the principal traveler: waiting for poland

by the Principal Traveler

I cried on the flight from Newark to Warsaw. Flying over the Atlantic I was physically and emotionally suspended between two worlds; I had left behind my post-college life of ease and was embarking on a strange new adventure that suddenly felt ridiculous and random. Poland? Teaching English? In a village? Whatever lay ahead, I was anxious to just get on with it and fast.

In our group of ten do-gooders, I was of course the only one with lost luggage. Danuta, our program director, waited patiently with me while her assistant ushered the rest of the group out to a van headed for the dormitory where we’d be staying for a month-long orientation in Polish and How To Teach English. At our third “service counter” we found ourselves facing a vaguely military-costumed man in front of a computer from the early eighties, absent-mindedly typing with one finger. It took Danuta a full ten minutes to get our man to understand the size, shape and color of my bag and another ten for him to say, “It may be here tomorrow, it’s hard to say,” all without ever looking at either of us. Danuta sighed, letting the heavy lids fall on her Betty Boop eyes more than once. “Let’s go.”

I followed her to the parking ramp outside the airport where we found her tiny, pale green hatchback. We sat in the car for awhile as she searched in vain for her parking stub. Having given up after a few minutes, Danuta sighed again and reached for her purse. She shot me a quick smile before beginning to apply a fresh coat of lipstick and mascara. Her elbow clack-clacked the car door as Danuta struggled to roll the window down for the parking attendant, revealing a puffy-faced guy with a bushy ‘stache. The five-minute exchange ended with Danuta’s lids falling slowly while displaying empty, upturned hands. He returned to the booth, closed the door, and picked up a receiver. Fifteen minutes later we were still there, both leaning against the hood of Danuta’s car, smoking in silence. The guard in his booth grinned, nodded slightly, and lit his own cigarette. We all locked eyes for a moment, tacitly recognizing that our collective fate was no longer in any of our hands. I anchored myself more firmly to the car and inhaled my smoke deeply.

Waiting is an art form in Poland and the sooner one approaches it with calm endurance devoid of any expectation for resolution, the better. Although this country was already several years past its bloodless release from the Soviets’ iron grip, it had not yet figured out how to maneuver its bureaucratic limbs efficiently. My first few hours in Poland had given me a brief taste of the time I would spend over the next two years as a slave to the whims of petty functionaries who had nothing better to do between coffee breaks than to see just how unhelpful they could be. Waiting in endless lines at the post office, government offices, or the bank was like a slow-motion Bataan Death March whose conclusion often involved going to the end of yet another line somewhere else.

It only took my American counterparts and I a few days to uncover the finer points of waiting in line. First off, lines always form to the right, and if you’re standing to the left you might as well be standing in Siberia. Always bring a book. But don’t get too wrapped up in it lest you end up with a waffle pattern on your ass formed by the shopping cart pressing from behind: a penalty for your absolute failure to fill in the two-inch gap which just opened in front of you. Expect your radius of personal space to be reduced to one-tenth of what it was in the States, and accept the boozy breath of some Witold or Wojtek on the back of your neck as just another fact of life. Always face forward.

Over the course of that first month in Warsaw I even had to wait for sleep. I lay awake between scratchy sheets every night waiting for the end of the prolonged screeches of freshly-stretched plastic emanating from the building’s back lot. There, groups of peasant-looking men and boys packed unknown items into boxes and sealed them with the rhythmic “Zshrt, zshrt, zshrt,” sound of cellophane tape rolling over side, top, side. Danuta referred to them as “the Traders,” and this particular neighborhood of working-class Warsaw came alive with them in the wee hours of every morning. Ancient diesel vehicles roared loudly as they swiftly swept both goods and people away each dawn, destined for illicit crossings at distant foreign borders.

Mealtimes were also tests in steadied perseverance. We sat at small tables in an all-white dining room, furniture and walls alike covered in crackly white paint like something out of a mental institution. The heavy, hair-netted babchas shuffled slowly across the cement floors and delivered food at five-minute intervals. We would wait for everyone to be served before eating — less out of politeness than out of a need to first correctly identify what cold meat hung suspended in the clear gelatin domes in front of us. The rest of the batter-fried food on our plates leaked oil and color as we sat patiently.

At first I found these situations frustrating. What was wrong with these people? As an effective multi-tasker and lifelong people-pleaser, the idea of working at the speed of molasses was reprehensible to me. I would later develop the theory that this mentality was a relic of a recently bygone era, yet one which had at the time served more patriotic ends. In an oppressive system that only recognized uncontested obedience, doing your job with a minimal amount of chutzpah was the only opportunity you had to stick it to the Man and yet still toe the Party line. What proud Pole would want to serve his Communist overlords any other way? Unfortunately, while the Soviets were swept away in a matter of weeks in the early nineties, the attitudes and behaviors of millions of Poles did not make the transition as quickly. After forty-plus years of Communism, I guess no one remembered how to do anything quickly.

At the culmination of our training period, I found myself sitting alone at the Warsaw Central Train Station, ready to board a train for the distant village I would be living in on the western border with Germany. This was it! Finally, my new life as a teacher and resident of the Polish hinterland was set to begin. I sat chain-smoking, nervously bending an index card with the phrase Gdzie stoi pociag do Kostrzyna? (Where is the train to Kostrzyn?) written on it. After an hour, I heard a monotone male voice on the loudspeaker. I moved up to the front edge of the bench to see if my ears could pluck out a number or place name from the garbled string of “sh,” “ch,” and “kuh” sounds. The announcement suddenly ended and the folks around me shook their heads in silent resignation and settled deeper into their seats. I blew out the collected air in my lungs and waited to see what would happen next.

tagged under:europe, living abroad