Krakow Melt (8 page)

Dorota and I hollowed out our bread rolls and laced them with
led
from a tin, dripping with tomato sauce and lemon juice. A stink bomb, quite literally; eating marinated herring on a train is the international sign for “don’t sit in our cabin.” So is yanking shut the orange polyester blinds on the cabin door window. In a country as densely populated as Poland, you must protect leg-room to the death. We stretched our legs and ate, ate, ate, washing it down with
herbatka
from a thermos. This was our poci
g pospieszny
to paradise.

The Polskie Koleje Pa
stwowe (PKP) is a notoriously ancient institution that uses maps and timetables corresponding to towns no longer serviced and rail lines long buried in weeds. Trains are never late, because they always come unexpectedly. The irritable clerks are happy to remind you, as they throw your change through the slot under the bulletproof “customer service” window, that there is no alternative. The PKP would choose steam locomotives for their
pospieszna
express trains, given the choice, just to make you late.

For the first ten minutes of the trip, our only view of paradise was of the unmoving platform. I was anxious to get going and fetched the ticket-taker.

“
Prosz
bardzo
, can you tell me when the train will depart?” I said. I hoped my earnestness would eventually trigger Dorota to say something snarky to him.

The ticket-taker spoke into a radio and listened, nodding his head and saying “
no
.” No means yes in Polish.

“There are some cows. They refuse to move and we cannot find the farmer.”

I looked to Dorota for help, but she was too busy playing tic-tac-toe on her arm to escalate the situation. I guess there were some battles she didn’t feel like fighting, and that was just fine.

We finally got moving, and left Kraków for the seven-hour trip north. We passed a string of villages, towns, and cities that may or may not have been on the map.

Kielce (quaint)
Skar
ysko-Kamienna (boring)
Radom (medieval)
Warszawa (overrated, yet still the international face of the
country)
Ciechanów (where we saw the offending cows shot and
splayed on the embankment)
Malbork (castles, ghosts, and tourists)

Trains make me want to smoke, but we had no cigarettes. As the train ripped through the countryside, we stood in the corridor and hung our arms out the window, letting the foliage whip our skin and stain it with chlorophyll. In Poland, trees are not trimmed unless they’re in someone’s yard. Weeds are not weeds; they’re wild plants that elder townsfolk search for and lure into garbage bags. I wish I were old.

We were invaded in Tczew: a platoon of soldiers boarded the train. It could’ve been straight out of a World War II movie, but their rifles looked like they were in such bad condition that I doubt they worked. Our car became a virtual barracks, with a kennel of twenty-year-old boys drinking Okocim beer from cans—the cheap stuff, let me tell you—and flirting with Dorota when she passed in the corridor. We shut ourselves in our cabin until we got to Gda
sk.

Still, they could’ve gang-banged Dorota any time they wanted. It would start with a polite knock on the door, and then it would be unstoppable rape, blood, laughter, and buckets of semen.

Was she going to fuck me on the beach?

When we got to Gda
sk, Dorota steered us away from the
Solidarno
monuments, not wanting any distractions to derail our afternoon of fun and discovery. She knew, the smart biscuit, that if I saw the wall at the shipyards that unemployed electrician Lech Wał
sa first stood on to stir brio in the workers, I’d never want to leave. The cradle of the Solidarity Movement was a warm place for babies of any age.