On crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border

przemysl map

There were nine of us when we departed from Krakow well before the dawn, so that we could be in Lviv for breakfast. Now, 15 hours later, seven of us were in Przemyśl and two in Rzeszów. Things did not go well. We were very much still on the wrong side of the Polish-Ukrainian border. But perhaps it was Przemyśl and Lviv that were on the wrong sides of the border. In another parallel universe, we would’ve been sitting in this pub in Przemyśl, enjoying our first stop on the Ukrainian side; admiring the picturesque town with its historic buildings and trying to decipher the menu in Cyrillic. In yet another universe, we might’ve had to push to Lviv and stop in this easternmost Polish city for the night, before continuing further east to the border with Ukraine.

These universes are not so impossible; they needed only a small bifurcation in the current of history to redraw the borders of Eastern Borderlands. Look at the history of Przemyśl[1] for example, and you’ll see what I mean.

Przemyśl is the second oldest city in the region, after Krakow. From at least the 9^th century, Poland, Kievan Rus and Hungary fought for the region until it became Polish in the 10^th century, or at least belonging to the warlord who was about to establish Poland. Then Kievan Rus took the city, then the city was returned to Poland and again retaken by Rus and we’re still in the 10^th century. In 11^th century a Polish king took it back and even resided there for a while (the region was considered more interesting then than now) building some catholic things in it. Then, guess what, the city was incorporated into the Kievan Rus state again near the end of the 11^th C, this time getting some orthodox buildings. Then the city was added to a new local superpower – Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, created by a prince of western Rus with the help of a Polish king in dire need of friends. But in the 14^th C the city of Przemysl was again recaptured by another Polish king.

A suspiciously long period of trade, peace and prosperity followed, and the city got some Jewish buildings. In the meantime, Poland ran out of heirs and entered a union with, briefly, Hungary and then, for centuries, with Lithuania. It all ended in the middle of the 17^th C, with, weirdly, Sweden of all places invading the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The city declined but its strategic for trade location meant it wouldn’t be left alone tucked away in the corner of history.

We left it down on its luck due to the Swedish invasion, but it would be Austria who annexed it in 18^th C after the first partition of Poland. Neighbours, right? As part of the Austrian empire, Przemyśl grew in cultural and military importance, and the city spent a century or so turning itself into a great big huge fortress. Then Russians came and obviously destroyed the fortress in 1914, then Austro-Hungarians came and recaptured the city in 1915. The World War I ended and the interwar iterations of Poland and Ukraine, theoretically independent, practically fucked and soon to be non-existent, both greedily eyed the city. There was a brief attempt at an idealistic democratic solution – forming a local government representing mostly Roman Catholic Poles, Jewish, well, Jews and Eastern Orthodox or Greek Catholic Ruthenians (let’s call them Ukrainians and hope no one gets offended). Well, that progressive solution lasted exactly two days. Ukrainians took over the east part of the city, Poles organised the defence in the west part. Neither could cross the river in between to control the whole city. Both waited for reinforcement, and Polish units got there first and so Przemyśl remained a Polish, not Ukrainian, city because that’s how history is made.

I mean until the Germans and Russians turned the region into the WW2 theatre, effectively disposing of both Poland and Ukraine. During the German invasion in Poland, Przemyśl got its own battle. It didn’t go well, Polish defenders lost – a sentence which encapsulates most of Polish history, really. Two invaders divided the city in half between themselves – Germans on the west side of the river, Russians on the east, soon to be incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. Then the Nazis came to take the city in 1941, leaving death and terror. The Red Army retook it from Germans three years later. In 1945 the Soviet Union signed an agreement with the Polish government (effectively established by the Soviet Union), placing Przemyśl just inside the eastern Polish border, while most of its eastern hinterlands stayed in Ukraine. And so it remains until this day, the end.

But we weren’t in Przemyśl to appreciate its history. We were there to forge documents – our only chance to cross the damn Polish-Ukrainian border this weekend. Perhaps forgery is too strong a word. It’s not like we were fabricating visas or passports. It was much more innocent than that – our minibus rental documents needed a little tweak, that’s all. Just one of those post-soviet glitches in reality processing, when actual life doesn’t quite match the bureaucratically proscribed reality. The grey zone in-between these realities is a space of creativity and initiative. Those two realities are grossly incompatible, and the process of trying to innocuously work around the law to align them would be better described as an action of załatwić than forge. Załatwić means to arrange a matter, to do the trick, to make things happen despite the prevailing forces of bureaucracy and the law.

It didn’t help that it was late Saturday and it was going to be bloody hard to załatwić anything more complicated than finding a pub to watch the England-Belgium third place play-off match. But we were determined, and we were resourceful. We needed a good quality scanner to scan printed out documents, with all their stamps and signatures, then change a few details in photoshop and then print them out again to show at the border. Scanner, photoshop, printer. Doable. We managed to find the scanner straight away, by invoking the first rule of załatwić – knowing someone who knew someone who could help. In this case it turned to be a guy from Przemyśl that A used to study with:

‘How are you? Yes, yes, long time—but do you happen to know somewhere with a scanner in Przemyśl? You are in Przemyśl? And YOU HAVE A SCANNER?! We’ll be there in 30 mins.’

So now we were waiting for A to catch up with her old friend and meticulously scan our minivan rental documents page by page. While she was having tea and home-made cake prepared by her friend’s mum, we were parked outside, sharing the last can of lukewarm beer, contemplating alternative solutions.

‘Maybe Croatia? How about Croatia? We’re already packed and in the car. No borders, we could pass with ID only. They don’t need a translated pile of papers proving that the car’s not stolen. We could start driving straight away. It’s nice there. Hot. Beaches. And it’s raining in Lviv. It’s supposed to be raining tomorrow. Everywhere in Ukraine—maybe not in Odessa—but how about Croatia?’

‘We could just drive there right now, collect this fucking moron from Rzeszów and go without any passports. Europe. Sun. Cheap’.

‘Yeah. And what will we do with the wads of those bloody hryvnias I bought?’

‘Not my problem, I still have pounds. What I also have is a flight from Ukraine next Sunday. I would like to be in Odessa next Sunday. Fuck Croatia.’

‘Four of us have flights from Odessa next Sunday.’

‘Not Croatia then.’

How did we end up here? Well, as Brexit proved, it’s not that easy to leave Europe after all. Our experience of trying to enter Ukraine from Poland seemed to confirm it. After around seven hours of queuing for the crossing, we were further from leaving the borders of the EU than in the morning. That probably happened only because Poles made Ukrainians queue even longer to enter Schengen – yet another example of the brotherly love between the two countries. We weren’t out of options, really. However, all of them involved illegal activity: forgery, drunk driving and bribing border control officers.

***

It started pleasantly enough. We were prepared to endure a reasonable amount of waiting to leave the EU and Schengen zone. When we joined the queue of cars waiting to cross the Polish-Ukrainian border it was still early in the morning. Yes, granted, the queue looked rather long and rather stuck but hey it was holiday and after all we were trying to leave some money in Ukraine rather than smuggle something into Schengen. It was unlikely people in this queue were trying to smuggle things to Ukraine, so how long could it take?

Long.

We haven’t even moved for the first half an hour. Not a single car. We opened some beers and A woke up ready for more after overdoing champagne at 5am. Guys relaxed into being boys, took out the volleyball and started playing, pretending they were again those 15-year old sporty maniacs back in their high school volleyball team rather than out of shape and drunk 30-year old office workers. They quickly went from 15-year olds to 6-year olds, racing each other up and down high stone banks. Five minutes later MW came back with a deep gash in his elbow, blood streaming. He huddled in the middle row of seats and started whimpering in pain. God, how much longer?

A lot longer.

It started to rain. We moved maybe 20 metres, which in yards is… well, not many yards at all. A few cars joined behind us and turned off their engines. A car whizzed past us on the left. The fast lane. Someone in the two front rows opened another beer. MW stopped whimpering and fell asleep. Or died. Another van passed us on the left. It was inevitable that someone was going to suggest:

‘We should try the fast lane.’

‘Yeah. We’ve got nothing to lose – still only a few cars behind us.’

And so we tried the fast lane. Fast lane, we were informed at the end of the fast lane by a border officer, was not for private cars going on holidays.

5 minutes later we were back at the end of the immovable lane.

An hour later we started running out of alcohol. Beer was gone, bubbly was just a distant memory. Whisky was gone. There were nine of us and we didn’t take nearly as much alcohol as we usually did. It’s one thing that our countries have raided and killed each other for centuries, that we continued to devastate each other’s statues of national heroes and hurl racial abuse, but one did not bring their own beer and vodka to a country that made good (and cheap) beer and vodka. Basic Slavic decency. So it was just a matter of minutes before someone requested:

‘El. give us that bloody gin.’

‘Nooo! Not my giin!’

I was particular about my gin, having got used to the good stuff in London. When visiting Poland, I was repeatedly disappointed with drinking Lubuski Gin with a shitty tonic and, with a bit of luck, with a bit of lemon. Interestingly, the only other place where I came across Lubuski Gin – the first traditionally manufactured Polish gin – was a hidden restaurant in a village in Cuba. Go figure. So this time I brought from England a bottle of Hendrick’s to avoid having to drink whatever terrible amber-coloured (and it is always amber-coloured) local alcohol we would at some point late into the night be left with (in case you wonder, in Ukraine it was koniak). So I had planned ahead. I brought my favourite gin. I brought tonic. I even brought limes. 10 minutes later some of my favourite gin was on my favourite yoga pants; a result of trying to make a g&t from 0.7l gin and 1l tonic in a 1.5l mineral water bottle. Precise calculations were never my strength. And I badly needed to pee.

‘You can walk to the border, probably they’ve toilets there’

‘It’s far away. And what if they don’t. I’ll go to the forest, there is a gap in that fence along the road.’

‘It’s probably illegal and patrolled’

‘Why would it be illegal? I’m still on the right side of the border. In Schengen! I have the right to pee anywhere in Europe, in Schengen’

I hoped no one with dogs and Kalashnikovs would prove me wrong. But just to make sure I took A and O with me. No military power was gonna stop three girls reinforced with champagne from peeing where they wished. The escapade was pleasant; the forest smelled like rain, the walk chipped away at the monumental wait. I even managed to clean the sticky tonic from my hands by rubbing them against wet grass.

‘I just peed here, you know?’, helpfully informed me A.

We returned to the car that moved 0 meters during that time. Covered in mud, blood, tonic and apparently piss, we patiently crawled nearer and nearer, passing the time by passing each other a plastic bottle of warm g&t. A few hours later we were getting near the buildings on the Polish side of the border. Maybe 30-40 minutes more and we’ll start the crossing. But then it started happening – the Brexit level of mess. Suddenly, S, our driver, swore loudly. And then swore again.

‘Kuuurwa. My passport is out of date. Invalid. Expired a few weeks ago and I didn’t notice. No kuuurwa no.’

I will spare the reader the description of the conversation that ensued after S’s exclamation, because it involved a lot of words and phrases difficult to translate for Westerners. I’ve always thought that English is surprisingly un-English in its directness and simplicity of swearwords, which seem to just straightforwardly describe a few crucial body parts; say cunt, dickhead or asshole, a few crucial acts in which those body parts engage – the key one being fuck – and consequences of such actions – a whore, motherfucker or cocksucker. Quite literal for a nation that tends to refer to actual fuckups as “things have gone a bit pear-shaped” or “being in a pickle”. I want to think that due to the complexity of the Polish language in which parts of words can be creatively tweaked to change their meaning, Poles are rather more poetic in their swearing repertoire. But of course there are also those Polish zen masters of the art of cursing, whom one can sometimes overhear when passing a construction site in any Polish or British city. Those zen poets can distil the essence of quite complex messages by replacing almost all verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs with strategically placed kurwas. But I digress.

In the meantime, our conversation boiled down to two conclusions:

S was a complete moron and it was the first and last time we took him on a road trip.
There wasn’t really anything to do but to wait and hope no one would notice.

Oh they noticed all right, in case the reader was wondering. But it would be another hour before they informed us that our driver couldn’t cross the border; an hour we all spent in relative silence, wondering if S was not only a moron but also a dickhead who realised his passport had expired a tad earlier than he admitted. This fuckup was weirdly out of character for him -usually sensible guy embarking on a political career and having his shit together. At least when sober.

The border officers on the Polish sides were very friendly and very understanding. But also very clear – the eight of us were free to go on to the Ukrainian side of the border crossing and S was free to go back where he came from. There were a few problems with that however:

It dawned on us that S was the only one sober. So if he wasn’t to continue with us, someone else would have to drive the minibus drunk.
Which wasn’t actually the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that S was even a bigger idiot than we thought and nominated himself as the only legitimate driver for this rental car. Apparently, Ukrainian bureaucracy was very particular about the ownership status of cars driven into their country and required solemnly written and painstakingly translated, signed and stamped documents certifying that although the car was rented, the driver would treat it as his own and would love it and cherish and not share it.
Even though S was a double moron, he was after all our companion and one does not abandon an idiot in need. Even if he totally deserved it.

So we asked a suspiciously polite and empathetic border patrol officers to give us a moment to consider our options.

‘You need to talk to them; tell them you’re a moron.’

‘Tell them you’re an important politician and you’re going to Ukraine on an urgent business trip’.

‘Urgent family trip’.

‘Just bribe them. Politely, I mean. Ask them if there is anything that you can do to załatwić it.

‘Just cry. Beg them’

He went. After 20 minutes or so he was back. Begging, crying or hinting that bribing was not entirely out of the question didn’t work. He had to go back to Poland. It was time for plan B. We had very different ideas about what plan B should involve:

‘go back to talk to them and try bribing them again’
‘pretend you go back to Poland, take your backpack and try to cross through the forest. If they catch you, just pretend you’re trekking, got lost, thought you were still in Poland’
‘go back to Poland and try to get a temporary passport’
‘go back to Poland and let us forget you exist’.

The boarder officers came back to our minibus. I opened the sliding side door, greeting them with the smell of half-digested alcohol and the racket of broken glass. An empty wine bottle rolled from the car and shattered right in front of them. I cleaned the biggest pieces of broken glass and started looking for toilets. It turned out peeing wasn’t allowed in this no man’s land unless we had a sound plan for who and how was crossing. However, there were nine of us and the officials cared more about those passportless than those taking the piss, so me, A and M sneaked out and entered a promising-looking building.

We found ourselves in the temple of bureaucracy. There are many such buildings, in many cities and many countries. When you enter, you just know it, even though the details vary, and the actual description is hard to pin down. The smell; it could be either dust or must or chemical cleanliness. There will be some cold shabby surfaces; gleaming terrazzo floors, corridor walls with oil-painted dado in sickish yellow or green. Old windows. Bad lighting. There is usually a sign or two of attempts at a bygone era grandeur; the imitation of marble, grand staircases, stucco decorations, old candelabras. The places can, in short, look very different. Nothing you can put your finger on, but when you enter, you can feel it. I’ve felt it in hospitals that remembered a pre-soviet era, in brutalist schools, in city hall behemoths. And I felt it here; the certainty that this building was not there for humans but served something bigger. The state. The idea of the state. It was there to protect state’s borders. Not resembling military posts in the slightest, the building looked more like a dentist clinic in a provincial town. It had no need for a militaristic look; its mission was to divide Polish land from Ukrainian land by an impenetrable wall of bureaucracy.

The corridor was empty, narrow and covered in yellow bathroom tiles. We dashed for the first staircase, as staircases always led somewhere. From the floor below we could hear female voices and the unmistakable roar of a hand drier. The toilet was full of women. But not just any women. These were women in transit and women whose business was transit. Most of them had long bleached hair woven into braids and updos. They wore heavy makeup, tight jeans and cheap colourful blouses and sweaters. Around their feet were checked bags made of woven polypropylene, undoubtedly the reason why they were in this outpost of a toilet that morning. We did what we had to do, not bothering with makeup or hair – it wasn’t going to get any better. After all, contrary to the ladies around us, we weren’t on a business trip.

When we came back to our marooned car, the debate seemed to have been brought to a conclusion. S was going back. His plan was to go to a town of Rzeszów, where theoretically he could apply for a temporary passport. It normally took a few days and it was weekend after all, so S had to figure out how to come up with some political or business emergency that would speed up the process. But that was a problem for later. Now, the friendly officer was telling him to hurry. If he wanted a lift, they had a bus going to Rzeszów, leaving now.

And so S and his loyal other half O gathered their suitcases and hurried off to the waiting bus. We tried to persuade O there was no need for her to suffer for S’s stupidity, but she was adamant she couldn’t leave him alone. Commendable. Five minutes later we were watching the military bus departing with S, A and what I imagined were other poor souls caught trying to illegally cross the border.

You can read part 2 of our adventure here.

El.

More posts featuring bits of Ukrainian culture, history and politics:

On waiting, stillness and the pace of change

On tasting Eastern European history

Polish wedding on a not completely serious note. Part 1: getting married

We’ve known each other for ages. Grew up in the same neighbourhood, went to the same school. Now she’s getting married and I’m flying back to my hometown. I’m having a chance to go back in space and time and get a glimpse of the life I chose not to live.

08:00

Woken up by the old, and clearly half-deaf, lady who lives the flat underneath, and most specifically by her habit of listening to extremist right-wing religious radio at all hours of day and night. She used to do that when I was little too. I grew up here, on the first floor of a large block of flats, in what Britain would call a housing estate. In Poland there is no stigma attached to that. The majority of city inhabitants live in tiny flats in huge block of flats. When they were building this district of Krakow, the soviet housing estates were a sought-after modern lifestyle choice. Everyone around here was relatively poor, and most men, including my father, were employed in a huge steel mill a few tram stops away. I wonder if the steelworks still work. Probably not.

nowa huta2 — 50 shades of post-soviet grey

The radio stops blaring. I can hear the birds outside and my mum in the kitchenette. I’m strategically not hungover this time and all is well. The morning light filtered by layers of heavy cotton curtains and sheer net curtains promises a suede shoes-friendly day in Nowa Huta[1].

“Nowa Huta [The New Steel Mill] is one of only two planned socialist realist settlements or districts ever built and “one of the most renowned examples of deliberate social engineering” in the entire world. Built as a utopian ideal city, its street hierarchy, layout and certain grandeur of buildings often resemble Paris or London. The high abundance of parks and green areas in Nowa Huta make it the greenest corner of Kraków”

Clearly, someone who wrote this Wikipedia entry has never been in Nowa Huta. It’s quite green, sure, but Paris or London it resembles only when—well—never.

08:20

Breakfast with my mother. There is bread, ham, sausage, eggs, cottage cheese and bickering. I drink some black tea. (Yes, I’m sure I don’t want anything to eat. I never eat breakfasts anyway. No, I won’t die. No, don’t want any cake either, thanks. Yes, I already had tea and no, don’t want another—and too bad you want grandchildren—I need to leave in 5 minutes. We’re not talking about children again, I’m serious—do you have some polish currency; I don’t think they take cards there?)

09:00

At the hairdresser. The décor makes me feel like I’m back in the post-soviet 90s. The smell of perm lotion is formidable. I ask for Mrs K. Only Mrs K., older than the rest of the salon crew, is brave and skilled enough to do wedding updos. I sit in the chair. I get the dentist feeling. Another customer walks in, another hairdresser gets her seated in the chair next to me. For the next hour we’re having a conversation about the damaging effect of social media on children and about the dangers of buying them expensive materialistic gifts. I can’t see what Mrs K. is doing to my own hair, so I’m watching the other hairdresser smearing, pulling and torturing her customer’s bleached wisps of hair. Every 20 seconds she stops in her tracks to add a few sentences to the conversation:

‘There are, what, 6 of them with cousins and everything. I won’t be buying them all presents, who has money for that. What I’ll do is I’ll take them to the cinema, to have a good time, you know, instead of buying them each a present for Kids’ day’

‘It teaches them the importance of spending time together rather than spending well… money’ – I pronounce, nodding sagely, having spent the previous evening buying shoes, handbags and jewellery. I’d hate to be offered cinema tickets instead.

The customer next to me cocks her head suspiciously and winces as if she could smell my hypocrisy but then I realise the wincing can be explained by the hairdressers still savagely pulling the strands of her hair.

By 10:00 my updo reaches Elizabethan proportions. When Mrs K. begins to take photos of it to immortalise her creation, we proclaim the importance of taking photos of children (they grow up so quickly!). The extra weight of hairspray and hairpins makes my nodding even more vigorous than intended.

When I leave, a cautious inner voice tries to point out that I dislike taking photos even more than I dislike children and I’m somewhat allergic to family values so wtf just happened. I get reminded of the quote from a classic ethnographic book I read when studying anthropology, written by the father of Social Anthropology[2] who nota bene was born in Krakow as well. The signs are unmistakable: I have gone native:

“…it is good for the Ethnographer sometimes to put aside camera, notebook and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on. He can take part in the natives’ games, he can follow them on their visits and walks, sit down and listen and share in their conversations. I’m not sure if this is equally easy for everyone – perhaps the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans – but though the degree of success varies, it is possible for everyone”.

(Malinowski, Argounauts of the Western Pacific, 1922 (1984): 21).

After this ceremonial hairdressing, my Slavonic nature is puffed up and ready for a Catholic church wedding and a full-blown onslaught of traditional family values that comes with it.

14:00

Love is in the air, crosses are on the walls. The church is nice enough; painted in pastel shades and decorated with white ribbons and flowers, but the whole transept, where we sit, is surrounded by stations of the cross. I’m trying not to think of the symbolism of this – of marital commitment being encircled by the Way of Sorrow; the symbol of sacrifice and suffering. Right. They really do look nice together!

Aaand we start. Pipe organs are joined by an otherworldly female voice singing from somewhere above us. A jovial-looking priest in ridiculous white and gold vestment appears in the apse. It’s been a while since I was exposed to a Catholic mass with all its trimmings. Something in me gets uneasy, possibly Satan. This time you’re here as an ethnographer, not a sinner, I remind myself. Enjoy it. Let’s hope it will be short and sweet. The mass, not the marriage.

The ceremony actually has its moment and in the more boring moments I entertain myself by watching my high school friends and total strangers, disapproving of black dresses and assessing slutty dresses, smiling at naughty children and frowning at loud children. Life, love, community and how lovely is everything! The next pronouncement from the altar brings me back to earth:

“Love, sanctified by the sacred bond of marriage, will overcome all. Love doesn’t get old. How many of you who are here, have been married for years, so tell me, has your love got old? No!”

I try to quickly analyse how statistically insignificant his theory is. Sample – around 120 of us. The average divorce rate? High. The average unhappiness in marriage rate? Cheating rate? Also high. I don’t think the priest or the bridal party would appreciate my theory that there is very little overlap in the Venn Diagram of Love and Marriage and we’re bound to be standing among many examples of out of date love.

Something in me gets uneasy again. By this point I realise it’s probably not Satan but Social Scientist. While my inner sociologist tries to calculate the average rates of love failure, my inner anthropologist scrutinises the promise and premise of marital commitment. I’m sure there would be something relevant to quote from Malinowski again, from his creepy observation of (and participation in) sex and romance in an exotic indigenous community. Something about the transcendental universality of marital naivety. Yeah, here we go:

“Jealousy, with or without adequate reason, and adultery are the two factors in tribal life which put most strain on the marriage tie. In law, custom and public opinion, sexual appropriation is exclusive. There is no lending of wives, no exchange, no waiving of marital rights in favour of another man. Any such breach of marital fidelity is as severely condemned in the Trobriands as it is in Christian principle and European law; indeed the most puritanical public opinion among ourselves is not more strict. Needless to say, however, the rules are as often and as easily broken, circumvented, and condoned as in our own society”

(Malinowski, The sexual life of savages, 1929: 114).

Ffs happy thoughts. Romance. Her dress is amazing. Their children will be cute. There is something ridiculously beautiful in the whole thing. There is, really. Moments like that do hold some transcendental truth about the human condition. Our willingness to disregard all evidence and fiercely believe that love will overcome all and death will never take us. We’re a magnificent species.

I give holy matrimony a break and move on to thinking about another suffering of the womankind; the stilettos I only bought yesterday are starting to take their toll. On the positive side, the pain is of the numbing kind, so one more hour and I’m bound to lose any feeling in my feet. Can make it. The comment from an old high school friend who with genuine awe asked how I could walk in heels so high is worth a bit of suffering.

Shallow thoughts in the house of God. I look at St Mary of Something, overseeing the procedure from above the altar. But she looks like she gets me and sympathises. She too was a woman after all. My eye catches the portrait of pope John Paul II, hanging in a less prominent spot. The pope sneers at me.

Jesus eating time. It’s been more than a decade since I gave up on Catholicism, but I still feel a bit guilty about not taking our Lord Jesus Christ in my mouth. No one else in our pew does either. All of us catholic school alumni. I glance up. The pope disapproves from his wall.

The priest tells the bride to smile. I tell myself not to cringe in case photos are being taken.

14:50

And they’re married. We’re done with the sanctified by God part of the ceremony; it’s time to get this marriage sanctified by vodka. I’m more than ready. I haven’t eaten anything today in fear of my cinched dress paralysing my diaphragm. Please give me food. And alcohol. And let me take my shoes off. What do you mean the wedding venue is an hour away?!

Polish Wedding part 2: Getting Wasted – coming soon.

On freedom to roam

cuba libre-2

“Libre de que?”, I wonder, looking at the intimidatingly pale cocktail standing before me. The ratio of rum to coke seems to be inversed, as in Cuba rum is the cheaper ingredient. At least that’s what I want to think. Ordered to provide respite from oppressive heat and thirst, my Cuba Libre provides also food for thought. The legends surrounding the origins of the cocktail connect it to the Cuban independence movement, dating back to times when Spain was an oppressor, America a friend.

As will be explained to us later, over another rum concoction, by Pedro, a local musician, Cuba no es libre. Not quite. Not in a sense that someone from a Western democratic country takes for granted. This is something that’s easier to relate to for someone coming from a country with a similar history of abusive relationships with alpha players in the region. Cuba had its brutal marriage with Spain and an unhealthy affair with America. Poland’s neighbours were known for similarly imperialistic streaks.

And then there are freedoms that can be taken from within. From the top, but without any foreign influence. Ah, you see, my Eastern European gloom got better of me. Here I am – drinking an exotic cocktail, sitting in the shade infused with sounds of mambo and scents of fresh mint, thinking about historical slights and wicked dead empires. I mean—just look around—isn’t all going well? American tourists are off guard, walking around in their flip flops and baseball caps, buying overpriced souvenirs from boutique shops set up by entrepreneurial locals. Commerce and tourism – peace and love 2.0 – rebranded for the globalised times.

It could be argued that Cuba is in fact freer than ever; free from the colonial yoke, free from slavery, America, and the strict Leninist-Marxist doctrine. Slowly, the people are gaining new liberties; access to international communication – internet and mobile phones, the right to run a small private business, sell a house and travel abroad. It seems then that Cubans are catching up with Western freedoms.

But the right to come and go as you please and cross the borders with ease is not something that can be simply bestowed with a presidential signature. Granted, the legal and political barrier has been somewhat removed in Cuba. But from talking to those who go and those who stay, I know there is more than the government and closed borders holding one back from travelling. I think of the freedom to roam as tethered threefold:

Travelling as something one is not allowed to do.
Travelling as something one can’t afford to do.
Travelling as something one can’t imagine doing.

I come from a stock of those who stayed for all the above reasons. My family roots can be traced to generations of farmers who all settled in neighbouring villages in one region of south-east Poland. My cousins from both sides are still there and still farming. My ancestors weren’t like the gypsies who were always on the go, periodically setting up their caravans on the borders of my grandfather’s farm or the Ukrainian labourers who came and went with the seasons, following the crops. They were farmers who only sometimes and always begrudgingly went to the nearest town or to send off potatoes on their international journeys. They themselves would never go that far, very rarely even staying one night outside the house.

Travelling was not what we did, not only due to the lack of imagination. It’s hard to leave a house that houses the young and the old that need to be taken care of. It’s hard to go away when there are humans and beasts to feed, bread to make, hay to turn, wild dogs to fend off, calves and foals to deliver. True, there are many cultures and peoples who have been doing that on the go for thousands of years; dwelling in movement. Well, we just do the dwelling part.

My ancestors stayed in the same villages and watched the tectonic shifts of empires, advancing and receding, moving over their lands. In the late 18^th century the Prussia[1], Habsburgs and Russia came, imposing new administrative barriers, visas, permits and suspicions that those who crossed the borders were likely to be involved in insurgency movements. And there were no roads anyway, so even the trips between major cities were a huge undertaking.

Then the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 19^th century, then the German Reich in the 20^th, subsequently replaced by the Soviets who frowned at passports and ideas, especially if they were to be used to mingle with the West. While people still travelled and emigrated and, with a bit of creative gumption, conducted international business back then, my parents only managed to migrate from their neighbouring villages to the nearest city. And they stayed there for the rest of their lives. When we move, we move to settle, not to roam.

In the 80s and 90s, the Russian influence ebbed East again and my generation grew up in a post-soviet capitalist frontier, in the Wild West of democracy. Suddenly, Poland had independent borders with a sovereign bit in the middle. But then the opt-in empire of European Union came, and the borders were thrown wide open. That was 15 years ago but I’m still the only one in my family for whom international travel, and transnational living, is an obvious thing to do.

Perhaps that still sits uneasily with me; makes me wriggle on my bar stool while my friends and colleagues compare Toronto, New York and Sydney over a glass of wine, simultaneously planning to vacation in Thailand in a few months, complaining about the drudgery of an incoming business trip to Chicago, and musing on a temporary career relocation to Singapore. Perhaps it will take another decade for me to feel that I truly belong to such a global class of citizens. It might take another uprooting and repotting myself in a foreign soil to dismiss the suspicion that freedom to roam is merely a temporary privilege rather than an irrevocable right. It doesn’t help that the world seems to confirm this suspicion; that such rights can be snatched by those in power. Borders can close, quotas be imposed, the free flow of dreams reduced to a trickle of luck. The freedom to roam is likely to be frowned upon by those who derive their identity and the little of power they have from forgetting the settling of their own families. Enough of you have come, they say. Or enough of you have left, depending on whether the river of human movement looks like a drain or a deluge from their perspective.

It’s either a bout of Eastern European negativity or this fixed farming genotype of mine that makes me dwell on those who dwell; especially on their juxtaposition to my newly acquired political, economic and mental freedom to travel.

So, over a bottle of Cristal, I think of how we get whizzed from a champagne bar at Heathrow to a coffee lounge in Mexico to the family-run restaurant in Havana, where we eat a meal that costs roughly the annual salary of our young and talkative waiter. When we head back to our air-conditioned condo in Havana Vieja, our neighbour roasts a whole pig right on the street, preparing for the new year eve fiesta. Next day more air-conditioned restaurants, airy galleries and secluded cafes in cul de sacs await us, while our neighbour boils the pig’s head with some corn right on the street. The following day I begin to grow weary of the kaleidoscope of places to taste, of thoughts running ahead of schedule to new destinations from the catalogue of possibilities. But we keep moving on to see more of the dissimilar before the procession of sights, scents and sounds takes us back to the airport, to the air and across the earth while our neighbour will proceed to bake some yams from his vegetable stand. Every day he places his makeshift barbecue on the same street corner and guards it late into the night, sometimes poking gently at a baking yam. He’ll put on some salsa CD to pass the long day of anyone buying hardly any of the guavas arranged from the greenest on the left to the reddest and ripest on the right. But by the time the green ones ripen exposed to the heat and sun, we’ll be on another continent.

cuba libre

El.

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Inspired by a trip to Cuba in 2018/19

On green walnut fairies

Before we continue further East, we’re stopping for a day in the countryside of south-eastern Poland to sit and talk and, obviously, drink with family. The weather’s been kind, so we sit outside, in a garden filled with the shade of thujas, pines and walnuts, surrounded with brown fields and green crops.

20170609_204052 — Polish countryside; fields of flowering potatoes and balks marked by walnut trees

‘Green walnuts’, grandfather Kazimierz pronounces out of nowhere.

‘What about them?’

‘You make a good tincture out of them. We made it last year’.

‘Out of green walnuts?’

‘Walnuts. You take half a litre of spiritus and half a litre of vodka’.

‘My goodness… How many walnuts?’

‘And green walnuts; you cut them in quarters and add them in. But they have to be green, still milky inside. Otherwise they won’t work, they have to be green. There were so many green walnuts that fell to the ground, so we picked them up, quartered them—you add spirytus and vodka—and you macerate them. And sugar, you add a lot of sugar. You take out the walnuts. After.’

‘How strong is it?’

‘I mean—how strong. You add spirytus[1] and vodka, so that’s like 140% – so in half—70%.

‘70%. So like a nalewka[2]? But green walnuts? It must be very bitter’

‘Very bitter. It’s not for drinking—you don’t drink it—it’s medicine! When you have stomach problems, it’s good, or when you ate too much, you drink it. Very good for digestion. Grandmothers and great grandmothers used to drink this stuff. Very healthy.’

20161223_183142 — Nalewka made by my mum in an old wine bottle

Green walnut tincture, called orzechówka, was the first, and last, nalewka grandfather Kazimierz made. While he might not have been an expert on home-made ‘medicine’, he considered himself an expert on the East. As his knowledge was last updated in the soviet times, it’s possible that this East has faded into memories and lingers only under the shades of green walnuts, as he paints it for us in vivid flavours, adding yet another thread to my kilim of Eastern cliché stories.

The stories of Soviet-time smuggling; of travelling with the ingeniously-hidden contraband through the routes of this Eastern empire that didn’t call itself an empire. The stories of exchanging green dollars and blue jeans, black gold and rose gold[3]. Trading holiday was the trending holiday of his time. It was possible to come back home not only with a sunburn but also with a profit. And with stories of borders and bribes, searches and lies. Stories of drinking warm vodka with the locals in even warmer Soviet seaside resorts. Drinking it from 125ml glasses, romantically called literatka[4]; you could down it like shots or sip it like whisky – made no difference – the crystal fairy could be conjured in many a way.

And in many a form, I wonder, watching the pyramid-like display of tinctures in all flavours, colours and sizes in the boutique vodka shop of Baczewski restaurant in Lviw. Now in Ukraine, J.A. Baczewski is considered the oldest Polish distillery[5]. Established long ago, when both countries were part of Galicia and belonged to the Austrian Empire. I spot a green walnut one. I didn’t have a chance to taste or even see the mythical nalewka made by grandpa Kazimierz. I half-expected this recipe of milking walnuts for medicinal purposes to exist only in his head. But here it is. And it even looks and smells and tastes like medicine; black and thick and herbal like a cough syrup. Perhaps then, I wonder, this half-mythical soviet East from his stories also still exists and is waiting for us, waiting to be conjured with only a little bit of help from the green walnut fairy.

El.

In memory of grandpa Kazimierz who passed away in May 2019.

20161225_140426 — A collection of Polish home-made tinctures (nalewki)

On how Krakow tries to unforget Jewish culture every hot summer

The Jewish district is a place unreal and unforgotten. It awakens for one week in the middle of each summer. It awakens to remember and celebrate that what’s been silenced for decades.

It’s a place that enchants naïve travellers who come here looking for something that doesn’t exist anymore. They’re looking for the land of their grandfathers, they’re looking for Galicia[1] – a half-mythical fatherland of Jews who long ago emigrated from Poland and Ukraine to the USA, to Britain, to Israel.

kazimierz-4

The streets are empty, dormant; cobblestones parched by extreme heat, the air shimmering. Even the ever-vigilant pigeons took cover. Yet shadows linger in the white glare of sunlight reflected in windows and pastel walls. This place is known internationally as a location near Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. The city forgot about that a long time ago. But the world remembers.

How to describe a place like that? If you were here, you could ‘do’ Auschwitz in the afternoon and come back to Krakow for the evening concert of Jewish music. Many do that. You could come here and never see one Jew. I hadn’t for years. Or you could take part in one of the biggest Jewish culture festivals[2] in the world, as I did that summer. Or maybe even the biggest, who knows. If you are one of those people who give a damn about local culture and the history of a place, who want to feel its spirit, then coming to the Jewish district in Krakow, you’d want a taste of its genuine Jewish life. As a tourist, you would probably start with ‘traditional’ Jewish restaurants and all their variations on the pascha dessert[3]. Then, you would visit synagogues transformed into museums, into bookshops, into cultural centres. There’s a good chance that on your way to the next one, you’d be offended by some anti-Semitic graffiti, which most probably did not refer to the Jews at all. If you’re lucky, you could even spot a group of real Hassidic Jews on a trip from Israel. And you could pass by so many other Jewish people, never recognising them. Let me take you to this place.

You are walking Szeroka Street, the main street of the Jewish district of Kazimierz[4]. Suddenly, you hear the ephemeral sounds of clarinet. Nothing unusual there – a Klezmer[5] band plays here live every Sunday, so that restaurant guests can have an authentic experience of Jewish culture while eating their cholent[6] or maybe pascha underneath a metal menorah on the facade of the Ariel restaurant. Or is it Esther restaurant? There are so many of them. Are you not interested? You want a real taste of Jewish heritage?

kazimierz-2

Keep going then; right behind the bold facades of restaurants, obscured by the sea of gigantic garden umbrellas, there is an entrance to a synagogue that still remains a synagogue. You just need to pass the stand with Jewish souvenirs, cross the car park that encircles this little green square… what is this plaque, you ask? It commemorates local victims of the Holocaust. There used to be a Jewish cemetery here too… but keep going. Now you just need to survive the attack of tour guides who know best what such a tourist like you needs to see on their Jewish heritage quest. Yes, that’s the synagogue entrance. I know — quite easy to miss compared to the flamboyant facade of the Szara restaurant on its left. But you’re in the right place: the Remuh synagogue. What’s that? Currently in renovation? Don’t worry, you can still go in. It’s only 5 PLN for entrance, so for more or less 1 Euro you will see a genuine, although somewhat bare, interior of an authentic community synagogue. Oh, and the cemetery is included in the price too. Yeah, you can take some pictures of the cemetery – you know; crumbling tombstones, dilapidated stars of David hidden in unkempt grass. You can really feel the decay, the loss, all this unremembering. No need even to make the photos black and white. The absence of caring.

kazimierz-3

But I couldn’t care less. It’s still before 10 am, and it’s already unbearably hot. The dress I’m wearing is lightweight silk, and I can barely feel it on my skin, but it almost makes it worse – there is no barrier between myself and the enveloping heat. I’m, as usual, hungover; it’s bloody impossible to stay sober when visiting this city. I really need coffee, but I can’t bear the thought of drinking anything hot. Oh why did I think it was a good idea to combine holidays with an ethnographic fieldwork?! I’m not exactly looking forward to another 14 hours of workshops, interviews, photograph taking, sketching, writing, and getting progressively more drunk today.

The first meeting is about to start in 10 minutes. I am of course late, and I’m supposed to help to organise the thing. I barely manage to arrange all the clunky folded chairs in the circle of the meeting room on time. We’re in the back of the Galicia Jewish Museum, where the meetings will be held for five consecutive days. I put the flowers in the centre of the circle, next to the altar-like centrepiece created by one of the meeting leaders. I play the first track from the CD. Serene meditative music fills the space and we wait, chatting. I don’t expect more than five people to come – come on; it’s too early in the morning, the location is hidden in the backyard of a shabby museum building on a quiet street, and it just happens to be the hottest day of the year (36°C). And frankly, there seem to be many more interesting festival events at the same time every day.

But I was wrong. More than 40 people show up for the first meeting, and more will come every day, making it really difficult to squeeze them in here so that everyone can sit in this bloody self-help meeting kind of circle. People of different ages. Couples and families. Poles. Polish Jews. Americans, Australians and Germans. With or without Jewish roots. Some of them came by accident, some were just curious, while others attend these meetings every year. They come to share their stories.

kazimierz

But I am not here to share anything. I’m just another ghost – barely there, barely visible at all. My Kazimierz is an impression created during this one unbearably hot and sunny summer, when I was invited to become part of it; walking its ancient parched streets from dawn to dusk, resting in its cafes, shady gardens and cold dark tea rooms shielded from the heat and modernity by their thick medieval walls. Spending the nights drinking in its damp cellars filled with smoke, filled with haunting music and the stink of beer and vodka. This place exists only in my eyes, in the eyes of someone local and yet so foreign now. In the eyes of someone who does not belong but yet fits in. A girl who cannot escape the fact that she was created in the culture that does not know how to speak of its past, does not know how to remember, or forget either. She was born in the place that yearns to look into the future and that consciously tries to invent it from the absences and silences that scream only about the past.

My Kazimierz is a place of encounters, a place where you know the faces you pass on the streets; the faces of experts, mourners, searchers, artists, and the locals. The place where people walk pregnant with stories. And I am here to listen to their silences, to their omissions, to their questions rather than answers. I’m here to collect them all.

Inspired by an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Krakow in the summer of 2012. First written as a vignette for my academic work, then adapted (boring theory bits removed) in 2016.

El.