Poland - Fragments

We walk out of Krakow airport, because the train station is just around the corner. Blinking in the newness of an unfamiliar country, the country is made even stranger by the heatwave. Bright blue sky, and the trees tall and vivid - hyper-vivid - trees in a dream. I look at a small wood behind a high fence - some kind of military complex perhaps - I don't know, because I can't read Polish - and this, this isn't England any more. Even the air tastes different - sharper and paler - of ice cubes and childhood, and other things I couldn't quite define.
England already seems impossible.
(...you know, I can't remember if it was a train we took, or was it a tram or some kind of bus? I remember staring out of the window at Poland, I remember a man on the bus, reading a book - looked like some kind of university textbook, and I think, to him, this unfamiliar country is home...)
We get to the centre of Krakow, to the building where we will pick up the keys for the apartment we have rented for the weekend. There is some debate over whether or not we should pay the deposit. I wait with the luggage outside, watch people pass by. Busy park, green trees. The sun is hot and I become afraid of sunstroke. We decide to pay the deposit and we go to our apartment located on the fourth floor of an adjacent building. This building is full of angles and bright planes. There are no windows, but two skylights in the living room, letting in the blue of the above.
I cannot find matches to light the cooker.
I would like a cup of tea.
Joe comes. I have not seen Joe since Al and Claire got married, a year and a half ago. We go out for a drink, and then come back. I fall asleep on the sofa for an hour or two. I am exhausted. I spent the night before at Gatwick Airport. Instead of sleeping in the cool silence of the small hours, I drank too much coffee and spent the night drawing.
We leave the apartment to meet Dagmara. I have not seen Dagmara since the December of 1998. I remember the night she arrived. I was sat on the phone in the hallway of 136 London Road. I can't remember who I was on the phone to - Ruth? Mina? - I remember the conversation was about our thieving landlord though. I remember there was a thunderstorm, a deep dark thing, all lightning flashes, driving rain qnd drama, - all those cliches that we never get tired of.
Before the jazz festival we sit on tables outside the venue, and drink beer in the twilight. I watch the river, the Vistula - and I think of how all cities that are split by great rivers - Prague, Worcester, Krakow - have a similar feel - as if they could be the same city but experienced - shifted - by their different languages.
During the gig, I watch a leaf fall from the ceiling. It seems a portent of something, but I can't think what.
A single leaf and that is all that falls.
I sleep deeply that night, and when I wake in the morning, I am still tired.
Coffee and breakfast sort me out.
(...memories of travel elude me... did we catch the tram to the art gallery or did we walk..?)
There is an exhibition on called Madness. I wish I could remember the artist's name. Great canvases full of nostalgia and atrocities. My god, he was prolific. Still painting now in his seventies. I bet he wouldn't have been so prolific if he worked in a call centre 40 hours a week. Joe points out that in one of the paintings, - of the interior of a room - there is another painting on the wall - a roughly sketched factory - who would have a picture of a factory on their wall? I would love a painting of a factory on my wall, oh, I would. Paintings within paintings, the joys of an infinite regress. Upstairs there is an exhibit consisting of mirrors and pillars and mirrors and pillars. Watch yourself curve off into forever. Watch your reflections, watch for that one reflection behaving differently, fourteen or fifteen mirrors down.
This might be the one which would follow you home.
Emily finds me a free newspaper full of comic strips. One comic strip shows a man walking a city street at night. He finds himself in a cinema watching a film of himself, ending with a scene of himself sitting in a cinema watching a scene of himself sitting in cinema, watching a scene of... well, you know the end, and there isn't one, of course.
It's twilight when we leave. It rains for a while. The gallery is situated in an area of the city that feels like Poland, I don't know why. Crooked street lamps, train tracks heading into a weedy nowhere, mysterious blocks of buildings that look like their interior walls are covered with pictures of factories.
After dinner at a restaurant full of dark paintings and clown figures, we head back to the apartment, and I fall into the sleep of a dead man again. Alistair says that someone knocks at the door in the night, but I do not hear them, and I do not remember dreaming either.
On Sunday night, everyone else goes out to a jazz gig (funk de nite) and I elect to stay in the apartment. We are due to fly back the next morning, and when I return, I have to grab a few things and catch the train up to the Midlands for Nan's funeral. I do not feel like going out, and stay in the apartment relaxing, drawing my energies together for the next couple of days.
Or try to.
At some point the knocking starts. Drunk people out in the stairwell. One seems very eager for someone named 'Coco' to let him in. He rants and screeches and shouts and pounds the door. This goes on for about an hour, then quietens. Then other drunk people turn up. There is more shouting and pounding. Voices come near to the door. I hope I locked the door. I imagine being murdered by Polish assassins. At one point I hear someone shout 'what about apartment seven?'. Am I in apartment seven? Or apartment eight? Because they have shouted in English, I imagine being murdered by English assassins. The sound of the voices in the stairwell makes the stairwell itself seem sharp. I watch the skylights darken into rectangles of dirty night. It is hot, but I do not turn on the air-conditioning. I hear someone play the trumpet, come drifting in through the night. A mournful sound, oddly plaintive but also comforting. I imagine the trumpet will be played long after I - after we all - have gone.
I am glad when everyone else comes back.
I sleep deeply again.
We catch the train to the airport in the brightness of morning. Alistair does handstands at the train station. We arrive early, and sit in the sun drinking coffee. Ordering coffee was difficult. The boy behind the counter seemed more interested in licking his ice-cream. We eat bread and cheese we bought the night before.
It seems impossible to think that we shall soon be back in England, but a few hours later we are, and it then seems impossible we were in Poland at all.
Travel is always the same I suppose, making an impossibility of either the place you have just left, or the one you are yet to arrive at.