Chapter 12

BEYOND THE PALESKI

Chapter 12

By mid March it seemed safe to assume the sub zero temperatures were over and that we'd seen the last of the snow. Soon it would be spring when young men's fancies would turn to what young girls had been fancying all winter. Misha, no longer having her snow tunnel to live in, had migrated to the kennel and, just like hibernatory animals, people too were emerging from the confines of their houses to spend more time in their gardens.

Ryszard came around to see us. After almost a year of saving their money Halina and Ryszard bought a new, Japanese colour television set but Ryszard had a problem with tuning it because the instructions, which were in eight languages, didn't include Polish. It was their first colour TV and they were understandably anxious to see it working so we downed tools and followed him straight back to their house. There was also a new antenna to be installed on the roof, a job which fell to me, and I spent half an hour up a ladder in the cold while everyone else sat in the lounge room, shouted instructions through the window and drank tea.

-How's that?

-A bit more. No, too much, go back. Hold it right there. Can you bolt it up just where it is?

-Is that it then?

-No, you'll have to go back out there again but there's something interesting on - come in and get warm.

I went inside and had to make myself a cup of tea as everyone else was engrossed in a program showing old black and white footage of World war 11. I couldn't understand it and tried to interrupt but was told to be quiet. They'd tell me all about it later. There was a lot of Polish chatter going on punctuated by uproarious laughter at one point and I waited patiently until the end of the program to ask what it was all about.

The TV program had been about Polish partisans and had featured the man who used to own Halina and Ryszard's house. It told of his heroic exploits fighting against the Germans in the forests on the Czech border during WWII. At the end of the program there was a list telling what had happened to all these partisans - most of which were by now dead. When it came to the previous owner of Halina and Ryszard's house it said "died in a road accident" and gave the date. That he had died in a road accident was true but not, as one would imagine, a collision between two fast moving, passenger carrying vehicles. He was cycling home one night totally paralytic and fell off his bike into a puddle containing only a few centimetres of water where he had lain, unconscious, face down, and drowned. Halina and Ryszard knew this first hand as they had attended his funeral.

That funeral had been eight years ago but now we ourselves were to attend a village funeral within days of hearing the story. We arrived home after shopping in Gizycko one afternoon and as Alicja was opening the gate we heard Eva calling us to the fence. Vladek's father had died. We didn't know he was ill but he'd been taken to hospital the previous day and had died early in the morning. I quite liked the old man but I seemed to be the only person who did. His family, especially his wife, didn't like him at all. He had been a tyrant to his family in his younger days, a drunkard who beat his wife and kids, he was both stingy with his money and lazy. As soon as Vladek had been physically strong enough to run the farm his father had feigned illness and never worked a day from then on.

His hatred for Eva, she said, stemmed from the fact that she had bought nothing into the marriage in the form of a dowry, wasn't from a Ukrainian family and didn't belong to the Orthodox faith. Of course, I saw none of this, mainly, I suppose, because I couldn't understand the language well enough to feel the atmosphere when I visited their house. His body was brought back from the hospital and he lay in his coffin on a table in the lounge room for two days and nights under the framed pictures of Jesus and the Virgin and Child. Plastic saints with halos on sticks stood guard on top of the sideboard and dozens of poor quality candles burned in the room filling it with so much smoke it hurt my eyes and the smell of moth balls from the suit they'd dressed him in took my breath away as I entered the room.

I'd never imagined Vladek's father in a suit and tie - certainly not one of my ties. I'd loaned it to Vladek weeks ago and now hoped they didn't give it back. Vladek, his mother and Eva, eyes reddened through lack of sleep and an overdose of candle smoke, took turns to sit with the body all day and all night as a procession of friends and relatives filed past him, each stopping to kiss his cheek. Even small children were lifted so as to be able to reach and kiss him.

One would have thought, from viewing the number of people who attended the room, that the old man had been well liked but people were saying what an old bastard he'd been even before they left the house. They put their arms around the widow's shoulders and hugged her but not to display sympathy for her having lost a life long companion. They seemed to be saying "don't worry, everything will be alright now he's gone."

We watched the funeral procession go by our windows. The coffin was carried by Gienek, Andrzej, Zenek and Ivan - two Poles and two Ukrainians. In front went two relations from somewhere other than Bocwinka carrying aloft colourful banners topped by the Ukrainian Orthodox cross. Behind came the widow followed by Vladek and Eva, side by side, and then various relatives in order of importance, villagers bringing up the rear. And ten paces behind - a staggering Marek. They sang some kind of funeral dirge as the coffin was laid in Jurek's cart, which only a matter of days beforehand had seen service in the fields during muck spreading. The flowers were placed on top and without ceremony Jurek and Adam climbed aboard and geed the horse into action.

A bus had been hired to take the mourners to the cemetery and this now slowly edged it's way out from behind the milk depot to take aboard it's impassive, slightly bored looking passengers, four of whom carried shovels. As it took off we followed slowly on in the car. The journey, at horse and cart speed, to Kruklanki church seemed to take an age. As we entered the church we knelt and crossed ourselves in careful imitation of those in front of us. The men who had already performed this ritual stood to one side, ushering, with outstretched hands, the ladies towards their seats. Not knowing the protocol to adopt I hung back and stood with the rest of the men but they all waved me past.

The Kruklanki church was built by German Protestants early in the century and now, through shortage of funds, served two religions catering for both Poles and Ukrainians. The garish, nay, tasteless decor bore traces of all three faiths, brightly painted cardboard cut outs of Roman centurions stood at either side of the altar - I know not what for - and cooking foil clad saints adorned the walls. The service took almost two hours and I was starting to get fidgety only ten minutes into it. The dirges were long and depressingly reverent and I understood about the same amount as I would have understood at a funeral in any other country. A peculiarity of the Orthodox Ukrainian funeral service, I thought, was that only the women sang the hymns. I was mistaken. I looked behind me and found that, apart from Vladek, I was one of only four men in the congregation - the rest had all slipped back out and were on the opposite side of the road outside the post office drinking vodka.

The inside of the church was bitterly cold and we were the only people not prepared for it. Everyone else was well wrapped up in winter coats including the pop (Ukrainian priest) who wore over his ceremonial robes a black quilted jacket emblazoned with the words PUBLIC ENEMY. I would have liked to have told him what the words meant in English but, as Alicja pointed out, it was unlikely that another English speaker would ever see it. I had understood not a single word all through the service until the end when I heard the Polish word "dachowki." I knew that it meant roof tiles and my mind raced back to childhood Sunday school classes - "the wise man built his house upon a rock" - no that wasn't it. I asked Alicja what it was all about when we got outside. It had been an appeal for money to buy roof tiles for the church.

We trooped outside, eyes blinking in the sunshine, and the male contingent began to wander back to our side of the road, a couple of them hiding their bottles behind a waste paper basket before they did so. Although they were all dressed in their best, some wore gum boots (the only foot coverings they possessed) and Vladek had on a pair of black plimsolls. We walked in procession to the grave, a sermon was read and the coffin lowered into the soft, muddy earth. One of the ropes jammed and after a few pulls on it, which nearly turned the coffin over, the owner of the rope decided, reluctantly, to abandon it and dropped it into the hole. The women then filed past the grave, each stooping to pick up a handful of earth which she threw onto the top of the coffin. This was followed by the men but by that time the area around the grave was so well trodden that we each scraped up a handful of mud and shook it all over each other trying to dislodge it from between our fingers. This step of the proceedings over, Vladeks father was buried by the sons of the men he'd known since he was first forced to move to Bocwinka in 1946. Adam lost a shoe in the process. Vladek's mother seemed, if anything, relieved as she approached us

-He's got a lovely voice hasn't, he the priest?

-Yes, said Alicja, -lovely voice.

-He's not as good as the one we had before though, he could reach the really high notes just like a woman. But he's good though, this one.

-Yes, said Alicja -I thought he was excellent.

-I'll move into his room now where the stove is. And see if I can get a television, he wouldn't have television you know.

After the funeral I had an article to finish for an English wildlife magazine and Alicja was also busy so we called in at the party only for a short while to pay our respects and offer our toilet for the lady funeral goers. Like most families in the district Vladek and Eva had no toilet either inside the house or out. Bodily functions were taken care of in the orchard in the warm weather or in the milking parlour when it was cold.

While I was typing a man came into the kitchen. -Toilet's through there, I said

-No, he said -It's nearly eight o'clock. I wondered if I could see the weather forecast. I couldn't see a TV over at Vladek's.

-Of course, I said. -Vladek's got a TV but it's probably in another room for the duration of the party.

-I'm sorry to bother you, he said -but it was snowing when I left the south east and I'm wondering how conditions will be on the way home. We've got the kids with us and if I'm going to get stuck in the snow I'd rather it was daylight. We'll stay in a hotel the night if the weather looks bad.

We watched the forecast together, I watched the temperature chart and he listened to the words.

-Good, he said -according to that, we should have a good trip back.

-They don't always get it right though do they?, I said.

-No, he said -but at least they don't lie about it any more.

-Lie about the weather?

-Yes, they used to under the old system - the communists lied about everything.

I asked him why the government would have lied about the weather, -after all, I said -forecasters get it wrong anyway, why would they have the need to lie. This man, whose name I never did ask, used to work in the city engineers department in Warsaw where, during winter, they were nightly given the correct forecasts. The central heating act - or whatever it was called in the constitution - stated that the heating to apartment blocks must be turned on when the temperature dropped below a certain set point for three consecutive nights. The country was always short of coal to fire the city's central boilers because it was exported to earn hard currency, so to save money on energy the Met' Office reports were distorted and a higher temperature was given out on the weather forecast. You could have been freezing to death but if the weather forecast said you weren't, you were not!

This gave the dwellers of apartment blocks no basis for complaint when the weather was cold and the heating wasn't operating. The reason that the city engineers department was given the real temperature was that they had to salt the roads to keep the traffic moving. Every Pole has a fund of such stories and I never tire of hearing them. Ryszard told me a good one about how he procured his car, a small 650cc Polish Fiat, that was sitting in his garage as he spoke and which he'd owned for over ten years.

Ryszard received a letter one day which informed him that after a wait of eight years, he had been allocated a new car. He had paid his last instalment on it about five years beforehand and he had paid in Polish currency. Had he paid in American Dollars, he could have had a car much sooner - the government was desperate for hard currency. Ryszard and a friend went to the factory by train and bus to pick up his car. When they arrived, they handed in the letter of entitlement and were told that they could choose which ever car they wanted. They walked out into the yard and saw a line of cars, all white except for one orange one. They chose the orange one, signed the necessary papers and drove the car away.

A few kilometres down the road, they had occasion to brake hard and the windscreen fell out and broke on the ground in front of them. They loaded the pieces into the boot and went back to the factory where the man didn't question their story at all and told them to pick another car. They said that they particularly liked the orange one and asked if they could have another windscreen for it. -I'd like to help you, he said, -but we don't have any more windscreens.

They offered him a bribe, as was the normal thing to do in the situation, but the man was adamant that there were no more windscreens to be had. Reluctantly they chose a white car, said goodbye and left. On the way out of the factory they had to drive over the kerb and as they did so, Ryszard's companion noticed the windscreen move inside the rubber. They stopped and pushed the glass lightly and could see that without too much encouragement, the same thing would happen again, Ie. the windscreen would fall out.

They reversed back into the factory yard and proceeded to try all the other windscreens. All of them were the same, all loose. They went back to the office and explained to the man what had happened, negotiated with him and ended up taking the orange car but with the windscreen out of one of the white ones which they loaded into the back seat. They arrived home six hours later with themselves and the interior of the car wet through after having driven through a rain storm. Ryszard had a friend who was a solicitor and he asked him if he could write a letter of complaint to the factory for him and see if the factory would be willing to exchange the present windscreen for a better one when they came into stock.

The solicitor wrote the letter, and sent it off on Ryszards behalf and waited for a reply. Nothing was forthcoming despite follow up letters until eventually the solicitor rang the manager of the factory and demanded an answer. The manager wasn't at all evasive and apologised for not answering the letters. But, he said, it wasn't the fault of the car factory, it was the fault of the glass factory which had supplied windscreens thinner than specified.

Here, I must digress while I explain the workings of a small but typical part of the communist system. Each factory or production unit of any kind had a yearly quota to meet and if met, all the workers would get a bonus, sometimes money, sometimes goods. One of the problems however was that quite often, the raw materials required to meet this quota were unavailable. Now back to the story; The windscreen factory had a quota to meet but the raw materials for making glass were in short supply and they just couldn't get enough. So what would you, as a factory manager, do when confronted with this situation? You'd probably do what the Poles did.

The factory had say, a ten thousand windscreen quota and only enough glass for seven thousand so they met their quota by making each windscreen thinner, so thin in fact that they fell out of the rubbers which were supposed to hold them in the cars. I remember that the first time I visited Poland in 1985 we stayed on a farm for three days and, upon seeing a stack of twenty five tractor brake drums in the farmers shed the first morning, I had asked if he was hoarding them in case of a shortage. -No, was the reply -they're there because there's a glut. I told the farmer that, to my mind, it didn't make sense to spend ones money on hoarding things in a time of plenty.

-Ah, that's because you don't understand the system, he replied, -I haven't bought them because I want them - I've been forced to buy them.

We went out for the day and I brought the subject up again over the dinner table that night and was educated in the ways of the system. Poland made a limited number of very good quality farm tractors, they are surprisingly tough and well suited to the conditions of the country. Our host told me that some farmers would pool their resources and buy a tractor between them and that they would take it in turns to guard these tractors at night. I said that I thought it unlikely that anyone would try to steal a tractor because there were so few of them that it would be hard for the thief to conceal fact that he had a tractor for very long.

-I haven't finished yet, said our farmer. -It's not the tractor they want, it's the parts they can unbolt from it."

The tractor factory had a quota to meet. In their job specification it said that they had to produce so many tons of spare parts per year to meet the quota. It didn't specify exactly which spare parts; it just said say, "five hundred tons of spare parts." The workers in the factory looked at this and came up with an idea, a typically Polish idea. They would make five hundred tons of brake drums - nothing else, just brake drums. Brake drums are heavy and they require less machining than any other part of the tractor so it was easier to meet the quota in this way. So what was the result of producing only brake drums as spare parts you are wondering? Well, stop reading, look at the ceiling and think for a bit. You have a situation where there is an excess of brake drums and a shortage of all other spare parts. Try to think of the logical consequences of such a situation; try to think how it would affect you as a farmer and we'll see, by your answer, if you could fit well into a communist society.

This is what happened: The farmers ended up with sheds full of brake drums because when they went into the spare parts shop to buy, say, an injector pump for their tractor, the guy in the shop said "an injector pump? you have to buy ten brake drums to get one of those." This state of affairs gives rise to the bribery which goes on anywhere in the World where demand for goods exceeds supply. If there was only one injector pump in the shop and there weren't going to be any more for a long time (until they got a new quota system sorted out at the factory) the real value of an injector pump would escalate.

In these circumstances the farmer would offer to pay the man in the shop a bribe so he'd sell it to him rather that anyone else. Guess what would happen then? The guy in the shop would say -oh that one (the injector pump on the shelf behind him) is only for show, or -that one is already sold but if you leave me your name and address, I'll see what I can do.

What that actually meant was that he was unofficially auctioning it to the highest bidder. You would have offered him, say, 10 dollars extra and he would say -I'm sorry I can't do that but, as I said, I'll see what I can do. If he didn't get a better offer by the end of the week he would contact you and say -OK, ten dollars extra and it's yours. If the farmer was lucky enough to secure this spare part, he would understandably guard his tractor at night from spare parts thieves. When a vital spare part was unavailable and the crops were ready for harvesting a farmer would have to have been a very upright person not to have been tempted to steal somebody else's parts or buy them from somebody who had stolen them.

Under communism everything was controlled by some state planning organization which conducted the affairs of industry from afar, in offices, and on paper. It might have made sense on paper and in theory but in this system everything was planned so far in advance that it was impossible for the planners to cater for every eventuality. For instance, the people who planned the production of cars didn't know that windscreen glass would be in short supply when they were only two years into the five year plan.

It wouldn't have mattered to them anyway because they'd done their job, and glass supply was some other department's business. So they would get into these uncoordinated situations where one department didn't know or care about the problems of another department.

In production schedules, a host of other things play their parts too. Things like the Polish currency of the time being worthless in the west. If they didn't get enough hard currency into the country, they couldn't buy the raw materials for, say, windscreens from a western country because the western supplier would say -we're not going to be paid in that crap, give us dollars.

So to a certain extent I could sympathize with these poor long term planners, it wasn't their fault that they'd put together a plan for car production and the government couldn't raise the cash to buy windscreen material. It must have been demoralizing to have done a good job and then to have watched it all come undone. I recall another time when we were in Poland and the place was alive with a couple of stories which had appeared in the newspapers

The government was desperately in need of glass but couldn't afford to buy the raw materials from overseas so the department responsible for glass supply sought to alleviate the problem by offering money back for re-usable empty glass containers. At the time there was a huge stockpile of tomato sauce in the warehouses which was years old and hadn't been sold. This was released to the shops at a discount to encourage people to buy it. The thinking was that people would use the tomato sauce and return the empties to claim the money on the bottles.

This would have been alright if the department who were responsible for setting the price of the tomato sauce had been in contact with the department who set the price on the returned bottles. But they had no reason to, communism didn't work like that. The result was that there was more money offered for the return of a tomato sauce bottle than a new bottle of tomato sauce cost to buy in the first place. Poles used to spend an inordinate part of their lives looking for opportunities like this and it wasn't long before it was picked up by two resourceful students. These guys invested every penny they had in tomato sauce, tipped it down the drain and claimed the money back on the bottles. With the money, they bought more tomato sauce and on it went.

They went to other cities to obtain tomato sauce and did the same. They were lucky that it happened to be a product that wasn't in high demand and they didn't have much trouble in procuring the stuff. They made a lot of money in a very short space of time but the law caught up with them and took them to court where they were proved innocent of any crime and let off. These two guys had achieved hero status at the time of our visit.

Another one? OK.
This one is about shoes. Quotas were applied in various ways, sometimes your quota would have been related to using up materials (you'd have to process so many tons of, say, fabric) and sometimes it was on the number of units produced. For instance if the factory had an ample supply of the raw materials required, then it made sense to set the workers a quota on materials used rather than units produced.

A few years ago, shoppers in Warsaw found that there was a sudden shortage of regular sized shoes, and what shoes they were able to find, were for some reason, all in large sizes. People were saying "this is stupid, if they made small sizes as well, there would be more shoes to go around." The reason was that the quota system at the shoe factory had changed and the workers bonus, under this new plan, was paid on a materials used basis rather than the number of shoes produced. The easiest way to get rid of the most leather and fulfil their quota was to make the largest size shoes which they had machinery to cope with.

Getting the idea?
We used to come to Poland quite frequently and I gradually got used to it and didn't ask "why?" so often. It was cold when we arrived in Warsaw one year so we went out to buy me a singlet. We found a shop with stock (no mean feat) and I said that I'd like a singlet to fit me. I didn't know what size but I indicated that it was for me. The shop assistant handed me a singlet and a pair of underpants which I didn't need. The underpants were made for a giant, in fact it was a subject of great hilarity to Alicja and I because they were the biggest pair of underpants we'd ever set eyes on.

-No thanks, don't need underpants, I said.

-They come in sets, was the reply.

-Well the singlet is my size but both of us could get into the underpants, can I have a smaller pair of underpants, please.

-Sorry, that's the set, that's how they come, she said.

-Seriously, I said. -have you ever seen a human being with a shape like that?

-Do you want the stuff or don't you?

I took the set and I didn't question it because, by that time, I could work it out for myself. "Remember the brake drums", I said to myself - "yes, the quota, it will have something to do with the quota." Poles didn't think about these peculiarities, they knew. For them it was normal because they worked in these factories and were responsible for these cock ups. They had a lot of extremely funny jokes about it all.

Can you imagine it becoming normal to you? Of course not, but I'm sure that if anybody had spent six weeks working in a factory in Poland under the old system it would have rubbed off onto him so smoothly that he wouldn't have noticed it happening. The whole of the communist bloc operated on a work to rule basis and to them it was normal and nobody, used a grain of initiative in their jobs. If you did use your common sense and initiative, and something went wrong, you could have been blamed for it because everyone was interested only in covering their own backs and looking for someone else to blame all the time.

If you worked by the book and never deviated, and something went wrong, the guy who wrote the book was to blame and your own back was covered. The inevitable results of it were shortages of goods and long queues everywhere. In Russia shortly before the fall of communism, the workers in a shoe factory in Leningrad nailed 4,000 heels onto the wrong end of shoes because the instructions were wrong. They knew what they were doing and they knew they could get away with it and still stay within the specifications. The reasons for such a seemingly unthinking course of action were not specified in the newspaper which contained this information but one scenario, a fairly common one, could have been revenge. E.g. the guy who wrote the specifications could have covered his own back on a previous occasion by blaming the workers in the shoe factory for his own mistake, so by nailing the heels on to the front of the shoes, they could get back at him.

Sometimes workers used to work strictly according to the book with the express intention of stuffing up the system. It wasn't their system, they hated communism, and if their instructions were at all ambiguous and could be interpreted differently, they'd go ahead and produce an unusable product - a legal form of protest, a reminder which said "you haven't got us yet - we remember."

Poland, according to an article in The Financial Times, actually achieved a negative Gross Domestic Product in some years, because the value of some manufactured products was less than the value of the raw materials which went into them. I can quite believe it too because, harping back to a pet complaint, the quality of metal articles like screws and rivets manufactured in Poland is still so poor as to make a large percentage of them unusable and they end up being thrown away. It would seem to make more sense to throw the steel away in the first place and save on the costs incurred in the manufacturing process - then, import decent screws and rivets which won't have the effect of slowing down production in those factories which must make use of them.

The Poles suffered under other peoples systems for two hundred years except for a brief respite between the two World wars, when Poland was owned and run by the Poles. They have become consummate experts in stuffing up other peoples systems and now that free market forces operate in the country, people have to adjust to it and they're not finding it easy. The mentality of the whole population now has to change and become more positive. They will have to learn that this attitude is, in effect, like urinating in their own swimming pools. But who can blame them for having had this attitude so far? Whole generations, in fact most of the present day work force, were brought up under communism - born into it - and now somebody tells them it's all wrong.

But down on the farm it's the quality of the vodka that matters, not the screws. Vladeks father and his contemporaries, when they were first exiled to Bocwinka, found its barns and outhouses crammed with tools and agricultural machinery hidden from the Russians by the Germans. He told me that the only Germans he'd ever met were in army uniforms during the war but, he said, holding up a scythe blade for my perusal;-look at this metal, Poland still hasn't produced anything as good.