During the final few years of communism a group of enterprising young Poles
found themselves a nice little earner: carrying money around Eastern Europe.
The collapse of communism took away Beata and Jurek's livelihood. So in May
1990, after an absence of three years, they went back home to Poland. If
they had tried it a year earlier the date of the visa in their passports,
which had only been issued for six months, would probably have landed them in
prison. Now the uniformed immigration officer just laughed.
Beata and Jurek had spent the last three years of the Eastern Block's
existence engaged in a traditional capitalist activity — currency dealing.
But, while their western colleagues in London, New York and Tokyo sat in
trading rooms, communicating with computers, Beata and Jurek actually legged
it across borders carrying bags of money. Apart from that, the principle was
the same: exchange currency A for currency B, then for currency C, and then
back to A and so on. Eventually, if you have done it right, you end up with
more money than you started with. Like the monks in the famous Escher drawing,
you tramp round and round in a circle, going up all the time.
In Poland under communism, citizens who did not have important government
jobs and who could invent a reason to go were given passports relatively
easily. Once they were outside Poland they could go anywhere that would have
them. In fact the two back-packing currency dealers used to move
continuously in a wide circle around Eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Austria, East Germany, and then round
again. As they went, bags of Koruna, Forint, Leu, Leva, Lira, Dinars,
Schillings and Marks were exchanged for Dollars, or for each other — the
exact procedure depended on the changing currency market.
They, and the twenty or so others on the circuit, made a good living
out of it. They built up a float measured in tens of thousands of dollars,
stayed in nice hotels, and stopped for a few weeks here and there to see the
sights.
It was the ideal life for people in their mid twenties: full of adventure,
not too much stress if you didn't dwell on the possibility of arrest. Against
the grey background of the Eastern block they lived their lives with the
chaotic insouciance of rich kids. They hid spare passports in a train
that then left the station without them. They fell asleep in a railway
carriage, woke up a mile from the Polish border, and had to run for it. They
made friends with a group of corrupt officials from the Vietnamese Embassy in
Sophia and met a succession of weird drifters. Beata's favourite trick was
amazing East German bank officials by pulling 100,000 marks out of her
underwear.
Their consumption was often surprisingly conspicuous; one of their number
celebrated his birthday by buying a television for every member of staff in
the hotel. If there was any problem with the authorities they usually had
enough cash on them to bribe their way out of trouble.
The whole world knows the end of the story. One morning they looked
out of a hotel window in the town of Timisoara in Romania to see the military
police firing into a crowd of children. In Sofia they watched the president's
palace being burnt down by an angry mob. They made it to Berlin in time to see
the wall come down. The Eastern Block was history and there was no more black
market. The game was changing so fast that it was impossible to be sure of
making a profit on deals. It was time to go home.
They stayed in Berlin for a while and then returned to Poland. The country
had changed completely, nobody wanted to know about what they had been doing
during the old regime; everyone had a story. Their friends who had stayed at
home were not sympathetic about their redundancy. They said that if they
hadn't been there during the changes they couldn't possibly understand what
had happened. Were they really misfits, or just a little ahead of their time?
* * *
The Iron Gravy Train is a simple, picaresque story of two adventurous and
likeable people who get their clothing caught up in the gearwheels of
history. It gives it a fresh angle on this much discussed part of
twentieth century by viewing it entirely from the inside.
Jim Burge 1998