The rain-slick street out of Okecie Airport swelled with papal adoration. Billboards that within days would return to shilling for Nike and Coke were plastered with the pontiff, often surrounded by flocks of children, and the glitterless slogan: B”g jest miloscia (God is love). Photos of the pope covered the windows of drab apartment blocks (political systems change, soulless architecture endures), and small bicolor flags — red and white for Poland, yellow and white for the Vatican — sprouted from the sills. The odd balcony was draped and garlanded in a tableau of domestic religiosity that the Poles have made a minor art form. At this first glance, Warsaw was exactly as I remembered it: soggy and supplicant.
The pope had passed through the capital the week before, in what everyone believed to be his final visit, and riding beneath his beatific gaze I thought back to his first. It had occurred exactly 20 years earlier, in June 1979, and I had stood with thousands of Poles in Victory Square for the outdoor mass and the raptly heard homily.
Ten years later the Berlin Wall came down. Now, outside Warsaw, Carrefour was going up.We stopped at Ikea. It anchored a new mall surrounded by a vast parking lot. Jan drove around for a few minutes before parking, as if disconcerted by the vast choice of spaces. “Shopping has become a popular pastime,” Jan’s wife, Zosia, said. “People who have never been abroad sometimes come to the malls just to look. They see a hairdresser and they think it’s wonderful. Imagine — buying groceries and then getting your hair done. And it’s educational. They see the restrooms are clean and proper and they think: We could do this at home.”
At home we turned on the TV and found the pope, bidding a final farewell at the Krakow airport. A damp crowd stood faithfully behind a fence, many parents with young children who, it occurred to me, must think that the pope is always Polish. They sang hymns, shouted endearments, clapped, chanted. “Poles never used to behave like that,” Jan lamented. “All that shouting and clapping — it came here from the West.”
I awoke the next day to gray and rain. I stuffed an umbrella into my bookbag — my trusty Polish torba, bearing scuff marks from around the world, now returned to its native land. After all the cities in which I’d stood out, here, at last, I was going to fit in.
Yet it is always risky returning to a place where you once lived, especially when the place has also grown up. Warsaw in the early ’80s, like most of Eastern Europe, was stuck in a time warp which, admittedly, gave it some of its charm. Hand-kissing. Chimney-sweeping. Peasants driving horse-drawn wagons. Now it was careening into the millennium. The Palace of Culture, that grim tower planted by the Soviets in the heart of the city, was pasted with advertising, like a battleship strung with party streamers. McDonalds stared across Jerozolimskie Boulevard at Burger King, while down the street the former Communist Party Headquarters housed the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
Nowy Swiat, the fashionable shopping street, had actually become fashionable. You could still buy flowers from sidewalk vendors, and fill your shoe with water by stepping on a loosened pavement stone. The Arena Restaurant and Nightclub, advertising in a city tourism magazine, promised “a night of crazy and exotic entertainment. Female mud and oil wrestling. 30 hot dancers. Sexy excitement. Polish cuisine.”
The young women were stylish as always, as were, now, some of the men (they couldn’t all be foreign consultants). De rigueur now was a briefcase, or, for students, the sagging backpack slung over one shoulder. I was the only male with an aged leather torba.
Osrodek Jezyka Angielskiego (English Language College) still loomed — solitary and free of endorsements — over the northeast corner of Plac Zbawiciela. I climbed the circular staircase to the third floor — exactly as I had for 2 years — and opened the door to the Teachers’ Room.
Most of the faces were familiar; the intentions as well. “Tom, sit down and have some tea.” And then that witty, quick-tongued barrage, partly a product of group dynamics, partly a result of their just being Polish. (I was also in the always more electrifying Smoker’s Room.). Life, everyone agreed, was unequivocally better. “We get `ER,”‘ Ms. Nowak said. “And `Ally McBeal.”‘
One of the teachers over in the Non-Smokers’ room was feeling ill, and I was enlisted as a substitute. The class was small; the students were finishing high school or already in college. They wore that bored look of adolescence which in my time had not yet become a generic import. I told them I had taught in this school 18 years earlier, and realized some of them hadn’t been born then. The Poland I knew — bread lines, ration cards, secret police — was something they studied in history class. And where once I could attract attention simply by the circumstance of my birth, these students ran into Americans all the time.They sat waiting for the bell, and wondering where in the world I got that silly torba.
Paulina was different. She met me downtown a few days later, a bright undergraduate in a short tartan skirt and damp brown shoes. She had e-mailed me about a year before, out of the blue, saying she had read my book about Poland while living in Canada and now wanted to translate it.
We took a bus to the suburb of Ursus and then dodged puddles in a downpour on our way to her apartment. It was small and basic, on the third floor overlooking a sodden cafe. Yet sharing it with her boyfriend, as opposed to her parents, was a rare and enviable arrangement.
Her mother had taken her to Canada when she was 15 (her father was already established there) and she attended the University of Toronto for a year. But she never took to it. “I remember looking out of the window one day and thinking: I don’t want to live in this country for the rest of my life. My parents kept saying they were going to return, but I got tired of waiting. So I said, `Bye, I’m going back.”‘
I asked her about the persistent difficulties. My wife’s cousins, with whom I was now staying, had daily intrigues with the workmen making repairs in their kitchen. “It’s still not easy,” Jurek had told me. “There’s no standard.”
“But it’s funny,” said Paulina, with the imperturbability of youth. “I tell stories about the funny things that happen to me.”
Her boyfriend arrived, a pleasant young man in denim, and her best friend Olga, bearing a box of paczki from the elegant Blikle shop on Nowy Swiat. We polished them off after Paulina’s tasty chicken and rice. Then we retreated to the bedroom where, from a small chair abutting the bed, I looked into the febrile glow of the computer screen and saw, incredulously, my out-of-print sentences resurrected in Polish.
That evening Jurek and his wife, Monika, took me on a tour of Warsaw’s newest monuments. It seemed a very Varsovian thing to do. First stop, near the Old Town, was the monument to the Martyrs of Soviet Aggression. The statue consisted of a lone railway carriage standing on tracks, its cargo a crush of tilted crosses. Scattered among the Christian crosses were a few Orthodox ones as well as — we saw on closer inspection — the occasional Star of David and Muslim crescent. The date read 17 September 1939.
“Walesa rushed to get this put up before the ex-Communists took power,” said Jurek, pointing to the dedication date of 17 September 1995.
A short drive away was the Warsaw Uprising Monument — gaunt, outsized, Modigliani-esque figures, including one lowering himself into the semblance of a sewer. In the northern district of Zoliborz stood the equestrian statue to Haller’s Army, Gen. Haller having been instrumental in the establishment of an independent Poland after the First World War. Back downtown again we parked and walked to the grand marble monument to the Battle of Monte Cassino.
It was dark by the time we reached the monument to the AK, or Polish Home Army, the armed force of the Polish government-in-exile during World War II. “The pope blessed it when he was here,” Jurek said, looking up at the haunting, modernist structure.
“After the war, the Communist government never uttered the words Home Army,” Jurek said. “They called them `foaming gnomes of reaction’. Your mother-in-law was a foaming gnome of reaction.”
My wife’s mother, who had worked for the resistance, spent several postwar years in the notorious Rakowiecka prison. Hania still has the bar of soap, painstakingly carved and painted with a scene from Little Red Riding Hood, that her mother made for her during her incarceration.
We got back in the car and drove home through a quieted city. Warsaw, for all its new cosmopolitanism, still closed down early. There were scattered clubs but no street life at night, even now in summer, which presumably brought busloads of idle tourists. Varsovians, one heard, were all working overtime, scheming, becoming rich. And the moneyed class had not yet produced a leisure one. At night, after the daytime brio of traffic and cell phones, the purposeful hum of meetings and appointments, memories of war reclaimed the city.
IF YOU GO
-GETTING THERE
LOT Polish Airlines flies non-stop from Chicago most days of the week.
– GETTING AROUND
The main downtown area is fairly compact and walkable. There is also good public transportation: buses, trams and subway with a single north-south line.
– LODGING
The best hotel in town is the pre-war Bristol (Krakowskie Przedmiescie 42-44, Warsaw 00-325). It sits on a beautiful street just blocks from the Old Town. Rates start about $300. Call 800-225-5843.
Many American consultants stay at the more modern Marriott (al. Jerozolimskie 65/79, Warsaw 00-697). Rates start at $280. Call 800-228-9290.A cheaper option is the Hotel Karat (ul. Sloneczna 37, 00-789 Warsaw). It is tucked away in a quiet spot across from Lazienki Park; rates start at $60. Call 011-48-22-601-44-11.
– DINING
Try pierogis (with either meat, potato or sauerkraut filling); bigos (aka Hunter’s Stew); delicious soups, including mushroom, zurek, and, in summer, chlodnik; sausages (kielbasa) like kabanosy; and of course the holeless doughnuts called paczki.
– SIGHTS
The Old Town, rebuilt after the war in the original style, is the most rewarding neighborhood for tourists. (The rest of the city, with the exception of Krakowskie Przedmiescie and Nowy Swiat, is pretty nondescript.)
Start at the city museum on Market Square to see the film of Warsaw’s destruction and its postwar rebuilding. It is a short walk from there to the Cathedral and the Royal Castle. Lazienki is a gracious park, and outside the city is the 17th Century palace of Wilanow.
– INFORMATION
Contact the Polish National Tourist Office, 275 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016; call 212-338-9412.
