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.