Cracow Letters: The Cafes of Atlantis, 1987

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The Cafes of Atlantis, 1987 (Part I)

The Rio, on Sw. Jana, was so smoky that cigarettes seemed to be obligatory. Decorated in post-cubist style, the cafe's "beatnik" furniture was made out of heavy iron. Everything had been there since the mid-fifties, and the metal parts had been painted over many times. There was no way that a person over 4’10” could sit comfortably. Some of the clientele talked loudly or even shouted. Men who looked like they were on their way to audition as secret agents sat between a couple of drunks on one side and middle-aged artists on the other, while elderly ladies in worn furs (Sw. Jana was the city's most aristocratic street, although most of the countesses or papal knights were relegated to single rooms in their palaces under government administration) pushed forward to get small cups of strong coffee with huge dollops of sweet cream on top.

At the International Press and Book Club on the Maly Rynek, you checked your coat downstairs and climbed a circular staircase. The cafe occupied opulent, beautifully restored Renaissance rooms with coffered beam ceilings. The chairs looked like massive versions of Hollywood director's chairs, except that they were not folding chairs. The seat bottoms and high backs were made of thick leather, like saddle leather, but more supple. They were the most comfortable cafe chairs in town.

A heavy green curtain divided the café into two parts. In the part that contained the metal counter behind which the waitress worked the espresso machine and dispensed cigarettes, orangeade, and paczki, people connected with the press monopoly drank coffee from early morning with journalists and other old friends who dropped in. A smiling man went on and on without making much sense; someone occasionally nodded in his direction or made a cursory remark before going back to ignoring him. An older woman with a face bespeaking too much experience for any single lifetime was was only partially present. She drank alcohol even in the morning. The atmosphere was relaxed and smoky.

On the far side of the curtain, students nursed cups of coffee or glasses of tea, talked or perhaps flirted in subdued voices, but mostly copied out each other's lecture notes by hand.

At any given moment during the 1980's, there were from one to a dozen western press titles available for reading on the spot. The newspapers were clipped into wooden holders. These split dowels, as long as swords, hung by a hook from a metal bar. There might be a British, French, German, or Italian dailies, and sporadically a news magazine. It took extraordinary patience to get one of these. Language students sweated for hours over the periodicals, writing down lists of unfamiliar words and checking them in their pocket dictionary--usually the yellow Langenscheidt ones that became available a few years before the system collapsed. Somebody would already have "nexts."

The remainder of the reading matter came from the “socialist democracies”: a wall of newspapers and a twenty-five-foot-long hanging magazine rack. Hardly anyone ever touched any of the socialist titles. However, the real purpose of the Club was to drink coffee and sit for hours doing lessons or watching the people, who represented a spectrum running from the unattractive to the divine.

**
At eight o'clock in the morning, serious philology students sat on little stools at the narrow built-in tables in the Mosaika on Golebia, poring over the subject of the day's lectures. The owner, a saxophonist, knew how to coax the city's only true cappuccino out of his old Italian express machine. This cafe catered mostly to those who desperately needed caffeine to wake up; the fact that it forbade smoking diminished its social function.

**
Retired people dominated the Antyczna on the Rynek. Coffee and good pastries were cheap and the waitresses and customers knew each other. One heard rumors that male students experiencing a shortage of cash went there to strike up mutually beneficial acquaintances with older ladies of means.

The Zalipianek on the Planty at Szewska had a mixed clientele. Customers who were middle aged or older seemed to have been coming there all their lives for the mint tea with honey. In the afternoons, lecturers would arrive with their classes and pull tables together, drink tea, order ice cream, smoke, and try to be heard over the general hubbub of conversation. In the evenings, the pendulum swung back towards a middle-aged constituency, some of them the same respectable burgher ladies and gentlemen as predominated in the morning, and others who focused on alcohol. The Zalipianka offered "black and white" ice cream, a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of cocoa, with a hardened syrup shell on top of it. This was one of the best dessert treats in town and tasted especially good in the summertime, when the terrace on the Planty was open. Around 1986, this terrace took on particular splendor with the installation of wrought-iron railings with posts that rose to support globular lamps and striped canvas awnings. On afternoon breaks from work, I read a couple of Gordon C. Prange’s excellent works on World War II there and a book that made an even greater impression: Grunberg’s Social History of the Third Reich, published in Polish in two volumes. His descriptions of how the Nazis used organizations like trade unions to keep the workers in line, and how the Party impinged upon personal prerogatives at all levels, seemed so similar to the workings of the communist system that I wondered how this book had managed to get published.

The cafe had a foul coeducational toilet. The woman who sat at a little table taking the fees complained about young people using her facilities as a love nest.

The As Pik on Garncarska was full of philology students studying or contemplating individually, or chatting with friends, or sitting with their lecturers and whole classes. The university foreign languages building was just around the corner and, on any given day, a fair number of classes convinced their lecturers that it would be better to spend the hour sipping coffee at the As Pik than sweltering stuffy classrooms whose windows had to be kept closed because the traffic on the Aleje was so oppressively loud. The lecturers never needed much persuading. In the As Pik, music played through car speakers; the sound quality was horrible. Black-on-white silhouettes of Kama Sutra positions hung on the wall until someone protested against their indecency, at which point they were replaced by a selection of Vedic texts. Many taxi drivers also frequented the As Pik.

The Kolorowa, the café of the Polish Scenic Tourist Association on Golebia, served drinks all day. Three steps up from street level, it had the sort of rough brick walls that the cellars in the old town had. Heavy, artistically woven tapestries hung in the corners; the one in the back room was full of blown-glass vessels that suggested exotic forms of deep-sea life caught in a fishnet. You could find a quiet corner and talk while sipping a vodka and orange juice. The waitresses took no lip. A certain drinking element favored creme de menthe or mint cocktails and tried to make trouble, but the women in their high-top waitress shoes with the heels cut out for comfort crossed their arms and held their ground behind the bar.

There was never any trouble at the Dniepr cafe, part of the big sixties-modern complex that also housed the city's largest Pewex, on January Eighteenth Street. Many of the cafe customers were money changers who worked the Pewex in shifts. After a few hours counting out dollars and deutschmarks, they would swagger into the Dniepr, unzip their leather jackets, and order Russian champagne. They filled the air with Marlboro smoke and thick cursing, but they watched over each other so that nobody ever got too far out of line. Built in sixties communist moderne, this café featured great round pillars and large expanses of decorative glass, recalling the décor in the Cracovia Hotel.

Kraków's most scenic cafe in the summer was the Literacka at the head of Slawkowska. Its terrace, partially covered by a corrugated fiberglass roof and overlooking the Planty, was a delightful place to sit in good weather. Surprisingly few customers went up there. Less surprisingly, waitresses were a rare sight on the terrace. The length of time that customers waited to be served probably played some role in their scarcity. Whichever waitress had responsiblity for the terrace on a given day wore a facial expression out of a passion play as she trudged up the stairs in her dark blue waitress sneakers. There was a working dumbwaiter, used for sending dirty dishes down, but not for sending orders up. In those long intervals of the waitress’s absence, the customers had perfect privacy at their white, often-painted metal tables, looking down through the thick foliage at passersby on the Planty.

Downstairs in the Literacka, a late cubist mural depicting Greek sun worship or animal metamorphosis graced a long room full of cramped tables with very high-backed chairs done in brown cloth upholstery. Even though a waitress patrolled each of the aisles, you could wait almost as long as on the terrace; waitresses spent a good deal of time in the kitchen as a matter of course. Some of the poorest-looking people in Cracow drank here, including old ladies in cloth coats carrying string-net shopping bags. They talked a long time over their cups of tea. In the corners sat young people, often making out. The girls tended to be "disco-style": they had shag haircuts combed back into Elvis-like pompadours and florid faces, and wore short black skirts and tiger-print blouses. The boys who sat with them mostly smoked and muttered swear words. People occasionally sat totally silent in a torpor that seemed narcotic. In the late afternoon, the queen of the Literacka appeared: a tall woman with bright orange hair and a prominent moustache who swung her hips as she walked between the tables, showing off shapely calves clad in imported hose whose pattern clashed with the swirls of hair on her legs.

The Olimpijska on Stolarska was a cold cellar, almost always full, with three different rooms: the dim upper room where people stubbornly tried to read, the large central room full of talk, talk, talk, and tables so close together that it was a wonder the waitress could get through, and the bar, with gin and tonic, whiskey, and coca cola always.

The Wiedenska, on the opposite side of the Drapers’ Hall from the Novorol, had comfortable booths and attracted a semi-hippie constituency of travelers from out of town, who mingled there with local teenagers playing hooky. In the summer of 1987, it became the first place on the Rynek to set up tables outside, and it stayed open until midnight. That was the summer when foreign tourists, especially Italians, first became noticeably prominent on the square, and there was a free-wheeling party atmosphere underneath the Old Town Hall Tower. Bicyclists and skaters wove back and forth across the uneven paving stones, an indefatigable drummer with the tall bongos beat out a frenetic rhythm all afternoon and evening, little groups sat singing around guitar-players, and white globular lamps on the borders of the outdoor café cast a holiday-cruise glow into the darkness of the unilluminated Rynek.

The Convivium in Collegium Novum combined the functions of café and workplace canteen. Most of the customers, on slender university salaries, took glasses of tea or little cups of coffee, and if they ate, it was usually the standard vegetable salad (in mayonnaise) on a crispy roll, or perhaps a paczek. Or pretzel sticks. The place also sold hard-to-get grocery items. You could often purchase yellow cheese there. The line was excruciating. Sometimes, you had to stand for ten minutes at the self-service bar to get your coffee. People sat according to departmental and political allegiances. The room contained despised university administraters, and people whom everyone knew as underground Solidarity activists, including some who went on to prominent political careers under a different system. It was one of the best places in town for the latest gossip and jokes. Illicit flyers appeared frequently on the little bench in front of the mirror in the entranceway.

I read a good deal of Dickens in the Lamus on Karmelicka, and always had the feeling that Mr. Venus was sitting at the next table. Most of the furniture was genuinely old, and there was a wind-up gramophone with a metal trumpet. The ancient samovar at the bar that had some suspicious role in the production of the thick, dark, calciferous quasi-Turkish coffee. There was always a half an inch or so of grounds left in the bottom of the cup.

**
The PCK (Polish Red Cross) café on Studencka, with a wide choice of cigarettes for sale loose, was down a desolate staircase. It featured aggressive music and a young clientele, many apparently cutting class at the high school across the street.

Taxi drivers gathered early in the morning and pulled their tables together, apparently holding some sort of general council, at the vast Temida on Grodzka. This café was upstairs, at the top of a wide, boxy staircase with wooden steps on which not a shred of paint remained.

Winter’s private sweet shop on 1-go Maja had a café upstairs with pine paneling on the walls, like a sauna, and big windows set into the sloping ceiling. In the winter, a gigantic electrical “accumulator heater” kept it warm even when the snow was falling outside. In the summer, the little serving counter on the landing of the stairs leading up to the café served the establishment’s own ice cream in metal bowls. All year round, the sweet shop turned out the best macaroons in town, with a crunchy outside and a chewy center. The place was light, airy, clean, quiet and intimate, and seemed like a harbinger of change for the better.

Who could forget Fafik on Sienna, with its knobby walls, the incredible chairs, and the sweet faced waitress in her curly permanent who seemed like she must have been there since it opened in the mid-fifties. The name alluded to a comic strip on the back page of the local magazine Przekroj, which presented an idiosyncratic and vaguely snobbish version of local bourgeois culture through a subtly pro-regime prism. Post-cubist figures of terriers and pipe-smoking Cracovians filled the wall murals that looked as if they had been painted by the creator of the comic strip, or a close imitator. Both the magazine and the café were very 1956, survivals from the “thaw” when Poland slipped free of Stalinism. Tables clung to the walls. Near the counter there was a small bar where you could sit on chairs made of steel tubing that rose in a pyramid topped by a vestigial back that came nowhere near the level of a small person’s lumbar region, and a tiny seat consisting of macramé-like netting stretched across the metal frame. The burgundy-colored netting was fraying; it must have been an original item from the fifties, like the waitress and the espresso machine. Indeed, it was said that the large chrome apparatus in the Rio and the one in Fafik had been the first two real espresso machines in town. By the eighties the two cafes were remarkable for their anatomically inappropriate seating and fifties décor.

The Merino on Zwierzynieckie was rumored to be a hangout for homosexuals. The queerest thing about it was the hammered tin sign over the door the door featuring the sheep’s head that gave the place its name. Inside, the usual crowd of middle-aged men sat smoking, drinking coffee, and reading the afternoon paper, and nothing at all seemed to be going on.

The Alvorado, at the corner of Szewska and the main square, was a sensation from around 1986 onwards. It had big windows giving onto the Rynek. These were removed in the summer, leaving the whole place open. Waitresses served customers at eight tables on the sidewalk – the first outdoor tables on the Rynek in our time. The two rooms on the Rynek (there were other chambers deep within the building, reached by a maze of corridors and stairs) had black and white marble floors that did not look good when people tramped slush inside during the winter. The round marble-topped tables with brass edges weighed a ton. Aside from coffee and tea, the Alvorado specialized in a range of ice-cream confections loaded with whipped cream, nuts, and fruit.

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