Dear Reader
I do hope you enjoy my book. And, if you do, please tell your friends and family about it. Moreover, if you know anyone in the publishing business please let them know I'm looking for a publisher.
Happy reading
Peter McLaren
wapenshaw@hotmail.com
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Introduction
BEYOND THE PALESKI
Introduction
I'm sitting at the kitchen table and I'm going to write a book, this book - the one you're reading now. This is my first book and I've only just remembered that I don't know how to write books. But there can't be much to it can there?
I've been here for half an hour so far, wondering just where to start and I couldn't come up with anything so I asked my wife Alicja. Alicja has an advantage over me in that she's actually read a lot of books and she thinks I should begin with what's outside the windows and why we're here and from there on, she's convinced me, the words will just come and the problem will be knowing where to stop.
So, what's right outside the windows? Outside the window behind me is the farmyard and it's under about 3 feet of snow with two tracks cutting through it, one leading to the barn where we keep the car and the other leading to the gate. Somewhere in a tunnel under the snow is a large dog called Misha. She's a Kaukaski (Caucasian sheepdog) and for the next 2 months she will live in her self constructed igloo - a cold weather dog that’s allergic to central heating.In front of me, as I look out of the other window, is a valley leading down to a frozen stream where a small group of kids are skating and, as I look past them up the hill, there are two houses, almost invisible, clad in the same snow as the fields but their presence given away by the smoke from their chimneys.
There isn't a sound out there and there won't be all day because the tractors have gone inside for the winter and the horses and sleighs have come out. It's pretty too, like something from the pages of a Tolstoy novel, a Christmas card scene but real. It was more pretty to me six weeks ago when all this white stuff first came floating down from the sky like a million tons of Ariel Ultra and filled up my gumboots but now I'm fed up with it because I know it will be around for another eight to ten weeks - I long for some green.
Where am I? My wife Alicja and I live on a farm in a tiny village in north east Poland way up near the borders with Lithuania, Byelorussia and that part of Russia which contains Kalingrad but became separated from Russia proper by some historical event of which I know nothing. It's the coldest part of Poland where the winter temperatures have been known to drop below 30 degrees Celsius and the area is as remote as it's possible to be in Europe.
It's a sparsely populated area of lakes and forests little known to, and seldom visited by Westerners except the odd intrepid bird, bison, butterfly or beaver watcher who ventures this way in search of something rare to tick off in his book and tell his friends about when he returns home. The land is farmed by peasant farmers using traditional practices long forgotten in the West, except for demonstrations at agricultural shows, and it's a most beautiful place in which to live - far from any industry of any kind save for the odd agricultural repair shop.
Why do we live here? Good question, and I'll write another book about the reasons some day but the short answer to it is that we were short of money and could hardly have raked up the deposit for a house in England or Australia, whereas here, we could own a house lock stock and barrel and still have the money to renovate it. The biggest problem with the whole idea though was that we knew there was no work in the area and no safety net of social security to fall back on.
So here's what we decided to do. We'd buy a farm, renovate the house and do B&B for those odd intrepid bird and animal watchers. Simple enough idea, a few floorboards, bit of plastering, throw a few walls up here & there, build a bathroom and advertise. There was one condition which Alicja insisted on from the outset; that I was to tell everyone here that I was a strict teetotaler and never to let anyone in the village see me drinking. Otherwise, she said, you'll have every piss pot in the village turning up at our door wanting to drink with you. She was right!
This is a story of what life is like in a small village in the middle of nowhere stuck in a nineteenth century time warp. It's the story of our first year, the laughs we had, the people we met and the reactions of the villagers, most of whom had never met a foreigner until we came here to live.
Introduction
I'm sitting at the kitchen table and I'm going to write a book, this book - the one you're reading now. This is my first book and I've only just remembered that I don't know how to write books. But there can't be much to it can there?
I've been here for half an hour so far, wondering just where to start and I couldn't come up with anything so I asked my wife Alicja. Alicja has an advantage over me in that she's actually read a lot of books and she thinks I should begin with what's outside the windows and why we're here and from there on, she's convinced me, the words will just come and the problem will be knowing where to stop.
So, what's right outside the windows? Outside the window behind me is the farmyard and it's under about 3 feet of snow with two tracks cutting through it, one leading to the barn where we keep the car and the other leading to the gate. Somewhere in a tunnel under the snow is a large dog called Misha. She's a Kaukaski (Caucasian sheepdog) and for the next 2 months she will live in her self constructed igloo - a cold weather dog that’s allergic to central heating.In front of me, as I look out of the other window, is a valley leading down to a frozen stream where a small group of kids are skating and, as I look past them up the hill, there are two houses, almost invisible, clad in the same snow as the fields but their presence given away by the smoke from their chimneys.
There isn't a sound out there and there won't be all day because the tractors have gone inside for the winter and the horses and sleighs have come out. It's pretty too, like something from the pages of a Tolstoy novel, a Christmas card scene but real. It was more pretty to me six weeks ago when all this white stuff first came floating down from the sky like a million tons of Ariel Ultra and filled up my gumboots but now I'm fed up with it because I know it will be around for another eight to ten weeks - I long for some green.
Where am I? My wife Alicja and I live on a farm in a tiny village in north east Poland way up near the borders with Lithuania, Byelorussia and that part of Russia which contains Kalingrad but became separated from Russia proper by some historical event of which I know nothing. It's the coldest part of Poland where the winter temperatures have been known to drop below 30 degrees Celsius and the area is as remote as it's possible to be in Europe.
It's a sparsely populated area of lakes and forests little known to, and seldom visited by Westerners except the odd intrepid bird, bison, butterfly or beaver watcher who ventures this way in search of something rare to tick off in his book and tell his friends about when he returns home. The land is farmed by peasant farmers using traditional practices long forgotten in the West, except for demonstrations at agricultural shows, and it's a most beautiful place in which to live - far from any industry of any kind save for the odd agricultural repair shop.
Why do we live here? Good question, and I'll write another book about the reasons some day but the short answer to it is that we were short of money and could hardly have raked up the deposit for a house in England or Australia, whereas here, we could own a house lock stock and barrel and still have the money to renovate it. The biggest problem with the whole idea though was that we knew there was no work in the area and no safety net of social security to fall back on.
So here's what we decided to do. We'd buy a farm, renovate the house and do B&B for those odd intrepid bird and animal watchers. Simple enough idea, a few floorboards, bit of plastering, throw a few walls up here & there, build a bathroom and advertise. There was one condition which Alicja insisted on from the outset; that I was to tell everyone here that I was a strict teetotaler and never to let anyone in the village see me drinking. Otherwise, she said, you'll have every piss pot in the village turning up at our door wanting to drink with you. She was right!
This is a story of what life is like in a small village in the middle of nowhere stuck in a nineteenth century time warp. It's the story of our first year, the laughs we had, the people we met and the reactions of the villagers, most of whom had never met a foreigner until we came here to live.
Chapter 1
BEYOND THE PALESKI
Chapter 1
We were at a party down in Warsaw when we first announced our intention to leave civilisation behind and go to live in the north east of the country. I was, I suppose, the guest of honour, being English and having spent twenty years in Australia, and I had the suspicion that I hadn't been invited purely because of my good looks and my witty repartee.
No, my face is forgettable and, at that time, I couldn't speak enough of the language to communicate anyway. I was there as the token foreigner to show the other guests what classy circles the hosts moved in - their English not being up to the standard where they could tell that I'm no person to boast about.
"You're doing what?" said our host.
Alicja went over the plan again in Polish for the benefit of all present. She told them that we'd found a farm in a beautiful area with water meadows gently sloping away from the house into a valley with a river at the bottom. That we'd paid a deposit and we were moving in as soon as we'd paid the balance and organised the transport to get our furniture delivered.
Everything went quiet for a while as people refilled their glasses and began to pull up their chairs to where we were sitting and offer their advice. The advice from all quarters was quite clear, frank...well, blunt. – “Don't do it" they said.
The party had hardly started and it never really developed into a party at all, just four hours of friendly advice and education on the ways of Polish villagers up near the Russian border, the mentality of the people we would encounter and heartfelt pleas for us to reconsider. I was impressed by the words of Mateusz, an artist and writer who, five years previously, had spent two years living in Colorado and a further six months living some fifty kilometres away from where we ourselves were now intending to set up house.
-I can tell Peter you that you cannot begin to imagine the mentality of the people up there. I've spent time living in the West and although I don't claim to be able to understand the Western mentality, for me it was easier to adapt to Colorado than it was to adapt to life where you're going - and I'm Polish. Perhaps you don't realise; where you're going to live used to be East Prussia, that territory has only been Polish since World War II
-Does it make a difference?
-Yes, the area was totally de-populated in 1946 and then filled with different ethnic groups from all around Poland.
-Which means?
-Which means that there is no indigenous, deep rooted culture there. Many of your neighbours will have their roots in the Ukraine and Lithuania, and there'll be all sorts of others too - small groups of people who the old communist government wanted to split up to stop them fomenting trouble where they lived before. They just bundled them up and sent them all up to what used to be East Prussia and they took all their old family feuds with them. They're, how shall I put it, culturally less advanced than the rest of Poland. It's the poorest part of the country and poverty eats away at the moral fibre of people. People up there are,... are,....well they're primitive.-
I still couldn't see why any of this should make any difference to Alicja and I. We weren't particularly looking for some deep rooted culture we just loved the area. Everything Matuesz said sounded good to me, just what Alicja and I were looking for after spending most of our working lives in city offices but to tell them why it appealed to us was too much for me to communicate in my limited Polish and now, everybody was waiting for my reply.
-It's too late, we've already signed for the place, paid our deposit and can't get out of the deal and, anyway, we're sure that we're going to like it. We're going to convert the farmhouse into a guest house and we'll live in an apartment which we'll build in the barn-
Again the conversation was broken by a silence, an embarrassed silence, a silence born of the realisation that you just can't explain colour to a blind man, to a man who refuses, is unwilling, to view his own folly from the outside. The conversation, when it resumed, turned to security systems because, we were assured by all, the territory we had chosen to live in was populated almost entirely by thieves, cheats and drunkards; all of whom would conspire with animal cunning to divest us of whatever we possessed.
Mateusz spoke in Polish slowly and clearly for my benefit and left off the grammatical suffixes which so confuse foreigners.
-Peter, if you're going to go through with it you must get yourself a big dog, a female.
-Why a female?
-Because if you have a male, those peasants will bring along a female on heat one night and a male dog won't bark once he gets the smell of the bitch. Then they'll rip you off. Believe me, I know.
-Oh, I see ... yes ... thanks ... good idea.
-Yes, and it gets awfully cold up where you're going, it's called the Polish Siberia and you need a dog which can stay out in minus 30 degree weather. No good having a dog to protect your property if it has to be kept inside at night is it? Go down to the Russian market at the football stadium on Sunday and get one of those big Kaukaskis (Caucasian sheepdogs) the Russkis smuggle in. They grow to an enormous size and become highly territorial.
From off of his bookshelves our host produced a book on dogs and Alicja translated the text on Kaukaskis for me. They sounded particularly vicious. They were, it said, loosely related to the Turkish Kangal, were used in the Armenian mountains to guard sheep and when in pairs would actively hunt wolves. The book also went on to say that Kaukaskis were bred and used by the Czars armies to guard the baggage trains. I thanked him for his advice and worried.
Others at the party told us that at least half the materials we needed to renovate a house wouldn't be available "up there" and we'd have to spend a fortune transporting things from Warsaw.
-Do you think we're doing the right thing?, Alicja asked me on the way home.
I was no longer sure whether we were or not but didn't want to admit it.
-Well, it's too late now, I replied, -but everyone we met up there when we were travelling around looking for a place to live seemed pretty decent to me. Glad we met those people at the party all the same though, they could be right, who knows? Lets go down town tomorrow and look at some kind of alarm system-
We ended up buying an infra red activated security light, two huge door locks and Misha who was only 3 months old and, at that stage, a loveable little bundle of fluff which bore little resemblance to the Baskervellian hound into which she would soon develop.
It was on the first Sunday in June that we finally moved into the house, agreements having been struck between ourselves and the previous owners concerning who was going to look after the crops already in the ground and who was going to get the lions share of the tomatoes in the glass house which I was going to be taking care of. We followed the furniture removals truck up from Warsaw, arriving at around noon and there waiting for us, was the previous owner of the house, Mr Polakowski who informed us that his family had moved out a week ago but he'd been sleeping in the house on the floor in case of thieves.
This wasn't really what we needed to hear at that point but it confirmed what the people at the party in Warsaw had told us - we'd moved into a den of thieves. We walked into the house and Mr Polakowski showed me how to operate the wood burning stove, where the electrical fuse (there was only one) was located and all the things one normally shows a new owner and I noticed that the place was absolutely bare - devoid of anything of value.
I turned towards him with a smile and said that I didn't think he needed to have bothered sleeping in the place for the past week as there was nothing to steal. He looked at me as if I was mad.
-What about the radiators, the central heating furnace, the floorboards?
I didn't understand the last word and asked Alicja to translate.
-What did he say?
-He said floorboards.
-Floorboards! - people steal floorboards?
-That's what he said.
-Christ, what have we done?
Mr Polakowski then tried to sell us the chickens and the cow which he said he'd been holding back for us and expressed surprise when we said we didn't want them.
-What will you do about eggs and milk?
Alicja assured him that we'd manage somehow and he asked if we'd mind hanging onto them for a while until he could sell them. We knew he was moving into Gizycko, the nearest town, and didn't have transport which would allow him to visit his animals so we quickly told him that we didn't know anything about cows and chickens and didn't feel qualified to look after them. He was incredulous, just couldn't believe that there were people at large on the planet who lacked these elementary skills and he went next door to ask the neighbour if he'd take care of them.
Meanwhile the removals men unloaded the truck and disappeared after asking us if we were sure we wanted to stay. Depression was slowly creeping upon us and although I didn't want to admit it to Alicja, I was indeed beginning to think that perhaps we'd done the wrong thing.
Mr Polakowski duly returned and advised us that the neighbour would be over later in the afternoon to milk the cow and feed the chickens.
-Aren't you scared the chickens will get stolen? I asked-
No, he replied, nobody steals animals, animals are recognizable so a thief couldn't keep them at home and they'd be seen if they were transported out of the village to be sold elsewhere. That little puppy of yours though would be worth stealing. If you like you can have my dog until yours grows, just to be on the safe side.
So there we were in a small village in a forgotten part of Europe where I could only understand twenty percent of any conversation likely to come my way and someone had just told me that our front line of defence against thieves was worth stealing. We refused the offer of the dog and Mr Polakowski bade us goodbye and that was the last we saw of him for another three months.
I was depressed and we went inside for a cup of tea but after rummaging through umpteen boxes we couldn't find the electric kettle and as the wood burning stove was cold we unpacked the microwave oven. It was then that we discovered that there were only three power points in the entire house, none of which were located in the kitchen and so I plugged the microwave in where Polokawski's television had been. As we switched it on there was a bang which we traced to the fuse box where old Polakowski had conveniently left 4 spare fuses.
It didn't take long to figure out that the electrical system couldn't cope with the microwave oven, in fact having located the electric kettle, we found that it couldn't even cope with that when all the lights were on. Now it was Alicja's turn to be depressed. I found some wood in the shed, lit the stove and after an hour the water boiled and we sat down to that cup of tea and what we thought would be a nice consoling chat but a man appeared unannounced in our kitchen.
He was a slack trousered peasant farmer of about 35 years with a bent nose and enormous hands and he introduced himself as our neighbour. His name was Vladislav, Vladek for short. He'd come to milk the cow but he was clearly very uneasy and wouldn't look at me. He shuffled his feet, looked up, looked down, from side to side, cocked his head and looked at the dog but just wouldn't aim his eyes in my direction.
In fact he wouldn't look me in the eye for another fortnight although by that time we had developed something of a neighbourly relationship. He told us some weeks later that, apart from the Russians and Lithuanians at the market in town, I was the first foreigner he'd ever met and that he hadn't been sure how to behave. But now he'd come to milk the cow and to offer us the free run of his vegetable garden which he said contained more vegetables than they'd be able to use.
-I've got a little electrical problem, I said. -Do you know where I can find the local electrician?-
He ignored me completely and addressed Alicja telling her that there was no such thing as a local electrician and that every man took care of his own electrical repairs. He added that he probably knew as much as anyone in Bocwinka about things electrical and he'd be pleased to have a look at our problem on Monday but today, Sunday, was the Lord's day and the only work which could be performed was that of caring for animals. The rest of the day was spent unpacking and assembling the bed and a wardrobe and we turned in early.
-What did you think of our neighbour?- asked Alicja as I turned out the light.
-Not much, I wouldn't trust him further than I could throw him.
-Why?
-The guy wouldn't look me in the eyes, I think he's shifty.
-You could be right but maybe he was just shy, embarrassed maybe.
-Well, I said -time will tell I guess, we'll see.
I had no way of knowing, at that stage, how much I would come to rely on Vladek in the coming weeks and, if the old adage "a friend in need is a friend indeed" be true, I've never had a better friend. Vladek was born in Bocwinka and knew everyone and everything within tractor driving distance. His parents were Ukrainian and they were the third family to have been transported to the village in 1946 after the Germans/Prussians had been sent off across the river Oder to Germany.
He'd been running his farm since he was 16 years of age when his father had become unable to work and had taught himself to do everything necessary to keep the place going. In such a remote area all the farmers, of necessity, had to learn to be self sufficient if they were going to be able to survive but Vladek stood head and shoulders above the rest when it came to versatility. Welder, plumber, bricklayer, mechanic, blacksmith and carpenter. Vladek was all of these and a lot more and I could never make out how he had the time to fit all these things in to his week but he did, and he never seemed to hurry.
For us, however, his usefulness lay in his extended family-everybody in the district seemed to be related to Vladek. When we wanted roof tiles he had a brother able to provide them, firewood-an uncle with a forest, car repairs-a brother in law, a haunch of venison-a cousin who was a poacher. It took us months to realise that the words used to describe all these family members (brother, cousin etc) were so loosely applied as to be unfathomable.
Anything gettable could be got whether legal or otherwise but it always came through Vladek and never direct as we were to learn in the months to come.
Chapter 1
We were at a party down in Warsaw when we first announced our intention to leave civilisation behind and go to live in the north east of the country. I was, I suppose, the guest of honour, being English and having spent twenty years in Australia, and I had the suspicion that I hadn't been invited purely because of my good looks and my witty repartee.
No, my face is forgettable and, at that time, I couldn't speak enough of the language to communicate anyway. I was there as the token foreigner to show the other guests what classy circles the hosts moved in - their English not being up to the standard where they could tell that I'm no person to boast about.
"You're doing what?" said our host.
Alicja went over the plan again in Polish for the benefit of all present. She told them that we'd found a farm in a beautiful area with water meadows gently sloping away from the house into a valley with a river at the bottom. That we'd paid a deposit and we were moving in as soon as we'd paid the balance and organised the transport to get our furniture delivered.
Everything went quiet for a while as people refilled their glasses and began to pull up their chairs to where we were sitting and offer their advice. The advice from all quarters was quite clear, frank...well, blunt. – “Don't do it" they said.
The party had hardly started and it never really developed into a party at all, just four hours of friendly advice and education on the ways of Polish villagers up near the Russian border, the mentality of the people we would encounter and heartfelt pleas for us to reconsider. I was impressed by the words of Mateusz, an artist and writer who, five years previously, had spent two years living in Colorado and a further six months living some fifty kilometres away from where we ourselves were now intending to set up house.
-I can tell Peter you that you cannot begin to imagine the mentality of the people up there. I've spent time living in the West and although I don't claim to be able to understand the Western mentality, for me it was easier to adapt to Colorado than it was to adapt to life where you're going - and I'm Polish. Perhaps you don't realise; where you're going to live used to be East Prussia, that territory has only been Polish since World War II
-Does it make a difference?
-Yes, the area was totally de-populated in 1946 and then filled with different ethnic groups from all around Poland.
-Which means?
-Which means that there is no indigenous, deep rooted culture there. Many of your neighbours will have their roots in the Ukraine and Lithuania, and there'll be all sorts of others too - small groups of people who the old communist government wanted to split up to stop them fomenting trouble where they lived before. They just bundled them up and sent them all up to what used to be East Prussia and they took all their old family feuds with them. They're, how shall I put it, culturally less advanced than the rest of Poland. It's the poorest part of the country and poverty eats away at the moral fibre of people. People up there are,... are,....well they're primitive.-
I still couldn't see why any of this should make any difference to Alicja and I. We weren't particularly looking for some deep rooted culture we just loved the area. Everything Matuesz said sounded good to me, just what Alicja and I were looking for after spending most of our working lives in city offices but to tell them why it appealed to us was too much for me to communicate in my limited Polish and now, everybody was waiting for my reply.
-It's too late, we've already signed for the place, paid our deposit and can't get out of the deal and, anyway, we're sure that we're going to like it. We're going to convert the farmhouse into a guest house and we'll live in an apartment which we'll build in the barn-
Again the conversation was broken by a silence, an embarrassed silence, a silence born of the realisation that you just can't explain colour to a blind man, to a man who refuses, is unwilling, to view his own folly from the outside. The conversation, when it resumed, turned to security systems because, we were assured by all, the territory we had chosen to live in was populated almost entirely by thieves, cheats and drunkards; all of whom would conspire with animal cunning to divest us of whatever we possessed.
Mateusz spoke in Polish slowly and clearly for my benefit and left off the grammatical suffixes which so confuse foreigners.
-Peter, if you're going to go through with it you must get yourself a big dog, a female.
-Why a female?
-Because if you have a male, those peasants will bring along a female on heat one night and a male dog won't bark once he gets the smell of the bitch. Then they'll rip you off. Believe me, I know.
-Oh, I see ... yes ... thanks ... good idea.
-Yes, and it gets awfully cold up where you're going, it's called the Polish Siberia and you need a dog which can stay out in minus 30 degree weather. No good having a dog to protect your property if it has to be kept inside at night is it? Go down to the Russian market at the football stadium on Sunday and get one of those big Kaukaskis (Caucasian sheepdogs) the Russkis smuggle in. They grow to an enormous size and become highly territorial.
From off of his bookshelves our host produced a book on dogs and Alicja translated the text on Kaukaskis for me. They sounded particularly vicious. They were, it said, loosely related to the Turkish Kangal, were used in the Armenian mountains to guard sheep and when in pairs would actively hunt wolves. The book also went on to say that Kaukaskis were bred and used by the Czars armies to guard the baggage trains. I thanked him for his advice and worried.
Others at the party told us that at least half the materials we needed to renovate a house wouldn't be available "up there" and we'd have to spend a fortune transporting things from Warsaw.
-Do you think we're doing the right thing?, Alicja asked me on the way home.
I was no longer sure whether we were or not but didn't want to admit it.
-Well, it's too late now, I replied, -but everyone we met up there when we were travelling around looking for a place to live seemed pretty decent to me. Glad we met those people at the party all the same though, they could be right, who knows? Lets go down town tomorrow and look at some kind of alarm system-
We ended up buying an infra red activated security light, two huge door locks and Misha who was only 3 months old and, at that stage, a loveable little bundle of fluff which bore little resemblance to the Baskervellian hound into which she would soon develop.
It was on the first Sunday in June that we finally moved into the house, agreements having been struck between ourselves and the previous owners concerning who was going to look after the crops already in the ground and who was going to get the lions share of the tomatoes in the glass house which I was going to be taking care of. We followed the furniture removals truck up from Warsaw, arriving at around noon and there waiting for us, was the previous owner of the house, Mr Polakowski who informed us that his family had moved out a week ago but he'd been sleeping in the house on the floor in case of thieves.
This wasn't really what we needed to hear at that point but it confirmed what the people at the party in Warsaw had told us - we'd moved into a den of thieves. We walked into the house and Mr Polakowski showed me how to operate the wood burning stove, where the electrical fuse (there was only one) was located and all the things one normally shows a new owner and I noticed that the place was absolutely bare - devoid of anything of value.
I turned towards him with a smile and said that I didn't think he needed to have bothered sleeping in the place for the past week as there was nothing to steal. He looked at me as if I was mad.
-What about the radiators, the central heating furnace, the floorboards?
I didn't understand the last word and asked Alicja to translate.
-What did he say?
-He said floorboards.
-Floorboards! - people steal floorboards?
-That's what he said.
-Christ, what have we done?
Mr Polakowski then tried to sell us the chickens and the cow which he said he'd been holding back for us and expressed surprise when we said we didn't want them.
-What will you do about eggs and milk?
Alicja assured him that we'd manage somehow and he asked if we'd mind hanging onto them for a while until he could sell them. We knew he was moving into Gizycko, the nearest town, and didn't have transport which would allow him to visit his animals so we quickly told him that we didn't know anything about cows and chickens and didn't feel qualified to look after them. He was incredulous, just couldn't believe that there were people at large on the planet who lacked these elementary skills and he went next door to ask the neighbour if he'd take care of them.
Meanwhile the removals men unloaded the truck and disappeared after asking us if we were sure we wanted to stay. Depression was slowly creeping upon us and although I didn't want to admit it to Alicja, I was indeed beginning to think that perhaps we'd done the wrong thing.
Mr Polakowski duly returned and advised us that the neighbour would be over later in the afternoon to milk the cow and feed the chickens.
-Aren't you scared the chickens will get stolen? I asked-
No, he replied, nobody steals animals, animals are recognizable so a thief couldn't keep them at home and they'd be seen if they were transported out of the village to be sold elsewhere. That little puppy of yours though would be worth stealing. If you like you can have my dog until yours grows, just to be on the safe side.
So there we were in a small village in a forgotten part of Europe where I could only understand twenty percent of any conversation likely to come my way and someone had just told me that our front line of defence against thieves was worth stealing. We refused the offer of the dog and Mr Polakowski bade us goodbye and that was the last we saw of him for another three months.
I was depressed and we went inside for a cup of tea but after rummaging through umpteen boxes we couldn't find the electric kettle and as the wood burning stove was cold we unpacked the microwave oven. It was then that we discovered that there were only three power points in the entire house, none of which were located in the kitchen and so I plugged the microwave in where Polokawski's television had been. As we switched it on there was a bang which we traced to the fuse box where old Polakowski had conveniently left 4 spare fuses.
It didn't take long to figure out that the electrical system couldn't cope with the microwave oven, in fact having located the electric kettle, we found that it couldn't even cope with that when all the lights were on. Now it was Alicja's turn to be depressed. I found some wood in the shed, lit the stove and after an hour the water boiled and we sat down to that cup of tea and what we thought would be a nice consoling chat but a man appeared unannounced in our kitchen.
He was a slack trousered peasant farmer of about 35 years with a bent nose and enormous hands and he introduced himself as our neighbour. His name was Vladislav, Vladek for short. He'd come to milk the cow but he was clearly very uneasy and wouldn't look at me. He shuffled his feet, looked up, looked down, from side to side, cocked his head and looked at the dog but just wouldn't aim his eyes in my direction.
In fact he wouldn't look me in the eye for another fortnight although by that time we had developed something of a neighbourly relationship. He told us some weeks later that, apart from the Russians and Lithuanians at the market in town, I was the first foreigner he'd ever met and that he hadn't been sure how to behave. But now he'd come to milk the cow and to offer us the free run of his vegetable garden which he said contained more vegetables than they'd be able to use.
-I've got a little electrical problem, I said. -Do you know where I can find the local electrician?-
He ignored me completely and addressed Alicja telling her that there was no such thing as a local electrician and that every man took care of his own electrical repairs. He added that he probably knew as much as anyone in Bocwinka about things electrical and he'd be pleased to have a look at our problem on Monday but today, Sunday, was the Lord's day and the only work which could be performed was that of caring for animals. The rest of the day was spent unpacking and assembling the bed and a wardrobe and we turned in early.
-What did you think of our neighbour?- asked Alicja as I turned out the light.
-Not much, I wouldn't trust him further than I could throw him.
-Why?
-The guy wouldn't look me in the eyes, I think he's shifty.
-You could be right but maybe he was just shy, embarrassed maybe.
-Well, I said -time will tell I guess, we'll see.
I had no way of knowing, at that stage, how much I would come to rely on Vladek in the coming weeks and, if the old adage "a friend in need is a friend indeed" be true, I've never had a better friend. Vladek was born in Bocwinka and knew everyone and everything within tractor driving distance. His parents were Ukrainian and they were the third family to have been transported to the village in 1946 after the Germans/Prussians had been sent off across the river Oder to Germany.
He'd been running his farm since he was 16 years of age when his father had become unable to work and had taught himself to do everything necessary to keep the place going. In such a remote area all the farmers, of necessity, had to learn to be self sufficient if they were going to be able to survive but Vladek stood head and shoulders above the rest when it came to versatility. Welder, plumber, bricklayer, mechanic, blacksmith and carpenter. Vladek was all of these and a lot more and I could never make out how he had the time to fit all these things in to his week but he did, and he never seemed to hurry.
For us, however, his usefulness lay in his extended family-everybody in the district seemed to be related to Vladek. When we wanted roof tiles he had a brother able to provide them, firewood-an uncle with a forest, car repairs-a brother in law, a haunch of venison-a cousin who was a poacher. It took us months to realise that the words used to describe all these family members (brother, cousin etc) were so loosely applied as to be unfathomable.
Anything gettable could be got whether legal or otherwise but it always came through Vladek and never direct as we were to learn in the months to come.
Chapter 2
BEYOND THE PALESKI
Chapter Two
It was Monday, our first full day in a new place and I was woken up at six o'clock by the bellowing of a cow, cocks crowing, people shouting and the twittering of birds in the bushes outside the bedroom window. It was a much noisier awakening than a regular week-day at our flat in Warsaw where I was so used to the trams and the distant rumble of the traffic that I no longer heard any of it.
I pulled back the blanket which had served the night as a temporary curtain and peered sleepy eyed out of the bedroom window, keen to see what the valley looked like first thing in the morning. A thin line of mist hung over the river, the sun was shining and a woman, who I presumed was Vladek's wife, was milking a cow by hand straight into a bucket in the field only twenty metres from our bedroom window. A buzzard or some such bird of prey was circling overhead waiting, I learned later in the day, to steal one of Vladek's ducklings.
A pair of storks were strutting through the water meadows thrusting their long red beaks, every now and then, into the damp grass. And I was sure that I'd found it, found the perfect place in which to spend a life and there was nothing I could think of to add to the scene, nothing could make it more appealing to me. I stood there for a full five minutes taking it all in, the black currant bushes in the garden, the sour cherry trees the crooked fence posts the sheer naturalness of it all.
I heard a clunk followed closely by swearing. I looked to the right. Vladek had joined his wife in the milking and the clunk had been the noise of a cow kicking over one of the buckets.
I recognised the swearing. Swear words, for some reason, are the words one remembers first and easiest when learning a new language although this time there were a few words which I knew just had to be swearing but which I'd never heard before.
Funny isn't it, how swearing the World over seems to be connected with things sexual? I mean, I'm sure that farmers in Peru, when they're loading llamas, victualling vicunas or adorning alpacas don't shout -get off my foot you elbow - no, it's always the naughty bits.
The threats of intended bestiality and the shouts concerning the cow's likeness to various parts of the anatomy woke Alicja who, relieved upon finding that Vladek was fully clothed and his outburst was directed to one of his cows, reminded me that before she could get breakfast, I'd have to light the stove.
The stove soon warmed up and I was standing in my underpants and slippers filling the kettle when I heard the outside door open and without a word the post lady walked straight into the kitchen, handed me a letter addressed to the previous owner and asked if I'd like to buy a copy of the local newspaper.
She was quite unperturbed to see me standing in my underpants and was busily thumbing through the rest of the letters in her satchel as she talked. That was the second person who'd walked straight into the house without announcing their presence and I wondered how we should go about teaching Misha to bark and act nasty.
Vladek came over a little after breakfast to look at our electrical problem and informed us that we didn't have one.
-All the houses are the same in Bocwinka, he said -they were all wired in the 1950s to the same pattern, the state paid for it and we didn't get any choice in the matter. I suppose you've got lots of electrical things have you?
We told him that yes, we had a few odds & ends, but nothing which consumed over two kilowatts, although with everything on at once it could possibly amount to perhaps ten.
-Ten, ten kilowatts? The wiring in these houses won't stand two kilowatts let alone ten.
-Oh, what do you do then, when you have everything on at once?
-We don't have to do anything. Our total consumption with the TV & all the lights only comes to about a kilowatt and a half. There's a family down the road who have an electric water heater though, but they turn everything off when they switch it on. If you want to use ten kilowatts you'll have to re wire the whole house starting at the pole out in the road.
It was slowly dawning on us that things in Bocwinka were perhaps a little further behind the times than we'd imagined and I changed the subject.
There had never been, and still isn't, any rubbish collection service in the village and the previous owner had been dumping his rubbish all over the back yard for upwards of 30 years so I asked Vladek if he knew if there was anyone in the village who wanted work.
-What kind of work?
-Rubbish removal to begin with. I need to hire a truck and get someone to go over the garden and pick up all these old buckets, bicycle tyres and what have you and then get them taken to the tip.
-Tip, what tip?
-Isn't there a rubbish tip somewhere. A big hole in the ground where people take their rubbish to be dumped.
-Oh, I see what you mean. Well, there's one close to town but that's all of twenty kilometres from here. We never go into town except on the bus, none of our tractors are registered for the road you see.
I paused to think. No rubbish tip, the house would have to be rewired, people just walk straight into your house without knocking, the area was full of thieves who'd even rip your floorboards up and they all drive about in un-registered tractors. Not shaping up to be a good day. But our neighbour seemed pretty normal to me, this Vladek, and I hoped he wasn't the only seemingly normal person in the village as we strolled outside to have a look at the rubbish in the garden.
-OK, don't worry about this lot, he said -we'll organise something.
-Any other problems?
-Yes, while you're here do you think you could help me move that old uh, that old thing over there, it's in the way of the door?
It was a sort of old copper which I guessed was used for cooking pig swill and he walked over to it, lifted one end and put it down again. Next he looked me up and down and judging me to be far too weak to lift the other end said -we'll organise something for that too.
With that he said goodbye and left. We had no idea who the "we" he'd referred to was going to be - -perhaps he means his family, said Alicja.
It was time for me to get to work and the priority was the security light we'd bought with us from Warsaw and the two, heavy duty door locks. I located the box with "security light & cable" written on it in black Texta colour and began to fix the sensor to the wall. It had only been twenty minutes since Vladek left us and suddenly there was a roar as a tractor and trailer came bouncing up the drive piloted by some "Nigel Manselski" drive-alike character with two front teeth missing.
It stopped in the yard and the driver, who introduced himself as Zenek, jumped down and asked where all the rubbish was. He was standing in it but I thought that perhaps he didn't regard it as rubbish and so resolved to be careful in my reply. I was about to answer when another tractor and trailer pulled up, this time with three men in the back, and this in turn was followed by a horse and cart driven by Vladek who, as our neighbour, knew where all the prime rubbish was in our garden. He began telling the tractor drivers where he wanted the trailers and what kind of rubbish he wanted in each - metal objects in one trailer, anything wooden in another, bricks, tiles and rubble in a third.
This done he asked Zenek -where's the battery?
-Jurek's bringing it later.
-OK, stop the engines.
This was a peculiar little conversation but as the month wore on I found out that there were only three tractor batteries in the whole village and eleven tractors at some time or another, shared them. The farmers who didn't end up with one of the batteries the previous night started their tractors in the mornings by means of transformers from the house electricity supply and each tractor owner had a slope in the garden to jump start his machine.
Vladek brought the five men over to where Alicja and I were standing and introduced them. They were all uneasy and again, like Vladek, wouldn't look me in the face. First was Zenek, the man with the missing teeth who'd already introduced himself. Zenek, like Vladek, was the son of Ukrainian parents and his was Polish difficult even for Alicja to understand. About the same age as Vladek he was tall and thin with blonde curly hair and a face ravaged by what must have been an almost terminal case of childhood acne or something blunt toothed and very hungry.
In quick succession I shook hands with Andrzej, Marek, Ivan and Bogdan, all self employed farmers or smallholders and all would become firm friends as the weeks went by. Between them they supplied us, sometimes unwittingly, with more laughs than any team of TV script writers could possibly dream up. Of course, at this meeting they had all come along to see what this foreigner and his sophisticated city wife were like and before the day was out all their friends and relations turned up on one pretext or another to have a look at us too. But now the six men set to, clearing up our yard and I went back to my security light.
Following the instructions to the letter I was well into the job after an hour or so and by that time Jurek had turned up with the battery. The trailers were full up and Ivan & Marek drove off somewhere to dump the contents. The remaining men drifted across to where I was working and Zenek asked what I was doing. I didn't really want to get into this conversation because I knew it would take more explaining than my limited Polish could cope with so I just said that it was a light. Vladek looked the wiring over & declared that I'd need to put a switch in the circuit somewhere.
-No, it comes on automatically, I said.
-What do you mean automatically? said Zenek
-I've seen this sort of thing before,said Andrzej -there's a little beam going between two points and the light comes on when you break it. The Germans use them in car parks.
-No, I said -it's actually infra red and it senses your body heat.
Blank stares followed and I could see that I was expected to explain further.
-Well, lets see. You know your blood is hot? Well, the light can sense the heat in your blood and it turns a micro switch on and the light works.
-What if you've got a coat on?, said Zenek.
-It will sense the heat in your face & hands, I said.
-What if you wear gloves and a balaclava?, said Andrzej.
It could still find the heat from your breath & anyway the heat would come through your coat, I replied.
-What about a tractor then?, said Vladek.
-Don't be stupid, said Zenek -a tractor's got no blood.
-No, I said but the engine would be hot, it doesn't have to be blood - just heat
There then followed a barrage of animals. Cow, horse, dog, cat, bird etc.
-If you had a tractor & trailer & you backed up to the gate it wouldn't come on would it?, asked Andrzej.
It would as soon as you came far enough for it to sense the engine heat, I replied.
All this time Bogdan had said nothing but now he fixed me with a stare and said -Crocodile!!
I looked at him for an instant wondering if he attached any importance to what he'd just said or whether he'd just chosen a crocodile at random. But Andrzej looked at him and told him he was stupid.
-Your head's full of pig shit, he said.
-Why?, asked Bogdan.
-Crocodiles, what whoring crocodiles?
-A crocodile wouldn't make that thing light up.
-Why?
-Crocodiles have cold blood.
-What cold blood?
-Cold blood - they're like frogs.
-Crocodiles aren't anything like frogs.
-Yes they are, said Bogdan -they're reptiles. All reptiles have cold blood. Animals and birds have fur and feathers to keep them warm but reptiles have cold blood. They have to sit in the sun to get their blood warm.
Andrzej was out of his depth, it was all too scientific for him and so he loaded the problem onto me.
-What about that then - what he says?
-Yes that maybe true, I said -but the likelihood of a crocodile breaking into a house to steal anything here in Bocwinka I would have thought was minimal.
-Oh, is that what it's for then, said Vladek -it lights up when burglars come through the gate?
-Yes, that's the idea.
-Oh you should have saved your money. Nobody steals things from houses here. There's only 30 houses in the whole of Bocwinka and we're in and out of each others homes all the time, we don't even knock before we go in. If you steal anything from a house here you can't use it because everyone would be able to see it the minute they walked in the door.
This conversation had taken place with me standing on a ladder and looking down at the lads but now I happened to glance through the window in front of me and there stood Alicja laughing so hard that tears were streaming down her cheeks. I mentioned that old Polakowski had slept in the house after his family had left because he was worried about theft adding that, from what they were now telling me, it seemed unnecessary.
-No, they said, -an empty house is considered fair game and a lot of things get stolen from farmyards at night but nobody would steal anything from inside an inhabited house - no thief would stoop to that.
This news didn't exactly set my mind at ease but things certainly sounded a little better than what I'd heard at the party in Warsaw and so I asked exactly what kind of things were stolen at night and how often did these things happened.
-Somebody tried to steal one of Vladek's tractor tyres one night and if it hadn't been for the dogs barking it would have gone, said Andrzej.
-When did this happen?, I asked.
-Last October or November.
-But that was seven months ago?
-Yes, but a milk churn was stolen in the village only a couple of weeks ago and that'll never turn up.
-But surely anybody would be able to recognise his own milk churn in another man's yard wouldn't he?, I asked.
-Yes, but the thief was probably from another village or, if he was from Bocwinka, he'd have sold it in another village to buy vodka.
A little further gentle probing revealed that, apart from cattle rustling and poaching, the area was practically devoid of theft but it was always a topic of conversation. In the following ten months there were no other thefts in the village apart from our own garden hose which had been laying in our field and visible from the road for 6 weeks. I found the mention of cattle rustling exciting though, and asked about it.
-Cattle rustling?, I said, -Mr Polakowski told me yesterday that people didn't steal animals because they're recognisable.
-Ah, well, said Zenek, -it's not exactly cattle rustling and when it happens the animal isn't recognisable.
-How come?
-They kill the animal in the field and strip the flesh from it. The next morning there's only the skeleton left.
-Shit, who does this sort of thing, I asked.
-We don't know but we think it's Russians and Lithuanians from across the border. The police must think it too because they'll never go out to a village if it's reported. They wait until the next day.
-Why the next day?
-The police are scared of them, they all carry guns.
-Tell me, I said, -do you believe it's true that Russians walk across the border and steal your cows like this?
-One thing’s for sure, said Vladek. -It only happens in the border areas and since the old system fell, the borders aren't patrolled - anybody can walk through them. There's no fence even, just posts in the ground.
I was glad Alicja was indoors and couldn't hear what was being said. I was gladder still that we didn't take Mr Polakowski's cow off his hands. For the moment we'd exhausted the subject of itinerant Russian slaughter men roaming the fields at night and there was a lull in the conversation.
-Do you watch Neighbours? asked Andrzej
-What? the TV serial?
-Yeah.
-No.
-Oh.
The tractors came back after a while and the men worked hard all day, taking countless trailer loads out of the gate but still making little impression on the overall scene, and they refused the tea & coffee Alicja offered them. Around midday Vladek's wife Eva came to introduce herself. A very cheerful person. She was loud, crude and a total stranger to deodorant - but cheerful. She was about the same age as Vladek, mid thirties, with straight blonde hair and she put her hand to her mouth every time she smiled to hide the fact that one of her front teeth was missing.
There seemed to me to be a shortage of teeth in Bocwinka because half of the guys working in the garden had lost one or more of their teeth. We were wondering how much to pay all these workers and Alicja asked Eva how much the going rate was for a days labour. “A bottle”, was the reply. By this we presumed that she meant the price of a bottle of vodka but there are something like fifty different brands of vodka in the shops and the prices varied widely.
-What sort of price though? Alicja asked.
-Oh, the stuff they sell at the village shop will do for them. It's the cheapest stuff you can buy, just go down there and buy them a bottle each.
-Don't you think I should ask them if they'd prefer the money?
-No, they don't want money - they want vodka. If you give them the money they'll have to go down to the shop and buy the stuff themselves.
I was managing to follow this conversation and asked Eva -what if a man has only done half a days work, you can't give him half a bottle of vodka can you?
-No, she said -they don't sell half bottles in the village shop, you give him the cost of a half bottle or don't give him anything until he's done another half days work - then give him a bottle.
This was something new to me and I asked if it would be normal to give somebody, say, ten bottles for a big job but she told us that two was the normal limit and anything over that was usually paid in cash.
-Their wives will tolerate a bottle a day but if a man came home with ten, his wife would want to know why there wasn't any money for the house, she replied.
This was our first introduction to the "vodka economy" and Bocwinka, like all other Polish villages ran on it. We became quite used to being told "a half" or "a quarter" in answer to the question "what do we owe you?" That evening Alicja presented the men with a bottle of vodka each which they all accepted bar Vladek and sat down to drink it straight away. Bogdan was the only man who didn't finish his bottle and apart from Marek, who needed help to get out of the gate, they all wandered off home to do their evening milking looking only slightly the worse for wear.
I couldn't believe what I'd just witnessed, men drinking a whole bottle of vodka in the space of twenty minutes and walking away looking relatively normal. I ran upstairs to watch them from the attic window to see if it was a show of bravado after which they'd all fall over. It wasn't. A couple of them staggered a little but they certainly weren't swaying around and they all disappeared into their respective houses. I went out into the yard again to look at the labels on the bottles which they'd left behind - it was 40% proof!
Over the coming weeks we got to know Vladek and Eva well. Vladek was the most helpful person either of us had ever come across and without him our house renovation project would have taken at least another four months to complete and we would have spent a lot more money than we did. He knew where to buy things cheaply, how to bribe people to get things done quickly and he worked like a slave for us and would never accept payment. Many times he would co-opt friends and relations to put in a days work without payment or send them off somewhere to buy some otherwise unobtainable item like gate hinges or door handles. One afternoon he told Alicja that he'd like a little chat with us and so she invited him and Eva over for dinner that evening. The little chat was about what we intended to do with our land. We'd been thinking about it ourselves as there were a lot of thistles and other weeds beginning to appear and, as we were to be running a guest house, we wanted the land surrounding us to look well maintained.
Now, at dinner, Vladek asked if he could rent a few acres from us and knowing he couldn't possibly afford to do this I proposed that he use the land for the next twelve months, rent free, in return for all the help he'd given us. Both he and Eva were touched by what they mistook for generosity on our part and agreed to keep us in eggs, milk, potatoes and the odd chicken or piece of pork when they slaughtered an animal. We hadn't told anyone at this stage that we intended to accommodate foreign tourists in the house but now we told them because we wanted them to see why we needed to keep our fields and water meadows looking up to scratch. They were flabbergasted at the thought that any sane tourist would want to visit the area.
-Peter, said Vladek. -Can't you find anything else to do? You'll never get tourists to come here, there's nothing here for them - no hamburgers or dances or anything like that. Look, I've never had a holiday in my life so I don't know what these people need but from what I've seen on TV, Bocwinka isn't like any of those places where people go on holiday. I tried to explain that there was a new breed of tourist - the eco tourist - who would like to see what Bocwinka and the area had to offer but it was beyond his comprehension. I explained that a certain type of tourist would like to see the bison in the forest and the storks and cranes, wildflowers, the clean lakes. There were also people, I said, who'd like to see his farm or just walk around Bocwinka, maybe go for a ride in his horse and cart but to no avail - Vladek had grown up with all these things and could see no value in them.
-Alicja, he said. -You explain to him. He's the only foreigner that's visited Bocwinka since I was born except for the odd person who's lost his way and one old German who was born here and comes back every year. You'll never get a single guest.
-You don't need the money anyway do you? he asked.
It was time to acquaint our neighbours with the facts regarding our financial situation.
-Vladek, I said, -when this house is finally finished we will have spent all our money, we don't have any other income and there's no work in the area. Yes, we need the money.
-Oh, we all thought you were rich - you come from the West and we naturally presumed you were rich.
We again emphasized that all our money would be spent renovating the house and that after this we would be poorer than him if the business didn't come. They were clearly worried about us and made the suggestion that we take up farming saying that they could fix us up with a horse and we could borrow ploughs and other necessary equipment from around the village.
It took quite some time to convince them that we were definitely going ahead with our project but in the end they accepted it and said they'd help us in any way they could. Our dinners had gone cold with all this talking and I would normally have put them in the microwave but Vladek and Eva hadn't seen the microwave as yet and after telling them how broke we were, I didn't want to show it off so we carried on with our cold dinners.
Alicja asked if they'd like a cup of tea. They said "yes" and I put the kettle on. It hadn't occurred to me that they may not have seen an electric kettle before and Eva asked if this thing was indeed an electric kettle as she'd seen them being used on TV. Vladek looked at it for a while and asked if I wasn't worried about the thought of water and electricity being in such close proximity to each other. I was at a loss to be able to think of any other appliance to compare it with which they might have already used, such as a steam iron or electric hot water service because I knew that they were unlikely to have any of these things in their house. I was in the middle of explaining that we'd had this electric kettle for five years and there had never been a problem with it, that it was double insulated and so forth, when it came to the boil and turned itself off.
-What's happened to it now, asked Eva.
-It's turned itself off.
-Why?
-Because it's already boiled and this saves electricity and stops it from burning dry.
Vladek was intrigued, examined it and declared that he thought he knew how it worked - he probably did too because although he'd had no exposure to a lot of modern day things he's smart & logical when he's not drunk. The next night when Alicja was in their house collecting our milk another villager was visiting them and Eva told him that we had this very clever kettle that was electric & turned itself off.
-It's even better than that gas stove of Domagalski's. You can put it on and watch TV and you don't have to worry that it'll burn dry, she said.
Alicja came home and related this to me and said that she thought an electric kettle would make a nice present for them because Vladek was still helping us almost every day and still refused take any money in return for his efforts. We were in town a couple of weeks later and in a shop window we saw an electric kettle made in Poland under licence from an English company so we bought it and duly presented it to them but a month later they asked if we could take it back to the shop for them because it had stopped working.
We exchanged the kettle with no questions asked and gave it back to our neighbours only to find that the same thing happened again about six weeks later. I cursed Polish products telling Alicja that "they can't even make things under license without messing them up" and back we went to the shop. The shopkeeper was very apologetic and said that he'd sold over 20 of these kettles and we were the first people who had complained and wasn't it a shame that it had happened to us twice? Then, rubbing the handle, he said "what's this sticky stuff around the switch?" I said I didn't know and he remarked that the other one had this sticky stuff on it too.
But we were in luck because the previous kettle had been repaired and he handed it over to take back with us. We dropped in at Vladek's on the way home and gave Eva the kettle. -Oh good, she said -he's been missing his hard boiled eggs. As the story unfolded we heard how Eva had been sticking down the switch of the kettle with adhesive tape and cooking in it, amongst other things, hard boiled eggs for Vladek's packed lunch when he was working in the fields. She went on to say that she used it for making soups too but ended with - no good for buckwheat though, it burns onto that thing in the bottom.
Chapter Two
It was Monday, our first full day in a new place and I was woken up at six o'clock by the bellowing of a cow, cocks crowing, people shouting and the twittering of birds in the bushes outside the bedroom window. It was a much noisier awakening than a regular week-day at our flat in Warsaw where I was so used to the trams and the distant rumble of the traffic that I no longer heard any of it.
I pulled back the blanket which had served the night as a temporary curtain and peered sleepy eyed out of the bedroom window, keen to see what the valley looked like first thing in the morning. A thin line of mist hung over the river, the sun was shining and a woman, who I presumed was Vladek's wife, was milking a cow by hand straight into a bucket in the field only twenty metres from our bedroom window. A buzzard or some such bird of prey was circling overhead waiting, I learned later in the day, to steal one of Vladek's ducklings.
A pair of storks were strutting through the water meadows thrusting their long red beaks, every now and then, into the damp grass. And I was sure that I'd found it, found the perfect place in which to spend a life and there was nothing I could think of to add to the scene, nothing could make it more appealing to me. I stood there for a full five minutes taking it all in, the black currant bushes in the garden, the sour cherry trees the crooked fence posts the sheer naturalness of it all.
I heard a clunk followed closely by swearing. I looked to the right. Vladek had joined his wife in the milking and the clunk had been the noise of a cow kicking over one of the buckets.
I recognised the swearing. Swear words, for some reason, are the words one remembers first and easiest when learning a new language although this time there were a few words which I knew just had to be swearing but which I'd never heard before.
Funny isn't it, how swearing the World over seems to be connected with things sexual? I mean, I'm sure that farmers in Peru, when they're loading llamas, victualling vicunas or adorning alpacas don't shout -get off my foot you elbow - no, it's always the naughty bits.
The threats of intended bestiality and the shouts concerning the cow's likeness to various parts of the anatomy woke Alicja who, relieved upon finding that Vladek was fully clothed and his outburst was directed to one of his cows, reminded me that before she could get breakfast, I'd have to light the stove.
The stove soon warmed up and I was standing in my underpants and slippers filling the kettle when I heard the outside door open and without a word the post lady walked straight into the kitchen, handed me a letter addressed to the previous owner and asked if I'd like to buy a copy of the local newspaper.
She was quite unperturbed to see me standing in my underpants and was busily thumbing through the rest of the letters in her satchel as she talked. That was the second person who'd walked straight into the house without announcing their presence and I wondered how we should go about teaching Misha to bark and act nasty.
Vladek came over a little after breakfast to look at our electrical problem and informed us that we didn't have one.
-All the houses are the same in Bocwinka, he said -they were all wired in the 1950s to the same pattern, the state paid for it and we didn't get any choice in the matter. I suppose you've got lots of electrical things have you?
We told him that yes, we had a few odds & ends, but nothing which consumed over two kilowatts, although with everything on at once it could possibly amount to perhaps ten.
-Ten, ten kilowatts? The wiring in these houses won't stand two kilowatts let alone ten.
-Oh, what do you do then, when you have everything on at once?
-We don't have to do anything. Our total consumption with the TV & all the lights only comes to about a kilowatt and a half. There's a family down the road who have an electric water heater though, but they turn everything off when they switch it on. If you want to use ten kilowatts you'll have to re wire the whole house starting at the pole out in the road.
It was slowly dawning on us that things in Bocwinka were perhaps a little further behind the times than we'd imagined and I changed the subject.
There had never been, and still isn't, any rubbish collection service in the village and the previous owner had been dumping his rubbish all over the back yard for upwards of 30 years so I asked Vladek if he knew if there was anyone in the village who wanted work.
-What kind of work?
-Rubbish removal to begin with. I need to hire a truck and get someone to go over the garden and pick up all these old buckets, bicycle tyres and what have you and then get them taken to the tip.
-Tip, what tip?
-Isn't there a rubbish tip somewhere. A big hole in the ground where people take their rubbish to be dumped.
-Oh, I see what you mean. Well, there's one close to town but that's all of twenty kilometres from here. We never go into town except on the bus, none of our tractors are registered for the road you see.
I paused to think. No rubbish tip, the house would have to be rewired, people just walk straight into your house without knocking, the area was full of thieves who'd even rip your floorboards up and they all drive about in un-registered tractors. Not shaping up to be a good day. But our neighbour seemed pretty normal to me, this Vladek, and I hoped he wasn't the only seemingly normal person in the village as we strolled outside to have a look at the rubbish in the garden.
-OK, don't worry about this lot, he said -we'll organise something.
-Any other problems?
-Yes, while you're here do you think you could help me move that old uh, that old thing over there, it's in the way of the door?
It was a sort of old copper which I guessed was used for cooking pig swill and he walked over to it, lifted one end and put it down again. Next he looked me up and down and judging me to be far too weak to lift the other end said -we'll organise something for that too.
With that he said goodbye and left. We had no idea who the "we" he'd referred to was going to be - -perhaps he means his family, said Alicja.
It was time for me to get to work and the priority was the security light we'd bought with us from Warsaw and the two, heavy duty door locks. I located the box with "security light & cable" written on it in black Texta colour and began to fix the sensor to the wall. It had only been twenty minutes since Vladek left us and suddenly there was a roar as a tractor and trailer came bouncing up the drive piloted by some "Nigel Manselski" drive-alike character with two front teeth missing.
It stopped in the yard and the driver, who introduced himself as Zenek, jumped down and asked where all the rubbish was. He was standing in it but I thought that perhaps he didn't regard it as rubbish and so resolved to be careful in my reply. I was about to answer when another tractor and trailer pulled up, this time with three men in the back, and this in turn was followed by a horse and cart driven by Vladek who, as our neighbour, knew where all the prime rubbish was in our garden. He began telling the tractor drivers where he wanted the trailers and what kind of rubbish he wanted in each - metal objects in one trailer, anything wooden in another, bricks, tiles and rubble in a third.
This done he asked Zenek -where's the battery?
-Jurek's bringing it later.
-OK, stop the engines.
This was a peculiar little conversation but as the month wore on I found out that there were only three tractor batteries in the whole village and eleven tractors at some time or another, shared them. The farmers who didn't end up with one of the batteries the previous night started their tractors in the mornings by means of transformers from the house electricity supply and each tractor owner had a slope in the garden to jump start his machine.
Vladek brought the five men over to where Alicja and I were standing and introduced them. They were all uneasy and again, like Vladek, wouldn't look me in the face. First was Zenek, the man with the missing teeth who'd already introduced himself. Zenek, like Vladek, was the son of Ukrainian parents and his was Polish difficult even for Alicja to understand. About the same age as Vladek he was tall and thin with blonde curly hair and a face ravaged by what must have been an almost terminal case of childhood acne or something blunt toothed and very hungry.
In quick succession I shook hands with Andrzej, Marek, Ivan and Bogdan, all self employed farmers or smallholders and all would become firm friends as the weeks went by. Between them they supplied us, sometimes unwittingly, with more laughs than any team of TV script writers could possibly dream up. Of course, at this meeting they had all come along to see what this foreigner and his sophisticated city wife were like and before the day was out all their friends and relations turned up on one pretext or another to have a look at us too. But now the six men set to, clearing up our yard and I went back to my security light.
Following the instructions to the letter I was well into the job after an hour or so and by that time Jurek had turned up with the battery. The trailers were full up and Ivan & Marek drove off somewhere to dump the contents. The remaining men drifted across to where I was working and Zenek asked what I was doing. I didn't really want to get into this conversation because I knew it would take more explaining than my limited Polish could cope with so I just said that it was a light. Vladek looked the wiring over & declared that I'd need to put a switch in the circuit somewhere.
-No, it comes on automatically, I said.
-What do you mean automatically? said Zenek
-I've seen this sort of thing before,said Andrzej -there's a little beam going between two points and the light comes on when you break it. The Germans use them in car parks.
-No, I said -it's actually infra red and it senses your body heat.
Blank stares followed and I could see that I was expected to explain further.
-Well, lets see. You know your blood is hot? Well, the light can sense the heat in your blood and it turns a micro switch on and the light works.
-What if you've got a coat on?, said Zenek.
-It will sense the heat in your face & hands, I said.
-What if you wear gloves and a balaclava?, said Andrzej.
It could still find the heat from your breath & anyway the heat would come through your coat, I replied.
-What about a tractor then?, said Vladek.
-Don't be stupid, said Zenek -a tractor's got no blood.
-No, I said but the engine would be hot, it doesn't have to be blood - just heat
There then followed a barrage of animals. Cow, horse, dog, cat, bird etc.
-If you had a tractor & trailer & you backed up to the gate it wouldn't come on would it?, asked Andrzej.
It would as soon as you came far enough for it to sense the engine heat, I replied.
All this time Bogdan had said nothing but now he fixed me with a stare and said -Crocodile!!
I looked at him for an instant wondering if he attached any importance to what he'd just said or whether he'd just chosen a crocodile at random. But Andrzej looked at him and told him he was stupid.
-Your head's full of pig shit, he said.
-Why?, asked Bogdan.
-Crocodiles, what whoring crocodiles?
-A crocodile wouldn't make that thing light up.
-Why?
-Crocodiles have cold blood.
-What cold blood?
-Cold blood - they're like frogs.
-Crocodiles aren't anything like frogs.
-Yes they are, said Bogdan -they're reptiles. All reptiles have cold blood. Animals and birds have fur and feathers to keep them warm but reptiles have cold blood. They have to sit in the sun to get their blood warm.
Andrzej was out of his depth, it was all too scientific for him and so he loaded the problem onto me.
-What about that then - what he says?
-Yes that maybe true, I said -but the likelihood of a crocodile breaking into a house to steal anything here in Bocwinka I would have thought was minimal.
-Oh, is that what it's for then, said Vladek -it lights up when burglars come through the gate?
-Yes, that's the idea.
-Oh you should have saved your money. Nobody steals things from houses here. There's only 30 houses in the whole of Bocwinka and we're in and out of each others homes all the time, we don't even knock before we go in. If you steal anything from a house here you can't use it because everyone would be able to see it the minute they walked in the door.
This conversation had taken place with me standing on a ladder and looking down at the lads but now I happened to glance through the window in front of me and there stood Alicja laughing so hard that tears were streaming down her cheeks. I mentioned that old Polakowski had slept in the house after his family had left because he was worried about theft adding that, from what they were now telling me, it seemed unnecessary.
-No, they said, -an empty house is considered fair game and a lot of things get stolen from farmyards at night but nobody would steal anything from inside an inhabited house - no thief would stoop to that.
This news didn't exactly set my mind at ease but things certainly sounded a little better than what I'd heard at the party in Warsaw and so I asked exactly what kind of things were stolen at night and how often did these things happened.
-Somebody tried to steal one of Vladek's tractor tyres one night and if it hadn't been for the dogs barking it would have gone, said Andrzej.
-When did this happen?, I asked.
-Last October or November.
-But that was seven months ago?
-Yes, but a milk churn was stolen in the village only a couple of weeks ago and that'll never turn up.
-But surely anybody would be able to recognise his own milk churn in another man's yard wouldn't he?, I asked.
-Yes, but the thief was probably from another village or, if he was from Bocwinka, he'd have sold it in another village to buy vodka.
A little further gentle probing revealed that, apart from cattle rustling and poaching, the area was practically devoid of theft but it was always a topic of conversation. In the following ten months there were no other thefts in the village apart from our own garden hose which had been laying in our field and visible from the road for 6 weeks. I found the mention of cattle rustling exciting though, and asked about it.
-Cattle rustling?, I said, -Mr Polakowski told me yesterday that people didn't steal animals because they're recognisable.
-Ah, well, said Zenek, -it's not exactly cattle rustling and when it happens the animal isn't recognisable.
-How come?
-They kill the animal in the field and strip the flesh from it. The next morning there's only the skeleton left.
-Shit, who does this sort of thing, I asked.
-We don't know but we think it's Russians and Lithuanians from across the border. The police must think it too because they'll never go out to a village if it's reported. They wait until the next day.
-Why the next day?
-The police are scared of them, they all carry guns.
-Tell me, I said, -do you believe it's true that Russians walk across the border and steal your cows like this?
-One thing’s for sure, said Vladek. -It only happens in the border areas and since the old system fell, the borders aren't patrolled - anybody can walk through them. There's no fence even, just posts in the ground.
I was glad Alicja was indoors and couldn't hear what was being said. I was gladder still that we didn't take Mr Polakowski's cow off his hands. For the moment we'd exhausted the subject of itinerant Russian slaughter men roaming the fields at night and there was a lull in the conversation.
-Do you watch Neighbours? asked Andrzej
-What? the TV serial?
-Yeah.
-No.
-Oh.
The tractors came back after a while and the men worked hard all day, taking countless trailer loads out of the gate but still making little impression on the overall scene, and they refused the tea & coffee Alicja offered them. Around midday Vladek's wife Eva came to introduce herself. A very cheerful person. She was loud, crude and a total stranger to deodorant - but cheerful. She was about the same age as Vladek, mid thirties, with straight blonde hair and she put her hand to her mouth every time she smiled to hide the fact that one of her front teeth was missing.
There seemed to me to be a shortage of teeth in Bocwinka because half of the guys working in the garden had lost one or more of their teeth. We were wondering how much to pay all these workers and Alicja asked Eva how much the going rate was for a days labour. “A bottle”, was the reply. By this we presumed that she meant the price of a bottle of vodka but there are something like fifty different brands of vodka in the shops and the prices varied widely.
-What sort of price though? Alicja asked.
-Oh, the stuff they sell at the village shop will do for them. It's the cheapest stuff you can buy, just go down there and buy them a bottle each.
-Don't you think I should ask them if they'd prefer the money?
-No, they don't want money - they want vodka. If you give them the money they'll have to go down to the shop and buy the stuff themselves.
I was managing to follow this conversation and asked Eva -what if a man has only done half a days work, you can't give him half a bottle of vodka can you?
-No, she said -they don't sell half bottles in the village shop, you give him the cost of a half bottle or don't give him anything until he's done another half days work - then give him a bottle.
This was something new to me and I asked if it would be normal to give somebody, say, ten bottles for a big job but she told us that two was the normal limit and anything over that was usually paid in cash.
-Their wives will tolerate a bottle a day but if a man came home with ten, his wife would want to know why there wasn't any money for the house, she replied.
This was our first introduction to the "vodka economy" and Bocwinka, like all other Polish villages ran on it. We became quite used to being told "a half" or "a quarter" in answer to the question "what do we owe you?" That evening Alicja presented the men with a bottle of vodka each which they all accepted bar Vladek and sat down to drink it straight away. Bogdan was the only man who didn't finish his bottle and apart from Marek, who needed help to get out of the gate, they all wandered off home to do their evening milking looking only slightly the worse for wear.
I couldn't believe what I'd just witnessed, men drinking a whole bottle of vodka in the space of twenty minutes and walking away looking relatively normal. I ran upstairs to watch them from the attic window to see if it was a show of bravado after which they'd all fall over. It wasn't. A couple of them staggered a little but they certainly weren't swaying around and they all disappeared into their respective houses. I went out into the yard again to look at the labels on the bottles which they'd left behind - it was 40% proof!
Over the coming weeks we got to know Vladek and Eva well. Vladek was the most helpful person either of us had ever come across and without him our house renovation project would have taken at least another four months to complete and we would have spent a lot more money than we did. He knew where to buy things cheaply, how to bribe people to get things done quickly and he worked like a slave for us and would never accept payment. Many times he would co-opt friends and relations to put in a days work without payment or send them off somewhere to buy some otherwise unobtainable item like gate hinges or door handles. One afternoon he told Alicja that he'd like a little chat with us and so she invited him and Eva over for dinner that evening. The little chat was about what we intended to do with our land. We'd been thinking about it ourselves as there were a lot of thistles and other weeds beginning to appear and, as we were to be running a guest house, we wanted the land surrounding us to look well maintained.
Now, at dinner, Vladek asked if he could rent a few acres from us and knowing he couldn't possibly afford to do this I proposed that he use the land for the next twelve months, rent free, in return for all the help he'd given us. Both he and Eva were touched by what they mistook for generosity on our part and agreed to keep us in eggs, milk, potatoes and the odd chicken or piece of pork when they slaughtered an animal. We hadn't told anyone at this stage that we intended to accommodate foreign tourists in the house but now we told them because we wanted them to see why we needed to keep our fields and water meadows looking up to scratch. They were flabbergasted at the thought that any sane tourist would want to visit the area.
-Peter, said Vladek. -Can't you find anything else to do? You'll never get tourists to come here, there's nothing here for them - no hamburgers or dances or anything like that. Look, I've never had a holiday in my life so I don't know what these people need but from what I've seen on TV, Bocwinka isn't like any of those places where people go on holiday. I tried to explain that there was a new breed of tourist - the eco tourist - who would like to see what Bocwinka and the area had to offer but it was beyond his comprehension. I explained that a certain type of tourist would like to see the bison in the forest and the storks and cranes, wildflowers, the clean lakes. There were also people, I said, who'd like to see his farm or just walk around Bocwinka, maybe go for a ride in his horse and cart but to no avail - Vladek had grown up with all these things and could see no value in them.
-Alicja, he said. -You explain to him. He's the only foreigner that's visited Bocwinka since I was born except for the odd person who's lost his way and one old German who was born here and comes back every year. You'll never get a single guest.
-You don't need the money anyway do you? he asked.
It was time to acquaint our neighbours with the facts regarding our financial situation.
-Vladek, I said, -when this house is finally finished we will have spent all our money, we don't have any other income and there's no work in the area. Yes, we need the money.
-Oh, we all thought you were rich - you come from the West and we naturally presumed you were rich.
We again emphasized that all our money would be spent renovating the house and that after this we would be poorer than him if the business didn't come. They were clearly worried about us and made the suggestion that we take up farming saying that they could fix us up with a horse and we could borrow ploughs and other necessary equipment from around the village.
It took quite some time to convince them that we were definitely going ahead with our project but in the end they accepted it and said they'd help us in any way they could. Our dinners had gone cold with all this talking and I would normally have put them in the microwave but Vladek and Eva hadn't seen the microwave as yet and after telling them how broke we were, I didn't want to show it off so we carried on with our cold dinners.
Alicja asked if they'd like a cup of tea. They said "yes" and I put the kettle on. It hadn't occurred to me that they may not have seen an electric kettle before and Eva asked if this thing was indeed an electric kettle as she'd seen them being used on TV. Vladek looked at it for a while and asked if I wasn't worried about the thought of water and electricity being in such close proximity to each other. I was at a loss to be able to think of any other appliance to compare it with which they might have already used, such as a steam iron or electric hot water service because I knew that they were unlikely to have any of these things in their house. I was in the middle of explaining that we'd had this electric kettle for five years and there had never been a problem with it, that it was double insulated and so forth, when it came to the boil and turned itself off.
-What's happened to it now, asked Eva.
-It's turned itself off.
-Why?
-Because it's already boiled and this saves electricity and stops it from burning dry.
Vladek was intrigued, examined it and declared that he thought he knew how it worked - he probably did too because although he'd had no exposure to a lot of modern day things he's smart & logical when he's not drunk. The next night when Alicja was in their house collecting our milk another villager was visiting them and Eva told him that we had this very clever kettle that was electric & turned itself off.
-It's even better than that gas stove of Domagalski's. You can put it on and watch TV and you don't have to worry that it'll burn dry, she said.
Alicja came home and related this to me and said that she thought an electric kettle would make a nice present for them because Vladek was still helping us almost every day and still refused take any money in return for his efforts. We were in town a couple of weeks later and in a shop window we saw an electric kettle made in Poland under licence from an English company so we bought it and duly presented it to them but a month later they asked if we could take it back to the shop for them because it had stopped working.
We exchanged the kettle with no questions asked and gave it back to our neighbours only to find that the same thing happened again about six weeks later. I cursed Polish products telling Alicja that "they can't even make things under license without messing them up" and back we went to the shop. The shopkeeper was very apologetic and said that he'd sold over 20 of these kettles and we were the first people who had complained and wasn't it a shame that it had happened to us twice? Then, rubbing the handle, he said "what's this sticky stuff around the switch?" I said I didn't know and he remarked that the other one had this sticky stuff on it too.
But we were in luck because the previous kettle had been repaired and he handed it over to take back with us. We dropped in at Vladek's on the way home and gave Eva the kettle. -Oh good, she said -he's been missing his hard boiled eggs. As the story unfolded we heard how Eva had been sticking down the switch of the kettle with adhesive tape and cooking in it, amongst other things, hard boiled eggs for Vladek's packed lunch when he was working in the fields. She went on to say that she used it for making soups too but ended with - no good for buckwheat though, it burns onto that thing in the bottom.
Chapter 3
BEYOND THE PALESKI
Chapter 3
Renovating a house anywhere in the World comes with its attendant problems and we knew that taking on such a project, even in the West wouldn't be without them. We knew too that in this far flung backwater of the former Soviet empire things were going to be a little more frustrating but we could never have imagined some of the difficulties we would encounter.
We theorised that now communism had gone and free enterprise was becoming rampant in Poland there would be no more shortages in the shops and, whilst that may have been true for food and a few other essentials, it wasn't true for building materials. There were shortages for different reasons - former state owned industries were going bankrupt at a rate of knots leaving a manufacturing vacuum which wasn't yet being filled.
The floorboards in one of the bedrooms had been covered with linoleum which I'd lifted to reveal a patchwork of various sized floorboards and under them was a layer of beech leaves which had served as insulation. The beech leaves had also served as a food supply for a variety of weevil like, maggoty creatures which we didn't think our future guests would come to love and develop meaningful relationships with during the short periods spent in the house. I spent a day lifting all the floorboards in the room and, along with the aforementioned weevil like magotty things, burnt them in the yard.
A couple of days later we took a trip into town to our one and only hardware store to order the new floorboards and the new floor joists to which they would be nailed. The owner of the store would visibly cringe every time we walked in the door because five times out of ten we'd be asking for something he'd never heard of and I'd end up drawing pictures of things like spokeshaves and tubes of silicon sealant only to be told that, whilst he thought these things were good ideas, they were all in the realms of fantasy as far as he was concerned. So on this day we asked him where we could obtain plain, simple old floorboards. We were in luck, he'd heard of them - in fact, he assured us, just about every house had them.
-OK, good, so where do we go to buy them?
-When do you want to use them? he asked.
-Yesterday, preferably.
-Mmmmm..... floorboards are things you usually plan a couple of years in advance.
Now, as I don't want to take up an entire chapter on the subject of floorboard procurement in north east Poland, I'll try to make a long story short. First we had to visit the manager of the local forestry department who asked us if the floor was going to be varnished or whether we'd cover it with linoleum. When we told him that we intended to varnish the floor he advised us to wait until the following summer. I couldn't see the reason for it so asked him why.
-It's the wrong time of the year, the sap will be falling.
-So what's wrong with that?
-It means that the floorboards will have a pink tinge to them.
It took a lot of persuading on our part to convince him that we didn't mind pink tinged floorboards if it meant that we could get them this year instead of waiting until the following summer. He reluctantly agreed to help us and arranged for us to meet one of his men in the forest a week later. On the appointed day, and at the appointed spot in the forest, we met Leszek the forester. It was a cold day, the forest canopy all but excluded the sunlight and we were shivering by the time he turned up.
He was an hour late and came almost silently through the trees in a horse and cart and before acknowledging our existence he climbed down and filled the horse's nosebag with hay and fitted it over the horse’s mouth. Then, taking an axe from the back of the cart, wandered over to where we were standing. He was positively Neanderthal in appearance, looking as though he had only recently learned how to walk upright. He was unshaven, his breath stank of vodka, and his forehead sloped abruptly back from his nose. Once, in Bulgaria, we'd stopped our campervan to make a cup of tea and I'd walked up over a ridge to take a leak and had run slap bang into a family of shepherds clad from head to foot in nothing but sheepskins. It was as though I'd stepped back in time two centuries but the man who now stood in front of us was from an era way before this.
He was, to all intents and purposes, a product of the forest. His jacket was made from different coloured furs and a bunch of herbs of some kind was pinned to the collar. His trousers were of deerskin tied below the knees with leather thongs and his crowning glory a Russian style fur hat with flaps loosely flapping about his ears which he lifted when he listened to what we had to say. Only his gum boots attested to the fact that he was living in the twentieth century.
-You must be Leszek
-Why do you want floorboards at this time of the year, the sap's falling?
-It's the only time of year we'll be able to get that special pinkish tinge we're looking for, I replied.
They'll be weak if they're cut now - won't last you more than fifteen years and you'll have to replace them.
We spent half a day tramping around in the undergrowth looking at suitable floorboard trees and Leszek knew his stuff, or at least, he knew a hell of a lot more than me, enough for me to be impressed. He could tell exactly how much floorboarding we'd be able to get out of each tree, he knew which trees would be rotten on the inside, whilst showing no visible symptoms on the outside, and could judge the required length of four metres with only a cursory glance. He marked our trees with his axe and felled them the next day.
Vladek arranged two tractors and trailers to transport the trees to the sawmill where they were cut into rough boards and we were advised that we should leave them for two years to season. Ignoring the advice we located a wood drying kiln some 20 kilometres distant and organised for the boards to be transported there to spend a week drying in the kiln. Organising transport wasn't an easy task as most of the tractors in the locality weren't registered for the road and the owners reluctant to venture out of their villages. We hired a forestry department truck and driver for the job and paid in vodka. A week in the kiln wasn't really enough to thoroughly season the wood but as this was the only kiln in the district and they had other orders to take care of, a week was all the time we could get and we were advised to lay the boards without nailing them down for a year or so to give them time to shrink.
Next the partially dried, rough floorboards had to be taken by us to a carpenters shop to smooth plane them and put the tongues and grooves in and, after another round of vodka bottles for the transport, "hey presto" we had floorboards. This was achieved in the record time, so we were told, of only 6 weeks and, not taking the advice of those who knew, I laid them down and nailed them all. Six months later we had to lift them all and re-lay them because over a distance of 5 metres we had a total shrinkage of 12 centimetres.
Floorboards, however, were the least of our worries - the general quality of Polish tools and building materials was far worse and when I got around to fitting the two door locks we'd bought with us from Warsaw I was in for a frustrating time. Firstly our door frames were made of metal and to fit the lock catches I had to drill two holes. I opened my brand new set of Polish drill bits for the occasion and started work, but it soon became evident that the drills were too soft to attack the metal of the door frames. "Oh intercourse", I seem to remember saying to my good woman as the third one broke on contact and she set off hot foot on a quest for harder drill bits.
She returned some hours later with two German drills she'd managed to borrow from our man in the hardware store in town and these cut through the steel of the door frames like they were made of butter. Next I took from the packet two self tapping metal screws with which I attempted to fasten the catch to the frame. No such luck. I used up the whole packet of screws but none of them would screw into the metal frame, the threads stripping as I turned them. Alicja had been watching the proceedings and I looked up at her.
-If you think I'm going all the way to town again just to spend the rest of the day looking for non existent screws you'd better think again, she told me.
I threatened violence but to no avail and went off into the garden to vent my frustration on Misha who wasn't particularly sympathetic either.
The next day Alicja returned from somewhere with a packet of German self tapping screws and I kissed her. They were Philips screws with a star shaped slot - I didn't have a Philips screwdriver. Nothing daunted I set off for next door but Vladek didn't have one either although he knew who did.
-Go and see the Soltys (the village head man) he's got a couple of them, said Vladek.
Alicja accompanied me to the Soltys house in case I wouldn't be able to make myself understood and I got a loan of the two screwdrivers and we ended up inviting the Soltys and his wife over for a cup of coffee. While we were there I asked where their toilet was and that was when I found out that, in Bocwinka, only a few houses had inside toilets - in fact some of the houses didn't have any form of toilet! Not only that, but we were one of the few that had running water inside the house at times when it wasn't raining outside.
When we first moved into our house there had been running water both hot (from the slow combustion stove) and cold but we thought that our lack of a proper bathroom had been an exception rather than the rule and building a bathroom had been our first priority. So on the way home from the Soltys' house we had something new to discuss - the toilet habits of the Polish peasant.
-What happens? I asked Alicja, -when it's thirty below zero and you need a pee. I'm sure I wouldn't struggle into all that clothing just to go outside and pee in the yard where icicles would probably form before it hit the ground. Alicja pointed out that at that sort of temperature ones skin freezes to things upon contact and we wondered how many people had frozen to death in Bocwinka over the years from being stuck to an outside loo seat. By the time we arrived home it was just on dusk and I set to work straight away while Alicja prepared dinner. The German self tapping screws were magnificent, really hard metal and infinitely superior to the metal of the Polish door frame. Unfortunately they were also infinitely superior to both of the Soltys' screwdrivers, the ends of which both twisted off before my very eyes.
It took many months for me to learn not to become frustrated at happenings such as this. It was senseless to be angry in instances where nothing could be done to improve the situation but for me, a do it now person, it was hard going. I got used to sawing slots in screws before using them, cutting the lumps off of the pointed ends of nails where part of the head of the next nail was attached. I got used as well, to tools like chisels breaking and bending on me, pliers and stillsons the teeth of which blunted at the first time of using. The ultimate in bad quality tools, as far as I was concerned, was a brand new claw hammer which broke in half while I was using it - not the handle - the metal part!
There was a knock at the door one day and there stood an American, Chris Sykes. I said hello and he answered me in English which at first took me aback as I hadn't heard any English spoken in a long time. He had volunteered for an assignment in Poland working for a division of the World Bank, teaching business management to small entrepreneurs (Pygmies?)and he stayed with us for two weeks. One night when he returned home he mentioned that he would be dealing with the subject of quality control the next day and asked if we had any ideas. I told him about the tools, screws, nails and so forth and showed him a few reject screws I'd been keeping as conversation pieces. He couldn't believe what he saw and asked me what percentage of screws didn't have slotted heads. I couldn't put a figure on it and so he decided to get up early in the morning and buy some screws before going into work.
He bought two kilograms of 1" long wood screws and distributed them in small piles to each of 6 teams and asked them to sort into two piles - those which were usable and those which were not, gave them a few minutes and walked around to inspect the results. The students were so used to bad quality goods after suffering nearly 50 years of communism that they had put what Chris clearly considered rubbish into the good pile and so he had to break down the screws into categories:
1 Those with no slots in the head
2 Those with slots but no thread
3 Those with blobs of metal where the pointed end should be
4 Rivets (those with no slots or threads)
5 Those with slots so deep that the screwdriver would break the heads in half as they were turned.
Out of the two kilograms of screws he finished with eleven usable items and took the whole bag back to the States as a souvenir. Of course, what I didn't tell him was that out of the eleven there would be four or five which would twist in half when they were only half way through the wood. It was great to have Chris around for that fortnight, he had a great sense of humour and just to be able to speak English to someone other than Alicja was a delight. And it was while Chris was staying with us that the Soltys and his wife turned up one Sunday afternoon for that cup of coffee we'd offered them.
Poland is opening up to western ideas with a rapidity which continues to amaze me from week to week. This is particularly true, of course, in the cities, where American fast food has already all but replaced the far healthier traditional Polish take away food. The television is now full of voiced over western advertisements and it's this form of advertising which reaches the homes of the villagers in Bocwinka and, on this occasion, it was the home of the Soltys and his wife. They came into the kitchen and sat down at the table where we introduced Chis to them and then, pointing to our kitchen window sill Jana, the Soltys' wife, enquired -is that a toaster?
-No, I replied, -that's a window sill. She didn't recognise my small attempt at humour and getting up and touching the toaster she unleashed a barrage of questions about it.
-Australians eat toast all the time you know. On "Neighbours" they're always eating it. The bread jumps out when it's cooked doesn't it? I've never tried toast. I saw a toaster advertised on TV but the talk was too fast.
- Would you like to try some now?, I asked.
-How long will it take?
After assuring her half a dozen times that it would be no problem and they'd get home in time for the afternoon milking we embarked on a marathon toast tasting session. Honey, jam, cheese spread, tomato - you name it, they devoured it. But it was the conversation which took place directly after the first slice that stuck in my mind.
-What did you think of it?, I asked.
-Mine was a bit burnt, said the soltys.
-So was mine, said Jana.
We then had to explain the whole concept of toast.
-That's what toast is, really, said Alicja.
-What?.. burnt bread?.. Doesn't the toaster do anything else......just burn the bread? I thought it was a bit strange that you didn't put anything in with it, just the bread. What are all those numbers for?
-Oh they're just different settings. You can vary the degree of burning from just warm to absolutely black.
-Why do they have a setting that makes it black? Do Australians eat bread so burnt that it's black?
-Well, no actually, they don't
-So what's it for then?
We didn't have an answer. I'd never thought about it before but they were right, who eats badly burnt toast? We then pointed out that the toaster was useful because you could use yesterdays bread for breakfast. This didn't seem to be a real advantage to them because, as they told us, they use week old bread.
-You just wrap it in a damp towel and put it in the slow combustion oven for 5 minutes when you get up and the oven's still warm from the night before. You wouldn't know that it wasn't fresh bread.
As for toast/burnt bread, they informed us, all you have to do is wait for the stove to heat up and throw the bread on the hot plate.
-Better than that toaster thing too, if you've got a big family like us. We could get 10 pieces of bread on top of the stove. You can only get two in that thing.
We had to admit that the toaster was a stupid western invention just made for people who have more money than sense and that eating burnt bread anyway was just a little bit silly and after they'd eaten all our bread and cleaned out our honey jar they left. A couple of weeks later Eva dropped off our mail on her way home from the post office. Eva goes up to the Soltys house for an hour every morning to help get the kids off to school & clean up the breakfast dishes because Jana goes to work.
-You've got a toaster haven't you?
-Yes Eva.
-Did you show the Soltys wife how to make toast?
-Yes Eva.
-Thought so. She's down the post office bragging about how they have toast every morning for breakfast. What's it like anyway, this toast?
-Well Eva, it's just burnt bread actually, it's a silly idea really.
-Oh, that must account for all that black stuff in their sink every morning.
By now it was the beginning of August, the weather was hot and the days long and the storks on the school house roof had reared five chicks which were learning to fly and would daily land in our garden in search of frogs and worms. Our water meadows all the way down to the river were covered in wildflowers and daily we'd see a pair of cranes in the back fields and we realised that we were missing out on the best part of the year. We were tired of renovating with it's daily hassles but we realised too that if we were going to be ready to receive guests the following spring, we'd just have to keep at it.
Our every day schedule was one of work, eat and sleep and we had been putting in twelve to fifteen hour days ever since we moved in. Neither of us had ever renovated a house before and we were doing everything ourselves not only to save money but also because there were no tradesmen in the area who'd ever seen the standard which needed to be met. The few tradesmen we had used had proved to be thoroughly unreliable and would just fail to turn up next day if they didn't like the work or, as we later dicovered, we gave them coffee instead of vodka during their breaks.
It was around that time that the bathrooms were ready for tiling and Bogdan told us that he had a cousin who was a good tiler, didn't drink and was a hard worker. Alicja was glad to hear about Bogdan's cousin viewing the news as a way to give me a break because, as she kept telling me, I'd been overdoing it. I wasn't so sure, but after meeting the man, and judging him to be a cut above the average; I agreed to give him the work after leaving detailed written instructions with diagrams in case he couldn't read. He told us that he'd tiled twenty rooms in the hotel in town and invited us to go there and have a look at his workmanship. That was good enough for me and we hired him and went off for a weeks holiday to visit Alicja's brother in Warsaw and look around the city hardware shops hoping to find a few imported tools and a double drainer sink for the kitchen.
I was happy about the tiling arrangement mainly because Bogdan had arranged it and Bogdan was something of a perfectionist. His hair was always neat, his garden well kept, children well dressed and he was the only person in Bocwinka who had a book shelf with books on it. All these little things, I told myself, went to show what kind of a guy Bogdan was and I knew that he wouldn't see his cousin let us down.
Chapter 3
Renovating a house anywhere in the World comes with its attendant problems and we knew that taking on such a project, even in the West wouldn't be without them. We knew too that in this far flung backwater of the former Soviet empire things were going to be a little more frustrating but we could never have imagined some of the difficulties we would encounter.
We theorised that now communism had gone and free enterprise was becoming rampant in Poland there would be no more shortages in the shops and, whilst that may have been true for food and a few other essentials, it wasn't true for building materials. There were shortages for different reasons - former state owned industries were going bankrupt at a rate of knots leaving a manufacturing vacuum which wasn't yet being filled.
The floorboards in one of the bedrooms had been covered with linoleum which I'd lifted to reveal a patchwork of various sized floorboards and under them was a layer of beech leaves which had served as insulation. The beech leaves had also served as a food supply for a variety of weevil like, maggoty creatures which we didn't think our future guests would come to love and develop meaningful relationships with during the short periods spent in the house. I spent a day lifting all the floorboards in the room and, along with the aforementioned weevil like magotty things, burnt them in the yard.
A couple of days later we took a trip into town to our one and only hardware store to order the new floorboards and the new floor joists to which they would be nailed. The owner of the store would visibly cringe every time we walked in the door because five times out of ten we'd be asking for something he'd never heard of and I'd end up drawing pictures of things like spokeshaves and tubes of silicon sealant only to be told that, whilst he thought these things were good ideas, they were all in the realms of fantasy as far as he was concerned. So on this day we asked him where we could obtain plain, simple old floorboards. We were in luck, he'd heard of them - in fact, he assured us, just about every house had them.
-OK, good, so where do we go to buy them?
-When do you want to use them? he asked.
-Yesterday, preferably.
-Mmmmm..... floorboards are things you usually plan a couple of years in advance.
Now, as I don't want to take up an entire chapter on the subject of floorboard procurement in north east Poland, I'll try to make a long story short. First we had to visit the manager of the local forestry department who asked us if the floor was going to be varnished or whether we'd cover it with linoleum. When we told him that we intended to varnish the floor he advised us to wait until the following summer. I couldn't see the reason for it so asked him why.
-It's the wrong time of the year, the sap will be falling.
-So what's wrong with that?
-It means that the floorboards will have a pink tinge to them.
It took a lot of persuading on our part to convince him that we didn't mind pink tinged floorboards if it meant that we could get them this year instead of waiting until the following summer. He reluctantly agreed to help us and arranged for us to meet one of his men in the forest a week later. On the appointed day, and at the appointed spot in the forest, we met Leszek the forester. It was a cold day, the forest canopy all but excluded the sunlight and we were shivering by the time he turned up.
He was an hour late and came almost silently through the trees in a horse and cart and before acknowledging our existence he climbed down and filled the horse's nosebag with hay and fitted it over the horse’s mouth. Then, taking an axe from the back of the cart, wandered over to where we were standing. He was positively Neanderthal in appearance, looking as though he had only recently learned how to walk upright. He was unshaven, his breath stank of vodka, and his forehead sloped abruptly back from his nose. Once, in Bulgaria, we'd stopped our campervan to make a cup of tea and I'd walked up over a ridge to take a leak and had run slap bang into a family of shepherds clad from head to foot in nothing but sheepskins. It was as though I'd stepped back in time two centuries but the man who now stood in front of us was from an era way before this.
He was, to all intents and purposes, a product of the forest. His jacket was made from different coloured furs and a bunch of herbs of some kind was pinned to the collar. His trousers were of deerskin tied below the knees with leather thongs and his crowning glory a Russian style fur hat with flaps loosely flapping about his ears which he lifted when he listened to what we had to say. Only his gum boots attested to the fact that he was living in the twentieth century.
-You must be Leszek
-Why do you want floorboards at this time of the year, the sap's falling?
-It's the only time of year we'll be able to get that special pinkish tinge we're looking for, I replied.
They'll be weak if they're cut now - won't last you more than fifteen years and you'll have to replace them.
We spent half a day tramping around in the undergrowth looking at suitable floorboard trees and Leszek knew his stuff, or at least, he knew a hell of a lot more than me, enough for me to be impressed. He could tell exactly how much floorboarding we'd be able to get out of each tree, he knew which trees would be rotten on the inside, whilst showing no visible symptoms on the outside, and could judge the required length of four metres with only a cursory glance. He marked our trees with his axe and felled them the next day.
Vladek arranged two tractors and trailers to transport the trees to the sawmill where they were cut into rough boards and we were advised that we should leave them for two years to season. Ignoring the advice we located a wood drying kiln some 20 kilometres distant and organised for the boards to be transported there to spend a week drying in the kiln. Organising transport wasn't an easy task as most of the tractors in the locality weren't registered for the road and the owners reluctant to venture out of their villages. We hired a forestry department truck and driver for the job and paid in vodka. A week in the kiln wasn't really enough to thoroughly season the wood but as this was the only kiln in the district and they had other orders to take care of, a week was all the time we could get and we were advised to lay the boards without nailing them down for a year or so to give them time to shrink.
Next the partially dried, rough floorboards had to be taken by us to a carpenters shop to smooth plane them and put the tongues and grooves in and, after another round of vodka bottles for the transport, "hey presto" we had floorboards. This was achieved in the record time, so we were told, of only 6 weeks and, not taking the advice of those who knew, I laid them down and nailed them all. Six months later we had to lift them all and re-lay them because over a distance of 5 metres we had a total shrinkage of 12 centimetres.
Floorboards, however, were the least of our worries - the general quality of Polish tools and building materials was far worse and when I got around to fitting the two door locks we'd bought with us from Warsaw I was in for a frustrating time. Firstly our door frames were made of metal and to fit the lock catches I had to drill two holes. I opened my brand new set of Polish drill bits for the occasion and started work, but it soon became evident that the drills were too soft to attack the metal of the door frames. "Oh intercourse", I seem to remember saying to my good woman as the third one broke on contact and she set off hot foot on a quest for harder drill bits.
She returned some hours later with two German drills she'd managed to borrow from our man in the hardware store in town and these cut through the steel of the door frames like they were made of butter. Next I took from the packet two self tapping metal screws with which I attempted to fasten the catch to the frame. No such luck. I used up the whole packet of screws but none of them would screw into the metal frame, the threads stripping as I turned them. Alicja had been watching the proceedings and I looked up at her.
-If you think I'm going all the way to town again just to spend the rest of the day looking for non existent screws you'd better think again, she told me.
I threatened violence but to no avail and went off into the garden to vent my frustration on Misha who wasn't particularly sympathetic either.
The next day Alicja returned from somewhere with a packet of German self tapping screws and I kissed her. They were Philips screws with a star shaped slot - I didn't have a Philips screwdriver. Nothing daunted I set off for next door but Vladek didn't have one either although he knew who did.
-Go and see the Soltys (the village head man) he's got a couple of them, said Vladek.
Alicja accompanied me to the Soltys house in case I wouldn't be able to make myself understood and I got a loan of the two screwdrivers and we ended up inviting the Soltys and his wife over for a cup of coffee. While we were there I asked where their toilet was and that was when I found out that, in Bocwinka, only a few houses had inside toilets - in fact some of the houses didn't have any form of toilet! Not only that, but we were one of the few that had running water inside the house at times when it wasn't raining outside.
When we first moved into our house there had been running water both hot (from the slow combustion stove) and cold but we thought that our lack of a proper bathroom had been an exception rather than the rule and building a bathroom had been our first priority. So on the way home from the Soltys' house we had something new to discuss - the toilet habits of the Polish peasant.
-What happens? I asked Alicja, -when it's thirty below zero and you need a pee. I'm sure I wouldn't struggle into all that clothing just to go outside and pee in the yard where icicles would probably form before it hit the ground. Alicja pointed out that at that sort of temperature ones skin freezes to things upon contact and we wondered how many people had frozen to death in Bocwinka over the years from being stuck to an outside loo seat. By the time we arrived home it was just on dusk and I set to work straight away while Alicja prepared dinner. The German self tapping screws were magnificent, really hard metal and infinitely superior to the metal of the Polish door frame. Unfortunately they were also infinitely superior to both of the Soltys' screwdrivers, the ends of which both twisted off before my very eyes.
It took many months for me to learn not to become frustrated at happenings such as this. It was senseless to be angry in instances where nothing could be done to improve the situation but for me, a do it now person, it was hard going. I got used to sawing slots in screws before using them, cutting the lumps off of the pointed ends of nails where part of the head of the next nail was attached. I got used as well, to tools like chisels breaking and bending on me, pliers and stillsons the teeth of which blunted at the first time of using. The ultimate in bad quality tools, as far as I was concerned, was a brand new claw hammer which broke in half while I was using it - not the handle - the metal part!
There was a knock at the door one day and there stood an American, Chris Sykes. I said hello and he answered me in English which at first took me aback as I hadn't heard any English spoken in a long time. He had volunteered for an assignment in Poland working for a division of the World Bank, teaching business management to small entrepreneurs (Pygmies?)and he stayed with us for two weeks. One night when he returned home he mentioned that he would be dealing with the subject of quality control the next day and asked if we had any ideas. I told him about the tools, screws, nails and so forth and showed him a few reject screws I'd been keeping as conversation pieces. He couldn't believe what he saw and asked me what percentage of screws didn't have slotted heads. I couldn't put a figure on it and so he decided to get up early in the morning and buy some screws before going into work.
He bought two kilograms of 1" long wood screws and distributed them in small piles to each of 6 teams and asked them to sort into two piles - those which were usable and those which were not, gave them a few minutes and walked around to inspect the results. The students were so used to bad quality goods after suffering nearly 50 years of communism that they had put what Chris clearly considered rubbish into the good pile and so he had to break down the screws into categories:
1 Those with no slots in the head
2 Those with slots but no thread
3 Those with blobs of metal where the pointed end should be
4 Rivets (those with no slots or threads)
5 Those with slots so deep that the screwdriver would break the heads in half as they were turned.
Out of the two kilograms of screws he finished with eleven usable items and took the whole bag back to the States as a souvenir. Of course, what I didn't tell him was that out of the eleven there would be four or five which would twist in half when they were only half way through the wood. It was great to have Chris around for that fortnight, he had a great sense of humour and just to be able to speak English to someone other than Alicja was a delight. And it was while Chris was staying with us that the Soltys and his wife turned up one Sunday afternoon for that cup of coffee we'd offered them.
Poland is opening up to western ideas with a rapidity which continues to amaze me from week to week. This is particularly true, of course, in the cities, where American fast food has already all but replaced the far healthier traditional Polish take away food. The television is now full of voiced over western advertisements and it's this form of advertising which reaches the homes of the villagers in Bocwinka and, on this occasion, it was the home of the Soltys and his wife. They came into the kitchen and sat down at the table where we introduced Chis to them and then, pointing to our kitchen window sill Jana, the Soltys' wife, enquired -is that a toaster?
-No, I replied, -that's a window sill. She didn't recognise my small attempt at humour and getting up and touching the toaster she unleashed a barrage of questions about it.
-Australians eat toast all the time you know. On "Neighbours" they're always eating it. The bread jumps out when it's cooked doesn't it? I've never tried toast. I saw a toaster advertised on TV but the talk was too fast.
- Would you like to try some now?, I asked.
-How long will it take?
After assuring her half a dozen times that it would be no problem and they'd get home in time for the afternoon milking we embarked on a marathon toast tasting session. Honey, jam, cheese spread, tomato - you name it, they devoured it. But it was the conversation which took place directly after the first slice that stuck in my mind.
-What did you think of it?, I asked.
-Mine was a bit burnt, said the soltys.
-So was mine, said Jana.
We then had to explain the whole concept of toast.
-That's what toast is, really, said Alicja.
-What?.. burnt bread?.. Doesn't the toaster do anything else......just burn the bread? I thought it was a bit strange that you didn't put anything in with it, just the bread. What are all those numbers for?
-Oh they're just different settings. You can vary the degree of burning from just warm to absolutely black.
-Why do they have a setting that makes it black? Do Australians eat bread so burnt that it's black?
-Well, no actually, they don't
-So what's it for then?
We didn't have an answer. I'd never thought about it before but they were right, who eats badly burnt toast? We then pointed out that the toaster was useful because you could use yesterdays bread for breakfast. This didn't seem to be a real advantage to them because, as they told us, they use week old bread.
-You just wrap it in a damp towel and put it in the slow combustion oven for 5 minutes when you get up and the oven's still warm from the night before. You wouldn't know that it wasn't fresh bread.
As for toast/burnt bread, they informed us, all you have to do is wait for the stove to heat up and throw the bread on the hot plate.
-Better than that toaster thing too, if you've got a big family like us. We could get 10 pieces of bread on top of the stove. You can only get two in that thing.
We had to admit that the toaster was a stupid western invention just made for people who have more money than sense and that eating burnt bread anyway was just a little bit silly and after they'd eaten all our bread and cleaned out our honey jar they left. A couple of weeks later Eva dropped off our mail on her way home from the post office. Eva goes up to the Soltys house for an hour every morning to help get the kids off to school & clean up the breakfast dishes because Jana goes to work.
-You've got a toaster haven't you?
-Yes Eva.
-Did you show the Soltys wife how to make toast?
-Yes Eva.
-Thought so. She's down the post office bragging about how they have toast every morning for breakfast. What's it like anyway, this toast?
-Well Eva, it's just burnt bread actually, it's a silly idea really.
-Oh, that must account for all that black stuff in their sink every morning.
By now it was the beginning of August, the weather was hot and the days long and the storks on the school house roof had reared five chicks which were learning to fly and would daily land in our garden in search of frogs and worms. Our water meadows all the way down to the river were covered in wildflowers and daily we'd see a pair of cranes in the back fields and we realised that we were missing out on the best part of the year. We were tired of renovating with it's daily hassles but we realised too that if we were going to be ready to receive guests the following spring, we'd just have to keep at it.
Our every day schedule was one of work, eat and sleep and we had been putting in twelve to fifteen hour days ever since we moved in. Neither of us had ever renovated a house before and we were doing everything ourselves not only to save money but also because there were no tradesmen in the area who'd ever seen the standard which needed to be met. The few tradesmen we had used had proved to be thoroughly unreliable and would just fail to turn up next day if they didn't like the work or, as we later dicovered, we gave them coffee instead of vodka during their breaks.
It was around that time that the bathrooms were ready for tiling and Bogdan told us that he had a cousin who was a good tiler, didn't drink and was a hard worker. Alicja was glad to hear about Bogdan's cousin viewing the news as a way to give me a break because, as she kept telling me, I'd been overdoing it. I wasn't so sure, but after meeting the man, and judging him to be a cut above the average; I agreed to give him the work after leaving detailed written instructions with diagrams in case he couldn't read. He told us that he'd tiled twenty rooms in the hotel in town and invited us to go there and have a look at his workmanship. That was good enough for me and we hired him and went off for a weeks holiday to visit Alicja's brother in Warsaw and look around the city hardware shops hoping to find a few imported tools and a double drainer sink for the kitchen.
I was happy about the tiling arrangement mainly because Bogdan had arranged it and Bogdan was something of a perfectionist. His hair was always neat, his garden well kept, children well dressed and he was the only person in Bocwinka who had a book shelf with books on it. All these little things, I told myself, went to show what kind of a guy Bogdan was and I knew that he wouldn't see his cousin let us down.
Chapter 4
BEYOND THE PALESKI
Chapter 4
We had been toying with the idea of planting a maze on our land as a sort of added attraction to the guest house and I needed information on hedge plants so this was something I wanted to chase up in Warsaw. As far as I had been able to ascertain, there were no mazes at all in Poland and I told Alicja that if we built a maze around the house they'd have a hell of a job delivering the electricity bill but she remained singularly unimpressed.
-Think of the security aspect, I said. -Can you imagine some poor sod stealing our video recorder and trying to get out before Misha got him?
I had already written to Kew Gardens in England for advice on types of hedge plants and they replied saying that I should ask the staff at one of the Warsaw horticultural research stations because there are different climatic zones in Poland and they gave me the address. Armed with their letter, which I thought may impress, we visited the offices in Warsaw. I couldn't communicate too well with the receptionist but upon showing the Kew Gardens letter she recognized the Kew logo immediately. She called the director - a woman - and said that there was a visitor from Kew Gardens in reception.
We were shown in and given the red carpet treatment and asked how they could help us. I told her about the project and she was very enthusiastic about it and called in an expert, a gentleman of the horticultural persuasion. I remember thinking to myself that if he could tell us how to grow hedges anything like he could grow a beard we'd be onto something good. It was like talking to an Old English sheepdog. He had two magnificent headfulls of grey and white fluffy hair starting somewhere above the top of his head and flowing in an unbroken line down to his waist and there was no skin to be seen anywhere except for his nose and eyes. He even sounded like an old English sheepdog, all the words being muffled on the way out of a narrow, hirsute tunnel ending up in a low growl.
His lack of visible facial features however, changed dramatically when he opened his mouth which lit up like a gin palace as the sun glinted on an orifice half full of gold teeth. My mind shot back to a time three years before when, on hands and knees, I'd peered into a cave full of glow worms in Jugoslavia through a cleft in the rocks. But Madame Director and the sheepdog were both very helpful and gave us some sound advice on the types of plants which would withstand the harsh winters in our area. For some reason, at this point, I began to feel slightly uncomfortable in the physical sense of the word and shifted my weight on the chair which emitted a crunching sound. Further discreet probing with my fingers revealed that the chair was stuffed with gravel and covered with a thin layer of foam rubber.
I thought that this was taking things horticultural a bit far but, as far as I could ascertain, there was nothing actually growing in it. The Yeti/Sheep Dog/King Midas of the toothbrush spoke only Polish but knew all the Latin botanical names as well, while the director spoke Polish & English and didn't seem to know all the Latin names but was trying to impress this important visitor from Kew. Having determined which plants were best for the maze and having been warned off the Dutch seedlings, which they said were grown under glass and wouldn't stand Polish winters, I asked which trees could be used for screening the whole complex. We needed something that grew as fast as possible but could be trimmed at a height of 2 metres to form a tall, dense sort of hedge.
I had in mind pine trees because I knew they'd stand the Polish winters well and under ideal conditions could put on a growth of 75cm per annum. I asked if it was quicker, long term, to plant small trees which would take root fast or whether advanced, 3 year old plants, would come away quicker, pointing out that we couldn't afford to have even one tree which didn't take root. They were in favour of Hornbeam trees (Carpinus betulis) for which the Polish name is Grab. The Latin name for trees of the pine family being Pinus which in Polish is pronounced Peenus but sounds to the western ear like penis. After consultation with the sheepdog, the lady director turned to me.
-He says that in the long run the small penisis will come up faster than the big one and earlier will be the more solid one. But if you go for the grab, it's much better and only half the price.
I couldn't look at Alicja, for she'd have shown the slightest grin I'd have cracked up on the spot. I just drew in my cheeks and gripped the gravel. While in Warsaw we also had to re register the car for another year and for this, a certificate of roadworthiness was required. There were a few things wrong with the car but they couldn't be easily fixed because the model wasn't sold in Poland and spares were unavailable. One of the headlight glasses was cracked and if the car was to fail the test on this point it would have to be taken off the road until another glass could be imported. We found two testing stations which looked too good in that they were clean & efficient in appearance so we cruised around the suburbs until we found a really grimy looking place with a grimy looking tester. A few wrecks were scattered about the yard, rusty drums full of old sump oil waiting to be used in the heater when the weather cooled down and mechanics standing around smoking.
The overalls these guys wore were so covered in old grease and dust that they wouldn't have needed hanging up at the end of shift - they'd have been able to stand up in a corner somewhere. Mind you, the Alsatian guard dog looked worse than anything else in the yard, it too was covered in grease and dust and had some sort of skin problem which had caused it to loose most of the hair on it's back. It's teeth could only have been a distant memory and it couldn't have bitten anyone although it could probably have inflicted a nasty gumming.
We queued up for an hour or so until it was our turn and we had a good chance to observe the above mentioned grimy tester in action. He was as miserable as sin and he barked orders out to the various car owners as he told them to put their lights on, operate the windscreen wipers, press the brake pedal & so forth. Alicja and I agreed that I wasn't to speak a word of Polish during the test and she would play dumb and not know the English for the things that were wrong with the car. Just maybe, he'd give up when he couldn't get the message across.
Our turn eventually came and I drove the car onto a pair of rollers which the tester set in motion and then came the first order -Put the handbrake on. Alicja made a real mess of the instruction & I made out I couldn't understand her and she told the man that she didn't drive & didn't know the English for the word brake.
-Where's he from?
-He's from Australia.
-What's he doing driving a heap of shit like this then?
-Oh we don't have much money and we're on holiday here and we just bought this car to get around in. We'll sell it when we leave - couldn't afford to hire a car you see..........
With that he came up to the window and told me he had a brother with a second hand shop in Melbourne and asked if I knew the place. Alicja explained it to me and I said it was a great place. From then on the man was all smiles and terribly polite and he walked over and closed the garage doors so we wouldn't be bothered by the other people in the queue. He was saying things to Alicja like -would sir be so kind as to put the lights on.
This is good I thought, being a foreigner impresses people. Soon words gave way to hand signals and we no longer needed Alicja who went outside to stand in the sun and a young mechanic in his early twenties from the adjoining building came in to borrow a tyre lever. He saw the performance going on and asked what was happening.
-Oh, he's Australian.
-What language do they speak then?
-English
-How are you managing to communicate then? You can't speak English can you?
I could see the testers head swelling.
-Oh I get foreigners in here all the time. They all have to get their cars tested no matter where they come from. I've worked out a system. Yes, signs, I use signs, international signs, watch this.
He made a motion with his arm, pulling it up from the elbow and closing his hand to indicate to me that he wanted the handbrake on. I did this and the younger man was clearly impressed. This was followed by a blinking indicator sign right & left and start & stop signs for the engine and I was performing all these tasks like a trained monkey for him although we'd already been through them all once before. As soon as they'd finished their discussion and the young man went back next door the test ended abruptly. I was shown the cracked headlight glass and the bald tyres, the jerky windscreen wipers and told I'd have to buy a special reversing light like the one in a brochure he showed me. I smiled and put my hand in my pocket and produced the equivalent of ten dollars and handed it to him.
Into the office we went and he wrote out the certificate immediately. We shook hands and I addressed him in Polish saying -thank you very much for a very interesting experience. He was completely and utterly stunned. I was relating the experience to English speaking friends later in the evening, people with businesses and cash to spare and was told that I was silly to have gone through all that.
-Next time hand over the car papers with the ten bucks already inside before you start and you won't have to be in there for longer than it takes to write out the certificate, was their comment. -What's ten bucks when you can waste all that time?
In all we spent 6 nights in the city listening to friends telling us about the pressure of their work, other people’s divorces, the rocketing cost of living and so on and it bored us silly. But it was good to have a meal in a restaurant and go to a movie and speak English for a while. We left on the Saturday morning and 4 hours later we saw our regular old buzzard circling above the trees at the cross roads. Misha peed herself with excitement when we arrived and Eva was at our doorstep to greet us.
We had asked Eva & Vladek to sleep at our place and look after Misha while we were away and she was just as excited to see us as Misha had been although she didn't pee. I started to unload the car while Alicja went inside to put the kettle on and take the bags and suitcases from me as I made trips to and from the car. I plonked a couple of suitcases down on the step at Alicja's feet and looked up. She looked worried and I asked what was wrong, expecting to hear that Vladek and Eva had been cooking roast dinners or something in our toaster.
-Promise you won't be angry?
-I promise I won't be angry.
She led me into the bathroom and I was angry.
The imported Italian tiles we had traveled all over the district to find were stuck to the wall at various angles and touching each other leaving no room for the carefully chosen, colour co-ordinated imported German tile grout which we'd just brought back from Warsaw. Being unable to find a tile cutter anywhere, including Warsaw, I'd had a friend in England send us one but Bogdan's cousin, the tiler, had never seen one before and he'd used a pair of pliers to hack the tiles about, leaving jagged edges all over the place and he'd even broken two tiles and joined them together on the wall although there was half a box of unused spares on the floor.
I changed into my overalls immediately and began chipping the tiles away from the walls before the tile cement dried but it was too late and we ended up smashing the lot with a hammer. This was the last time we used "skilled labour" and apart from labouring jobs, we finished the whole house ourselves after getting my sister in England to send us every Do It Yourself book available. Mind you these books served to frustrate us no end as they were full of building materials and tools which we had no hope of getting where we lived.
Electrical wiring, plastering, bricklaying, plumbing and more - we did it all and made all the mistakes every amateur makes. It was what the books call a learning experience but the skills we developed will, hopefully, never be used again. By now we knew pretty well all of the people in the village as at one time or another they all came around the house to see what we were doing. At first they would offer advice but as the work progressed and they saw the general standard of finish on things, I became known as some sort of master craftsman and often found myself working with an audience.
They would marvel at my straight lines when I painted anything, not my ability to paint a straight line, but that I bothered to paint in a straight line at all. Products that hadn't yet made it to Bocwinka were of particular interest to all, especially silicon sealant which was dubbed "instant plastic" and thought by everyone to be the best thing yet invented. It was borrowed by everybody and now there's hardly a home in the village which doesn't bear some evidence of it and the makers of the product could do worse than to visit Bocwinka and see for themselves the applications to which it has been put.
I bet the makers didn't know, for example, that silicone sealant can be used for making artificial worms. They were used last winter as home made fishing lures which were jiggled in the water through the holes in the ice of the frozen lakes. And to good effect, it's reckoned in Bocwinka to be as good as any commercially available lure and, unlike real worms, it doesn't become brittle and snap in sub zero temperatures. Needless to say, nobody in the village ever bought a tube of silicone sealant - they couldn't afford it - they borrowed mine.
I first used it in front of an audience when I was fitting the satellite TV dish and wanted something to seal the co axial cable connections with. Someone asked what it was and I squirted a little on the fingers of all present to let them smell it and wipe it on their trousers knowing it would surprise them later when it solidified. It caused a lot of chatter and attracted the attention of a woman who I'd never seen before. She was passing by in the lane and upon hearing the lads, all excited like, wandered up the drive and stood among the crowd watching me. I didn't know who she was and she didn't introduce herself but she had a quieting effect on the proceedings and not a word was murmured until she left.
About a week later I was outside fastening a mail box to the fence, to stop the post lady from walking straight into our kitchen, when this woman turned up again and began an interrogation concerning our satellite TV system. She addressed me formally as "Pan" (sir) and she was unusually well spoken for a person living in Bocwinka. It had been a long time since I heard clearly spoken Polish which I could easily understand. She was, I suppose, in her mid fifties, her clothes were in tatters and she carried a home made string bag which was full wild mushrooms and various sprigs of wild plants such as stinging nettles and cowslips.
-Excuse me Pan, she said, -but I have an interest in that satellite of yours-
-Yes madam, what would you like to know?
-Well, I walk past here three times a day and that thing there (pointing to the dish) is always in the same place.
-Yes we only pick up the one satellite you see. There are others but we don't have a moveable dish.
She thanked me and went on her way only to appear again a few days later, first thing in the morning, when I was working in the garden.
-Excuse me Pan, but I didn't really understand what you told me about the satellite the other day. The satellite moves all the time doesn't it? I mean, it's up there in the sky going around all the time isn't it?
-Yes, that's right it's moving very fast in fact.
-Well how come that dish thing on your wall stays still then?
I explained as best I could that the satellite traveled at exactly the same speed as the earth as if on the spoke of a gigantic wheel and that it always stayed in the same place relative to our satellite receiver dish. I don't think that she got the idea but she nodded her head and winked at me as much as to say "dead clever these Chinese." At that point we ran out of conversation for a while and she told me that I shouldn't plant vegetable seeds next year until after the bullfinches had gone from the area. -They don't leave until after the last frost you know.
She then stared at me for a second or two.
-They say you've been to Australia?
-Yes that's right.
-Did you go there on a plane?
-Yes, on a plane.
-How does the plane land in Australia then?
-Just the same as here in Poland. I didn't notice any difference.
She had a stick in her hand and she drew the earth and then described an arc indicating the path of the plane travelling from Poland to Australia.
-When you get here. In Australia. The plane's the other way up isn't it? What I mean Pan, is that to come down to earth again it's actually got to go up as it were.
My breakfast was waiting for me and I tried to extricate myself from the situation by feigning ignorance but she wouldn't let me go.
-You're an educated man sir. I can see that. I'd like to talk to you some time about the universe. We have a small library here but there's nothing in it about the universe.
I asked a group of farmers outside the post office the next day, who this woman was and found that she was regarded as a weirdo by the rest of the village. She never visited anyone, even at Christmas, had no friends and apart from the village children, she was the only person who used the library. She'd apparently read every book in it several times and hadn't been out of the village for over twenty years. She had a widows pension, didn't use electricity (although it was connected to the house) grew her own food and hauled her own logs from the forest for cooking & heating. Andrzej the shopkeeper told me that she came in one day with a gap where there used to be a rotten tooth. -Visited the dentist have you madam?, asked Andrzej.
-No, she said, -pulled it myself.
I found out from the post lady, who delivered the occasional letter to the woman, that her name was Marta and I only came into contact with her on one more occasion before she died a few weeks after our discussion about the satellite dish. An English ecologist had written to us asking if we could show him some badgers during his intended stay and I asked Vladek if he could tell me where they lived. He told me to go and see Marta because, he said, she had once been seen feeding them at night in the old German cemetery.
She didn't invite me in and I could see that the house and outbuildings were in a bad state of decay from years of neglect. It was the only house in the village which didn't have chickens scratching around the yard, in fact no signs of animals at all except for a storks nest on the barn roof and I suspect that she was a total vegetarian because nobody in the village could ever remember seeing animals at her house. I asked her about the badgers and received a rather strange reply. She told me that she was sorry but she wouldn't tell me where to find them because all the animals were creatures of the earth and their relationship was to the earth and not to other species. She said that animals shouldn't bother each other unless they were predators and that they'd contact people if they felt the need.
“You'll just have to be patient Pan, and if, in your heart, you really want to meet them, they'll come to you eventually.”
For some reason it made news in the village that I'd visited "the strange one" and Jurek's mother made a point of stopping me on the road one day and telling me that it was widely believed that Marta didn't believe in God. She never turned up at either the Polish or Ukrainian shrines on religious days, her husband was buried in the village cemetery and she never visited the grave. -The devil's waiting for that one -Jurek's mother said.
I've always been attracted to out of the ordinary people and I've often regretted that I didn't get to know Marta before she died but at the time we were simply to busy renovating to go out and socialize. Her house was taken over by the council because there were no living relatives and, finding it beyond repair, they knocked it down and I took a few bricks from the rubble to build our barbecue with - I think that's the only memory of her now left in Bocwinka.
Chapter 4
We had been toying with the idea of planting a maze on our land as a sort of added attraction to the guest house and I needed information on hedge plants so this was something I wanted to chase up in Warsaw. As far as I had been able to ascertain, there were no mazes at all in Poland and I told Alicja that if we built a maze around the house they'd have a hell of a job delivering the electricity bill but she remained singularly unimpressed.
-Think of the security aspect, I said. -Can you imagine some poor sod stealing our video recorder and trying to get out before Misha got him?
I had already written to Kew Gardens in England for advice on types of hedge plants and they replied saying that I should ask the staff at one of the Warsaw horticultural research stations because there are different climatic zones in Poland and they gave me the address. Armed with their letter, which I thought may impress, we visited the offices in Warsaw. I couldn't communicate too well with the receptionist but upon showing the Kew Gardens letter she recognized the Kew logo immediately. She called the director - a woman - and said that there was a visitor from Kew Gardens in reception.
We were shown in and given the red carpet treatment and asked how they could help us. I told her about the project and she was very enthusiastic about it and called in an expert, a gentleman of the horticultural persuasion. I remember thinking to myself that if he could tell us how to grow hedges anything like he could grow a beard we'd be onto something good. It was like talking to an Old English sheepdog. He had two magnificent headfulls of grey and white fluffy hair starting somewhere above the top of his head and flowing in an unbroken line down to his waist and there was no skin to be seen anywhere except for his nose and eyes. He even sounded like an old English sheepdog, all the words being muffled on the way out of a narrow, hirsute tunnel ending up in a low growl.
His lack of visible facial features however, changed dramatically when he opened his mouth which lit up like a gin palace as the sun glinted on an orifice half full of gold teeth. My mind shot back to a time three years before when, on hands and knees, I'd peered into a cave full of glow worms in Jugoslavia through a cleft in the rocks. But Madame Director and the sheepdog were both very helpful and gave us some sound advice on the types of plants which would withstand the harsh winters in our area. For some reason, at this point, I began to feel slightly uncomfortable in the physical sense of the word and shifted my weight on the chair which emitted a crunching sound. Further discreet probing with my fingers revealed that the chair was stuffed with gravel and covered with a thin layer of foam rubber.
I thought that this was taking things horticultural a bit far but, as far as I could ascertain, there was nothing actually growing in it. The Yeti/Sheep Dog/King Midas of the toothbrush spoke only Polish but knew all the Latin botanical names as well, while the director spoke Polish & English and didn't seem to know all the Latin names but was trying to impress this important visitor from Kew. Having determined which plants were best for the maze and having been warned off the Dutch seedlings, which they said were grown under glass and wouldn't stand Polish winters, I asked which trees could be used for screening the whole complex. We needed something that grew as fast as possible but could be trimmed at a height of 2 metres to form a tall, dense sort of hedge.
I had in mind pine trees because I knew they'd stand the Polish winters well and under ideal conditions could put on a growth of 75cm per annum. I asked if it was quicker, long term, to plant small trees which would take root fast or whether advanced, 3 year old plants, would come away quicker, pointing out that we couldn't afford to have even one tree which didn't take root. They were in favour of Hornbeam trees (Carpinus betulis) for which the Polish name is Grab. The Latin name for trees of the pine family being Pinus which in Polish is pronounced Peenus but sounds to the western ear like penis. After consultation with the sheepdog, the lady director turned to me.
-He says that in the long run the small penisis will come up faster than the big one and earlier will be the more solid one. But if you go for the grab, it's much better and only half the price.
I couldn't look at Alicja, for she'd have shown the slightest grin I'd have cracked up on the spot. I just drew in my cheeks and gripped the gravel. While in Warsaw we also had to re register the car for another year and for this, a certificate of roadworthiness was required. There were a few things wrong with the car but they couldn't be easily fixed because the model wasn't sold in Poland and spares were unavailable. One of the headlight glasses was cracked and if the car was to fail the test on this point it would have to be taken off the road until another glass could be imported. We found two testing stations which looked too good in that they were clean & efficient in appearance so we cruised around the suburbs until we found a really grimy looking place with a grimy looking tester. A few wrecks were scattered about the yard, rusty drums full of old sump oil waiting to be used in the heater when the weather cooled down and mechanics standing around smoking.
The overalls these guys wore were so covered in old grease and dust that they wouldn't have needed hanging up at the end of shift - they'd have been able to stand up in a corner somewhere. Mind you, the Alsatian guard dog looked worse than anything else in the yard, it too was covered in grease and dust and had some sort of skin problem which had caused it to loose most of the hair on it's back. It's teeth could only have been a distant memory and it couldn't have bitten anyone although it could probably have inflicted a nasty gumming.
We queued up for an hour or so until it was our turn and we had a good chance to observe the above mentioned grimy tester in action. He was as miserable as sin and he barked orders out to the various car owners as he told them to put their lights on, operate the windscreen wipers, press the brake pedal & so forth. Alicja and I agreed that I wasn't to speak a word of Polish during the test and she would play dumb and not know the English for the things that were wrong with the car. Just maybe, he'd give up when he couldn't get the message across.
Our turn eventually came and I drove the car onto a pair of rollers which the tester set in motion and then came the first order -Put the handbrake on. Alicja made a real mess of the instruction & I made out I couldn't understand her and she told the man that she didn't drive & didn't know the English for the word brake.
-Where's he from?
-He's from Australia.
-What's he doing driving a heap of shit like this then?
-Oh we don't have much money and we're on holiday here and we just bought this car to get around in. We'll sell it when we leave - couldn't afford to hire a car you see..........
With that he came up to the window and told me he had a brother with a second hand shop in Melbourne and asked if I knew the place. Alicja explained it to me and I said it was a great place. From then on the man was all smiles and terribly polite and he walked over and closed the garage doors so we wouldn't be bothered by the other people in the queue. He was saying things to Alicja like -would sir be so kind as to put the lights on.
This is good I thought, being a foreigner impresses people. Soon words gave way to hand signals and we no longer needed Alicja who went outside to stand in the sun and a young mechanic in his early twenties from the adjoining building came in to borrow a tyre lever. He saw the performance going on and asked what was happening.
-Oh, he's Australian.
-What language do they speak then?
-English
-How are you managing to communicate then? You can't speak English can you?
I could see the testers head swelling.
-Oh I get foreigners in here all the time. They all have to get their cars tested no matter where they come from. I've worked out a system. Yes, signs, I use signs, international signs, watch this.
He made a motion with his arm, pulling it up from the elbow and closing his hand to indicate to me that he wanted the handbrake on. I did this and the younger man was clearly impressed. This was followed by a blinking indicator sign right & left and start & stop signs for the engine and I was performing all these tasks like a trained monkey for him although we'd already been through them all once before. As soon as they'd finished their discussion and the young man went back next door the test ended abruptly. I was shown the cracked headlight glass and the bald tyres, the jerky windscreen wipers and told I'd have to buy a special reversing light like the one in a brochure he showed me. I smiled and put my hand in my pocket and produced the equivalent of ten dollars and handed it to him.
Into the office we went and he wrote out the certificate immediately. We shook hands and I addressed him in Polish saying -thank you very much for a very interesting experience. He was completely and utterly stunned. I was relating the experience to English speaking friends later in the evening, people with businesses and cash to spare and was told that I was silly to have gone through all that.
-Next time hand over the car papers with the ten bucks already inside before you start and you won't have to be in there for longer than it takes to write out the certificate, was their comment. -What's ten bucks when you can waste all that time?
In all we spent 6 nights in the city listening to friends telling us about the pressure of their work, other people’s divorces, the rocketing cost of living and so on and it bored us silly. But it was good to have a meal in a restaurant and go to a movie and speak English for a while. We left on the Saturday morning and 4 hours later we saw our regular old buzzard circling above the trees at the cross roads. Misha peed herself with excitement when we arrived and Eva was at our doorstep to greet us.
We had asked Eva & Vladek to sleep at our place and look after Misha while we were away and she was just as excited to see us as Misha had been although she didn't pee. I started to unload the car while Alicja went inside to put the kettle on and take the bags and suitcases from me as I made trips to and from the car. I plonked a couple of suitcases down on the step at Alicja's feet and looked up. She looked worried and I asked what was wrong, expecting to hear that Vladek and Eva had been cooking roast dinners or something in our toaster.
-Promise you won't be angry?
-I promise I won't be angry.
She led me into the bathroom and I was angry.
The imported Italian tiles we had traveled all over the district to find were stuck to the wall at various angles and touching each other leaving no room for the carefully chosen, colour co-ordinated imported German tile grout which we'd just brought back from Warsaw. Being unable to find a tile cutter anywhere, including Warsaw, I'd had a friend in England send us one but Bogdan's cousin, the tiler, had never seen one before and he'd used a pair of pliers to hack the tiles about, leaving jagged edges all over the place and he'd even broken two tiles and joined them together on the wall although there was half a box of unused spares on the floor.
I changed into my overalls immediately and began chipping the tiles away from the walls before the tile cement dried but it was too late and we ended up smashing the lot with a hammer. This was the last time we used "skilled labour" and apart from labouring jobs, we finished the whole house ourselves after getting my sister in England to send us every Do It Yourself book available. Mind you these books served to frustrate us no end as they were full of building materials and tools which we had no hope of getting where we lived.
Electrical wiring, plastering, bricklaying, plumbing and more - we did it all and made all the mistakes every amateur makes. It was what the books call a learning experience but the skills we developed will, hopefully, never be used again. By now we knew pretty well all of the people in the village as at one time or another they all came around the house to see what we were doing. At first they would offer advice but as the work progressed and they saw the general standard of finish on things, I became known as some sort of master craftsman and often found myself working with an audience.
They would marvel at my straight lines when I painted anything, not my ability to paint a straight line, but that I bothered to paint in a straight line at all. Products that hadn't yet made it to Bocwinka were of particular interest to all, especially silicon sealant which was dubbed "instant plastic" and thought by everyone to be the best thing yet invented. It was borrowed by everybody and now there's hardly a home in the village which doesn't bear some evidence of it and the makers of the product could do worse than to visit Bocwinka and see for themselves the applications to which it has been put.
I bet the makers didn't know, for example, that silicone sealant can be used for making artificial worms. They were used last winter as home made fishing lures which were jiggled in the water through the holes in the ice of the frozen lakes. And to good effect, it's reckoned in Bocwinka to be as good as any commercially available lure and, unlike real worms, it doesn't become brittle and snap in sub zero temperatures. Needless to say, nobody in the village ever bought a tube of silicone sealant - they couldn't afford it - they borrowed mine.
I first used it in front of an audience when I was fitting the satellite TV dish and wanted something to seal the co axial cable connections with. Someone asked what it was and I squirted a little on the fingers of all present to let them smell it and wipe it on their trousers knowing it would surprise them later when it solidified. It caused a lot of chatter and attracted the attention of a woman who I'd never seen before. She was passing by in the lane and upon hearing the lads, all excited like, wandered up the drive and stood among the crowd watching me. I didn't know who she was and she didn't introduce herself but she had a quieting effect on the proceedings and not a word was murmured until she left.
About a week later I was outside fastening a mail box to the fence, to stop the post lady from walking straight into our kitchen, when this woman turned up again and began an interrogation concerning our satellite TV system. She addressed me formally as "Pan" (sir) and she was unusually well spoken for a person living in Bocwinka. It had been a long time since I heard clearly spoken Polish which I could easily understand. She was, I suppose, in her mid fifties, her clothes were in tatters and she carried a home made string bag which was full wild mushrooms and various sprigs of wild plants such as stinging nettles and cowslips.
-Excuse me Pan, she said, -but I have an interest in that satellite of yours-
-Yes madam, what would you like to know?
-Well, I walk past here three times a day and that thing there (pointing to the dish) is always in the same place.
-Yes we only pick up the one satellite you see. There are others but we don't have a moveable dish.
She thanked me and went on her way only to appear again a few days later, first thing in the morning, when I was working in the garden.
-Excuse me Pan, but I didn't really understand what you told me about the satellite the other day. The satellite moves all the time doesn't it? I mean, it's up there in the sky going around all the time isn't it?
-Yes, that's right it's moving very fast in fact.
-Well how come that dish thing on your wall stays still then?
I explained as best I could that the satellite traveled at exactly the same speed as the earth as if on the spoke of a gigantic wheel and that it always stayed in the same place relative to our satellite receiver dish. I don't think that she got the idea but she nodded her head and winked at me as much as to say "dead clever these Chinese." At that point we ran out of conversation for a while and she told me that I shouldn't plant vegetable seeds next year until after the bullfinches had gone from the area. -They don't leave until after the last frost you know.
She then stared at me for a second or two.
-They say you've been to Australia?
-Yes that's right.
-Did you go there on a plane?
-Yes, on a plane.
-How does the plane land in Australia then?
-Just the same as here in Poland. I didn't notice any difference.
She had a stick in her hand and she drew the earth and then described an arc indicating the path of the plane travelling from Poland to Australia.
-When you get here. In Australia. The plane's the other way up isn't it? What I mean Pan, is that to come down to earth again it's actually got to go up as it were.
My breakfast was waiting for me and I tried to extricate myself from the situation by feigning ignorance but she wouldn't let me go.
-You're an educated man sir. I can see that. I'd like to talk to you some time about the universe. We have a small library here but there's nothing in it about the universe.
I asked a group of farmers outside the post office the next day, who this woman was and found that she was regarded as a weirdo by the rest of the village. She never visited anyone, even at Christmas, had no friends and apart from the village children, she was the only person who used the library. She'd apparently read every book in it several times and hadn't been out of the village for over twenty years. She had a widows pension, didn't use electricity (although it was connected to the house) grew her own food and hauled her own logs from the forest for cooking & heating. Andrzej the shopkeeper told me that she came in one day with a gap where there used to be a rotten tooth. -Visited the dentist have you madam?, asked Andrzej.
-No, she said, -pulled it myself.
I found out from the post lady, who delivered the occasional letter to the woman, that her name was Marta and I only came into contact with her on one more occasion before she died a few weeks after our discussion about the satellite dish. An English ecologist had written to us asking if we could show him some badgers during his intended stay and I asked Vladek if he could tell me where they lived. He told me to go and see Marta because, he said, she had once been seen feeding them at night in the old German cemetery.
She didn't invite me in and I could see that the house and outbuildings were in a bad state of decay from years of neglect. It was the only house in the village which didn't have chickens scratching around the yard, in fact no signs of animals at all except for a storks nest on the barn roof and I suspect that she was a total vegetarian because nobody in the village could ever remember seeing animals at her house. I asked her about the badgers and received a rather strange reply. She told me that she was sorry but she wouldn't tell me where to find them because all the animals were creatures of the earth and their relationship was to the earth and not to other species. She said that animals shouldn't bother each other unless they were predators and that they'd contact people if they felt the need.
“You'll just have to be patient Pan, and if, in your heart, you really want to meet them, they'll come to you eventually.”
For some reason it made news in the village that I'd visited "the strange one" and Jurek's mother made a point of stopping me on the road one day and telling me that it was widely believed that Marta didn't believe in God. She never turned up at either the Polish or Ukrainian shrines on religious days, her husband was buried in the village cemetery and she never visited the grave. -The devil's waiting for that one -Jurek's mother said.
I've always been attracted to out of the ordinary people and I've often regretted that I didn't get to know Marta before she died but at the time we were simply to busy renovating to go out and socialize. Her house was taken over by the council because there were no living relatives and, finding it beyond repair, they knocked it down and I took a few bricks from the rubble to build our barbecue with - I think that's the only memory of her now left in Bocwinka.
Chapter 5
BEYOND THE PALESKI
Chapter 5
Despite the shortages of supply and a number of other related problems, by September we were ahead of schedule. Our intention was to open the house for business in May and things were looking good. We had surprised ourselves by the amount of work we had been able to get through in the last month without skilled help and it was due to our new methodology. Instead of downing tools and scouring the shops for things when we reached an impasse we started on the next job and asked Vladek to put the word out for whatever it was that we needed.
This meant that we had half a dozen jobs on the go at all times but in the middle of the month a few of them came together and life became, for a while, a little more comfortable. We now had a kitchen, bathroom and a bedroom set up more or less permanently even though there was still work to be completed in all of these rooms. Prior to this blissful state of affairs we had been living in one room at a time and migrating between rooms as the work dictated. After demolishing the slow combustion stove early in the piece our cooker had been a single burner on top of a gas bottle and we'd done the washing outside in a tin bath; our toilet having been a plastic bucket.
Good as our progress had been however, Alicja reminded me that come the second week in November all outside work would have to stop until April because the weather would be too cold. Winter, I was told by all, would be a time for house bound activities and visiting friends. I tended to view this as an attitude rather than a fact and although I recognised that the ground would be too hard for digging foundations and drains or holes for clothes posts and the like I was still confident that, no matter how cold it got, I'd be able to do something outside.
But September was clearly the time to sit down with paper and pencil and work out exactly which jobs should be completed before the freeze came. The garden would have to be straightened out ready for planting the trees and we'd have to get as much as possible done in the barn, where we were building an apartment, so that we could install some form of temporary heating in order to be able to work out there. Misha was growing at an alarming rate and it was obvious that fences would be needed to keep her in and this would have to be done before the ground became to hard to dig the post holes so we decided to leave all the interior painting and things like fitting skirting boards because all of these things could be done in the warm in a few months time - we'd concentrate as much as possible on the outdoor work.
I went down to the milk collection depot early one morning to look for Ivan who was reckoned to be the best man in the village when it came to fencing. At eight o'clock every morning Bocwinka's milk collection depot is the focal point for the farmers from four villages. I liked visiting the milk collection depot at this time of day to look at the various assembled modes of transport employed to bring the milk down from the farms. Some farmers would only have 5 litres of milk from a single cow and would transport it in a small churn tied to the handlebars of a bicycle, others would have perhaps fifty litres and would use a tractor and trailer. Some came from villages six kilometres distant and would push a bicycle with a couple of churns attached all the way there and back.
But there were other, more interesting modes of transportation too. One farmer always sent his crippled father along with one churn of milk. He could be seen every morning zig zagging down the street in a sort of three wheeled wheelchair powered by a chain attached through gears to the back axle. The old man wound two bicycle pedals around in front of him to provide most of the motive force and the balance was made up by a large dog in a harness. I'd seen him many times in his wheelchair and always thought the old man and his dog had been doing this together for years but when I asked how long the dog had been performing this function he said -only three months, he won't last long, this one. I get through two dogs a year - the strain kills them.
From an engineering stand-point Mr Koncevicz had the most interesting carriage. It was a long narrow, four wheeled cart where the horse had been removed and replaced by two thirds of a motorcycle. The steering was by means of the motorcycle handlebars and Mr Koncevicz sat on the motorcycle seat. Beneath him the back wheel had been removed and the rear of the motorbike frame was attached to the cut down horse shafts by four bolts and a lot of coiled fencing wire and two leather belts. The motorcycle chain had been lengthened to drive a sprocket on the front axle of the cart and the whole thing must have weighed upwards of a ton. It certainly weighed a lot more when the Koncevicz family of eleven all piled in it to go to church on Sunday mornings and all it had in the way of brakes was on the tiny motorcycle front wheel. Looking at the thing I was inclined to think the braking system wasn't as much of a worry as the chain, which, if it had broken at any speed, would probably have sliced Mr Koncevicz straight down the middle.
There was a man from Zywki, the next village along our lane, who had a current, no frills model Russian tractor. It was a peculiar thing in that it was a two seater and the two occupants sat side by side on a wooden bench seat just like a horse and cart. But the engine was the most primitive thing I'd ever seen. It was a single cylinder engine with an exposed flywheel, no bonnet and an open cooling system in which the water just bubbled away open to the air at the top. The driver could see when the water level was getting low and just poured in another bucketful. I asked the man why he didn't put some sort of cover over the flywheel in case it should pick up a foreign object and throw it at some passer-by. He told me that it wasn't a problem, had never been known to happen and that the greatest danger was it's habit of throwing hot water over all and sundry when traversing bumpy roads. Vladek told me he'd heard that in Russia they put a wire netting bag into the water jacket and cook eggs in it.
But today I was at the milk collection depot looking for Ivan and as I picked my way through a variety of wheel barrows, old prams, tin baths with wheels underneath and an assortment of home made trolleys I stumbled upon him - literally, he was drunk and sleeping in the grass. Jurek borrowed a pencil from Jana, the soltys's wife who ran the depot, and wrote a note for Ivan to come around and see me when he woke up and pinned it to his cap which was laying on his chest.
He arrived at the gate at eleven o'clock, I showed him what I wanted done, he went off to get the village measuring tape and came back three days later acting as if he'd only been away for ten minutes. Together we measured the length of fence we'd need and discussed the design. It had to be strong enough to withstand the weight of a snow drift and I wanted to know how far to bury the posts in the ground and what kind of wood to use. Ivan seemed to know his stuff and understood where the fence had to go and after measuring we came up with a requirement for a total of 200 metres worth of alder wood palings plus the rails and the oak posts which were to be burnt in the fire to preserve them before placement in the ground.
-I'll order the wood for you if you like, said Ivan
I thought that maybe Ivan was going to load the price by a few bottles and so declined the offer.
-No, that's OK thanks I know the forester down at Borki, we bought the wood for our floorboards from him.
-Yes, go to Borki, tell him I sent you and he won't give you any rubbish.
After he'd gone I took Alicja outside to show her the fencing plan but she had a better idea which involved leaving the wood shed outside the fence line and this reduced the length of fencing to exactly 148 metres. What with other, more pressing things, on our agenda we didn't get around to looking for fence wood for a fortnight. Buying the fence posts and palings, we just knew, was going to be another run around like when we'd bought the floor boards and this time the forester told us that they had stopped cutting for the season. We had visited him at his house where we found him and half a dozen of his workers - two of them unconscious from an excess of vodka and the rest half cut.
-But we have to have a fence, said Alicja -it's very important.
-Well, the only thing you can do is steal the stuff out of the forest
-Maybe, but we don't know anything about stealing trees and we don't have a chain saw or anything. What if we get caught?
-Oh you'd have to do it when I wasn't looking. You couldn't do it in daylight either and you'd have to keep off the asphalt roads in case the police caught you.
-Exactly what are you telling me?
-Oh, I'm not telling you anything, I can't tell you anything about stealing trees, I'm the forester; I'm here to stop people stealing trees
-Well, the position is that we need fencing posts and palings and we don't care too much about how they end up in our yard but we don't want to be involved in the actual......procurement, said Alicja
-You'll have to hire a thief then.
Alicja had at last broken the ice and there were smiles all round, the sort of half smirks which meant that we were involved in something mischievous together like a bunch of school kids.
-OK. So where do we find a thief?
Pointing to one of his comatose drinking partners he said -him, he's a good thief. I'll tell him about it when he wakes up and he'll organise everything for you.
I said that if this Rip Van Vodka would care to come around to the house when he was sober I'd show him exactly what we needed and tell him how much of it was required.
-That's not necessary- replied our forester, -just tell me how many metres you want to fence and he'll work out exactly what you need. He knows all about fencing.
-Great, we need enough for 148 metres and a few spare palings, OK?
-Be better if you took enough for 200 metres - it won't cost you any more.
We left the order in their capable hands and went home to spend the rest of the day planning the garden, pleased with the thought that we were gradually getting to know our way around - getting to know how to work the system as it were. -If only we'd known about this way of obtaining wood, our floorboards would probably only have been half the price, remarked Alicja.
The next morning before light I was woken by the noise of a tractor. This was nothing unusual but it seemed louder, nearer, than usual. Misha was going berserk and I climbed out of bed to investigate but looking out of the windows nothing untoward appeared to be going on so I brought Misha into the bedroom and told her to shut up. But when I went outside after breakfast there were tractor tyre marks in the soft earth of what one day would become our lawn and the barn doors had been lifted off their hinges. I was sure that we'd been ripped off and I ran over to the barn and looked in. There was a huge heap of planks strewn at random all over the interior of the building.
-It must be for our fence, I told Alicja. -The planks will be cut down later to make the palings.
-Nothing, but nothing ever moves this fast in Poland, especially up here in the wilds, Alicja told me. -I reckon someone like Vladek stole the stuff in the night and he wants to hide it here in case the police or the forestry officers come looking for it.
I waited until I saw Vladek coming past with the horse and went outside to ask if he knew anything about it.
-Yes, that's your fencing wood.
-They must have worked all night Vladek, it was only yesterday that we were speaking to the forester and his mates and they were all half cut at four in the afternoon.
-Yes, I heard all about it down at the milk depot earlier on. They cut the stuff two weeks ago when you measured your back yard with Ivan. Ivan told them you'd be needing the wood and they've had it stashed in the forest under a big pile of leaves and other rubbish ever since - they've been scared stiff that someone from the forestry department would find it.
-Why didn't he mention it to me then?
-No, he wouldn't have told you about it. He's been worried that you weren't going to order it though because he charged the forester two bottles for getting the business, told the forester he was sending you down to order the wood from him and he's already drank the two bottles. The forester's been worried too because he's doing it illegally. Peter, you should let me handle these things for you - if you'd have only told me about it I'd have told you to hang on for a while and soon they'd have approached you to take it off their hands for next to nothing.
So much for us knowing how to work the system! But it couldn't be argued that when Ivan finished his work, in a lightning four days, the fence was perfect and took the weight of some very heavy snow drifts during the winter without moving an inch out of line. Meanwhile Vladek had volunteered to landscape the garden for us using the horse, plough and an assortment of other implements we didn't know the names of and he was doing a good job but was hindered by a number of bee hives which were in the way of the plough.
When we first took possession of the house from Mr Polakowski it was agreed between us that he could leave his seven bee hives in the garden until the time was right for bee moving. This, he assured us, wouldn't be later than the first week in September. We were careful never to go near Mr Polakowski's bee hives because he told us that bees were delicate creatures & didn't like to be disturbed. Come the third week in September I'd sent word to him four times asking if he would move his bees but nothing was happening and Vladek was becoming impatient to finish the landscaping because he would soon be busy with his field work and wouldn't be able to help us.
I stood pondering the hives one evening when I saw a wasp go into one of them and I cautiously lifted the lid. The hive was absolutely devoid of bee frames, bees or anything else to do with the procurement of that sticky substance which bees are famous for and was occupied only by a wasps nest. I checked another hive and another, but they too were empty and upon checking the fourth one found it full of bee keeping equipment, a smoke generator, bee keepers gloves, veiled hat etc. This left three hives and I found that out of the total of seven, only two had bees inside.
It was beginning to look as though we'd been taken for a ride and after making a few enquiries we learned that Mr Polakowski now lived in a third floor flat in the middle of town and had nothing more than a balcony on which to keep his hives and only the flowers in a window box for his bees to work with. He was obviously using our garden for storage. I mentioned it to Vladek and together we moved the five vacant hives (after destroying the wasps nest) out of the way so that he could continue landscaping.
Two weeks went by and then one evening around seven o'clock Vladek arrived drunk & we sat together on the verandah smoking and staring out at the garden. Every time Vladek had too much to drink he became bolder. He'd promise anyone anything and come up with silly ideas which, he would assure me, he'd put into operation the next day. The next day, of course, he wouldn't remember. But on this evening his idea was that he was going to move the two occupied hives.
"Yes" I said, "let's do it together in the morning."
"No, no , no. No, not the morning, I need to be drunk for this job. I'm going to do it now - don't need your help"
We told him, even begged him not to do it but he wasn't to be dissuaded once his mind was made up and donning old Polakowski's bee keeping hat & gloves he staggered towards the first hive and taking it in his arms set off across the garden. The bees went troppo, circling his head and stinging him through his clothes but at first he was too anaesthetized by the effects of the vodka to feel anything.
Now, it's known that when bees locate a good patch of pollen they return to the hive and perform a dance which indicates to their work mates the direction & distance between the hive and the flowers. I can tell you that whatever their terpsichorean abilities they could have learned a few new steps from our neighbour that evening. Vladek suddenly let out a hell of a scream, dropped the hive and broke into some kind of jazz pasadoble, the likes of which are yet to be seen in any Latin American dancing competition. It was the most energetic dance I think I've yet witnessed. It combined a flamenco like movement of the feet with the slapping usually practiced by leather shorted, overweight German accountants at October fests but was made all the more entertaining by the fact that it was performed whilst running at the speed of a supercharged Carl Lewis towards the fence.
Vladek was demonstrating a latent athletic ability even he didn't know he had as he cleared our fence and threw himself into his horse drinking trough and we saw the splash go up just like in the Wild West movies. The rest of the family came running from the house thinking him to be injured and his father laughed so much that he was forced to sit down & rest until his breath caught up with him. We all had a good laugh and Alicja and I went inside for a cup of tea but had hardly boiled the kettle when we heard the gate open. Vladek had come back for the remaining hive. There was no opportunity to reason with him and we watched from the window, speechless, as he purposefully staggered towards the hive, this time clad in a thick winter coat for good measure.
We ran outside just in time to see him, hive in hands, trip over the hastily placed previous hive which broke open strewing the contents on the ground.
This time our hero didn't waste any time dancing. He was up in a flash & away on his toes taking the same path as before but this time he wasn't so lucky when he reached the fence and he ran straight into it knocking himself out cold. By now quite a crowd had gathered at our fence and I was suddenly struck by the absurdity of the situation & started to laugh out loud but the soltys was the one who immediately saw the seriousness of the situation.
He leapt over the fence and ran across to where Vladek was lying & shouted "if they sting him in his throat he won't be able to breathe" and he wrenched up a handful of stinging nettles, which were the tallest plants growing in that spot, and began flailing away at the bees. The bees weren't stupid either; they new that it was Vladek they were after and now the air was thick with them around where he was laying. It was the old man (Vladek's father) who with characteristic calmness saved the situation. He casually grabbed a handful of hay & threw it over the fence to me. -Light it Peter, light it. Spread it all around his head and light it. Someone threw a box of matches into the fray and I did as instructed and within a very short space of time the bees were keeping their distance.
Vladek was unconscious for a good five minutes and when he came round he decided that it might be a good idea to retire from the scene. The old man came over just on dusk and, although we didn't know it until the morning, he'd set the hives up again. We went over to see Vladek after breakfast, his face was badly swollen and we were told by Eva that she'd spent the remainder of the previous evening picking stings out of him with a pair of tweezers. But sitting at the kitchen table was the old man enjoying his morning cup of tea with bread and honey. I looked at the honey and then at him and he smiled. -No use letting it go to waste was it?, he said.
We never saw much of Vladek's father. He was old and spent most of his time sitting indoors or on the seat outside in their back garden which he did for hours at a stretch ;his threshold of boredom was seemingly limitless. I'd last seen him in August out in the road with Old Man Miankowski waving the storks goodbye and they were both wondering aloud if they'd still be alive when they returned next year.
It was during the third week in August that the storks began circling over our house and the nearby lake. They are the most graceful of birds when in flight and for five days they flew around in circles, a few more coming into the flock every day until there were over fifty of them. One day Alicja came out to the barn where I was working and told me to come quickly and watch the storks. A big catherine wheel of storks was unwinding with the birds on the outside of the circle gradually peeling off and following each other in a straight line across the lake and over the forest. They were heading back to Africa and as we wandered out of the gate and down the lane to get a better look we saw that the school kids were all out in the road with their teachers waving them goodbye.
We took a stroll up to where Vladek's father and Old Man Miankowsi were standing and struck up a conversation. Old man Miankowski told us that the storks were late and should have left on the 18th of the month. He said that this was a sign that we were in for a mild winter and that his well would run dry next year unless we had heavy snow falls. This turned out to be true but when we got to know Old Man Miankowski a little better we found that just about all the folk lore he imparted to us was complete rubbish. But it was from him that we first heard why Bocwinka was populated by so many people of Ukrainian extraction.
In 1946 these people had been living in the far south east of Poland in the Ukrainian borderlands and formed a sizeable ethnic minority. Sizeable enough to have had the Communist government of the time more than a little concerned that they could become some sort of ethnic thorn in their sides and foment trouble, demand the use of their own language, claim that they were persecuted and so on.
The government solved the problem with a standard communist government solution - they simply knocked on their doors one day and told them that they would be moving somewhere in twenty four hours time and that they must pack a limited amount of luggage for the trip. Ethnic groups were divided and scattered to the four corners of Poland in this way and the process was duplicated all over Eastern Europe.
Bocwinka was all but empty at the time as most of the previous occupants had been German and they'd been "sent back" to Germany. Old Man Miankowski was among the lucky ones because when he arrived in Bocwinka he was placed in a house which was far superior to that which the family had been living in when they were in the south east and the outbuildings were full of good, modern German farm implements. Not so his friend Alexander who had been a blacksmith and upon arrival in Bocwinka was placed in a partially completed, windowless house and, like everyone else, was given a production quota to fulfil with serious consequences if it wasn't met.
Alexander has long since passed away but his son Stan still lives in the village and like his father he never quite got the hang of farming. Instead, he took to poaching and did well out of it all through the days of the communists. So well that he managed to keep his farm as a front for all those years, purchasing his production quota from others and raising a family of seven children. I was later to develop a good relationship with Stan who took me along with him on a few of his nocturnal outings. The Germans who were expelled from our own house, which at that time was only partially completed, were never heard of again until the Autumn of 1994 when one of the sons (who was only 15 years old when they left) came back to look at the place.
He was an immaculately dressed, silver haired old gentleman, driving a top of the range BMW and smelling of after shave lotion. He brought with him a German speaking Polish nephew to act as translator not knowing that we were English speakers and communication was long winded but we still managed a reasonable conversation from German to Polish and Polish to English. He had been born in a small house in our garden and his father was still building our house when the family was told to leave the country. He took me outside and showed me where the old house had been. By then Vladek's landscaping had eliminated all trace of the foundations. He cried and I put my arm around his shoulder thinking of the childhood memories which this scene must have invoked, the forced deportation and the hardships the family must have had to endure in a newly war torn Germany.
He wasn't crying with sadness though but with happiness that our house (or, as he called it, the new house) was being restored and he would finally get to see the place completed. He told us that he had had the vision of the house for all those years and expected it to be in ruins and he gave us our first booking for two weeks in the following year for him and his brother. I asked if he was disappointed in the general state of the area, knowing that the communists had let the whole country fall into a state of disrepair.
-No, he said. -Not at all, it's all just as I remembered it. There's been so much so called progress in Germany since the war that it's now unrecognizable but here it's all as we left it. Even the agriculture is the same as it was, scythes and horses have gone from where I live. No, the countryside hasn't changed apart from the trees, there are more forests than I remember but if all the houses could have a new coat of paint it would be like stepping through a time warp. Where else in the World can a man go back after nearly fifty years and find that nothing has happened?
-Yes, I said, -I guess communism has a lot to answer for.
-In some ways yes, but I hope we Germans will look after it all as well as this when the pendulum swings back again.
-Do you really think it'll happen?
-Oh yes I'm sure Germany doesn't have any designs on this area at all at present but if you read your history you'll see that national borders have never lasted long in this part of the world.
I asked him if he remembered what had actually happened - how the Germans were sent to the newly delineated Germany after the war. He said that many of them left by any method possible when they heard that the Russians were advancing throughout the area and headed West. Nobody had expected the Russian advance to be as quick as it was and a large number of people were rounded up while still on the road and sent back to where they had lived. Most people, however, stayed and were governed for the first few months by the Russians and, following that, by the Poles. The Russians had made them work. Some, including his father, had to drive cows and horses east to the railway headings where they were sent to Russia. Others had to round up all the agricultural tools and machinery and that too was sent to Russia.
He said that his mother was charged with the collection of all the musical instruments in the village which had to be delivered to a railhead somewhere where they stayed out in the weather and rotted. The last action of the Russians, before handing over to the Poles had been to recruit most of the able bodied men in the district to rip up all the railway lines and throw them onto the trains which took it all back to Russia.
His family, like most others, hung around for a few months living hand to mouth until they heard one day that they were free to go to West to Germany. They could only take hand luggage with them and had to walk for three days to a railway station from where they were transported free to the old East Germany and from there escaped through a hole on the fence to West Germany. The electricity meter reader came around in September and it was then that I learnt that we were the only people in the entire village who weren't cheating our meter.
Alicja had read to me an article in the newspaper some months earlier which said that, in some Polish villages, only thirty percent of the electricity which went into the village actually registered on house electricity meters and, at the time, I didn't take much notice of it. I was in Eva's kitchen one day when she looked out of the window and let out a gasp. She asked me to turn the kettle off and ran upstairs coming back with a long length of electric cable which she took straight down to the cellar.
She ran around turning off everything powered by electricity except for a light which was hung on a piece of string over a box full of three day old chicks and then looked at the meter. It wasn't going around fast enough so she switched on the kitchen light and had another look. Satisfied that the wheel was going around at the required speed she turned the gas back on and continued to make me a cup of tea. The meter man knocked at the door a few minutes later, read the meter and left. Eva immediately dampened a piece of rag, stuffed it into the slow combustion stove and stood looking out of the window.
-What's that for I asked.
-Oh, if anybody sees the white smoke they'll know something's not right. The people across the valley may see it.
-But what for, I asked.
-Everyone in the village does it as soon as the meter man leaves. It lets everyone know that he's around.
Vladek later showed me how everybody cheated on electricity, it was simple.
The old fashioned wiring included a screw in fuse upstairs in every house located before the meter. All that was necessary was to unscrew it and screw it back in again with a length of cable inserted into the screw hole. The other end of the cable had a multiple electric socket attached and it was possible to run practically anything in his house from it.
-Of course the electricity department know that everybody’s cheating, said Vladek -but they don't have the money to go around re-wiring houses with new meter boxes, anyway, he added, -they've got to catch you at it haven't they?
Chapter 5
Despite the shortages of supply and a number of other related problems, by September we were ahead of schedule. Our intention was to open the house for business in May and things were looking good. We had surprised ourselves by the amount of work we had been able to get through in the last month without skilled help and it was due to our new methodology. Instead of downing tools and scouring the shops for things when we reached an impasse we started on the next job and asked Vladek to put the word out for whatever it was that we needed.
This meant that we had half a dozen jobs on the go at all times but in the middle of the month a few of them came together and life became, for a while, a little more comfortable. We now had a kitchen, bathroom and a bedroom set up more or less permanently even though there was still work to be completed in all of these rooms. Prior to this blissful state of affairs we had been living in one room at a time and migrating between rooms as the work dictated. After demolishing the slow combustion stove early in the piece our cooker had been a single burner on top of a gas bottle and we'd done the washing outside in a tin bath; our toilet having been a plastic bucket.
Good as our progress had been however, Alicja reminded me that come the second week in November all outside work would have to stop until April because the weather would be too cold. Winter, I was told by all, would be a time for house bound activities and visiting friends. I tended to view this as an attitude rather than a fact and although I recognised that the ground would be too hard for digging foundations and drains or holes for clothes posts and the like I was still confident that, no matter how cold it got, I'd be able to do something outside.
But September was clearly the time to sit down with paper and pencil and work out exactly which jobs should be completed before the freeze came. The garden would have to be straightened out ready for planting the trees and we'd have to get as much as possible done in the barn, where we were building an apartment, so that we could install some form of temporary heating in order to be able to work out there. Misha was growing at an alarming rate and it was obvious that fences would be needed to keep her in and this would have to be done before the ground became to hard to dig the post holes so we decided to leave all the interior painting and things like fitting skirting boards because all of these things could be done in the warm in a few months time - we'd concentrate as much as possible on the outdoor work.
I went down to the milk collection depot early one morning to look for Ivan who was reckoned to be the best man in the village when it came to fencing. At eight o'clock every morning Bocwinka's milk collection depot is the focal point for the farmers from four villages. I liked visiting the milk collection depot at this time of day to look at the various assembled modes of transport employed to bring the milk down from the farms. Some farmers would only have 5 litres of milk from a single cow and would transport it in a small churn tied to the handlebars of a bicycle, others would have perhaps fifty litres and would use a tractor and trailer. Some came from villages six kilometres distant and would push a bicycle with a couple of churns attached all the way there and back.
But there were other, more interesting modes of transportation too. One farmer always sent his crippled father along with one churn of milk. He could be seen every morning zig zagging down the street in a sort of three wheeled wheelchair powered by a chain attached through gears to the back axle. The old man wound two bicycle pedals around in front of him to provide most of the motive force and the balance was made up by a large dog in a harness. I'd seen him many times in his wheelchair and always thought the old man and his dog had been doing this together for years but when I asked how long the dog had been performing this function he said -only three months, he won't last long, this one. I get through two dogs a year - the strain kills them.
From an engineering stand-point Mr Koncevicz had the most interesting carriage. It was a long narrow, four wheeled cart where the horse had been removed and replaced by two thirds of a motorcycle. The steering was by means of the motorcycle handlebars and Mr Koncevicz sat on the motorcycle seat. Beneath him the back wheel had been removed and the rear of the motorbike frame was attached to the cut down horse shafts by four bolts and a lot of coiled fencing wire and two leather belts. The motorcycle chain had been lengthened to drive a sprocket on the front axle of the cart and the whole thing must have weighed upwards of a ton. It certainly weighed a lot more when the Koncevicz family of eleven all piled in it to go to church on Sunday mornings and all it had in the way of brakes was on the tiny motorcycle front wheel. Looking at the thing I was inclined to think the braking system wasn't as much of a worry as the chain, which, if it had broken at any speed, would probably have sliced Mr Koncevicz straight down the middle.
There was a man from Zywki, the next village along our lane, who had a current, no frills model Russian tractor. It was a peculiar thing in that it was a two seater and the two occupants sat side by side on a wooden bench seat just like a horse and cart. But the engine was the most primitive thing I'd ever seen. It was a single cylinder engine with an exposed flywheel, no bonnet and an open cooling system in which the water just bubbled away open to the air at the top. The driver could see when the water level was getting low and just poured in another bucketful. I asked the man why he didn't put some sort of cover over the flywheel in case it should pick up a foreign object and throw it at some passer-by. He told me that it wasn't a problem, had never been known to happen and that the greatest danger was it's habit of throwing hot water over all and sundry when traversing bumpy roads. Vladek told me he'd heard that in Russia they put a wire netting bag into the water jacket and cook eggs in it.
But today I was at the milk collection depot looking for Ivan and as I picked my way through a variety of wheel barrows, old prams, tin baths with wheels underneath and an assortment of home made trolleys I stumbled upon him - literally, he was drunk and sleeping in the grass. Jurek borrowed a pencil from Jana, the soltys's wife who ran the depot, and wrote a note for Ivan to come around and see me when he woke up and pinned it to his cap which was laying on his chest.
He arrived at the gate at eleven o'clock, I showed him what I wanted done, he went off to get the village measuring tape and came back three days later acting as if he'd only been away for ten minutes. Together we measured the length of fence we'd need and discussed the design. It had to be strong enough to withstand the weight of a snow drift and I wanted to know how far to bury the posts in the ground and what kind of wood to use. Ivan seemed to know his stuff and understood where the fence had to go and after measuring we came up with a requirement for a total of 200 metres worth of alder wood palings plus the rails and the oak posts which were to be burnt in the fire to preserve them before placement in the ground.
-I'll order the wood for you if you like, said Ivan
I thought that maybe Ivan was going to load the price by a few bottles and so declined the offer.
-No, that's OK thanks I know the forester down at Borki, we bought the wood for our floorboards from him.
-Yes, go to Borki, tell him I sent you and he won't give you any rubbish.
After he'd gone I took Alicja outside to show her the fencing plan but she had a better idea which involved leaving the wood shed outside the fence line and this reduced the length of fencing to exactly 148 metres. What with other, more pressing things, on our agenda we didn't get around to looking for fence wood for a fortnight. Buying the fence posts and palings, we just knew, was going to be another run around like when we'd bought the floor boards and this time the forester told us that they had stopped cutting for the season. We had visited him at his house where we found him and half a dozen of his workers - two of them unconscious from an excess of vodka and the rest half cut.
-But we have to have a fence, said Alicja -it's very important.
-Well, the only thing you can do is steal the stuff out of the forest
-Maybe, but we don't know anything about stealing trees and we don't have a chain saw or anything. What if we get caught?
-Oh you'd have to do it when I wasn't looking. You couldn't do it in daylight either and you'd have to keep off the asphalt roads in case the police caught you.
-Exactly what are you telling me?
-Oh, I'm not telling you anything, I can't tell you anything about stealing trees, I'm the forester; I'm here to stop people stealing trees
-Well, the position is that we need fencing posts and palings and we don't care too much about how they end up in our yard but we don't want to be involved in the actual......procurement, said Alicja
-You'll have to hire a thief then.
Alicja had at last broken the ice and there were smiles all round, the sort of half smirks which meant that we were involved in something mischievous together like a bunch of school kids.
-OK. So where do we find a thief?
Pointing to one of his comatose drinking partners he said -him, he's a good thief. I'll tell him about it when he wakes up and he'll organise everything for you.
I said that if this Rip Van Vodka would care to come around to the house when he was sober I'd show him exactly what we needed and tell him how much of it was required.
-That's not necessary- replied our forester, -just tell me how many metres you want to fence and he'll work out exactly what you need. He knows all about fencing.
-Great, we need enough for 148 metres and a few spare palings, OK?
-Be better if you took enough for 200 metres - it won't cost you any more.
We left the order in their capable hands and went home to spend the rest of the day planning the garden, pleased with the thought that we were gradually getting to know our way around - getting to know how to work the system as it were. -If only we'd known about this way of obtaining wood, our floorboards would probably only have been half the price, remarked Alicja.
The next morning before light I was woken by the noise of a tractor. This was nothing unusual but it seemed louder, nearer, than usual. Misha was going berserk and I climbed out of bed to investigate but looking out of the windows nothing untoward appeared to be going on so I brought Misha into the bedroom and told her to shut up. But when I went outside after breakfast there were tractor tyre marks in the soft earth of what one day would become our lawn and the barn doors had been lifted off their hinges. I was sure that we'd been ripped off and I ran over to the barn and looked in. There was a huge heap of planks strewn at random all over the interior of the building.
-It must be for our fence, I told Alicja. -The planks will be cut down later to make the palings.
-Nothing, but nothing ever moves this fast in Poland, especially up here in the wilds, Alicja told me. -I reckon someone like Vladek stole the stuff in the night and he wants to hide it here in case the police or the forestry officers come looking for it.
I waited until I saw Vladek coming past with the horse and went outside to ask if he knew anything about it.
-Yes, that's your fencing wood.
-They must have worked all night Vladek, it was only yesterday that we were speaking to the forester and his mates and they were all half cut at four in the afternoon.
-Yes, I heard all about it down at the milk depot earlier on. They cut the stuff two weeks ago when you measured your back yard with Ivan. Ivan told them you'd be needing the wood and they've had it stashed in the forest under a big pile of leaves and other rubbish ever since - they've been scared stiff that someone from the forestry department would find it.
-Why didn't he mention it to me then?
-No, he wouldn't have told you about it. He's been worried that you weren't going to order it though because he charged the forester two bottles for getting the business, told the forester he was sending you down to order the wood from him and he's already drank the two bottles. The forester's been worried too because he's doing it illegally. Peter, you should let me handle these things for you - if you'd have only told me about it I'd have told you to hang on for a while and soon they'd have approached you to take it off their hands for next to nothing.
So much for us knowing how to work the system! But it couldn't be argued that when Ivan finished his work, in a lightning four days, the fence was perfect and took the weight of some very heavy snow drifts during the winter without moving an inch out of line. Meanwhile Vladek had volunteered to landscape the garden for us using the horse, plough and an assortment of other implements we didn't know the names of and he was doing a good job but was hindered by a number of bee hives which were in the way of the plough.
When we first took possession of the house from Mr Polakowski it was agreed between us that he could leave his seven bee hives in the garden until the time was right for bee moving. This, he assured us, wouldn't be later than the first week in September. We were careful never to go near Mr Polakowski's bee hives because he told us that bees were delicate creatures & didn't like to be disturbed. Come the third week in September I'd sent word to him four times asking if he would move his bees but nothing was happening and Vladek was becoming impatient to finish the landscaping because he would soon be busy with his field work and wouldn't be able to help us.
I stood pondering the hives one evening when I saw a wasp go into one of them and I cautiously lifted the lid. The hive was absolutely devoid of bee frames, bees or anything else to do with the procurement of that sticky substance which bees are famous for and was occupied only by a wasps nest. I checked another hive and another, but they too were empty and upon checking the fourth one found it full of bee keeping equipment, a smoke generator, bee keepers gloves, veiled hat etc. This left three hives and I found that out of the total of seven, only two had bees inside.
It was beginning to look as though we'd been taken for a ride and after making a few enquiries we learned that Mr Polakowski now lived in a third floor flat in the middle of town and had nothing more than a balcony on which to keep his hives and only the flowers in a window box for his bees to work with. He was obviously using our garden for storage. I mentioned it to Vladek and together we moved the five vacant hives (after destroying the wasps nest) out of the way so that he could continue landscaping.
Two weeks went by and then one evening around seven o'clock Vladek arrived drunk & we sat together on the verandah smoking and staring out at the garden. Every time Vladek had too much to drink he became bolder. He'd promise anyone anything and come up with silly ideas which, he would assure me, he'd put into operation the next day. The next day, of course, he wouldn't remember. But on this evening his idea was that he was going to move the two occupied hives.
"Yes" I said, "let's do it together in the morning."
"No, no , no. No, not the morning, I need to be drunk for this job. I'm going to do it now - don't need your help"
We told him, even begged him not to do it but he wasn't to be dissuaded once his mind was made up and donning old Polakowski's bee keeping hat & gloves he staggered towards the first hive and taking it in his arms set off across the garden. The bees went troppo, circling his head and stinging him through his clothes but at first he was too anaesthetized by the effects of the vodka to feel anything.
Now, it's known that when bees locate a good patch of pollen they return to the hive and perform a dance which indicates to their work mates the direction & distance between the hive and the flowers. I can tell you that whatever their terpsichorean abilities they could have learned a few new steps from our neighbour that evening. Vladek suddenly let out a hell of a scream, dropped the hive and broke into some kind of jazz pasadoble, the likes of which are yet to be seen in any Latin American dancing competition. It was the most energetic dance I think I've yet witnessed. It combined a flamenco like movement of the feet with the slapping usually practiced by leather shorted, overweight German accountants at October fests but was made all the more entertaining by the fact that it was performed whilst running at the speed of a supercharged Carl Lewis towards the fence.
Vladek was demonstrating a latent athletic ability even he didn't know he had as he cleared our fence and threw himself into his horse drinking trough and we saw the splash go up just like in the Wild West movies. The rest of the family came running from the house thinking him to be injured and his father laughed so much that he was forced to sit down & rest until his breath caught up with him. We all had a good laugh and Alicja and I went inside for a cup of tea but had hardly boiled the kettle when we heard the gate open. Vladek had come back for the remaining hive. There was no opportunity to reason with him and we watched from the window, speechless, as he purposefully staggered towards the hive, this time clad in a thick winter coat for good measure.
We ran outside just in time to see him, hive in hands, trip over the hastily placed previous hive which broke open strewing the contents on the ground.
This time our hero didn't waste any time dancing. He was up in a flash & away on his toes taking the same path as before but this time he wasn't so lucky when he reached the fence and he ran straight into it knocking himself out cold. By now quite a crowd had gathered at our fence and I was suddenly struck by the absurdity of the situation & started to laugh out loud but the soltys was the one who immediately saw the seriousness of the situation.
He leapt over the fence and ran across to where Vladek was lying & shouted "if they sting him in his throat he won't be able to breathe" and he wrenched up a handful of stinging nettles, which were the tallest plants growing in that spot, and began flailing away at the bees. The bees weren't stupid either; they new that it was Vladek they were after and now the air was thick with them around where he was laying. It was the old man (Vladek's father) who with characteristic calmness saved the situation. He casually grabbed a handful of hay & threw it over the fence to me. -Light it Peter, light it. Spread it all around his head and light it. Someone threw a box of matches into the fray and I did as instructed and within a very short space of time the bees were keeping their distance.
Vladek was unconscious for a good five minutes and when he came round he decided that it might be a good idea to retire from the scene. The old man came over just on dusk and, although we didn't know it until the morning, he'd set the hives up again. We went over to see Vladek after breakfast, his face was badly swollen and we were told by Eva that she'd spent the remainder of the previous evening picking stings out of him with a pair of tweezers. But sitting at the kitchen table was the old man enjoying his morning cup of tea with bread and honey. I looked at the honey and then at him and he smiled. -No use letting it go to waste was it?, he said.
We never saw much of Vladek's father. He was old and spent most of his time sitting indoors or on the seat outside in their back garden which he did for hours at a stretch ;his threshold of boredom was seemingly limitless. I'd last seen him in August out in the road with Old Man Miankowski waving the storks goodbye and they were both wondering aloud if they'd still be alive when they returned next year.
It was during the third week in August that the storks began circling over our house and the nearby lake. They are the most graceful of birds when in flight and for five days they flew around in circles, a few more coming into the flock every day until there were over fifty of them. One day Alicja came out to the barn where I was working and told me to come quickly and watch the storks. A big catherine wheel of storks was unwinding with the birds on the outside of the circle gradually peeling off and following each other in a straight line across the lake and over the forest. They were heading back to Africa and as we wandered out of the gate and down the lane to get a better look we saw that the school kids were all out in the road with their teachers waving them goodbye.
We took a stroll up to where Vladek's father and Old Man Miankowsi were standing and struck up a conversation. Old man Miankowski told us that the storks were late and should have left on the 18th of the month. He said that this was a sign that we were in for a mild winter and that his well would run dry next year unless we had heavy snow falls. This turned out to be true but when we got to know Old Man Miankowski a little better we found that just about all the folk lore he imparted to us was complete rubbish. But it was from him that we first heard why Bocwinka was populated by so many people of Ukrainian extraction.
In 1946 these people had been living in the far south east of Poland in the Ukrainian borderlands and formed a sizeable ethnic minority. Sizeable enough to have had the Communist government of the time more than a little concerned that they could become some sort of ethnic thorn in their sides and foment trouble, demand the use of their own language, claim that they were persecuted and so on.
The government solved the problem with a standard communist government solution - they simply knocked on their doors one day and told them that they would be moving somewhere in twenty four hours time and that they must pack a limited amount of luggage for the trip. Ethnic groups were divided and scattered to the four corners of Poland in this way and the process was duplicated all over Eastern Europe.
Bocwinka was all but empty at the time as most of the previous occupants had been German and they'd been "sent back" to Germany. Old Man Miankowski was among the lucky ones because when he arrived in Bocwinka he was placed in a house which was far superior to that which the family had been living in when they were in the south east and the outbuildings were full of good, modern German farm implements. Not so his friend Alexander who had been a blacksmith and upon arrival in Bocwinka was placed in a partially completed, windowless house and, like everyone else, was given a production quota to fulfil with serious consequences if it wasn't met.
Alexander has long since passed away but his son Stan still lives in the village and like his father he never quite got the hang of farming. Instead, he took to poaching and did well out of it all through the days of the communists. So well that he managed to keep his farm as a front for all those years, purchasing his production quota from others and raising a family of seven children. I was later to develop a good relationship with Stan who took me along with him on a few of his nocturnal outings. The Germans who were expelled from our own house, which at that time was only partially completed, were never heard of again until the Autumn of 1994 when one of the sons (who was only 15 years old when they left) came back to look at the place.
He was an immaculately dressed, silver haired old gentleman, driving a top of the range BMW and smelling of after shave lotion. He brought with him a German speaking Polish nephew to act as translator not knowing that we were English speakers and communication was long winded but we still managed a reasonable conversation from German to Polish and Polish to English. He had been born in a small house in our garden and his father was still building our house when the family was told to leave the country. He took me outside and showed me where the old house had been. By then Vladek's landscaping had eliminated all trace of the foundations. He cried and I put my arm around his shoulder thinking of the childhood memories which this scene must have invoked, the forced deportation and the hardships the family must have had to endure in a newly war torn Germany.
He wasn't crying with sadness though but with happiness that our house (or, as he called it, the new house) was being restored and he would finally get to see the place completed. He told us that he had had the vision of the house for all those years and expected it to be in ruins and he gave us our first booking for two weeks in the following year for him and his brother. I asked if he was disappointed in the general state of the area, knowing that the communists had let the whole country fall into a state of disrepair.
-No, he said. -Not at all, it's all just as I remembered it. There's been so much so called progress in Germany since the war that it's now unrecognizable but here it's all as we left it. Even the agriculture is the same as it was, scythes and horses have gone from where I live. No, the countryside hasn't changed apart from the trees, there are more forests than I remember but if all the houses could have a new coat of paint it would be like stepping through a time warp. Where else in the World can a man go back after nearly fifty years and find that nothing has happened?
-Yes, I said, -I guess communism has a lot to answer for.
-In some ways yes, but I hope we Germans will look after it all as well as this when the pendulum swings back again.
-Do you really think it'll happen?
-Oh yes I'm sure Germany doesn't have any designs on this area at all at present but if you read your history you'll see that national borders have never lasted long in this part of the world.
I asked him if he remembered what had actually happened - how the Germans were sent to the newly delineated Germany after the war. He said that many of them left by any method possible when they heard that the Russians were advancing throughout the area and headed West. Nobody had expected the Russian advance to be as quick as it was and a large number of people were rounded up while still on the road and sent back to where they had lived. Most people, however, stayed and were governed for the first few months by the Russians and, following that, by the Poles. The Russians had made them work. Some, including his father, had to drive cows and horses east to the railway headings where they were sent to Russia. Others had to round up all the agricultural tools and machinery and that too was sent to Russia.
He said that his mother was charged with the collection of all the musical instruments in the village which had to be delivered to a railhead somewhere where they stayed out in the weather and rotted. The last action of the Russians, before handing over to the Poles had been to recruit most of the able bodied men in the district to rip up all the railway lines and throw them onto the trains which took it all back to Russia.
His family, like most others, hung around for a few months living hand to mouth until they heard one day that they were free to go to West to Germany. They could only take hand luggage with them and had to walk for three days to a railway station from where they were transported free to the old East Germany and from there escaped through a hole on the fence to West Germany. The electricity meter reader came around in September and it was then that I learnt that we were the only people in the entire village who weren't cheating our meter.
Alicja had read to me an article in the newspaper some months earlier which said that, in some Polish villages, only thirty percent of the electricity which went into the village actually registered on house electricity meters and, at the time, I didn't take much notice of it. I was in Eva's kitchen one day when she looked out of the window and let out a gasp. She asked me to turn the kettle off and ran upstairs coming back with a long length of electric cable which she took straight down to the cellar.
She ran around turning off everything powered by electricity except for a light which was hung on a piece of string over a box full of three day old chicks and then looked at the meter. It wasn't going around fast enough so she switched on the kitchen light and had another look. Satisfied that the wheel was going around at the required speed she turned the gas back on and continued to make me a cup of tea. The meter man knocked at the door a few minutes later, read the meter and left. Eva immediately dampened a piece of rag, stuffed it into the slow combustion stove and stood looking out of the window.
-What's that for I asked.
-Oh, if anybody sees the white smoke they'll know something's not right. The people across the valley may see it.
-But what for, I asked.
-Everyone in the village does it as soon as the meter man leaves. It lets everyone know that he's around.
Vladek later showed me how everybody cheated on electricity, it was simple.
The old fashioned wiring included a screw in fuse upstairs in every house located before the meter. All that was necessary was to unscrew it and screw it back in again with a length of cable inserted into the screw hole. The other end of the cable had a multiple electric socket attached and it was possible to run practically anything in his house from it.
-Of course the electricity department know that everybody’s cheating, said Vladek -but they don't have the money to go around re-wiring houses with new meter boxes, anyway, he added, -they've got to catch you at it haven't they?
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