Bronik Returns to Vienna

Abstract

In the old days, before democracy, a tobacco shop looked like a farmer's kitchen. The countertop would be crowded with unfilled jars and boxes and the glass case stained yellow from age and tobacco smoke. Peer through the glass top and you would see two shelves with small, separated piles of one or two or three packets of cigars, cigarettes, or pipe tobacco. Cuban cigars were cheap here but hard to find. Everything was hard to find. On open shelves cut into the stone wall behind the counter, there might be a few more items, only for smoking. Related goods that filled and brightened smoke shops in more frivolous citiessay London or New Yorkwere sold here in dedicated magazinas: a candy store, a paper goods store. If you wanted a tobacco pouch, you would have to go to a store for leather goods. Against the far wall in this tobacco shop, under a calendar, some pictures of working people and a few announcements printed in the alphabet of that country, would be a small wooden table with a not very clean oilcloth cover and two ungainly wooden chairs. The storekeeper, a smudge of a man with hair like a scrubbing brush, might be sitting on one of the chairs, reading a newspaper, the newspaper, drinking dense sugared coffee from a chipped cup. A friend might join him with a deck of cards. On unspecified days new supplies would be delivered by a worker with a handcart, breathing hard, while customers hurried after him and lined up at the door. On such days the storekeeper did not sit. Merchandise was stacked on the table and chairs. No