The Influencer Comes to Kazimierz

The young woman arrived with three telephonic devices arranged on a mechanical arm, the entire apparatus suggesting a small and aggressive insect. She set this contraption on the table of the café Pani Henryka had operated since 1994, at a window overlooking the square, and she began to speak to nobody visible in a tone of fierce intimacy.

Pani Henryka watched from behind the counter. She had survived price liberalisation, the smoking ban, two floods, and a health inspector who once questioned the origin of her smalec. She was not easily unsettled. Nevertheless she found herself unsettled.

"This place," the young woman said to her devices, drawing the word out until it achieved a kind of philosophical weight, "is so authentic."

The authenticity she referred to included the cracked plaster above the door, which Pani Henryka had been meaning to repair since approximately the second Tusk government. It included the mismatched chairs, which were mismatched because chairs break and replacement is expensive, not because anyone had consulted a mood board. And it included the żurek, which had appeared on the menu because it was cheap to make and people wanted it, a system of logic that required no branding consultancy.

Within four days, twelve more young people with mechanical arms arrived. They all said "authentic." Two of them said "liminal." One said the café existed in a "third space," a concept Pani Henryka received with the expression of a woman hearing that water is, in fact, wet.

The problem was not the young people. The problem, as is generally the case, was the landlord.

Mr. Czyżewski had owned the building since his cousin sold it to him in 2003 under circumstances which, in a just world, would have been examined more carefully. He had not previously shown enthusiasm for the property beyond depositing the rent cheques. But he had a son who followed matters on the internet, and the son showed him the videos, and Mr. Czyżewski's eyes acquired the brightness of a man who has discovered that something he owns has become fashionable.

He arrived to inspect the café for the first time in eleven years. He used the word "potential" four times in three minutes, a frequency that Pani Henryka recognised as dangerous. He suggested a "rebrand." He mentioned, with studied casualness, that rents in the area were undergoing a period of "adjustment."

The adjustment, when it arrived in writing, was forty percent.

Pani Henryka did not weep. She was sixty-three years old and had wept about all she intended to weep about before she was thirty. Instead she did something more useful: she spoke to her customers, the ones who had been coming for years, the retired schoolteacher who took the window seat on Tuesdays, the two gentlemen who argued weekly about football with the commitment of scholars defending competing theories of consciousness, the young mothers with pushchairs who needed somewhere warm and unhurried. She explained the situation without dramatics, because dramatics were for people who had not yet learned that reality is dramatic enough.

What happened next was not a revolution. It was not the kind of thing that produces speeches or monuments. The regular customers began coming more often and spending slightly more. The retired schoolteacher wrote a letter to the district council, because she had written letters to councils since the 1980s and had developed considerable technique. The two football scholars told everyone they knew, which collectively was a great many people. A journalist from a local newspaper, a real newspaper printed on actual paper, wrote a piece that described the situation with admirable plainness.

The young woman with the three devices returned, saw what was happening, and filmed a video about it. "Corporate greed," she said to her apparatus, with the air of someone encountering the concept for the first time. The video was watched by an enormous number of people, which proved that an audience and an understanding are not always the same thing.

Mr. Czyżewski, faced with a quantity of public attention he had not anticipated, adjusted the adjustment. The rent increased by twelve percent, which was still an increase, and Pani Henryka accepted it the way one accepts weather: without approval, but without the delusion that one's feelings on the matter are relevant to the outcome.

The café remained. The cracked plaster remained. The mismatched chairs remained. The young people continued to arrive with their devices, searching for something genuine in a place that had never tried to be anything other than what it was, which is perhaps the only reliable method of achieving genuineness, and also, unfortunately, the only one that cannot be taught in any course or packaged in any format and sold to people who would very much like to purchase it.

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