there anyway. Moreover, the place is in the centre (at Leszno Street 58) and its luxuriousness and comfort attract “better” clients.
When you enter the café for the first time you get the impression that the war had never broken out. Except for the armbands there are no traces of war, captivity, or the ghetto. The faces of the clients are not gaunt. On the contrary, people look normal and well-fed. Their clothes are perfectly decent, if not smart. The ladies are dressed up, powdered, and made up like in illo tempore.178 They promote fashion “made in the ghetto,” as if their only problems [63] were the ones they had yesterday, when they jabbered about clothes, movies, and beaus. The men too are wearing very fine clothes. Their ties, sweaters, socks, and handkerchiefs all match the colour of their suits, as if nothing has changed. Nowadays, we worry only about how to dress warmly in winter, and in summer our only worry is how to conserve as much clothing as possible for winter. By contrast, they worry about buttons, colours, and cuts. Even though the older men are “only” well dressed, the fabric [of their clothes] is brand new (a suit costs 3,000 zlotys), and their shirts are silk and clean (while we wash our shirts less and less often, because we have too few of them, and because washing is costly and damages the clothes). They enter the café, nonchalantly bow left and right (they all know each other), choose their table, frown, fuss, order mocha (“but make sure it’s real”) and pastries (“I would like to order abisynki, croquettes, stefanki”)179 , light up fragrant cigars, and stretch out in the armchairs. Having expressed their satisfaction with the music (the orchestra is playing ‘Si, si, si, this is a tramp’s serenade’), the cakes, and the whole café, they get down to business. This does not mean that such clients constitute 100 percent of the clientele. On the contrary, the clientele is non-uniform, changeable, and mixed. [64] This is just the first impression because such clients are the boldest and thus the easiest to notice. Fortune’s darlings, they set the tone and stand out.
When I sit in the very centre of the largest room, surrounded by a crowd of people sitting at the tables, I begin to notice more and more about the clientele.
It is mixed, usually better-off, but not in a uniform way. You can see grocery owners, policemen, some physicians, a lot of young people, and the
