The Other Side of the Mirror

I’ve just come from the Krakow Central Post Office (Poczta Glowny), where I mailed my absentee ballot back to North Carolina. I’m writing this on the upper floor of the Kawarnia Provencja, off the Main Square. I don’t know exactly how old this building is, but the sign out front is charmingly missing a few letters, and if the timeline I’ve been given for the city’s growth is correct, it predates the U.S. by a century or two.

The difference between the two buildings seems to mirror, if you’ll allow the flight of rhetoric, a similar divide in the Polish psyche. The post office, in a nice, old, building, looks on the inside like I’d imagine a Soviet government office would look is the Soviet Union had never collapsed. Clean, modern, but very impersonal, clerks behind plate glass, and low ceilings and light. The café, in contrast, is the kind of place that makes Lonely Planet editors hard. Sloped, white-washed ceilings, vintage ceiling fan at the apex. Paintings on the walls, older, wooden tables. Candles are burning at various places around, and of course this balcony where I’m sitting right now, accessible by a steep, narrow flight of stairs. Did I mention that the “coffee” I’m drinking, which is really more of a long, double espresso, cost me like $2.50? And it goes without saying (I AM in Central Europe) that smoking is…I wouldn’t go so far as to say encouraged, although the EU might. Stack of ashtrays on the counter is all, take them as they’re needed.

William Gibson, in his novel Pattern Recognition, which I just finished re-reading, described Great Britain as “the other side of the mirror.” Poland feels very much like that. Everything here was, since the war, anyway, imported from Russia or built on their model. As a result, they’re built themselves up into a modern European country, but everything feels a little bit…off. Light switches aren’t switches so much as they’re two-inch-square power studs, still on a pivot, but taking nicely to a full-handed slap if you get out of bed in the middle of the night. Vending machines seem to be non-existent, but tiny, vending-machine-sized kiosks, with a person inside, are omnipresent, and sell cigarettes and soap to boot. Buildings have yet to be retrofitted with streetside entrances, the effect being that entering a lot of places, cafes and offices includes, requires a turn down an unnamed alley with a number posted above it, looking for your sign on a door. The traffic lights are the old, Eastern-Bloc style ones which they also have in East Berlin. Walk is a green man walking, Don’t Walk is a red man, standing still.

The nicest thing about Krakow in this sense, though, is the way all the influences seem to meld. Warsaw, by all accounts, is a mostly Soviet city. It was destroyed during the war, and rebuilt, and as a result is on the ugly side. I’m up there for a night or two next week, so I’ll see for myself. But Krakow managed to escape Luftwaffe and Red Air Force bombing, and so the old buildings survived. The Communists built their stuff and now, in the last few years, the EU has funded a variety of modernization campaigns. And so the mirror is here, plainly visible and immediately tangible…but so is the construction of a newer Poland, one that exists outside the old oppositions. Whether that’s entirely a good thing remains, judging from people I’ve talked to, to be seen.