There's an Egg in My Soup (6 page)

I was getting thin. In fact, the pounds were falling off me like leaves in autumn. I hated taking a bath, because a glance in the bathroom mirror revealed a ribcage like the bellows on an accordion. There were also queries from the cooks as to why I wasn't coming down for dinner and tea every day, communicated to me via the director, via one of the other English teachers. They were concerned for my well-being, as was anyone else who caught a glance at me. I told them that I had different eating habits, preferring a big dinner in the evening and a light lunch in the afternoon. They didn't really buy it, so I went for the odd dinner on a Thursday when I figured out it was ‘meat' day.

I had got that information from some of the kids in school. I began to notice that the boarding students in the 12.30 class on Thursdays were always itching to leave early. They would look at their watches constantly and whisper to each other in the last quarter of the class. This was one of the ‘post maturity' classes, so I wasn't all that surprised. But one day, with a badly planned lesson and twenty minutes left over at the end, I began to chat idly with them about the school, the
internat and the general trials of life around the town.

They had all kinds of complaints, most of which had never occurred to me – curfews, cleaning duties, cold rooms, cockroaches, irregular hot water and skimpy bedclothes. It was some eye-opener, and I think they detected my fear when the cockroaches were mentioned. I can tolerate many things, but not insects, and especially not cockroaches.

I knew it was only a matter of time before the inevitable occurred. One evening, I came into my kitchen and turned on the light, to see scores of insects tearing across the floor like a scatter of marbles. I didn't get a wink of sleep, but spent the night flicking the light on and off and looking under the sheets. At first light I went to the director with the English teachers in tow as interpreters. I told him that if something wasn't done lickety-split, I was either going home or to a hotel in Warsaw. As it turned out, the director of the internat had ordered the whole building fumigated – every inch of it, except my flat, which made a huge amount of sense. The roaches, which are pretty adept at survival, realised there was one safe corner left in the building, and promptly moved in with me.

Eventually, the fumigator was recalled and I had to vacate the place for the weekend. The only thing I had to worry about thereafter was the state of my lungs, wondering what the hell the guy had used in my flat. I
never saw so many creatures on their backs in all my life. It was a fairly unnerving experience, but I was not alone. One of the other Irish guys, Gearoid, a big lad from Cork, had a worse deal when it came to the roaches.

He had been placed in a town called Miedzyrzec Podlaski, further east. I passed through it once and remember being glad that I was only passing through. You could tell how bad our various towns were by the number of times we visited each other, and I don't think anyone ever visited Gearoid. Back when we had arrived at the monastery in the summer, almost all of us had our accommodation set up, but there were a couple of people who still had no confirmed home and the APSO project manager was trying to sort them out. Gearoid was told one day that he had a choice regarding his accommodation – he could share with a family or live in a workers' hostel that, in the words of the project manager, ‘you wouldn't put a dog in'. Of course, he opted for the family. When the shared arrangement wasn't working out he tried to find somewhere else, but APSO were slow to move on it back in Dublin, so he just went to the hostel himself.

Several months later, when the project manager was over again on a sort of assessment mission, he asked Gearoid how things were with the family. Gearoid told him he'd since moved out. ‘To where?' asked our manager. ‘To the place you wouldn't put a dog in,'
answered Gearoid.

One can only imagine what it was like. There, he said, roaches crawled regularly from a drain in the corridor. Gearoid poured every chemical available, from bleach to vodka, into the throat of the drain, hoping it would discourage the roaches from surfacing. But it only made things worse, since he swore they began to mutate. Large roaches with several antennae, three legs and other deformities began haunting him nightly. I was never sure whether to believe him or not though, as he had grown quite fond of pouring a variety of stuff down his own throat by then.

After my chat with the students that day, I realised that I clearly had a better deal than some. But there were a few things that we had in common. The building we shared was definitely cold – when the wind blew at night, the windows sang like panpipes. And this was still autumn. The rain came in under the cracked window panes, but I knew that from the first week here and had blocked the main points of entry with towels. At one stage however, the whole frame – containing three separate windows – came in on top of me when I recklessly tried to force open a window that had refused to budge since my arrival. I was left standing in a crucifixion pose holding the windows for some time, until I could secure it and go for help. That evening the school carpenter arrived, with a little cotton bag of nails around his shoulder and a hammer stuck in his belt like
a gunslinger.

He was an old man and walked with a bit of a limp, frowning when he saw that the whole window frame had simply popped out like a large eye. But it didn't take him long to remedy the matter. A few nails, a few whacks of the hammer and a firm nod. That was that sorted for the coming winter.

I felt for the poor kids, particularly with regard to the cold. Between the windows and the central heating system, which ran off a massive coal-burning boiler but whose coal was spared for only the coldest days, the internat was not always warm. At least I had an electric heater, bought for me after a teacher leaked the information that I was taking the hob cooker out of the kitchen and into the main bedroom every night to get a bit of extra heat. The brand spanking new electric heater that arrived at my door made a good bit of difference. It also blew fuses regularly. The fuse box for the whole corridor, one of those antiquated boards with huge, ceramic fuses rather than trip switches, was in my hallway. Before a fuse blew there would be an ominous and quite frightening fizzling sound, like a giant glass of coke being poured out in the hall. Then bang. Lights out, electric heater out, the lot.

All I could do was enjoy the darkness and wait until the following day to summon the school electrician. He would arrive in his blue coat, approaching the fuse box with the caution of a soldier about to defuse a
landmine. Extracting the old fuse carefully, he would replace it with another as large as the butt of a snooker cue. Then, with a short smile, he would leave. Within three days he would be back to do it all over again. We became very close, that electrician and I.

But the worst gripe I had in common with the students concerned the food. The only good day was Thursday, because you got meat, and to get the best bits you had to be there early. As for the food in general, they shrugged indifferently. We went through the menu of the various days together. What I thought I was eating, and what they told me I was eating, were two very different things, except for the sheep's stomach. I was right about that – it was sheep's stomach all right, and none of them liked it. But they ate it. That was the difference. It was food, and they were hungry all the time.

One evening, some of the older guys who lived in the block came to my flat looking for bread. Most likely it was simply to accompany the vodka they had managed to smuggle in, but it was still pretty alarming. They treated bread as if it were actually manna from heaven. Whatever else you found in bins here if you went looking, you'd rarely find a piece of bread. From then on, I let them go early on Thursday and we all got the best bits of meat together.

People underestimate the importance of food. When it is there in front of you all the time it doesn't have a
real value. But I grew to respect food greatly that first year, knowing that it would make the difference between me coming home to Ma looking like Dracula, a beanpole or – God forbid – in a black body bag. I was reminded often enough that I was getting close to one of these. Obtaining food, however, was the greatest of inconveniences.

The supermarket in a small town would generally only have basic goods. The shop could be full, but there would be nothing there to eat. You could find pasta in every form imaginable, tins of odd stuff, single frozen fish gazing up at you with glassy eyes, and packets of that noodle soup they give out free in student unions. Getting a meal of decent food together meant visiting the grocer, the butcher, the baker and so on, accumulating all your ingredients and rolling up your sleeves for an evening bent over the hob.

Most of the time I just wasn't bothered, and arrived home to make do with whatever I'd come up with in one shop. Usually that was soup of some sort, normally powdered stuff, accompanied by bread. I ate barrels of this desiccated rubbish. When I later grew more adroit at the language, I realised it was sauce I had been eating, and not soup. Whatever it was, I knew it wasn't much use. It filled rather than nourished, and my final belch lacked substance, suggesting that little had passed through my body but hot water. Christ, I was starving in those days.

Vegetables were okay when you could get them. They sat in big baskets on the floor of the grocer's shop. But in winter they were harder to come by and, as they were caked with frozen muck, it was hard to distinguish between them. They were all just brown – beetroots, potatoes, turnips, all just brown lumps. At least you could tell a carrot from its shape.

Meat was almost always bought on the bone, which meant having to hack it up yourself. If you wanted a couple of pork chops, you were shown the full spine of a pig. You indicated how much you wanted and an axe was promptly cracked down on the bone. Coming home with half a pig's back wrapped in newspaper does nothing for the appetite. Sawing through it with a penknife is particularly unappealing. But asking the butcher to do it for you was the greatest of all evils in Poland. The butchers, for some reason, felt they had done enough once the beast was swinging in the window. What you did with it after that was none of their business.

Having visited all the butchers in my town, I eventually gave them separate titles, to amuse myself. There was Butcher Nice, Butcher Nasty, Butcher Nervy and, finally, Butcher Nephritis. So, here goes:

Butcher Nice is a big, broad lump of a woman with a small but profitable business among the locals. She greets you with a smile as large as a rasher and almost always gives you a few ‘extras', with a wink and a sly
grin. I imagine that, although her trade dictates it, she weeps nightly at the slaughter of all the poor animals that go under her knife. I even suspect she keeps a pet cemetery hidden away in the orchard somewhere, memorials of all the beasts sent to the great butcher shop in the sky. She is my favourite of the quartet, and the one most likely to win an award. Although she does oblige when you ask her to cut up the meat, this is the shop with the biggest queue, so I don't visit it as often as I would like. The word for ‘cut' in Polish is a bit of a tongue-twister, not worth risking in front of the natives.

By contrast – and what a contrast – comes Butcher Nasty, who works in the ‘delicatessy' that I visit the most. This woman is to animals what Satan is to God-fearing Christians. Mean and tight and with a stare that would stop a cuckoo emerging from its clock, she cuts cold meats using a cheese-wire and a ruler. I recall one day when I wanted to buy a chicken breast, but being so nervous in her presence mistakenly asked for a chicken instead. When she came out with a whole, freshly slaughtered fowl, I apologised and pointed to the breasts sitting on the tray. The torrent of abuse I received nearly made me wet my pants with fright. I only once requested that she cut the pig's back into chops for me, and never did so again. She wrapped them in a newspaper with the headline ‘Murder' on one of the pages, and followed me with her eyes when I was leaving the shop.

Next up is Butcher Nervy, who has to be watched carefully. Butcher Nervy is a schizophrenic. Although she works alone, I distinctly heard her talking to her ‘assistant' one day when I asked for a pound of sausages. She also gave me a pile of dodgy ribs and when I brought them back she blamed her ‘assistant', telling me she would be severely punished. The type of character that would have floated around the mind of Hitchcock, Butcher Nervy wields the knife in a callous and brutal, yet disturbingly calm, manner, hacking away at the meat like a dysfunctional schoolboy dissecting a frog. The meat she gives out tends to vary in colour when cooked – a bit like those rainbow gobstoppers you ate as a kid – and I often have guessing games as to whether it originated on the ground, in the sky or even in the sea. Still, she's not the worst of them.

That prize goes to Butcher Nephritis. Nephritis is, of course, a digestive disorder, in the gallery of disorders like colic, botulism, flatulence, piles, ulcers, gripes and so on. Mysterious visits to the toilet in the middle of the night can only be a result of Butcher Nephritis and her handiwork. Again, it's a difficult one to prove, but I have a gut feeling about it, as they say. Butcher Nephritis' shop looks and smells like a lepers' graveyard. But Butcher Nephritis is really a kindly old soul, a typical country butcher, and perhaps only for this have the tools of her trade not been confiscated and herself locked away in a walk-in freezer for a minimum
sentence of ten years.

What did I survive on? As time went on, things got better. Some of the shops even began to bring in self-service – like that delicatessy, for example. No more queues! The town was transformed, but over the course of years, not weeks or months. Occasionally, I would strike gold in this delicatessy store – perhaps discovering some tinned beans in tomato sauce, a rare and valued commodity. I also ate a lot of eggs, fresh as daisies, many still decorated with feathers and gick. However, concerned for my cholesterol level, I eventually cut back a bit on my egg consumption. As for milk, the milk you could get in cartons here was UHT – you couldn't drink it straight or you'd be as sick as a pike. I tried drinking two cartons a day when I was told I was losing weight and began to grow extremely pale, developing huge circles like eclipses of the moon under my eyes. If you wanted ‘fresh' milk, you were really taking your life into your own hands. Fresh milk, until EU hygiene tests came in, was never pasteurised and came in plastic bags. Putting milk in a plastic bag is an idea that must have flown straight past the main door of the logic department. You hold the bag under your elbow and cut the corner off it with a scissors and the stuff shoots out all over the table. I mean, have the Poles never come across bagpipes?