Of Tomatoes, Airports and Trains

Two days before the Easter of 2023, I flew back home to the east of Poland from my paradise in sunny Catalonia. I left with regret as I hadn’t had enough time to plant my tomatoes, and I wasn’t due back for another few weeks, which meant that I was going to miss out on a few weeks of tomato growing time.

I arrived to find my mother in the midst of preparations for Easter. We drove to the village shop to buy ingredients for the traditional Easter bread soup. For some reason, my mind was still away, thinking of the tomatoes I hadn’t planted, rather than Easter and the precious time I was going to spend with my Mam. Odd how much energy we spend on the things that we haven’t done, and we couldn’t have.

To centre my mind, I went on a bike ride. I have a second-hand but modern bicycle that had been imported from Switzerland by a shop in my small city of Rzeszów. The bike has a sign that reads Tour du Suisse, which makes me feel very good. I imagine myself racing on those curvy mountain roads near St. Moritz; I see Alpine peaks and glaciers at every bend.

I cycled to our Airport. Rzeszów Airport has been a blessing to me. As a kid, I used to walk my dog on its runway. The dog’s name was Rex; he was a police dog that Dad had acquired from the police dog unit. Dad was the head of the police in our city, so I presume he had just asked for one of the pups when they had been born.

I knew a hole in the fence of the Airport. Once in, I would let Rex loose and watch planes land and take off. There weren’t not too many of them—three small planes to Warsaw per day and a big one to Chicago once a week in the summer. Everyone had relatives in the States; we were incredibly poor, and if one could get out, they did.

Sitting there in the tall grass near the runway, I often dreamt of flying. I was curious what it would be like to take off, close my eyes, and wake up in a different place.

So on my way to our Airport on my bike, I thought that my dream had come true. The Airport took my out of this kip, it gave me a job, linked me to love, friends, hobbies, work. Now I fly a lot, mostly for work, but also for leisure. I sip my Bushmills whiskey in business lounges, and I don’t get excited when planes swoop down during turbulences. I watch real Alpine peaks and glaciers through a porthole like a true citizen of the world.

As I cycled, I also remembered that access to the Airport was cumbersome. I cycled to it whenever I could, the weather permitting. I would leave my Swiss bike at the Airport (it has a bike rack - how hipster of it). However, there was no direct bus or train to it from my place. One had to take a bus back to the city and then another one to the Airport. There was an old train line that passes near our house that could be extended to the Airport, but I’d heard that they were planning to do it in 2050 or later - the traffic at the airport was still at levels that didn’t justify a permanent rail link.

So I kept cycling, and I was surprised pleasantly when I saw a new train line! I had thought 2050 was the target indeed, but within a few weeks, since the last time I had passed through the Airport, they had almost completed the new line. You could see tracks, stops, semaphores, and level crossings. The terminus station at the airport had a steel fence around it, and there was a little kiosk on the platform—presumably a ticket office.

I cycled back home filled with warm joy. Very soon, my journey to the Airport would be fast, easy—and sustainable. I was proud of my country. It used to be a hopeless, dark, cold hole, and now it built train lines within weeks. I would be able to leave the house one hour before a flight—a rare privilege, indeed. I relaxed, and my mind swung back to the tomatoes that weren’t going to be planted for another few weeks. I remembered that the end of May could be very hot in Catalonia, and that the tomatoes needed to be in the ground before that heat.

Excited, I stopped the bike at the edge of the Airport and checked the internet for any news on this topic. That’s how I learnt the true reason for the expedited construction of the seemingly unneeded train line: it was meant to facilitate the delivery of ammunition and weapons to the Ukraine.

As I cycled back home along the train like and then through the fields around the Airport, I felt a constant stinging in my heart.

I remembered the blood of my father’s feet when he returned home after a few months in 1982. Dad had taken his riot police unit on a a tour de force around the country. Their job was to quench strikes and riot. For weeks on, I kept asking myself how the blood had gotten onto his feet.

I remembered my Granny, whose farmhouse was near a train track leading to a concentration camp. The trains stopped sometimes there to wait - the camp’s gas chambers had a limited capacity and couldn’t process the incoming cargo fast enough. Granny told me that she would go out to watch the Jews on the trains to see how they behaved in their last moments. The Jews would stick their heads through the small windows of the train carriages and shout back: ‘You are next!’

And I remembered the loud conversations my Hungarian university mates who had run away from Serbia to avoid being drafted had with their Serbian friends visiting them after the war in Yugoslavia. They laughed at how grenades could turn a person’s head into pulp.

I asked myself how one should handle this disparity - how one could live normally with the constant shadow of violence over their heads. I didn’t have an answer. The easiest thing would’ve been to think again of the tomatoes that weren’t going to be planted before the end of May heat wave, but I couldn’t.

(2023)