We were almost back again when I spied something in the shadow of a tree. ‘This one?’ I asked Mela. It was at least ten centimetres across. Mela ran over, checked, and nodded her head in admiration. She gave me her small knife and I cut it off at the stem like she’d showed me, so another would grow. I posed for a photo with my find. Catch of the day!
‘It’s funny,’ I said to Agnieszka, ‘I’ve never done this before, but it seems so familiar.’ All those stories from my childhood of little girls mushrooming in forests, I guess. ‘Can mushrooming be in your genes?’
‘Maybe if you’re Polish!’
We’d no sooner reached the kitchen with our catch than our host Agnieszka breezed in, unaffected by the clutch of children – Mela and her two brothers – following after her. There were only three of them, but their flailing arms and excited screams took up a lot of room in the small home.
Agnieszka and Piotr apologised for their poor English, before proceeding to speak to me fluently on a range of issues, all while Piotr whipped up a two-course meal with the mushrooms their daughter had collected. Usually I persisted in Polish. Today I decided to just enjoy the conversation.
We sat down to eat a meal of homegrown vegetables and forest-picked mushrooms, in a one-hundred-and-ten-year-old restored country farmhouse, warmed by the heat from the stove that had cooked our meal. How many people must have done just this in this house over its long life? But here I was, probably the first Australian. Maybe the first Australian to have ever been to this tiny town.
‘This is lovely, Piotr. You’ve gone to so much trouble.’ I said to the host.
‘Do you know the Polish saying, Gość w dom, Bóg w dom?’ he asked me.
‘Guest in the house, God in the house?’ I tried a translation out loud.
The Agnieszkas and Piotr nodded enthusiastically. ‘To a Polish person, a guest is sacred. It’s never a trouble to have a guest. It’s always a pleasure.’
Agnieszka reeled off another one: ‘Więcej gość w cudzym domu przez godzinę niż gospodarz za dzien ujrzy’.
I shook my head and looked at my old teacher.
‘A guest in a foreign house sees more in an hour than the host sees in a day,’ she enlightened me. I rolled that one round in my mind for a while.
‘A guest in a foreign house sees more in an hour than the host sees in a day.’
A few hours later and Agnieszka and I were making ourselves comfortable in the space where a barn had once been, to one side of the house. With a couple of mattresses, thick blankets and a wall full of books, it was a cozy guest room.
‘Do you feel homesick for Poland still, Agnieszka – even after all these years in Australia?’ I asked her. It had been twenty years. I fully expected her to say no.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said instead, with an intensity that surprised me. ‘It’s so easy here for me. With my parents and my friends and my language – my many words for mushrooms. Australians always want to ask me where I’m from and how long I’ve been in Australia and what I think of it. It’s okay I guess. But it gets boring. How come Australians always ask you all those things anyway?’
‘How come Poles never do?’ I said.
‘What about you. Do you feel homesick being away from Australia?’ Agnieszka asked.
I shook my head. There were a few things I missed about Australia, I supposed. But I didn’t dwell on them. We were only here for three years, after all. I was making the most of it. ‘Being an expat isn’t like being a migrant. It’s just three years. I’ll be back in Australia soon enough,’ I said.
‘Oh, I nearly forgot, I brought you something!’ She fished a small plastic bag out of her things and gave it to me.
The drab olive of a eucalyptus branch showed through the plastic. She’d brought me gum leaves! I opened the bag and inhaled their distinctive scent. The smell of the hills I used to walk on after work to the sounds of pink and grey galahs and crimson rosellas. Of the endless lazy hours of the summer holidays of my childhood. Of camping holidays by the ocean. Of a place where things were easy, and people were like me. Where what I could say wasn’t limited by the vocabulary and grammar I had. Where Tom and I had felt like we were on the same team. Not where crazy event after crazy event left us no time to just be together. I wondered if Charlie was still waiting for us to come home, with no idea we never would. All of a sudden a flood of hot, heavy tears were rolling down my face and I was powerless to stop them.
‘It’s hard sometimes. Being a guest in someone’s house, isn’t it?’ Agnieszka said.
