Dokumenti!

by Esmond Chorlton

The police car, lights flashing, seemed to come out of nowhere. I was concentrating on trying to avoid becoming terminally lost in the maze of roads that is Katowice, a big industrial town in the south of Poland and the last thing I was going to be doing was speeding. They had already caught me twice for that. I was nabbed on my second visit in 1991 and then again in 1996. It was now 1997 and I was determined to avoid the hat trick.

In my defence, it is not easy to tell what speed you should be doing in Poland. There were no motorways at that time and you spent most of the time travelling cross-country on long roads with hundreds of little villages strung out along them. Outside of villages you can travel at 90 kmph (about 56 mph). At the entrance to each village or town there is a sign with a little urban silhouette and the name of the place, usually featuring an unfeasible number of ‘z’s and ‘k’s. You immediately have to slow down to 60 kmph (about 37 mph). Just as well there’s a sign because it is not always obvious that you are in a Polish village. There could be acres of fields with only a house or two, then maybe a shop, more fields, a few more That works fine - unless of course there is a hay wagon parked in front of the sign, or you are distracted by a combine harvester lumbering towards you taking up 90% of the road or the village drunk doing the same, or you are just plain mesmerised by the unending rolling countryside. Then you can find yourself hurtling into town at a death defying 56 mph and there are no indications you should be going slower. They don’t do lampposts a lot in the Polish countryside.

They do radar though. Back in the 90s the Polish state had hit upon a new way to fill the national coffers. They found villages with edges that looked just like the identical open fields on the other side of the small sign. Then they stationed a couple of police armed with a radar gun carefully out of sight round a

bend of behind a tree. They would point their radar gun at the passing traffic and if you were over 60kmph they would jump out and wave a little lollipop shaped stick at you. This was their signal to pull over while they extracted heavy on the spot fines from you.

The first time it happened to me I hardly spoke any Polish at all. ‘Hello, goodbye, I don’t understand’ and ‘Please don’t feed me any more food’ were the limit of my bilingual ability. If you’ve ever had Polish hospitality you’ll know why I needed the last phrase. The cop who had stopped us immediately headed over to my wife, Chris in the passenger seat.

He gave an almost comical double take when he realised she had no steering wheel, in front of her but recovered himself and sauntered round to my side. I wound the window down. He said something to me that is a mystery to this day so I smiled sweetly at him, selected the appropriate phrase and gave him my best Manchester Polish.

“Nie rozumie, mate”. I said, I don’t understand. I could see he was struggling not to arrest me on the spot for mangling his beautiful native language but he said something else equally mysterious. Chris is bilingual so she started to tell me what he had said until I gave her a warning jab with my elbow.

“Still nie rozumie mate.” I said.

“Dokumenti” he said. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t understand that, so I opened the glove compartment and gave him the passports, the car registration document, the insurance documents, the green card, our ferry tickets, our National Trust membership, RAC breakdown cover and anything else I could find, all in English and all as incomprehensible to him as he was to me.

He looked at the passports and realised he could not even pronounce my name. Oddly enough I understood him when

he handed me the documents back and told me to get out of his sight before he changed his mind.

The second time was a lot more difficult as the cops were a shady looking pair and we didn’t trust them one little bit. They wanted 300 zloty on the spot. Not only did we not have the cash, we suspected it would end up in their pockets rather that the Ministry of Transport’s coffers. They offered to drive one of us into the town to get some money. That would have been a bit of a feat on a Sunday night before cash machines had hit Poland. Chris proceeded to do the most magnificent roadside strop in Polish, slapping her forehead and beseeching heaven, ranting on about how her father was waiting for us on the other side of Poland, he had fought the Nazis for the likes of them, and this was all the thanks he had to have his daughter ripped off.

One of them looked at our passports and noticed that he could understand one word, Chris’s Polish middle name ‘Jadwiga’ . He nudged his mate and showed him saying “She’s Polish”. This seemed to change their attitude and we ended up giving them what little cash we had on us and thought we had got away with it lightly.

Anyway, this was now and I was sure I wasn’t speeding; in fact, I was driving very carefully through the Katowice maze looking for the turnoff for Krakow. The police car window opened and a little lollipop was waved at me. As I pulled over I wondered whether it was the car that was the problem. We didn’t have a lot of money at the time but we had wanted a new car. The best option for us was a new shiny black Lada Samara. That was fine, it wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t fast, it wasn’t particularly comfortable, but it was reliable and we got 80 odd thousand miles out of it before we traded it in. For a Skoda.

Anyway it wasn’t the lack of trendiness or the reliability that was an issue here. The newly constituted Russian mafia had found that Poland was a vast repository of free spare parts for their national car, the Lada. Free because they stole the cars

and just drove them over the Russian border to be broken up for parts, or sold on. The border was only about three hours away from where we were but we knew that our car would be very unlikely to be nicked simply because the steering wheel was on the wrong side. Not because that would make it easily identifiable but because we had seen the horror on the faces of Poles at the thought of driving a car with a steering wheel on the right. We were fairly confident that horror would be matched by their Russian neighbours, however larcenous.

Driving an English car around Poland at the time was sometimes a hazardous occupation. No one had ever seen a right hand drive before and the kids just staring open mouthed through the back window of the car in front of you could be very distracting. You could almost hear their parents telling them not to be silly; cars didn’t have steering wheels on the right. If Chris was checking where we were, people would jump out waving because they thought the driver had the map spread out all over the wheel while she read it intently, completely ignoring the road. Whole bus queues of heads turned as one as we drove past. Drunks swore to take the pledge.

So, Russian car thieves didn’t really cause us any sleepless nights I wasn’t in the best state to meet the police. We had been staying with Chris’s cousin Teresa and her husband Zbiszek in a little town in the South West of Poland for a few days. They had taken us to a new bar that had just been converted from a shop. We had a couple of beers and I had wanted to go to the loo. Chris insists I was tipsy. I insist I wasn’t but that might be because I had absorbed the Polish attitude that drinking anything that isn’t vodka doesn’t really count. The tiny toilet had been built into the corner where the stairs were. As I opened the door I found that they had tiled the whole place, floor, walls and ceiling with white tiles. I have a slight visual disability and find it difficult to judge distances in some circumstances. This was one of those circumstances.

There was a step up into the toilet and as I took it I failed to see that the newel post from the stair case above projected diagonally into the corner of the room. They had helpfully tiled the sides and bottom of it so the whole thing just blended into the walls and ceiling for me. The tiles met in an extremely sharp ceramic point that scored across my forehead leaving a four inch gash which immediately started to pour blood. I couldn’t have been in better company to injure myself. Chris’s cousin is a nurse and her husband was an ambulance driver at the time. They gave me immediate first aid and then drove me straight to hospital where they fast tracked me through A&E and introduced me personally to the doctor who stitched up my forehead without delay - with bright blue thread. It was certainly eye-catching. I looked like I’d just come off worst in a razor gang dust up.

Although I was not in the best shape to meet the Polish police, the same could not be said for Chris. We had been on diets before the holiday and were looking particularly svelte. Also, we tended to dress up a bit for Poland because people dress more smartly in the towns than they tend to in England. There is a Polish saying “Pawn everything. Show off.” What we didn’t realise until we got to Poland and the family pointed it out, was that Chris bore a fairly close resemblance to the wife of the Polish President. We had wondered why people looked at her a bit strangely but we kept getting really good seats in restaurants so we weren’t looking a gift horse in the mouth.

The other person in the car was my father in law. After my mother in law died in 1995 we took him back to Poland each year to see the family as he still had two sisters alive. Like a lot of his generation who had years of poor nutrition before and during the war particularly, he had dentures. He had just got a new set before we set off for Poland and they were causing some trouble. As soon as we arrived he asked me to go to the chemist. He was a native Pole and Chris is bilingual but somehow it was me who had to go to the chemist – it was good practise for my Polish I was told.

So I checked in my dictionary, went to the chemist and later proudly handed him a nail file and a tube of the Polish equivalent of Bonjela. After that, every so often on the back seat of the car while we were driving across Poland, he would take out his denture, nail-file off a bit that was causing him gyp, squirt it with Bonjela and stick it back in. I tended to use my side mirrors a lot.

Chris’s dad also had macular degeneration so although he did have some peripheral vision he was registered blind. We had a difficult journey across Germany. When they originally designed the autobahns, they were only wide enough for the odd Panzer column heading to the border. They were completely inadequate for the constant stream of massive lorries, motor homes, BMW motorbikes and the odd Trabant or Wartburg left over from before the Wall came down, that now trundled down them day and night. It was becoming difficult for the Porsches and Mercs to travel at 150 mph down the outside lane. This was clearly unacceptable so that year the Germans decided to put an extra lane on their autobahns. This entailed long delays while they blew up bridges, cleared away rubble, put in contra flows, closed off lanes and generally put the whole autobahn system in chaos just as we were crossing Germany from west to east. It also entailed, every time we got stuck in a jam, a loud voice coming from the back seat “Why we no go?”

Of course he could not see so he didn’t know why we had stopped. Unfortunately, apart from the fact that every car as far as I could see was stationary, neither did I. This was made worse as traffic started to move because it is an iron law of driving that if you are in queues, every other queue moves while yours stays stock-still. For some reason you discount the times that you are moving and they are not, but that was little help when the next question was “Why they go? Why we no go?” The first time I just said “I don’t know” and ”We’ll catch up in a minute” but somehow it seemed inadequate around the twentieth time and it certainly didn’t do anything for my already high stress levels. In fact they were only relieved by the fact that the exits on German autobahns are all marked ‘Ausfahrt’; a source of childish but constant amusement.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, Katowice. The police car pulled up in front of us and a grim faced policeman got out and strode towards us. With a careful look at the passenger side he came to my window as I wound it down.

“Dokumenti” he demanded. No ‘prosze’ or ‘pan’ I noted, the polite please and sir that you get everywhere in Poland. Chris handed me the passports, the car registration document, the insurance documents, the green card, our ferry tickets, our National Trust membership, RAC breakdown cover and anything else she could find, all in English and all as incomprehensible to him as they were to his colleague years ago. My Polish was a bit better though. “What is the problem” I asked him in imperfect but understandable Polish – well everyone understands ‘problem’, it’s international even in my lousy accent. He didn’t answer but continued to riffle through the hieroglyphs on the pages we had given him, pausing only to peer into the car to compare the pictures in the passports with our guilty looking faces. I asked him again “Jaki jest problem?” He looked at me with mild disgust and said “Nie ma problema”, strode off back to his car and took off into the traffic without so much as a backward glance , or look in his mirror as far as I could see.

I turned to Chris, a bit shaken and said, “What the hell was that all about? I wasn’t speeding, why did he stop us?” Chris looked at me strangely and said “Why did he stop us? You mean why did he stop a mafia car with its steering wheel on the wrong side being driven towards the Russian border by a desperado with a massive slash across his forehead stitched together in bright blue thread, with the President’s wife apparently in the driving seat but reading a map while an old bloke files his teeth in the back seat shouting ‘Why we no go?’ I really can’t imagine.”

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