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Warsaw's Palace of Culture, around dawn |
What to do in a city when you've
nowhere to go? This question, with its whiff of the
flâneur,
has preoccupied many a modern titan, from Virginia Woolf to Julie
Delpy, sun-kissed in the 1990s. The answer, offered freely enough,
amounts to the injunction: wander
(or more tepidly: wander
and daydream).
It helps, of course, if you're in Paris, where you might feel less of
a burk craning your neck at the perceived poetic dimensions of some
ragged washing line. Elsewhere, the lack of Second Empire uniformity
(which gives Paris that endlessly reproducible fantasy charm)
necessitates a certain selectiveness. This is perhaps why in Prague,
Paris's jumbled, motley cousin, most flâneurs
prefer
the cover of night: better to soften the city's ragged
inconsistencies beneath plumes of darkness and mist. While, for
Baudelaire, the flâneur
represented
a uniquely modern self-erasure, a oneness with the crowd and the life
of the city, the noční
chodec
(night walker) of Prague is a faceless silhouette banished to
suburban anonymity. Warsaw, on the other hand, has no firm tradition
of either, so the question posed here is more prosaic, more
poetically deflating: What to do in a city when you
don't really want to be there?
If, for Walter Benjamin, Paris was the city of the 19th century, then
Warsaw is either the city of some dimly distant future not yet worth
registering, or the city of some missed historic opportunity.
Well,
why wouldn't
you want to be in the city? Exasperated, the flâneur
assumes the lure of the city is universal. The question remains:
which
city? In this sense Benjamin was right: in the imagination of the
19th century the
city was always Paris. The special relationship between Napoleon and
Polish Republicanism (the result: the Duchy of Warsaw and a Polish
mistress) ended with the General's hasty retreat (from both). No
doubt the French Revolution lived on in the minds of subject Poles.
In even their
fantasies of national liberation, the point of reference was Paris.
The Polish question even won the heart of Karl Marx, otherwise pretty
chauvinist on the question of 'unhistorical peoples', swiftly binding
the matter of Polish democracy to his youthful sympathies with
Republican Jacobinism and its battle with the ancien
régimes
of Europe. While Polish liberation became the unifying glue
- "a matter
of honor for all the democrats of Europe"1
in Marx's words - of left-national and revolutionary democratic
movements, it is not entirely clear how many of Europe's democrats
fancied the actual journey there.
Warsaw,
after all, is not a capital in the sense that Paris is. Few places
are, of course. It's not even the most famous city in Poland, nor
really the seat of culture (though it did become the inheritor of the
legacy of the collapsed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). Warsaw is
not so much a destination as a passing-place between East and West.
This is not intended as an insult: for all its oddness, it still has
the power to fascinate. It has also become, by remarkable historical
accident, Poland's most fun city. Quite an achievement for a
city that literally stood in ruins after the Second World War.
Nonetheless,
Warsaw's first post-revolutionary role, in the years immediately
after 1989, was as a stopping point for eastern European Roma on
their way to Germany. As dictators fell all across the continent the
mood of the so called 'persecuted majorities' in countries from
Romania to Yugoslavia turned decidedly sour. Slightly later, the
American writer Isabel Fonseca wrote:
Thousands
of Gypsies occupied the station that winter and into the summer of
1990; the waiting room was still a waiting room - one with
laundry-festooned radiators. (In recent years Warsaw has only ever
been a stopover on the journey west. You are still likely to see
washing in any public toilet - tiny tights and long, graying tube
socks: whole families pegged on a moveable line).2
Poland
has all too often been the setting for and a participant in forced
human migration on massive scales: the deportation of intellectuals
and nationalist Poles during the first Soviet occupation; the utter
destruction of Polish Jewry by the Nazis; the organised deportation
and murder of another two million non-Jewish Poles; the flight and
expulsion of 12 million Germans from restored Polish territory
following the War.3
Poland remains home to one of Europe's most rabid far right street
movements, which manages to mobilize thousands for violent marches
every year on Independence Day.4
Can it be helped, then, that a modern capital capable of representing
not only the homogeneous state that Poland became under the
Communists, but one capable of supporting new arrivals, new
diversifications, is only just emerging?
Being
in Warsaw and not really wanting to be: not, perhaps, so uncommon.
And for many, the circumstances have been less auspicious. Foolishly
we'd embarked on a train journey which included that most delicate of
operations: a closely-timed transfer. In this case our train from
Kraków
arrived at Warsaw Zachodnia five minutes before the departure of the
last train back to Bydgoszcz. Travelling by train in Poland is in
itself a risky undertaking. The tickets, which in my memory are
almost A4-sized, are criss-crossed with endless indecipherable codes,
the secret language of a vast regulatory bureaucracy, communicating
quietly and contradictorily with itself. One code, even if properly
understood, might, in the eyes of some particularly truculent
inspector, be undermined by some other baffling string of numbers
and letters. Polish rail combines this obsessive pedantry with a
vaguely superstitious attitude to the trains themselves. While petty
officialdom frets endlessly over the precise structure of passenger
codes, trains are treated like wild things, free to come and go as
they please. I imagine them roaming the vast Polish flats, directing
themselves towards stations only out of boredom or hunger. Their
actual presence is somehow magical, baffling even, for the hapless
staff, who treat them rather like clumsy but dangerous animals,
huffing breathlessly at the garden gate.
All
bags and confusion we bundled off the train-beast, scrambling along
the cracked platform in search of a sign of our next ride. The last
light of day was slipping rapidly behind a distant high-rise. Most
Polish train stations don't bother with platform signs, preferring
instead indecipherable loudspeaker announcements. As we surveyed the
other platforms, marching pointlessly up and down the length of the
station like some frantic version of boot camp, one such announcement
began. My girlfriend made out the time (which we knew) and the
destination (equally unhelpful). Neither of us caught the platform
number. Confusion turned to panic. Could it be that the train would
arrive on time? Early, even? On one of the distant platforms on the
other side of the station? Several trains were now visible - one
clearly local (municipal colours; modern; small), the others less
distinguishable in the gloom.
We
ran under a corrugated iron shelter and down into the station
underpass. Lurid yellow; the smell of old piss. An office at the far
end. A woman in uniform was, just barely, visible inside. We ran up
to her window and managed, between breaths, to ask where we could
find our train. She, heavy-set and rouged, looked lazily up. One eye
half closed, presenting a stale looking blotch of mascara, haughtily
unimpressed. She took a defensive breath - less than a sigh, but
indicating that she hadn't planned on speaking
this evening. Certainly not to anyone less than fluent in Polish.
Repeating the question, however, seemed to provoke her interest. She
shouted some numbers, voice smudged by the old, scuffed plastic
window which was her defence from the outside world.
We
ran to the appropriate spot. No, both trains were approaching
different platforms. We ran back and asked again. This, predictably,
flummoxed her. She - this was unprecedented - stepped out of her
office. Hand steadying her hat, she jogged heavily to the stairs,
went up, came back. The train was now late. Maybe it would be there
soon, she reported. The two suspect trains pulled into the station
and hissed noisily. Next, a throng of people. I started shouting,
frantically, 'To Bydgoszcz?' A few shaking heads. Even the station
steward was now panicking, if only because of our evident excitement.
We separated, running desperately up to the platforms. The trains had
closed their doors. No guards to be seen. And then, as I dropped my
bag, about to start banging on windows, they left, in opposite
directions.
We
never did figure out where the train was supposed to be. By the time
we got back to the underpass the station steward had returned to her
office. Any sign that she had been flustered by the turn of events
was gone. Impassive, she directed us to the coach station, stating
baldly there were no more trains tonight. But we knew already that
there were no buses left either. So in desperation we walked back up
to the platforms and waited, squatting on our bags (there were no
seats), attempting to come up with a plan.
There
was one train left to arrive, heading into Warsaw Central (Warszawa
Centralna),
which, with its indoor hall, was at least slightly more hospitable
than our present location. As we waited, it started raining. Never
the world's happiest traveller, I despaired. Siobhan managed to laugh
off this final insult. This struck me, in my misery, as a kind of
warped gallows humour. Though I can blow some mishaps out of
proportion, my misery seemed entirely appropriate. Not so for her. I
ranted about the terrifying contingency of travel; about our
dependence on vast forces beyond our control. Suddenly a train
journey had become a metaphor for existential powerlessness. Ten
minutes of this (in retrospect, understandably) annoyed her. Quietly,
we boarded the last train.
Alighting
at the main station, where crowds of weary travellers passed us on
their way home, we were left to face the grim reality alone: What to
do in a city when you don't want to be there? What, specifically, to
do in this
city? There was no train to Bydgoszcz until eight in the morning. So,
since there wasn't much else to do, we went and sat with the other
late arrivals, baffled foreigners, and homeless people, in the grand
hall. We bought sandwiches and bottles of Coke in the hope this would
pass a decent amount of time. I planned to take one bite of sandwich
every five minutes and see if it would last forty-five. Only when
finished would I open the Coke. Siobhan, more comfortable with the
idea of the empty time ahead, sat on her bag and read. In imitation I
opened my book, but failed actually to read a word. The dead hours
stretched out before me in a terrifying, flood-lit eternity. Sleep
was impossible.
Eventually
I decided to interrupt Siobhan. We had probably waited half an hour.
Between us we decided to walk to an all-night bar. There was one near
Warsaw's colossal Palace of Culture and Science (Pałac
Kultury i Nauki),
a gift (hard to refuse, as others have observed) from Stalin himself.
This squatting imitation of the Empire State Building now contained
actually no Science and no Culture, just a very long elevator ride to
the top. We slipped past its enormous feet, the only wanderers in a
vast, deserted panorama. The trees stood as still as the grim statues
of sturdy soldiers that surrounded the palace. The surrounding
mishmash of department stores, hotels and modern skyscrapers, all
ululating surfaces and shimmering glass, retreated into the darkness.
There are parts of Warsaw that heave with people, even late at night,
but this evidently was not one. A figure shuffling in the dark felt
ominous.
Turning
off the main square we found a sanctuary of sorts: in the bar the
only requirement was that you stayed awake and continued drinking,
which was ultimately cheaper than finding a hotel room. As the night
progressed, those arriving got at first drunker, then more sober. As
it was getting light the first few revellers to order breakfast
arrived, sitting lazily alongside those who were on their next
cocktail. Outside the bouncer - our guardian - warded off any danger
with a sternly upheld palm.
We
walked back to the station at dawn, an orangey hue just filling the
sky, visible between forking towers. Buses packed with morning
commuters slid past, juddering at traffic lights. (The average Polish
working day still starts at seven.) The peculiar, alien landscape of
nocturnal Warsaw had been replaced by the familiar bustle of any
awakening capital city. Walking to the central station, amid all this
calming anonymity, swallowed up by the vast flood of the city, you
could - if you squinted your eyes, perhaps - almost imagine it was
Paris. Finally having somewhere to go, it seemed I didn't mind being
in Warsaw after all.
1Marx,
'Communism, Revolution, and a Free Poland, available here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/02/22a.htm
2Fonseca,
Bury Me Standing, 198
3For
an honest account of all of these, see: Snyder, Bloodlands
4A
decent account of the re-emergence of Polish far right activism can
be found here:
http://www.social-europe.eu/2012/11/the-rise-of-the-far-right-in-poland-and-europe/
Thoroughly enjoyed this - and the rest of your excellent blog. With flaneurism in mind, you may like to read my review of 'Prague Palimpsest' here: http://www.praguepost.com/blogs/books/2011/08/15/review-prague-palimpsest. Thanks also for following The Prague Vitruvius on Twitter. Maybe meet up some time for a coffee/pivo?
ReplyDeleteHi Alex. Sorry for the tardy reply, I hadn't noticed your message. Just read the review. Puts me in mind of Ripellino's Magic Prague. On a related note, do you know where I can get hold of some translations of Nezval? I also have to say I find the Prague Story project a fascinating bit of geekery and am very much enjoying the fruits of its labour! Pivo absolutely.
DeleteHi Alex. Sorry for the tardy reply, I hadn't noticed your message. Just read the review. Puts me in mind of Ripellino's Magic Prague. On a related note, do you know where I can get hold of some translations of Nezval? I also have to say I find the Prague Story project a fascinating bit of geekery and am very much enjoying the fruits of its labour! Pivo absolutely.
ReplyDeleteHi Adam. Good. For Nezval translation, you shd get in touch with Stephen Delbos. His collection From a Terrace in Prague has a handful, I think. For drink, pls email me from this page http://www.praguestory.com/p/keep-in-touch.html
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