From the Poland Files: Industrial Espionage, English Style

Wup-wup-wup-wup-wup-wup-shhhh…wup-wup-wup-shhhhhhhh… wup-wup-wup-wup-wup-shhhhhhhhhhhh. Instead of accelerating, the trams in Warsaw shake and worble up the tracks until some negative feedback is tripped and shooshing hydraulic stabilizers kick in: shhhhhh. The no. 23 crossed the Vistula and lesser rivers on its way north. It was crowded, but I could get a seat somewhere between the Russian market and the shacktowns where they grew their own cabbages and beets. A Platonic female voice, a slavicized Star Trek computer, would call out the stops overcorrectly, emphasizing the nasal vowels as if there were a government white paper pronouncing them endangered. I formed the sounds of the stops with my lips, trying not to think about what I had to do.

The ex-pat asylum that gave me a bed and beer money made me pay my way teaching business English. This meant they billed out at 300 zloty per 50-minute hour for sending out, via subsidized public transportation, a snivelling, underqualified cipher whose task it was to impersonate a teacher. The cipher was paid 30 zloty and handed a photocopied map of how to reach the kiosk selling the cheapest tram tickets.

Within this system, the newest ciphers got the in-company teaching gigs noone else wanted. So picture me on the no. 23 tram wup-wup-wupping northwards past the six-by-six beet gardens and potato vodka bottle glass and pasturage and lives too badly shitfucked by faux-Marxism to ever get anything out of the free market…rattling north on rusty rails to the low-rent moonscape where FSO-Daewoo swooped down, sank in its talons, saw that it was good, and said: “Here. Never mind the cow patties. Here we shall general our way into the Polish market."

Vital facts: FSO was the Polish government-controlled car-tel with the catchy, monopolist-smug social-realist name: Frabryka Samochodów Osobowych, or People’s Car Manufacturing Company. Daewoo was a Korean electronics and automotive zaibatsu that Enronned out of existence in 2000. But for a few brief years, these two companies—one with no hope of competing in the free market, the other living from audit to audit—refused to die the death and siamesed into a producer of cars whose size and quality were in the range between subcompacts and Hot Wheels.

One of the more manageable problems of the merger was communication. The Polish engineers and salespeople weren’t going to pick up Korean on their breaks, so I was going to come twice a week and teach them Anglo-Saxon. The tram shuddered to a stop to let me and only me off at a stop named Zakłady Mięsne. With my limited Polish, this seemed to—and still seems to—mean Meat Factories. Aside from the FSO-Daewoo plant, it was Childe Roland territory out there: stunted shrubs and tracts of gravelly mud about to freeze into protoplasmic lumps. I shuffled over the parking lot to security to present my letters of introduction. A guard with a ruined nose accepted them like a signed confession. His heavy fingers were slow to dial on what must have been his first touch-tone phone. He waved over his shoulder for me to sit down. Eventually, a grinning blond engineer called Mirek came to fetch me.

“You are English man?”

“Well…yes.”

“You come.”

He showed me a few open-concept detail units and desultory shop floors on the way to the classroom. It was like watching them on 16mm film. They reminded of the Flint, Michigan of Roger and Me.

For lack of anything else to say: “So what do you work on, Mirek?”

“I develop a car that run on butter.”

“Excuse me?”

“Is our goal to make this car by five years.”

A moustache wearing a tall man passed us in the hall, slapping its hard hat in recognition of Mirek, who said nothing.

“What kind of car?” I asked.

“Butter power. No more gasolines. In futurity, everything running on butters.”

“You mean batteries.”

“Yes, buttery. I very like buttery.” We walked some more. “You know, our cars are most quiet in the World.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“No, no, you ask why.”

“Why what?”

“Why are most quietest.”

“Why are your cars the quietest?”

“Because…your knees covering your ears!” He dissolved into a little fit of nitrous oxide.

We were approaching raised voices. In a drafting room a Pole and Korean were arguing in broken English over a schematic diagram of an engine. They beckoned me in.

“You are…English man?” one of them asked.

“Um…yes.”

The Pole smiled triumphantly as he placed one hand on my shoulder. With the other, he pointed expertly with his index fingernail to an infinitesimal gizmo in the deepest bowels of the engine. “Then you will please to tell my friend…what is that!” I bent over the diagram—drafting pencil on transparent paper. I could think of no way even to describe the shape of the part or how many sides it had or what it might do; it was no less complex than I imagined an entire engine to be. One of those little Maxwellian demons who lurks in the heart of the machine, enforcing the laws of physics.

When I looked up, the two engineers were watching me, hopefully, nervously, waiting for me to settle their argument. Mirek had disappeared without my noticing. I could hear the buzzing fluorescent lights. They didn’t know what I knew, so they couldn’t say what they did. I didn’t know what they knew, so I couldn’t do anything at all.

* TO BE CONTINUED *