poland. Piotrkowska was under repair for ten years but now it’s good-looking and fit for purpose. The street is the city’s spine, integral and nervous. I enter the Holiday Inn and approach the receptionist for a piece of her mind.
‘Do you like Łódź?’
‘Yes of course.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m from here.’
I get that sort of thing a lot, that sort of response, when I issue quick quizzes to clerks and drivers, bouncers and bellboys. People are proud and protective, but they can’t tell you why. Being from a place is reason to like it.
I am tempted by Flamingo on the left but opt for Cinnamon on the right. There are no private rooms available, but there’s a bed in a dorm at 30 zloty. The dormitory is certainly snug. A quick glance tells me that people live here. On one of the bottom bunks is a long, ghostly Pole, eating toast without spread. On one of the top bunks is a Belarusian, flat on his back, hands behind his head, counting time on the ceiling. I tell both men that I’m going for a beer and they’re welcome to join me. The ghost says no, the Belarusian, why not.
It’s dark and wet now, drizzling. Sergei is 47, new in town, starts work tomorrow at 5am, first day on the job. He looks at the sky reproachfully: ‘typical British weather’, he says, then looks at me, as though I’d brought it with me. He smokes as we walk, holding the cigarette in such a way that it’s sheltered from the rain. He knows a place near the hostel; we take stools at the bar. Football lends a shared focus. I order vodka while Sergei provides his context: no jobs in Belarus; twice divorced; worked in Norway, during which time his first wife went off with a Pole; worked in Germany during which time his second wife went off with a Slovak. I order another pair of vodkas then turn to my friend and say: ‘You know what? You should stay at home more.’
When it comes to settling the bill, I tell Sergei I’m paying, that it’s a British custom to shout the drinks on the first date and that I’d be positively offended if he didn’t let me honour it. (It’s not, of course, but I want him to think I’m being dutiful rather than kind.) But he won’t have it, custom or not, duty or otherwise, and practically forces some notes into my pocket. Leaving the bar, he says that he’s a bit scared about tomorrow, that he feels like a child starting a new school, only the school is a building site, and the children are men. ‘I don’t have good Polish,’ he says. ‘Norwegian, German, yes. Polish, no. It cannot be easy tomorrow.’
I return to Piotrkowska – Long Peter henceforth – and go pointlessly north. It is a mighty, mostly empty avenue, half-lit by identical, elegant lampposts. I see a rickshaw in the offing, coming slowly south. It makes a nice scene in the lamplit mist. I get in its way, stand in its path, play chicken with the pedaller. At 50 metres I gain a crude idea of the passenger: she is broad and made-up and pushing 70, dressed for a lavish ceremony. Her driver is wrapped in black, wears a flat cap and a grimace, is straining for his fare. If I was Richard, who takes pictures as if they were already his, I’d hold my ground and snap as they swerve to avoid me; I’d get their passing faces – his amused, hers haughty – and not think twice about it. I’m not Richard, I’m a hack, so make a note and step nicely aside.
At the north end of Long Peter is the old ghetto, where the city’s 200,000 Jews were rounded up to be unmade, to be taken off the books. The heart of the ghetto is the Stary Rynek, or old square. It is small and empty and ordinary. It has nothing of the glitz or fizz of Wrocław’s or Poznań’s. I expected more but am not disappointed: its understatement is suitable. There is one bar on the old square. It is approaching 8.30pm and the barman, I see now, is closing so he might watch the Madrid–Warsaw match in peace. I photograph a hundred pigeons, asleep among the rafters of the arcade, necks drawn in, some alone, others in pairs. I had never seen a sleeping pigeon before, and then a hundred at once.
Across a main road to Manufaktura, once a cotton factory, now a shopping and leisure complex. The original factory was commissioned by Izrael Poznański, who resided in a palace up the road, a stone’s throw from harm, a safe distance from the freedom and dignity that came with sixteen-hour back-breaking shifts.56 Perhaps I’m being presumptuous. Perhaps I’m being unfair on Izrael. Perhaps he was the first to roll up his cotton sleeves and muck in. No matter what, the factory spun its last in 1994. Now the cotton is processed in distant lands – Ceylon, Dhaka, Beirut. So it goes.
For one night only, Poland’s best bartender will be concocting drinks at a place called Bawełna (Cotton). I squeeze in at the bar and order an Old Fashioned. Award-winning Mateusz works on my drink in stages over fifteen minutes, displaying a touching confidence in my patience. He moves from customer to customer to rattle and enflame, syphon and explain, while a team of myrmidons carve wedges and salt rims. My drink is worth the wait. It is the best cocktail I have put in my mouth. It is somehow a resolution of conflicts, simple and complex, familiar and foreign, intense and gentle – it is Poland. I want to stay for several more, but my phone has died and I wouldn’t be able to photograph my good fortune. If it’s not on the record, it’s nothing at all.57
I head south on Long Peter until I trip on a suitcase. It’s bronze and on the pavement because its owner, Władysław Reymont, wrote a famous novel called The Promised Land, which shows Łódź in its industrial heyday. The city’s boom in the second half of the 19th century owed to plenty of things. The city was usefully squashed between ready markets (Russia to the east, Europe to the west), the chemical composition of the local water was conducive to the processing of textiles, and the city had something of an open-door policy – Germans and Jews and Bohemians and Brits were all encouraged to stick a finger in its pie. Łódź was the promised land, the Manchester of Poland. Given what Marx said about Manchester – that it prepared you for hell – one is apt to wonder what Łódź promised exactly.
OFF Piotrkowska is a plot of old warehouses that have been taken over by avant-garde barbers, bakers and brewers. Tesknie za zydzi toba has been painted on a wall. I have it translated by a smoking hairdresser. ‘We miss you, Jews.’ In a Vietnamese canteen, my faltering attempt to order draws the attention of a film student from Palestine called Mohammed, who volunteers to assist. I sit with him and we talk. When I tell him about my arrival at Widzew, Mohammed corrects my pronunciation, repeating the word several times to make sure I’ve got it. The mention of Widzew alarms a neighbouring diner, who has misconstrued our trivial discussion of the station in Widzew as outspoken support for the region’s football team, whom he evidently dislikes. As we pass the man’s table on our way out, he gets out of his chair and barks something at us – to do, presumably, with stepping outside and settling this once and for all. The whole thing is fully absurd, but nonetheless real, so I assure the man in toddler Polish that I am from England and won’t use that particular train station again, and then we leave, quickly.
In the dormitory, a Bulgarian whose shoes are too small by half shows me his betting slips. Doing so, he tells me in bitty English that he is here to visit his son, that he’s only visiting mind you, that he doesn’t live in the hostel, not at all, wouldn’t if you paid him, isn’t looking for work or anything like that, is just here to visit his son, in case I had formed a different opinion. He takes me through to the kitchen, fiddles with the television mounted in one corner. ‘They have BBC,’ he says, ‘I promise they do. I can find it for your consideration. I’ve seen it – it’s good television.’ He locates the BBC’s international news channel, turns up the volume. ‘That’s Fiona,’ he says, ‘she’s good, tells the truth.’ When Fiona mentions Brexit the Bulgarian looks at me accusingly, as if it were a horse that fell, and I was its trainer.
I set off for a place called Rudzka Gora (Trash Hill) because I like the name. I take a tram south then get off when I sense a summit. When I reach the bottom, a sign says the hill is closed to climbers. Two women are in conference nearby. Like me, they’re unsure what to do. I take matters into my own hands: after quick introductions, we surmount the barrier and I lead them up the hill. At one point the way is blocked by foliage. I’m ready to turn back but one of the girls thinks that with a run up it can be penetrated, and so it proves. It’s slippery underfoot, but not dauntingly so. We talk as we go. They are from Taiwan, are studying in Łódź to become teachers of Polish. (‘Who are you going to teach?’ ‘We don’t know yet.’) The girls find just about everything funny: my nationality, my name, the hill, their career paths, this path. When I say that the hill used to be a pile of rubbish they belly-laugh as if I was Tommy Cooper and had just cracked the joke of my life. We can see nothing from the summit, save for a smattering of treetops and rooftops, and the odd chimney adding to the murk. It is, as warned, a rubbish hill.
I’m at the modern art gallery – MS2. On its threshold, I read the preamble to the current exhibition. I read that ‘to appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow’, and then wonder what that means. I read of the author’s uncertainty as to whether ‘Poles are real subjects of modernization processes, consciously transforming themselves and the world, or, rather, just objects mindlessly accepting roles written for us in the scenario of modernization’, and then wonder what that means. I read that the ‘incompleteness of this collection and the collage-like arrangement of elements seem to render best a modern view of reality with its fragmentary nature and discontinuity’, and then make a note to tell my niece, who’s seven, that she might defend her incomplete homework on similar grounds. Finally, I read that the gallery is ‘continuously questioning and undermining dominant judgements about what is important in art.’ This is fair enough. This I like. I like things to be tested; I like norms defied and perceptions nudged. By extension I like galleries (as this one) that show such art; but for the love of God don’t bamboozle me at the front gate with such a cryptic intro, lest my subjectivity be made to feel like a twit and run off.
I’m glad I withstood the prologue because the collection itself is great. A photomontage by Kazimierz Podsadecki shows how unhealthy the urban situation is. A painting by Stanislaw Notarjusz called Dancing shows the robotic nature of leisure. Ali Kazma’s film Jean Factory points at the highly-controlled, highly-constructed nature of identity. Włodzimierz Pawlak’s Diary No. 51 is nothing more than a canvas of tally marks, pointing to the robotic nature not just of leisure but existence. There may not be much work here, and it may be chaotically arranged, and I may not understand the curator’s stated ambitions, but the collection nonetheless compels, questions and consoles, which is fine by me.
I move to the adjacent shopping mall. There is muzak to stupefy, bright lights to render all things obvious, and uncomfortable furniture to keep shoppers moving. I find a food court and sit on one of a thousand plastic orange chairs. I ponder the garish perimeter of options and the countless uniformed servants and think of Pawlak’s diary and Kazma’s film. See how art comes with you, leaves its official space and follows you, around the shops, back home, into your dreams? Art is ideas in the end, and ideas can go anywhere.
I can go anywhere but I go to the streets west of Long Peter, which have none of the gloss and sparkle of the city’s main artery. Here the buildings only hint at better times; block after block of shell-shocked bunkers that once teemed with overworked hands. For the families that inhabited them, times would have been hard in these tenement buildings, you can be sure of that, but they would have been good and hard, loud and hard, keen and hard, quick and cunning and silly and hard. Now there is nothing, less than nothing, nothing in decline, nothing in reverse. Who owns these streets? Why are they doing nothing? Is ownership disputed? Where is Reymont’s promised land? The population of Łódź has fallen by 100,000 since Poland joined the EU, so perhaps it’s elsewhere.
I eat a toasted sandwich at Foto Café 102, whose barman remembers a Liverpudlian who came for a drink once and stayed for a year. I can see why they might have done. The pub is comfortable. It has hygge, if you’re familiar with that bestselling concept. It reminds me of Dragon. It could easily become an extension of one’s living space. Mohammed enters. Mohammed from last night. We both say: ‘I meant to call you!’ He reminds me of Jesse Klein, a Canadian friend, also a filmmaker. Perhaps filmmaking attracts certain types – watchful, shrewd, pithy, as if they’re constantly casting and shooting, conceiving and cutting. It can look like anxiety, but it’s more a type of vigilance, coupled with an imagination that won’t shut up. Mohammed is aware of himself as an auteur, and such a burden restricts levity: when the conversation takes a silly turn, Mohammed instigates a game of Truth or Dare, though soon tires of it because neither the questions nor the dares are sufficiently existential. I am asked to truthfully explain why I came to Poland. It’s a harder question than it ought to be. Over the past six months I’ve given a dozen answers. I was bored. I’m contrary. I got divorced. For the money. Asked for the truth, I give it: I still don’t know.58
I check out from the hostel and then take a tram to the train station. The journey is quicker and more direct than my bus journey into town, and the worse for it. Travel oughtn’t be direct, oughtn’t be quick. It ought to take a while, the better to see and notice. Then I discover my train is delayed by several hours, and think again.
56 I allude to the Protestant notion that gruelling, often fatal work curries favour with God.
57 An official Twitter slogan is: ‘If you didn’t tweet, it didn’t happen.’ For the love of God, somebody shoot me. And then tweet about it.
58 I stayed in touch with Mohammed Almughanni. His films tackle issues of identity and conflict, and are worth watching.
25
What time are the ambulances?
16 October. I’m going to a Polish wedding. Nobody’s paying me: I’ll be the guest of flatmate Anna, whose friend Barbara will be marrying a gentleman called Lucas at a registry office near Konin. The service will be followed by an almighty knees-up. In advance of the wedding, Anna insisted I have some work done on my face, the objective of which was to make me seem more winning on her arm, like a fancy watch. In the event, I emerged from the treatment requiring more treatment. Anna had got carried away, believing, like somebody prospecting for oil or gold, that the further she went down the more chance there was of finding something worth looking at. In the wake of my face-job, a crust of dry, flaky skin spread across my face: I was scabbing. Anna told me to grin and bear it, only I couldn’t grin, because a side-effect of the work was that I was unable to form expressions. I would simply have to bear it.
