"Mother Poland, So Freshly Entombed" [10/15?]
anonymous
January 28 2011, 13:44:05 UTC
--
Nobody panicked right away. They had ninety days reserve, after all; they were required to. There were other suppliers. Gazprom had always been difficult, and they always backed down in the end. Half the EU got their gas from the Northern Lights pipeline, and nobody in the EU wanted their neighbors to freeze.
Mirosław went on with his life. He studied. He spent long hours writing articles for Janusz, and long letters to his brother. He bought a new coat for Graźyna, white with broad green trim, in a fashionable cut - even with Orek's rent, money was starting to worry her, and the winter was turning cold. They celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the townhouse, and Janusz turned up with a whole roast turkey and five hundred euros, which he handed to Romana. Gas money, he said. No one could quite bring themselves to ask.
His train back to Warsaw, after the Christmas break, was delayed twelve hours by snow. Anya's was delayed three days.
--
Poland acquired a coat in the same cut as Grażyna's, green with gold trim, and took to wearing it constantly, even indoors. He did the same with his long red scarf, loosening it but never removing it. His drinking got heavier. Mirosław did his best, but there seemed nothing to be done. "I fucking need it, okay?" Poland snapped, the one time Mirosław dared to bring up the issue directly. "It's not like my liver can give out."
Mirosław wasn't even worried about that, really. What worried him was that the Gazprom negotiations were going nowhere, and he kept hearing his neighbor yelling on the phone and he was sure that was connected, and the reserves kept going lower, and the winter kept getting colder. People kept asking if they should have developed the shale-gas drilling more. His groceries were creeping up in price - fuel costs. The university was talking about using a four-day week for a while, to save on heating. Orek's seminary had already made the switch.
--
Mirosław was alarmingly close to broke; he'd started having the library's horrible breakroom coffee for lunch, and staying late for hours rather than go home and turn on the heater. He found himself obsessively searching for articles on the national personifications, browsing through the musty magazine stacks they were going to digitize any decade now, abusing his staffer's free-xerox privledges for the sake of odd paragraphs. Poland, it seemed, had nothing interesting to say to his people between 1950 and 1989. Russia had given speeches on a regular basis. Mirosław spent his exams fretting and shivering, with a dark suspicion he'd bombed the lot.
On Friday he met Janusz for a thank-god-it's over drink. They were just finishing when he saw the flash of a red scarf outside, moving at speed. He half-stood in surprise, chair scraping back. Janusz blinked at him, and Mirosław's fingers tightened on his glass. "I think my neighbor just went past," he said.
"Ah." Janusz blinked, then peered out the window. "Over there? In the little mob of people with the 'We Freeze While You Bicker' signs?"
Mirosław craned to see. He spotted the red scarf and blond hair, but they were on a woman, shoulders hunched and hands waving. "Ah - no. Wasn't him. Are they yours?"
"Please, credit me with a bit more subtlety. I havn't called a mob together since the Gazprom business started. It would scarcely help; there are greater forces at work. God, I miss it. Shall we go lend our screaming voices to the throng?"
By the time the throng arrived outside the PGNiG offices ("Thank the Lord, at least they can aim," Janusz muttered, sotto voce) it had grown to a few hundred. Mirosław's toes were freezing, but the press of bodies kept him warm, otherwise. There was chanting, and he wasn't sure, afterwards, if he joined in or not. But he remembered the chanting, and the noise. Some men in suits emerged from the building, and the throng pressed forward to greet them.
He saw the woman in the red scarf again, raising her hand, and then Janusz caught him by the elbow and held him back against the tide, and then things got rather disjointed.
The news reports, later, tried to analyze it. They blamed the rising food prices, rumours of fresh drilling in Kazakhstan, someone's aunt dying of hypothermia in her apartment.
Nobody panicked right away. They had ninety days reserve, after all; they were required to. There were other suppliers. Gazprom had always been difficult, and they always backed down in the end. Half the EU got their gas from the Northern Lights pipeline, and nobody in the EU wanted their neighbors to freeze.
Mirosław went on with his life. He studied. He spent long hours writing articles for Janusz, and long letters to his brother. He bought a new coat for Graźyna, white with broad green trim, in a fashionable cut - even with Orek's rent, money was starting to worry her, and the winter was turning cold. They celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the townhouse, and Janusz turned up with a whole roast turkey and five hundred euros, which he handed to Romana. Gas money, he said. No one could quite bring themselves to ask.
His train back to Warsaw, after the Christmas break, was delayed twelve hours by snow. Anya's was delayed three days.
--
Poland acquired a coat in the same cut as Grażyna's, green with gold trim, and took to wearing it constantly, even indoors. He did the same with his long red scarf, loosening it but never removing it. His drinking got heavier. Mirosław did his best, but there seemed nothing to be done. "I fucking need it, okay?" Poland snapped, the one time Mirosław dared to bring up the issue directly. "It's not like my liver can give out."
Mirosław wasn't even worried about that, really. What worried him was that the Gazprom negotiations were going nowhere, and he kept hearing his neighbor yelling on the phone and he was sure that was connected, and the reserves kept going lower, and the winter kept getting colder. People kept asking if they should have developed the shale-gas drilling more. His groceries were creeping up in price - fuel costs. The university was talking about using a four-day week for a while, to save on heating. Orek's seminary had already made the switch.
--
Mirosław was alarmingly close to broke; he'd started having the library's horrible breakroom coffee for lunch, and staying late for hours rather than go home and turn on the heater. He found himself obsessively searching for articles on the national personifications, browsing through the musty magazine stacks they were going to digitize any decade now, abusing his staffer's free-xerox privledges for the sake of odd paragraphs. Poland, it seemed, had nothing interesting to say to his people between 1950 and 1989. Russia had given speeches on a regular basis. Mirosław spent his exams fretting and shivering, with a dark suspicion he'd bombed the lot.
On Friday he met Janusz for a thank-god-it's over drink. They were just finishing when he saw the flash of a red scarf outside, moving at speed. He half-stood in surprise, chair scraping back. Janusz blinked at him, and Mirosław's fingers tightened on his glass. "I think my neighbor just went past," he said.
"Ah." Janusz blinked, then peered out the window. "Over there? In the little mob of people with the 'We Freeze While You Bicker' signs?"
Mirosław craned to see. He spotted the red scarf and blond hair, but they were on a woman, shoulders hunched and hands waving. "Ah - no. Wasn't him. Are they yours?"
"Please, credit me with a bit more subtlety. I havn't called a mob together since the Gazprom business started. It would scarcely help; there are greater forces at work. God, I miss it. Shall we go lend our screaming voices to the throng?"
By the time the throng arrived outside the PGNiG offices ("Thank the Lord, at least they can aim," Janusz muttered, sotto voce) it had grown to a few hundred. Mirosław's toes were freezing, but the press of bodies kept him warm, otherwise. There was chanting, and he wasn't sure, afterwards, if he joined in or not. But he remembered the chanting, and the noise. Some men in suits emerged from the building, and the throng pressed forward to greet them.
He saw the woman in the red scarf again, raising her hand, and then Janusz caught him by the elbow and held him back against the tide, and then things got rather disjointed.
The news reports, later, tried to analyze it. They blamed the rising food prices, rumours of fresh drilling in Kazakhstan, someone's aunt dying of hypothermia in her apartment.
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