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Dispatch 10: Doorbell Ditch, Polish Style
The summer between my junior and senior year of university I went to Poland to teach English in a little seaside Scout camp in the village of Puck, up the coast from Gdansk in the northeastern corner of the country. That was 1991, the year of the attempted coup in Moscow against Gorbachev, the year that the trendy backpacker destination switched from recently-unified Berlin to recently-opened Prague. It was a magic summer, full of promise. The kind of summer where, sitting on an empty station platform late one night, I was serenaded with folk songs from a train window by a lovely blonde Polish girl and her equally blond charges, simply because I was the first American they had ever met.
Having some time at the end of my teaching stint, I travelled south to the Polish Ukraine to meet my students back in their home city of Przemysl. The day before I was to meet them I went by train and bus to Ustrzyki Gorne, as far as you could go into the Bieszczady range of hills. I arrived mid-morning. From there I set out on foot towards the hills of Rawka and Krzemieniec. They were the highest in the area, just over the treeline at 1307 and 1221 metres respectively, and they were bang on the border where Poland, Slovakia and the (still at that point) Russian Ukraine met. On my back I carried the pack I had lived out of for the past three months.
I don't know what I expected when I go to the top of Rawka, but it certainly wasn't to look down at utterly silent, tree-covered hills, with the national borders cut in swathes along the ridge-lines. Those grass strips, a regular 10 feet wide and branching off in three directions, were the only human signs for as far as I could see. I knew that half a day's walk down the thin dirt trail east of me was the town of Ustrzyke Gorne, but there was not a house, a road, anything visible from where I stood, atop the highest hill in the Bieszczady.
The shadows were already long as I stared at the hills with their clearly-marked borders. It was like standing on a map. I knew that unless I hurried back to Ustrzyki Gorne, I risked being caught out here after dark, and would have difficulty finding the hostel that my guidebook told me lay somewhere in the town. But what's one little risk, when you can take a much bigger one? I legged it for Krzemieniec, right on the border. Down into a high valley then up again. The trail petered out and I pushed on through trees and, finally, as the sky was already fading to orange, I could see the clear-cut strip ahead of me that separated Poland from the Russian Ukraine.
I slid my grubby blue pack off my shoulder and walked across the strip. It was just some grass, seven steps, eight steps, and then some trees. In Russia, by a matter of inches, I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet and felt absurdly pleased with myself. The Bieszczady remained deafeningly silent. Then I hightailed it back across the border, grabbed my pack, and beat it for Ustrzyki Gorne.
By the time I got back to the village, it was dark. Small villages in the Polish Ukraine don't exactly come equipped with extensive streetlighting systems. My legs were a mass of cuts from crashing through branches and thorns. Even worse, my guidebook was being extremely coy about the exact location of the hostel where, hopefully, I would spend the night. I was exhausted to the point where I was starting to cast evaluatory looks at various bushes and hedgerows to determine which would be the softest to kip in for the night. This, I know, is not a good idea, but I wasn't looking like I have any other choices.
A middle-aged man walks quickly past me, head down and determined for home. I run after him, and in my grammatically mangled Polish I ask him where the hostel is. He looks at me, squinting a bit. "What hostel? There is no hostel," he responds.
"Oh. Crud," I say, deflating.
"Where are you from?"
"I'm an American student. I was walking in the Bieszczady..."
"Why don't you have a tent?" he asks. "Polish people, when they go walking, they bring tents."
My lack of language lets me down at this point, so instead of launching into an explanation of how I was only going to be walking for a couple of hours, but en route I thought it would be rather fun to break a few international laws and this kept me out longer than intended, I just look at him and shrug. "Because I'm stupid, OK?"
The guy laughs. He's not very tall, and has the tan, thin, leathery face of someone who has spent most of his life in manual labour, outdoors. His shoulders are bent.
"Is there anywhere I can stay?" I ask.
"You should have brought a tent," the man comments.
"Yes, I should have brought a tent," I agree, exasperated.
This seemed to galvanise something in the man. He nodded, pleased I had finally admitted my deep wrongness in camping preparation, and said, "You can stay with us. This way." He turned and took off quickly down a side road.
This could go very badly wrong, I think, as I follow him. He ducks into a tiny house, not more than three rooms, and motions me to follow. Inside is a small sitting room and attached kitchen, a bedroom off to one side, and a bathroom off to the other. And a stout wife in a floral dress, who is not happy to see me. Mine host explains that he met this idiot American on the road, who tried to go camping without a tent, and he offered for her to stay here.
The woman explodes. A rapid fire exchange follows, too complex for my limited Polish, but the upshot of the problem seems to be that if I stay, I get the daybed in the sitting room, and the husband and wife have to sleep in the same room. This seems to be an event which has not occurred in recent history. I look around the room as they argue. On one wall is a framed marriage photograph of the couple, two head shots, hand tinted. He leans forward, eyes wide open, startled and innocent. She gazes towards him, coquettish, radiant. Blue eyes, sandy blonde hair, flushed cheeks against a pale red background. You can smell the hope shining from the picture.
My host, having re-established marital superiority, grabs a brown bottle of Tatry beer out of the refrigerator, opens it, and upends it into his mouth. I have never seen someone drink a beer so fast. It was like the bottle was being emptied down a drain. I curl up on the daybed and attempt to sleep, wary but grateful.
I board a bus for Przemysl at 5.30am the following morning. The stop is on a lonely, backcountry road. It's still dark out. The man sees me off and I thank him profusely. I offer him some zlotys, to pay for the trouble I've caused, but he refuses. Polish hospitality is Polish hospitality, and it wouldn't be right for him to accept money for it. He smiles and waggles his finger at me. "Next time..." "Yes! Tent! Tent! I know!" He laughs. Thirteen years later, one of the few words of Polish I still remember is namiot - tent.
As the bus honks impatiently, I shake his hand and slip some cash into it. He looks startled, and before he can give it back I dive onto the bus. The driver muscles the doors shut and the heavy old bus lumbers into a turn. The man smiles and waves. Resting my throbbing head against the cold glass window, I wondered how much of that cash his wife would see, if any. I wondered how far it was from a photograph's young hope to a cold and sour bed, and bottles drained in anger. Not far, I know now. Not far at all.
When I get to Przemysl that afternoon, I tell my kids the story of my little adventure across the Russian border. Ben, one of the more practical boys, rolls his eyes and thumps his forehead in the international gesture for, You are such an idiot!.
"You know why those grass strips are there? They have motion detectors all along them, and they send jeeps down those paths to pick up people who try to sneak across the border!".
Oh, I said. I didn't hear any jeeps...
"Well. The Russians were probably too amazed that anyone wanted to cross from Poland to Russia to do anything."
"Shut UP, Edyta."
"It's true! Tell Alex about the old lady."
Ben sighs and folds his arms. He explains how the city of Lvov in the Ukraine used to be part of Poland, and plenty of people in Przemysl (which was the border town on the main road to Lvov) still have family there. But under the Communist government you weren't even allowed to mention the city. The Russians set up a huge, gated checkpoint at the border, a mile or two from Przemysl, with high walls, towers, barbed wire, and alarm-triggering motion detectors; Lvov no longer existed for the Poles, and that was that.
Or it would have been, except for a very irascible old lady who lived in Przemysl. She hated the Russians, and hated their huge, ugly border. So once a fortnight or so, she would walk out to the border at night, with her tricornered, old-lady shuffle. Once she got to the gate, she would march straight up to the areas where the motion detectors were, and jump up and down on them, and thump the ground with her stick. Alarms would screech, lights would come on, and detachments of Russian border guards, clumsy with sleep, would stumble to the walls. And be faced with the rump view of a gnarled, heavyset old baba, stomping slowly homewards to Przemysl in a state of righteous indignation.
The old lady died soon after they opened the border. There was nothing large enough left to take her anger.[August 1991, Przemysl, Poland]