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?