Beatification

“This was not, in other words, the Warsaw of Western imagination.”

In 2011 I found myself in Warsaw – part whim, part accident. I arrived on Constitution Day to a city of empty streets and shuttered stores. Everyone was off spending their long weekend in Kraków or Zakopane, and through my jetlagged lens the city seemed gray and deserted. A week later, though, the capital was exploding with life, its streets thronged with pilgrims celebrating the beatification of Pope John Paul II, a man who’s slowly edging out Frédéric Chopin as Poland’s favorite son.

For most Poles, Warsaw was a more practical pilgrimage than Rome. Still, if one thought that the actual beatification ceremonies were happening here in Poland, it would have been a forgivable mistake.

The neoclassical facades along ul. Nowy Świat were garlanded for the occasion, and huge pictures of a smiling Jan Paweł II were draped across the streets. The road was packed with government vehicles from Poland and elsewhere, and everywhere were crowds that on any other day would’ve seemed absurd. Bicycling nuns and cassocked priests rubbing elbows with a flock of drunken Scots. A group of kids with matching backpacks decorated with Russian Federation flags, looking a bit lost. Some Japanese tourists admiring the Gothic architecture of Warsaw’s Old Town. All manner of street vendors and performers had turned out for the occasion, though some were less professional than others; worse, some seemed to be accidental, like the fat drunk guy belting out Belinda Carlisle songs to a slowly gathering audience. Even the fake palm tree at Aleje Jerozolimskie, ordinarily a bit of a head-scratcher, had a certain Levantine charm about it today. This was not, in other words, the Warsaw of Western imagination.

My companion at this holy carnival was a woman I’d met a couple days prior. Her name was Ania, and she was twenty years my senior. The Warsaw of her childhood was not the one I saw on Beatification Day. The Warsaw of her childhood was something I barely understood, a city of shortages and food queues and ration cards.

We spoke little of each other’s language. We tried Russian, but it was an awkward fit for both of us. Finally we settled on an English-Polish pidgin. If you cared to, you could have followed our conversations and determined which textbooks we’d used to learn the other’s language, down to the lesson.

Lesson one, somewhere in a hotel lobby downtown. My name is Michał. It’s very nice to meet you. Poland is a very beautiful country. I have twenty-six years. She is forty-six and it’s very nice to meet me as well. Your Polish is very good, she says. Your English is more good, I reply.

Lesson two, grabbing a cup of coffee and some train tickets down in the metro station. She has two daughters studying at Uniwersytet Warszawski. She works at a nearby hospital – and here our pidgin falters – doing some kind of administrative work. I am a teacher. I have one older brother, and he has a wife. I do not have best girl. (She reacts with exaggerated surprise, I imagine, to spare my feelings.) I don’t like long flights and heat. She doesn’t like this metro station.

Lesson three, Old Town, Nowy Świat. We both agree that Kraków is very pretty. I like old buildings. She asks where I’m from, but she either hasn’t heard of Detroit or doesn’t recognize the word in my pronunciation. Close to Chicago, I say, and she brightens up. Just as every Midwesterner claims to have at least one Polish ancestor, every Pole has at least one relative in Chicago. If we hadn’t been standing in Old Town at that moment, I would’ve told her, or tried to, that Chicago and Warsaw kind of look the same.

Lesson four, Beatification. We’ve been talking like children for hours, and we both have big stupid smiles on our faces. Jan Paweł II grins from every street corner like a father watching his children play in the yard. The one-man Belinda Carlisle cover band seems like he belongs here. Ania likes disco, she says, and I reply, diplomatically, that I really like Chopin, though in truth I was already kind of sick of him before I even left his eponymous airport.

So I tell her I like disco too. I also like pierogi and Polish vodka. She grins. We all like Polish vodka.

Before long, I start seeing our signs of our jerrybuilt language cropping up in the landscape around us. There’s at least one shop called “American Bookstore,” and there are several sidestreets being renamed for the late pontiff even before our eyes – except the city planners can’t seem to decide whether they should be honoring the man in Polish, Latin, or English. (Italian is strangely underrepresented.) There’s a youthful electricity in the air. I don’t even complain when a Ukrainian embassy vehicle, executing a creative traffic maneuver on the sidewalk, clips my leg. I laugh like a kid who hasn’t yet learned the concept of danger.

Such bliss in painting in primary colors, no shading.

We make homes of our words, and this is true especially when we can’t understand the words around us: our native tongues become us, contain us. When we can only express ourselves like children, our words build a bulwark of temporary youth. On Beatification Day, Ania and I were simply strange children in a world at once new and familiar. Telling, then, that Nowy Świat, when translated literally, means New World. The centuries-old buildings appeared now as they never had before, all fancied up in their paradoxically papal saturnalia. I may have been the foreigner, but this vista was new to both of us.

Some part of me hoped I might miss my flight back to Germany, and, as it turned out, our crummy pidgin nearly came to my rescue.

Lesson five, Lotnisko Chopina w Warszawie. Neither of us really remembered lesson five, which had something to do with telling time, and as a result we arrived at the airport just fifteen minutes before my flight departed. Ania ducked under the ticket cordons and described my situation to the Lufthansa representative. Somehow my check-in process was expedited in a way that would never occur in an American airport, and a moment later we were searching our pocket dictionaries for goodbyes.

“Greetings to your family,” she said, squinting at her little Oxford and pausing dramatically. “And to America!” 

I thanked her profusely and hurried through security. I never saw or heard from her again.

At the gate, I talked to an American businessman. We complained about getting stuck in the morning traffic. Apparently we’d both almost missed our flights.
This conversation jerked me back awake, back into adulthood. Once more the world was tedious and vulgar and full of anxieties, the sorts of complexities that I can only describe in my native language. I had come back into myself: tired, hungover, confused, weary. Once more life was complicated and vague, sometimes frightening but mostly annoying. Adulthood was right there where I’d left it.