column by Jakub Szczęsny from issue 7/8 of A&B
I remember a picture like this: monsieur Abderzac strangely bent in half is once gazing through the keyhole, once pressing his ear to it. Abderzac, a meter fifty in a hat, actually in a woolen flannel, is ridiculously diminished in scale by the double doors of the conference room, which in the days when Albert Camus wrote "Nuptials in Tipas" in our hotel was probably a separate dining room.
Owned by Algeria's Ministry of Culture, the Beau Rivage, hardly a more cliché name for a colonial hotel on the charming coast, is fully populated by Polish architects and engineers working on the restoration of Algiers' citadel complex. It's 1983 and residents are gossiping that Yuri Andropov, the first secretary of the Land of the Rades, is to visit Algeria. Some important figure from the Polish embassy, accompanied by the secretary and two jovial gentlemen in dark glasses, arrives at the Beau Rivage on a Sunday morning. The guests and Polish executives sit on the conference room's absurd red faux leather covered armchairs and couches. I'm ten years old, helping in the kitchen to earn money for the goodies-containing French magazine "Pif," which I buy every Tuesday for two dinars at a kiosk on the main promenade. I stumble upon Abderzac in the dark stuffy hallway, carrying the pot in which we are to prepare fries for the slowly approaching dinner. "Tout va bien, monsieur Abderzac?" ("Are you all right, monsieur Abderzac?") I ask, placing the pot on the thick, dusty-smelling carpet. It is only after a moment that the preoccupied man peels his eye away from the pothole and turns his head toward me. His face covered with gray beard is adorned with a friendly smile. "Tout va bien, mon petit, c'est juste la grande politique que je suis!" ("It's all right, my little one, I'm just following the great politics!"). A cordial man this Abderzac was. He helped everyone, brewed great Turkish coffee, distributed rachatlukum to children and ladies, and people easily opened their hearts to him. He was a man for everything, and by the way, as the community rumor went, he was also a "ministry man," although I suspect that he was referring to a completely different ministry than the Ministry of Culture.
The twentieth century was slowly coming to an end. A time of people entangled in politics. A time of mass casualties, moral dilemmas, careers of cynical apparatchiks and courageous colonels. A gallery of two major wars and hundreds of smaller ones, a review of the spectacular collapses of colonial empires and the enthusiasms of creating new identities, as was happening, for example, in Algeria. The Soviet Union was drowning in debt caused by the war in Afghanistan, just as the British Crown once was. Soviet missile bases, including one located in the nearby town of Cherchell, were slowly ceasing to make sense. The new was coming, as always unknown, but already palpable. At the end of their Algerian contracts, the hotel's residents faced an inevitable choice. They could return to the country, admittedly with foreign currency, but it was always the same, sad parochial country. The more determined ones sought a way out - into the great world, to which Algeria was only a vestibule. A few managed to catch on in Canadian and French companies operating here. They would drop by Poland later only to visit their families. But most returned to the culmans and drawing boards in the state offices of the withering communist Poland, which were soon closed or privatized. "New" indeed came, bringing the belief in the "end of history" and the quasi-happiness of quasi-generic consumption that was to relegate big politics, and with it the management of fear and hatred. The greenish Rambo of the endlessly copied VHS cassette finally brought us, like some Died Maroz, the taste of McDonald's, the bald-faced gangsters of Pruszkow and the cult of the car.
My parents decided to return. I graduated from one school after another, following Minister Wilczek, the execution of Ceaușescu, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Yanayev's revolt on bigger and bigger TVs, for a while restoring in me the fear of history, which could come back and put its nasty paw on my country and, necessarily, on me. At the time, for me, immersed in fantasies of drawing, sculpting and making mock-ups, politics practically didn't exist, especially not in the context of architecture. Social realism, the visions of the Italian rationalists and Speer, or the revolutionary fantasies of Boullée remained locked in albums on the shelves of my parents' library. It was more important to create, listen to music, and spend time with peers. Even the Orange Alternative's demonstration in Dzerzhinsky Square, during which I got clubbed by a Zomovnik through the back, was an enthusiastic experience of youth, and the fall of the Bloody Felix statue was merely a change of urban decor. The inflamed political zealots, especially the followers of Leszek Moczulski, seemed to me the last pathetic sign of not even the 20th, but the 19th century, closing two hundred years of historical facsimile and the kneading of crosses from bread in the basement of Warsaw's Citadel.
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