There's an Egg in My Soup (3 page)

They lead me to another supermarket down on the main road, the road that runs all the way to Russia and rumbles occasionally from the weight of large trucks with foreign stickers on the back. This supermarket, thankfully, is self-service, but it isn't well stocked. It is also full of half-dressed firemen from the depot across the way, bored with the heat, buying single bottles of beer and flirting with the giggling assistants. Single bottles of beer are a common feature in Poland, where a customer can stroll into a shop and purchase a bottle from the fridge, drink it at the counter, then leave.

When I enter, the giggling ceases and the assistants stare, one following my every move round the shop with her eyes. When I go down towards the back, she leaves her counter quietly and efficiently, as if on wheels, and stands directly behind me, arms folded. In a bit of a panic I grab some cheese, ham, bread, what I presume is soup and as many bottles of beer as I can fit into a bag.

The clatter of these bottles raises the eyebrows of my two new friends when I come out. I thank them, telling them I can find my own way back. They smile politely and I shake hands and walk the other way, the clinkety-clink of the beer bottles one of the only sounds on the quiet streets.

When I get home it is around five o'clock and the main room basks in a deep orange. I load up the fridge with the few bits of food and the myriad bottles and wonder how I can kill the evening off quickly and efficiently. It needs to be murdered because it is going to be a long one.

As the fridge fills up and the light at the back dims, I start to feel a bit guilty. I never fancied the thought of drinking alone before, and so never did. Who do you talk to? How many can you take and when do you stop? And what about the following night when you're sitting here again with nothing to do? I finally decide not to care. It is going to be a long, lonely night and sleep will not come easily.

So that evening, at the end of my first real day here, I sat down with the windows open and began writing letters to as many friends as I could, each one concluded with a bottle of strong Polish beer, the envelope sealed with stringy spit. Lord knows what I wrote. Writing a long letter is a poor substitute for conversation.

With letters done and the sun setting, I found
company in a new acoustic guitar that I had taken with me and which cost what I would probably earn here in a year. I had been playing for years, but I would get to play that guitar so much in Poland that the frets would eventually become like flattened matchsticks.

I wondered what the other Irish guys were up to, whether they had gone down the same route as myself and had stocked up on alcohol to make the opening of this chapter in our lives that bit gentler. For emigration means opening a new chapter. You remove yourself from the norm and anything is possible. Who knew how things would go? You could fall in love with the place and remain for the rest of your days. You could swing the other way and return home after a matter of weeks. Or you could do your time, enjoy it, take the rough with the smooth, work hard and meet as many people as possible. People who, in years to come, when all was in the past, would be nothing more than distant but charming memories, their fates and whereabouts unknown. Some would have been closer to you than others, but all would have contributed in some way to the colourful experience that you would never had known had you stayed in the one place. It was all there ahead of us.

With darkness settled outside, I sat on the couch and went through some of the cassettes I'd put together, not being able to take my CD collection along. Tom Waits became a favourite, with one
album in particular, ‘Nighthawks at the Diner', getting a lot of airing at night with the beers. There were so many stories there, set in the groove of a light jazzy accompaniment that was just so soothing and homely. One track on that album is ‘Better Off Without a Wife', which I used to quote liberally from without any idea of what Poland had in store for me.

As the music played and a warm breeze floated through the open windows, kicking the curtains up like skirts, I felt good. The light in the fridge grew brighter as it was emptied of bottles and I decided, in my high spirits, that I would work out some good reasons for being there, a reason why I was doing my utmost to get away from a career path at home to come to a small town in Poland to teach in a State school. I thought long and hard, and came up empty-handed. So I gave up thinking.

I didn't need a reason. I wanted to get away, and could have ended up anywhere. Something took me to this place and that was that. I started to believe in a destiny of sorts, that it was impossible for people to plan on ending up in situations like this and that it wasn't merely down to a roll of the dice. If chance couldn't be that random with people's lives and plans like this aren't really made, then there must be something or someone else at the controls that had it all worked out for us. I liked that idea, so I went with it. But it still wouldn't convince the Poles.

Day two was a Sunday and I was woken early by bells. It must have been just after dawn. They went on for what seemed a long, long time.

I fell back asleep and the next time I woke it was the rain I was hearing. It came down like something out of the Old Testament, pounding the windows like buckshot, and now I had a blinding headache. Instead of the buttery sun spread out on the lino, a large pool of water crawled from the ground beneath the window before snaking out towards the rug in the centre of the floor. I stood and waded through it barefoot, lifting the soggy curtains slowly from the sill. The windows looked frail, the paint peeling, the wood beneath starting to crumble like a sodden cigarette. If the rain gets in, what's going to stop the cold when winter falls? Abandoning that thought, I jammed a couple of towels under the frames and got dressed to go foraging for food once more.

Outside, puddles turned to ponds and the sandy pavements became scarred with rivulets, threatening to pull the ground from beneath like a rug. The supermarket on the main road that had yesterday saved
my life was closed, so I walked further, halting at a roadside statue of Our Lady in a glass case. I stood under a tree to shelter from the rain, still coming down in buckets. The statue reminded me of the one that now sat in my hallway and I wondered briefly if I was being followed. If I was, then I prayed I would be guided towards food and some solace, because I needed it that morning.

From an old church down the road, a large, white building with steeples that more resembled the churches of Russian Orthodoxy than Roman Catholicism, people filed out with black umbrellas and walked bent over into a sheet of rain. Some of them stopped and entered a small building on the far side of the road, near the park. It was a rather plain building, square, with net curtains and simple tables visible inside. One of the old communist-style bars that served beer, coffee and food measured out in grams – sausage, bread and butter. I wasn't brave enough to go in. So, bidding adieu to Our Lady in the glass case, I pulled my jacket up around my ears and set off.

I chanced upon a small, wooden grocery store worked by an old but strong-looking man, a clean, white coat tied at his waist. We soon devised a system of communication. I point at something and he points with me and when I nod he makes sure of the choice by holding whatever it is in the air and raising his eyebrows. I nod again and he lays it on the counter,
scribbling down the price for a tot on a sheet of brown paper that eventually goes to wrap up a lump of ham. I also managed to get bread, thank the Lord, a few bananas, eggs and a packet of imitation Jaffa Cakes, the luxury item in the day's catch. Apart from the imitation Jaffa Cakes, it occurred to me that finding convenient food here was going to be difficult.

That particular Sunday was one of the worst days I spent in Poland. From the church bells at dawn to the buckets of rain, and the feelings of envy watching families and elderly people file into that old communist-style ‘stolowka' for lunch. I missed home dinners and I missed home. With only myself for company, I was bored beyond belief and keen just to start working.

The days were long after that. Jarek called again a few days later but I turned down the offer of help or another tour, for some reason preferring the solitude of the vacant flat. Anyway, I was quite happy arranging everything in the flat to suit myself. There was a surprising amount of space, with a large living room/bedroom (depending on whether you'd converted the couch or not), a hall, a bathroom, a kitchen and a spare room that was eventually just used as a dumping ground for books and drunken visitors.

On the whole, I'd done rather well. The flat was really too much for one person, and I had been told by the guide that it was originally home to a whole family.
It was clean, if basic, and clearly a lot of effort had been made for me. I took this as a good sign. It meant that the people here cared. They cared about me before they'd even met me, which must be a good indication of their hospitality.

The view out of the main window was hardly inspiring, but it was genuinely pleasant – a large block on the left, the ground floor of which housed a kindergarten, and the main school buildings visible on the right beyond a small green where children from the kindergarten played. There was a laneway that had yet to be paved and tarmacked on the left also, all mud and puddles. Where it led I didn't know at this stage. In the distance a variety of wooden houses, brick houses and other nondescript buildings stretched out towards the train line, beyond that only fields.

I kept the windows open all the time. Apart from the rain on the Sunday, it was hot during the day, and in the evenings the heat would be replaced by a pleasant air carrying with it a scent of warm moisture and coal smoke. I would stand at the window and watch the sky dim and the fields become obscured. The houses would gradually disappear until, finally, there would be nothing but darkness. I liked those evenings. I would drink one beer after the next, watching this transformation from day to night. By the time it got dark I was almost fit for bed. And I would wonder where all the people were in this town. It seemed to just grind to
a standstill once night fell.

In the mornings I would wake and take a minute to remind myself where I was. Then I would take a look around the flat, maybe fix up one more room, unpack a bit more, and plan what to do with the place for the year.

Still lacking the courage to queue in the main store for proper food, I was driven to the pizza restaurant a number of times over the next few days, until some old woman farted at me. I can still picture her perfectly. She stood outside a planked-up wooden house, sucking the guts out of a cigarette, idly examining the evening. Short legs planted into a pair of furry slippers, she fixed me with a stare from some way off. Then as I passed, she winced up one eye and farted loudly. Maybe she didn't mean it. But I won't forget that fart. It was the only form of human communication in days.

In contrast to the quiet of the previous few days, the day school started was mayhem. The night before it was due to commence, the students began arriving in droves to take up their rooms on corridors that had until then been like a tomb. It had been explained to us that all schools have their boarding blocks, but that didn't mean they were all boarding schools. Kids would come from remote villages or towns scattered across the province or even further, and rather than face long journeys on infrequent buses through cold winters, would instead stay in the blocks for a very small fee, since the schools were essentially run by the State.

I sat up for hours that night, distracted by the chaos of slamming doors, screaming kids who hadn't seen each other all summer and a discordant mix from a variety of stereos playing a variety of music.

Poring over the books and notes that I'd taken with me, I realised I hadn't a clue how I was going to get through it. Too many years in college had put the idea in my head that I wanted to teach. It was the necessary
extension of a long period of academia without any practical applications. In fact, it was the only route I wanted to go down, because I was really a domesticated college animal. Business, uniforms, suits and nine-to-five jobs held no interest for me whatsoever.

But as I sat there that night reading over the notes from the training school, I realised that I'd no idea where to even begin. Teaching is a vocation and, like many vocations, it can call on those who have the heart, but perhaps not the expertise, to deliver. It occurred to me that evening that maybe I was one of those poor souls. Good intentions are not always good enough.

The instructors in the school in Dublin had bent over backwards to prepare us. We had spent weeks in mock lessons, experimenting on Spanish and Italian kids who had volunteered to be taught by the teachers who had never taught before. Throughout the training a lot of worrying issues were raised regarding the schools to which we were being sent. Tape recorders, televisions, photocopiers, proper books and possibly even chalk would be lacking, so we were warned to prepare and to take with us any amount of props that could be used to get us out of sticky situations – regular and irregular verbs written on stiff pieces of cardboard and laminated; articles from magazines; photographs, books and lots of coloured markers. But I was still trying to come to grips with the complexities of English grammar. The ability to
speak and write your native language doesn't qualify you to explain its make-up. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there were an infinite number of questions that could leave me stumped up there.

Also bothering me was the fact that the Polish language differs so greatly from ours and is, in fact, missing what we would take to be basic elements in language. There are no articles, for example. If the Poles are used to saying, ‘Cat walks down street,' how can you convince them to put ‘a' or ‘the' in front of the nouns? Worse still, how do you explain when it's ‘a' and not ‘the'? The Polish language also lacks the perfect tenses. ‘He has been here twice this morning,' doesn't make any sense. ‘He was here twice this morning,' is adequate in Polish. Also, because of the amount of cases their language contains, there is no need for a definitive word order in sentences. Where we must put, for example, place, frequency and time in the correct order, for the Poles it makes no difference. ‘Twice to the cinema went I last week,' is a well-constructed sentence in Polish.

I was staring at time charts that showed you how to carefully divide up a forty-five-minute period so the students don't lose sight of your goal. Then there were the problems of the goal itself, which should be based on a language function, a concept to present that language function, a medium through which to present that concept and a method of checking to see if it was
fully understood at the end. I don't remember any of that from when I was in school. Maybe that was because the teachers all spoke the same language as me. Now, somehow, we were supposed to teach English, through English, to people who had no English. The trainers in Dublin had a convincing enough logic for doing this, but eleven hundred miles away in a remote town in Eastern Europe, the same logic just didn't seem very compelling at all.

When I finally got to bed I think I must have prayed myself to sleep. I prayed that I would be forgiven for thinking I was a teacher. I prayed that if I was going to try to be a teacher, that the Lord would come halfway and help me. I even reasoned with Him, offering up the view that I was really here to do a good service for people and, in a world with more evildoers than good, I deserved a break. He did come halfway, actually. But that's about as far as He got.

At half-past eight the next morning, after a night where sleep came only in fits and starts, two large pairs of knuckles battered the paint off my hall door. I knew there were two pairs because of the incredible racket and because of the hollow clatter of four high-heeled feet coming down the corridor beforehand. I was already beginning to detect some odd habits in the Polish people. Knocking on doors, for one, was extremely rare, and was not meant as a request, but a warning. Sure enough, no sooner had the knocking
faded but the door handle was being wrenched out of its socket like a limb. So, this was my first introduction to the teachers. Thankfully, I had anticipated it and locked the door overnight.

The knuckles belonged to two women, English teachers, who had come too early – another distinctly Polish habit – to escort me to the opening ceremony. One was older and seemed on the brink of retirement, the other was younger and broke into a giggle when I opened the door in nothing but a pair of trousers. Both stared at me as I scurried between the bathroom and bedroom in a fluster, making myself look respectable for my first day.

Once outside we slammed into a wall of heat and I immediately began to sweat. My bowels rumbled with nerves. The shirt itched. The collar was hard and tight on my neck. The trousers were too heavy. But this was the opening ceremony and all ceremonies, big or small, are important events here. They involve the staples of music – preferably with a good parp of brass – plenty of speeches and applause, an abundance of flowers and immaculate dress.

In the main hall, several hundred students were assembled in rows of seats, with several hundred more standing at the back. The noise was like a local football derby, and only for a stunning Polish girl running up and presenting me with flowers at the door, I probably would have wet a portion of my new trousers. She
planted a kiss on each cheek, which took me by surprise, and, after exchanging a few words of welcome, dashed away into the mob like a startled deer before I could even get her phone number.

I took a seat near the front, nodding keenly at random individuals along the way, doing my best to look as if I already belonged. But I could feel the eyes behind me, along with the giggles and whispers and the prods of fingers in mid-air.

It was natural for the girls to be staring, surely. Not only was I the sole foreigner on the staff, I was also the youngest and, by the looks of it so far, the only male. It was an enviable position to be in, if it weren't for the fact that this was a school and I had a responsible position in it. I focused on the prospect of having to get up in front of all these girls and make them learn the English language. That, and the appearance of another young male teacher, soon drove any other thoughts out of my head.

The ceremony began with what I gathered to be the National Anthem and a student body, consisting of four girls dressed in white blouses and short black skirts, marching in from the corridor with a flag. I couldn't keep my eyes off them, distracted only when I had to stand and bow as the director introduced me as the new English teacher. Finally, after various speeches and applauses, the student body stood again with the flag and the whole assembly filed out and into the
classrooms.

Lessons actually began quite well. At least, I was able to remain reasonably composed. I had been practising a strut of confidence on my empty corridor, and the technique of not looking up until I was at the desk with the ledger open. I remembered teachers in school who did this, and they were all bastards. Not that I wanted to be a bastard, but there was just something authoritative about it, I felt. That technique didn't last too long. Ignoring the students at the beginning of each lesson is a bad way to start.

In the beginning, it was all trial and error of course. When you walk into a foreign class for the first time you don't know how good their English is. So you rant on anyway, until you realise they haven't a clue what you're saying. Staring back at you wide-eyed like budgies on a perch, their awful silence steadily creeps into a whisper before lurching forward into chaos. Before you know it, you've lost control of thirty-five teenage girls. And you won't get it back. It is the longest forty-five minutes you will ever have to live through. Because of a few pretty bad days early on, I learned a number of basic rules quite quickly.

You have to learn all their names. That means all of them. There is nothing as devastating for a teenager than to be the only one who appears to have been forgotten by the teacher. It is like having a bad skin disease or some horrendous smell disorder. So, I asked
them all to write their names down on large pieces of paper and place them on their desks in the mornings.

The word got round the school quite quickly that this was my method, and immediately all the girls in the new classes had made large name tags from pieces of white card. By day two it had almost become a competition. Almost. Some were fastidiously coloured in, with flowers, the seaside or pictures of an eye winking with long lashes. Others were simply scrawls. I could quite quickly separate the more diligent and creative students from the layabouts, simply by the amount of effort they put into these name cards, and was quite proud of my early forays into classroom psychology.

The first ten minutes of every lesson was taken up with me making an arse of myself trying to pronounce their names and admiring their handiwork. But I was quite prepared to make an arse of myself, if it meant they got a laugh and the ice was broken a bit. When I was finished doing that I'd throw in a story about me going round the town trying to get things done, adding a smattering of bad Polish for an extra chortle. That was obviously a gas for them – the Irish clown trying to buy his groceries.

Of course, this was a grave error. I forgot that most of these girls lived in the same town. From then on, whenever I went into a shop I'd be watched and studied like some rare species of animal that had
moseyed in by mistake.

The curiosity of the students never ceased to amaze me. Some were immediately brazen and would stand and ask questions in fabulous English, which for a new teacher was very encouraging. A lot of them would simply stare at you, like the folk in the shop – not a stare of ill will at all, just a stare or a smile. Maybe they weren't used to many foreigners. Maybe I was odd. But so many of these stares would be possessed of looks of such fragility that I was struck hard by thoughts about their backgrounds, what some of them may have gone through, and the possibilities that lay ahead. I realised very quickly how placid the Poles were as a race – apart from some of the lunatics on the street I would eventually get to know – a placidity that was torn apart so many times throughout their history. So when I met a stare in the class, I felt taken with a sense of responsibility that was often uncomfortable.

Within a few days I had also started to figure out what kind of school I was in. When I arrived, the name of the school was just a jumble of letters over the main door – ‘Zespol Szkol Ekonomicznych'. Other schools could be called ‘Technikum' or ‘Zawodowa'. Although to all of us who arrived here they were simply schools, your sanity and career could depend on exactly where you were placed.

As opposed to the general education system at home, where you go to school, do the obligatory subjects and
have a fairly limited choice for your leaving certificate, the Polish education system acknowledges the fact that not all students are academic. That may sound a little condescending, but it is a simple fact of life. Not everybody has the inclination or ability to get through English, maths, Irish, geography and history, with further hopes of attending a university. Some are academic; some are more technically minded; some are creative; others plan to live on a farm. The Polish school system, then, is broken down into many categories for the student – technical schools, mechanical schools, catering schools, professional schools, schools of economics, language and academic schools, farming schools and so on. Because APSO didn't want to be seen as elitist by sending everybody to serve in a language or economic school, some of us ended up in technical and mechanical schools.

The project was a bit of a disaster in that respect. It was never going to work, but it took some time to realise that. Some teachers had success stories, particularly a few of the girls who had been given jobs in primary schools. The kids in these schools loved them, and many teachers stayed well beyond their one-year contracts. A few handled the language schools very well and were well received. But there were schools that really didn't care less whether or not a new teacher had arrived, be it from the West or the East.

However, only one girl went home that first year. She
had been sent to a town farther away in the remote east of Poland, a vast, bleak area that has little to console an expatriate. She was living in a classroom, with a curtain separating her bed. Every morning she would be woken by the kids peering in at her, with that odd, endlessly curious stare. So she packed her bags.

To be fair to the students, and without trying to disparage the teachers in any way, years of inferior methods and forced learning had crippled the Polish education system to a great degree. It all began with the Russians. From the moment of their occupation, they drove the Russian language down the throats of the Poles, starting with the letter ‘s'. Why ‘s'? The staple textbook, even for the kids in primary school, was
Stalin, Voprozy Leninizma (Stalin, Studies in Leninism).
While they were at it, they rewrote the history of modern Poland. The Katyn massacre, the deportations, the shootings, the gulags, the Warsaw Rising, were all conveniently left out.