A Chip Shop in Poznań, page 2
‘Irrelevant.’
‘I don’t live anywhere.’
‘Irrelevant.’
‘I’ve not told anyone I’m here.’
‘Irrelevant.’
‘Would you employ an English-speaking goat?’
‘Almost certainly.’
I take the job.
1 Poland’s economy is not notoriously sluggish. If anything it is the opposite. It was the only European country to avoid recession after the 2008 financial crisis. A rule of thumb: if you like things reliable, only read the footnotes. The main text is a naive, real-time account, drawn from diaries I kept during my year in Poland. Of course the diaries have been edited, but I was careful to keep their tone and atmosphere, their misconceptions, their errors of judgement.
2 Norman Davies is a pre-eminent historian of Poland.
3 Cameron, then prime minister, visited Warsaw to ask the Polish prime minister if she minded if he made life a bit harder for the Poles living in the UK by cutting their benefits. This was part of a wider effort on his part to ‘get a new deal’ for the UK in Europe ahead of the forthcoming referendum. The idea was that a ‘new deal’ with the EU would make it harder for the public to vote to leave. In the event, the ‘new deal’ wasn’t up to snuff. ‘Cameron promised a loaf, begged for a crust, and came home with crumbs,’ wrote one columnist.
2
What’s the point having a home if it means nothing to you?
12 March. I walk to the address. It is below freezing. I don’t know the streets. Their names are reminders of my status – out of place, unknowing. Sienkiewicza. Słowackiego. Bukowska. I don’t know if the names refer to fish or trees or dead parliamentarians. I notice the registration plates. If the car was born before 2004, when Poland joined the European Union, the plate bears a little Polish flag. If it was born after, the flag is European. An incidental detail perhaps, but one that argues a redirection of the patriotic spirit. Polishness, at least superficially, and in this small way, has been made subordinate to Europeanness.
I don’t know how to pronounce the name of the young European I am on my way to see. Jędrzej. That’s how it’s written. What a queer set of letters. Surely the word is an expletive or imprecation, the noise Poles make when something goes wrong. A Pole drops a platter of dumplings – ‘Jędrzej!’ A Pole hears disappointing news on the radio – ‘Jędrzej!’
Jędrzej is a friend of my new employers. Like me, he is looking for a home. Having heard of my arrival he has invited me to look at a four-bedroom flat that has two rooms available. I don’t much like the idea of living with a civil engineer but am sufficiently open-minded to at least take a look. The flat is in a rough neighbourhood put up by the Germans in the late 1800s, when Poland was having time off from being a country. The district is Jeżyce. The street is Szamarzewskiego. Hardly rolls off the tongue. What’s the point having an address if you can’t articulate it? What’s the point having a home if it means nothing to you? I arrive at the building – 36 – give it a good look through the fog. It is elegant but tired. I know the feeling.
‘Hey there!’ says an American tourist tethering a bicycle.
‘Hey.’
‘I’m Yen-Jay. I’m a civil engineer.’
‘That’s nice. In fact, I’m supposed to be meeting a Polish civil engineer right now.’
‘Yup. That’ll be me.’
‘It can’t be. I’m meeting a Polish civil engineer who isn’t American and has a very, very different name to you.’
‘Let’s just go take a look, shall we?’
I take the room. It’s the smallest of the four. There are no curtains but plenty of motivational framed posters from IKEA. My favourite, probably owned by half of Europe, encourages the viewer to embrace their individuality.
Jędrzej is happy with his room, too. He has reason to be. It is three times the size of mine but the same price. When I point this out to him he looks delighted, not at all abashed that he’s on the right side of a massive injustice. I notice that Jędrzej smiles a lot. After signing a twelve-month contract, he goes to the kitchen window and smiles out of it for ten minutes. ‘Don’t ya just love the rain, Benny?’ It is hard to say if we are going to get along.
I sign a two-month contract with the option of an extension. I don’t want to commit to longer, not with Jenny about, or whatever his name is. The contract’s terms and conditions mean nothing to me. For all I know I can keep seven pets in my room, apart from at the weekend when I can have as many as I want. It hardly seems worth asking for a translation. Jenny is evidently quite good at English but it is mostly a sort of cartoon-English taken from the Disney Channel and I don’t think he’d cope with the legal terms.4 I pay the first month’s rent and another month’s worth for the deposit. I’m handed a set of keys. That’s all there is to it. The potentially troublesome bureaucratic procedure of finding a place to live has been dealt with. Compared to Paris and London, where it’s easier to get malaria than a roof over your head, securing accommodation in Poland has proved pleasingly simple.
In the evening I go to the local convenience store. I inspect the place as if it were a precious archive of exotic oddities. I am amused to find a pack of ground coffee beans called ‘Family’. The coffee’s packaging shows two adults and two children – the eponymous Family – sat around a table upon which stands a steaming percolator and four expectant cups. That’s fair enough, I think, depicting people looking happy in response to the commodity in question, but the children look no older than eight or nine. At what age do they start drinking coffee in Poland? The Poles in the UK have a reputation for being hard workers. Perhaps I have stumbled upon the explanation. Perhaps it’s because they start drinking coffee before they’ve hit puberty. Either way, I put a pack in my basket and continue shopping: the number of gherkins is astonishing; there’s no beef or chicken to speak of but about a kilometre of sausage all things considered; and milk comes in two qualities, 2.4 per cent and 3.2 per cent, which may, this being East Central Europe, refer to alcohol content.5
18 March. Tony and Marietta (my employers) met at a disco in Billericay, back in the 80s. Marietta had gone to England to find herself. Instead she found Tony. This must have been quite a shock. At any rate, and with no clear idea what she would do with him, when Marietta’s holiday in the Free World ended she returned to Poland with Tony on her arm. She hasn’t been back to England since, in case the same thing happens again.
The couple opened The Cream Tea School of English – which is also their house – in the mid-90s. It is a small, independent school that provides extra-curricular tuition to young Poles whose parents want their children to leave the country as soon as possible. The school is in the Starołęka district of the city, south of the centre on the east side of the River Warta. From my flat it takes two trams and a bus to get here, which is a bit of a pain. Also a pain is the idea of teaching. As Tony and Marietta introduce me at length to each of the trees and plants in their garden, and then their dog Pirate, I can’t help thinking that the time might be better spent telling me what (and how) they expect me to teach. In lieu of such instruction I am given tea and biscuits and told exactly how my tax contributions will be spent by the government. Some will go on infrastructure, a small bit will help Poland remain a member of NATO, while the lion’s share will help fund the 500-zloty monthly baby payments that are issued to parents to encourage breeding.6 ‘Now for the good news,’ says Tony, ‘your pension!’ Apparently, explains Tony, if I put in some decent hours over the next year I can expect to draw a pension of 10 zloty a week when I reach the age of 75 – enough to get a hotdog. There is little in the way of paperwork. All Tony requires of me is my British National Insurance number. It is frustratingly easy to enter the Polish tax system.
My first lesson is with D1. D, I quickly discover, stands for diabolical. The students, aged between eight and ten, are not in a cooperative mood. I have lost my patience before I’ve finished listing their names on the board.
‘You. What is your name?’
‘You just wrote it.’
‘Which one?’
‘Top one.’
‘How do you say that again?’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘At any rate, you are playing up.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘To play up is a phrasal verb. It means—’
‘What is a phrasal verb?’
‘You will learn about phrasal verbs when you start behaving yourself.’
‘So how are we supposed to understand you in the meanwhile?’
‘If you are able to heckle like that, I’m sure you’ll understand well enough.’
‘What is heckle?’
And so it begins. Sensing an alien out of his depth, a wanderer beyond the pale, the students are openly and joyfully defiant from the word go. It stands to reason. I can’t speak a word of Polish and they could speak Polish fluently when they were five. Ergo, I must be stupid. The people they have learned to respect and obey and defer to – parents, teachers, adults generally – know Polish to an advanced level, and are able and ready to manipulate their use of the Polish language, their tone and diction and syntax, in order to win arguments and appear awesome and earn authority. But the adult before them, supposedly a teacher, can barely say hello. He is either stupid or lazy, neither quality deserving of respect. This is the conclusion they all silently draw. When I step outside to hyperventilate, the ringleader, Lucas, briefs the others. ‘He is either stupid or lazy. In either case, he neither deserves nor shall receive our respect. Not until he pulls his socks up and finger out and gets up to speed. Agreed comrades?’ When I return to the classroom, Gosia and Basia are actively attempting to escape through a window, while another pair have begun to argue and tussle noisily, having failed to reach an agreement as to which of them is the greater nuisance. There is misbehaviour in front of my eyes and behind my back. When I ask for an example of the present continuous tense, Nella starts jumping on the table.
‘I am jumping!’ she shouts (which, to be fair, is an example of the present continuous tense). When Marietta pops in to check on my progress, D1 briefly settle and feign interest in what they did last weekend. Marietta is all smiles, is pleased with how it is all going, is proud of her gang of brats. Alone with me again, the feigning stops and the rebellion resumes. I try to be patient. I try to be philosophical. I even try to empathise. I tell myself that these kids have already spent the day at school, that no kid, not a single kid in the world, not the nerdiest, gawkiest, most scholarly child in the solar system wants to go to school after they’ve already been to school. When these kids get to Cream Tea they are ready to burst. If they are met with anything other than an iron fist – with me for example – they detonate. Their answers are nonchalant and sarcastic at best, hurtful and upsetting at worst. The kid who is normally easy-going becomes stubborn and obnoxious, while the kid who is normally a bit shy starts actively trying to sabotage the lesson. It is easy for all this to sound mirthful and harmless, to sound as if I’m playing it up, but I’m not. The lesson with D1 is actually stressful. I won’t name names, but Lucas is almost certainly related to the devil. Olivia, on the other hand, is devilish one moment and angelic the next, which is even more intimidating because there is no legislating for it. You can put Lucas in the cupboard and be done with it. But you can’t put Olivia in the cupboard and be done with it because she’ll turn into an angel in that cupboard and start to sob and bleat like a gorgeous cherub in the unfair dark. It would be like putting Joseph Stalin in solitary confinement only to discover upon his release 30 years later that it was actually Jesus. Besides, the cupboard wouldn’t even scare these kids. They’d sit down and play on their phones. They’d call their grandparents and explain how rewarding further education is. By the lesson’s end I am ready for retirement, ready for my pension, ready to book a vasectomy that I might assist the teaching fraternity by keeping class sizes down. I can’t possibly carry on. I must seek alternative work. I want to deliver pizzas. I want to deliver newspapers. I want to stack shelves. Now that I think of it, I bet most of the people stacking shelves in supermarkets are ex-teachers.
After a five-minute break spent in the garden trying to understand who I am and why I am here, I head upstairs to face M17, hoping M doesn’t stand for malignant and 17 for the size of the group. The students are aged between sixteen and eighteen. They are receiving extra tuition in preparation for their final high-school exams, the equivalent of British A-levels. Mercifully, the group are less inclined to get under the table, or on the table, or out the window, in part because the classroom is on the second floor. Unlike Lucas, M17 do not think it reasonable to take my journal and start reading it to the class in an affected English accent – ‘I was am-bi-va-lent about the dump-lings’ – and nor do they think it reasonable to make jokes about me in Polish, to the amusement of the rest of the class and to the detriment of the scholastic atmosphere and my self-esteem. As well as being altogether less demented, M17 are also more self-conscious, with the result that keeping a conversation going with them is a challenge. They care what I think of them. They care what their classmates think of them. In Freudian terms, D1 were light on superego, heavy on id. M17 have enough superego to sink a ship. When I ask what their motivation for studying English is they all insist they have none. I take that as my cue to wrap things up.
23 March. I spend my first wage packet in a pub called Dragon. I spend too much time here. It is proving an extension of the flat, a distant living room, a boozy en-suite. It has a homely quality and takes a varied crowd. A suit at the bar with a beer and newspaper. A pair of skateboarders sharing a pack of cigarettes in the courtyard garden. Students from Southern Europe talking quickly in mother tongues, asking when the weather will turn and where the wine is. Eighties pop music from the UK and the US plays as loud as the bartender wants, while conflicting music videos run on a TV above the bar next to a protruding dragon’s head. It’s a very social place – for me at least. I am sociable here because I am always alone and open and willing to practise Polish or English and so on. Moreover, I’ve been more or less in a good, gregarious mood ever since arriving in Poland (apart from when in a classroom), and such a mood can make anywhere social. I consider the corner shop a social place, and the trams, and even the public toilets. I spoke to my mum last night and she asked if Poland was a friendly place. I quickly answered that it was. But on reflection perhaps it isn’t, perhaps it’s me that’s friendly – buoyed by being away, apart, abroad – and perhaps it’s my friendliness that forces it out of others in a sort of unnatural way. All that is not to say the Polish are unfriendly – I’m sure some are and some aren’t just like everywhere else – but rather that I am probably not the best barometer. If you sent a deprived child into a toy shop and then asked them for a report, no doubt it would be glowing. Poland, for the time being, is a bit like that for me. I’m out of place here and it suits me.
I’m here for a date. I’m meeting Tala, who I connected with on Tinder.7 To be candid, I am less interested in Tala as a potential romantic partner and more as a pedagogue. This, I know, shouldn’t be my opening line. In the event, we have a good, solid lesson. I am introduced to Polish history (one thing after another by the sound of it) and then the Polish case system (distinct from the Indian caste system, which is a lot more fun believe me), which requires all nouns, even the most trivial, like carrot, to take fourteen different spellings, depending on what mood it’s in. When the subject drifts off learning Polish as a foreign language, Tala asks me what I think about the attacks in Belgium. I ask her what attacks in Belgium. She tells me that members of ISIS detonated themselves at various places across the country to make a point about something, but that the ‘something’ can’t be agreed upon. ‘No matter what,’ she says, ‘it will make it more likely that you leave Europe.’ I tell her I’m going nowhere, that I’m not scared. ‘Not you,’ she says, ‘the UK. In the referendum. Such events get distorted, are used to make people fearful. It happens here in Poland. Half the country is scared of Russia, the other half is scared of Muslims.’ I will almost certainly see Tala again, though next time I should offer to pay an hourly rate.8
4 Henceforth, and without his consent, Jędrzej became Jenny.
5 I regret this flippant comment about Poles being heavy consumers of alcohol. By suggesting that the Poles drink a lot I was lazily recycling one of those clichéd, often fallacious ideas about this or that group. The Irish eat potatoes. The English drink tea. That sort of thing. It is exactly this sort of clichéd thinking about the Polish – about Others – that I hoped to counter or complicate by moving to Poland. One reason for moving to a new place is to challenge one’s attitudes and intuitions, to destabilise one’s common sense. As evidenced above, old habits die hard.
6 The 500-zloty ‘baby payment’ is a divisive policy. It is essentially a child benefit. The government’s detractors insist that in the run up to the 2015 election the policy was dangled in front of the electorate like a reckless carrot. It is not inherently regrettable for a government to support families with more than one child, and yet if you were to ask any Pole who is against the governing Law and Justice Party for an example of its misbehaviour, they will most likely cite the 500-zloty baby payments. Why? Because they feel the benefit makes people reliant on the State when they should be reliant on themselves. And they don’t like the idea of people being paid to have sex.
7 Dating application millennials require to fill their weekday evenings. I used it a bit in England, and then a bit in Poland. It makes you a worse person in both countries.
8 I never saw her again.
3
Love is blind
