A Chip Shop in Poznań, page 19
When I return to the hotel the concierge is in pyjamas. He is busy arranging flowers on the reception desk but doesn’t mind doing an internet search for bus times to the mountains. He hands me a note – 9.10am – and then a flower, a white rose. I take the flower to my room and put it in a cup of water, which means I can’t have tea.
Gone is Monika. Gone is the concierge in pyjamas. In their stead is a young, red-headed man called Bolek. Having an hour before my bus, I ask Bolek what he’d do in my shoes. He says that’s easy, he’d go to a restaurant called Polish Kitchen, which does an all-day buffet.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘If it was your only hour in Jelenia Gora?’
‘My only hour? Well that is different. Altogether different.’
‘Okay – so what would you do?’
He gives it some thought. ‘In fact, I would still go to Polish Kitchen.’
I ignore Bolek and go to the Church of St Erasmus and St Pancras. Erasmus and Pancras are the city’s patron saints. The former certainly deserves the recognition. For a start, he translated the New Testament as a hobby. He was also a monk, caretaker-manager of the Catholic Church, a classical scholar, and head coach of the Dutch volleyball team. I first heard of Erasmus when I was studying abroad. The Erasmus exchange program allows thousands of students (and teachers) to skip town for a year to broaden their horizons. Erasmus himself studied at Cambridge, Paris and Turin, and counted himself a global citizen before the term was fashionable. He once wrote to a friend: ‘That you are patriotic will be praised by many and easily forgiven by everyone; but in my opinion it is wiser to treat men and things as though we held this world the common fatherland of all.’ Erasmus wouldn’t get elected these days, I fear.
I’ve just time to climb the medieval tower at the end of ul. Grodzka. I write down what I can see: rooftop pigeons, the gentle rise and sweep of Bank Street (surely one of the loveliest in Poland), the obscure back alleys beyond the ring road, the sublime contrast of industry and nature, chimney and mountain, all veiled by mist and sun. I watch a babcia (grandma) telling off some skateboarders, a spherical gentleman in slippers smoking a cigar, a young couple entwined and grinning, as if this were a month of Sundays. It is a good view to finish on.
On the bus to the mountain town of Karpacz there is a boy and he is alone. I am convinced he’s nervous about something, and sure enough a few stops down the line, where the road turns south and begins to climb, a girl gets on and sits next to him. The first thing she does is affectionately count the spots on his face. Then she traces the bumps and vales of his skull. These two don’t care where they’re going: the journey is the thing. He pulls out a flower and a card. She stows the card deep in her bag for later, then inhales the flower carefully, as if it were something to be read.
I alight in the shadow of a rundown church – a rare site in Poland. This is the town’s main road, Maya 3. On each side are souvenir shops and restaurants, convenience stores, grilled smoked-cheese stands, bars and pubs. I continue up the street until I come to Willa Andromeda. Aunt Zofia is peeling potatoes in the kitchen. She has short red hair the colour of her lodging house. Watching her peel, I feel an instant bond, for I have been in her shoes. I will render the following exchange in English, but it happens in Polish, and for the most part I have no clue what Zofia is saying.
‘Good day, madam.’
‘What?’
‘I am the friend of your niece – nephew!’
‘Yeah?’
‘I am the friend of your nephew from Poznań and I am here to stay.’
‘It’s my lucky day.’
‘I am the friend of Piotr.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Piotr said you are his favourite aunt.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Piotr said I would be welcome.’
‘Piotr says a lot, huh?’
A woman appears at my shoulder. A guest. She is Polish, but fluent in English, and agrees to mediate. Zofia puts her side of the story across, then the lady translates. ‘Madam Zofia says there might be a room, at 100 zloty with three meals included, but she is wondering who the hell is Piotr? She says she has never been to Poznań, and never wants to. She says she cannot remember anybody ever calling her Aunt. Does she have nephews? Does she have nieces? God above knows. She wants to know what time you want breakfast.’
‘Eleven?’ I say.
‘Madam Zofia says Jesus and Mary, are you serious? She says she doesn’t care if you’re English the breakfast will be no later than eight. And she wants to emphasise that the room is for single occupancy, no matter the occasion, and you must have a bowl of soup before you do anything else.’
The soup is cabbage-based with bits of redeeming bacon and rib – kwaśnica they call it. I eat alone in the dining room, at a table set for two-dozen. There are pictures of the villa on the walls, as well as the Pope and various beach scenes. A slim man – Uncle Anthony? – arrives to take my empty bowl. Only it’s not empty. It was a big bowl and I couldn’t get through it. He looks flummoxed, scared even, for now he’s faced with the prospect of reporting back to Zofia that the soup didn’t all go down. He calls over his shoulder. ‘Myślę, że pan Anglik nie docenił swojej zupy, moja droga.’ I think that Mr England doesn’t fancy the soup, my dear. ‘Wylej mu ją na głowę!’ cries Zofia. Put it on his head! Then Uncle Anthony smiles, drops his stern façade and concedes with a wink that he is only playing, before taking the remaining soup to meet its maker.
It has been nearly ten years since I skied. Watching the skiers come down silkily, I am incredulous that I ever managed something similar. They are so at ease they’re able to record their competence on smartphones as they descend. I dislike all of them. I enter the rental hut. The outfitters are a jovial bunch who enjoy speaking English. The boss asks if I want boots.
‘Just one will do,’ I say.
‘Very good. Poles?’
‘Too many in my opinion.’
‘What?’
‘Go on then. If only to signal with.’
‘Helmet?’
‘Nah.’
‘Helmet. Now go.’
The worst bit is dismounting the chair lift. After that I’m alright. I fall over once but nothing major. All things considered, it is a generally pointless couple of hours – in that it’s perfectly unproductive. This is by no means a bad thing. It is sort of meditational. Skiing at this level, on an intermediate run, requires just enough concentration to prevent you thinking about anything serious or boring – work, debt, erectile dysfunction – but not enough to make the whole thing a strain. In this respect skiing is like peeling potatoes, which is a comparison I never thought I’d make. I’m sure there are some good essays on skiing – plaintive, thoughtful, insightful – but you’re not going to get one out of me.
I unclip and shuffle over to a small eatery for a cup of żurek. Two men join my table. One asks after the soup, as if it were a relative. I say it’s good, but not the best. He shrugs, as if it were ever thus, then says I should have ordered the pierogi.
‘But I don’t like pierogi.’
‘What was that?’
‘I don’t like pierogi,’ I repeat, holding my nerve.
He looks at his friend, then at me, then at his friend, then at me, then at his friend, like a film gangster on hearing bad news. ‘Serious?’ he says.
‘Yup.’
‘What filling?’
‘All of them.’
‘All of them, huh?’ He stews on this, chews his toothpick. ‘And who, may I ask, if it’s not, you know, too impertinent, made all these dislikeable dumplings?’
‘I bought them from the shop mostly.’
‘To czego sie, do cholery, spodziewałeś?’ He laughs. It’s a false alarm. It wasn’t real pierogi. ‘You must try my grandmother’s pierogi before you say another word.’
‘I’d like to.’
‘You can’t. She’s dead.’
I go to a pub called Morskie Oko, where I get talking to a Pole at the bar. We converse in a mash-up of English and Polish. His name is Hubert and is a dairy farmer. I ask about his cows, whether they’re good ones etc. Hubert pulls out his phone, scrolls through pictures: cow, cow, cows, tractor, cow, his wife in her wedding dress, cows, milk, tractor, cow. I’m impressed.
‘I would like to meet your cows,’ I say.
‘Yeah? Which one?’
‘All of them.’
‘I dry them twice every day.’
‘Why?’
‘I dry them. For the milk. Alone. Every day. One hundred cows. You must visit my cows.’
‘Okay.’
‘Good.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fine.’
Hubert’s wife comes to retrieve him. We exchange numbers (Hubert and me, not his wife and me), and agree it was wonderful to have met each other.
Opposite the pub is a big hotel. It is twenty times larger than any other building in the town. It is in every sense and aspect an anomaly. Hotel Gołębiewski. Upon entering, I am met by the amorphous shriek of children and the smell of chlorine. I take a lift to the eighth floor, the uppermost. I am joined, on the third or fourth, by a woman in a dressing gown carrying a plate of food. I am not sure how one measures such things, but I’m sure she’s not pleased to see me. The carpet on the eighth floor is reliably unpleasant, an artist’s impression of squashed tiramisu. The corridor is a hundred metres long. There are no windows. You have to reach a wing of the building before there’s natural light. At the north-east corner a door gives onto a communal terrace, whence I can see the rear balconies of the rooms I’ve just passed – identical arrangements of plant and table, with bamboo screens to privatise a shared experience. On three of the balconies women of a similar height look up to the mountain and smoke, more or less in sync. They cannot see each other but I can see each of them. It makes a nice picture. The sixth floor is for conferences. One is ongoing. I wander into the main conference hall, finger some literature, lift some fruit, then proceed to the fifth, where there’s a kids’ zone. A handful of kids are presently interred. They look bored. One kid, no older than six, is making a phone call. Who’s he calling, his lawyer? Around the corner is Tropikana, for swimming and fitness. A vast window lets me experience Tropikana without the inconvenience of entering the place. Adults absorb media on sunbeds. Children travel down chutes like parcels of garbage. I picture the late Theodor Adorno – who wrote about the standardisation of leisure, about leisure time as an extension of factory time – on one of the sunbeds, taking it all in, a scathing review forming on his lips. I return to the main reception and ask if there’s a job going.
‘Sir can clean?’
‘I keep the flat pretty tidy.’
‘You’ve evidence of that?
‘Yeah, I guess I have.’
‘Come tomorrow. Between 7am and 3pm.’
‘How much is a room, by the way?’
She laughs, enjoys the joke, then realises I’m serious. ‘A room is … well … it’s quite a lot in fact. Are you sure you want to know?’
A single room is 700 zloty, or 70 hours’ work. I take an armchair instead, order a coffee, watch a cleaner buffing the floor. She’s got a lot of ground to cover. I watch her steadily for a minute, at one with her trembling machine. Then the machine cuts out. She’s reached the limit of her extension. I couldn’t work here. I’d freak out on day two, make a run for it, bypass the queue outside Tropikana and jump into one of the pools in my uniform. There’s an aquarium by the hotel entrance. I stop to stare at the fish on my way out. The fish look lost and purposeful at once. It would be easy – too easy – to compare the tank to the hotel. Outside, a bank of dark cloud against the fading sky resembles a mountain range. I walk slowly away from the hotel, because the prospect is beautiful.
At dinner there are two Polish families and me. I am ten minutes late. There’d been quite a bit of chat going on before I turned up, but now there is silence. I’d hoped to sort of just blend in, or if not blend in then be ignored, but now all talk has ceased. Because of me. I say a sequence of things in Polish that are either deeply banal, potentially offensive, or so grammatically wrong as to be senseless. It is my opinion that potatoes have a big meaning; I am happy to be in Poland but not its history; the snow is in the process of being cold. During the main course – breaded pork cutlet topped with cheese and grated carrot – I opt to perform my ideas rather than enunciate them. I gesture skiing, England, fish and chips, abortion. The adults are unmoved, but the children think I’m a hoot. They laugh at me indulgently. Olga in particular can’t stop giggling. I ask her what’s funny. She answers in Polish, then her father translates: ‘Olga is accustomed to being the most stupid in the room. She is enjoying having the night off.’ The children are Olga and Wojciech, who have travelled from Krakow and are well behaved, and Radek, who has arrived independently from another planet. Radek is focused on eating as many potatoes and bread rolls as possible. When Radek starts licking the buttery sauce from his plate, his father, by way of explaining his son’s behaviour, says, ‘Forgive Radek, he’s from Warsaw.’ This gets a laugh from everyone. When the pudding arrives and is larger than the main course, I rise from my chair, indicate a bloated stomach, then go out for a pint.
I cross Maya 3, descend Mickiewicza, then enter Paddy’s Irish Pub. I sit down and write, my thoughts muffled by the sound of football on the telly – the divisions of Europe are playing out on a split-screen: a duel in Naples, a clash in Munich, a contretemps in London. At half-time, a fiddly trio turn up and start thrashing out tunes. When it all starts to get lively, I leave the pub and continue downhill until I reach Jaśkowa Izba. The barmaid has a sister in Leicester. We talk about her sister and Leicester and her old job at the big hotel. I ask why it’s so big. She shrugs. ‘Big rooms, I guess.’ Then Gregory turns up. Gregory’s a cook at the big hotel. Ewa – the barmaid – pours us all vodka then asks if it’s true the English don’t like the Polish anymore. I drink the vodka then rubbish the notion. ‘There were one or two,’ I say, ‘compared to millions who don’t care one way or another, and tens of millions who don’t dislike a single human soul. You are welcome anywhere, Ewa. You too, Gregory. Believe me.’
Alcohol inspires candour. When I get home, I am tempted to put a note under the door of room 2. ‘Don’t let Radek eat so much.’
66 The dog pictures, by the way, were done by Joanna Burda. They go for about 20,000 zloty apiece.
67 It occurs to me now that some of the cities bequeathed to Poland via the Potsdam agreement would have been bombed to smithereens by Polish squadrons fighting on the side of the Allies. There is probably someone out there who bombed their own house.
30
In you come
24 December. The plan is to approach a random house and ask if I can come in for dinner. You see, in Poland there is a tradition of setting an extra place at the table for the Christmas Eve feast in case a stranger turns up. It is meant, I suppose, to reinforce the notion that Christmas is about sharing, kindness, and bearing in mind those who are in need. Everybody I spoke to about it knew and honoured the tradition, though nobody knew of an occasion when someone actually turned up. The doors I plan to knock on later will all be in the vicinity of Jenny’s family home, because if I don’t have any luck Jenny said I can come to his. With this in mind, Jenny calls to ask if I could come to his parents’ house with the chopping board he’s made for his sister before I commence my experiment. He left the flat in a hurry and forgot to take it with him. Fine.
It isn’t easy to carry the chopping board. It is just a little bit wider than the distance between one’s armpit and one’s fingertips when the arm is fully extended, meaning I can’t carry it as you might a folder or similar. The best way in the end is to use my arms to stabilise it on my head. There aren’t many people on the streets to draw odd looks from. They are probably all on their way by automobile to have dinner with people they know. The city feels closed, emptied. It isn’t unpleasant, as far as atmospheres go. What is unpleasant is the weather – jolly cold, overcast and windy. Because of my obligation to the chopping board, and a lack of gloves, I’m forced to expose my hands to the elements at all times. By the time I reach the Theatre Bridge, therefore, I have forgotten I have fingers and have largely lost the feeling in my arms. As a result, I’ve almost lost sight of the fact that I’ve a chopping board on my head.
When I get to Jenny’s house I can see him through the kitchen window. I am worried for a second that he’s helping with the cooking, but he’s only washing his hands. He spots me and gestures something dramatically, pointing at the chopping board and then at something in the house I can’t see. He opens the door before I can ring the bell.
‘Benny, hide the frigging chopping board, dude!’
‘Jenny, how the frig do you expect me to do that?’
The chopping board is snatched off my head and hid in the garage. Then I’m sat at the kitchen table and told to relax, but I can’t. I am feeling increasingly anxious and uneasy. I don’t want to be strange. I want to stay here. I want to unwind and put my feet up and chat and be in the company of friends. I don’t want to go back outside and wander the streets, knocking on doors to see if I can ruin a family’s evening. I don’t want to test the sincerity of a tradition. Every culture has empty traditions – so what, big deal. Besides, I’m not exactly in need. I’ve been invited to eat with Jenny’s family. Am I not being insensitive and deceptive by imposing myself on others? Plus it’s cold outside and I still can’t feel my arms. All things considered, I’m better off where I am.
Which is why I go. I walk up and down the surrounding streets for nearly an hour, trying to identify the most likely house and practising my lines, which I have written down on a Post-it note stuck to the box of chocolates I’ve got with me in case someone lets me in. ‘Dzień dobry. Jestem Benjamin. Jestem z Angli. Słyszałem, że to tradycja …’ Choosing the right house is important. What indicates a kind spirit? What betokens the sort of household that, in order to do a ‘good’ thing, will risk jeopardising the rest of their evening? I dismiss anywhere too big with flashy vehicles in the drive (‘Easier for a camel to pass’ etc.) and anywhere with too many Christmas lights (‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’ etc.). Then I find the house. It is a modest size, and elegantly decorated with a tasteful number of festive lights. I hesitate at the front gate. I look down at the box of chocolates, look back towards the beckoning warmth of Jenny’s living room, take a deep breath, then ring the doorbell. Three people rush to the front window, yank the curtains back and have a good look at me. They are all small – the tallest not much more than a metre – with an average age, I’d say, of about four. They arrived at the window wearing excited smiles. Those smiles have gone. They were expecting someone else. A taller person in a red dress comes to the window, looks at me as though I were an unexpected parcel, then tells the children to withdraw to the back of the house, where it is safe. The lady opens the door the way you might to – well, to a stranger.
