There's an Egg in My Soup (15 page)

Corporal punishment is strictly forbidden in Polish schools. But I came close to thumping the heads off one particular bunch of kids. I threw them out one morning and missed one of them by mere inches with a large bag that had been left behind. It was one of the few occasions where I actually lost my temper, but it had been boiling for months.

Monday morning they were in, screaming and laughing and swearing in Polish. They never did a thing in lessons and I'm sure it was them that planted that note under the door. The one about breaking my legs or something. I'm also sure it was them firing stones at the window on a regular basis. I got revenge by giving them atrocious marks. Then I began chatting to them a bit more and I think they gave me a bit of respect eventually. But I wanted them to suffer and thought about requesting to have them demoted – keeping them back a year. When I spoke to one of the other English
teachers, she appeared troubled by this idea. Two of them were orphans and another guy's parents were divorced, so I was asked to go easy. I made more of an effort with them, not that it paid off. At the end of the year their grades in their Matura wouldn't have got them far. So off they go to the army.

Every young man leaving school is obliged to serve twelve months in the army. This has been the case since 1949, and in 1967 the age for mandatory service was set at nineteen. The basic term was set at two years. The first post-communist regime made some changes however, shortening the term to eighteen months and eventually to just twelve. It will soon be phased out altogether. There are ways of dodging conscription, or there is a choice of spreading it out in short terms over a longer period. But why would you wish to drag out what is viewed by most as a prison term?

The system has four categories: A, B, D and E. A means you're fit and able to serve; B means you're a third-level student and can defer; D means you're medically unfit, but can be called up for active service; E means you're insane and therefore exempt.

The army is a nightmare for the young kids, who join very soon after finishing school. The majority will do whatever it takes to dodge it, although some, of course, go voluntarily for a long term. That way, you at least get to choose your location and regiment. I spoke to two young guys who were in their final year in school. One
had no false hopes that he was going on to college, and had resigned himself to the fact that in a few months' time he'd be cowering under a bunk bed trying to escape a barrage of boots. He wasn't great at English, but he was a good kid and worked hard. The other kid was happy to be joining the army. He was volunteering, looking forward to a long career, and felt that it was every young man's patriotic duty to serve for a minimum term. To encourage him, he had a father who was a high-ranking officer.

The punishing of new recruits is a mechanism intrinsic to the very workings of the army. Everyone knows about it, from the officers to the raw recruits, to the mothers who receive letters from kids unable to tolerate the strain. The methods don't look so severe on paper – punches, kickings, dragging recruits through the muck, making them smell dirty clothes, stealing food packages sent from home – but it is abrasive and effective, and eventually the weaker ones fold up. Most soldiers will adopt a recruit as their ‘cat' when they enter – a bit like the prison system where a new guy will have to become someone's ‘bitch' for his own protection. These ‘cats' will inflict the aforementioned hardships and personally assist their masters. Some commit suicide. The ones who get out when their time is done could swing any way. They could be mentally unstable; they could be seeking vengeance wherever they can find it; they could become part of the criminal
gang system.

If you're rich or lucky enough to get a third-level place, that's one way out. You don't see many of those privileged Warsaw kids in the army. If you're not rich or intelligent, you could fake a medical. This means you're put down as Category D or E and it's stamped in your ID, which all future prospective employers will wish to see. Those poor guys, the ones with no grades, they'll get their year in the army all right. But what will it prepare them for?

At this stage, 1999 and my fourth year, I had become what you might call an expatriate, although I don't very much like that term. It suggests Brits over in India with gins and tonics, mixing homogeneously and dreaming of England.

I prefer something like a ‘comfortable misfit', as I was fitting in perfectly well, despite being a foreigner, and wasn't dreaming about home as much as I used to. It is an odd feeling, immersing yourself in another culture. You grow comfortable enough with the language. You settle into your job and accept it for what it is. You also assimilate the habits of the locals – eating as they do, drinking as they do, swearing and cursing as they do, supporting the local football team and turning your nose up at Guinness in favour of the local brew when you visit trendy bars in bigger cities. To a point, of course.

Supporting their football team was something that the locals were surprised at one day. It was a World Cup qualifier between England and Poland, and the match was only on satellite television.

Satellite television was still a rare enough
phenomenon, and few would have been able to watch the match. So the council stepped in and decided to screen it in the town cultural building for a small fee. Needless to say, the place was mobbed. Whole families turned up in the park outside hours beforehand with packed lunches, vodka and those big sausages, all ready for a grand day out.

Myself and my pal Paul, also still in the country, managed to find a small, dingy bar that was showing the match. It was also mobbed, but at least it was a bar rather than a large hall. The few hostile leers turned to confusion when England scored and we began swearing in Polish. Even people I knew quite well couldn't understand it. It was an English victory in the end and any chance of us getting thumped evaporated once they realised – if never quite fully understood – that we were as despondent as them about it.

We had both, in a sense, become attached to the country. Paul was engaged at that point and I was not very far away from it myself. I put it off until my fifth year, when we went into Warsaw one evening, Asha and I, to turn out my pockets and see what sort of ring a spendthrift on €150 a month could afford. It didn't really matter to us at the time what the ring looked like – a homemade job actually. We weren't material as individuals as there wasn't much chance of that on our salaries. The ring only sealed what we knew from the first year was inevitable. There was no question of it
ever being otherwise, and it was that knowledge that had kept me in Minsk, when otherwise I would have packed up and gone home.

Of course, when you become absorbed in another culture to such a degree, you become aware of its negative aspects also. One of these aspects is crime, something that everyone, no matter where they go, has to be aware of. Luckily, I never got too close to being a victim.

The trains that I mentioned earlier are a nightmare when you're coming home late. Stories like this one abound. It was the last train from Warsaw, 12.30 at night, and this young guy was coming home to Minsk, about an hour's journey. Two louts approached him and demanded his money. He foolishly pulled a canister of CS gas and began spraying them like flies.

CS gas is not the best thing in the world to pull on these people. I bought a can myself, but eventually decided to leave it at home. Firstly, if the coppers catch you with it you're in trouble. It is illegal for a member of the public to possess it, but in Warsaw, you can buy anything. The biggest open-air market in the world is in Warsaw's Stadion (Stadium) – everything from guns, gas, old Russian cameras, pirate CDs and videos, to prostitutes doing the job on-location can be found there. Traders come from everywhere – though mostly from Russia – and with them come the travelling brothels. It's a disturbing place, because of its sheer size and the
number of dodgy-looking characters creeping around it. Muggings are rife. It is also brilliant for its chaos and diversity – you could literally spend days browsing. And if you dress down, nobody will bother you. Sadly, it was also being earmarked for development.

Secondly, if you spray one of these thugs with gas, you had better make sure you spray them good. Into the eyes first time and be ready to run like a scalded cat. CS gas is not pleasant, and if you don't do it right and give yourself a chance to flee then it's like stirring a hornet's nest. Also, sometimes you might buy something called ‘CS gas', but find that it is actually only pepper spray, used to give dogs a bit of a fright. You'll really get the guys going with that one, and they'll thump you round the train like a pork chop because of it.

Anyway, how far can you run on a train doing eighty miles an hour? Where are you going to go? Don't expect other passengers – if there are any – to help you. They just run into the next compartment and hide under the seats at the slightest sign of trouble.

So this young guy did exactly what he shouldn't have done. Worse still, there were two more thugs he hadn't seen in the next compartment. They didn't like the CS gas either. So, after beating him half unconscious, they dragged him to the doorway, opened the doors and flung him out onto the tracks. Miraculously, he survived. I imagine he was lucky enough to land on the far bank, or maybe the train was slowing down as it approached
a station. The story around the town was that he was an off-duty cop who got too brave.

Another man, a teacher who had worked in my school, had recently died after several years bedridden from a similar incident on a train. I had never met him, but knew his daughter. He was an exceptionally popular man and prayers were always said for his recovery whenever there was a teachers' get-together. Sadly, he didn't make it.

The money is nothing, give it to them. And if you have to take a few digs, okay, sit there, close your eyes and hope it won't last too long.

I got that last train regularly and dreaded the trip. It comes rattling out of the tunnel like a great iron horse, dark and intimidating, sometimes with several of the windows and lights smashed in the rear compartments. You have to go for the front because of the ghouls that hang around at the back, but even then you've no guarantee. As people get off and carriages empty, you run up and down looking for other passengers to make you feel safer. But who do you feel safe with at one o'clock in the morning?

One night I was coming home from Warsaw after spending the Friday evening in a pub after work with a mate of mine. We'd drank a good few beers and as each hour passed I knew I was pushing it close to the last train. So I left, pretty drunk and very tired, and got the 11.30 train, which is almost as bad. The carriage was
fairly empty apart from one or two other drunkards asleep on the seats and it wasn't long before I fell asleep with them. It was always a good idea to blend in with the drunkards on these late trains to avoid becoming a target. So I'd always try and be half drunk anyway, sipping on a can of beer and pressing my head against the window looking destitute. I had with me my equipment I used in the radio station for interviews and my small green rucksack, which has gone everywhere with me for years.

When the train pulled into Minsk, I woke up and got off in a hurry, leaving the green bag behind. Halfway down the road I realised what I'd done and almost cried. In it were a few cans of beer, three or four books I'd bought, a range of discs with months of work on them and two videos from the British Council library. The British Council is a life-saving institution that has centres all over the world. Each centre not only runs courses in English but contains a library with books, videos and tapes. If you lose them though, you'll obviously have to pay. But the money doesn't always compensate, since a lot of the films they have are old and irreplaceable.

The next day I asked around as to the whereabouts of the lost property office in Siedlce, which is the terminus for the local trains. The Polish friends thought this was great gas. Lost property? If it's lost then it's no longer your property. The chances were the bag was
stolen and thrown in a ditch somewhere, or if it was found by a conductor or cleaner it was rifled and was now lying lonely and empty on the track.

The next day, Sunday, saw a blizzard that would have stopped a war. After ruminating all afternoon I ventured out late in the evening to Siedlce, where I was told a lost property office of sorts existed on one of the platforms. People said I was mad. But through some bewildering twist of fate, my bag was there and was returned by a kind old woman, with a not-so-kind young man in the back of the office breaking into fits of laughter. My discs are there; so too are the magazines. The beer, the books, my glasses and the videos – Father Ted and a Dudley Moore & Cook comedy – are gone. Anything that can be drunk, eaten or sold will be taken. You have to remember that. So someone, somewhere, that weekend, was watching my Father Ted, through my glasses, and drinking my beer. I hope they enjoyed it. Because I never got to, having to foot the bill instead. But the baffling thing was, whoever stole the bag had the decency to hand it into the lost property office. A thief with a conscience.

Crime, unfortunately, was a subject that was very difficult to avoid. People were obsessed with it. Equally depressing were constant reminders that, although Poland was not exactly the safest place to be, at least you could be comforted with the statistic that eighty percent of crimes were urban. There was a programme
on Polish television, something similar to the ‘Crimewatch' programmes, designed to aid police, only the Polish show was like the triple-X certificate version of the ones shown on RTÉ or the BBC.

Where reconstructions of crimes would normally leave something to the imagination, the Poles evidently decided at some stage that the shock factor would be more effective for jogging people's memories. You get vivid portrayals of young girls being kidnapped from villages and driven off into the woods in the backs of vans. Women knocked unconscious, raped and set on fire during break-ins. Gangs tearing around, having a ball, kicking in heads. This programme also had a curious habit of showing horrendous pictures of the victims, as if the reconstructions weren't harrowing enough.

I remember talking about this with some of my Polish friends. They simply shook their heads and told me, for God's sake, to stop watching it. That was hard though. It seemed to be the most popular programme on television and was repeated several times a week. I didn't dwell on it too much, but there seemed to be a lot of negative energy floating around this country that needed a focal point. But there wasn't one.

On Polish radio, a professional car thief said that stealing cars was his job. He had to make a living like everybody else. No bother to him. I know there are groups of guys in Warsaw who will gladly ‘sort out' a
problem for a few bottles of vodka. And I wouldn't like to be ‘sorted out' by these fellas. One of my colleagues was attacked in the park in Warsaw by a gang of about five men, armed with iron bars, knuckle-dusters and baseball bats. He made the mistake of going through the park after visiting the Irish bar. But it takes about half an hour off the route to the train station. I've done it myself hundreds of times. You have a few drinks, take a look into the park and decide, ‘To hell with it. I'll risk it.' These thugs wanted money and they made sure they were going to get a kick out of getting it.

That's the more disturbing aspect. You can part with your money, but picking up your front teeth is a whole different thing. This guy was lucky. He's big and fit and came away with his life. I wouldn't have made it.

A sixteen-year-old girl from my school was pulled into the woods here and raped in broad daylight by three guys who were all drunk on vodka. They then beat her and left her unconscious in the hopes that she wouldn't remember who did it. That's what they told the police. I could go on, but why bother? It's not my intention to make Poland look bad, and crime exists everywhere. But it leads me back to all of the negative energy floating around in this country. And crime, as somebody said, is simply misguided energy.

It is after midnight in the newly paved square in Minsk. They've done a great job here, transforming a patch of grass in the centre into a cobblelock plaza – it's
hardly Milan, but it's a pleasant place to sit on a summer evening. I recall my first year here, when the pavements were all collapsing into the sand. Now there has been a transformation. The proprietor of the local cinema directly opposite the square has taken full advantage and opened a bar on the pavement. Genius. Now we've somewhere to sit and have a beer in the summer.

A white BMW cruises past, humming like a large wasp. The BMWs here belong either to those who have worked their arses off to get the money, or those who have stolen it from them.

The beamer slows as it passes me and, like a lazy animal opening one eye after a doze, rolls down a window to get a closer look. Two muggish-looking faces peer out at me – one with his lip curled up in the corner in a sneer of contempt, a vain effort at a moustache sprinkled across the top. He must be about seventeen and looks like a ‘Gypsy', as Poles call them. The Gypsies here are mostly Roma, and a lot of them have settled down and become quite well-off with stalls on the markets.

One of these Gypsies wanted to do me in once, the boyfriend of a student of mine. She was a nice wee girl who then turned into a right little cow, so I gave her bad grades. He wanted revenge for that. Somebody, somewhere, intervened on my behalf, telling him that if anything happened to me, he was dead. For a while though, it looked as if I was in trouble. Stones at my
window and long stares in the pub. It upset me for a while and didn't help my sleeping patterns.

The beamer follows me for a few yards and I get a bit nervous. Then it suddenly takes off, with a screech and a hot blast of burning rubber. I let out a sigh of relief and cross the square. It's quite pretty, but those benches – although transforming the appearance of a once drab-looking street – will do nothing but attract the mobs. And here they are.