Warsaw (from memory)

Warsaw is a city where you feel constantly exposed. Perhaps this sensation is a hangover from viewing old aerial photographs of the city after the war, the ruined buildings poking out of the rubble with their entrails exposed, miles and miles of them, layers of history obliterated in a few months. People say that it is one of the few cities in history to undergo such systematic destruction that it consequently lost its soul. Or perhaps it comes from the width of the streets, made for the passage of tanks and marching armies. The boulevards of Warsaw could host an unforgettable car chase if not for the inhibiting factor of traffic gridlock at most hours of the day. Perhaps it is the bulk of the Palac Kultury i Nauki looming over the city, the building which Stalin gave to the Poles in the fifties. It has been endlessly maligned but I reserve an affection for it as the site of many cinematic escapades and tete-a-tetes (tetes-a tete?), a place to view and review Warsaw on every visit. (Click here if you want to read more about 'the Palace's unique ability to encode and compel the changing constructions of individual and collective narratives of Polish identity.' )

It is this sense of exposure which makes the boltholes that much more attractive where they can be found. One of these is a bar known to me only as 'the kurwidołek' (vulg., 'place where there are prostitutes'), within a block or two of Marcin's old apartment building on Ulica Hoza. It is a dim-lit place, presided over by a pockmarked, long-haired barman who looks as though he has been taking lifestyle advice from Keith Richards. The walls are draped (in memory if not in fact) in purple velvet. It is a place without windows, entirely divorced from external reality, which closes when everybody goes home. It has the ambience of someone's loungeroom, with couches strewn about and such limited visibility that you can only see the person you came with, and others recede to shapes in the gloom. In this womblike space love affairs grow (including mine), watered by vodka, and sometimes die for lack of sun.

These are my twin impressions of Warsaw: the secret city, with its renewed soul, its lovers and drunks and whores, and the wide-open city made for constant surveillance. It's easier to pronounce like this from a distance, where the detail doesn't interfere.