There's an Egg in My Soup (14 page)

It was all good experience, of course, and I was paid well – about five or ten quid a week if I was lucky. But the money wasn't important. It was an enjoyable time overall and it opened up a whole new area for me, eventually driving the fear of broadcasting out of my system. It was also interesting working in Warsaw, a world apart from Minsk. I remember somebody from Warsaw making a joke about me living in Minsk. He laughed and said, ‘You must be a real hero out there.' His attitude was that these people, who lived beyond the pale in places like Minsk or further afield in areas such as Grabarka, were simple ‘buraks'.

‘Burak' is a word for beetroot in Polish, and is used as a derogatory term for country folk. However, the ‘buraks' were those who I had grown closest to here over the few years.

Many of the people in Warsaw were snobbish, as far as I could see. The students in the school I taught in were a whole different breed. They were more worldly-wise definitely. They were far more privileged, of course. But apart from a handful, they were tough cases, demanding, obstinate and difficult to deal with. I suppose they were paying good money. And if the teacher wasn't up to par then it was made known. If a lesson was badly planned, there was no breaking off into a bit of banter about the local markets or the bad train service and having a bit of a laugh. There would be complaints and slaps on the wrists. One day a certain student would just stop coming. Then you would find him or her attending the classes of another teacher. Or a student might drop in for one or two lessons, scrutinising you from the corner, then decide you were hopeless and not turn up again.

Rural and urban Poland were two different worlds, years apart. But with the infrastructure now growing rapidly as the new millennium approached, it wouldn't stay that way for long. The private buses, the new train lines, the Metros, all brought the small villages in the region I knew as a backwater in 1994, closer to towns like Minsk, Minsk closer to Warsaw and Warsaw closer to cities in the West. It was very clear to anyone there at the time that with membership of the EU on the horizon, all roads would lead out of Poland and into the West, with millions of Poles taking to them.

He's about seventeen, I'd say. No more. Baggy jeans, short tight hair crowned with a cap and an oversized Diesel T-shirt hanging off his shoulders. J is probably paying about fifty zloty for one period of private lessons. At least, his parents are. Now he has two sessions of forty-five minutes back-to-back. That's about thirty quid and he does it twice a week. The boss has told me that his usual teacher, who is off sick, generally brings in
Newsweek
or something, and they sit around and have a chat about various issues.

That's an expensive chat. It doesn't seem to bother him though. He reclines on the chair, sticks his feet on the one in front and gives me a wide, friendly grin. Suddenly his mobile rings. He excuses himself for a minute while he chats to his mate about last night's party.

When he finally hangs up, he turns to me and tells me about it with a loud guffaw. It was in his parents' second home in the suburbs. There were plenty of girls, plenty of booze and plenty of designer drugs. The folks didn't know, he says with a laugh. They were in the apartment in Warsaw. He concludes his description of
the party with a distant gaze and a wistful shake of the head, as memories of three-in-the-bed romps no doubt come flooding back. He's actually a really nice guy. He's pleasant to talk to and has excellent English. So I move onto other things, like his hobbies – besides partying.

For the rest of the day, he explains, he is going shopping to buy some sprays and a few new caps for his graffiti. That's his passion. The sprays come in different colours and the caps vary the thickness of the jet. He has his own insignia and is quite well known around Warsaw as a spray artist.

Then there is a knock on the door. In walks a woman in her fifties in a sandy-coloured fur coat, a host of shopping bags in her hands. To match the coat, her hair has been recently coloured and styled. It sits comfortably on her head like a fresh cream bun. The bags are all from top stores in the city and they're as crisp and stiff as cardboard. Inside them, I imagine, is about five hundred pound's worth of clothing.

‘What are you doing here? Your maths tutor is waiting at home for you. And you shouldn't be driving. Where are the keys?'

‘They're here in my pocket.'

‘Did you not remember – excuse me,' she says then in English as she turns to me to apologise, beginning again in Polish, ‘Come straight home after this lesson. Do you hear me?'

She walks out and young J smiles at me.

‘That was my mum. I took a car this morning when I got home and I forgot I had a maths grind as well,' he laughs.

He took
a
car. God knows how many the family has. He double-booked himself for grinds that must have cost a fair bit of money. Then there's his schooling in the private English Institute in Warsaw, his mobile, his graffiti hobby, and all the parties and girls on the side. Some guys have all the luck.

Saturday night in my old local. It was a great spot when it opened, but it started to go downhill within a matter of five or six months. They stopped doing food, the first nail in the coffin. On a Thursday or Friday night you had been guaranteed a good salad and a few grilled chops. There was nowhere else in the town that knew how to do food like it. After the food disappeared, the bottles of imported beer went the same way. Polish beer is fine, but when you're out for the night there comes a point where you have to go on to something lighter. Otherwise you'll just explode.

The final nail in the coffin was the local ‘mafia' moving in. The word ‘mafia' is becoming increasingly popular around here. People say the word as if referring to some omnipotent deity that exists outside of time and space. But they're simply organised groups that can be broken down into smaller, less organised and unrelated groups. They control regions geographically, whether that means a whole town, a ghetto, a neighbourhood or
even a street. The common denominator is that none of them work, but they all have money. In terms of a mafia food chain, these Minsk thugs were pretty much at the bottom, mere scumbags with cars and money. A good car in these parts does give its owner a certain amount of prestige though.

In they'd come, demanding a table, locking themselves in the toilet to talk on the phone and generally behaving like arseholes. Eventually, the good customers stopped coming.

This was a good bar, run by a young married couple. Unlike a lot of bar owners in the town they knew how to treat people, as they'd travelled and had both worked abroad. I asked them what had happened to the food, the beer and the live music. It was okay for me and my mates, they said, to come here on the weekend and get hammered until the cows came home. But during the week where are you? We have to get business in and these guys arrive all the time, so what can we do?

Finally, they had to close down. She looked exhausted and he was suffering from nerves and between the two, it was obvious that it would only be a matter of time before their marriage would suffer. Now he runs a fishing shop. Less money, but a normal life. Anyway, fishing was his greatest passion. It was a shame, shame, shame.

So I'm back for a drink on Saturday and I miss the old place. Poor quality techno music floods the room,
but I don't mind that. A dog barks in the corner as two drunks get into a fight. One of them is covered in muck from wherever he snoozed during the day, and the other is pulling on a cigarette while he thumps his drinking companion. Eventually, something happens to distract their attention for a moment and they sit down, forgetting that they were ever fighting in the first place.

This young guy comes up to me and asks me if I want to sit down. I tell him I'd rather stand and he looks a bit disappointed. He sits back down but continues to smile over at me. Up he comes again. Maybe you want a drink, he asks. I'm fine, I tell him. But he persists and finally I give in. I recognise him from around the town and he seems like a nice bloke.

He asks me how things are in England. I tell him I'm not from England and he's baffled. When I tell him I'm from Ireland, his brain goes into a flurry of activity with little light shed at the end of it. It's to the left of England, I tell him. The island. He concentrates on an imaginary map but shakes his head and laughs. ‘Doesn't matter,' he says.

I teach his girlfriend. She's doing her ‘Matura' exam soon. He asks me about her progress with his eyes twinkling like dew on grass. She's beautiful, he tells me, and I agree. But the truth is I never liked her. She is intelligent but arrogant.

I could also tell him right there and then that as soon as the last bell rings on the last day of school she will
be gone from his life. The signs are there. He is mad about her – hanging around the school during the day, peeping in windows, smoking, waiting on the steps for about an hour or two before the final bell rings. Then she comes out and they walk home together. That walk, which probably only lasts about fifteen minutes, is the light at the end of this guy's tunnel.

He wants to marry her, but her parents won't agree. They don't think he's good enough for her, since he only finished technical school, specialising in cookery. Now he works in a pizza restaurant and makes good pizzas. His ambition, he tells me, is to be able to cook for her as a husband. If he married her, she'd never have to do a thing.

By the end of the night he's drunk, raving about the girlfriend, the parents, money and other existential crises. Finally, my young companion insists on escorting me home and promises to phone me for the next disco in the Zajazd, the place where I'd had the teacher's meal but which has also since become a mafia locale. I thank him, assuming that it's the last I'll hear from him.

He does phone me a few weeks later, but I decline. His girlfriend has given him the flick and I don't think he'll handle it too well. God bless him, he is such a genuine and decent bloke. That's his dream over with though, and off he'll go to the army. That guy in Warsaw? He'll avoid the army, because he'll be in college long enough to keep out of it. But I'm still glad
that I ended up in Minsk.

There was a particular girl I taught the first year I came over. She was in one of the post-maturity classes. Some of the girls in this group were a lot friendlier outside the school than in it. They were really just bored. I got to know some of them better over the years and watched the majority succumb to a type of despair that eventually seemed to just become a part of their lives. In school they simply sat there at their desks, sighing and moaning, day after day, week after week.

In each class, however, were those who had the will to overcome this hurdle, and this particular girl always made a real effort. She frequented a bar a little way outside the town and was usually there with her boyfriend, older than she was and a terribly nice fellow if a bit of a barfly. Figuring that he would either serve the alcoholics or become one himself, he had bought a bar eventually. They got married, and between the two of them tried to get a life together. After a year, the council closed the bar down, saying that it was selling drugs. But the word around the town was that another bar didn't like having competition so close. Bribes were exchanged and the young couple were put out of business. The last I heard of them, they had moved in with her parents.

I have mentioned the ‘Matura' often enough, so it's worth describing briefly what it involves. At the end of each school year, I had to sit on a panel with several
other teachers and examine those students who had chosen English as one of their Matura subjects. There are times even now when my conscience haunts me over the whole thing. Year after year, you saw the same few girls do nothing in lessons and less at home, then burst into tears outside the examination room when their grades were dismal. If they failed, they repeated the exam; if they failed again, they repeated the year. The first time round I was very lenient. The second year I was less so, but made sure that no student failed. After that I began to harden up, primarily because I tried to work hard with the students and half of them did diddly squat.

This latter half, I learned, chose English because they figured it was easier than the other subjects available. Or, more likely, I was easier than the teachers that taught those other subjects. So I decided eventually that I was going to fail a few to change that view.

I remember one girl who could barely put a sentence together in English. When she did manage a bunch of words, it barely made sense. If it did make sense, it was the wrong answer anyway. The other two English teachers carried on regardless, smiling when the girl had finished. She was a nice girl, friendly, polite and good-natured, but did nothing in class except have a giggle and a chat, winking at me every now and again if I told her off.

During the exam, which might take anything from
three to eight hours depending on the number of students present, food is brought in, along with tea, minerals and cakes, by a chosen team of parents whose daughters are sitting that subject. They hang around outside the door, glancing in at every opportunity and rushing to refill your cup. It is a nice gesture and very typical of Polish society. However, at the end of the exam, when we were conferring, I had this particular girl down for a ‘2' grade – a borderline pass technically, but regarded by most as a fail.

The teacher beside me, however, had her down for a ‘4', which is an honour. When I went to protest, I was given a sharp kick on the ankle under the table and told to shut up, as her mother had made the tea and cakes. Meanwhile, girls who I knew had worked their arses off but may not have performed brilliantly on the day, received a ‘3' grade, which is a straight pass.

It was a total joke. I had several rows about it afterwards, but, although the other teachers knew I was right, they felt there was nothing they could do about it. The same problem applied across the board. I had colleagues in other schools who had been visited by distraught parents in the middle of the night with bottles of vodka and money. It was a mess, but it was a mess that had always been there. How were kids supposed to come out of a system like that?

Thereafter, I decided to be as corrupt as everyone else, only I let favouritism creep in. If I liked the girl, I
would ask an easy question, shaking my head or kicking her under the table if she began heading in the wrong direction. If a girl had given me a hard time all year, I'd throw a stickler at her. I would make it so hard that even if her mother had made the cake to beat all cakes, it would have been impossible to give her a good grade. I didn't do it too often, because really I was too soft and should probably never even have been a teacher.

In the end I couldn't stick it. The last straw was giving two excellent girls a ‘3' grade pass because they hadn't done well on the day, even though they were brilliant students. I'm not even sure why I gave them a poor mark. Maybe I was just confused with the whole system. But their faces when the results were called out at the end of the day will haunt me forever. In fact, I could barely look them in the eye. When I did, I saw that they were not only shocked at their grades, but deeply disappointed with me for giving them. It was the last exam I ever did.

Thankfully, the Department of Education introduced set exams when I left, with a representative sitting on the panel. Still, there's a danger that the tea and cakes will remain. All Poles love tea and cakes.

Over sixty percent of Polish people don't read books and fifty-eight percent only have two books in the house. This was the finding of a study done at the end of 1999, when the world was on the brink of the new
millennium and everyone figured a new era would be ushered in. If the parents don't read, then neither will the kids. I wondered, though, about that statistic. Where was it taken from? Which region? I decided to do my own little survey. When I asked the kids in school how many of them read on a daily basis, I didn't need to actually count the hands. The number was instantly obvious. But if I had asked the rich kids in Warsaw the same question, I guarantee that, despite their party image, the answer would have been very different.