Around the bus, the passengers hugged family and packed their baggage off into waiting cars. 26 hours ago, we’d embarked in Victoria Coach Station, London. The trip was supposed to be 24 hours, but some joker’d shoplifted a bottle from the duty-free on the Dover-Calais ferry. Twenty minutes into France, we got pulled over and escorted back to the Channel, where the gendarmerie questioned him and gave him cigarettes. I suppose if he’d stolen a carton of Gauloises they’d have given him some wine. Back en route, the joker’d found another way to get hammered. By Germany, he was in the maudlin stage, crying all over us. I watched as his smiling family piled him into a late-model Mercedes along with his luggage.

I was exhausted, ravenous and worried that because of the bus’s delay, the man sent to collect me had given up and gone home. I had no idea what he looked like. The school had assured me that he’d pick me out, pick me up and drive me to my assigned apartment. In front of me, evenly-spaced seedy guys in suits lined the entrance to the terminal. Several of them were watching me. I noticed that I was holding an imaginary handkerchief to my mouth. The air’s metallic taste wasn’t going away. To give my hands something to do, I dug out and finished the granola bar I’d bought at a gas station in Holland. The seedy guys looked away and went on shrugging the rumples out of their jackets. I knew they must be the Polish mafia cab drivers I’d read about in my guidebook—same fare but in dollars. I lugged my bags as purposefully as I could without going anywhere, avoiding any further eye contact with them. I felt pleased with my street smarts. But it occurred to me that if I couldn’t find my contact, I didn’t even have an address to give a legit cab driver. I knew nobody in town and the phrases in the guidebook were only of use in expensive hotels and emergency rooms. The benches outside the terminal were used mainly as ashtrays.

It was late. The crowd from the bus was thinning out. Swept by an October breeze, the city showed nothing of itself but lights and silhouettes. I spotted a tall, Slavic-looking young man in a shirt and tie, slouching on the side of a car, thudding the tires with his heels. He looked resentful, cheated of sleep. I walked into his field of view, craning my neck at the signs. I suppressed my mounting desperation in order to appear bemusedly lost. No response. I took another walk around the outside of the terminal. My helplessness must have been palpable: this time a seedy suit broke the line and approached me.

“Tack-see?” he said.

“No thank you.”

“Tack-see,” he said, coming closer.

“No.”

“I drive you everywhere,” he said by phonetic rote.

The rest of the suits looked on balefully. I could go with any one of them, they seemed to concede, but it would make no difference: Hey buddy, we’re not thieves. We’re stuck poaching at the bus station in the middle of the night. Your dollars’ll end up in the same higher-up’s pocket.

I trotted back to the tall young man slouched on the car. He was sliding his tie bar on and off.

“Excuse me,” I said. “You’re not here to pick up a teacher for the Axebridge School of English, are you?”

He froze with his tie half-clipped and looked me up and down.

“How could you know that?” he asked, bewildered. He was definitely a Pole—one who’d learned English from Brits.

“I’m the teacher,” I said. Joyous, I put down my nylon Black Knight bag and offered him my hand. “Tavish McDonell. Pleased to meet you.”

Like one used to frauds, he scrutinized me: my almost-long hair under my Vancouver Canucks cap, my zits, my blue Mountain Equipment jacket, shapeless jeans and Docs. Some teacher. When he saw that I wasn’t going to retract what I’d said, he introduced himself cautiously as Rafa?. He stowed my backpack and canvas flight bag and pulled onto the street.

I relaxed back into the seat and watched the my new town roll by. The streets were empty except for an elderly couple in gloves and hats. They stopped to watch us pass, as if they divined that, for me, seeing citizens out for a stroll in felt hats and gloves was an ethnographic moment. Ever since, that irreproachable old couple has been for me like Bernstein’s girl in the white dress in Citizen Kane: I don’t think a month’s gone by when I haven’t thought of them.

So this was Poland: right now there was too much that was different, too much to register. Beyond my tiredness, I felt that I’d given myself up to a stream that was flowing hard in the general direction of real life. The stream was fast and treacherous and would go on carrying me for a long time. It was more important to hang on than to take it all in. I turned to Rafa? and asked him about the filthy Polish air. He turned on the AC. I made a joke about the irony of us being at the terminal to look for each other and taking so long to do it. He smiled for as long as politeness required.

I knew I didn’t look teacherly. I was young and looked even younger. I envisioned myself buying a rack of tasteful Oxford shirts with my first paycheque. Except that I didn’t know how to buy a shirt. I didn’t know what the sizes meant. I decided that I would borrow someone’s shirt and a tape measure and figure it out in front of the mirror. It was important, I reasoned, to be taken seriously. I would also have to observe my posture and speak with deliberate calm and adult gravity. It struck me that it was just four months ago that I’d decided to follow through on this teaching English abroad dream. The 26-hour bus trip was the final test. To see if I wanted it enough. And I did. I’d made it and now I was impatient for the elegance and sexual license of Continental living.

Rafal pulled up at an apartment block. The lobby was so dark that we had to let our eyes adjust. I would describe the décor as late-war U-boat. Under a caged red light bulb hung a sign:

Smoking—Forbidden!

Rafal wrinkled his nose at the tang of urine in the air and frowned at me for my carefully considered choice to live in this building. I said nothing. I was so tired that I’d entered a state of hyper-alertness in which, however, it was impossible to react to anything. While we waited for the elevator, he gave me my keys. The one to the apartment was six inches long with teeth the size of drill bits. I pocketed it and concentrated on adapting to its scrape against my thigh.

The fourth floor was even darker than the lobby. I half-saw, half-felt my way along, kicking garbage out of the way. Rafal began muttering to himself in Polish. He showed me the apartment and I pretended to see it. I summoned up the words to ask where my bedroom was. Rafa? explained that there was only one closed bedroom, and my roommate, Richard, slept there. He looked meaningfully at the sofa. This gesture was so consistent with everything else I’d seen that I didn’t think to question it. And bedding, I asked. He said it wasn’t his job. I nodded and collapsed in the direction he was looking.

As Rafal was letting himself out, he turned back and said:

“I have to tell you one very important thing.”

“Mmm?”

“You must [unintelligible] the freezer once a month.”

“What?”

“On the first of the month, [unintelligible] the freezer.”

“Um…‘defrost’?”

“What?”

“Defrost.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means…it’s what they say you should do to freezers.”

“How do you do it?”

“I don’t know, I never have.”

“If you’re going to do that, fine, just make sure you [unintelligible] the freezer, too.”

“OK, fine, I will.”

“You know how?”

“I just told you I didn’t.”

“You said you couldn’t ‘defrost’ it.”

“How about you come back next month and then you can show me how to do this very essential thing?” Dubious, he scanned the apartment. He looked me over exactly the same way he had at the bus terminal when he was about to call me a teenage crank. He frowned at me for the way I’d really let things slide around my place.

“No, I don’t think so. Goodnight,” he said, and left, closing the door slowly and gently, as if on an inmate known to get hysterical over nothing.

A minute later I got up and looked around. I was too excited to touch anything. At last. If not a room, I had a place of my own.