A Chip Shop in Poznań, page 10
34 The Hungarian president was in attendance because Hungary saw its own share of strife in 1956. Thousands of Hungarians were killed in fighting, and thousands more fled as refugees. Taken together, the ’56 uprisings were the first major test of Soviet control over the Eastern Bloc countries.
16
I love Others. I am one, for heaven’s sake
5 July. I arrive at work and find a note instructing me to have 30 kilos peeled by this evening. The prospect is so unappealing (if you will) that I make a desperate phone call to Julia, wherein I wax lyrical about a set of chips I ate the other day whose skin had been left on. Not only did leaving the skin on make the chips healthier and tastier and crispier, I tell Julia, it also made them more profitable because nobody had been paid to peel the potatoes. (I didn’t eat such chips, but that’s why we have imaginations, to spare us from grief.) Julia is prepared to give it a go. I celebrate my reprieve by burying the peeler in the garden. Then I get on with washing the spuds. I fill up the sink with cold water and then pour in a few kilos. I plunge my hands in the water and turn and shift my potatoes – yes, my potatoes – so they clash and rub and rid themselves of dirt. The gradual discharge browns the water until it becomes a muddy broth, wherein the spuds steadily ricochet, each coming-together prompting a partial cleansing. Running my hands around the opaque basin is like trying to read enormous, vivacious brail, its starchy signifiers hopping and dancing and evading comprehension. It’s fair to say the experience of washing the potatoes is unexpectedly pleasant, and it makes me wonder if any task can be made remedial, restful, sensual, if one has a mind to make it so, before deciding, after washing the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth kilos, that it can’t.
Anita is here, for the record. We haven’t spoken much since that time when she left me at the food court. We aren’t cold with each other. We’re friendly, professional. We’re colleagues now, and I suppose that’ll have to do. I’m not perplexed by her rejection of me. After all, I’m no Renaissance man. And even if I was a Renaissance man there’s no guarantee I’d be irresistible. Consider the case of Leonardo da Vinci. Leo was arguably the most diversely talented person known to man – a prolific painter, sculptor, engineer, astronomer, anatomist, biologist, geologist, physicist, architect, philosopher and humanist – and yet he couldn’t get a girlfriend for love nor money. You’d think if you were Leo all you’d have to do is show up to the date and put your CV on the table, but evidently not. Perhaps da Vinci spent so much time being diversely talented he was simply too busy to woo. I’d love to claim the same for myself, that I’m too busy being diversely talented to woo Anita, but the real reason things aren’t escalating between us is there’s an inequality of stature – that is to say, I’m just another person, whereas Anita isn’t. As far as I’m concerned, there has been no miscarriage of justice – which makes the whole thing easier to deal with. In fact, I’m feeling so sanguine about the situation that when she occasionally comes into the kitchen for a chat – like now for example – I’m able to enjoy the exchanges far more than when I was after her heart. In a sense, I like Anita more since I stopped liking her, if you know what I mean.
‘Are you happy, Benjamin?’
‘Yeah, I don’t mind making the salad.’
‘I mean generally. Being in Poland.’
‘Definitely. I like being away.’
‘Away from what?’
‘Away from the familiar, I suppose.’
‘What’s wrong with the familiar?’
‘Oh, you know. There’s something a bit repulsive about all familiar things.’
‘That sounds severe.’
‘I don’t mean repulsive as in disgusting. I mean repulsive as in having the ability to repel. No matter if the familiar thing is sweet and wonderful and good, we are apt, after a time, to desire its opposite, to want the unfamiliar.’
‘I see. And is there anything in Poland that’s too familiar?’
‘I’d say yes.’
‘And what would that be?’
‘I’m looking at it.’35
12 July. On the train back to Poznań from a neighbouring town, a pregnant academic invites me to the sixteenth conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration she’s on her way to. I like the sound of the conference – I’m a migrant myself and it’s on my doorstep – and so when we alight at Poznań the three of us proceed to the appropriate university building on Plac Mickiewicza, where we are just in time for the welcome reception. I help myself to canapés and wine and partly enjoy a pair of violinists working through a piece of Schubert. I am unable to fully enjoy the fiddles for two reasons: first, I wasn’t subjected to a classical education and so have no idea whether the music has nuances or not, and second, I have to watch out for conference officials whose job it is to eject anyone that hasn’t paid to be here. After the concert, I get talking with an English girl and a group of Italians. The consensus is that there’s no wine left and it would be nice to go on somewhere. I extrajudicially appoint myself social coordinator and force a group of ten to migrate to Dragon, where we get a good table in the courtyard garden. When I’m finally asked about the research that I’ll be sharing at the conference, I tell my story about meeting the pregnant professor on the train (and where have those two got to, by the way?) and not being able to fully enjoy the music. I’m asked if I plan to attend any of the lectures tomorrow. When I say that I couldn’t possibly because I haven’t paid anything, they all laugh and say not to worry, which is all the persuading I need.
13 July. I arrive during the morning break. Through the building’s glass exterior, I can see steaming pots of coffee and ornate biscuits. I daren’t go in. Yesterday’s bravado owed to a disturbing hangover which made me careless. (It is easier to be bad when one feels so.) I draw back from the window and sit on a bench, where I read some abandoned literature about the conference. It would appear that much of it will be spent addressing the ongoing migrant crisis in and around the Mediterranean, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people attempt to enter Europe from Africa and the Middle East. I know a bit about the crisis. You’d have to be an ostrich not to know something about it. I know there are suspicions that some of the asylum seekers are actually charlatans jumping on the refugee bandwagon. I know there are concerns that it is overwhelmingly men of working age that are undertaking the journey, which might look a bit odd to some but makes sense to me: in short, men of that age stand a better chance of surviving the ordeal, and they know that in the event of asylum being granted they’ll have the right to be reunited with their family. I know that reports of some migrants falsely claiming to be Syrian or younger than they are in order to receive favourable treatment are making it harder for people to warm to their cause. I know that my thinking on the whole thing is simple: anybody who pays a smuggler the equivalent of a year’s earnings to attempt a potentially fatal crossing of an unforgiving body of sea in an improvised vessel so that life for them and their beloved might be less punishing is deserving of respect and sympathy and support. I also know that before my simple thinking is ten metres down the track it runs into a load of questions of a practical and philosophical nature. It’s easy for me to say that anybody in need should be helped, but where do you draw the line? One way I like to think about the problem is to conceive of Europe as a house, a house that sits on a street that is the world. The word on the street is that the European set-up is decent: a better stocked pantry, bit of a garden, and maybe a pool. For one reason or another (rogue landlords, weak foundations), certain other houses on the street aren’t in such good shape. They require more maintenance, there’s less in the cupboards, and no central heating. One day someone from one of these houses risks their life by walking up the street (it’s a dangerous street, full of sharks) to knock at Europe’s door. They explain their situation, their motivation, their wish. I’m decent, they say. I’m human, they say. You might not be aware but it’s actually pretty effing hard down the street, they say. I want to live here, they say. Europe shrugs, then says, ‘Sure, why not, so long as you don’t mind cutting the grass every other day and cleaning the pool once a week.’ The next day there’s another knock on the door, and the day after that there’s another. Some of the European household start to feel that the door should be left open so there’s no need to knock, while others want to fortify the property and evict the latest arrivals. In the meanwhile, with confusion and uncertainty rife, and while signs of damp start to appear on the walls and the basement is hastily converted into bedrooms, the knocking at the door persists. You’re a tenant of this house. What do you do? For my part, I’d be tempted to move to another street.36
A bell rings. It must signal the end of morning break. Those inside are jostling about confidently, last minute banter before heading to this room for that paper, or that room for this one. I am disinclined to ask for guidance from one of the volunteers, lest they start wondering why I haven’t got a clue what’s going on. In the end, I follow a brace of women up two flights of stairs and along several corridors, only to discover they have nothing to do with the conference. I head back on myself and find a lecture theatre wherein a discussion on how the countries of Europe (or their governments, rather) have responded to the aforementioned migrant crisis is in progress. It is generally agreed that Britain’s response has been negligible and Germany’s exemplary. The Polish response isn’t mentioned at all, which is odd given where we are. The silence might have to do with the fact that when Poland was asked by the EU to accept its fair share of asylum seekers, it said, ‘Nah, you’re alright.’ Poland’s uncompromising stance will have come as no surprise to anyone even slightly conversant with contemporary Polish politics.37 If Poland’s refusal to take its ‘fair share’ was to be expected, less expected was the panellists’ unwillingness to mention the fact. Surely it would have been both appropriate and salutary for Poland’s attitude to migration to be discussed. Discussed, mind you, not rounded upon or attacked. After all, there are many reasons why Poland might be unusually averse to immigration, not least among them the historic tendency of other countries to invade, ransack and subjugate Poland whenever they felt like it. The title of a book by Norman Davies about Polish history – God’s Playground – hints at the number of times Poland has been the site of international contests. If it wasn’t Austria, Russia and Prussia taking Poland off the map for a century and attempting to annihilate its culture and language, it was the Nazis prospecting for an extended living room in 1939. If those two experiences weren’t enough for Poland to grow somewhat cautious, somewhat cagey, somewhat paranoid regarding outsiders, then 60 years under the heel of the Soviet Union, which saw the country practically sealed off from the rest of the world, certainly was. When compared with Britain, which hasn’t seen an invasion since 1066, Poland’s unfortunate track record helps one understand why the country might be less than enthused at the prospect of being forced to open its doors to what is foreign and unknown. By saying all this, I don’t mean to excuse Poland’s position vis-à-vis asylum seekers and migrants. What I do mean to say is that a conference being held in Poland that is ostensibly concerned with issues of migration and asylum and tolerance and prejudice, really ought to have asked itself how Poland has behaved in relation to these issues and why it might have done so. All that having been said, it is worth remembering that I am an interloper at this conference, and that beggars can’t be choosers.
We are dismissed. Walking south on Independence Avenue, I reflect on the matters at hand. It would be hard not to. I tell myself that when a person arrives in a new place, they come with a dowry of habits and manners, of airs and graces, aims and intents, beliefs and gods, foibles and fancies, and that these dowries are benevolent more than they are malevolent by a factor of a hundred. Then I tell myself that maybe it’s easy for me to champion migration and diversity because I have never suffered by its hand, have never personally witnessed its uglier side – the clash, the clamour, the scrap, the tussle, the irreconcilable dispute. But then I tell myself that during my life I must have passed, crossed, needed, seen, heard and served circa 50 million people, and not once during all that crossing and passing and seeing and needing and hearing and serving did a single human being of any stripe or any land harm me or injure me or threaten me or impact my life in an appreciably negative way. What am I to do with this fact? I am to conclude that people are overwhelmingly peaceful, overwhelming good. My mother sometimes chastises me for trusting people I don’t know and putting myself in dangerous situations. I can’t help it. I’m convinced they deserve the trust. It is the same with migration, with multiculturalism, with the supposed threats and imminent dangers presented by Others. Others have never bothered me a jot. I love Others. I am one, for heaven’s sake, and so are you. As far as I’m concerned, migration is the movement of decency, and always will be.
35 I was looking at a pile of cod.
36 Douglas Murray alludes to a similar scenario in his book The Strange Death of Europe. The gist of the book is that Europe is tired, vacuous and nihilistic, which makes it masochistic, gullible and guilty, and thus a danger to itself. In order to prevent Europe self-harming, Murray prescribes migration control, obligatory integration, and a Christian renaissance.
37 To explain its negative position vis-à-vis refugees and multiculturalism more broadly, the Polish government claims that it is protecting Poles from both an imminent security threat and an unsuccessful social model.
17
About lechery
17 July. I am speaking with a girl at Dragon about lechery. We fell on the topic because I was sat alone reading a book and the girl used to love going to bars on her own to read but stopped doing it years ago because she couldn’t be alone ten minutes before being made to feel uncomfortable by a man. She is now of the opinion that it is unethical for a man in any scenario to look at or approach a woman just because they’re attractive. Because this would make me unethical, and I’m not sure if I am unethical, I say: ‘But people look at things. Buildings, nature, road accidents, paintings, other people. Aesthetically speaking, people are just things that can be looked at, studied, ignored, interpreted. Of course, people are sentient and have feelings, which complicates the matter. Landscapes and buildings can’t let it be known if the experience of being attractive – of having people clamber over them, gawp at them, photograph them, merchandise them – is disagreeable. People are different. People can let it be known, and so the looker must listen and pay heed, must be sensitive to the degree to which the person they are looking at is made uncomfortable by their doing so. It can be hard to judge the degree to which a person is made uncomfortable by our looking, of course, which complicates the matter further still.’
At this point the girl looks at me (the pest!) as if to say: and your point is? ‘My point is I don’t think it is always unethical for one person to discreetly appreciate another, while admitting that it often is, and that the matter is complicated.’ The girl laughs and then says: ‘I am sorry but it is hard listening to a man talk about these things because frankly men haven’t got a clue because they have never felt uncomfortable being looked at. However discreet such appreciation, it nevertheless reveals a basic instinct which more or less covers men in shame. Men fall on women as if by gravity. And so does their gaze. It is unoriginal, unflattering and, yes, basic. If you want to be impressive as a man, then do something else. Be un-manlike. Have different priorities, different sensibilities. Appreciate other things, be distracted by other things, compelled by other things, preoccupied by other things. Be otherwise attracted. That would be attractive!’
‘So you’re saying, in short, that men need to get over women?’
‘Yes. Exactly. Then they might stand a chance of impressing them.’
20 July. The barman and I lie on picnic benches in the sun and smoke. At least an hour passes before a customer appears on the horizon. While I scuttle back into the kitchen to appear professional and willing, Lucas merely sits up, lights another cigarette, and resumes playing a game on his phone. It isn’t until the customer politely asks Lucas whether anybody is around to pour a drink that he acknowledges his existence, and then only with a surly glance. Lucas finishes his cigarette, pockets his phone, hops off the picnic bench, returns to the bar and then cups a hand around an ear as if to say, ‘I’m listening.’ The customer, for his part, doesn’t appear to be bothered by the horrendous customer service he’s getting. If anything, he looks almost pleased with how he’s being treated. When I mention the episode to Anita later, she doesn’t understand why I’m bringing the matter up. ‘I don’t understand, Benjamin. What did you expect Lucas to do?’ I decide that Anita’s indifference to Lucas’s indifference provides sufficient grounds to claim with some authority that the Poles, all of them, are not in the habit of giving, or wanting, customer service that might be described as bubbly.38
