by Rolf Potts
We walked down Próżna Street, past the last brick buildings of the old Jewish Ghetto. We crossed Plac Grzybowski, whose unruly grass made me think of Noemi. We visited Nożyk Synagogue, the only one in Warsaw to survive the war.
Kasia had started an organization, Forum for Social Diversity, whose challenging mission was to make tolerance in Polish society mainstream. With her American upbringing, she was accustomed to being with people from different countries, cultures, religions; this type of experience was new to most Poles, who lived in a predominantly Catholic and ethnically monotone country that traditionally produced immigrants but now, with its healthy economy on a continent in crisis, was receiving them. She had recently been working with the Ministry of Internal Affairs as it attempted to implement a strategy on immigration.
We stopped for lunch at Chłodna 25. The café had a familiar look: mismatched furniture, T-shirted staff, laptops-in-residence. Yet its renunciation of slickness was perhaps more crucial here because, as Kasia said, “Warsaw is still in a transition period.” Foreign chains continued to move in, threatening the existence of places like this. Kasia mentioned that the cafe often hosted events: readings, discussions, exhibits. “It’s a model,” she said, “for those who do socially conscious businesses.”
After lunch, we met two of my friends for a tour of Praga. Joasia was an artist who had recently moved from Krakow to be with Jason, a translator originally from Austin, Texas. Praga is a working-class neighborhood on the other side of the Vistula River, long famous for drunks and now popular with artists.
The tram rumbled east across the Poniatowski Bridge. Joasia told me that she sometimes felt homesick for Krakow, its beauty and compactness, but that she was enjoying the clean air of Warsaw. “And there are a lot more things happening here.”
We changed trams, ending up eventually at Fabryka Soho, a former factory now housing offices, studios, and exhibition spaces. A bus—Jason had the routes down pat—took us to Fabryka Wódek, an old distillery now peppered with galleries and studios. At one point we passed the gates of the old Bazar Różyckiego where Hania and I and many Varsovians used to hunt for Western goods—food, clothing, household items—unavailable in the shops.
We wandered ignored down supposedly mean streets, ducking occasionally into Dickensian courtyards. One had been turned into a bar—with trees in huge pots—and christened Sen Pszczoł (Bees’ Dream.) Tonight it was showing the multimedia works of student artists. Their professor gave a short speech, then kissed the hands of all of the females.
“In Krakow,” Joasia said impressed, “students kiss professors’ hands.”
The next morning I went to see Barbara Otwinowska, the professor with whom Hania had been corresponding. She lived on the eleventh floor of an eyesore at the edge of the Old Town. Her apartment was a cramped space lined with bookshelves and hung with oil paintings, as well as a large mirror in an ornate gold frame. Like the apartments of many older Varsovians, it was a rich representation of a rudely circumscribed life.
The professor showed me a copy of her book on female political prisoners. Walking past the prison a few days earlier I had stopped to read the plaque on the wall. Warsaw is a city of plaques, the majority commemorating victims of war and totalitarianism. They are ubiquitous, everyday reminders—often brightened with flowers—of the immense suffering that has been inflicted on this place. And they make one appreciate, in a way, the charmless (if leafy) neighborhoods outside the center. For if all of Warsaw looked like Krakowskie Przedmieście—if the city possessed the unbroken beauty of Paris—it would be difficult to believe in its brave and tortured past. The gray apartment blocks are their own kind of memorial.
The large plaque on the prison wall carried the names of the people who had died inside during “the years of Communist terror . . . 1945-1955.” The date of its unveiling was 1992.
Now I sat at the professor’s book-piled table, eating lemon sorbet while she read the letter I had brought from Hania. When she finished, she said that she knew a man at the Ministry of Justice who might be able to get us into the prison.
Jurek and Monika were leaving for vacation, so I moved to a hotel on Krakowskie Przedmieście—exchanging a view of a guard tower for one of fairytale rooftops. Downstairs there was a notice of a book reading—my hotel was Dom Literatury (Literature House)—starting shortly in the Museum of Literature on the Old Town Market Square.
Tour groups scuffed the cobblestones of Świętojańska Street. Because it was rebuilt, the Old Town is sometimes criticized for being Disneyesque. Such complaints usually come from people who have never seen it deserted on a winter’s night. It is an exquisitely detailed, faithfully rendered, and now well-worn replica of the original. It is long past its days as the commercial heart of the city, and so has the feel more of an attraction than of a vibrant urban center. But it is far from being what one might call plastic.
In a crowded room overlooking the square, Jacek Moskwa spoke about his biography of Pope John Paul II. The beloved actress Maja Komorowska read dramatic excerpts. The filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi listened in the back. It was like an old Catholic intelligentsia meeting.
Czesław Bielecki arrived for the reception. A renowned and often reviled architect, and former mayoral candidate, he had also been a resident—in ’68, and again in the ’80s—of Mokotów Prison. When told that I was writing an article about his city, he announced in characteristically hyperbolic fashion: “Warsaw is the ugliest capital in Europe.”
“I would agree with that,” Filip said quietly when I fed him the line. “But it’s got its own charms.”
We were having breakfast at Charlotte, a bright café on Plac Zbawiciela next door to the English Language College where I used to teach. I had seen it a few days earlier, when I had visited the school and met with Jolanta, the daughter of the headmaster who had hired me in 1978. Back then the school had 2,000 students; today, according to Jolanta, it has 350. Language schools now dot the city, while in the ’70s and ’80s the English Language College was the only private school teaching English, and the only place Poles could learn to speak it with a New York Jewish accent. (On Fridays I played tapes of Woody Allen’s old stand-up routines.)
I knew Filip’s father, a photographer who had grown up in England and moved to Poland in the 1970s, a propitious time for photojournalists in Eastern Europe. In fact, in 1981 he took the iconic photograph of martial law: a tank parked in the snow in front of the Moscow Cinema which was advertising the film Apocalypse Now.
His son had gone into the writing side of journalism, and was now a magazine editor. He had not only studied but worked abroad, and he spoke English with a British accent. I asked him why he lived in Warsaw.
“It’s an easy life,” he said. “It’s much more comfortable than in New York or London. And it’s cheaper. You can afford so much more. You can go out every night.” The words of a man with a good job in publishing; pensioners were a lot less sanguine.
Filip admitted that Krakow had better nightlife. In Warsaw, he said, you always went to the same places: Powiśle, for instance, the converted ticket hall under the Poniatowski Bridge. “Practically every night you end up here on Plac Zbawiciela.” Upstairs from Charlotte was the club Plan B, though it was hard for me to think of my old school’s square (really a circle) as constituting “the scene.”
On his way to the office—it was now after ten—Filip dropped me at the Copernicus Science Center on the banks of the Vistula. Inside, crowds of excited children pulled at contraptions and excavated for artifacts and listened to the voice of an electronic poet (based on a character in a Stanisław Lem novel). The place had more of the air of a funhouse than of a museum. After some searching, I found the interior of a small car built into a wall; taking a seat, and pressing buttons, I heard forthright answers to questions about human reproduction. Jurek had told me that the government wanted to get more young people studying hard sciences, as subjects like sociology had become popular. And it struck me that it w
as not only the museum’s interactive aspect that was novel, but its focus on the future.
In the evening, back in the city center, I walked into the whirl that is U Kucharzy (Chez the Chefs). The name was appropriate, because the restaurant is housed in the former kitchen of the Europejski Hotel. I knew the place well; Hania and I had eaten a sad dinner there on December 25th, 1978—her first Christmas without a mother.
The owner, Adam Gessler, stood overseeing the action in jacket and tie. He had gone beyond the concept of the open kitchen by placing cooking stations out in the dining rooms, and then having the chefs deliver their own food.
“It’s not that important that people see the cooks,” Gessler told me, deftly stepping out of the way of an oncoming cart, “but that the cooks see the people. Usually, they’re cooking for a wall.”
Under his jacket, sweat darkened his shirt. “You can feel the energy,” he said enthusiastically, as more chefs-turned-servers barreled past, “of all the people who worked here for the last 150 years.” In Warsaw, even restaurants respect the past.
Next door, giving onto Krakowskie Przedmieście, stood another Gessler establishment: Przekąski Zakąski (Snacks & Bites). A curved bar faced a room emptied of tables and overheated with young people. A silver-haired barman—in black vest, white shirt, and black bow tie—poured shots of vodka and handed across dishes of kielbasa and herring. He had an assured, unhurried, almost courtly manner; I watched as he greeted regulars, shaking the men’s hands, kissing the women’s. There has been a refreshing return to national cuisine: a rash of pierogi restaurants after the obligatory influx of sushi. But this place—open twenty-four hours—managed to do something more: It took Polish standards and made them hip.
Friday morning I sat with Professor Otwinowska in the waiting room of Mokotów Prison. (Now officially named Areszt Śledczy Warszawa-Mokotów.) After a few minutes the man from the ministry arrived—our liaison—and when I said “Nice to meet you” he replied: “We’ve already met. I was one of your students. I remember very well. You told a funny story about buying vinegar.”
Tomasz led us through the gate, where we relinquished our IDs and cell phones, and into the prison yard. The professor, elegant in her sunhat, clung to my arm as we entered the first building.
Two prisoners were rousted from their cell so we could have a look inside. The professor measured its width by spreading her arms, declaring it bigger than the one she had lived in. And, of course, she had had no TV.
There was the sobering air of any correctional facility, but here it was thickened by the historical chords. I thought of all the interrogations, hunger strikes, acts of torture, and executions that had taken place within these walls. All the lives lost, the productive years wasted. (A waste that seemed all the more senseless when seen against the prospering normalcy outside.) I thought of all the courageous citizens treated as criminals, the mothers separated from their babies. The babies separated from their mothers.
Our tour ended in the director’s office. Bogdan Kornatowski was a tall, handsome, well-built man. He presented each of us with a small etching on glass of the old prison building. He talked with the professor about upcoming events. Then, unexpectedly, he turned his gaze to me.
“What I am about to say may sound a bit strange,” he began, then paused, searching for the right words. “Perhaps even ugly. But please tell your wife that she has best wishes from the director of the prison.”
Thomas Swick is the author of a travel memoir, Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland, and a collection of travel stories, A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler. His most recent book, The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them, explores, through personal essays and nonfiction narratives (including “Warsaw Redux”), what he considers the seven fundamental pleasures of travel.
OLGA PAVLINOVA OLENICH
When the Journey’s Over
An angel appears in the night on the train from Venice to Nice.
When the journey’s over, there’ll be time enough to sleep.
—A. E. Housman
I left Venice in the night, which is the best time to leave Venice because the city’s luminous and melancholic beauty continues to ripple through your mind like the long shimmering reflections of lights on the lagoon. You can fall asleep without really feeling you have left, and you are saved the worst agitation of parting by this prolonged dream of Venice. But, as it turned out, I was not to sleep nor to dream on the night I left and I was not to be the romantic traveller swathed in her silk scarf, dreaming her diaphanous dreams in the corner of the first class carriage of the night train to Nice.
At Padua a young woman hauled her backpack into the carriage and dumped it at my feet as she turned around to say something to a bulky shadow in the corridor. The bulk shifted. The dim corridor light appeared at his shoulder and I could see the hunched figure of a man, hunched because he was shouldering a large plastic shopping bag stuffed to overflowing (all his worldly possessions, as it turned out) and hunched because of some inner defeat, some blackness that followed him into the carriage. I felt uneasy. I looked at the girl for reassurance and she was obliging, overly so. She did not stop talking. Words bubbled out of her impossibly small mouth like water from some secret spring that is the unlikely source of a great river. She loved Italy. She loved France. She loved the world. She loved God. Didn’t I? She didn’t give me a chance to answer, which was possibly a good thing. She was a pilgrim and she was overwhelmed with the messianic desire to make herself heard above the indifferent noises of the speeding train and through the heavy darkness of the carriage. She stopped only to make signs at her silent traveling companion who got the message and wearily put his shoulder to her backpack, heaving it painfully into the rack above my seat.
“I picked him up at Padua,” she explained breezily, as if the man was an inanimate souvenir she’d acquired at one of the booths outside the Giotto-frescoed Capella degli Scrovegni. “I can’t work out what language he speaks. I’ve tried everything, but he seems happy enough to tag along. It’s handy for the luggage.” She smiled. Then she went on at length about the miracles of Lourdes and the sightings at Fatima and the Black Madonna of . . . I didn’t quite catch the location of the Black Madonna because I found myself wishing, uncharitably, that the slick Italian ticket inspector would do his rounds and send them to second class where they obviously belonged.
Where they obviously belonged! My own line of thinking appalled me. Only a few days ago I had declared adamantly that the worst people traveled first class. I had an international rail pass, which made me a first-class traveler and, since my first trip from Switzerland to France, I had seen enough of the petulant first class to tempt me back to second class, where, by the way, I belonged, despite what the ticket said. But the sight of the fabulously comfortable first-class seats weakened my resolve time and time again, especially at night when the prospect of comfort fell in so easily with the prospect of sleep. So here I was again, in first class and, appallingly quickly, making myself a first-class passenger with all the misguided arrogance and ignorant intolerance I had observed in my first-class fellow travelers.
However, when the slick conductor insinuated himself into the carriage to check the tickets of my new companions, I woke up to myself and pleaded their case. The carriage was empty, I said. I didn’t mind, I said, convinced, out of a sense of guilt that I could listen to some more about the Black Madonna. But the man who had come in with the girl was already on his feet, frightened and defeated. It seemed to me that he was ready to run. I felt that something was required of me, as the girl also got up, perturbed perhaps by her friend’s alarm. I was soothing. I suggested that they leave their luggage with me, at least while they looked for a seat in the crowded second class. It was summer and the height of the season. The rest of the train was full. The girl took up my offer quickly. The man hesitated, looked at me with sad eyes, and then nodded. They left. The conductor smiled at me triumphantly. I turned
to the window where the lights and yellowish facades of earth-bound Italian cities swam in the darkness and made me think of Venice again.
At Milan I was disturbed by a great commotion, the sort of Italian commotion you get used to after a while in Italy. Loud voices, dramatic exclamations, flights of curses and any number of Madonnas. Madonna this and Madonna that! Someone wasn’t happy. The door of the carriage crashed open and the light went on. I blinked to see a bad-tempered Adonis who stood in the doorway insolently waiting to be admired and feared. While I am enchanted with Italy and the Italians, there is a type that leaves me cold. This is the type whose sultry droop of the eyelid is just that bit too sultry, whose mink eyelashes are that much too thick and long, whose crushed-grape mouth is that much too full-lipped, and whose expression is entirely self-absorbed. I suddenly felt very cold. Behind Adonis, in the narrow corridor, a jostling, wiggling, giggling group of black girls (Black Madonnas? The thought was tempting.) Or at least they were dressed like girls. Les Girls. Hot volatile stuff. Pink mini, spangled top, midriff as black as night. Lime green shorts, gelato bra, hair as high as a cloud. Amid screams and curses and whistles and laughter, he sent them packing to the second class. There was no sign of the ticket inspector. There was no longer any hint of Venice in the night.
The Adonis closed the door, switched off the light and took up a position opposite me, stretching his legs across the carriage to the other seat and smiled, insolently, waiting for a sign of nerves or perhaps even fear. I wanted to grab my handbag on the seat beside me and leave the carriage, but I would not give him the satisfaction. Instead, I continued to look out of the window into the warm summer night but my breathing was shallow and I was alert to any movement in the carriage. It was unpleasant. I cursed the inspector and my first-class ticket and the pride that would not let me make a run for it. Then the door opened. It was the pilgrim’s traveling companion, the silent man. He’d come for their luggage, his and the pilgrim’s. I felt relieved. His bulk made light work of Adonis whose legs came down to the floor in a flash. I heard the newcomer utter his first words, a guttural curse. “Bloody Italian!” he muttered in Russian. I didn’t quite make the connection. It was three A.M. I hadn’t slept but the darkness and the motion of the train had given me the occasional sense of being asleep and dreaming. I was momentarily confused and then he said it again. “Bloody Italian!” In Russian. In my language, or should I say, the language of my parents. Before I could make myself known to him as this new person, this person who could understand him, he had taken up the seat next to mine, making it very clear that he was not going to leave me alone with Adonis. I was grateful.