I didn’t go to Krakow to see Ralfi – not specifically – but I was glad to meet him outside the airport; glad I’d booked an extra day at the beginning of my trip to spend time with the Polish engineer, the friend I’d been tutoring in English for almost two years. A tall, handsome family-man in his 40s, Ralfi was the kind of man I’d always enjoyed; someone with energy a little beyond himself, a streak of naughtiness and a heap of curiosity. His capacity for wonder in our lessons has always made me smile. Some students, you teach them a grammar rule and they nod and say ‘okay’. Others, they open their eyes and mouths wide and say ‘wow’. Moments like that make me smile somewhere deep inside.
So I met Ralfi at the airport, standing beside his car at the kiss-and-fly, and we hugged and said hello again – we’ve met once before, last summer in Brighton with his wife and two daughters – I got into his hulking white BMW and we drove into the drizzle and grey of an autumn afternoon.
“I see you have brought the weather with you, Danny,” Ralfi said.
Nobody in the world calls me Danny but Ralfi. I never asked him to, he just started doing it one day and I didn’t correct him. I quite like it, actually.
“You see this bridge here? I designed it,” said Ralfi, as we drove beneath an overpass and through a tunnel.
“It’s a very good bridge,” I said. “I’ll tell Sonya that when I meet her tomorrow. ‘I know the guy who built that bridge’.”
Ralfi laughed.
“You are funny, Danny. So what do you want to do today? I think maybe to visit the camp is not so good an idea, for this time. It is very emotional place, and I think because we have just one day, maybe is not the best way to use this time.”
Auschwitz, he was talking about. The day before I flew out, he’d presented me with a choice: would I prefer to spend our single day together exploring the concentration camp, or Krakow’s famous salt mine. I’d answered the salt mine. I imagine I will visit Auschwitz one day – I feel obligated to, even though I know it will be awful, will ruin me for days. But a friendly, once-a-year brotherly reunion felt like the wrong moment for such an experience. I was glad Ralfi had reached the same conclusion.
Ralfi called his wife, Isabella, on speakerphone, and they spoke in Polish while I watched the outskirts of Krakow through the window of the car. The limits of every European city look the same, thickets and petrol stations, gigantic flat roundabouts and drab modern flats. There’s always a sense of dread fresh off the plane: is this it? But it never is – it. The architecture grows steadily richer and older and more interesting as you head towards the centre, like a pass-the-parcel wrapped in newspaper and gaffer-tape that unpeels layer by layer to reveal a faberge egg.
There are two schools of thought (in my own head) about this curiously pervasive city setup – shit, less shit, alright, quite nice, gorgeous. One school is depressedly romantic: ugh, it says, everything modern is ugly. We’ve forgotten how to make things, nobody cares about beauty anymore, money and speed are the only things anyone gives a damn about. There’s probably some truth to that way of thinking, gloomy though it is. But there’s another possibility that’s more logical: survival bias. All 500-year-old buildings are beautiful because only the beautiful ones were worth keeping. There were ugly buildings 500 years ago, just as today, but they didn’t survive, because nobody cared enough to preserve them because they looked like ass. And so, naturally, the oldest part of a city – the centre – evolves to have all these gorgeous buildings that appear contemporaneous and casual but were in fact the most shining architectural examples of various centuries, carefully kept for precisely that reason, while all the shanties and sloping shacks and skewiff brick shithouses were dutifully bulldozed to clear space for something nice. Maybe in 200 years the outskirts of Krakow – or Leeds or anywhere – will be nice too.
Or maybe everything modern is just ugly. Hard to call!
We pulled up in a carpark that looked to double as some kind of shrine – there was a big crucifix with Jesus on it – and climbed out into the drizzle. I looked around me at the buildings and the street and the people and I thought: Poland. I didn’t feel anything more than that yet, because over the course of too many heartbreaks and messy wounding adventures I seem to have developed some sort of membrane between myself and the world that slows down sensations before they reach me, like the vibro-shields in Dune. I need to sit and soak up an atmosphere for a while before I can feel anything – let it seep in slowly. It happens when you have travelled too much too quickly, I think. All that flitting and flashing around – too much breadth. You need depth to feel.
And so depth we went to seek. Ralfi took me across the city and we plunged past the city gate – the barbakan, he called it, and I told him we have the similar word ‘barbican’ in English although I don’t know what it means – and into the old town, or ‘stare miasto’ in Polish. It reminded me – uncannily, disarmingly so – of Strasbourg. Medieval cobbles, kooky rooftops, Carrefours, gentle buskers, restaurant menu ushering-you-to-dinner guys, bicycles, brisk autumn chill and flutter of languages from couples huddled in scarves.
“So that’s a Polish bar, hey?” I asked, gazing through a glass window into a crowded-for-a-Wednesday-afternoon wood-and-barstool establishment.
“But no beer, Danny,” said Ralfi. “This one is vodka bar. Only vodka in there.”
“Crikey.”
“Why? You want to try, Danny?”
“Absolutely not.”
Laughing, we stepped into the main square, hurrying across the street ahead of an oncoming horse and carriage. Krakow’s medieval square is a vast open space ringed with old buildings, pocked with statues, crowned with a covered market and shanked with a great towering spike of a church in the top right corner. We trundled through the market in the middle of it all, itself many hundreds of years old.
“Many famous writers and artists lived in Krakow,” said Ralfi, as we glanced over stalls of amber necklaces and leather gloves. “Warsaw is very modern, because it was destroyed in the war. But Hitler wanted his headquarters in Poland to be Krakow, so it was not bombed.”
I found myself feeling very happy as I listened to Ralfi, not so much for the content of what he was saying as much as for the fact he was saying it at all. How lucky I was, I thought, to know such people. How lucky I was to have met a French man in Colombia three years ago who told me about online language tutoring – how lucky to have built such a life that allows me to earn an income, however modest, from helping people. And how lucky, how very bloody lucky, to now, as an indirect and totally unforeseen consequence, be able to travel to faraway places and find familiar faces waiting for me – friends – full of passion for their homelands, and facts, and stories, and – ah, the great luck of it all. Luck, yes – and a lot of hard work. I felt very proud, all of a sudden.
“Now, my wife, she give me–” Ralfi caught himself here; he’s always been diligent about his English – “she gave me a recommendation for a very classic Polish restaurant. I hope you will love it, Danny.”
We ducked off the cobbled sidestreets into a cutesy Polish diner that looked like the kitchen of a jolly grandmother – lots of dried flowers and wooden trinkets and blue-white china sitting on charmingly paint-chipped shelves. Pots and pans hung on wrought-iron racks beside wooden chopping boards, and upon the blue-white walls hung images of Mary and Joseph and Jesus. We sat at a table in the back, Ralfi speaking to the waiter in English by accident – unaccustomed to switching languages quickly – and the resulting linguistic kerfuffle caused several blonde heads to turn our way as we took our seats.
“This is a very cool spot,” I said, glancing around at the warm colours and the stacked Polish bric-a-brac and the Catholic iconography.
“Is not expensive place, just very simple food. But it’s very Polish. I hope it’s okay for you?”
“Dude, don’t be silly. This is exactly what I wanted to see. I’ve been in the country for what – two hours? – and I’m here in a proper Polish restaurant. This is amazing. Actually, I wanted to ask you – can you teach me a few words in Polish?”
“Ho ho, Danny,” he laughed. “Now I can be the teacher and you student! What do you want to know?”
And there it was – the depth. The feeling hit me then, delayed by the membrane: the gratitude, the awe, the wonder of being far away and making discoveries. It felt like a hug, warm and familiar, motherly even – reassuring me that yes, I may have changed, and travel may have changed from how it all worked and felt ten years ago, and no doubt those changes would continue on both our parts – I would get older and slower and more cautious, and travel would get smoother and slicker and it would get harder to seek out experiences unpackaged, uncommercialised – but whatever, because there would always be a piece of my heart devoted to the hunt for wonders great and small – and to time spent with friends in faraway places.