Against the Flow Read online

  Kraków’s antique shops and secondhand and antiquarian bookshops seemed to set the trading tone. It was easy to imagine unearthing some extraordinary treasure in them, if you had unlimited time to pick through the mounds of unsorted volumes and rooms stacked with paintings, dust-shrouded furniture, chests of silver and once precious ornaments; less easy to understand how anyone could make any money from these enterprises. Curious literary byways revealed themselves among the sagging shelves of Tauchnitz classics in German and Polish classics in Polish. I came upon a hoard of cowboy books in English – The Golden Hawk by Frank Yerby, J. L. Bouma’s The Avenging Gun – and a run from the Woman’s Weekly Library bordered in sickly pink with titles like Love Hath An Island.

  I don’t know when Kraków’s age of innocence ended but I doubt it lasted long. Strolling around the Rynek once again, I looked in vain for the vestiges of the old, shabby charm. The reliefs and friezes stood out in brilliant white. The colours of the smoothly stuccoed façades – apricot, terracotta, cream, sea-blue, sky-blue, leaf-green – glowed. Where restoration was in progress, the hoardings disguising it conveyed urgent consumer messages; the Kamienica Montelupich, on the east side of the square, was hidden behind an immense awning advertising the new Samsung mobile phone with two simcards.

  Outside the Mariacki a miniature ensemble was into its musical loop: Bach’s D Minor Toccata and Fugue, some Four Seasons, a dose of Pachelbel’s Canon, back to the Bach. Inside, the church had got its wares displayed and its act together, and the tour guides were engaged in hot, lucrative competition. A queue of golf buggies was lined up along Mikolajska Street, taking their turn to whisk the infirm and the idle away on the ‘Krak Tour’, extendable if required to include the old Jewish quarter, the Kazimierz. Blinkered greys, with white plumes and scarlet pompoms oscillating above their ears, clip-clopped over the cobbles pulling white barouches with gilded steps and wheel hubs, piloted by characters in cod mountain shepherd gear, long whip in one hand, reins and mobile phone in the other.

  There was not a cabbage or a ewe’s cheese to be had in the covered market, just factory-made jewellery, painted boxes, overpriced woollen jerseys, woven bags and the usual souvenir trash. The great space of the square had been gobbled up by tables and chairs and umbrellas spewed forth from the bars, cafés and restaurants. A babel arose on all sides, English predominating, Polish hardly heard except between the gliding waiters.

  The volume of human traffic was astonishing to me. It was like the incoming tide meeting the rocks. The stream advanced, paused, advanced again, dividing to swirl around obstacles and flow together on the other side. When one detachment stopped to rest or look at something its place was at once taken, so that sometimes it seemed it must only be a matter of time before every inch of space was filled and all movement ceased. Only when the bars finally closed their doors did the city have a few hours to recover itself, while the rubbish carts came in to clear away the debris.

  It was not easy to escape the tourist press. But there was still peace and shade to be had in the Planty, which had somehow managed to remain in the ownership of the city and its residents, and acted as a green sponge, soaking up refugees from the crush. And, almost miraculously, it seemed to me, some of the traditional canteens – known in Kraków as jadłodajnia – had survived the relentless advance of Colonel Sanders and the armies of the fast-food empire. You could still find them down passages and alleys and at the back of office buildings, places of extreme functionality organised on the sole principle of getting hot, filling, familiar Polish food into mouths fast and cheaply. There, at a Formica-topped table, you can literally rub shoulders with the ordinary Krakovians – students, office workers, street cleaners, low-ranking municipal functionaries – so conspicuously absent from the establishments around the Rynek. There is little opportunity for contemplation or conversation in a jadłodajnia. Orders are given and within a few minutes the steaming bowl of bigos or barszcz or plateful of pierogi, placki or gołaki is delivered. Custom dictates that you start eating at once. Ten minutes later, stomach reassuringly heavy, you are outside.

  Overall, I felt profoundly and uncomfortably ambivalent about the transformation of Kraków. I tried to remind myself that, from the perspective of most of those who lived there, life was surely more enjoyable, more rewarding, less depressing, more comfortable and generally better than it had been under the heavy, hairy fist of the Party; and that that mattered a lot more than the fastidious reservations of an occasional visitor. The city, in the sense of the community of its people, had undoubtedly been reborn, which must be a good thing.

  Still, something precious had been lost. When I was there in 1990 it was rundown, dirty, conspicuously lacking in vitality. But it belonged to its people, as it had for a thousand years. They went about the business of being Krakovians while we, the visitors, looked on quietly and marvelled. Now we had taken over and the city had been reorganised to cater for our requirements, the same ones the tourism industry imposes on every place it colonises. In common with other historic and beautiful cities, Kraków had leased itself indefinitely to the tour operators and travel agents representing the massed armies of sightseers. Through this marketing process it seemed to me to have lost much of its particular flavour, its sense, not merely of being Polish, but of being Poland’s finest, most beautiful, cultured and treasured possession.

  There was also a mystery in Kraków that troubled me, which I tried and failed to solve. Or maybe I was wrong and there was no mystery at all. Maybe it was just that times change and people with them.

  Adam Gebel

  I have to go back to the Second World War. Adam Gebel, an officer in the Polish army – by then under German control – was ordered to the eastern front to confront the advancing Russians. Recognising a bad move when he saw it coming, he and some others commandeered a truck and went south. Eventually, by devious routes, they found their way to England. I never really grasped what those devious routes were. Budapest was mentioned, and Trieste, and Rome, or possibly Genoa, certainly Paris, where Adam was given artichokes to eat when he was dreaming of meat and champagne.

  He ended up in Catterick, in the Polish army-in-exile, where he spent the rest of the war as a motorcycle instructor. In his spare time, Adam learned to speak an idiosyncratic version of English, played the guitar and piano, drank, cooked Polish food, charmed and seduced women, gathered mushrooms, poached game. He did some fishing too; there was an episode in Scotland involving the capture, not by fair angling means, of a pike so enormous that, when lifted to his shoulder, it was said that its tail dragged along the ground.

  After the war Adam gravitated to London where he found work in the building trade. One of his employers was an English woman, Pamela Eley, who had a small, classy interior design business. Adam beguiled Pamela, who was several years older than him, and married her, much to the disgust of her family, who were Gloucestershire gentry, and to the dismay of most of her friends.

  My father was the exception to the general disfavour. He had known Pamela since childhood. He liked Adam and enjoyed his theatrically Slavic enthusiasm for the pleasures of life. Adam and Pamela used to come and stay with us, and Adam used to make a good deal of noise. My mother was very attached to Pamela and theoretically fond of Adam, although she found extended exposure to his company tiring.

  My father was killed in a car crash when I was eight years old. My mother and Pamela remained close, and later Adam and I were drawn together by a shared love of fishing. His approach was both more direct and more underhand than mine. His aim was to catch fish in order to eat them, and he was not too particular about how he did it. If he could get away with putting a maggot on his fly, he would do so. If he could get away with killing more trout than was permitted, he would do so. He regarded the makers of rule-books as adversaries to be outwitted. On one occasion he telephoned me to say that he had been banned from a trout fishery run by someone I regarded as a friend, for taking more than his permitted limit. ‘He is Jewish bas
tard,’ Adam said to me. I pointed out that the friend in question was born and bred in Reading. ‘Welsh bastard then,’ he replied.

  Adam seethed with prejudices. He was anti-semitic and racist. Along with Jews and blacks, he disliked the French and the Spanish, and his loathing for the Germans and the Russians was visceral. His attitude to England was complicated. Theoretically he approved the idea of it as a bastion of freedom and tolerance. In practice Adam’s own capacity for tolerance was limited, particularly when it came to the liberal tendency. This was the 1970s, the era of industrial conflict, power cuts, unemptied bins in the streets. ‘Bloody Scargill,’ Adam would growl as we cast our flies. ‘Is fucking Communist. You vote for Scargill?’ He would glare at me. He had soft, silver hair over a steep, smooth forehead, a falcon’s beak of a nose bracketed by jutting cheekbones. I said I had voted Labour. ‘Is same. You want bloody Scargill running country? Is same as having fucking Russians.’

  Every so often two of my elder brothers and I would be summoned for supper with Pamela and Adam at their house in Holland Park. In the early days we took our wives as well but they tended to find Adam overbearing, and did not take kindly to his habit of embracing them from behind and putting his hands on their breasts, so they dropped out. Pamela would sit at one end of the table, talking quietly of family matters and gardening. At the other end Adam would boom and shout and bark with laughter, delivering tirades of abuse against left-wingers, homosexuals and women’s libbers. In between, we brothers would hurl back the obligatory succession of tots of iced vodka and tuck in to slabs of trout and rich stews of Polish sausage, tripe, cabbage and wild mushrooms.

  Adam and I often talked of going together to Poland to fish the rivers he had known in his youth. But it was only ever talk. The truth was that he couldn’t bear the prospect of being brought close to what had happened to his country. Having extricated his mother and father to England in the early 1950s, he had been back only once and hated everything about it. The events leading to the downfall of the regime in 1989 confused him. When I said that things seemed to be getting better, he would grow angry and assert that it would take more than strikes by trade unionists to roll back the years. He said he was too old. He was right.

  Nevertheless he took a close interest in the planning of my Polish adventure, and arranged that when I got to Kraków I would stay with Leszek Trojanowski, who was the son of his oldest Polish friend. I already knew Leszek and his wife, Isa, because they used to come to London each autumn to stay with Pamela and Adam. Adam had a pronounced tyrant’s streak and treated Leszek like a poor relation, getting him to run errands and work in the garden, while Isa’s role was barely distinguishable from that of a serving girl.

  Leszek

  I drove into Kraków on 4 May 1990. The weather was as blissful as early May knows how, and the warmth was matched by the welcome I got from the Trojanowskis. They lived in a spacious house just beyond the Planty gardens, which also contained Leszek’s dental surgery. I was given a tour, Leszek beaming as he patted the reclining seat and stroked his high-speed drill. In the house I admired the microwave, the washing machine, the dishwasher, the new TV and video. Outside were Leszek’s Toyota estate and Isa’s Fiat. When I commented on his evident prosperity, Leszek grinned. ‘When tooth is hurting it not matter if you are Communist or capitalist, you pay good money to stop the hurting.’

  We had lunch at the dining table: grilled pork and potatoes. On one wall of the room was a portrait of Leszek in old-fashioned military uniform, his features and bearing deliberately reminiscent of Napoleon. Isa faced him across the room, bare-shouldered and full-bosomed, every inch an Emperor’s wife. Hardly had I cleared my plate than we were off in the Toyota, swooping south past the panting Trabants and Fiats and sooty trucks towards the foothills of the mountains, where they had a weekend house.

  A month earlier there had been five feet of snow on the slopes around the village of Półrzeczki. Now the intense green of the meadows was brushed by drifts of buttercups, orchids and poppies. The hilltops were covered in the deeper green of mixed woods, spotted with brown where the conifers had been frosted. The fields were divided into long, narrow strips, all privately owned and worked by hand.

  The village was spread across the valleys of two small streams. In the evening I walked with Leszek and Isa up one of the valleys. Horses plodded up and down, dragging wooden ploughs, single furrows snaking out behind. We passed horses and donkeys pulling carts hidden under heaps of grass on which men with walnut-brown faces perched, cigarettes going under straw hats. Outside the single-storey wooden farmhouses yelping dogs flung themselves against the restraints of their chains. Chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys pecked at the dust.

  I was taken aback by Leszek and Isa’s contempt for what seemed to me a rural idyll. ‘They are primitives,’ he said. ‘Aboriginals. You know, they live in these houses all in one room … animals too. In one bed, I think.’ The inhabitants were superstitious, depraved, simple-minded, usually drunk, cunning in a low peasant way, apparently. We passed a shack belonging to a forester. He was a good man, Leszek conceded, although primitive and usually drunk.

  The spaces between the old wooden houses of Półrzeczki were being rapidly filled. Many of the plots had been sold to Krakovians like Leszek for their weekend houses, usually alpine chalets with steep-hipped roofs, balconies, and strong fences and gates. On the proceeds of these sales, the landowners were building themselves new houses, three or four storeys high, of coarse grey or rusty red blocks, with metal roofs. According to Leszek, though, moving house made no difference to old habits. ‘He is still very primitive. Still have animals in house. He is happy with table, chair, bed, TV and vodka. Sometimes no bed. Always vodka.’

  The building boom was in full swing along every road and in all the accessible villages of the region. Like some latterday Slavic Mr Toad, Leszek drove at terrific speed through these untidy settlements, blasting his horn and shouting abuse, sending livestock and their owners scuttling for cover. He steered with one arm draped over the wheel, leaving the other free for contemptuous gesticulations at the peasants, while he maintained a commentary on their degenerate character and habits.

  That first evening two friends came round after supper. They were having a chalet built a little way up the valley. They talked with Leszek and Isa about city matters: their children’s tennis lessons, the opening of private schools, which shops could be relied on to have meat, the petrol shortages and how the Jews must be behind them. They showed no interest at all in the village, its people and life, except for the price of land. To me these steep ribbons etched into the hillsides spoke of a system of husbandry that had served Europe for centuries, and whose survival seemed rather wonderful. To the Trojanowskis and their friends, their only value was as potential building plots, which depended on how easily they could be connected with power and water.

  The next day I had an uncomfortable baptism into Polish fly-fishing. We went to the Dunajec, a major tributary of the Wisła, which flowed with foaming urgency out of the mountains. Its water was a milky, steely grey/blue, thickened with snow melt. Leszek cut me a staff of ash to steady myself as I waded. ‘Is too early for swimming,’ he said with a slightly unnerving grin. A few steps out from the bank I found that my waders were leaking in a number of places. Freezing fingers of water crept down my legs and insinuated themselves into sensitive nooks and crannies. The power of the current dragged at me, and I felt my studded soles sliding across the stones. I cast my flies for a time, and watched them being torn around by the force of the water. I quickly became too cold to continue. Leszek appeared with two little trout that he killed even though they were well below the official size limit.

  We gave up fishing and went on an excursion to Mogielnica, a shrine on top of a hill above Półrzeczki. It was a six-hour walk so we drove most of the way in order that Leszek could bring his latest toy, a video camera. On the way we passed an elderly woman riding an ancient horse, with a mangy mongrel trotting
behind. She shouted at Leszek, who shouted back. After a stormy exchange she rode off. Leszek said that she had objected to the contamination of the mountain air by the fumes from his car. She was the local doctor, he said, a well-known madwoman and drunkard who preferred to live out here and treat the peasants.

  A path led up to the shrine. The wooded crests of the Beskids stretched away to the south. Beyond, 50 miles or so away, the horizon was guarded by the jagged white teeth of the High Tatras. Two sparrowhawks patrolled the woods to our left. A pair of skylarks swung and swooped over the meadows. Leszek’s younger son, Wojtek, aged ten, hunted lizards through the grass, whooping with excitement when he grabbed one. Leszek gasped under the weight of the camera. At the top a crudely painted Madonna and Child looked out from beneath a wooden shelter across a clearing scorched by campfires and strewn with rusted cans and empty beer bottles.

  The next day more friends came to pay a call: Krszysztof, the owner of a factory and bar, and his pregnant wife Mariola, who owned a smart clothes shop in Kraków. She spoke fluent English and set about educating me in the subject of Poland’s glowing future. English was the key, she said, the language of the new Europe. Leszek joined in. ‘Give us two years to catch up … maybe three. People like us will flourish because we understand the free market, understand capitalism. In fact, we’ve been practising it for years under the noses of the bastard Communists.’ To my subsequent dismay, my own contribution to the conversation – a lamentable string of stale platitudes about the benefits of democracy – was faithfully recorded on the sound-track of his camera.

  No one could have been kinder to me than Leszek and Isa were. She fed me and washed my clothes and escorted me around some of the sights of Kraków, and did her best to cheer me up when I was briefly overcome by an acute attack of homesickness. He sorted out all my practical requirements and was touchingly concerned about my welfare, even displaying unmistakable jealousy when I made other Polish friends. When Leszek and Isa pressed me to delay my departure so that I could attend Wojtek’s First Communion – a sacred occasion for Polish families – I felt almost one of them, an honorary Trojanowski.