a man and his chair

A bright sun beats down on the cobblestone square around the arched, blue domes. I come out into the open from the tunnels filled with people, food shops and gambling machine booths and cross the space in front of the entrances to the Centrum station of Warsaw's subway - "metro", as we call it.

The square is already bustling. The crowd is not very thick, but there are plenty of people hurrying along, on with their little lives, in their little worlds - just like me. I take a newspaper from one of the people giving them out, then head on to the wall on the square's side, lean against it and begin reading.

It's 9:40 in the morning. In twenty minutes or so, most of us should be gathered and we'll head out to see the animals kept in the Warsaw zoo. It's a long time, enough to read through the paper.

A man brings a chair to the centre of the square.

He puts it upside down, on a stack of other bits of furniture, from what I could see. He grabs a pair of sticks and begins a strange ritual.

He beats on the legs of the chair, creating a slightly disorganized rhythm of clacking, clattering and crashing noise. The sound permeats the square. Not even my earbuds can block out the noise completely with music and rubber.

And he bangs on and on. Noone accompanies the rhythm he creates. It's way too fast for footsteps to match up with. It's a hustle-bustle that only a thousand footsteps could match.

And I wonder...

What is his purpose here? Does he really think he'll receive money for this... noise? It's nothing like someone playing on an accordeon or a guitar... It's just noise. I don't believe I have ever witnessed him getting any money. As I was told later, neither did my friend.

On the other hand, maybe he is stating something with this noise.

Maybe that's really how the "rhythm" of our cities sounds. A disorganized jumble... Thousands of legs, beating down on pavement.

Maybe he wants to enhance the jumble that already fills the little square of Metro Centrum. Maybe the noise is meant to be like another thread woven into the musical composition of the bustling mass of humans.

I will never ask, so I will never know. All I can do is just watch as the man beats out his noise on the chairs restlessly.

Or go back into the tunnel and get myself a Mirinda.

edit: This might be either my memory failing me, or the man changing his setup - in any case, I've recently been to the Metro Centrum square at the same hour. The man was already there. He had a single chair, a box for donations and two sticks. The chair was upright, on its legs, and the man was striking a metal handle that you normally could move the chair by. This might have been different from what I saw prior to writing this post, though...

Memory is a fickle thing.