Translation

When I was little, I lived in Tajikistan, in a village and this story is a very smelly story. It's a very scary story. It's a story of a little boy’s first encounter with flush toilets. Now in the village life was simple. If you wanted to, you know, there was that abandoned building where everybody went and you could squat and when it was summer you can do a little bit of investigation because the turds would go hard on the surface but soft inside, you know, a little bit like a brownie. So, I sat and enjoyed my brownies and in winter we would use a potty and then we would take the potty into the maize field and toss it between the maize stalks and by the summer the dogs would eat it and it was alright. One day I walked with my parents, I was six. I walked with my parents to the city, Stalinabad where we had a friend and she lived on the first floor. The friend was called Olga. She became my piano teacher much later when returned to Poland again but that's another story. Anyway, on the first floor I wanted to do #2, but there's no destroyed building and there are no public toilets, which in the village were just holes in the ground excavated from time to time and everything would go down with a very satisfying plop. So what do they do in the capital? What do they do in Stalinabad? So I wanted to go so I was told, yes there is a little room at the end of the corridor you just go there. So there it was and there was a porcelain contraption and some water at the bottom and I squatted on it because that's what you did and then I noticed that there was a chain leading to something at the top of the room so I pulled the chain and a great stream, a whoosh of water, came down and I ran out of the little receptacle with my pants hanging down because I've never seen anything like it in my life. 

My first flush toilet actually was a lot more dramatic than that. It was on a train going from Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea to Tajikistan. It was a flush toilet and I was told to just to pull the handle after I've finished and I thought that it would just open a flap and it will fallout, but it didn't. A great stream of water came down and I rushed out. And in Stalinabad was my second encounter. For years I could only squat on top of a toilet, I couldn’t sit down