The Pole

In a usual Icelandic manner, it took me six months to finally make contact with The Pole. There were a few strange things about him.

Firstly, he was the only Pole in our factory. Other companies were usually swarmed with those white-and-red men working their asses off. And yet, he was the only one among many Latinos and Azerbaijanis. Not your usual setup.

I liked to joke about the location of the factory as a Name-You-Can’t-Pronounce-Anyway. Just a little tease with the foreigners, as they don’t accept the obvious fact that Icelandic is the easiest language in the world to learn. As they really couldn’t pronounce the Name-You-Can’t-Pronounce-Anyway, they started to call the village “Anyway”. Every day, we were driving to Anyway and leaving Anyway.

But The Pole has actually learned to pronounce the real, domestic name of Anyway. I didn’t know that before we talked. To be fair, I didn’t know anything about him. Being a focused and dedicated worker does not count – that’s more of a managerial observation. It has nothing to do with knowledge.

It would take even more than half a year to make contact with The Pole, if not for him standing that evening next to my Jeep in after-sunset gray dimness, shaking his shoulders because of harsh Icelandic winds. “Didn’t you go with your colleagues, my friend?” I asked.

He shrugged between the shakes and said “They finally forgot about me and made it official.”

I laughed, but also immediately sensed it’s not a laughing matter to him. So I gave him the lift, as there was no other choice, and we left Anyway. “Do you mind coming over for a beer?” I asked, to my surprise, halfway through. Apparently, the silence filled me with irresistible curiosity.

“I don’t drink, but I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea.”

“Sure, my friend.”

He spoke much better English than you would expect from someone who’s packing fish all day long. When I told him that, The Pole didn’t move an inch.

“Oh, I just paid attention in school. My dad raised me that way”, he responded and sipped some green tea I made him.

“So, your dad raised you well.”

“Yeah."

“So what do you do here, in the end of the world?”

“I work.”

“Yeah, I figured that out, you know?”

The Pole’s face lit up with a very brief smile. “I was working in finance in my previous life”.

“Previous life? What do you mean? Are you a ghost?” I laughed.

“In a way, yes.”

That didn’t strike me, but the follow-up did.

“Because I saw my dad die.”

Ten years ago, we were a truly happy family. I left the house to study in Wrocław, a beautiful Polish city located close to where we lived. I was coming back to visit my parents every other weekend. I had to do laundry somewhere, right? But of course it was much more than that. We never stopped playing board games together, do some simple gardening with my mum, and watch handball matches in the telly with my dad. We were all flourishing, maybe more than ever.

When I started a second year, however, I also started to sense some issues that have not yet emerged. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. We feel when the tides change, even if we can’t point at the cause yet. The air gets slightly sour, and the uttered words start to itch. But the only think I could pinpoint and call strange with confidence in my voice, was that apart from handball matches, we also started watch football with dad, which he very often labelled as a sport that’s too famous to pay it any more attention. Oh, the irony.

At first, I thought: well, I’m an adult know, and relationships change. That’s natural. Whatever we were, my dad, my mum and I, are now a bit different, because we all transform. Slowly, but surely. I was accepting that I’m no longer a little child, and they don’t have to parent me anymore.

But on one winter day, my mum said “I want to talk with you.” Just like that, out of the blue, when she was standing at the kitchen counter.

My dad wasn’t at the house. She didn’t know where he went. But I also didn’t.

“But maybe he said something to you?”

“No, mum, not at all. What happened?”

My mum turned her face in front of the window. It was snowing on the other side, and a thin white blanket covered the ground of our garden and the roof of our Mercedes.

“Do you think he has an affair?”

Mum’s laugh came from her very depths. It was her loudest laugh I’ve heard, and there was a primal fear in it. Hidden, but I spent basically my whole life with her. I could sense it, and it was unnerving.

“Not a chance. I would smell the fuck out of other perfumes if there were any!”

My dad came back home long after the dark has covered that day, with icy hair, eyebrows and lips. We pressed him to talk, but he just said that he was on a very long walk. A very much needed one.

And now, when I said it aloud, I actually think this was the last moment my dad said something completely true, from top to bottom. Like he always did before.

It’s not like he started lying to us, but he became a master of half-truths, tinkering and swerving the real events we couldn’t fully reach anymore. He started to drink frequently. Not much, just a glass of wine every day. “French do it all the time,” he used to say. But he never cared to admit that French stop at one glass for a day, even when months later his daily glass became three daily glasses, and three daily glasses became three daily cans of beer.

My mum asked him many times why he started to drink so much and why wouldn’t he quit. But he shrugged it all off. So she started to threaten him that she would leave, which she never intended to do. But he shrugged it off too. He downplayed all the questions. He stated that he needs a break, that there’s too much stress in his work. She could sense, that he is, indeed, stressed. But not from work. From what, then?

We finally got the answer for that question, and it was delivered via bailiff. Luck had it, if only we could have some luck, that all three of us were there when we lost the Mercedes, after a very long round of shouts, threats and scuffles.

My dad couldn’t hide the truth anymore, or at least the most important part of it. And it was astonishingly simple: my dad got addicted from betting and lost not only all of the savings, which we had plenty, but also the money he gathered from various payday loans that temporarily acted as an “everything’s okay” cover. That’s why he started to watch more football. When handball betting wasn’t enough, the sheer amount of various football events you could bet on was too tempting for my dad. He fell for its glistening wealth and drowned in it.

Somehow we kept the house, but dad didn’t keep mum from leaving. He promised to both of us that he will never place a bet again in his life. As far as I know, he delivered the promise. But what started with betting, ended with alcohol. He was drunk now more often than not, and quickly lost his job. So I decided to quit from the last year of the university, especially when it was already quite easy for me to find some work in finance. It allowed me to support us both. Barely, but it did. And obviously I wanted my old dad back. I wanted to feel that all the tears I shed didn’t dissolve in abyss. I simply wanted to believe, in all my naivety, that it was me, and not my mum, who was right.

Countless times have I tried to persuade him to quit drinking. He never heard, he just dug more half-truths, quarter-truths, no-truths. So after some more months I finally decided to act.

I found all the alcohol I could, as it was usually very well hidden. I gathered all the cans, and when my dad wasn’t drunk, I flushed them all in front of him. Or rather, I tried, because he punched me straight away and yelled “GIVE IT TO ME!”

My once lovely dad hit me, and he never felt bad about it.

I flushed the beers anyway a couple days later. He needed a shock therapy, as everything else wasn’t working. It was now or never.

My dad was desperate for some booze. He asked me nicely to get some, but I looked at him disgusted and said “No more drinking. It’s finally time”. Dad didn’t say a word and left the house. He was dirty, smelly and without a penny in his holes that were once pockets, so I wasn’t concerned about him getting a beer, as no one would sell or give him any.

I did become concerned, however, when he didn’t come back for the rest of the day.

At midnight, I left the house to look for him. First I went with the closed stores, maybe he somehow got drunk somewhere there, but no. Then I went with the local places from my childhood memories, but that was a stupid idea. And going to a nearby forest with some flashlight was nothing else than desperation. But it worked that time. I saw my dad lying under a bench, surronded with empty bottles and howling winds. That night, he went with vodka.

His body danced with shivers. Danced, like if it was something pleasant. Danced, like if it was something he wanted. Danced, like he never did.

“Yeah, I saw my dad die.”

The Pole raised a cup and finished the tea.