Chapter 13

BEYOND THE PALESKI

Chapter 13

Bocwinka lies roughly midway between two lakes connected by a river which runs through our own land. Upstream from Bocwinka is Soltmany lake and downstream, Zywki lake. At Easter time when the snow melts, the Zywki lake fills up, due to a restriction at its outlet, and the water backs up along the river flooding the water meadows.

On Easter Sunday I got out of bed at about 7am and, as usual, the first thing I did was to pull the curtains back to check on the weather. After a week of fairly solid rain I was delighted to note that it was a sunny day. The view down the valley to the river had been a deciding factor in buying the house although, at the time, we didn't know that the view would be covered in snow for five months of the year. Now it was just as we'd seen it on our first visit, the cloudless blue sky above the ridge on the other side of the valley, a ribbon of alder and willow trees recently decked out with fresh new leaves following the line of the river banks, a few cows grazing at the top of the slope and......hey, wait a minute, who's that on our land.

Four men in gum boots, hands in pockets and heads bowed were paddling about in the flooded meadows. They were shuffling their feet as people do at markets when the haggling reaches an impasse, the way people kick the dust around before coming up with the next offer. I switched on the kettle and went to look for the binoculars but, remembering that Vladek hadn't returned them from the last time he borrowed them, I made a cup of tea and returned to the window. The four men were each walking off in different directions. I thought it strange but dismissed it from my mind until I went over to Vladek's that evening for the milk.

-Did you see some men walking around in our water meadows this morning?, I asked.

-Yes, I was one of them.

-What were you doing down there?

-szczupak Peter, it's Easter, this is szczupak time.

Szczupak is Polish for pike and I asked exactly what "pike time" meant knowing full well this would mean that I wouldn't get home for at least an hour, during which I'd be compelled to drink at least two cups of the foulest coffee known unto man.

Although this stuff bears a label designated "coffee" it's made from 10% coffee, 70% chicory, a sprinkling of wheat and barley and something which tastes uncannily like the smell you get when you put a chain saw through a tree with an ants nest in it. Mind you, the taste is the best part of it, the consistency is even worse. We called it True Grit because the particles in it refused to sink for ten minutes by which time it was cold and even more unpalatable. I always drank it hot through clenched teeth but even then I'd find annoying little granules in the remoter regions of my mouth for half an hour afterwards.

Vladek & Eva, of course, were unaware that there was any other sort of coffee to be had and once when they came to our house and we gave them German filter coffee they couldn't get over the taste but preferred to have it unfiltered the next time. So, I settled back in the armchair, True Grit in hand, and prepared myself to be educated on "pike time".

At Easter time, give or take a week, the pike make their way up and down river from the two lakes, to lay their eggs in the warm shallows of the water meadows. The pike prefer to deposit their eggs in the warmest, and therefore the shallowest, parts of the flooded meadows which makes them fairly easy prey to the villagers. However, the problem faced by the villagers is not so much one of catching the pike but of catching them unseen - it's not legal. It's a fairly sophisticated operation that starts with what I'd seen out of our bedroom window - a scouting party to see if the pike have arrived. Satisfied that they have, something like a Territorial Army operation begins.

There are the goodies, in the shape of the village farmers, and the baddies, in the shape of the rangers from the department of inland waterways & fisheries. Both sides have a clear objective; the goodies have to remove as many fish as possible from the river, the baddies have to catch the goodies in the act. It's a game that's been going on for more than twenty years and was started when the department of inland waterways & fisheries first discovered that the river in Bocwinka was a spawning ground and should therefore, come under it's protection.

Both sides play hard to win and the game is taken very seriously. But, like the Oxford & Cambridge boat race, the same side seems to win most years - the Bocwinka team. The department also sends it's scouting party for walks in the water meadows to determine the time when the game will commence. This is signalled by the arrival of an old 4 wheel drive van which parks on the road bridge, giving it's two occupants a clear view of the river both upstream and downstream.

Bocwinka's advance intelligence agent, Agnieszka "The Mole" Ropelska will by that time already have alerted Pani Zosia in the shop, who will have spread the word via the village information superhighway. Agnieszka is Pani Zosia's daughter and she works in town at the department of the baddies and keeps her ears open for information about when the rangers will begin their surveillance. The baddies all know that she's the village informant and the subject is never brought up in the office in front of her but she knows what's going on anyway because of the fact that they stop speaking in front of her just before the event.

Back in Bocwinka, after dark, look-outs are posted in the upstairs windows of two houses overlooking the road and the lads go to work laying their nets down at the river. The early warning system isn't terribly sophisticated; all that happens is that the look-outs switch their upstairs lights on if they see a car coming. And as there is only one road into and out of the village it works perfectly providing that the look-out isn't drunk.

During my first "pike time" there were four nets in the shallows, so well hidden that I only managed to find one of them in daylight. They were simply straight lines of netting strung across different parts of the meadow & tied to submerged stakes. In the same way that pheasants are beaten out of a thicket at a shoot, the fish are directed into the nets by three or four people walking abreast towards it. Two drainage ditches run from the meadows into the river and there they place a different type of net. These are ordinary fisherman's keep nets with a strip of netting sewn onto either side of the mouth so that when spread out, they cover the width of the ditches.

Of course, the men from the department look all over for the nets and sometimes find & confiscate them but it's impossible to point a finger at anybody. The rangers also keep a close eye on the villagers who are sometimes to be seen casually strolling through the meadows in gum boots, but in daylight, that's all they do -stroll. I was invited on one of these strolls and was asked if I'd like to bring Misha along although I couldn't quite make out the purpose, or why the lads made so much fuss of her as we walked down towards the river. The strategy had been well worked out before I was invited to take part. They split into two groups, one each side of the net. Then, in chorus, the lads on the opposing side of the net all started to call Misha who splashed towards them. And, unbeknown to me, drove the pike before her.

To them, I must have seemed remarkably thick - I was the only person during this walk in the water who didn't know what he was there for - I still hadn't seen the net. Suddenly, out of a clump of alder trees emerged a man in an official looking hat and expensive, green gum boots.

-OK, what are you lot up to, said the green booted official.

-We're taking this man's dog for a walk in his own meadow, replied Marian. -He's a foreigner and he lives in that white house up there and this is his land and he wants to know why you're trespassing on it.

There was nothing the man could do except check to see that the dog was registered (which it was) and we kept on strolling for another 10 minutes before returning to our homes. Although the fish are driven into the nets during daylight hours they can only be taken under the cover of darkness so, in daylight, poaching by another method takes place. The modus operandi is to hide in the trees with a home made harpoon cut from the forest and simply spear the fish as they spawn in a foot of water where their mobility is impaired by the meadow grass. This though, is a one man operation simply because there is only one pair of wading boots in the village and they all take it in turns to wear them. I once saw the village wading boots being repaired, they were of the poorest quality Russian manufacture and had 13 pieces of bicycle inner tube vulcanised over the rips and tears.

But to get back to Vladek, Eva and the second cup of True Grit - there in their lounge room I was regaled with tales of pike times past and what struck me as funny was that the goodies and baddies all knew each other, in some cases went to school with each other. The stories were mostly of midnight chases somewhat reminiscent of the partisans fighting the Nazis. The men from the department have the advantage in that they have strong torches and once the beam picks out one of the farmers, the chase is on to head him off before he gets home because he'll already be in bed when the torch light shines through the window.

If any of his mates can get to his house first they'll let his dogs off the chain and delay the baddies by accusing them of wandering around the village at night with intent to steal. Another ruse used is for someone other than the fugitive to switch on his kitchen light for a couple of minutes. This sometimes causes the pursuers to think that their man has just reached home (the wrong home) and upon arrival at the door they're greeted by a perfectly dry farmer rather than the soggy, out of breath peasant they've been looking for.

It all sounded like tremendous fun to me and I asked Vladek if I could accompany the party on the next night time campaign and he agreed. However, after he'd consulted with the lads he reported back to me that they'd talked about it and, although I must understand there was nothing personal about their decision, they didn't want me along because they didn't think I could run fast enough in gum boots and I didn't know any hiding places. I was though, honoured with the position of look-out from our upstairs windows. A decision arrived at because the previous year, one of the look-outs fell asleep after consuming a half bottle of vodka and, as a result, caused a few men to have to run faster than they would have liked.

I was also mentioned in dispatches in the smokehouse and a toast was drunk to "The Anglik". Every household, including ours, has a smoker which consists of an earth tunnel at the end of which is an oil drum with a lid on it. The fish, eels or meat are hung from fencing wire in the oil drum and wood shavings lit at the tunnel entrance. These are for the use of individual families but two farms have underground root cellars with large smokers. It was in one of these that all the men involved in the pike catching gathered together, smoked their fish and drunk copious quantities of vodka.

-To the best fucking milk tanker driver in Bocwinka, shouted Zenek and they all downed another glass - and so it went on. I went home and left them to it.

That Easter, the joint village effort brought in 37 pike and an assortment of smaller fish over four nights. The heaviest weighed in at a little over 24 lb although the majority were around the 4 lb mark and I was shown the preserved head of one pike from twelve years ago which, I was assured, had weighed over 35 lb. Two things impressed me about the whole episode: one being that they were sensible enough not to have taken all the available pike because they recognised that they would have to leave some to breed in the coming years. And the second being that after the pike were cured, they sent fish around to a couple of widows and families whose men were too old to have taken part in the event but were of the generation who had taught these guys to catch the pike years ago.

April saw the first wedding of the year in our little community, in fact the first wedding either of us had seen in Poland. The bridegroom's name was Piotr and he was a well dressed, clean cut city boy from Warsaw - when he arrived - that is. By the time he left however, his parents would have had difficulty in recognising him. He came to Bocwinka to marry Alexandra, a girl who was born just across the valley from us. We'd never seen either of them before, as Alexandra lives in Warsaw where she studies biology at the Polytechnic and it was there that she met Piotr.

They are both of Ukrainian descent and came to be married in the local Ukrainian church and spend their honeymoon in the village where Alexandra was born. The party went on for 6 days and hardly a stroke of work was done in the whole of Bocwinka during that time. The couple arrived two days before the event in a shiny, new red Mazda and came around to see us about accommodating some of the wedding party who would be coming the next day and had nowhere to sleep. We agreed, although not relishing the thought of a crowd of drunken party goers staying in the house & sleeping 6 to a room.

The first thing we did was to move most of the breakable objects up to the attic and change the layout of the furniture so that there would be fewer objects for them to bump into when they returned drunk in the early hours. We searched the linen cupboard for old towels and tablecloths to put over the mattresses, just in case, and hid all the booze in the shed. Our guests arrived on the Friday evening and we were more than a little surprised at the standard of both the people and the cars they arrived in. They were immaculately turned out in the very latest gear and with four cars so exclusive that when the owners were out of the way I took a photograph of the house with the fleet in the foreground and used it as our publicity shot.

We showed them around the house and they all liked it and complimented us on the colour of the kitchen tiles, the choice of wood we'd used for the floors and so forth and one of the men produced a video camera and filmed the whole place. At 4pm on Saturday the wedding party left the village and at 6pm they returned from the church and drove up the lane as far as our house where they were stopped, in what we were told was the traditional Ukrainian fashion, by the rest of the village.

The children, dressed in their best clothes, were all lined up at the sides of the road as far as a table which blocked the way and had upon it a loaf of bread and a saucer of salt. The bride & groom were in the first car and were expected to partake of the bread and salt and, in gratitude, hand over a bottle of vodka. A problem arose - they didn't have a bottle of vodka and the self appointed reception committee weren't going to let them past until they'd paid up.

An argument developed during which it was revealed that the groom didn't drink and didn't know or care a hoot about Ukrainian traditions and his new in laws were derided by the Ukrainian & Polish factions alike for letting their daughter marry a city slicker. The argument raged for some 20 minutes and ended up in a total boycott of the reception by the village population - although the lure of free vodka brought everyone back together again on the Sunday.

Meanwhile, in the lane outside our house, the argument was still blazing and ended with the wedding party all backing their cars down the lane and going home (the reception was held in the barn) by another route. Insults were hurled after them all and remarks were made concerning the bridegrooms gender and legitimacy- even the Polish faction were up in arms about his ignorance of Ukrainian tradition. Around noon on Sunday, the groom's brother who was staying at our place, turned up with a couple of broken toes which he got from kicking a table leg during a football match involving a balloon at the reception the night before.

We ran him into the hospital in Gizycko where we had to wait three hours for him to be attended to and then had to chase around Bocwinka to see who had the village crutches. In payment for services rendered Alexandra's mother came to the house and presented us with a live chicken. The bride's father had gone to much expense for his daughter's wedding, buying in and slaughtering a cow and 2 pigs and he had also purchased a quantity of live chickens to be on hand should they run out of meat.

We didn't quite know what to do with the chicken and we didn't want to appear ungrateful so we accepted it and I held it upside down by the legs until Alexandra's mum had gone. I put it in a sack to keep it quiet and after dark we sneaked out with it in the car and drove around several villages looking for a suitable home and new family for it. The trouble was that we'd forgotten that chickens don't roam around the streets at night and there wasn't another chicken in sight.

I wanted to release it in the first field we came to but Alicja was scared that a fox would get it and so we drove around for ages before we saw a brand new chicken coop next to the road in the village of Soltmany and I threw the chicken over the fence. On Monday we were woken by Misha's bark and, opening the door, we were greeted by the new groom and his new mother in law who explained that Piotr had been bitten by their dog on the day of his arrival and the wound had now turned septic. As all the car owners present in the village were either drunk, partly drunk or suffering, she asked if I would be kind enough to take another trip to the hospital, adding that I could use Piotr's car.

We had to go to Gizycko anyway to do some shopping and we dropped him off at the hospital arranging to pick him up a couple of hours later. But when we turned up to collect him we were told that he'd already left. We searched the whole town for him and ended up at the pizza bar opposite the railway station where we sat drinking tea and wondering where to look next.

Alicja saw him first. -There he is, that's him over there on the platform.

I looked across the road and sure enough there he stood as if waiting for a train and I left my cup of tea and went over to him. He was distraught and I couldn't understand him and so beckoned Alicja to join us. He told Alicja he was going home and never coming back. He didn't like his new in laws, Bocwinka, or the drunken load of bums who lived there and we found ourselves acting as marriage guidance counselors to one half of a marriage which was only 3 days old. With much coaxing Alicja eventually managed to get him to come home with us, although against his better judgement, and for the day's effort we received another live chicken which we disposed of that night by the method previously employed.

We didn't know it but while we were at the railway station the ambulance had been in Bocwinka and had taken Alexandra, Piotr's bride, and two other wedding guests to the same hospital with stomach cramps. Piotr came around to the house in the evening to once more cry on Alicja's shoulder. He carried on at length about his guilt feelings, for being so insensitive, thinking only of himself while his dear Alexandra was suffering and he ended up sleeping at our place. The next afternoon, Tuesday, I drove Piotr into town in his car to pick up Alexandra and received from her mother - another sodding chicken! I took another short drive to Soltmany that night and threw it over the fence to join its friends.

It wasn't long after this that a fire broke out in one of the barns in the village and everyone, including Piotr, turned out to lend a hand with the fire fighting. Poor Piotr was standing just outside the barn door with a full bucket of water waiting to hand it up the ladder to Bogdan, when he was struck on the head with an empty bucket thrown down from upstairs. The blow, which I suspect was deliberate, rendered him unconscious, and when he came round a few minutes later he found himself laying in the manure heap where he'd been placed as a joke by those who he'd been silly enough to argue with on his wedding night.

His back was covered in the stuff and I took him home in the car wearing only his underpants - the rest of his clothes, I insisted, went into the boot. Alicja stuck a plaster over the cut in his forehead, put his clothes in soak and I leant him a pair of my overalls. We then sent him back to his in-law's house with strict instructions not to return with a chicken. In due course we received a parcel from Warsaw containing my laundered overalls and a small present for the house together with a letter thanking us for all our help and inviting us to stay with Piotr & Alexandra next time we visited the capital.

A fortnight or so after the wedding a man from Soltmany came to the gate and told us that he wanted to sell his house. He'd heard that we were wealthy and thought we might be interested in buying it. I told him that we weren't in the market for another house and he left. When he'd gone I heard Eva calling me and went over to the fence to see what she wanted.

-What did he want? she said.

-He's trying to sell me his house.

-Did he tell you about his chickens?

-No, what chickens?

-He's got these chickens over in Soltmany and he reckons that every week God sends him another one. He tells everybody about it.

-What? God sends him another chicken? A big one or a small one?

-We don't think it's true Peter. It's true that he's got more chickens than he started off with but everybody's saying that he goes out at night and steals them and then tells everyone he gets them from God.

-Is he very religious then Eva?

-He didn't used to be but he is now.

We'd been out with the dog one evening and when we got to the other side of the valley we could see that a car had pulled into our drive. I looked at it through the binoculars and saw that the registration wasn't Polish so, thinking that we might get a booking for the house, we hurried back home arriving breathless. A German couple in their mid thirties were standing at the gate and the wife, who spoke English, said that they'd come to ask us a few questions about the area. We asked them in for a drink and asked how we could help them. Her mother had been born over sixty years ago in Jeziorowskie, a village close by, and they had visited the house two years ago and met the Polish family who now lived in it.

They had recently visited the family again and found that the house was for sale and they wanted to buy it for use as a holiday home but they knew that, not being Polish, they couldn't legally own it. They had heard that we were foreigners and so came to see us hoping that we could advise them on the legal aspects of leasing the place. We couldn't help them with their problems but during our conversation she told us that her late father was born somewhere not far away, also in village. She couldn't remember the name of the place (and it would have been changed to a Polish name anyway) but she remembered that he had said there was a pyramid there. I quizzed her about this pyramid but she couldn't remember anything other than that her father had mentioned that it was a spooky place and that, as a child, he had been scared to go close to it.

The subject had me intrigued and I determined to find out as much as I could about it and let her know if I came up with anything. Over the coming weeks Alicja wrote letters to historical societies asking about it but to no avail. I asked everyone we knew if they'd heard of a village with a pyramid but all it got me was strange looks and I gave up. History in our area, as far as Poland is concerned, started after World War Two and anything prior to this was known only to the Germans. I was surprised when, a few weeks after speaking to the German couple in our house, I received a letter from them telling me the name old German name of the village. With this information I was able to quite easily find the Polish name and, with the help of a detailed military map, find its location. It was only twenty minutes drive from Bocwinka and was called Zabin.

I found Zabin without a problem but I drove through it three times without finding any sign of a pyramid so I stopped at the village bus stop where three teenage boys were sitting. I asked them if they knew if there was a pyramid in the village but they just looked at me with blank expressions. Alicja had already told me how to pronounce pyramid in Polish before I left the house so I knew I was asking for the right thing - just not getting through. I asked the kids again saying that it might not be in the village but near the village, but again I was met with blank stares so I got out of the car and drew a picture of a pyramid. This time there was a reaction but I couldn't tell exactly of what kind. So far they hadn't said a word to me but now, they seemed to go even quieter as though I'd asked for something they weren't allowed to discuss.

I pointed to my drawing and said -where this? where this?, at which point one of them opened his mouth and said to the other two,-vamper. It was a word I wasn't familiar with but I picked up on it and pointing to the drawing again said -this is vamper? One of them seemed to nod and so, not being able to get any further with them, I got back in the car and went looking for someone else to ask. Two old women walking along the pavement didn't know what I was on about but I saw a man outside the shop and showed him my drawing and he, at least smiled. I asked him if he knew where there was a pyramid and added, for good measure the word vamper which the kids had used. He looked up at me with eyebrows raised thoughtfully, rummaged around in his pocket and produced a pencil with which he drew me a map with a triangle to illustrate the pyramid. I thanked him and started the car but he put his hand on the door and came closer.

-Why do you want to go there?

-Just interested.

-Be careful, he said.

I thanked him and drove off following the map he'd drawn. Just outside the village the road went through forest and quite suddenly I came across a gap in the trees, a straight line cut long ago and now overgrown. At the end of the gap, some three hundred metres from the road, was my pyramid. I could see that it wasn't a classical pyramid shape but more slender, almost like a squat church spire and it was set on top of a big square box of a building about four metres high. I stepped off the road and went straight away up to my knees in mud. The whole of the immediate area surrounding the pyramid was swampy and I thought that vamper probably meant swamp or bog in Polish.

I tried to get to it through the forest from all directions, eventually finding a way that was reasonably solid underfoot, and I stood under it looking up at the "spire". From a patch where the outer plaster covering had come away I could see that it was built of bricks and that there had once been windows and a big double door in the box like part at the bottom, but they had been bricked up. I walked around it and on one side somebody had knocked a few bricks out of one of the bricked up windows and I climbed up to it and looked in. It was dark but I could see the floor directly under the window and so I climbed through it. I moved a couple of paces forward and took my cigarette lighter out of my pocket and lit it.

On my right was an open coffin with a headless body in it, not a skeleton but a dead body. I moved to the left and there was another one. It suddenly came to my mind that the word the kids and the old man had said to me wasn't vamper but vampir - Polish for vampire. Now, I don't believe in vampires, never have. But I do believe in fear and the next thing I remember is being outside again leaning against a tree with the noise of my heart banging in my head and throat. I took a couple of photographs from the outside of the building and hurried home.

That night I went to see Ryszard and Halina and told them what I'd seen and Ryszard agreed to accompany me back to the pyramid the next afternoon. We took a torch and gum boots and Alicja's instant camera, as it had an inbuilt flash, and set out. We re-traced my steps of the previous day until we arrived at the hole in the side of the pyramid where I handed Ryszard a torch and told him to look inside. He took one look, stepped back and leaned against the wall shaking. I took back the torch and looked in. There were three coffins visible each with the lid off and each contained a headless body, but on closer inspection they seemed to be dried out. When we eventually plucked up enough courage to go inside we saw that there were four closed coffins and four minus the lids. Three adults lay in the open topped coffins and the fourth contained the body of a small child.

They were all obviously very old, perhaps hundreds of years, but their skin hadn't decomposed, instead, it had turned to hard leather and where it had drawn back from the finger nails it did indeed give the hands a vampire like appearance. Once outside again Ryszard and I took stock of the situation. The pyramid was located in swampy ground and the trees around it were alder trees which thrive in wet conditions and the pyramid had moss growing on the outside of it. Everything seemed to say that the bodies in the coffins should have decomposed very quickly but even the coffins were so dry that they were turning to powder.

I thought we'd found something unique that the Polish equivalent of the National Trust would have been vitally interested in but when we returned home, nobody, including the local newspaper, displayed the slightest interest in it. We were not the first people to have come across it in recent years, as evidenced by the hole in the wall, but nobody we contacted had ever heard of it or wanted to know about it. Months later Ryszard managed to locate a newspaper article on the subject written years beforehand. It said that it had been built by a Fritz von Farenheid in 1811 as a family tomb when his 11 year old daughter died. Fritz von Farenheid had spent some time in Egypt where he had made a study of one of the pyramids and he had designed the family tomb himself.

At that time, however, the family lived over one hundred kilometres from the site and no reason was given in the article for it's being positioned where it is. The journalist also went on to say that it's alignment to the sun is the same as that of the great pyramid of Cheops and that it is positioned on ley lines. The heads of the corpses were said locally to have been kicked around and lost by Russian soldiers who also threw the bodies out of the pyramid but which were rescued by the villagers and returned to their coffins.

I wondered what happened to the von Farenheid family, perhaps they all perished in the war? But it did seem strange to me that being born in England, I'd always looked upon Australia as being short on history. In the middle of Europe however, I was now living in a place where history only began fifty years beforehand.