A sip of history
Who were the men who left this behind? And did they mean to leave it? A Na zdrowie, a Sto lat for us to find here, almost a hundred years later?
The bottle was found inside of a wall that had just been opened, found by the same sort of men who presumably left it: the kind caked with dust, with dirt under the nails, with tired eyes and heavy boots. These are the good men who do the underrated work: waking up early and leaving their own homes to make others’ more livable. And all day drilling into walls such as these, and replacing the old or the busted with the new, with these veins of comfort — the pipes, the furnaces — which the rest of us will never really think about until something’s gone wrong. At my grandmother’s flat near the Wisła river, for many weeks now these good men have been diligent and kind and often funny in this work, announcing themselves to her, for example, as “Policja!”, the Police, when arriving anew.
And then there was this other announcement — this old bottle, discovered within the wall of my grandmother’s large work room which faces the Poniatowski Bridge. The bottle was just standing there, they said. Empty, upright. Standing directly beside one of the rusted pipes now needing to be replaced. The bottle, caked with plaster and dust. Uncapped. And on its faded and tattered green label, there in big letters, the words Wodka and Czysta, meaning Pure Vodka. On the other side of that label, visible through the other side of the glass, was the stamp of a date which matched the year my grandmother’s apartment building was completed: 18 IX 31 …
1931. The world then, it was in the throes of the Great Depression, which began two years earlier on the other side of the sea. Here, Poland was still just learning how to be Poland again, having regained its place on the world map only 13 years earlier, following World War I and more than a hundred years of Prussian, Austrian, and Russian rule. Seven out of ten Polish workers then were farm peasants. The country was rife with production issues, land disputes, and waning industrialization. And between people, there were other fissures: a third of the population within the newly drawn borders were minorities — Ukrainians, Jews, Belorussians and Germans — and between these groups and Poles, racism, antisemitism, and policies of exclusion sometimes bubbled. Long story short? It was a climate conducive to a drink.
Elsewhere? In America, 1931 was a time of Prohibition and bootlegging; when “The Star Spangled Banner” was adopted as the national anthem; when the Empire State Building was completed in New York. It was the year the film Frankenstein was released, and when the inventor Thomas Edison died. Closer, in Germany, 1931 was two years before Hitler came into power, the consequences of which the world and certainly the people here in Poland couldn’t fathom.
And within that world, that time, here in a district of Warsaw called Powiśle which was then mostly empty fields rather than the hub of hip living as it is today, yes within all that this new apartment building was going up. And some workers were finishing a job, another day’s work. Or perhaps drinking while on the job. Or celebrating a birthday, a Name Day, who knows. But there was a vodka bottle somehow involved, and somehow it then ended up behind a wall, this time capsule, this message in a 156-gram bottle.
“But look at S. The S is what I like!” This now from my grandmother, an artist forever obsessed with the beauty of letters. The longer S on the label, she suspects, must have been drawn by someone’s hand, as letters like these usually needed to be done back then. Of course the comment then sent her grandson off on yet another mission, a search for more, for any answers using the tools of today — computers, Google, things which might have been difficult to explain away to those soot-covered men of 1931 with vodka on their breath.
And while clues pertaining to the label’s design never quite led to anyplace concrete, some other stories did emerge from some of the other things printed there. Beginning at the top:
Panstwowy Monopol Spirytusowy, or State Spirits Monopoly. This was the state organization, formed at the conclusion of World War I, to take control of Poland’s alcohol trade and production in those blurry times. Back then, moonshine and illegal distilleries were rampant. And even in a bad economy, good money is of course to be had; and sure enough, proceeds from alcohol were later said to have accounted for as much as ten percent the state budget. (State monopolies also existed for tobacco, salt, a lottery, natural gas, and matches.)
Further down the label now: 35° … 1/4L. In these characters, other stories: the alcohol content and bottle size, of course, but also the hidden story of another bottle also once in circulation, the 1/10L, or so-called “hundred” as it was known, a bottle so small, so cheap and filled with 45-percent alcohol that it was thought to be the downfall of society; a person could buy one of those in lieu of bread and without much thought. And because this proved so easy a foray into alcoholism, especially among the lower classes, even the Monopoly at one point banned that smaller bottle in favor of this bigger one filled with vodka a touch more diluted.
Which isn’t to say this found bottle is big at all — no, certainly not by today’s standards; it’s about the size of the glass Coke bottle my 91-year-old grandmother now buys and sips from from time to time, the Coke bottle notably made to hold the same amount of liquid yet weighing nearly 100 grams more.
And so? So we can do little else for now, except maybe wonder. Wonder about those men who left the bottle there. Wonder whether they were happy. Whether they ended up in that oncoming war. Whether their own homes survived it as this one did somehow, while 80 percent of the others in Warsaw did not. We can wonder whether those men loved, or were loved. Whether they earned what they needed, lived good lives, fulfilled lives, lives which hopefully purred on just as their handywork did here; the original piping they left behind beside the bottle, it lasted all this time, nearly a hundred years.
And so we wonder. We wonder and we raise our glass up to theirs, and do as we do here in Poland when such a spirit is raised: we wish them a Sto lat, a Na zdrowie in return — to a hundred years, to health.
