When this family took out their lunch they offered me some sandwiches and fruit, and so I broke out one of my bottles of amontillado and we drank it together.
"Mongolia's so far away," Ewa said. And then it sounded as though she were saying to Woityek, "He's going all the way to Mongolia on the train!"
"They came here once, you know — the Mongols."
Battle of Liegnitz (1241), about eighty miles south of here: we had just stopped at Zbaszynek. The Mongols annihilated a combined army of Germans and Poles.
"Everyone came here," Ewa said. "That's why Poland is such a mess."
On the station platform, two fat, white-faced workmen slathered brown paint on an iron bench. The paint dripped and ran, and when they painted the feet of the bench they slopped paint on the platform. Some Poles watched disapprovingly but said nothing. They wore snap-brim hats and carried plastic briefcases. Most Poles seemed overweight; they talked constantly about food and food shortages — but that wasn't odd. Food is a frequent topic with fatties. They wore old clothes and had sour bready breath and lived in pockmarked houses.
Ewa and her mother and child got out at Poznan to catch the train for Katowice, but gave me their address.
"Send us a postcard from Mongolia…"
We were delayed in Konin. That was convenient. I could write without my arm being jogged. I wrote: In brown April, in Poland, it looks as though spring will never come — bare trees, dead grass like rags, cold winds, rubbly earth, apartments plastered with wet washing, furrowed fields with nothing sprouting, a man plowing with one skinny horse, men shoveling dust, muddy creeks and ditches, a plastic bag jammed on a stick to scare birds; such monotony… But this is the view in April, when things in Poland look so bleak that even the ducks seem to be drowning, and the chickens are frantic. In a month or so, things will be different: spring will come, the whole country will be in bloom. Yet it still seems an awful fate to be a Pole.
It seemed to me, as we set off again, that the only really interesting buildings were the churches — the only ones with curves, at any rate. The rest were all right angles and had flat roofs.
The landscape brightened in the environs of Sochaczew — patches of woods, better houses, birch groves — but the struggle continued. People labored everywhere, doing clumsy jobs, shoveling, breaking rocks, chopping wood. All the work looked very hard, and Poland seemed like a glimpse of the past.
Catholicism is obvious, not only in the churches, and the rosaries people wear around their necks, and the way they bless themselves before the train starts; but also in the statuary. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary forty feet high, on an eight-foot pedestal, on the forecourt of the railway station at Szymann. That was something I had never seen in Italy or Spain, or even in Ireland, which claimed the Blessed Virgin as the Queen of Ireland. There were more Virgin Marys on pedestals in bean fields, and in the distance, beyond the man plowing, was always a Virgin Mary.
They served a devotional purpose, and it was possible they were useful in scaring birds, but I felt there was yet another motive in their ubiquity. They were the classic Our Lady of Fatima statues, and what the commissars didn't know — but something every Catholic learns early — is that the message Mary gave to the three little children at Fatima in Portugal, in 1917, was that if they prayed very hard, Russia was going to be converted from atheistic communism to Catholicism. "And now we will pray for the conversion of Russia," priests announced throughout the fifties, all over America.
That's what this statue represents to most Catholics and probably to all Poles: the Mother of God at her most political.
I had finished Elmer Gantry and given it five stars, and now I was reading Balzac's Old Goriot. A Polish proverb was quoted in that book: "Hitch five oxen to your cart" — meaning take precautions so that nothing can go wrong. But reading this in Poland seemed very odd. There were no oxen at all, and the carts were rickety things. I spent an entire day traveling slowly through western Poland, almost 300 miles, from the East German border to Warsaw. I did not see any mechanized farming at all and not a single tractor. Instead, I saw the picturesque hopelessness of the farmer gently whipping his horse as the poor beast struggled with an old plowshare.
"It doesn't look too bad," Ellen Wittrick said, raising her eyes to Warsaw for the first time. The late-afternoon sun had gilded the facades of the narrow buildings on Jerozolomskie and given that whole block the look of Harrods.
"Get me out of here," Millie Westbetter whispered to Rick, who replied, "Take it easy, honey. We'll be back on the train tomorrow."
And then I gave them all the slip and plunged into Warsaw. Two men, one after the other, asked me to change money, at five times the official rate; that was outside the hotel. I crossed the street, and while I was looking at a big, clumsy chess set carved from purple wood, a man approached me with the same question. I was pursued by another man, and all the way down Marszalkowska asked the same money-changing question and quoted rates of exchange.
"Aren't you afraid of the police?" I said.
"The police change money, too," he said.
The merchandise in the shops looked substandard — the clothes, the radios, the pots and pans, even the food: it looked unappetizing, the fresh food somewhat wilted and dusty, the canned food dented and with faded labels. And in every shop, my arm was tugged and the same question whispered, "Change money?" Poverty can make people look bowed down and beaten, but just as often it can make them shameless, fearless, predatory and dangerous. I found all these apparent lawbreakers rather worrying, but when I mentioned it to one man he said, "Don't worry — it's a double morality. Everyone does it."
This look of bankruptcy in Warsaw was also a facial expression: stricken, demoralized, lonely and a bit desperate, a look of suffering on some, cynicism on others. It is surprising that people so victimized can have such dignity and can also be so polite and friendly. It is a good thing, too, because that courtliness takes the curse off their other side — the hunger that makes them food bores, the poverty that makes them seem grasping, the deprivation that has made them appear materialistic, and the economic policies that have turned them into religious nuts.
The bar of my hotel, the Forum, was crowded and smoky, so I wandered around, dropped into the Habana Nightclub and watched people jitterbugging. As I watched, a voice whispered in my ear, "Change money? Seven zlotys for one dollar."
"What would I do with all those zlotys?" I said, and turned.
A plump girl in a black dress was smiling at me. Perspiration had given a stickiness to her orange makeup, and there were little sooty flecks on her eyelashes.
"You can buy Polish vodka, you can buy curios. Poland is famous for amber. You can buy. Or stamps. You are staying at a hotel?"
"Yes, I am."
"I can visit you in your room. We make love. Fifty dollars."
"What about this amber?"
"Bursztyn," she said, explaining that it was the Polish word. "It is lovely. It comes from under the sea."
"My problem is that I have zlotys but not many dollars."
"I prefer dollars," she said. "We need dollars. In Poland it is impossible to do anything without dollars."
"Where do you get the dollars?"
"From you," she said.
"Not tonight."
I left, looked at the gloomy shop windows, marveled at the wide, empty streets, and went back to the Forum.
My challenge the next day was first to withdraw some Polish zlotys from Bank Handlowy — royalties that I could not take out of Poland; and then to spend them all before the train left. The bank opened at nine-thirty, the train was going two hours later. I estimated that I would have about an hour and a half to spend whatever amount I withdrew. In New York it would not have been difficult. But this was Warsaw.