What is Flash Europa 28?

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Nothing to declare

It’s July, the train is slowly rolling through the heat of Lower Silesia. A factory, a wheat field, a potato field, an advertising-pillar field, a field that’s not filled in. A new estate with copy-and-paste houses, a sophisticated security system, and a shortage of young married couples with children. You’re on your way home, to the east, from Poland A to Poland B. Or Poland Z.

Everything works. The window opens, the water runs in the toilet, there’s heating under the seats – roused from its winter sleep, it gives you a sharp slap on the bum. Seven more hours to go, but you’ve already had a fight with your mother about when you’re coming next. She got upset because you’re not coming for Christmas, only for November the first. What can you do? You can’t stand all those best wishes. Besides, All Saints means a shorter time in church, and somehow more people than Jesus, even if they’re dead. Anyway, better stones with names on them than babies in the manger.

You study the girl sitting opposite. A face from a Renaissance fresco, beautiful and past its sell-by date.

Yesterday you saw Aśka, but having a beer at the pub was pointless. Worse yet, it was the pub on the Marketplace. After five years of drinking in pyjamas, in the kitchen or the TV room at the Kredka student hostel. You always had a drink with her, along the way, while writing an essay or reading a thousand pages for an exam. The conversation that happened to come up always broke the banks. But yesterday there was none of that, no flood at all. It wouldn’t come out. Or else it had all come out already, never to return.

You told her how you’ve been making application after application, everywhere, but life keeps rejecting your candidature. Even if you lie and say you’re motivated and want to be a team player.

The older woman takes out a salami, egg and pickled gherkin sandwich. At least nobody’s going to come and sit here.

When life didn’t invite you for interviews, you got by – the corporation did it instead. You had no choice. You’ve had to change yourself into just another fold in the flesh of a big fat body. You’ve had to resign yourself to a diet of reheated experience, until you deserve something more palatable.

Soon you met other folds in the flesh straight out of college, and it was just like in the past at the start of the school year. Everyone had changed, though you didn’t entirely know how. As for you, you just had a few new clothes. While after a week at school everything went back to normal, after two months at the corporation you still felt like at assembly on September the first, when the gym teacher barked the order: “And now the school song”. You were in a strange and uncomfortable position.

After her sandwich the woman took out Sudoku and a rosary. You weren’t a Sudoku fan. All that oiling the brain bored you. You’d rather improve it than preserve it.

But the rosary – who knows? A mantra like any other. There could always be a haemorrhage of something interesting in the course of it.  You ask if anyone fancies a smoke.

I’d love one, replies the lady with the rosary, I like to now and then, for the scenery.

You go out into the corridor. You praise the Sudoku and the rosary – as for you, you do nothing on the train. You just tank up on additive-free time, you freeze a supply of empty hours.

Venus comes to join you. She’s Ukrainian, living in Poland, recently adopted by a Frenchman she knows. Because actually she’s fourteen, not twenty. The Frenchman won’t let her stay up late having a good time, but he’s promised her a future abroad with a cushy nationality.

That’s it, you think. Give yourself up for adoption. Suddenly you dream of someone not allowing you to come home later than ten, putting you down for extra classes, getting you used to nice chats and public places. Bringing you up to be a wholesome human resource.

The train is slowly braking. The route’s impassable – someone’s stolen the tracks.

Not the first ones or the last.

 

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones 

Artwork

Artwork credit: 
吴佳渝, Beijing Film Academy

Our Partners

Flash Europa 28 is organised and run in cooperation with the Delegation of the European Union to China, the embassies of each of the 28 EU member states, The Bookworm, Literature Across Frontiers, and social media platforms in China.