A Chip Shop in Poznań, page 16
It’s a civil ceremony, which is a blessing, because the Catholic type can go on for hours. I am dressed as well as possible – I look better than most of those over 50, but worse than anyone under. The ceremony room is small, suitable for maybe 50 people, and yet at least a hundred have squeezed in. Anna and I stand with our backs to the wall. The ceremony’s over in about ten minutes: it’s more a clash of heads than a solemn conjugation. As the bride and groom take a seat to sign on the dotted line, we’re organised into a funnel outside. I suppose we’re about to throw confetti.
‘Do you want some rice?’ asks Anna.
Odd question. ‘It’s fine. I can wait.’
‘Do you want some money then?’
Odd question. Is she all right? ‘Sure.’
Anna hands me some coins and tells me to lob them at the happy couple when they emerge.
‘They won’t be a happy couple if I do that, Anna.’
‘Aim for the legs. It will be fine.’
The venue for the reception isn’t far, about twenty minutes or so by car. It’s a sort of holiday camp, with modest huts by way of accommodation, and a main hall where the festivities will take place. When Barbara and Lucas arrive, a queue forms to give them a present, which is invariably cash, a few hundred zloty per head, says Anna, to cover the costs. When we get to the front of the queue, I explain who I am and that Anna has the money. Anna encourages me to say more, to say something else. To Lucas I say, ‘You are beautiful. I am a friend of Anna’s. She isn’t paying me. I am happy to be here,’ while to Barbara I say, ‘Thank you for the invitation. You are also beautiful. Smacznego. (Enjoy your dinner.)’
I study the table plan. My name stands out like a sore thumb, a queer Anglican arrangement amid a sea of sturdy Polish tongue-twisters. Ten or so long tables, formally set, with a top table for the newly-weds and their special advisers. There’s already food on the table: bowls of plain, cold spaghetti. Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I get stuck in.
‘What are you doing, Benny?’
‘Should I wait?’
‘Yes! You must wait for the soup. This is rosół.’
There are ice buckets on the table. At first glance, I assume they contain bottles of water but in fact they’re loaded with vodka. There appears to be at least one bottle per person. I’m sat next to a man called Adrian Gaszpit. I ask what he does in Poland and he says he works in the field of optic fibres. That is the end of our conversation. One meat course arrives after another. Anna, who is a vegetarian, chews the inside of her mouth and makes do with vodka. After about an hour’s eating, DJ Piotr takes up his station and starts us off with ‘Hit the Road Jack’ by Ray Charles, which might be thought an odd choice for a wedding breakfast. Then the newly-weds are called up for the first dance. The way Lucas and Barbara go at it, you’d be forgiven for thinking it actually was their first dance: Lucas is grinding and twerking like Romeo on ketamine. Children are taking advantage of their parents’ turned backs. One youngster has got hold of his mother’s smartphone and is snapping his pal pretending to drink champagne, while another is feeding spaghetti to a cat.
I’m outside in the smoking area. I haven’t seen Anna for over an hour. She’s probably trying to get hold of her vegetable dealer. Adrian Gaszpit comes up to me with a tray of vodka shots. I do one, then he hands me another. ‘Steady on, Adrian,’ I say. ‘It’s for the other leg,’ he says. I do another, then Adrian tries to force a third on me. ‘Just how many legs do you think I’ve got, Adrian?’ I watch the party through the window. Whereas I prefer to move between the dance-floor and the smoking area, the older guests are more inclined to stay at their tables, working on the vodka and picking at the food. They really are spoilt for choice. On top of the various cuts of meat and genres of fish that are doing the rounds, there’s a permanent exhibition of cold meats and cheeses to one side of the room. At a British wedding you’re lucky to get 500 calories. You might get a bit of pâté to start, then a chicken breast, and then a square of brownie to wind things up. At a Polish wedding, if you approached it as a squirrel, you could take enough on board to see you through winter. There’s not much alcohol around, mind you – apart from the bottomless vodka, of course. The Poles know better than to mix their drinks. Lionel Richie comes on, ‘Easy Like Sunday Morning.’ Easy for you to say, Lionel. You’re not the one at a Polish wedding on a Saturday night.
Oczepiny. A customary period of games and frivolity at midnight. The couple sit back to back in the middle of the dance floor and answer questions about each other. I enjoy Anna’s translation of the questions. They’re not as accurate as they might have been a few hours ago. Example: ‘Is it true that Lucas only uses socks for sex?’ The next game involves several ladies manoeuvring boiled eggs up and down their partners’ trousers. This is done to a very popular Polish song that, according to Anna, is about nothing more than watching legs and wearing mini-skirts. The chorus of the song is sung with such gusto that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the national anthem. I am quite sure the song must have more historical significance than Anna is letting on. It simply can’t be the case that the main substance of such a revered cultural artefact is, ‘I want to watch your legs (legs, legs, legs) / I want to put you in a mini (mini, mini, mini).’ Barbara’s great aunt assures me that it can be the case, that it is the case, and I’d better get used to it or go home. Then there’s a game a bit like Twister only you work in pairs. Anna and I are tethered together and then ordered to put three feet and one hand on the ground and so on. As with any challenge she faces, no matter how small or incidental, Anna approaches this one with the utmost seriousness. Nevertheless, we end up in a heap on several occasions, me happily, Anna incredulously. When the game is done, Anna orders her friend Natalia to delete the photographs immediately, then joins the back of the conga that is now bopping around the room like a giddy queue for scant rations. Lucas, the groom, is at the centre of everything, launching the words, dancing ferociously, hugging anything that moves. Watching him, I learn something of happiness, of ecstasy. Only very rarely during the rest of his life will Lucas reach such levels of joy, such uncomplicated euphoria. I can’t help but smile, and love him despite not knowing him.
I return to the table and although it’s three in the morning the food keeps coming. I rebuff the soup and the bigos but am helpless in the face of a large silver platter of pork knuckles, languishing like flabby monarchs on a king-size mattress of sour cabbage. I permit the platter’s delivery, then stare at it with double or triple vision. ‘Do you not like golonka?’ says Adrian. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Adrian, it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s that – it’s that I wouldn’t like it now.’ Adrian is dubious. ‘Were you to smother it with mustard – just like this, with the back of a teaspoon – I promise it will be delicious.’ I’ve experienced this sort of thing before. This sort of Polish problem solving. Poles are quick to present solutions, especially if you suggest you don’t like a feature of their cuisine. I tell Adrian I’m not keen on mustard, which is a lie but a nice construction. ‘Then you must have horseradish! That’ll do it!’ I concede to Adrian’s fascistic insistence and eat. I manage a few fiery morsels then pretend to pass out until Adrian loses interest in me. Sometime later – an hour? two? – Anna sits down next to me, taps me on the head, puffs her cheeks, and says, ‘What time are the ambulances?’
26
I go to Harlow because a Polish man was killed there
22 October. I went on three dates last week. With different people. Same place, same cheese, same wine, same vague agenda. I was feeling low and wanted company, attention, affection. The dates were mostly hard and empty and sad. My behaviour – three dates in a week – was out of line. Out of line according to me. But I’ve felt out of line for months – debased, ashamed, feckless, perturbed – and so it’s little wonder I behaved accordingly. I’ve lost my way. (I mean, I got so drunk one night I wanted to become a politician.)59 And when you’ve lost your way, when you’ve slipped beneath dignity a notch, it is easy to stay lost, to stay slipped, to mistreat, to be fickle and unfair, to be weak. I am drinking too much and courting three women at once knowing nothing will come of it, wanting nothing to come of it. Does Anita have something to do with it? Do the nicotine and alcohol and their boring, noxious, accumulated effect have something to do with it? Is it being away from home? No. I don’t want excuses. I’m just like that sometimes. I’m capable of that. I can be basic and indecent and needful and excruciatingly selfish. It’s part of me. I know this sounds banal and boorish and self-involved, this confession of sorts, and it is all those things, but it also happens to be true, and an account of my time in Poland without it would be— would be the truth wrapped in cotton.
23 October. I am hungover. I take a tram to Starołęka then eat a miserable plate of food outside a kebab shop. Nearby children stare at me. I drink a beer then go to the convenience store and buy a hotdog and an ice cream. It’s that sort of day. When I arrive at the house, at my old school, Tony is putting what we’ll need in the back of the car. He looks at me with his customary sceptical grimace.
‘I see you’re wearing shorts. That’s good. You’ll be able to see the ticks on you.’ The what? ‘Ticks. They’re tiny but they burrow into your skin and give you brain damage.’ I look down at my legs, my shorts. ‘It’s fine,’ says Tony. ‘We have some spray. It doesn’t work very well but there you are.’ He can see I’m worried; he can sense he’s scared me. ‘What I do – right – after we’ve been picking in the forest – yes – is to check Marietta very carefully all over when we return. After supper or something. Isn’t that right, Marietta?’ Marietta answers from inside.
‘It is a nice thing to do – I check Tony, Tony checks me.’ I don’t want to think about this too much. How do you even get them off? ‘Tweezers,’ says Marietta. ‘They really are very tiny. I have to look everywhere, don’t I Tony? Anyway. Are we ready? No. Where’s the dog?’
When we get to the forest I want to be left in the car. I am not ready for four hours trudging around woodland looking for mushrooms and getting infested with brain-damaging ticks.
‘I think I’ll stay in the car.’
‘Ha!’
‘No seriously.’
‘Don’t you like mushrooms?’
‘I like milk, Marietta, but I don’t necessarily want to spend the afternoon milking a cow.’
‘Now,’ says Tony. ‘Let’s get serious. Be careful what you pick. Right? Or it will kill you. So: big stem with collar – no. Big stem no collar – maybe. Big stem no collar no spots – maybe, could be a Cossack. Big stem no collar no spots with gills – absolutely not, that’s a Fat Head and will kill you in a second. Right? Off you go then. We’ve sixteen acres to cover. See you!’
And with that Tony is off, on his own, with his crucial knowledge, to scour sixteen acres. Marietta is not much use. She’s playing with twigs and pretending to be a fairy. ‘It’s not really about the mushrooms – it’s a social exercise,’ she says, to herself, up a tree, stroking its leaves. For Tony it evidently is about the mushrooms. He’s already out of sight, hell-bent on showing us what a stellar mushroom hunter he is. I catch glimpses of him far off, between trees, beneath bushes, grabbing and prising and pulling at fungi, a fixed, earnest, maniacal grin on his face, like a mythical goblin creature thing, cackling each time he rejects a poisonous specimen – ‘He he he, you won’t get me!’
‘What’s that you’ve got?’ says Marietta.
‘A mushroom,’ I say.
‘Yes, but which one?’
‘This one.’
‘Yes, but has it got a—’
‘It’s got a collar and a coat and a backpack, Marietta, so what? I don’t care if it’s a Cossack or a Fat Head or a Black Head or a Shaggy Umbrella. I just want to fill up my punnet so we can go home.’
After a while, my hangover abates and I’m able to start enjoying myself. I grow conscientious and fastidious about what I’m doing. At first, I was flippant – I didn’t care if I got poisoned. Now I’m a pedant, purposeful, boastful. ‘Look Tony, you mad old plonker! Look at the size of this Lemon Dangler!’ A few hours later we call it a day and return to the car, where Tony carefully checks my mushrooms for anything dodgy. We must have about five bags of mushrooms between us. Despite my earlier misgivings, and despite being hampered by a hangover, I can see why mushroom picking is so popular here. It’s not only fun but it makes sense. The way the Poles are aware of the seasons and harvest the seasons is a great thing. They go out mushroom picking in October as naturally as they put up a Christmas tree in December. Strawberries appear in June, while apples, beets, asparagus and pumpkin all have their moment in the limelight. There’s an attachment to the land and its tides – its calendar, its virtues, its fruit – that is unquestionably good, something to aspire to.
I’m dropped home. Because Anna isn’t here, and Jenny and Richard won’t mind, I tip the bag of mushrooms onto the kitchen table. I look at them for a bit, then go to my room and watch Fry and Laurie for an hour, then return to the kitchen and look at them a bit more. I can’t just leave them there, like an ornament – Anna would kill me. Not one of the mushrooms looks up for consumption. I test the most suspicious on passing flatmates – ‘Jenny. Hey. How was work? Too bad. Try that. It’s a mushroom! It’s delicious. Just try it. That’s it. Good boy. All the way down. Good. How do you feel?’ – and then in the end just throw all the mushrooms in a large pot, add some butter and stock and herbs, let the whole lot bubble for an hour and then blitz it into a soup. It’s delicious. Then I invite Jenny into the kitchen.
‘Hey, Benny, how’s it— ooh, yum. Smells good.’
‘Yeah forget about that. Can you check me for ticks?’
27 October. I go to Tandem because a local Pole called Max is giving the second of a series of lectures called How to Survive in Poland. Because I could pass as a Pole, I haven’t had too much trouble surviving in Poland. Sometimes when I open my mouth it can annoy people, like that time outside the kebab shop months ago, when a bloke told me I was in Poland and should speak Polish, and I said fair enough and started speaking Polish, and we ended up talking about his cousin who lives in Scotland. And then there was the cage fighter in Wrocław, who wasn’t especially impressed with me, but these were exceptions: routinely I am treated with respect, with indifference, equally. It must be harder for others, for those more obviously from elsewhere – like Mohammed in Łódź, for example. Anyway, when I arrive, the lecture has already started. A group of twenty or so have gathered loosely around the lecturer, who is perched on a low wall in the courtyard with one of his very long legs less crossed and more flung over the other. His very long arms are also crossed, knotted even, and despite these eye-catching contortions the lecturer is able quite comfortably to manoeuvre a bottle of cider with one hand and gesticulate with the other. So pleasing is Max to behold it’s hard to pay attention to what he’s saying, which is a lot, in short. If this is the second in the series, then the first must have dealt with Poland in the Iron Age, for Max’s current musings range in time from Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps on an elephant to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1952. Max speaks more or less without pause – about gentrification (anticipated to commence in 2025), national characteristics (pugnacious, suspicious), the third partition of Poland in 1795 (not as good as the second) – for an hour and a half, at which point he uncrosses everything, mounts his sedan, and is carried off into the night by a team of Ukrainians. No, after delivering his theory of everything what Max actually does is invite questions, of which there are plenty, though they are, in point of fact, less questions and more corrections and complaints. An Indian man thinks it ridiculous to suggest the Alps could be traversed by elephant. A Polish girl says her parents and grandparents are suspicious not by nature but by training, which she considers an important distinction, while a Norwegian dentist takes exception to Max’s performance of the Swedish Deluge. As far as I could tell, the problem was that Max had offered his ideas as if they were truths, which got people’s backs up. ‘If the truth be told’ was just about his favourite construction, used to preface most of his instructions. ‘If the truth be told, the best way to deal with Poles who want something from you is to run away.’ ‘If the truth be told, Polish women undress on the nineteenth date, men on the third.’ ‘If the truth be told, there is no more nationalism or racism here than anywhere else.’ For all his peccadilloes, Max is clearly a sweet and bright guy, so I throw him a gentle question about the Polish habit of pickling then buy him another bottle of cider.
4 November. During a trip to England for a family occasion, I go to Harlow, Essex, because a Polish man was killed there.60 I remember learning of the news back in August. ITV said that a man in Harlow had been murdered for being Polish, and that the killing was evidence of a post-Brexit backlash against immigrants. Any evidence? The deceased’s cousin says so. I remember thumping my desk. I couldn’t believe how flimsy and irresponsible the reporting was. ITV – and they were not alone – had readily and baselessly cast Britons as vengeful nationalists ready to kill. The whole thing was confusing. Conventionally, if regrettably, it is the outsider that’s scapegoated. On this occasion, it was the native, the local, the insider. ITV framed the tragedy as ‘British racist kills innocent immigrant’, and yet when the bulletin went out there was nothing by way of evidence to confirm the reported motive, but what the heck, said ITV, said the British media, let’s run the story, let’s push the narrative, let’s whip up a fuss, let’s accuse Britain of racism, no matter if it puts Poles on edge, no matter if it puts dangerous ideas into impressionable minds, no matter if it’s just a hunch. Cause and effect; causality; consequences. These things are real. Yeah, says a teenager in Yeovil, having seen the news, let’s rough up the Poles, let’s force the point, let’s make sure they get the message. Alright, says a Pole in Wrocław, if that’s what’s going on, let’s do something about it, let’s rough up the Brits, let them know that Poles don’t put up with that sort of thing, that Poles fight back. I remember thumping the desk for a second time and upending my mug. So. Yeah. I wanted to go to Harlow.
