Riding the Iron Rooster Read online

  I sensed what it was, but I didn't say anything. Until then I had been proud of the fact that no one on the tour had the slightest idea that I was a writer—and of travel books about train trips, too. I thought it would inhibit them or else, and just as bad, provoke them to importune me ("Boy, have I got a story for you"). Some of the members of the group I had told I was in publishing, and others I had told I was a teacher. I hardly ever entered a conversation. I listened, I smiled, I made notes. When Kicker was being outrageous I blinked and shuffled away. I was the man who got up from lunch before it was over and people started talking about themselves. I was the man who was constantly drifting away—the man with no last name. I was the man with the book that you didn't want to interrupt. I was the quiet, dim, dull fellow in the old mackintosh, standing and whistling tunelessly on the platform. I agreed with everything you said. You hardly knew me—in fact, it was only when you saw me on the train that you remembered I was on the trip, and even then I was unobtrusive and faintly barmy looking, just harmlessly scribbling.

  "I've seen you on television," the woman said. "Haven't I?"

  "Probably," I said, and told her my name.

  "Amazing," she said. "My sister won't believe this—she's read all your books."

  Her name was Rachel Tickler, and I found it a relief to tell her I was on my way to Mongolia and then China—yes, to do some writing—and that I had just come from London. What was that about the States? Oh, yes, I did spend part of the year on the Cape—yes, it's a wonderful place. A far cry from this trip, which was involving me in note taking. I told her everything, I bought her some tea and we sat up late so that I could be confessional. There was no risk. Unlike the members of the tour, Rachel Tickler was a perfect stranger.

  It did me a lot of good to tell her these things, because I had been so secretive on the tour it was like being invisible. It certainly wasn't much fun to be the dim, dull fellow in the mackintosh, keeping out of every conversation. Keeping quiet gave me chest pains. I longed to lecture them about the Middle East, and if they gave me half a chance on the subject of travel, I could seize their wrists like the Ancient Mariner, and a tale unfold.

  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 w
ill 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.

  "Aren't you afraid of the police?" I said.

  "The police change money, too," he said.

  The merchandise in the shops looked substandard—the clothes, the radios, the pots and pans, even the food: it looked unappetizing, the fresh food somewhat wilted and dusty, the canned food dented and with faded labels. And in every shop, my arm was tugged and the same question whispered, "Change money?" Poverty can make people look bowed down and beaten, but just as often it can make them shameless, fearless, predatory and dangerous. I found all these apparent lawbreakers rather worrying, but when I mentioned it to one man he said, "Don't worry—it's a double morality. Everyone does it."

  This look of bankruptcy in Warsaw was also a facial expression: stricken, demoralized, lonely and a bit desperate, a look of suffering on some, cynicism on others. It is surprising that people so victimized can have such dignity and can also be so polite and friendly. It is a good thing, too, because that courtliness takes the curse off their other side—the hunger that makes them food bores, the poverty that makes them seem grasping, the deprivation that has made them appear materialistic, and the economic policies that have turned them into religious nuts.

  The bar of my hotel, the Forum, was crowded and smoky, so I wandered around, dropped into the Habana Nightclub and watched people jitterbugging. As I watched, a voice whispered in my ear, "Change money? Seven zlotys for one dollar."

  "What would I do with all those zlotys?" I said, and turned.

  A plump girl in a black dress was smiling at me. Perspiration had given a stickiness to her orange makeup, and there were little sooty flecks on her eyelashes.

  "You can buy Polish vodka, you can buy curios. Poland is famous for amber. You can buy. Or stamps. You are staying at a hotel?"

  "Yes, I am."

  "I can visit you in your room. We make love. Fifty dollars."

  "What about this amber?"

  "Bursztyn," she said, explaining that it was the Polish word. "It is lovely. It comes from under the sea."

  "My problem is that I have zlotys but not many dollars."

  "I prefer dollars," she said. "We need dollars. In Poland it is impossible to do anything without dollars."

  "Where do you get the dollars?"

  "From you," she said.

  "Not tonight."

  I left, looked at the gloomy shop windows, marveled at the wide, empty streets, and went back to the Forum.

  My challenge the next day was first to withdraw some Polish zlotys from Bank Handlowy—royalties that I could not take out of Poland; and then to spend them all before the train left. The bank opened at nine-thirty, the train was going two hours later. I estimated that I would have about an hour and a half to spend whatever amount I withdrew. In New York it would not have been difficult. But this was Warsaw.

  I knew only my account number. The bank was in a modern building, a steel and glass tower, the top of which was wreathed in fog. It was a rainy day, and it seemed to me that I was on an absurd errand. But it would have been more foolish to leave my Polish money where it was and not try to withdraw some. I had vowed that I would never give it to Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement, because he had once publicly boasted that he had never read a book in his life. The last thing that man deserved was my book royalties.

  I entered the bank. The entire ground floor was an open-plan office—hundreds of employees tapping on computers, calculators, typewriters, or else pushing stacks of tattered money around. Just looking at the enormity of the operation made me feel I didn't have a chance.

  At the marble counter I explained to the woman that I had an external account and wanted to make a withdrawal.

  "Please write your account number."

  I did so on a scrap of paper.

  "Passport, please."

  I handed it over.

  Without hesitating, and without leaving the counter, the woman stretched out her arm and fished a small wooden box, like an old cigar box, from beneath the marble slab. She glanced at my account number and plucked another scrap of paper out of the small box.

  "How much do you want to withdraw?"

  "How much have I got?"

  "Two hundred and sixty thousand zlotys."

  "I'll have a hundred thousand."

  Six hundred dollars at the official rate.

  The woman passed the scrap of paper she had initialed to the clerk, who called me over and counted out the money. The whole operation had taken less than five minutes.

  My pockets were now bulging with Polish money.

  "You could buy half a car," Gregory the taxi driver said, when I told him my problem. "You could buy a hundred thousand kilos of ham."

  Gregory spoke perfect South Jersey English—he had worked for an Ocean City trucking company for two years. But then he had returned to Warsaw. He explained, "Warsaw is miserable, yes, but Warsaw is my city. My father was born here, my grandfather was born here, and so ... and so..." He shrugged. "You like this song?"

  A bouncy little ditty crackled from his car radio. I said yes, it was melodious.

  "I sing it for you."

  I thought, forget it.

  Cry, little woman, cry!

  Go ahead and cry!

  Cry, little woman, cry!

  "Good, eh?"

  "Wonderful," I said. "Maybe I could buy an antique with my money."

  "The shops open at eleven-thirty," he said. "You'll miss your train."

  "What about amber—bursztyn?"

  "Very nice. We go to old city."

  But the jewelry shops didn't open until ten-thirty. While we lurked in the old Warsaw—cobblestone streets, medieval buildings, the ramparts of a fort—Gregory told me he wasn't a member of Solidarity. "I don't need a party. My wife is my party. My kid—my family. That's my party."

  A man accosted me and asked if I was interested in buying a very rare stamp of the German occupation. He showed me a head of Hitler with a Krakow postmark, and another stamp—Polish—depicting saints or angels, overprinted with swastikas.

  "How many stamps have you got?"

  From under his jacket he produced a stamp album—about twenty pages. He riffled through: more Hitlers, more angels, more overprinting and interesting postmarks; about 400 stamps.

  "I'll give you ten thousand zlotys for it."

  Without a word he handed over the album and took the money.

  We passed a butcher shop. I s
aid, "I could get some sausages."

  "You need one of these." He showed me his meat ration book. He was allowed 2.5 kilograms of meat a month. That was his May book—with some coupons missing. He had used up his April book, though today was only the 16th of April. "Not much meat in Poland. We have to sell it—for dollars. I've seen more Polish ham in Ocean City than I've seen in Poland."

  "Why not become a vegetarian?"

  "No, no," he said, showing me his sharp carnivore's teeth. "And you know, Poles hate everything except cow meat and pig meat. They don't eat lamb, they don't eat chicken."

  I said that surely there were some vegetarians in Poland.

  He only knew one, he said—an old lady, whose doctor had forbidden her to eat meat. It seemed to me characteristic of Polish conservatism that they should be unwavering in their eating habits, and would spend all morning waiting in line in front of a butcher shop (Warsaw was full of such lines) instead of developing a taste for quiche or ratatouille. It occurred to me that people who refused to change their diet were not only stubborn and self-defeating but probably very superstitious as well.

  When the jewelry shops opened I bought some amber, and on the way back to the hotel a half-dozen bottles of Polish champagne, some yellow caviar, pickled mushrooms and sardines. I paid Gregory and tipped him for helping me. I still had twenty-thousand zlotys left and nothing to buy with them.

  It was then that I remembered Ewa and Woityek, from the train. Send us a postcard from Mongolia, Ewa had said, and scribbled her address. I put the remainder of the zlotys into and envelope with a note saying This is for Woityek and sent it to them. It was a wet day in Warsaw, rain completing the picture of utter misery; and rain was sweeping against the train as we set off for Moscow.

  I had a crate of Polish provisions and decided to have a party in my compartment before we got to Brest Litovsk. I had invited Ashley, Morthole, Chris, and the less inquisitive members of the group.

  We drank most of the champagne before we got to the Soviet border. Ashley was drunk and put his face against mine and said, "I've got a bet with Morthole that you're with the State Department."