Rachel herself was in Berlin working on lawsuits connected with asbestos hazards, one of the current growth areas in lawsuits. A lawyer from New York, she was attending a conference of insurance companies—reading papers and evaluating information.
Having told her everything, I went to bed strengthened in my resolve. In one sense we were like an adulterous couple—or more accurately it was like a one-night stand. It was tender and I was eager to be candid, and she was a good listener. At five o'clock the next morning I rejoined the group, and it was like being back with a lot of distant relatives.
We had taken the train to East Berlin, and changed, and were now on the Warsaw train, making a slow trip to the Polish border. Police, customs officials, soldiers—it was impossible to tell them apart—got on, examined passports, demanded to see money, scribbled receipts. Theirs was a mysterious business. They all wore old, terrifying shoes.
Poland from the train looked altogether senile—exhausted fields, decaying apartment houses, broken roads, and great, dusty factories. It has the appearance of an elderly country—it is visibly doddering—but it has the most humane and polite people I have ever met, thoroughly gentle and civilized, which is probably the reason theirs is a history of being overrun and occupied.
In my compartment was a little group traveling together—mother, daughter, grandson. They were from Katowice, and being with the daughter reminded me that young Polish women are madly attractive, with clear skin and large, limpid eyes and lovely hair.
"Don't go to Mongolia," Ewa said. "Come to Katowice and I will show you interesting things."
The mother rolled her eyes and said, "She's crazy—pay no attention to her."
Woityek the little boy was solemn faced and sat without making a sound. A Polish man offered Woityek an apple, which the little boy took but didn't eat. That was another thing. The Poles seemed to me to be very kind and courteous to each other; the Germans were less so; the Russians not at all.
Ewa said, "We have relations in Chicago, in New Jersey, in Los Angeles, too. If it weren't for them we'd probably starve. They send us money. I'd like to go there—the States. Or maybe to Paris. I could learn French."
Ewa was twenty-eight and had been divorced for two years. She worked in a bank in the foreign exchange section. I told her I wanted to withdraw some money I had in a bank in Warsaw, the Bank Handlowy. She gave me precise instructions, the address, the telephone numbers. She said it would be easy.
When this family took out their lunch they offered me some sandwiches and fruit, and so I broke out one of my bottles of amontillado and we drank it together.
"Mongolia's so far away," Ewa said. And then it sounded as though she were saying to Woityek, "He's going all the way to Mongolia on the train!"
"They came here once, you know—the Mongols."
Battle of Liegnitz (1241), about eighty miles south of here: we had just stopped at Zbaszynek. The Mongols annihilated a combined army of Germans and Poles.
"Everyone came here," Ewa said. "That's why Poland is such a mess."
On the station platform, two fat, white-faced workmen slathered brown paint on an iron bench. The paint dripped and ran, and when they painted the feet of the bench they slopped paint on the platform. Some Poles watched disapprovingly but said nothing. They wore snap-brim hats and carried plastic briefcases. Most Poles seemed overweight; they talked constantly about food and food shortages—but that wasn't odd. Food is a frequent topic with fatties. They wore old clothes and had sour bready breath and lived in pockmarked houses.
Ewa and her mother and child got out at Poznan to catch the train for Katowice, but gave me their address.
"Send us a postcard from Mongolia..."
We were delayed in Konin. That was convenient. I could write without my arm being jogged. I wrote: In brown April, in Poland, it looks as though spring will never come—bare trees, dead grass like rags, cold winds, rubbly earth, apartments plastered with wet washing, furrowed fields with nothing sprouting, a man plowing with one skinny horse, men shoveling dust, muddy creeks and ditches, a plastic bag jammed on a stick to scare birds; such monotony ... But this is the view in April, when things in Poland look so bleak that even the ducks seem to be drowning, and the chickens are frantic. In a month or so, things will be different: spring will come, the whole country will be in bloom. Yet it still seems an awful fate to be a Pole.
It seemed to me, as we set off again, that the only really interesting buildings were the churches—the only ones with curves, at any rate. The rest were all right angles and had flat roofs.
The landscape brightened in the environs of Sochaczew—patches of woods, better houses, birch groves—but the struggle continued. People labored everywhere, doing clumsy jobs, shoveling, breaking rocks, chopping wood. All the work looked very hard, and Poland seemed like a glimpse of the past.
Catholicism is obvious, not only in the churches, and the rosaries people wear around their necks, and the way they bless themselves before the train starts; but also in the statuary. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary forty feet high, on an eight-foot pedestal, on the forecourt of the railway station at Szymann. That was something I had never seen in Italy or Spain, or even in Ireland, which claimed the Blessed Virgin as the Queen of Ireland. There were more Virgin Marys on pedestals in bean fields, and in the distance, beyond the man plowing, was always a Virgin Mary.
They served a devotional purpose, and it was possible they were useful in scaring birds, but I felt there was yet another motive in their ubiquity. They were the classic Our Lady of Fatima statues, and what the commissars didn't know—but something every Catholic learns early—is that the message Mary gave to the three little children at Fatima in Portugal, in 1917, was that if they prayed very hard, Russia was going to be converted from atheistic communism to Catholicism. "And now we will pray for the conversion of Russia," priests announced throughout the fifties, all over America.
That's what this statue represents to most Catholics and probably to all Poles: the Mother of God at her most political.
I had finished Elmer Gantry and given it five stars, and now I was reading Balzac's Old Goriot. A Polish proverb was quoted in that book: "Hitch five oxen to your cart"—meaning take precautions so that nothing can go wrong. But reading this in Poland seemed very odd. There were no oxen at all, and the carts were rickety things. I spent an entire day traveling slowly through western Poland, almost 300 miles, from the East German border to Warsaw. I did not see any mechanized farming at all and not a single tractor. Instead, I saw the picturesque hopelessness of the farmer gently whipping his horse as the poor beast struggled with an old plowshare.
"It doesn't look too bad," Ellen Wittrick said, raising her eyes to Warsaw for the first time. The late-afternoon sun had gilded the facades of the narrow buildings on Jerozolomskie and given that whole block the look of Harrods.
"Get me out of here," Millie Westbetter whispered to Rick, who replied, "Take it easy, honey. We'll be back on the train tomorrow."
And then I gave them all the slip and plunged into Warsaw. Two men, one after the other, asked me to change money, at five times the official rate; that was outside the hotel. I crossed the street, and while I was looking at a big, clumsy chess set carved from purple wood, a man approached me with the same question. I was pursued by another man, and all the way down Marszalkowska asked the same money-changing question and quoted rates of exchange.