A Chip Shop in Poznań, page 5
10 May. It is hard to learn Polish on foot, on the street, in the field, for each word, even the simplest and most quotidian, like banana, can take up to twenty different forms – quite a slippery banana. This is the Polish case system that I have been trying to avoid. It is a grammatical conspiracy, designed a millennium ago to make life unnecessarily difficult, and so doing give Poles a common adversary around which they can cohere. I used to stay alert when walking the city, keeping an eye open for recognisable words, hunting for connections or resemblances between something I had ordered for lunch and something for sale in a shop. I thought I knew the word for bread but then I heard it being called something else, and then written down as something different again. I began to think that the Poles were just very bad at spelling. And that would have been all right, preferable to what’s actually going on, which is that the appearance of banana will vary depending on whether you’re ordering a banana or addressing a banana or undressing a banana or accusing a banana or whatever it is one is inclined to do with a banana. The upshot of all this is that, after nearly two months of endeavour, my Polish is still the Polish of a baby. My favourite Polish TV programme is Bolek and Lolek, because the characters don’t say anything. If it is a meaningful conversation in Polish I’m after, I really ought to be hanging out with Poles under the age of two. We could toddle around pointing at things and taking it in turns to have a stab at the noun in the nominative case. It’s unlikely to happen though, for obvious reasons, so I’ll have to persist with adults – or Jenny at least – and hope for the best.
16 May. The 24-hour convenience store across from my flat attracts a regular congregation, usually in the evening and sometimes through the night. At all times, each member of the congregation appears to be waiting for an arrival or a delivery – wide stance, darting eyes – and yet nothing ever comes. Sometimes the men drink and smoke, but for the most part they just stand, sharing jokes and observations and making loud, demonstrative phone calls (sometimes to each other). The phone calls are a charade, I feel, designed to communicate to the street that each of the men has dependents, sycophants, dealers, acolytes, interlocutors, a thick reliable phonebook of touchpoints, of ready ears, with each point and each ear evidence of their membership and vitality and identity. But the overall paralysis of the scene, of the routine, night after night before the same unclosing shop, gives lie to the idea of urgency, of vitality, and argues for a lack of options, a dearth of alternatives, a net deficit of status. I don’t know. There is something pathetic, in the noblest sense (in that it is moving and human but sad), about their pointless vigils, their manly posturing. For it is a posture. They are a menacing prospect but give no grief to passers-by or the shop’s keeper, who years ago might have feared their presence, but now values their familiarity. If a shopper is struggling with their load, or if someone has a puncture across the street, one of the men will be the first to attend. The group’s integrity usually starts to unravel about the time I’m trying to sleep, when the chorus will start to sing and quarrel, perhaps to distract themselves from the cold, or the fact that there is nowhere else to go apart from home. For many of the men, home is overbearing, is on top of them: many live in the flats above the shop. The windows of the uppermost flats are mere portholes, manholes, no bigger than the heads that stick out of them, to check on the weather, the traffic, the scene, to watch out for news, to wait for Godot or winter or the Russians. I would paint the scene if I were able. I would have the heavy, aimless congregation on the street, and then duplicates of each at the windows, humanising the stone façade of home. Sometimes, when I’m watching the chorus from my window, I call Jenny in to translate what the group is saying. He says, ‘I don’t want to know what they’re saying, and nor should you.’ Perhaps it is easier for me to appreciate the men because I don’t understand them.
24 May. B4 sat an exam, if you remember. I return their papers, which all earned more or less the same grade, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the spirit of collaboration and consensus in which the exam was carried out. That done, I show the class a section of a BBC documentary about the migration of Poles to the UK. It is called The Poles are Coming, or something equally alarming, as if the Poles were a criminal outfit from another galaxy, ready to wage war with sour cucumbers and pork knuckles. After showing a twenty-minute clip of the documentary I ask the students questions about what they’ve seen – about the town of Peterborough and the European Union and the migrants’ motivations for leaving Poland – before chairing a more general discussion about the film. Timothy thinks the portrayal of Poles in the film is unfair. Zosia, who is always quick to disagree with Timothy, says that maybe the Poles that go to the UK are simply like that (which is to say, unruly characters with a fondness for alcohol). In which case, says Barbara, it is sad that British ideas about Poland are formed in response to such a narrow ‘delegation’ – that’s the word she uses – whose members are often in difficult economic situations. How do you know they are in difficult economic situations? asks Zosia. Well, says Barbara, if they weren’t then why would they leave Poland and go looking for work abroad? Someone suggests that all television is propaganda and I ought to be ashamed of the BBC. After the screening and discussion, I set a grammar exercise. You might have thought, from the collective groan, that I’d sentenced them to ten years’ hard labour. Some of the groans carry accusatory tones, as if I had betrayed them, gaining their interest and trust by showing the documentary only to go and stab them in the back with a grammar exercise. And yet, despite their protests and moans, I sense that at some level the class is pleased to suffer this reversal of fortune.
I ask M17 to nominate ten famous Poles and tell me why they are famous. This exercise is as much for my benefit as theirs, but then I don’t see why teaching shouldn’t be mutually stimulating. Top of the list is Copernicus, who said the sun doesn’t move. A close second is Robert Lewandowski, who is the leading scorer for the Polish national football team. Others on the list include Marie Skłodowska-Curie (scientist), Adam Małysz (ski jumper), Lech Wałęsa (shipwright turned president, responsible for the capitulation of communism), Dorota Rabczewska (eye-catching singer better known as Doda), Roman Polanski (director), Joseph Conrad (writer), Reksio (animated dog) and Arthur Rubinstein, who, I’m told, played a slow, powerful version of the Polish national anthem on the piano at the inauguration of the United Nations in 1946, in protest of Poland not having a delegation.18
27 May. I haven’t been in a canoe since I was seven, when I had a lower centre of gravity and less anxiety. Most of the group I’m with are paired up, so to divide the responsibility and labour, so they might lend each other support and counsel and reassurance, or make life saving interventions should the canoe flip. Marietta, knowing of my inexperience and anxiety, decides I’m better off in an individual canoe, ‘so I can have a real experience’. Lowering myself into the canoe is like trying to rest a pint of milk on a bobbing apple. Marietta enjoys my attempt to embark. You’d be forgiven for thinking the sight of my struggle the essence of comedy, the very peak of wit, such are her giggles and guffaws. In the end I board the canoe on dry land and demand to be pushed in. After an hour or so of nervous flapping and wobbling the going improves and my mood lightens. After several hours we come to a big lake. I am at the front of the pack when I make an ostentatious U-turn and start paddling the other way, towards the start. As I pass the other canoes, the occupants turn their heads and look to me for an explanation. I bide my time and then say, ‘It’s alright. I left something in the car.’ I am alone in being impressed with this tomfoolery.
We stop to eat something and rest. Fixed to one of the trees is a memorial to John Paul II, who used to muck about on this river when he was a lad. By all accounts JP2 was a popular pope, and by all accounts the Poles were rather proud that their man got such a big job abroad. I understand their pride but wonder if it sometimes goes too far. I mean, if the Poles are prepared to commemorate a river John Paul once jollied on, what else are they prepared to commemorate? Is there a memorial on the forecourt of John Paul’s preferred petrol station in Katowice, and another outside the supermarket where he got bitten by a dog as a teenager? I keep such thoughts to myself, where they are undoubtedly better off, and instead watch Tony swimming pedantically in his Y-fronts. I am invited to take part in a tree-climbing competition – Marietta promises it will be another ‘real experience’ – but I refuse. My reasoning, happily shared, is sound enough. ‘Look, there are things we are better at, things we are worse at. I happen to be bad at Polish and lovemaking and climbing trees. Because I am not totally without a spirt of adventure, I am happy to give Polish and lovemaking a go, a good go even, because even if my attempt is unsuccessful there is no chance that I will die or break my neck. The same cannot be said of climbing trees.’ By the time I have reached the end of my reasoning, the competitors are out of earshot, are at the top of the tree celebrating their ability and supremacy and daring, comparing grazes and routes, pointing out landmarks in the offing – the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, Brandenburg Gate, the docks at Gdańsk. From where I am sat, the view is just as memorable.
After the day’s paddling, we go to a traditional village for a traditional meal in a traditional restaurant. I enjoy the golonka (pork knuckle) for the first twenty minutes but then grow tired of the thing. I try and hide what I’ve left under my sour cabbage. To encourage digestion, I get a bit of political talk going. I turn to Dominic (Tony and Marietta’s son) and say, with my tongue in my cheek, that communism was a good thing because it provided equality. Dominic snorts. ‘Sure there was equality. Everyone was screwed.’
18 And that was fair enough; to be irked by Poland’s treatment after the Second World War, I mean. The Polish government in exile in London had been told that in the event of an Allied victory Poland would be independent and the government in exile reinstated. In part, the hundreds of thousands of Poles who fought for the Allies did so with this in mind. Squadron 303 of the RAF, formed in Blackpool and made up exclusively of Poles, was the safest and most effective squadron throughout the war. And yet at Yalta and Potsdam and Tehran, when the future of Poland was on the table, Stalin was given what he wanted, which was most of Eastern Europe. The Polish government in exile were delivered the news over afternoon tea at the Ritz in London. ‘Er, now listen up, would you. That thing we said, about you getting your country back, well it turns out it was a silly idea all along, so we’ve given Poland to the Soviets, who say they’ll do a smashing job of it. More tea?’
8
What would you say if I said that I often think about kissing you?
29 May. I miss my mother. Because without her my life lacks the pleasure she gives, and there is no replacement for that pleasure. New friends and new experiences, as well as alcohol and cigarettes and all that rot, are poor substitutes for a mother’s love. I am not a person inclined to solitude. I can cope with it, and sometimes aim for it, but raised on love as a child, and then carried through on it into adulthood, it comes as a harsh ration to be without it now. I don’t always feel this way. Days and sometimes weeks go by without my feeling any lack of love at all, for curiosity and novelty and adventure are themselves great loves of mine, and between them have the ability to support and nourish me. But moments come – this morning for example – when I would give my right arm for some time with my mum, not to gain anything in particular – news or food or reassurance – but to be thoughtlessly surrounded by her easy and lasting love. It’s invisible, such love. It doesn’t need form, or indicators, or obvious expression – though doubtless my mum wouldn’t mind a few more postcards. It’s invisible and yet I see it and need it and am better for it. A friend once told me about a book called Promise at Dawn by Romain Gary. The book’s main idea is that a child will spend the rest of their life searching for a love that lives up to the one given to them by their mother. With this in mind, I am almost certainly barking up the wrong tree by looking for love in bars and pubs and discos and other such juvenile places. I’d be better off asking Tony and Marietta to put me in touch with any single mothers they know. But say I did ask Tony and Marietta and they did put me in touch and I did enter a relationship with a single mother able to love me as my mother did when I was a child, what then? If history were to repeat itself, I would spend the first stage of the relationship being generally defiant and obnoxious, before escaping abroad at the first opportunity. No, it’s a bad idea. It wouldn’t work. A mother is only able to love like a mother when they have no choice in the matter. As a result, the only mother in a position to love me like my mother is my mother, and I can hardly go out with her.
1 June. Anita invites me to meet her halfway. When I arrive she is drinking pink lemonade and doing paperwork. I order nothing, just sit next to her and lean backwards into the sun with my eyes closed because I feel awful. Minutes pass, and then several more, and just as I begin to make my peace with the fact that we have nothing to say to each other, she asks what I want to do before I depart. It’s daft, and pompous, but all I can do is quote William Blake, because I love the lines and they are as true as anything else.19
‘I kind of meant what do you want to do in Poznań before you leave,’ she says.
I smile, still with my eyes closed, still leaning backwards so my hungover face is in the way of the sun. What do I want to do in Poznań? I want to express my feelings for you, Anita, which are outgrowing, it feels to me, the present shape of our relation. Because we can’t always do what we want, I say: ‘I would like to spend an entire afternoon walking this street, back and forth, until I know it like the back of my hand.’ I smile again, laugh almost, thinking how little I know the back of my hand. ‘And then I want to photograph all of Poznań’s churches, for some are plain and others monstrous, and then I want to visit all of the city’s statues, to learn what Poznań chooses to remember.’
Anita looks at me, or at least I think she does, and says, ‘Well you can do those things alone, so please go ahead.’
And then I let it go, let it out. I take a mental run up – while she sips her pink lemonade – and then say, ‘But in fact the first thing I want to do is ask you something.’ She says nothing. I take a deep breath, a deep cliché breath to buy time and draw composure. I guess this is the end of fear.
‘Anita. What would you say if I said that I often think about kissing you?’
‘I would say stop thinking about it.’
2 June. Down in the courtyard there is a step that gets the sun for a good portion of the day. I go there this morning with green tea and two rolled cigarettes to move on with Laurie Lee. I am reading his As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, which recounts the author’s teenage jaunt from Gloucester to Spain in 1936 or so, on the brink of that country’s civil war. My favourite bit in the book so far is when the author’s landlord in London, having seen a poem of Lee’s in the newspaper, says to him, ‘I didn’t know you had such beautiful thoughts.’ Every few pages or so I pause to watch a tireless ant for some minutes, or to drain the pool of sweat that has formed between my foot and sandal. A dog enters from the street with the intention of pissing on as much of the milieu as it can manage. It is pursued by its owner and best friend. ‘Daisy! … Daisy! … DAISY!’ Daisy pays no attention; I’m quite sure she would answer back if she could: ‘What now, woman? Can’t you see I’m busy?’ More than anything else, it is such moments on the step, or at the kitchen window, when a happy inertia keeps me still and quiet and ponderous, that make me feel at home in Poland, rather than away or apart or merely passing through. Odd that a part suggests inclusion, whereas apart – so nearly the same – means the opposite.
3 June. To the step once more, where I take the sun and read. Laurie isn’t as good today, and nor is his landlord. I resent the sweat that pools between skin and sandal. The tea is bitter (I left the bag in too long) and the courtyard smells weakly of urine. I was here yesterday and felt fine, glorious even, wanting nothing. Today I could stamp on the ants and want everything.
5 June. I enter a room on the sixth floor of the university’s humanities department and there listen to the poetry of Vona Groarke, who I know loosely from my time at Manchester University, where she writes poems about the rain and Gary Neville. I enjoy the reading. It is a bit like being in a yoga or meditation session. There are all these words buzzing around, like soothing gentle flies, landing on shoulders and earlobes before leaving via a window. It is nice to be led out of my own world of words (both said and unsaid) and into someone else’s, someone who makes word-worlds for fun, for a living, for life. I reproach myself between poems. Why don’t I listen to more poetry? I know that it does me good. I know that it removes me and improves me and makes me feel better and calmer. And yet I never make it a recurring thing in my life. Instead, in the gap provided by poetry’s absence, I routinely poison myself until I can’t think or talk in order to spend the next day in a state of subdued idiocy, a lazy moronic torpor, of which no good comes, of which no good can come. Yes – I will drink and smoke until the cows come home (and even after they’ve come home) and will do so knowing that such behaviour will make me worse, make me dull, make me ordinary and idle, but I won’t listen to poetry for twenty minutes twice a week. Gosh no. Hell no. Poetry’s got nothing over petty intoxication. Fool.
