To eke out one’s days on a mythical shore in the east, knowing one can never be found, and no-one can ever visit. Surrounded by locals who talk in a strange tongue almost impossible to master. Is that my fate?
Perhaps that is why I am shifting along on these trains, in search of that space where I can rest alone (sans dog). Poland doesn’t have an eastern shore either. But here I am.
The train journey from Wroclaw to Krakow was challenging. An hour into the journey we stopped for four hours, waiting for a bridge across the Oder to be made safe. Outside it was 40 degrees, and the track had supposedly warped and softened in the heat. Inside the carriage, with no air conditioning, the temperature went above 45 degrees. We are all warped and softened also.
I was reminded of InterRail trips from my teens. Here I am again, forty years later, in a carriage full of foreigners stopped in the middle of nowhere with no information about what is happening or when the endurance trial might end. Locals make off with their bags across the tracks, abandoning ship, taking with them any knowledge that might have helped the rest of us get out of here. I sit in the heat, or stand outside in the shade of the train, sipping water from a plastic bottle, wondering how long I can make this tiny portion of liquid last. The fug of foreign cigarettes surrounds me.
I’m cast back to 1980 and the former Yugoslavia. I had been drinking beer in the rear carriage with a load of local young men, who then ask me to carry their US dollars across the border into Italy. When we near the border, I return to the Westerners section of the train holding several thousand dollars in cash.
When the border police come through checking papers, they look suspiciously at my water can that is shaped like a petrol container (it basically is a petrol container). Two German assholes we’re sharing the carriage with tell the officials that my tank doesn’t contain water but benzene. Why anyone should beleive this I don’t know, but I am immediately whisked off the train.
Word gets out down the train that the idiot English boy who is holding all the dollar is now being frog-marched by two police officers with guns down to a track-side office. All the locals hang out the windows and stare hard at me, watching to see if I’m the sort who will break easily, surrender their cash and sell them out. I get the sense that they are no longer the friendly laughing beer-swillers I was with 30 minutes ago.
In the office, I wave my British passport vigorously. The official behind a desk has not been told why I am there. He is puzzled and irritated. He makes me wait for a few uncomfortable minutes while he flicks through my papers and makes a phone call. As I hand over my rail pass I realise that if I miss this train, I will miss all my connections that would get me back to the UK by the pass’s expiry date. I’d be stranded without money somewhere in France. I’d be forced to make a humiliating reverse charge call to my parents who had strongly disapproved of this Eurotrip in the first place.
I’d also no doubt be confronted by these boys on the train when I arrived in Trieste, asking where all their money was. It seemed unlikely they would leave me with the fingers to dial a reverse charge call.
The official eyes me lazily and dismisses me with a wave of the hand. I am to get back on the train. Still the locals are hanging out the windows, wondering if I am returning with the cash or whether I’ve handed it over and been sent on my way. I want to smile and tell them it’s ok, but boarding school training tells me I need to remain stone-faced, neutral, nothing to see here. A show of relief or joy at this point would prove some kind of guilt and I’d be hauled back again.
Only when the train has started up and we are well clear of the police do I move back through the carriages to confront my so-called friends. They eye me aggressively at first, but then I produce the rolls of dollar from my pants and from the pouch around my neck hidden under my shirt. Smiles all round and back to the conductor’s cubby hole to break yet more disgusting cheap beer. Everyone is happy. I’m ecstatic – I managed not to wet myself.
Back to the present situation, the train has decided to return to Wroclaw, so five hours after we started, we’ve progressed precisely nowhere. We sit in the station for another hour – still boiling - waiting to find out what to do. The two guards on the train have no idea what is going on. The only thing they can tell me in English is that I must ‘ stay on the train’.
Eventually another set of carriages is hooked up to our train, and the word is we’re going take rural train lines down to the east of the Oder, thus avoiding the buggered bridge. What no-one tells us is that the train will be forced to stop every 20 mins or so by some slow and outmoded signal system, and that the train is to be restricted to going at 40kmh. We take another four hours to get back to the town where we got stuck in the first place.
I arrive at Krakow station at two in the morning. A journey that should have been less than 3 hours has taken more than 14. And for half that time I’ve been slowly roasted inside a tin can. Nobody in Poland wears a mask, so I’ve essentially been in some kind of heated petri dish of human germs with the guards throwing free water at us every twenty minutes. God knows what kind of bacteria we’ve been growing and sharing between us. I can already feel a sore throat and runny nose coming on.
I am in no fit state to re-unite with my family in an AirBnB flat in a strange town at 2:30 in the morning. They have had to sort everything themselves, so now I am useless to them. I agree to crash out in a spare room and leave them to resume their slumbers. I fail to get to sleep easily thanks to the mad tradition of a fireman trumpeter letting rip from a tower every so often to remind us all that Krakow is not burning down or being attacked by Mongol hordes.
In the morning, we meet up with others who are attending the family wedding and traipse round the old city obediently following a desultory tour guide. Here is a tower, here is another tower. Here is a church. Here is a story about another Polish king, another Pope, another Bohemian or German invader. There are myths about dragons and brothers who fight each other with a knife that is still displayed in the old market place. There is much talk about Pope John Paul, his legendary fitness and athleticism, his clever way of siding with the Polish resistance in the war without ever actually joining the resistance, his clever way of doing business with the communist regime in exchange for the Catholic church being able to privately get on with its business – including the kiddy-fiddling presumably.
By the end of the tour, I’m heartily sick and tired. I need to go back to bed. And I also need to have a good brush up on my history to try and understand why Polish nationalist narratives are so keen to erase much of the true history of Krakow – to skim over centuries of Austrian and Prussian rule, to diminish the impact of the Hungarians, the Nazis and the Soviets. We are to look with admiration at the medieval university, the castle towers, the cloth market and marvel at the miracle of the first Polish kings, and then skip conveniently across 600 years or so to 1918 and the establishment of a Polish republic.
We do it in every country these days – cherry pick the bits of our history that bolster a nationalist programme and chuck out that bits that might suggest something more complex and real, regarding where we come from and how we might live peacefully together.
I was hoping to watch some football from my sickbed. But Brexit has meant my Sky roaming subscription can only work in the UK and no longer allows me to stream for any country in the EU. Somehow I’m still paying the same monthly fee for this much reduced service. I imagine the kings of Poland would have a way of explaining to me that things are better for me this way.