2 + 3 = 5

From Madame Tussaud's wax figure museum in London.

(The amazing thing about Madame Tussaud’s is not how realistic the wax figures look (you can tell they’re not alive all right), but how unrealistic the people that stand next to them are. That figure over there, next to Michael Jackson, posing for a photograph – what an unnatural smile, what waxy skin, what improbable proportions! One wax figure unfreezes and walks away, the other stays on, smiling interminably. Aren’t humans the most unnatural animals?)

I never believed in following the crowd. In fact, I seem to have a mild case of crowdophobia, with a gathering of more than thirty people causing discomfort, headaches, and suicidal thoughts. The first few rooms of Madame Tussaud’s – a teeming mass of bodies, all swarming to take pictures with figures of people I’ve never even heard of – are therefore something of a nightmare. I want to scream for help, to run away to a medieval castle or abbey that no one visits. Instead, I try to join the idiots surrounding me, to take a picture next to one of those celebrities I don’t give a damn about. Oh why oh why don’t they have civilized lines you could stand in, why does it have to be push your way through and the fittest survives? I take a step toward the figure, already five people jump in to have their pictures taken first. In the process I stand between someone’s camera and the scene they’re trying to take a picture of. “Sorry”, I mumble almost inaudibly, too stressed out to be truly polite.

(As I look at the fifth or so figure of a supermodel that I’ve obviously never seen before, I realize that they all look like Barbie dolls. Yeah, I know, Barbie dolls were based on supermodels, not the other way around, but what of it? In my life, the appearance of the doll came chronologically before the model. And why anyone would want to look like a Barbie doll is beyond me. Humans are the strangest animals, aren’t they?)

But Madame Tussaud’s is not just for the crowd. In the room which exhibits historic personae, the clumps of human mass gathered around wax figures thin out noticeably. I happily dive toward each and every “unpopular” wax model. I can’t resist the urge to look through the prism Newton is holding, to stand on tiptoe in order to reach Oscar Wilde’s eye level, and, most of all, to ruffle Einstein’s hair. Vincent Van Gogh makes a particularly strong impression on me, with a face just like the one in his self-portraits, only realistic. With bittersweet amusement I notice that they placed King Charles I next to Oliver Cromwell. You couldn’t have two more different men – the short, curly-moustached dandy on the left, and on his right the ungainly Puritan, seemingly hacked out of a large and gnarled piece of wood, with two warty knobs on his face. To think that it was not the tree-like one that was eventually cut down!

When I come to the room dedicated to musicians, I rush past the Britney Spearses that everyone’s lining up to see, and head instead toward the Beatles, upon seeing whom I feel a queer desire to shriek my head off. I do wonder what I would have thought of them if they had been popular in my time. “I never believed in following the crowd, do I believe in running away from it at all costs?” I ask the figure of the young Mozart as I look him in the eye. He looks back down to his violin, clearly thinking “don’t be silly, you came here, didn’t you?” And so I did, my dear Mozart, so I did.

Stuck-on smiles

I chanced upon this text I wrote in Polish during the first few days of our stay in Bristol, when I had too much free time on my hands. As we're leaving Bristol in a week and the text isn't too bad, I thought it was appropriate to translate it and add a few ending sentences.

"This is a very important test," says the n-th lady with a wide smile I see that day. "But it’s nothing to worry about," she adds, seeing my not-too-enthusiastic expression. "Just try to do it as quickly and as carefully as possible," she smiles even more widely.

With a deep-set belief that there is some internal contradiction to her words, I start the test. It turns out that it’s an insult to my intelligence. Which makes the situation all the worse, since, deeply insulted, and strained by two hours of trying to sign up to a British school on top of that, the aforementioned intelligence decides to abandon me completely...

I press the “play” button on the computer screen for the third time. While I manage fairly well on the conventional, written questions, to which I’m used from Polish school, my thoughts are already miles away halfway through the problems that necessitate the use of headphones.

The test is disgustingly practical, and therefore presupposes knowledge of British reality. I’m supposed to click on the check which is filled out correctly – and no one gives a damn about a Pole that might not know what a British check looks like.

I’m being unfair. Oh yes, everyone gives much more than a damn about me. If it hadn’t been for the chemistry teacher that had been helping me out for the whole day, I would’ve been running from one part of the school to another not for two hours, but for five, and my frustration would’ve reached its heights after five, not ninety minutes.

Yes, the first hour-and-a-half was alright, and at times even pleasant. At each turn I was struck by how “American” the British are – smiles almost never leave their faces and kind words almost never leave their lips – words such as “That’s lovely!” and “How can I help you?”. A Pole finds a smile so wide for such trifling reasons difficult to believe, so he says loftily and sarcastically: “How fake!” . I reply that it’s just good manners. It’s hardly reasonable to accuse someone of “fakeness” when, for example, being angry, he doesn’t show his anger.

Besides, if I’m to be sincere (and that, as you can see, is a prime virtue for a Pole), I don’t care much whether the waitress that serves me is really happy or not. I only want her to smile at me and ask me if I have everything I want, because that’s part of her job. And sometimes the mask can become the face; I think that a waitress that smiles more often turns happier. During our first few days in England it felt as if everyone here took a deep liking to us personally. I find it hard to believe that a completely insincere smile could have caused such a feeling.

All this doesn’t alter the fact that after two hours of signing up to school my smile felt unskilfully stuck on and I would’ve liked everyone to just leave me alone, instead of constantly asking me if everything was alright. I was beginning to run short of synonyms for the word “yes”...

It seems that the turning point was somewhere in the office of the maths (not “math”, this is Britain, after all) teacher. I tried to persuade him that I’m really capable of finishing a two-year course of mathematics in a year. "But you won’t be able to attend all the courses, you don’t have enough room in your timetable ," he protests. He’s so persuasive that I begin to believe that the feat I am proposing is indeed impossible. Then I remember that I went to a mathematical school. Explaining this to him is no easy task. You can hardly blame a teacher for doubting a student from a foreign country – and a girl at that! – when she says that she’ll finish a two-year course ( a course that English students often have troubles with) in a year.

Eventually, I managed to persuade him. Nineteen exams in a year was a bit tough, but boy am I glad that I didn’t give up and attend first year courses like he wanted me to – trying not to fall asleep would have been much tougher.

As for the test on that first day of school, I never did find out my results and it seems it was not such an important exam after all.