SHORT: CAFE CSABA

Café Csaba

I.

Yanush was only unpleasant to me in those mornings of remaining inebriation.  These were typically Mondays, as he often drank heavily after evening services at the church down the street.  As he sauntered over to me, skin almost jaundiced and eyelids at half-mast, he would grouse, “Good morning, daughter of bitch-whore.”  He held a grudge against my mother for refusing his advances once at her fifteenth birthday party, a feeling intensified by a night of repeated beltings of the Polish national anthem and breaking things in his apartment.  Yanush forgot nothing.

He was the proprietor of Café Csaba, where my grandfather spent his more serene days of retirement: idling, playing chess, and reading poetry – mostly to himself, but there were times when he was so struck by a line that he shouted it out loud, “Do I dare disturb the universe?  In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”[i]  If the words resonated with the patrons as they did with him, there was applause.  Those were rare occasions, however; most of my grandfather’s poetic eruptions were met by indifferent silence.

The café was situated in a hidden part of Westwood, in between an Indian restaurant called Mumbai Palace (which had recently been given a ‘C’ rating by the Department of Health), and Erotiq Fantasy, an adult video store.  It was where the philosophy students of UCLA would come on their lunch breaks, and tried to get Yanush to talk to them about the virtues of communism.  He responded with a characteristic burst of expletives, “Get out of here you fucking faggot bitches!  Bother someone with smaller dick, I don’t have no time for this pussy shit.”  After all of Yanush’s abuse, they still returned – probably for their pride in finding a place so strange and obscure – but learned that Yanush was a man never to be bothered.

And then there was Ivan: a stocky Russian émigré who seldom spoke, but when he did, he emitted only sparse, tragic whispers.  Ivan and Yanush had known each other for about sixty years; they met at the 1938 Fencing World Championships in Czechoslovakia, when the two were in their prime as haughty teenage sabre fencers with a penchant for violence, liquor, and women.  Unfortunately, that year their shared traits cost them a disqualification, as they were involved in a bar fight over a beautiful Portuguese foilist.  “Traitorous whore,” Yanush recalled, “She ended up with that cheating Italian bastard Giuseppe Perenno.”  Ivan worked as a reference librarian at the university, a job my grandfather secured for him. 

It was Ivan who was responsible for the café’s name.  This was all I knew (in addition to the fact that the institution was originally intended to be “Bar Csaba” but Yanush failed to obtain a liquor license) until the summer after my first year of college, when an array of circumstances required my staying in L.A. for the duration of the break.  I decided to work at Csaba’s instead of finding an internship somewhere because it allowed me to further delay learning how to drive (Westwood was within walking distance from home), and Yanush promised me that he would pay “more than minimum wage, under table.  That is cash, mami.”

 “So this is how it will be,” he said to me on my first day of work, “You clean, you make the coffee, you applaud when grandpa reads from the poem-books.  Understand?” 

“Alright, Yanush,” I said, hiding my surprise for his last instruction.  The moment was a rare window into Yanush’s otherwise unfathomable capability for tenderness. 

“Simi – another thing,” he leaned back in his chair, hands interlocked at the back of his neck.  “Drinks at closing, tak?” 

“Tak.”  It was one of the few words I knew in Polish, meaning ‘okay,’ or ‘yes.’

II.

            I soon learned that downtime would be the defining element of my summer job experience.  For the most part, Café Csaba’s customer base only included the aforementioned individuals, and on occasion, two busboys from Mumbai Palace, and a heavily pierced, gender-ambiguous employee of Erotiq Fantasy.  The institution lacked the free restroom facilities that attracted Westwood’s homeless population to Starbucks, and to the rest of the college town, I imagined that Csaba’s looked more like a front for the Polish mafia than it did a café. 

            But the sun shone through the windows in its greatest California effervescence, which was my most comforting welcome home from the bleak collegiate study-holes of the East Coast.  Yanush often asked me, “Why in the hell do you choose to live out in that place?  The East of the United States is just full of the ugly bitches and the freezing balls.  You know why I come to Los Angeles?  Because of the fucking weather and the T-V babes.  I am done with ugly Polish whores.”  I concluded very early on that Yanush was someone that I would never understand.

            Because we were open until around sundown (the Poles are an imprecise people), the days were vast, and my interactions with the three old men were drawn out beyond social norms – at least the ephemeral ones to which I had grown accustomed in college.  They knew each other’s secrets, histories; and were relieved that, after so much time, they had been blessed with a fresh set of ears. 

            “I have a story for you,” Grandpa said as he wiggled his fingers, eyeing the espresso I fixed for him with unmistakable glee.  He reached for a pack of sugar, shook it once, tore off the top, and poured it into the demitasse.  “It’s a funny one, about Ivan.”  He took a sip, and closed his eyes for a brief pause.  “So this one time, after a long day at the Fencer’s Club in New York, we all went out to a bar called Stanny’s ‘round the corner.  This was in Ivan’s more garrulous days, when conversations with him didn’t sound more like shiva small talk.  So we all were at a table in this bar when these girls came up to us.  Real built.”  He then cupped his hands out in front of his chest, gesturing in assurance that their breasts were something about which I should have been impressed.

            “Jesus, Grandpa!”  I instinctively shielded my eyes with my forearm. 

            “What?  Can’t I appreciate a woman’s endowments?”

            “Christ, fine.  Story.  Go on.”

            “So these girls introduced themselves to us – Sally, Betsy, Susan – whatever.  ‘I’m Yanny (That’s what he called himself back then),’ ‘Hi Yanny;’ ‘Jim,’ ‘Hi Jim.’  Ivan was already drunk; hunched over, clutching his most recently consumed shot of vodka.  When the girls asked what his name was he looked up, and with his Russian accent, said, ‘I am Ivan.’ They looked at him, back at each other, giggled a bit, and then one of them said, ‘You’re cute!  We’ll call you Pookie!’”

            “Pookie, really?”  I said, looking over at Ivan, suppressing laughter. 

            “Yeah, I know.  We called him that until he gave me a black eye for it.  You should try it sometime though; he likes you.  And Yanush would get a kick out of it.”

III.

            I once got a call from Yanush after closing, when I had already locked up and taken the Number Two bus back home:

            “Czesc,[ii] mami!”

            “Czesc, Yanush.  What’s going on?  Is everything okay?”

            “Okay?  Shit is great!  Come down for the drinking!  We are all drinking!”

            “What, at Csaba’s?”

            “Mami, I tell you – this is your job.  Yes, at Csaba’s.  Get bitch-whore mother to take you.”

            “Tak tak tak.  I’ll be over.”

            “Dobrze,[iii] bye.”

            I took the Number Two to Csaba’s instead of bothering my mother, who (understandably) was wary about my newfound association – not to mention employment situation – with Yanush.  He was the family friend who was drunk at every notable celebration: my brother’s bris, countless anniversaries, my bat mitzvah.  He caused quite the upset at my older sister’s wedding, when he chased after my six-year old twin cousins, yelling, “Come here, you double fuckers!  Little double fuckers!”  My grandfather couldn’t stop laughing, but the head rabbi of our synagogue banned him from any other religious events (citing repeated offenses of sacrilege). 

            When I arrived at the café it was nine o’clock.  I came in through the back way, where I saw the two busboys from Mumbai Palace, Amar and Janesh, smoking in the parking lot.  “Hey Simi,” they said, almost in unison.  I waved back. 

            Yanush, Ivan, and my grandfather sat around Csaba’s largest table in the corner, each with a glass in his hand.  They all drank vodka, which Yanush knew I detested, so to my surprise, there was a bottle of a modest pinot noir beside the half-empty handle.  “For you,” he said, pouring me some.  I took a sip, and could feel my light-Irish cheeks start to burn a little.  “The shiksaleh can’t hold her liquor!” my grandpa cried.  They all were amused by me, granddaughter of the self-proclaimed “shetle prince,” not looking the least bit Jewish (I took most of my Catholic father’s genes). 

            They talked for a half-hour or so about the latest fencing events at the Olympics – Ivan predicted (correctly) that Covaliu, the Romanian, would win the individual gold.  Yanush just hoped that, “those French pussies,” wouldn’t win anything.  To his disappointment, the French team eventually won the silver medal, as did the individual competitor, Gourdain (They received the gold medal four years later in Athens).  The discussion ended when Yanush went outside to buy some Indian pornography from Janesh.

            His exit prompted an inebriated lament from my grandfather, which started by his muttering, “The yarzheit for his beloved! Today is the yarzheit for his beloved!”  Ivan nodded knowingly.  “My dear friend Yanush, you know my dear friend Yanush.  His beloved!”  I nodded, unknowingly.  He told me the story (or rather, this is what I could glean from the drunken tangents and hyperbole): Yanush was in love only once.  During the War, his family managed to hide their Jewish neighbors in their basement for over two years.  He and the eldest daughter, Rivke, had been friends since childhood, and over time, grew to be quite enamored of each other.   Thankfully, the two families survived the ordeal, and Rivke’s family decided to make aliyah when the war had ended.  Yanush followed them, all the way to an internment camp in Cypress for displaced persons.  It was there that he asked Rivke to marry him.  She accepted, and the couple was set to start a new life in Israel.  Two weeks later, however, she contracted a mysterious fever and died within three days.

             Yanush returned, carrying a stack of magazines.  I couldn’t look at him. 

“It’s time to go, Grandpa.  Come on, I called Mom,” I said with tremendous unease.  He put his legs on top of the table, threw his arms up in the air, and exclaimed, “They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’  They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’”[iv] as if it were an impassioned plea to hang on to the night for just a while longer.  I didn’t know if I was obligated to applaud. 

IV.

“It was the name of some son-of-a-bitch he killed in the War,” Yanush said to me one day in August, after I served him his cappuccino. 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Csaba.  Ivan.  Ivan killed Csaba.” 
            “WHAT? Holy – What?”

 “No big deal, mami.  Thought you like to know.”  Yanush returned to the game of chess he was playing against himself. 

V.

            I was due back at school in a week and a half when I got a frantic call from my grandfather:

            “Hello, Simi?”

            “Hey Grandpa.  You sound worried.  Are you alright?”

            “Yes, yes, I’m fine.  Yanush is in the hospital.”

“How in the hospital?  Like, sick in the hospital?”

            “That shmuck got drunk last night and slept in the VA cemetery.  Woke up shaking because he’d been sleeping in wet grass all night.  A custodian found him and called an ambulance.  So now Yanush has pneumonia.”

            “Is he at UCLA?”

            “For now, yes.  Visiting hours are 2-4pm.  I was just there.  He looks alright, for a stupid asshole.”

            “I can probably go tomorrow.”

            “Do that.  That will be good.  I’ll speak with you later, Simi.”

            “Okay, bye.”                       

            I put off the visit for a few days; somehow I managed to convince myself that packing for college was a more pressing ordeal.  When I finally did decide to go, taking the Number Two bus to the UCLA hospital, I had some time before visiting hours began to sip an iced americano in the lobby café.  I stared at a pastel green stripe that ran through the room, dividing what was two feet below the ceiling from the immense space beneath.  I could feel my heart beat and my palms sweat a little, as I kept looking around the room, searching for an unidentifiable something that would somehow ameliorate the situation.  I might have been looking for Ivan.  Oddly enough, the final bout between Covaliu and Gourdain was on the television.  The Romanian, Covaliu, was up by three points.

            When I got to his room on the fourth floor, Yanush was sitting up in his bed, watching Jerry Springer.

            “Yanush!  How are you feeling?”

            “Fucked, mami.  Pretty fucked.”

            “You know Covaliu and Gourdain are fencing for the gold right now.”

            “I don’t watch no pussy sabre bullshit.”  He picked up a plastic cup containing jello from his bedside table and started to eat it.  “Listen, Simi.  I have complaint.  Your grandfather comes by in the afternoons and reads to me from that fucking poem-book.  I say to him, ‘Where is the pornography I ask for?’

“What, Penthouse?”

“That is the one.”

“I’ll get it for you the next time I come by.”

“When is that, mami?” 

“I don’t know yet; I have to pack and run some more errands.  I’m leaving Friday for Providence.”

“Tak tak, I understand.  Before I forget, here is something for Grandpa to add in his poem-book.  Something Ivan got for me in library.  I wrote it down for him.”  Yanush handed me a poem written on a scrap piece of notebook paper.

The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water[v]

 

I heard the old, old men say,

‘Everything alters,

And one by one we drop away.’

They had hands like claws, and their knees

Were twisted like the old thorn-trees

By the waters.

‘All that’s beautiful drifts away

Like the waters.’

“Tell him I wouldn’t mind if he read it out loud at Csaba’s.  Tell him even I will clap for him.”

---

[i] T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

[ii] Hello

[iii] Good

[iv] T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

[v] W.B. Yeats, “The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water”