By 9:00, the older librarians had linked arms and were dancing around the bonfire. The blaze roared, ran ten feet high. The songs were incomprehensible, but the singing was joyous, raucous, slightly dangerous and sentimental. Maria from Katowice filled us in. “They’re singing the Communist Youth songs they learned at summer camp.” No longer Communists (at least not overtly) and certainly no longer youths. There was nothing for it but for us to stand at the edge of the firelight, beers in hand, still holding the long sticks we’d used to roast our sausages, and cheer them on. It was the last night of the gathering of former Soviet bloc medical librarians – The Ways of Development and Directions of Cooperation of Medical Libraries: An International Conference, 16 - 18 May, 1996, Warsaw, Poland.
Lynn used to tease that in choosing me over Nick she’d given up a lifetime of travel. Not that they’d done much travelling together in their year and a half, but it was important to both of them and they would fantasize about places they might go. Lynn had circled the globe as a kid, and in her current job was flying around the US or off to Europe several times a month. Me, I’d been to Cancun once. Some roadtrips into the Great Plains. Crossed into Canada once at Sault Ste. Marie. Travel had never been high on my list of desires, and when I imagined a life with Lynn, it was about what we’d be, not where we’d go. But then there’d been the practice honeymoon in Hawaii, and the real honeymoon unexpectedly in France, and now here we were, not seven months later, deep in the Kampinos Forest, just west of Warsaw.
***
We’d been in Poland for two days. The arrangements had been sketchy and I was uncertain how we were going to find whoever was supposed to be picking us up. We’d been told the Professor would send someone. I was hoping for a sign. Sure enough, as we tried to make our way through the crush of people at baggage claim, there was a plump, bright-eyed, middle-aged woman holding a big card with printed letters: Lynn Fortney, Scott Plutchak, USA. (Presumably this was so she didn’t inadvertently collect a Fortney and Plutchak who had arrived from elsewhere).
We attempted to introduce ourselves, but she quickly led us off to the side, frantically apologizing, told us to wait just a moment – smiling and bowing the entire time – and disappeared. She was back a few moments later and we were able to make out that she’d lost the driver, but was in the process of finding us another ride. Off she went again. I stretched out on one of the garish orange plastic seats, boots up on Lynn’s big suitcase. The terminal was small, a little shabby and bedraggled, with lots of hot colors – oranges, yellows, deep reds everywhere, as if it was doing the best it could given the limited resources it had to work with, determined to be welcoming in this new era of opening borders. Very different from the oh so cool modernity, all the shiny clean and chrome of the Frankfurt airport we’d transferred through a couple of hours earlier. My guidebook called this the new terminal, and the guidebook was only a couple of years old. Did things wear out faster here?
I was fascinated with the schoolkids that kept crisscrossing the open space. Each time the gaggle came by, the kids were older – first they came through looking four and five, hand-in-hand, very orderly and went up the escalator. Then the bunch came down the escalator, but now they were seven and eight and starting to get unruly. They went off to my left, through a door. And then back from that way a little later, now pre-teens, rowdy and laughing and being generally obnoxious in a non-threatening way. Lynn tried to convince me they were all separate groups of kids, but I was skeptical. Time was wobbly here.
There were two phone kiosks, two phones each, one near either end of the floor. People queued up at all four, trying to get their phone cards to work with only marginal success. I saw Eva at one of the phones near us, gesticulating and talking aggressively into the mouthpiece. She rejoined us, announcing proudly that we had a cab! Only wait a few more minutes. What about the driver, Lynn wanted to know. He’d just gone off? Gone off to get a drink? Gone back to work? But all we could determine through Eva’s broken English was that the driver was gone – and that Eva was going to kill him.
Finally, the cab. Eva bustled us out with our luggage. She and the driver exchanged words, quickly, sharply. It seemed as if they knew each other, but it was probably just hearing them talk together in a language completely foreign to me. In France I could at least catch the cadence of what was being said, could pick out some of the words, but here I was totally lost. I listened for the music in the phrasing, the fricatives buzzing, the clashing of consonants. Looked for other cues to understand what was going on – the body’s movements, hand gestures, grins and grimaces. It’d be like that for the next three days.
Despite the loss of the driver, our packets of conference materials were waiting for us when we got back from dinner. From our 19th floor window I looked across at the monstrous tower of the Palace of Culture and Industry.1 The room was small, with thin walls. Twin beds. Lynn grimaced. I’d been hoping to connect my laptop to the phone line, but the phone was hard-wired. I flipped through the program. Lynn was in the bathroom unpacking. I called out, “Oh, Lynn...” “What?” “According to the program, we’ve got fifteen minute slots.” “What?!” her head shot around the corner. We’d been told to prepare thirty minute presentations. We got our notes, figured out how to trim. Annoying, but manageable. No time for jetlag.
***
The conference room is a beautifully appointed space in the Special Collections Building of the Central Medical Library. Ornate. Gilt. Sculptured busts on stands in the corners, somber paintings on the walls. Thrum of conversation in several languages, nothing the ear hears as English. Eventually people take their seats. We’re ushered to the front row. There’s a podium at the front of the room, a table next to it. There sits the Professor, Janusz Kapuścik, director of the library, his deputy Ed Pigoń next to him. On the other side of him a skinny little guy, young, nervous, bushy black beard, an assistant who we will learn is Krzysztof. He’ll be important shortly.
The Professor stands at the podium and speaks. We don’t have any idea what he’s saying but presume it’s the general welcome. He calls a small bespectacled man up and presents him with a medal. The man sits down and the Professor speaks again, then looks around expectantly. We don’t know what’s supposed to happen. He looks back at his notes, starts speaking again, and this time I recognize my name. I realize that he had introduced Lynn, and when she didn’t come up, he moved to the second speaker on his list. I quickly tell this to Lynn who stands up and moves forward. The Professor smiles and shakes her hand. She steps to the podium. Polite applause. She begins to speak. And the audience begins to chatter among themselves. Not whispering. Normal tones of voice. Not exactly ignoring Lynn, but certainly not paying close attention. And why should they? She’s speaking in English, which few of them know. We’re confused, but she perseveres.
She finishes. I’m up next. There’s whispering going on amongst the three at the head table. Ed stands up and announces that for the next few presentations, Krzysztof will provide translation. Alternate translation. Krzysztof looks stricken. My 30 minute presentation, which last night I trimmed to 15 minutes has now been effectively cut to 7 ½. I step to the podium.
We’d been required to send our papers ahead of time so they could be printed in a cheap little paperback volume with a dour gray cover. I open mine, look down at Krzysztof, whose expression of agony clearly indicates his belief that Siberian exile looms if he messes up. I point to the first paragraph of my paper, nod to him, and begin to read. I finish the paragraph, nod to him again, and he begins to speak in Polish (I think – or Russian? I never did get clear which language was the default). While he translates, I look ahead through the paper, skipping several paragraphs until I find one that isn’t a total non sequitur. As Krzysztof finishes, I point to that one and begin to read, and so we make our way through my allotted 15 minutes. The chattering continues.
While I wait to speak my next paragraph I have time to scan the crowd. In the front row are two men I haven’t met yet. I deduce they are speakers three and four, two of the distinguished guests from Great Britain, and I can tell from the wide-eyed glassy grimaces on their faces that they did not notice the night before that the program had cut their presentations in half, but they certainly know now that they’ve each ended up with seven and a half minutes as well. One of them has a stack of overhead transparencies in his lap. I’m so glad I decided not to use visuals.
Auspicious beginnings, this, our first sighting of Tony McSeán and Bruce Madge. They managed their presentations brilliantly, of course. Tony discarded his overheads, riffing off the best lines of the conference – “Don’t put up with stupid employees.” “Directors can’t know everything anymore”, the latter getting a huge gasp of delighted amazement from the people who worked for the Professor.
We learned later that the convention in these multi-lingual East European conferences was for the papers to be printed (as ours were) and for the speakers to take their fifteen minutes to briefly describe what their paper was about. Which makes complete sense when you think about managing the different languages without professional translators. It’s just the way things were done. We came to it with a very different expectation of the way things are done. I’ve had few conference experiences in the decades since where I learned so much so quickly about how malleable are the ways things are done.
***
For the banquet that evening, they took us to the Rozdroże Café.2 Brightly lit, crisp modern furnishings. The six of us English speakers seated at one table. Hanna, who’d been the one to arrange our invitations, Tony and Bruce, Peter Burnett.3 The day’d been fascinating and intense and we were ready to unwind. The table was laid with smoked meats and cheese, a vegetable platter and two bottles of wine. We polished those off promptly. Not nearly enough under the circumstances. When we inquired about another bottle we were told there’d be more with dinner. There didn’t seem to be any hurry about serving dinner, however, so I went to the bar to see about buying another bottle. And was told, politely but firmly, no, there’d be more with dinner. Eventually two more bottles arrived and it was clear that’d be it. The band started to play. The boy with keyboards and a drum machine, the girl singer warbling into her handheld microphone and swinging her hips. I imagined them in a Holiday Inn lounge, some small town in rural Indiana. Setlist straight off Top of the Pops, circa 1972. We ended up dancing, crazed flailing, a spasmodic polka to a horrifying rendition of Venus.4 Dancing was better than sitting with our empty wine glasses silently trying to conjure the buses to return us to our hotel.
***
The next day’s schedule called for more conferencing in the morning and into the early afternoon. Then a visit to Chopin’s birthplace, followed by what the program described as “supper by fire in forest”. The urgency with which our hosts talked about the mosquitos we were going to encounter was not encouraging. Mindful of the meagre refreshments the night before, we had most of a bottle of Jameson in Lynn’s bag. Just in case.
The drive out was mellow, forty or so of us on a comfy tour bus. It got us past the drabness of the city and eventually out to the flat green countryside, which seemed, at first, much like the Wisconsin farmlands where I grew up. Until I looked closer and saw how the details transformed it into something unfamiliar, older. Much older. Just a few wooden buildings. Some run-down sheds made of slats set ground to sky. Otherwise, the buildings were brick, even the large barns. Very little machinery. Around one corner I saw a man working a plow behind a horse; around another there was a woman digging in the furrow with a hoe.
We turned off the main highway and drove through the little village of Żelazowa Wola until we came to the Chopin estate. The building was modest, unremarkable, the grounds rather pretty, clouds of mosquitoes everywhere. We took a tour of the house. There was no concert, which seemed to disappoint Burnett terribly. He was so convinced there’d be something special for us. But there were only recordings of Chopin’s music playing on the loudspeakers outside. One could sit on the benches and listen, but I figured I had a better chance of avoiding the bloodletting if I kept moving.
Ed announced that we had twenty minutes to wander the grounds at our leisure after which he and Krzysztof would round us up. We gathered at the gate and bought water and slapped bugs until Ed was satisfied that the honored guests from the west were sufficiently rested to go on.
The roads narrowed, the turns of the tour bus getting tighter. The trees thicker and then there was a sign that appeared to say we were entering the Kampinos Forest. The trunks of the pines were long and slender, the bark a reddish brown and the ground a carpet of reddish-brown fallen needles. It was very pretty, but we were in Poland and I couldn’t help thinking about boxcar loads of Jews being hustled uncomprehending off a nearby train track and murdered there by squads of faceless hulking Nazis in gray greatcoats. I had no idea if anything like that took place near there, but as the thought rose, suddenly in the middle of the forest was a cemetery, the low flat crypts above ground, crowded together, the crosses (no stars) haphazard throughout with their shiny black accents against the flat gray of the stone. There were villages in the forest – we went through a couple. There’s our shiny tour bus, rumbling through the narrow streets. The locals look over at us with mild disinterest. I suppose tourists have been coming out from Warsaw for centuries, so we’re not that big of a deal.
Finally, a small grass parking lot. I grab the bag with our Jameson and we disembark. The Professor accosts us with some foul smelling cream that he wants to rub on our faces. We fend him off, following Ed as he leads the trailing medical librarians. It’s a sandy path through the wood, fifty yards or so. Before we get to the clearing we run into the director from Poznań who’s spraying everybody with bug repellent. I manage to convince him to spray my hands rather than my glasses and I rub the stuff all over my head and face and neck. I ended up with only two bites on my poor bald head and none on my face. I should’ve thought to have covered the backs of my hands.
The clearing is a big circular area, perhaps seventy-five yards across. Off to one side are long tables with a rustic wood canopy covering them. In the center, the makings of a bonfire, though it’s not lit yet. A big cone of wood and you can tell that it’ll be massive. There’s a sheave of thin sticks nearby that doesn’t quite register with me – I just assume they’re part of the fire although I find out differently later on. There’s a man with an accordion strolling around playing Polish folk songs. It’s not rock and roll but I vastly prefer it to what we endured the night before.
Most importantly, there’s a little beer stand. Just a simple cart with two barrels behind it and two guys working the taps. The Brits eyes’ light up and we go over to get in line, Lynn and I, Burnett, Tony and Bruce. The beer is wonderful. My experience with beer outside in plastic cups is, of course, of cheap mass market American beer. This is something else entirely, dark, rich, full. We immediately get back in line, uncertain how soon they might cut us off. Then we stand to the side, each with a beer in each hand, sipping, taking in the scene, thinking this evening might have potential.
The Professor is in one of his gray suits, dashing about, saying hello, trying to be sure the arrangements are just right, very serious and solemn. We’d met him at ICML5 in DC the year before, a wild man on the dance floor. It appeared that was an aberration, and the true Professor Kapuścik is a much more staid and serious guy. I’m a little disappointed.
However, after a bit, a small red car trundles down the sandy trail into the clearing and as the door opens we see that that the passenger is the same guy the Professor presented the medal to on the previous morning. Maria from Katowice whispers that he’s the deputy from the Ministry of Health – the big guy, in other words (although he’s actually a tiny, bespectacled, frantic-haired, functionary type fellow). The Professor gives out a whoop of greeting and hustles over to the car bowing and grabbing hands and schmoozing extravagantly. He’s happy now, he’s reassured. He can start to relax. He gets the deputy minister a drink. The accordion player plays and a couple starts dancing. Out here in the woods the mood so much looser than the carefully controlled frivolity of the night before.
The deputy minister wants to read a proclamation. He has it in a little portfolio. The professor stands behind him, hands clutched in front, a bashful but delighted grin on his face. Maria from Katowice translates for us. She’s tall, blonde, pretty, always with a smile that has a bit of the devilish in it. The minister praises the professor lavishly and talks about the importance of the conference, how grateful he is to everyone for coming. It’s all starting to get surreal. Have I mentioned that there are no restrooms? Ed had gestured vaguely toward the trees. Think beer. Mosquitos.
Time for the first course. Ed and Krzysztof line us up at one end of the tables where there are two big cauldrons of soup simmering over an open flame. We’re each served a bowl and a hunk of bread and the professor hustles us down to his end where he’s sitting with the deputy minister. We’ve barely tasted our thick and spectacularly delicious potato soup when he pulls out a small package wrapped in brown paper. He tears it open and starts handing around exquisite little crystal aperitif glasses. From another bag he pulls out a bottle of cognac and pours a round. He offers a toast, possibly to us, so we reciprocate with the second round. Language ceases to be a barrier. Anatolij, from Kyiv, pulls out a bottle of vodka, refilling our glasses after we polish off the cognac. “Crimea!” he declares, raising his glass high. Then, with a wicked wink and growly tone “Chernobyl!” as he lowers his glass toward the ground. We all laugh, shaking our heads as he repeats the toast.6
I might be a little hazy on how things flowed from there. At dusk, the bonfire was lit and it turned out that the sheaves of long sticks I’d seen earlier were for grilling the sausages, which were the second course, just as delicious as the soup had been. I think I only lost one to the flames. We asked Maria about her plans. She’d impressed us so on the tour the day before, and even more in the forest where with one beer her wit and spark were even sharper. We asked her to write to us. She told Lynn on the sly that she was leaving the library, going for a job with a telecommunications company. She’s twenty-three and we think she’d make a great librarian, but she’s impatient working under the rigid tutelage of the Professor and Ed Pigoń. Later on, Lynn and I scheme on how we can get her to the States for a few months to show her what librarians can be so that the profession doesn’t lose her.7
Eventually the flames subsided, the dancers slowed, laughing and wheezing. Ed and the Professor herded us back to the bus. We drank Jameson from the crystal glasses and watched the forest give way to the villages to the outskirts to the city and on to our hotel.
***.
On our last night, after the close of the conference, after the visit to the Warsaw International Book Fair (where I was astounded, but shouldn’t’ve been, to come around a corner to find Czesław Miłosz signing books), we went to dinner in Old Town with Hanna and Burnett. On the tour that first afternoon, we’d learned about the destruction, Himmler’s order to kill all of the inhabitants and burn Warsaw to the ground. Eighty-five percent of the city destroyed, 700,000 dead. A city with a history of 1,400 years. I can’t comprehend such a thing. In the little paper mill town where I grew up, the oldest building is the Grignon Home, the 1837 “mansion” built by the guy who ran the first trading post in that part of the country. And now here we are at U Fukiera, Warsaw’s oldest restaurant with a lineage going back to the early 16th century, painstakingly rebuilt in 1953 along with the rest of Old Town, a triumphant repudiation of all that Naziism tried to impose. Down two flights of stairs, candles in wine bottles, the recovered wooden beams showing the wear of centuries.
In that spring of 1996 there was excitement in Warsaw, the country full of possibility. The economy was booming. Just six months earlier, Solidarity hero Lech Wałęsa had been narrowly defeated in his bid for re-election as President. He conceded and Kwaśniewski took office and there were new Parliamentary elections and whichever side you’d been on you could be giddy with pride that there’d been no violence, and people accepted the results and democracy prevailed. A peaceful transfer of power from one party to another. Remarkable.
Hanna’d never known such a thing growing up. Born and raised in Warsaw, she’d married an Englishman and spent a few years in London. It was there that she’d begun to work for the same company as Lynn, and when her marriage failed about the same time the Soviet Union did, the company, seeing an opportunity, asked her to go back to Poland on their behalf, which is how she’d come to line up the speakers from the UK and the US. She and Lynn compared backgrounds. Fathers in the military. An independent streak nurtured in college. That earlier marriage that hadn’t lasted long. A determination to explore the world. Hanna said it was ironic to find each other now. If they’d known of each other as girls they would have had to hate each other – because the one was Polish and the other American. Because they’d grown up on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain and that was the reality. Until the electrician scaled the fence, led the workers’ strike and said, no more. Now they were on the same team.
***
A lifetime of travel after all. The images flick, flitter, timeless, tracing time. The young girl we were so taken with, waiting tables in that tiny restaurant on the Île de la Cité. Burnt out cars abandoned on the streets of Bucharest. Bouncing along mountain roads in Brazil on our way to the cigar factory. Running in the rain along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Chicago. Pushing Josie on the swings in Washington Square Park while the Chinese nannies looked at me askance. In Scotland we were the “talk of the steamie”. On Table Mountain we looked across to Robben Island and then ate roast wart hog8 in an elegant little restaurant overlooking the bay.
We never did find out if Eva killed the driver. We saw her the day after and Lynn made some off-the-cuff query. Eva took a moment trying to understand what she meant – and then laughed and laughed.
That drive in from the airport. Jetlaggy in the bright. Looking out at the strangeness and loving it. Broader streets than I expected, and very crowded. Little cars, blue, orange, red, yellow, weaving among the few vans, the big double-decker city buses. Horns braying. Lawns unkempt by western standards, massive buildings, gray squat barracks looking things. Profusion of traffic signs. I guess at the meanings. From billboard after billboard sexy young people leer at us, smoking aggressively. On the small shops lining the roadway, the lettering of the signs splattered with unfamiliar accents. More monolithic buildings. It’s all a little grimy and worn, but beautiful in the afternoon light. Full to the brim with history and promise. I’m soaking it in. I have no decisions to make.
Driver flicks on the radio. More incomprehensible chatter, but then the familiar cadence of a DJ. Western style. Song comes on. It’s Joan Osborne’s “One of Us”. I’m amazed. “What if God was one of us / just a slob like one of us...” There’s a sweet wistfulness to hearing it here, driving through the crumble of the eastern empire, a gentle song full of sympathy for the poor outdone, outmoded god. Not dead, just downsized. “Just a stranger on the bus / trying to make his way home.” I remember a story about the angel of history being blown backward. All those places still to be seen. I have no idea. Sad god sits with us in the taxi. I put my arm around the poor guy’s shoulders, tell him it’s okay. We watch the buildings, the cars, the people – he sees their pasts and futures. Does that account for the sadness? I tell him it’s okay. There’s nothing but now. Eva points to our hotel rising in the distance. I keep my heart held open. Just a slob, one of us. A holy rolling stone.
We’d call it a convention center. When we went there for the book fair on our last day in Warsaw, Ed grimaced and said it had been a gift from the Soviet Union. “Very ugly”.
The Crossroads Café. How appropriate.
Tony was Librarian for the British Medical Association, Bruce handled Medical Informatics for the British Library. Burnett was head of tech services at the Bodleian. We imagined, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that he was secretly working for MI6.
“I’m your Venus, I’m your fire, at your desire.” They were copying the original version by Shocking Blue, not the later Bananarama cover.
International Congress of Medical Librarians, held every five years.
We had only the most superficial awareness of the geopolitical realities our companions were living in. We knew about Chernobyl, of course, the disaster having occurred almost exactly ten years earlier. We did not know, however, that it was this very weekend that Crimea had formally agreed to remain part of Ukraine, ending (at least for a time) the tug of war between Ukraine and Russia that had been roiling the region since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Alas, we never did. She’d be 50 now. I hope things worked out.
“And what’s the ‘venison of the day’?” I’d asked the waiter, reading from the menu. When she told me, I couldn’t resist.