There's an Egg in My Soup (11 page)

Crossing the track, I stroll down the hill to where a few wooden houses stand. In the yard of the first house, a man is chopping wood. A few chickens tear around aimlessly, and an old peasant woman stands watching at the gate. She has her hair wrapped up in a bundle under a large red scarf, and her body in an assortment of other various-coloured clothing. Her arms fold across two giants of busts as she leans down on the gate and waits for me to come closer.

I go over to ask her where the hell Grabarka is supposed to be.

‘Is it Grabarka or the Holy Mountain you're looking for?'

‘The Holy Mountain, I think.'

‘It's not a Catholic place, you know,' she says, squinting one eye.

Since Poland is ninety-four percent Catholic, such responses are normal. Although, to be honest, any flame of an urge to practise my Catholic faith was well smothered after only a year here. When I was living at
home, I went to mass on a Sunday. It was a habit as much as anything else, a ritual that somehow fulfilled a desire for inner peace once a week. Half the time, I would stand in the porch daydreaming, but the mass was short and the sermon had a semblance of a point, and there was nothing very arduous about it.

Jesus himself wouldn't stick mass in Poland, and I left one Sunday so utterly dejected and dispirited that I knew I simply couldn't go again. Old women caw up at the crosses with mouths wide open and eyes dilated, their bead-wrapped knuckles quivering in prayer. The priest, meanwhile, pummels the podium, screaming and shouting at his clergy who all stand frozen like statues. Religion is supposed to lift the soul, not smother it.

Of course, religious fervour here has its roots. During the Russian occupation, the leader of the Polish church, Cardinal Wyszinski, a determined and strong-willed man, acted as a direct conduit from the Polish people to the Vatican. The people's voice from behind the iron curtain substantially came through him. With the appointment of John Paul II as Pope and his pilgrimage in 1979, the spirit of the people was greatly lifted – it was this visit that undoubtedly influenced the Solidarity movement. In recent history at least, Poland owes a large debt to the Church. But the Church has a worrying hold over the people, which doesn't always seem healthy.

So when this countrywoman told me it wasn't a
Catholic place, it was said on the presumption that I was.

When I tell her I am simply here to see it as a tourist, she goes out of her way to give directions, confusingly providing me with three routes of varying lengths. She must have noticed my confusion, because twenty minutes later into the woods a young guy on a bike comes up behind me.

‘I am here to show you the mountain,' he says to me.

‘No, I'm okay,' I tell this guy, ‘I'll manage.'

‘But my mother sent me, and you are to come back for tea afterwards.'

Again I decline. I'm not in the mood for too much talking; I really just want to ramble around on my own. The young guy insists though, so finally I give in and follow him through the woods to the mountain.

The ‘mountain' turns out to be a small and disappointing hill. It must have been pretty crowded up there during the cholera outbreak. Piotr, my new guide, takes me first to a well at the bottom, with a small, whitewashed wall around it and a blue roof over it. A clear stream trickles into the well from the woods and apparently people with assorted skin diseases come here all the time to bathe their feet in the waters. As Piotr reaches into the well with one of the receptacles hanging beside it, the image of three hundred years of feet fills my mind.

‘You have to drink it,' he says. ‘That's why people
come here.'

The look of disbelief as I refuse is startling. He shakes his head and nods in the direction of the trodden path leading up to the church on top. Once we get halfway up, the crosses begin to appear, varying in size from a few centimetres to well over a metre. By the time we get to the church, which is a tremendously picturesque, wooden building in the typical style of the Orthodox faith, crosses peep out at us from everywhere. It's a visual feast, and Piotr takes me through the woods to the fields at the back where more crosses have been planted randomly, scattered around like toothpicks; some are old and gnarled, others still smelling of fresh resin.

Here lies three hundred years of faith, faith based on a miracle. I will say one thing for the Poles – after all they've been through, they certainly have faith. You can be cynical about it, but it is a sign of a strong human spirit to retain such faith in the face of endless suffering. Or you could, of course, take the view that it is the suffering itself that induces their faith.

The rain is coming down hard again as we walk back through the thick pine woods. With the wind thrashing the tops of the trees, the offer of a cup of tea is sounding a bit more enticing. When we get there, Piotr's mother is bent over in the garden at the front of the house, fiddling with some plants buried in the soggy ground. I think it's lettuce, but whatever it is, five
minutes later it's sitting on the kitchen counter as she cuts a loaf of bread between her breasts.

The home is basic, as you would expect here. Having taken off my boots, I sit at the table opposite the door and try to take it all in without appearing rude. A large stove burns away in the far corner, where Piotr is boiling a kettle. His mother stands on my right cutting the bread at the sink, while on my left at the end of the table under a lamp, a handful of newborn chickens prance around in a cardboard box. The room is warm despite the whole house being made of wood, and the smell from the chickens in the box blends somehow with the strong tea just put on the table to give the type of odour you can grab. It's not unpleasant, it's just country.

Down come the sandwiches. Thick bread like the heel of a boot, freshly torn lettuce with traces of muck and meat from the arse of a fat Polish pig. Perfect. Cold hands on a hot mug and the strong taste of ham, the glow from the stove and the beating of the wind-driven rain on the hollow wooden walls. It is at times like this that you want to drop out of the race. They have everything here, she tells me. All the food they can eat is either running around outside or waits to be lifted out of the earth, while life beyond this pleasant little microcosm goes on at a pace that would shorten the lives of these people by half. And what the hell for, I wonder?

I sit there with the family for at least an hour, the father coming in from the yard to join us, bowing slightly and offering his hand. The mother goes through the family history in some detail. She eventually urges Piotr to take out the photo album, something which often happens when you sit with Polish families. While going through the photos, Piotr goes into his room and returns with a box of inexpensive chocolates. It was his birthday yesterday, the mother tells me, as he offers me one. There are only about four gone from the box and he has had them a day. I wonder how many times he has been given a box of chocolates.

Eventually, Piotr tells me it is time to get the train; he will show me where the timetable is. It's sunny again when we step outside, growing warm, and the smell of wet grass and steam hangs in the air. Piotr takes me up the hill and across the track to a bank on the far side. The station is up here, he tells me.

Climbing to the top of the bank, I'm greeted by an old woman, scarf on head, sitting on an empty crate beside a cow. The ‘station' turns out to be her house – on the wall in her porch is nailed a timetable carved from a piece of wood. I am sure I would have found it eventually.

If time moves too fast, visits to places like this appear to slow it down for a while. Sentimental that may be, but it's true. Normal days for modern man are not made up of working to live. You live to work, and the result
is wealth. Going out with a bucket to the water pump will mean that the cup of tea you make will be cherished. Running out of the train station and grabbing a take-out on the way to the office will mean it won't be. It is that simple.

When I got back home that evening, I remember feeling a bit emotional about the whole experience. Hospitality like that is such a rare and odd experience that it is bound to leave an impression. This mood doesn't last very long – it is quickly driven out by the real world. A taste, though, is enough to leave a tinge of regret.

I promised myself to go back there once more before leaving for good. The truth is though, I grew afraid to. Something would have changed that would ruin it for me – a bus stop, a new platform, a shop, something. I'm better off just keeping the one image. Some time later, however, I sent the family a postcard – the mother had given me their address and made me promise I would send her son a card from home. I hope they got it, I really do.

If places like Grabarka represent the Poland of old, travel to the west is the polar opposite. The German influence is immediate, those who live there tending to speak to you in German rather than English upon hearing you're a foreigner. BMWs are everywhere. Stylish restaurants, chain stores, designer names and top brands on billboards; it is obvious why we were sent as volunteers to the east rather than to the west.

In the second year of our stay, myself and a few of the lads in the group got an urge to buy a bar. It was a bit mad, one of those ideas actually conceived in a bar. But it was a bar in Minsk, opened by a student, which gave us the idea. If he could do it, so could we. Only better. That was the motivation.

The other bars in the town at that time were rarely visited. There was a café that was too full of students and closed at ten o'clock. There was a bar at the bottom of a block of flats that had two pool tables and plastic patio furniture. That was the spot I frequented with the ‘pomaturalne' students who I had grown close to in the first year. It was an awful place, but it was a bar. The bar lady was very friendly, and gave you
bread and ‘smalec' with every round. ‘Smalec' was basically a thick fat spread that a lot of the alcoholics ate. It helped line your stomach. You would see them early in the morning buying a bottle of spirits, some bread and a little, margarine-sized pack of smalec. The sad fact was that they were saving money on food to buy drink, and lining their gut with this stuff instead.

There was also the café place that I had avoided on my second day, which catered for older people and had a dance of sorts on a Sunday. You could get breaded pork chops there after a few beers and the bar ladies, dressed in flowery aprons, would warn you against drinking cold beer in the winter. Actually, they would almost refuse to serve it. They would point at your throat and offer a tepid bottle or, better still, hot beer with cloves.

The bar that inspired us, though, was a dirty, festering dive. There were no doors on the toilets, and the cubicles for men and women were right next to each other. That's the first image that comes flooding back, as images of that nature would. If a girl wished to pee, a friend or boyfriend stood where the door should have been and blocked the view. Men didn't bother trying to block the view, sometimes using the sink. I've seen bars in the States that employ similar tactics when it comes to their toilets, but that's mostly to prevent drug users from injecting themselves. In this bar, it was
simply because the owner wasn't arsed hanging doors.

Some of the insane antics that went on in that bar have long since been obliterated from memory. Many nights went on until six in the morning, with Sunday creeping in through cracks in the grubby windows. With a floor caked in filth, a toilet gurgling in excrement and a rowdy mob every weekend, its heinous reputation was smeared on the feet of all who passed through it, and spread thereafter throughout the town like a plague.

Some of the characters that haunted the place, I'm convinced, were merely bodies separated from a mind cremated by meths. Descartes would have loved to have met them. Dark eyes with black rings like tractor tyres gazed from hollow corners of the pub. Gaunt faces, cheekbones hoovered into dry mouths, barely a sentence passing their lips. Christ, to think I was among them as a teacher.

Strangely though, I never saw any trouble there. Some of the more rebellious students frequented this dump also, and for a while we all rolled out the same door in the same state on a Sunday morning. There were a few ‘pomaturalne' students who I went there with regularly. They made more of an effort in class as a result – most of them anyhow. So I figured that I was doing a good service by going out and getting hammered with them. Anyway, I needed the company.

Of course, I was ‘advised' not to go there by some of
the teachers when they found out. The director said nothing, and the vice director, who was quite fond of a tipple herself, thought it was a great idea for me to mix with the students as much as possible. But some of the English teachers were concerned. That pub had a bad name and my reputation simply wouldn't recover.

They were probably right. You can drink a lot and get away with it in Poland, but there were many with serious drinking problems from which there seemed to be no going back. The price of vodka didn't help. There were nights with Poles where a serious, dangerous amount of drink was consumed. We all had the tales to tell, and they weren't even funny.

This particular bar, perhaps inevitably, didn't last very long. After a few months it changed hands. As it attempted to clean itself up, the old crowd left or died off. Finally, it was closed down as a condemned building. The name of the bar, by the way, was ‘Beirut'.

Deciding that Poles didn't know how a good bar should look or how it should be run, myself and Keith, a friend from Belfast, saw a viable business opportunity. After a bit of research, we decided to visit a town called Wroclaw, in the west of Poland, to see if we could find a premises. Lord knows what we were thinking about. It was a ridiculous idea, as Wroclaw is one of the richer cities in the country and has plenty of bars already. Even if it hadn't, a group of lads on APSO volunteer money would never have been able to afford a lease,
and if APSO had found out there would have been hell to pay. APSO send volunteers to other countries so that the natives can benefit from our ‘skills' and go on to make good livings for themselves, not vice versa. While our intentions at the time we came over were noble, we were a bit warped twelve months later, and were quite prepared to build for the future, providing a valuable service to the community at the same time.

Getting into the station in Wroclaw late on a Thursday night after a seven-hour journey, we check into the nearest hotel, directly across the way. It's a bit dingy, but fine. We book three beds, since we've arranged to meet another friend, Paul, off a later train at about 12.30am.

It is some time in March, and a cold night. Poland is balancing on the cusp between winter and spring, always the worst period since you never know what kind of weather you'll be assaulted by. Myself and Keith head out for a bite to eat and a couple of beers, finding a bar eventually but no food. The first thing we notice is the price of everything, almost double what we're used to paying in the east.

At midnight we leave the bar, which is closing anyway, and turn back to the station. It is bitterly cold now, with a harsh wind and biting sheets of sleet. We're not talking much, since we're both thinking the same thing. A bar of our own is a pipe dream, another one of mine that will have to go up in smoke. What is more,
we're here for the weekend and it's not a cheap city. We should really just go home.

The train is delayed. No one can tell us why, so we'll just have to wait. Train stations in Poland are not good places to wait, day or night. Warsaw Central, for example, although well-serviced, has a few dodgy corridors and passageways that are a vision straight from the pages of a horror book. Junkies hang around like vampires, clawing at passers by, and smells ranging from hotdogs to urine float in the air.

Wroclaw station is not much better, at least, not at night. It is a long building with gaudy shops and cafés parked along either side, mostly closed now save a few rudimentary hangouts selling beer and coffee. We make for one that has a good view of the information board and get beer in plastic glasses.

The place is submerged in drunkards, and after an hour we're beginning to fit right in. Nobody hangs around stations at this time except drunks, and nobody goes into the station bars except drunks. Leaning on a plastic table, we stare out at the wind blowing about a few papers and patches of sleet.

A drunkard parks himself beside us and begins to chat. I like talking to these guys sometimes. They all have a story to tell, and most of them, at some point in their lives, had a place to call home. Keith swears in his sharp Northern accent and heads to the information desk, leaving me to chat with the drunk. It turns out
he's a fisherman from Kaliningrad, a corner port belonging to Russia that no one in Poland seems to know anything about. Nor do they want to, but that's another story. The guy offers me a job on a fishing boat, but I decline. There can't be too many creatures left alive in the Baltic.

At about 2am, the train comes in and there's no sign of Paul. Tired, cold and drunk, we go to bed.

Friday morning isn't so cold, but the dark sky looks swollen with rain. During a McDonald's breakfast, we browse through a local paper and discover the address of an agency that deals with leasing. An hour's rambling finds us parked at a desk in front of a very attractive lady, with Keith trying to explain in Polish that we're here to find a vacant building to open a pub.

She's not taking us seriously. To begin with, we're not dressed very well, with Keith in a striped anorak and me in a black docker's jacket. On top of that, we're both hungover, our eyes pinched up from the cold wind and the alcohol. We react with shock at a price she finally gives us, then wander away, feeling like a pair of eejits.

The rest of the day is spent touring the city, wishing we lived here instead of in the east. After several hours of brooding, we go on a pub-crawl to reinforce the fact that we'll never own one ourselves. Then we almost get into a spot of trouble.

Some time after one in the morning, we're drifting
around the main square looking for another drinking den and we approach a taxi driver for a recommendation. Asking us what it is we want, the word ‘girls' is blurted out unconsciously. A strip bar or something similar is what we had in mind, a bit of harmless fun to raise the spirits.

We climb into the taxi, after the driver – clad in tracksuit and gold chains – assures us he knows a good place. The tracksuit and gold chains are the uniform here for thugs and ‘mafia', with most of the taxis run by the mafia in the larger cities. You usually get ripped off if you land in one of these, but, unless you do something drastic, that's about the worst that will happen. Of course, if you try and argue the fee at the end of your journey, you're liable to find yourself surrounded by a dozen more tracksuit-clad thugs who have been radioed in.

We wind through a few back streets of the old town and head out onto a main road. The further we go, the more suspicious we become, as the town seems to disappear behind us and the road ahead becomes drenched in darkness. ‘Christ,' Keith begins, ‘I knew it, we're fucked now.'

Despite his fears, I'm not that worried. I have a feeling I know where we're heading, and begin to think it's funny. Maybe it's due to Keith's background, but he has convinced himself that we're going to be robbed and shot. After half an hour, we pull over on the edge
of a quiet road and stop outside a large house. Now my mood changes. Shaped like a cardboard box, two square windows stare out from the top of the building, lit from somewhere in the background by a pair of seedy red lights. It's like the Amityville Horror. The driver steps out and I expect him to a have a cloven foot, just like that story my ma used to tell me about the devil. But he doesn't, he has a pair of imitation Adidas.

He leads us into the hall. We pay him and are met by a sleazy-looking guy with a goatee beard. A curtain is pulled back, revealing a large, sombre room that smells of dirty sex, cleverly disguised by cheap incense. About ten girls sit in a line, gazing up at us from a balding couch against the near wall. One of them has one of her breasts hanging out and smiles as we run past them, towards a tiny bar in the corner. At this point, of course, the laughter sets in. We were already well hammered before we got there, and are now suffering from a dose of nerves. I could pretend and tell a typical sailor story, tattoos and all. But I'll tell the boring truth instead.

In Poland, organised criminals, who like to call themselves ‘mafia', import women from other Central and Eastern European countries, as well as from Russia. They also export Polish girls to the West. This arrangement was, of course, aided by the break up of the Soviet states in the early nineties. The Polish mafia is taken seriously here, although most are really nothing more than common gangsters. When it comes
down to sorting out the men from the boys, it's the Russians who have the balls.

However, these Polish gangs still run a good business. The girls they bring in are generally aged between sixteen and twenty, many arriving in Poland in the hope that it can be used as a springboard to the West. Once they arrive, ostensibly to work as waitresses or hotel staff, their documents are taken from by the traffickers, who force them into prostitution on the pretence that the costs of their passage have gone up.

For many of these poor unfortunates, the closest they'll get to the West is the motorway, where they can be seen in the spring and summer sporting tight bicycle shorts and shiny tops, hitching a lift. It is a rather ridiculous sight – lines of heavily made-up girls standing along the road near the woods, sticking their bums out at passing cars. But it's also very tragic.

One area of Poland, Zielona Gora, has a twenty-kilometre road that cuts through the forests close to the German border. For the Germans, this is a Mecca for the sex trade – the price of a girl on this side is probably three times less than they would pay in Germany. Gubin, a town in this area, has a population of 15,000, together with fourteen escort agencies working round the clock. The women here are predominantly from the former Soviet states. Most have obtained legal residence permits and are relatively well educated. According to the police, they ply their trade
by their own free will. If there exists a ladder of success in this business, then working in a top-class escort agency is fairly close to the top.

There are some who make it to the West, but not on their intended career path. Having been ‘trained' in Poland, many are sold on to brothels in Germany or Holland for a sum that can be as little as $250 and as high as $4,500, depending on their appearance and well-being. Many of these girls come from very impoverished backgrounds and will already have suffered hardships. They mightn't last very long. What happens to them in countries like Holland or Germany when they are finally no use doesn't bear thinking about.