A Chip Shop in Poznań Read online

  For my parents, who got me going.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 We are here to go somewhere else

  2 What’s the point having a home if it means nothing to you?

  3 Love is blind

  4 The city doesn’t shut up

  5 They wouldn’t leave if they didn’t have to

  6 Was your mother happier under communism? (Katowice)

  7 Sure there was equality. Everyone was screwed

  8 What would you say if I said that I often think about kissing you?

  9 Do you want to go to Gdańsk?

  10 I’d rather be a man of the world than a man of merely England

  11 Do you want a job making fish and chips?

  12 I said nothing at all

  13 The morning of Britain’s detachment (London)

  14 I just don’t want any more to come (Boston)

  15 An important day for the whole country

  16 I love Others. I am one, for heaven’s sake

  17 About lechery

  18 I miss the bus to Auschwitz (Wrocław)

  19 I don’t know the colour of my father’s eyes

  20 It won’t be an ordinary shift

  21 What do the Polish do at the seaside? (Sopot)

  22 It’s funny where hearts end up

  23 My chip shop swansong

  24 The Manchester of Poland (Łódź)

  25 What time are the ambulances?

  26 I go to Harlow because a Polish man was killed there

  27 I wake up to snow and President Trump (Lublin)

  28 Everything is in the east if you keep going long enough

  29 Skiing is like peeling potatoes (Jelenia Gora)

  30 In you come

  31 You were never hungry. So be quiet (Konin)

  32 The thing is, I’m not a Catholic (Krakow)

  33 I suppose it depends how you look at it

  34 And to think I almost died getting here

  35 It’s okay because you can live with me and become a farmer

  36 A thirteen-mile souvenir

  37 The thing is to go, really, is to have gone, is to have been elsewhere

  38 We must be coming to the end of Poland (Cologne)

  39 I want to see the European Union

  40 And where are you going now?

  Acknowledgements

  Permissions

  Copyright

  1

  We are here to go somewhere else

  8 March 2016. I decided to move to Poland in the sauna. It seemed sensible. I had seen Poles in Peterborough and Portsmouth and the Cotswolds and I had followed the conversation about whether there were too many in the UK or too few, whether they were doing all the work or none at all. I wanted to know why the Poles – a notoriously patriotic people – were leaving home in their millions. I am also contrary by nature and design, so the idea of going the other way, of being a British immigrant in Poland, was appealing. Also appealing was the idea of being elsewhere. I had grown tired of Great Britain. Its comforts were a pain. Its nice routines were doing nothing for me. I wanted to be alone and abroad and innocent and curious, to have my character reset, my faults unknown, to find stories in buildings, stories in people, to be childish once more, to be again at the beginning. Moving to Poland is not the only way to deal with a case of itchy feet. I might have moved to the Falkland Islands. But if Britain chooses to leave the European Union in three months’ time (a referendum is in the diary) my freedom to move and work and love and learn in twenty-odd countries will be irrevocably lost. Make hay while the sun shines.

  Four days after the sauna I flew to Poznań. I chose Poznań because I had never heard of the place and it was the cheapest flight. I didn’t want to move to Warsaw or Krakow, where there would be plenty of English speakers. I’d had enough of those. A friend had been on a stag do in Krakow. He was able to consume things that were pronounceable, to take trams and taxis in the right direction, to convince a pair of police officers he had no idea throwing kebab meat at the statue of a Nobel Prize winner wasn’t de rigueur. (Despite all their practice, the British don’t travel well.) He did all these things in English, of course. Polish wasn’t necessary to get by. I didn’t want that cushion. If I was caught throwing fast food at a national treasure, I would like to defend myself in the local tongue. It would show respect. In short, I wanted to feel that I was fully elsewhere. I wanted to be an alien. ‘We are here to go somewhere else,’ said the writer Geoff Dyer.

  Eastern Energy, Western Style it says in baggage reclaim. What does that even mean? Is Poland on the fence? Is it caught in two minds? Poland was a communist country for 50 years until the early 90s, under the thumb of Russia. It was forced to look east. But now what? I don’t have anything to reclaim – or claim for that matter – so spend time in front of touchscreen info-points that issue warnings and invitations. The city is its brands, says the screen, before showing a list of popular retailers. West, indeed.

  On the 59 bus I see international brands like old foes, with their inevitable flags and packaging, then a World Trade Centre, squat and beige and laughably low-key, a mile shorter than the one that famously fell. Then endless residential blocks in lime and butter, mint and pink, colour an apology for form, stubbornly stretching along Bukowska Street. The bus’s upholstery and layout and adverts beg questions. Simple things, suddenly odd. There is nothing remarkable about the bus or the journey, and yet I am transfixed. A slideshow of paintings by Delacroix and Hockney, of peasants and swimming pools, couldn’t hold my attention more tightly. And so it starts, I think, the endless enquiries of the uprooted, the keen eyes of the replaced. I am delighted to feel the questions come on, after months of stale thinking at home, that well-loved place that I often long for, but more often long to betray. Oikophobia is a chronic inclination to leave home. I’m a first-class oik. Home is Clive Road, Portsmouth, England, Britain. Portsmouth was built to build ships that no longer need building. Charles Dickens was born there but moved to London when he was five, already tired of the place. The football club and the sea give people something to look at. That’s all you need to know about home.

  If ignorance is bliss then I’m in for a good time. I know absolutely nobody in Poland and know nothing of the language. Is it the Roman alphabet? Is there even an alphabet? Perhaps the alphabet was destroyed in the war, along with the rest of the country. In any case, moving to Poland will be rejuvenating. If I work hard over the next year, I’ll be able to speak Polish as well as a three year old. The idea appeals to me. Three year olds are some of the happiest people I know. My niece is three. She’s ecstatic. She gets a thrill out of the simplest of things, like waking up or tying her laces. Maybe being effectively three won’t be such a bad thing. Maybe it will teach me a few things. There is much said or written about travel improving or stretching a person. ‘Didn’t she grow!’ they say. Less is said of travel reducing a person, infantilising them, making a child of them, and how it does them a service thereby.

  Even an innocent needs to break the ice. I had bought a phrase book at the airport in London, had committed a few phrases to heart over Germany. By the time I landed I knew how to say ‘I love you’, that I am ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, that something is ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’. I would live a binary existence, a yes-or-no lifestyle (not unfashionable these days), surely preferable to a life on the fence, to considering all things alright. It would be liberating to leave such a linguistic centre-ground, such a diplomatic no man’s land. I look forward to tapping a stranger on the shoulder and pointing to a child riding a bike for the first time and saying, ‘That is not ugly, I love you.’

  The bus terminates outside Planet Alcohol and Mr Kebab. Scanning
around for bearings, it is apparent that Polish words are longer than average. Most look like Wi-Fi passwords, anagrams to be unscrambled, encryptions to be cracked. No wonder that a lot of the groundwork for the Enigma codebreaking machine was done by Poles. Untangling is in the genes. One of the reasons that Poland’s economy is notoriously sluggish, I would like to think, is because everyone is staring at memos and instructions and agendas and emails wondering what on God’s earth is meant by them.1 There is no two ways about it, it will be a hard language to learn. Not only must I learn new letters – e and a and o and s and c have alternatives that are accessorised with tails and fringes – but I must also contend with familiar letters arranged in new ways, with the result that when one finds oneself in front of a door, and is invited to pchać, one doesn’t know whether to push or pull. Moreover, faced with such an impassable door, such a language barrier, one is unable to ask a passer-by to clarify the situation, for their instruction – ‘Push it and see, you immigrant!’ – is bound to be equally senseless. An alien in Poland, therefore, can reliably be found stranded before some portal or another, wishing (in English) that it were automated.

  I check in at a hotel on Freedom Square then go to a nearby information point. The women at the information point can’t answer my questions about registration, health insurance, benefits. They don’t seem able to deal with someone long-term. ‘But when are you going home?’ they ask. ‘When does your holiday end?’ What they can tell me is where a bank is. I go there for a short interview, during which I’m offered coffee and a translator. If this is the face of Polish bureaucracy, it’s a face I could get used to. It wasn’t always thus. Michael Moran was not offered coffee. By his account – A Country in the Moon, which remembers the author’s time helping Poland convert to capitalism in the early 90s – it took Michael seven months to post a letter. ‘A country in the moon’ refers to a remark made by Edmund Burke at the end of the 18th century, when Poland was taken off the map by Austria and Russia and Prussia, and then put on the moon, where it remained until 1919. It was an extraordinary historical circumstance, an exceptional vanishing act, a momentous dislocation. I bet the Polish people remember the moon days keenly.

  9 March. I eat dumplings in a park near the hotel. They are either ugly or beautiful, I can’t decide. The park is named after Chopin. There is a bust of the composer on a flint pedestal. An ear is missing. A team of high-brow pigeons have had it for lunch. I think of that poem by Shelley or Byron about Ozymandias, about legacy and mortality, and wonder if Chopin wrote music in order to be remembered, to be set in stone and planted in a park where students come to snack and slumber. I can be glib about motives. I can say I came to Poland because the flight was cheap and I fancied a change. My fundamental motives are less glib. To write a book, to write anything, is an attempt to be less dead. I move and write because those things are essential to me. I could go without many things in life – toast, sex, Canada – but I don’t think I could go without travel and words.

  Being of working-class stock, I am drawn to a bar called Proletariat. I shan’t tell you the street name because if I did you’d accuse me of using difficult words for the sake of it. The barman must have seen me outside looking at the door and wondering what to do with it, for he issues an English menu before I’ve chance to say anything. The bar is decorated with busts of Lenin and Chairman Mao, portraits of Marx and Engels and Russell Brand, whose recent book Revolution has inspired a million people to stop reading books. I would like to think that the talk at neighbouring tables is of revolting peasants and meaningful social change, but I suspect it isn’t. It is a young crowd, affluent looking. They don’t seem the revolting type. What they do seem is eager to be branded – New Balance trainers are part of the youthful uniform. They cost the same as they would in the UK, 350 zloty a pair, about £70. To earn that sum here one must work a low-wage job for a week, the minimum wage being roughly 8 zloty. I am starting to understand what was meant by Western Style, Eastern Energy. Poles must work thrice the hours to wear the same trainers. The iron curtain was drawn back and onto the stage came a company of trademarks, each ready to impress, to make their mark.

  I find the old market square, faithfully repaired after being squashed in the war. I don’t try to put my finger on the buildings – to label the gables, spot the styles. The buildings may bear signs of stucco or rococo or art nouveau but what of it? The beauty of this old square is too obvious to invite further analysis. The detail is beside the point. How is it beautiful? is not a question we often ask or answer. At any rate, I am invited by a girl with a red umbrella to watch 22 beautiful girls at Euphoria. But it is only the afternoon, I point out. That is not a problem, she says. The girls don’t mind. Desire doesn’t rest. I can drink a coffee or tea if I wish. Twenty-two, she repeats, as if one either side would make all the difference.

  I resist Euphoria, enter a pub called The Londoner, already attracted to the idea of return. I sit with an imported ale, beneath images of Big Ben and Tower Bridge, mounted encouragements to try Kilkenny, to give London Pride a go. I’ve never been anywhere like it. I ask a young man if he speaks English. Of course, he says. I ask an old man if he speaks English. He just points out the window. Outside the bar, beneath the ornate clock tower of the town hall, I talk with Alfie from Norway and Emre from Turkey. They insist I get out of the hotel and move into their hostel, where I can mix with internationals and speak in English. I don’t want that, I explain. I want to get the wrong end of the stick. I want the quiet and disquiet. I want to speak in black and white. I want to see things starkly. I want not to know.

  I want to see Citadel Park, where a battle was fought at the end of a war. Once seized, Hitler designated the citadel a festung: a crucial fortification to be defended at all costs. Thousands perished fighting over it. I seek the park at dusk, find it at length and enter by a hundred steps, at the summit of which stands an overwhelming memorial, a testament to disaster, to a Europe at odds. I want to locate the headless people – a mindless sculpture that remembers those taken by war – but find only tanks, perhaps the very ones that blew off the heads. I clamber onto one of the tanks and enjoy sitting astride a lethal snout and watching my breath. I cross the park alone. Occasional couples on benches pause their conversations until I’m once more out of their lives. I fear the subject of their talk is of a serious nature. Why else would they come out here in dark winter to talk?

  At the end of the day, I have not done enough. I do not know how to describe the architecture, the habits of the people, the colour of the eyes, the history of the city, the political situation. I have formed an impression but little more. Too much of Poland has gone over my head, when I might have reached up, intercepted it, pulled it down to my level. I’m supposed to be inquisitive. I have read some of Moran’s book and some Norman Davies and their grave erudition makes a fool of me.2 These chaps were serious gringos, serious fish out of water. Neither of that pair would miss the hotel breakfast. They would have it at 7.00 and then go to an early service at the Franciscan Church to get a look at the devoted, before strolling around town as the shops started to open. I have not seen either of the castles. I have not entered a museum or gallery. I have not taken a photograph. I have not seen the goats that are supposed to emerge each day at noon from the clock tower. I have asked few questions of people and the questions I have asked have tended to be vague and boring. Do you live here? What’s that? What time are the goats? Instead of seeing things and forming opinions and asking questions, I have drunk and smoked liberally. Such are my thoughts on this, my second Polish night, just before bed.

  10 March. I’m woken by the sound of a crowd protesting in the square onto which my hotel room looks. I open the window, ready to remonstrate, to tell them to put a sock in it. An angry Pole is blasting something through a megaphone about the cost of lemons or the recent visit of David Cameron.3 I have missed the hotel breakfast. My nose is out of joint. I have a hangover. It is midday. Oh, wouldn’t they just be quiet! But
then I remember that I have an interest in the welfare of all people, no matter their nationality or class or colour, and no matter the time of day or the extent of my headache. And so I put myself in the shower, experiment vainly with the vanity pack, then dress in the clothes of an ordinary person to go and inquire about the disquiet of ordinary people, and perhaps lend a hand.

  The thousand-strong throng is arranged on Freedom Square, outside the neo-classical library. I approach a young couple to ask what all the fuss is about. Tessa tells me in perfect English that the protest has to do with the newish, right-wing, ultra-Catholic government, which has been ignoring the country’s constitution on a daily basis in an effort to destroy liberty and antagonise the EU and thwart a Russian invasion and bring back slavery and deport all non-Catholics and make it illegal not to have one’s forehead or forearm (whichever is more spacious) branded with the Polish eagle. Phew. I look forward to hearing the other side of the story, I say. There isn’t one, says Tessa.

  I am introduced to Tessa’s father, who sounds like the headmaster of an English boarding school, and then her mother, who doesn’t. They are all going for pizza to discuss the general folly of the government. I am told to come along. I do as I’m told and I’m glad for the fact because before Tessa’s parents are halfway through their pizza, and despite the fact that I have barely said a word and am quite obviously hungover, I have been offered a teaching position at the school they run. It turns out they need someone to stand in a room of Polish eight year olds four times a week and say things in English. Can I manage that? Can I start on Monday?

  ‘But I’ve got no experience.’

  ‘Irrelevant.’

  ‘And I’m not very good with kids.’

  ‘Irrelevant.’

  ‘And I’m not very well behaved.’