A flustered new father attempts to navigate Poznan’s chaotic main station and a malfunctioning train while dodging the well-meaning interventions of Polish grandmothers.
The lady approached me from the left, walking low and fast, ducking and weaving among the hasty commuters that packed Poznan’s main train station. Like many cities in Poland, with the notable exception of Wroclaw, Poznan’s central station undersells the city. The city is largely clean, with historic, winding cobbled alleys and that gorgeous old square. The station is essentially an ashtray stapled onto a shopping mall. It is filled with the day drinkers, indoor smokers, and pigeons. And, on this Friday afternoon, one small baby who simply would not stop crying.
I’d been cradling her in my arms for 20 minutes, soothing her while my wife finished running errands. We knew she was sleepy, and if she fell asleep in the pram before the ride, this would be our best chance of a peaceful railway journey, for us and the other passengers. I placed her in the pram and started pushing her through the station. She began crying again. My wife went to the store stoabkas, Poland’s answer to 711, within spitting distance of each other, to get water for the journey, while I stood and rocked the pram back and forth, side to side, trying to lull the baby to sleep. A proven technique. It would work; we just needed time.
The lady reached me, munching on an apple core, pointed to my baby in the pram and yelled, in Polish, ‘cuddle her!’ Now, it had been a long day. And I’d been doing this for five months, every day. I knew my baby’s ways by now, and that the pram was the best solution for her. I also didn’t take kindly to being yelled at, imperiously, by a stranger. I won’t record my response. But it wasn’t polite. After a brief exchange, the wild-haired stranger scuttled away.
The little one finally fell asleep as I was pushing her up and down the platform as we waited for the 16:47 to Wagrowiec. She thrives on movement and the crisp outdoor air. The train would be stuffy, but it would move. At least, mostly. Trains stop at platforms. And the Pol Regio, a regional network, stops frequently. And here’s some unsubtle foreshadowing: This was going to be an issue.
Turns out there’s a special entrance on the train you need to take if you have a pram. It’s even labeled on the door. Normal people without prams can take this entrance too and some of them even let me go first, which feels very strange. Have these entrances always existed? Do all trains have them? I sat in one of those seats that you have to fold down in the aisle.
There’s a sign on the door opposite to the one we entered through. ‘Avaria drwi.’ It has a nice ring to it. I wonder briefly what it means… My Polish language skills are not impressive but the words are there in my sleep-deprived brain somewhere… Drwi means door, and avaria… that’s word you often see on signs next to escalators, and escalators in Poland never work.
Subtle foreshadowing: This was also going to be an issue.
The first few stops were still within the Poznan city limits. The mingled glass highrises and old stone and wood buildings faded away to the communist-era tenement blocks or osiedles which are either repulsive, charming, or nostalgic depending on your mood or background. She awoke when we reached Czerwonak, a fairly non-descript industrial outlier of Poznan made somewhat awkwardly famous by the recent presence of a notorious French (alleged) cult-leader.
Her blue eyes wide open, scanning the interior of the train from her supine perch in the pram. Her legs started to kick as if pedaling an upside-down bicycle. Noises beginning, but calm ones, even nice ones. Coos and ‘agoos’ and humming. Passengers have noticed, but they are charmed.
Without so much as a look to myself or my wife, a grandma leaps up from her seat opposite us in the train, grabs or four or five-year-old grandkid, and hoists him up, dangling his head over the pram. “Look at the baby!” she commands to him. The boy and the baby made awkward eye contact. Then the babcia scuttled back to her seat, fastidiously avoiding eye contact with me the whole time.
I lean over the pram to see how she is doing. She is bored with eating her toys and cooing at strangers, and fixes me with teary, pleading eyes. I pick her up and bring her to my shoulder. This works for a while. My wife takes over and fees her. We pass her back and forth, rocking and bouncing. Keep are keeping the tears at bay for now, but the battle is turning against us. I try and stand with her, being held while standing always soothes her, and I stand on trains all the time, being well accustomed to the rocks and bounces. I steady myself against a wall, secure. My baby is happy and calm, enjoying her first-class seat, looking down on the other passengers from on high.
The ticket collector approaches. She is stern and delivers a swift lecture in Polish. “She is telling you that you can’t stand with the baby” my wife translates, mostly unnecessarily; even with my bad Polish, the meaning is obvious. We sit and the baby starts crying, predictably. I am hoping the weary fellow passengers will blame the conductor for denying the baby her comfortable standing position, but their glances go mostly between the baby and me.
I place her in the pram. People get out at the first town of significance outside of Poznan, and there is now room to move. I stand and push the pram back and forth, pack and forth, traveling thousands of kilometers over the next 20 minutes in 2-meter oscillations. It works. The screams become wails, the wails become moans, the moans become silence.
Our stop is next. We have survived. But then…Avaria Drwi. The door is out of order… on the very side that we know it should open at our small countryside station platform. We look around. The train is still quite full. Ours is a small station and the stop won’t be long. We are in the section reserved for prams, people in wheelchairs, and cyclists. To get to the other sections on the train, you need to climb up stairs to where most people are sitting. The stars are narrow. The corridor is narrow.
“Baby or pram?” I ask my wife.
“What?”
“The door is broken,” I say, thumbing the sign. “We need to get to the next part of the train. Do you want to carry the baby or the pram?”
“Baby,” she says, catching on quickly. She takes the sleepy yet still calm baby and zips on up the stairs and toward the working doors ahead. I hoist the pram. It is a large contraption, reminiscent of a baby tractor, designed to handle the bumps and mud of our countryside pathways. It is too wide for the stairs. It is heavy. Grunting, I lift it, high over the heads of the baffled passengers. A wheel collides with something. Someone? No time to check. I push on. The doors ahead are open. Wife and baby our outside on the platform. A stumble forward through the open doors…
… The train drives away. The doors that opened were not on the broken side after all. I blush with embarrassment. But the train is already rounding a bend and disappearing from sight. The baby giggles, and we place her back in the pram. In a few minutes, she is asleep again.
