The Polish Squeeze

I was eighteen. I thought I knew what life was all about; thinking back, I was dreadfully earnest. I'd been watching the news with my parents for years, and seeing the fall of the Berlin wall and the breakup of the USSR as slowly developing trends, I felt like I was ready to school Kissinger in foreign relations. When the other kids were out making the mistakes you're supposed to make as a teenager, I'd been at home reading the newspapers and magazines, and concentrating on my schoolwork. Having got a place at a decent British university to read Social and Political Science, I was certain that a blazing career lay ahead of me as an academic; or perhaps in the Foreign Office; or the BBC's man in Moscow.

However, at that time the done thing in the UK was to take a year out between school and university -- a gap year. A chance to broaden your mind, see the world, travel, explore, and ideally boost your CV with some voluntary work. I set my sights on Poland, and relatively easily got a job as English language assistant at the prestigious Gdansk University -- they were desperate to fill the sudden need for teachers and I needed a job. It came with an apartment in a Leninist concrete tower block and a salary that would be laughable back home but that was more than sufficient to keep me going out there.

Of course, that's not what I told my parents. I preyed mercilessly on their fear of sending away their firstborn across the Iron Curtain, and although they weren't well off I persuaded my father to talk to his bank manager and get me a stack of 80 hundred dollar bills. No travelers' checks, no ATM cards in those days, and no sterling either. I'd seen it on the news -- Russians, East Germans, Poles, all repeating the only English phrase they knew, their mantra: "We want green money".

$8000 was twenty times the wage I would be making in my entire year at the university. Sure, I wanted to see gritty post-Soviet life, but I didn't want to live it. I wanted to go to a place where a decent sum in hard currency looked like a small fortune. I wanted to drink at the glitziest nightspots, eat where the new oligarchs ate, never take a bus again. And most of all, after so many cold dark nights spurring myself on in my schoolwork with the promise of a better future, I wanted to get laid.

Of course when I got there Gdansk was not what I had imagined. Partially, it was me: I had not expected to feel so scared, so homesick. I arrived before the university term started so the campus was echoing and empty, but when a matronly professor called Joanna started to mother me -- making sure I was getting three square meals a day and doing my laundry on time, bringing me whatever she'd been baking, asking after me in an almost imperceptibly condescending tone -- I was more enraged with myself than with her.

She knew what I was unable to admit even to myself. For all my unearned money, all my bluster and all my big dreams, I was a little lost boy trying to play at being a man.

I had no idea what to do with myself. There were no students there to teach yet, and although I had no work to do I would spend hours each day hiding in my tiny faculty office poring over a Polish newspaper that I was far from understanding, or leafing through the class plans that I was to assist with. When Joanna popped her head in I would give her a big smile and tell her how busy I was, how much there was to stay on top of, but she must have seen the loneliness in my eyes.

When I wasn't in my office I would head out onto the streets. It was easy to change money on the black market and to haggle with traders selling off old communist military uniforms and badges, but I had no idea how to find the glamorous highlife that I was yearning for. I went to an expensive restaurant once, no doubt the happy watering hole of the elite, but it was almost empty. I sat at a table alone as ten waiters fawned on me. The food was dull and the service poor, but I left a hefty tip as if to prove my right to be there. What was twenty dollars? I honestly had no idea -- a tiny fraction of the block of cash that I'd brought to have fun with, or more than I was making in a week? I'd never had a real, paying job before.

I left the restaurant and was back out on the street, feeling worse than before. Beautiful girls walked by, but they never returned my shy smiles. Scared of crime, I went to bed early rather than brave the night, but I could never sleep.

It all came to a head one day, about two weeks after I'd arrived. Joanna came into my office while I was pretending to study and made what was clearly a carefully-rehearsed speech: would I like to join her and her family at their dacha out of town over the coming weekend? They would be swimming in the lake, walking in the woodland, and making a traditional kind of barbecue. Her son was only a little older than me.

I have no doubt that the offer was genuine; I would have been more than welcome to go along, and get a chance to see real Polish life with just about the only person in the country who I knew. However, I could see the pity behind the invitation. This was to be an act of charity to the lonely little boy who couldn't find a way of amusing himself. When I replied that I was sorry, but I already had plans for the weekend that I simply couldn't get out of, she accepted with good grace veiling surprise and a good measure of disbelief.

I muttered the first thing that came into my head -- I said that I had agreed to go with some friends to some popular thermal baths at a hot spring about 25 minutes out of town, a place called Ciechocinek. I'd read all about it in my guidebook, and it was clearly one of the few popular things to do that I would feel safe discussing with Joanna. Families went there for fun, old people to cure the aches in their joints, and young people to soak and hang out. Fine.

Only I had no friends and there was no trip planned, so I was back on my own.

Saturday came, and the weekend loomed ahead. I couldn't go into the faculty, and my only other activities were spending endless hours walking the streets dreaming of unlikely fantasies, or staying in my drab apartment staring at the walls.

Fuck it, I thought, I might as well go to the hot springs anyway. It couldn't be worse than this, and I knew I had to get out more. In fact, it struck me that a thermal bath might be a place you could strike up a conversation with someone else -- even, potentially, a girl, although I was not quite sure how to go about that. If not, I could just lie there in the hot mineral water and nobody would think it odd. I was way too self conscious about what other people might think I was doing.

I got up, already energized with my new purpose. I grabbed some swimming trunks and a towel, plus flip flops and my cheap folding camera. That was everything, apart from cash.

I was hiding my money in seven piles of a thousand dollars each under my mattress, and one fatter and altogether more colorful pile of złoty. Nobody else ever went into my place, and the locks on the front door were sturdy, so I felt safer leaving the money there than trying my luck with a post-Soviet bank. I grabbed a handful that might have been a month's salary, and reckoned by the heft that I wouldn't end up falling short. There were still a lot of złoty in the pile.

Ciechocinek was only a few miles outside of town, and the public transport system that the communists had installed was still running. I could have got there making just one change, for a ticket that cost the equivalent of well under a penny. However, as I got into a taxi I convinced myself that this was about my new high roller lifestyle; in fact, I had no idea how the bus system worked.

Once I got to the baths, I almost panicked on seeing a whole board of different entrance tickets at different prices. Bolstering myself with my self-image as a rich man, I asked for the most expensive; it was still cheap enough that the elderly attendant gave me a surly look at having to make change from my smallest banknote. I later realized that it was a full month family pass.

The attendant gave me a carefully counted stack of bills and coins, and a plastic pass. Lost, I wandered until I found the changing rooms, where another man took my pass and gave me a numbered key on a thick rubber band.

I slipped into a cubicle and hurriedly changed into my speedos. I hadn't noticed anyone wearing sandals, so I put everything into the bag and locked it away in the locker with my key's number on it. Feeling utterly self-conscious and naked, I walked out, barefoot in my swimming gear, and worked the rubber band over my wrist like a watch. I wasn't fat but I certainly wasn't tanned or muscular, and I felt horribly uncomfortable with so much of me exposed, and particularly with the uneven bulge of my genitals behind the lycra. I headed in the direction the steam was coming from.

Looking back, the baths were beautiful; old Stalinist magnificence, a temple to the proletariat with high concrete arches in the ceiling and tiles painted with murals of factories belching smoke as they drove the union onward into the future, and laborers in fields of golden wheat. At the time, I was basking in the wisdom of my foresight, having followed the news of the collapse that, of course, everyone had seen coming. I didn't see the skill of those painters in the past, I saw their foolishness at believing the lie that I had seen through.

All around were happy locals chatting, splashing each other, and lying back in the hot, mineralized water of the springs. It doesn't come out of the ground clear, but rather milky with the salts dissolved in it, and I felt so naked in the swimsuit that I wanted to get neck deep as fast as possible. At first the water felt scalding hot, but I pushed on in as fast as I could bear. As the heat touched my shoulders and back I was sure that I was being horribly burned, but I had seen everyone else acting as though it was bathwater so I winced and worked at holding back the scream that was bubbling up within me.

Once the initial shock was over, the thermal bath really was a wonderful experience; it felt good, just not so hot as to be unbearable; a challenge that my body first struggled against but then let in. Once I could allow the water to totally envelop me, I found myself relaxing into it, only my head above the milk-white surface, steam roiling around my ears.

The moment of peace did not last: I suddenly realized that there was laughter all around. Worst of all, people were laughing at me. Indeed, I must have looked a picture as I was writhing in the heat-shock. In particular, two very large, aging men seemed to be having a whale of time. One of them, a beast of a man with massively thick grey hair all over his chest, shouted something to me in Polish. I replied with my one phrase: "I'm sorry, I don't understand; do you speak English?"

His accent was strong, but he didn't miss a beat, shouting back at me from across the baths. "Ah, you are American, very good!"

"Well, British actually."

"Ah, English, English, even better! Welcome to Poland! Do you like our beautiful baths at Ciechocinek?"

He was surging over towards me though the chest-deep water, but his deep voice, laden with bonhomie, still boomed out and filled the echoing hall: "It's very hot! Very hot! And outside, very cold!" He mimed shivering, although it was actually still late summer. "So, here, only here we are filled with warmth. At home, the heat does not work, there is no more gas from Russia, so like here we must use good Polish heat." By now he was right in front of me, and took the chance to make a friendly swipe at my shoulder with a great bear-like arm. "At home, we get warm with vodka!"

Once again he descended into wreaths of laughter at his joke, making waves that ran the length of the pool. Some other bathers were relaxing with their eyes shut or talking amongst themselves, but at least half were watching the huge comedian, smiles and laughs on their faces too. I was wearing a pained smile. At least I didn't seem to be the butt of his jokes.

"Ah, you don't care." He made a comical mime of sadness that I wasn't entering into the spirit of it. "But you are bored! You did not come to Ciechocinek to talk to me! You came here to talk to pretty girls!" With that he gave a massive pantomime of a conspiratorial wink.

I made noises and gestures to indicate that he was absolutely wrong, mainly because really that was exactly why I was there. The big man was having none of it. He pointed across the water at two stunningly beautiful girls who were watching his show with clear enjoyment. They looked a couple of years older than me, and even up to their necks in hot spring water they had a kind of cool, unflappable elegance that would leave me tongue-tied. They were way out of my league. I must have looked mortified.

However, the bear-man seemed to think this was all great fun. "What do you think? They're good for you, OK?" I stammered something meaningless, but the man was in his stride. Raising his voice even further, he bellowed something at them in rapid-fire polish that I didn't stand a hope of understanding, but I recognized the last word: English.

Taking all the time in the world, the girls looked at each other and smiled, whispered between themselves, and one of them replied to him in English: "Yes."

The big man was overjoyed. "Girls, I want to you to meet my dear friend from England..."

He looked to me and I prompted him: "James."

"James! And James, you must meet my good friends from Poland..."

The girl who had spoken before filled in their names. "I am Izabela and this is Magdalena." Even carrying on a shouted conversation with this jovial giant, she seemed effortlessly in control of herself.

The man went on, "Me, I am leaving now with my cousin, we must get home." He repeated his caricature of sadness. "But James, I am sure that Izabela and Magdalena will be very happy to talk to their new English friend!" He beckoned them over and shouted some more fast Polish, as he and his friend surged powerfully to the edge of the pool and heaved their heavy bodies out towards the changing rooms.

I still had little idea what was going on; as I saw the girls climbing up the steps that made the edge of the pool, I thought that they must be leaving too.

In any case, I was transfixed. As they languorously lifted themselves out of the milky water, they slowly revealed the bodies of goddesses. They didn't look like the girls I'd seen around and fancied, they looked like models -- another species, something I'd only ever seen in magazines and on the TV. There was something unutterably effortless about their flat stomachs, their hips and their waists that made their curves seem like a law of nature. They were perfect simply because they could be no other way. The water glistened off their white skin as they strolled along the side of the pool, making them seem more three-dimensional than the rest of the world. I was mesmerized.

Izabela glanced across and caught me gawping. As I stared frozen in shame, she gave a sidelong glance and the thinnest of smiles. She wasn't angry and certainly wasn't in the least bit surprised. She knew the effect that she had on men, and neither relished it nor resented it, almost as if she took my lust merely as a feature of the world around her. She looked back to Magdalena as they strolled on and said something to her almost in a whisper, her hand unconsciously drawing around her friend's hip and pulling the two of them a few inches closer as she shared her secret. The movement was subtle, but drenched in an exotic intimacy that left me reeling. These two girls, barely older than me, were as utterly comfortable with each others' bodies as I was uncomfortable with my own.

Taking their time, they strolled around the pool and slid into it a few yards from me. Barely acknowledging my presence they drifted through the deep water until they were right in from of where I was sitting on one of the underwater steps. Only then did they both look into my eyes and fix me with welcoming but slightly condescending smiles. Izabela did all the talking. Her English was very good.

"You looked... uncomfortable getting into the water."

I muttered shy agreement. She went on in a philosophical tone, as though she was talking to herself. "Desperate. You were fixated. We could see how your body screamed at you with one voice to get out of the heat." She paused before she went on, a pause that felt precisely timed like a rest in a bar of music. "We all wear our masks all the time. We hide ourselves from others. We try to seem so cool and in control, we lie that our minds are masters of our bodies." She shared a smile with Magdalena. "It is so... refreshing to see a man in his primal state... His face showing every feeling that is within him, unmasked, unfiltered."

This was not the kind of conversation I was prepared for. I wanted to talk about trivialities, and I felt totally lost. Izabela seemed not to notice my confusion, and went on, still in the same airy tone. "You conquered it. You felt that need to escape, welling up from the animal in you but you overcame your instincts. Are you a man who is able to dominate your physical world?"

I had thought conversations started with questions like "Where are you from?" I had no idea how to answer that strange compliment and as a repressed teenager I was incapable of carrying on in the same vein. I muttered some kind of "Well, you know, I just, I'm just a," and ran out of steam. I could feel how horribly flat my answer had fallen, and I felt ashamed to have been so unable to follow this beautiful girl's lead. I was still in shock that she was talking to me at all.

Izabela picked up perfectly on my discomfort, and shifted the topic of conversation back onto more familiar territory. Throughout it all, the two girls rested almost floating in the water in front of me, feet on the floor of the pool and just their heads and the tops of their shoulders showing above the milky surface. Magdalena smiled serenely with a look of polite interest on her face, but only Izabela talked. She started asking me about myself.

She seemed so impressed and so fascinated in every little detail I told her that my confidence quickly rose. I almost heard an inner voice looking down on me talking to these two goddesses and telling me "Keep it up, you're doing great, champ." I learned almost nothing about the girls as they volunteered little and I was so intoxicated with their interest that I barely asked them anything about themselves.

I began to feel that my fantasies about this gap year -- up to then so utterly dashed against the rocks of reality -- were something real. OK, it had taken me a couple of weeks to get my feet under the table, but here were the first two girls I'd properly met, they were captivatingly beautiful, and they were paying rapt attention to me. Maybe I really was the exotic European playboy that I'd been trying to convince myself I was.

Everything I told them about myself seemed to interest them more. They loved that I was spending a whole year in Poland rather than just visiting. They were as impressed as I'd hoped when I explained that I was a professor at the university -- I'd upgraded myself from mere language assistant without a thought. I was positively glowing when I talked to them about my relatively spacious apartment in the huge Stalin era tower block, as that was one of the city's more prestigious addresses. It might have been a horribly ugly monstrosity, but it had been built for the Party elite and the size and quality of the units there went way beyond what the people's republic had actually made for its people.

Izabela wanted to point out the high points of the cathedral-like building that housed the hot springs; the girls shared another brief, knowing look and glided off through the warm water. They didn't look back, daring me to follow them. I felt ungainly as I struggled to keep pace with them through the chest-deep mineralized water; I couldn't see their bodies below the surface, but somehow they slid through it like swans, while all my exertions could barely keep pace with them.