Read Online There's an Egg in My Soup by Tom Galvin - Free Book Online Page B

off and looking under the sheets. At first light I went to the director with the English teachers in tow as interpreters. I told him that if something wasn’t done lickety-split, I was either going home or to a hotel in Warsaw. As it turned out, the director of the internat had ordered the whole building fumigated – every inch of it, except my flat, which made a huge amount of sense. The roaches, which are pretty adept at survival, realised there was one safe corner left in the building, and promptly moved in with me.
    Eventually, the fumigator was recalled and I had to vacate the place for the weekend. The only thing I had to worry about thereafter was the state of my lungs, wondering what the hell the guy had used in my flat. Inever saw so many creatures on their backs in all my life. It was a fairly unnerving experience, but I was not alone. One of the other Irish guys, Gearoid, a big lad from Cork, had a worse deal when it came to the roaches.
    He had been placed in a town called Miedzyrzec Podlaski, further east. I passed through it once and remember being glad that I was only passing through. You could tell how bad our various towns were by the number of times we visited each other, and I don’t think anyone ever visited Gearoid. Back when we had arrived at the monastery in the summer, almost all of us had our accommodation set up, but there were a couple of people who still had no confirmed home and the APSO project manager was trying to sort them out. Gearoid was told one day that he had a choice regarding his accommodation – he could share with a family or live in a workers’ hostel that, in the words of the project manager, ‘you wouldn’t put a dog in’. Of course, he opted for the family. When the shared arrangement wasn’t working out he tried to find somewhere else, but APSO were slow to move on it back in Dublin, so he just went to the hostel himself.
    Several months later, when the project manager was over again on a sort of assessment mission, he asked Gearoid how things were with the family. Gearoid told him he’d since moved out. ‘To where?’ asked our manager. ‘To the place you wouldn’t put a dog in,’answered Gearoid.
    One can only imagine what it was like. There, he said, roaches crawled regularly from a drain in the corridor. Gearoid poured every chemical available, from bleach to vodka, into the throat of the drain, hoping it would discourage the roaches from surfacing. But it only made things worse, since he swore they began to mutate. Large roaches with several antennae, three legs and other deformities began haunting him nightly. I was never sure whether to believe him or not though, as he had grown quite fond of pouring a variety of stuff down his own throat by then.
    After my chat with the students that day, I realised that I clearly had a better deal than some. But there were a few things that we had in common. The building we shared was definitely cold – when the wind blew at night, the windows sang like panpipes. And this was still autumn. The rain came in under the cracked window panes, but I knew that from the first week here and had blocked the main points of entry with towels. At one stage however, the whole frame – containing three separate windows – came in on top of me when I recklessly tried to force open a window that had refused to budge since my arrival. I was left standing in a crucifixion pose holding the windows for some time, until I could secure it and go for help. That evening the school carpenter arrived, with a little cotton bag of nails around his shoulder and a hammer stuck in his belt likea gunslinger.
    He was an old man and walked with a bit of a limp, frowning when he saw that the whole window frame had simply popped out like a large eye. But it didn’t take him long to remedy the matter. A few nails, a few whacks of the hammer and a firm nod. That was that sorted for the coming winter.
    I