Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (14 page)

MAY 1986

Usually, a plane ride gives me some distance on questions of
dogma, the way a martini or a lungful of hashish does. We don't
call it "high" for nothing; that was slang three centuries before the
Wright brothers. Whatever those microbes down there think is no
concern of mine-unless I fly into the Soviet Block. Something's
wrong when harebrained ideas can be spotted from Olympian
heights. On the outskirts of Warsaw, the whole countryside is
scarred with the gravel pits and gray dust plumes of cement
factories. Commies love concrete.

Commies love concrete, but they don't know how to make it.
Concrete is a mixture of cement, gravel and straw? No? Gravel,
water and wood pulp? Water, potatoes and lard? The concrete
runway at Warsaw's Miedzynarodowy airport is coming to pieces.
From bumpy landing until bumpy take-off, you spend your time in
Poland looking at bad concrete. Everything is made of it-streets,
buildings, floors, walls, ceilings, roofs, window frames, lamp
posts, statues, benches, plus some of the food, I think. The concrete that hasn't cracked or flaked has crumbled completely.
Generations of age and decay seem to be taking place before your
eyes.

Yet all of this is new. The Poles rebelled against Nazi occupation in 1945, and the Germans, in their German way, dynamited
Warsaw house by house. Some stumps of churches and museums
survived, but nothing major in the central city is older than
Candice Bergen. And the place is dirty with a special kind of
Marxist dirt. I've seen it before in Moscow, Rostov and East Berlin:
It doesn't reek like the compost heap squalor of Mexico City. It isn't
flung all over the place like the exuberant trash of New York.
There's no litter. There isn't much to litter with. It's an orderly and
uniform kind of dirt, a film of dry grit and slough on everything and
an atmosphere lachrymose with diesel stink and lignite-coal
smoke.

I got into an airport taxi, and the driver came right to the
point, "Do you want to change dollars?" The Polish zloty is an
animal tranquilizer on the international currency market. Even the
official exchange rate is enormous, 163z1 to $1. Dinner at the best
restaurant in Warsaw costs only 3000z1, a street car ride is 3z1. "I'll
give you 500 to 1" said the driver.

"How much is the fare?" I asked.

"Business is business," he said, "the cab ride is free." I
handed him ten twenties, made myself rich and tried to go shopping.

The Polish Communists have done their dim-bulb best to
recapture something of the pre-war Warsaw style. That is to say, not
every building looks like a parking garage. And the Russian-type
"Stalin's wedding cake" architecture is absent except for the huge
Palace of Culture and Science, a "gift from the Soviet people,"
which everyone execrates. But there was only so much they could
do with bad materials and worse sense. And they seem to have built
the city from broad-shouldered, quick-breeding New Masses who
never showed up. Meanwhile, a sparse stand-in population rattles
around-tired looking, tending to middle age, not completely
clean. There's too much room on the sidewalks and in the vast
public squares. The farty little East German Wartburg cars and
dinky Polish-built Fiats are at sea on the huge boulevards. Warsaw is empty. But not silent-too many trucks and buses are missing
their mufflers, and the ill-machined wheels of the street cars squeal
on the badly laid rails. The place sounds and smells more like a
lonely freight yard than a capital city.

I found the three main department stores, "Wars," "Sawa" and
"Junior," next to each other on Marszalkowska Street, the main
drag. They had a little neon on their signs, which was a relief. Lack
of advertising leaves a weird hole in the urban landscape. You
think, "What could be uglier than billboards?" But have you ever
looked behind them? In Communist countries you don't get to see
the giant pictures of the cars, boats and pretty faces that fill
people's dreams. You just see the people and where they live.

Each department store had the look of a small-town five-anddime a few months after the new mall opened out on the highway.
Except they don't have malls here or many highways either. The
merchandise in all three was identical. Pants, coats, blouses and
jackets were badly stitched and lumpy and cut like Barbie and Ken
clothes blown up to life-size. Everything was made of imitation
polyester, if there is such a thing. Muddy purples and cheap sky
blues predominated-the kind of colors you see when antinuclear
activists try to dress up. The mannequins had hems falling down
and collar points awry and lint in their synthetic hair. The housewares section was filled with nasty little glass tchotchkes and
disposable-looking aluminum skillets and pans. The toys were fat,
pad-faced dolls and sagging truck-shaped doodads made from
plastic Americans wouldn't use for the bags the toys came in. The
only interesting things I saw were the appliances, and the only
interesting thing about them was that I couldn't tell the stoves from
the washing machines or the washing machines from the refrigerators.

There's a joke in Poland about shopping, as there's a joke
about everything. A woman sends her husband to buy meat for
dinner. He stands in line for six hours at the butcher shop, and
then the butcher comes outside and says there's no more meat. The
man explodes. He shouts, "I am a worker! I am a veteran! All my
life I have fought and toiled for socialism! Now you tell me there's
no more meat. This system is stupid! It's crazy! It stinks!"

A big fellow in a trench coat comes out of the crowd and puts his arm around the man's shoulder. "Comrade, comrade," says the
fellow in the trench coat, "control yourself. Do not go on so. You
know what would have happened in the old days if you had talked
like this." And the fellow in the trench coat pantomimes with a
finger at his temple. "So, please, comrade, calm down."

The man goes home empty-handed. His wife says, "What's the
matter? Are they out of meat?

"Worse than that," says the man, "they're out of bullets."

I crossed Marszalkowska Street to a row of small private shops
rented from the government. The first shop had a single shirt in the
display case. The second had five hair ribbons and a ladies hat
from the Jack and Jackie White House era. But in front of the third
shop twenty or thirty people were gathered gawking at something in
the window. I elbowed into the crowd and pushed my way to the
front. They were looking at plumbing fixtures.

I had 100,000 zlotys in my pocket, more than some Poles
make in six months. I finally bought a hot dog. I suppose it was no
worse than an American hot dog. Horrible things go into hot dogs.
But in this hot dog you could taste them all.

When I was applying for my Polish visa, I didn't know what to
tell the people at the consulate. I couldn't very well say I was doing
a story on "Does Thirty Years of Involuntary Marxism Make Folks
Nuts or What?" The press officer wanted to see a copy of Rolling
Stone, the publication I work for, so I told him I was doing a piece
on Polish rock and roll. There actually is such a thing, if anybody
cares. Poles themselves would rather listen to The Clash and Bob
Dylan.

But this fib got me press credentials so I could go to news
conferences in Warsaw and listen to the Polish government do the
"Modifier Bop." It takes a lot of adjectives and adverbs to give the
Marxist side of the news. The official Polish press agency is called,
no joke, Pap. Here's an excerpt from one of their releases:

Wojciech Jaruzelski and Gustav Husak stated concordantly
that Poland and Czechoslovakia attach essential importance
to the further deepening of the relations of friendship and
cooperation between the two countries, based on the princi- pies of Marxist-Leninism and socialist internationalism, the
consolidation of fraternal ties with the USSR, cooperation
within the political-defensive alliance of the Warsaw
Treaty .. .

You get the idea.

At the first press conference I attended, government
spokesman Jerzy Urban was refuting some statement on long-term
effects of Chernobyl fallout. "False, erroneous news," said Urban,
"due to a general psychosis which is being established in the
West."

An American reporter asked him, rather gleefully, "How's the
blanket collection going?" Poland had volunteered to donate five
thousand sleeping bags to New York City's homeless. But so far
only five hundred sleeping bags had been found in the country and
only one had been donated by a private individual. The American
reporter wanted to know if there wasn't something strange about
donations to the homeless from a country where so many people
want to leave home. Everyone in the room, including Jerzy Urban,
tittered.

The person next to me whispered, "A classified ad ran in the
Warsaw papers, `Will exchange two-bedroom apartment in Warsaw
for sleeping bag in New York."'

The American reporter quoted Lech Walesa as saying, "If the
borders of Poland are ever opened, will the last person out please
turn off the lights and close the windows."

Urban laughed at that, too, and said Walesa could leave
anytime he liked and "didn't have to bother with lights or windows."

Then Urban went back to straining credulity on the fallout
topic. "When you say you can't confirm something," asked a BBC
reporter, "does this mean it's completely untrue?"

"Is this your first time at a press conference?" said Urban.

What ails Poland is, as the Poles say, "fatal but not serious."
When I went to Interpress, the government agency that provides
services to (and presumably keeps tabs on) foreign reporters, my
"minder" immediately told this week's General Jaruzelski kneeslapper. The general is on a Polish TV quiz show. He has to answer four questions to win a prize. The host asks the first question,
"What happened in Poland in 1956?"

Jaruzelski says, "There were riots and strikes resulting from
the justifiable anger of the working class."

"Correct," says the host. "What happened in Poland in
1970?"

"There were riots and strikes," says Jaruzelski, "resulting
from the justifiable anger of the working class."

"Correct," says the host. "What happened in Poland in
1980?"

"There were riots and strikes resulting from the justifiable
anger of the working class."

"Correct. And now for the fourth and final question. What will
happen in Poland in 1987?"

Jaruzelski thinks for a long time and finally says, "I don't
know but I'll take a shot at it ..."

"CORRECT!!!"

Telling the Poles I was writing about rock and roll turned out
to be an inspired lie. It let me get official help to go have fun. It
gave me not only an excuse but a mandate to be out prowling
around at night, checking the dance halls and juke joints and
trying to find the wild get-down side of communism. A nation's fun
will tell you more about that nation than anything except its jails.
And, if I got into enough fun, maybe I'd get into jail too.

Interpress hired a translator for me, who I'll call Zofia, a tall
and pretty, bespectacled and intense girl-half head librarian and
half fashion model. She spoke five languages. "Will you want to
interview many prominent figures in the field of popular music?"
she asked, looking bored.

I said, "Zofia, there's only one way to cover this story. We have
to get inside it. We have to experience it in the social context. We
have to capture the gestalt, get the big picture. We've got to go out
and drink too much and boogie."

"Your magazine pays you for this?" she said.

"Of course they do. I'm behind the Iron Curtain. This is
dangerous. No agency of the U.S. government can help me now. I
might be grabbed for a spy at any minute. Held incommunicado.
Interrogated. Days without sleep. Drugs. Electric shock. A story like this is bound to put me in touch with antisocial elements,
people opposed to the government."

Zofia began to giggle, "Everyone in Poland is opposed to the
government."

Zofia rounded up two friends, Mark and Tom, both Americans. Tom was a graduate student, studying Slavic languages in
Warsaw. Mark was a college professor bumming around Europe on
vacation. We drove off in Tom's car and were promptly stopped by
the police, who stop you all the time in Poland for no particular
reason, like your mother did when you were a kid and trying to get
out the back door.

"Do you know why the police have dogs?" said Tom in English
as he smiled pleasantly at the cop. "Somebody has to do the brain
work." "Do you know why police cars have white stripes on the
side?" Tom continued, "To help policemen find the door handles."
Tom turned to me, "Before Solidarity was crushed in 1981, these
were all Russian jokes." The puzzled copper wanted to look in the
trunk. Maybe we had the other 4,500 sleeping bags in there or
some plumbing fixtures. "A man goes into a bar," Tom told him,
"and tells the bartender, `I just heard a new policeman joke.' A
man who's sitting three stools away says, `Wait a minute, I'll have
you know I'm a policeman!"That's all right,' says the first man, `I'll
speak very slowly and clearly."'