Chapter 16

BEYOND THE PALESKI

Chapter 16

July saw us as the official stork counters for our local borough - a job which we were offered by a group of ornithologists who were part of an international team conducting a stork inventory covering the whole of Europe. The ornithologists were expecting to find over 30,000 storks (approximately 25% of the world's stork population) in Poland, most of which they expected to be located in the north east of the country and we were given a parish and a detailed map on which to mark each nest.

We were told that the area could be covered in three days on a bicycle but in fact it actually took Alicja & I thirteen days going around by car and if we'd known what we were letting ourselves in for we'd have thought twice about it. Some of the hamlets we visited consisted of only 2 or 3 houses with no car access and we had to walk across fields & down forest tracks to get to them. The farmers & foresters who lived in these places were, for the most part, completely cut off from the rest of the world for 3-4 months over winter and they told us that only during dire emergencies would they get the horse and sleigh out of the barn. In one small settlement we met a woman whose husband had died during winter and the body had to be kept in one of the out houses for 5 weeks while the temperature hovered between minus 15-25 Celsius and snow drifts prohibited travel.

This same woman told us that she had never met a foreigner although she had seen some Russian soldiers at some time near the end of WWII when they came through on the way to Berlin. She was a young girl at the time and her father had hidden her and her sister in the hay loft from where they watched the soldiers take all the vegetables from their garden and lead away their only cow. Needless to say, most people thought we were a little strange - nobody counts storks, least of all people who have all their senses about them - but the hospitality in some of these isolated places was something we won't forget for a long time. We returned home each day with a boot load of vegetables and flowers after having refused countless live chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese.

We were in the village of Zywy towards the end of our stork counting and asking questions of a young couple who had a storks nest on the roof. Alicja was asking the questions in Polish and telling me the answers in English as I filled in the spaces on the questionnaire. An older man appeared at the door, smiled and said -Vood yoo like to haff zum nize kalt beer unt to sit int dershadow?-I was quite taken aback at hearing English spoken in a village and accepted his offer. His name was Ernst and he was a German businessman spending his holiday with the occupants of the house who were distant relations.

He spoke no Polish, his hosts no German, and he wanted someone to talk to. He convinced us that we should stay for dinner. He was born in 1938 in that very house and had gone to Germany when the family was repatriated along with all the other Germans from the area at the end of the war. His mother had died recently in Germany and when going through her papers he found hundreds of newspaper cuttings pertaining to Zywy and other villages in the locality. He took these papers home and began to read them in the evenings and determined to visit the area and see if he could locate the house where he was born. He made enquiries by mail and, to his amazement; the husband of the young couple living in the house was related to him.

It was two years before he had time to return to his roots and, just before he did, he purchased a brand new, top of the line, Mercedes. His wife refused to accompany him on his trip to Poland and implored him not to take their new car saying that Poles were well known car thieves so, in an effort to appease her, he had spent a lot of money on the very latest, hi tech, computerised security alarm. He spent a week in Zywy where, as in Bocwinka, it was obvious that nobody in the village would steal his car and then he stole something himself. It was his grandmother's gravestone which he was going to take home to Germany and place alongside his mother's gravestone in the cemetery in the town where he lived.

He put the grave stone in the boot of his car and went off across the border to Kalingrad in Russia for two days and came back to Zywy again. Arriving after dark, he alarmed the car and went to bed. In the morning the outside door of the house wouldn't open and he looked through the window to see the gravestone propped up against it and his car gone. He wrote to me weeks later from Germany telling me that he'd heard from the Polish police who found that on his trip to Kalingrad he'd been followed back across the border by Russian thieves.

As we ate dinner the gravestone sat silently in the corner of the kitchen.

-Are you going to come back and get it?, Alicja asked.

-Not on your life, he said - but I'll pay anyone who wants to deliver it to me in Germany.

Our two week job as stork counters proved to be good fun and we learnt more about our area in that fortnight than we could possibly have done by any other means. I quickly became known as the "Stork Man of Bocwinka," a title I was more comfortable with than "A Bloody Good Milk Tanker Driver" and people started turning up at our door with information about the whereabouts of nests which we would never have found otherwise.

One evening when we had a German family staying with us there was a knock at the door. It was a small boy who asked me to come to the gate where stood a farmer, and behind him, his wife & family all sitting in a horse drawn cart along with two small pigs, a bicycle, an old gas cooker and half a ton of potatoes - how the horse pulled it all I am at a loss to say. I opened the gate and motioned for the man to come in but he started to walk back towards the cart and I followed him. As I approached the cart a toothless old Granny wearing clothes literally made from sacks and topped by a bright red head scarf stood up and, leaning forward, presented me with a stork. I didn't want it but when someone thrusts a stork at you it's an automatic reaction to take it. It was surprisingly strong and it's big clawed feet scratched at my shirt.

-What's wrong with it? I asked.

-What do you mean what's wrong with it, replied granny.

-Well, is it OK - not hurt or anything?

-Were honest people, she said -do you think we'd sell you a bad stork?

-Sell me? you mean you want to sell it to me?

-Of course.

When I told them that I wasn't prepared to pay for it they became quite angry telling me that they'd travelled a long way to bring it to us. I told them that I hadn't ordered a stork from them and asked why on earth they should think that I should want to buy one. They didn't know what to do and started to whisper amongst themselves.
I asked how many other people they had tried to sell the stork to but there was no answer.

-Why did you come all the way to Bocwinka to sell this stork. Why didn't you sell it in your own village, I asked.

-There's only Poles in our village, they wouldn't buy a stork.

-OK, I said -my neighbour is Ukrainian, why don't you go over there and see if he's interested.

-No, said the father -Ukrainians wouldn't want a stork either.

-So why do you think I should want a stork.

-Everybody knows.

-Listen, I said -I don't know who gave you this information but I've never bought a stork in my life and I never will, so you're wasting your time here. Why don't you go home and put the poor thing back exactly where you found it.

There was more whispering and the father climbed back into the cart and, without a word to me, they moved off down the lane. This left me holding the stork. I walked back up the drive and across the lawn to the apartment to show Alicja, passing as I went, our German family who were having dinner on the verandah.

-My God, Is that a stork, asked the father.

-Yep, that's a stork, I said.

-What are you going to do with it?

-Probably a few chips, carrots, peas maybe. Alicja does this great pepper sauce too.

-But aren't they on the endangered species list?

-It was only a joke.......

-Oh.......good.

Young storks are ravenous creatures and eat astonishing quantity of frogs, mice, small fish and other live food which their parents bring to the nest and I knew that duplicating this parental effort was going to be difficult. We had nowhere to put the bird. We didn't want it walking around the garden in case a dog, cat or fox got to it so we shut it inside the bathroom while I dug worms for its evening meal. Then, the father of the German family held it while I dropped the worms down its throat.

His kids all stood around him and they liked watching it. They liked it even more when it emptied the contents of its stomach in their dad's lap. Storks are big birds and void at least a cupful of whitewashy substance at a time, which as we were shown the next morning, takes the colour clean out of stone washed Levis. It was obvious that we weren't going to be able to keep up an adequate supply of live food for our wing-ed whitewash dispenser and so, in the morning, we took it across the road where our land sloped down to the river and I attempted to launch it like a hang glider.

I ran down the meadow full pelt holding the stork aloft by the feet as it flapped its wings and just when I thought all was going to be well it did to me what it had done to our German guest the previous evening - but in my face. But our stork was up and flying. I didn't actually witness the event due to temporary blindness but by the time I'd wiped my eyes it was soaring up and up on a thermal and we never knowingly saw it again. I walked back up the slope to where Alicja and our Germans were waiting and together we crossed the lane to go back up to our house.

I glanced to the right. Big Jan was strolling casually up the lane with a very relaxed looking Little Yusef over his shoulder.