A small village in Greater Poland is home to two horses, one store, and an old man who sits in front of it with a beer close at hand, ready to greet anyone who happens to wander by.
On one side of the only road in my village is a paddock where two horses slouch about most of the day. The white one sometimes hides away in his little hut, especially when the weather is unpleasant, which is often. The brown one is subject to inexplicable bursts of energy and will gallop, suddenly, fifty or so meters here or there before slowing down to a trot. On weekends in the summer, daytrippers make the hour-long drive up from Poznan, and families often park alongside the fence so the children can feed them. They chatter to the horses as if they can understand.
On the other side of the only road in my village is the general store. It used to be a Sklep Polski, but it changed over to the Odido franchise a couple of years ago, though the owners and seemingly everything about it stayed the same, except for the sign. It is still dark. The eggs are often expired. The bread is either missing or stale. The fridges are not switched on, so the beer they sell is warm, but the regulars do not seem to mind. They hang out on one of the two picnic tables in front of the store and drink Zubr beer, smoke cigarettes, and either talk loudly, animatedly, or stare blurrily off into space.
The most regular of the regulars is a man called Stasiuk. Unlike many of the other all-day, every-day storefront drinkers, he never seems wasted, and always has a warm, calm energy to him. He may be 50, or he may be 70. His face is thin, but always smiling. At 7 AM or at 4 PM, he is there, slowly sipping on his beer, perhaps with a fellow drinker; there is a rotating cast of men young and old, and occasionally one woman who matches them drink for drink. Often, he is alone.
Stasiuk was there the first day we saw this village. We’d just toured the house we would eventually buy, two storeys, big ragged garden, intimidating coal furnace, view of trees and trees, and had wandered to the store for refreshment. We bought beers and sat down on one of the picnic tables. Stasiuk and his accomplices for the day sat at the other. My wife and I chatted briefly and then stood to wander back to the train station 20 minutes away. As we walked past, we heard Stasiuk say to his friends, with wonder in his voice, “English… here!?”
I pass Stasiuk most days, pushing my daughter in her pram as we take our daily walk, a loop around the forest, past the quarry, and then by the lake and back into the village. Wary of my weak Polish, Stasiuk makes only brief, polite greetings. If it is hot, he will say so. If it is cold, he will say so. Sometimes, he will warn me that the store is about to close. His greetings are always lively. When my wife is with me, he is more chatty, knowing she is a native Polish speaker. Once, when I was holding the baby in one arm and a stack of boxes in another, Stasiuk frowned at my wife and said, “You shouldn’t make him do this. A man should be at home with a beer.”
The lake is often crowded on summer afternoons, parents or grandparents with kids playing on the small beach. Families leave plastic toys there year-round, a kind of communal treasure trove, and my daughter, Jozia, loves playing with the plastic cars and trucks, some of which are bigger than she is. She calls them aucar, a fusion of the Polish auto and the English car, one of the ways she is navigating her bilingual situation. When other kids are playing with a ball, she will want to join them. She will charge at them, squeaking ‘Ball! Ball! Ball!’ They will smile, but they will not understand her, because she is saying it in English.
Sometimes, Jozia points out one of the horses and says “hau hau.” This is what dogs say in Polish. Perhaps deploying a similar mental shortcut, Stasiuk once asked me if I was Irish. I said no, I’m from New Zealand. This elicited a blank stare, even though my Polish pronunciation of my home country is well-practiced; Nowa Zelandia. Not wanting to leave him baffled, I corrected myself and said I was from England. “Ah,” he said, relieved comprehension settling his features, “Elżbieta II!”
A tractor lumbers slowly down the road. Three boys whip by on bicycles. A girl is feeding the brown horse a carrot she has bought from the store; she giggles as the horse eats it from her palm. It’s rubbish day tomorrow, and the bins are in front of the houses. The unsegregated bins are not uniform. Every house has a different size, a different shape, a different label. In a treelined grove a little ahead of the store is a wooden, fairy-tale style house with a posh car sometimes parked in the yard. Walking by once, I noticed the bin looked strangely familiar. Then I saw the label. “Auckland City” was emblazoned in white on the front. What is a municipal rubbish bin doing 17,000 kilometers away from the city it belongs to? Was it overspill from some factory in China that somehow ended up being sold on the cheap to Poland?
I still pass by that bin sometimes, and always give it a little nod. Somehow, we both ended up here, on the other side of the world, in this little village with two horses and Stasiuk.
