Ryszard Kapuściński
* * *
Nobody Leaves
Impressions of Poland
Translated by William R. Brand
Contents
Translator’s Note
The Dune
Far Away
A Survivor on a Raft
A Farmer at Grunwald Field
The Fifth Column on the March
An Advertisement for Toothpaste
On the Ground Floor
No Known Address
The Big Throw
The Geezer
The Loser
Danka
Nobody Leaves
The Taking of Elżbieta
Us against the Trees
The Stiff
A Dispatch from Ghana
Follow Penguin
Translator’s Note
In 1959, when he turned twenty-seven, Ryszard Kapuściński had already been abroad as a reporter. In that year, he went to work for the weekly Polityka, which sent him into the field as a domestic correspondent between brief assignments in Africa. His stories appeared at irregular intervals, often on the front page. In annual polls, the paper’s readers picked Kapuściński as their favourite writer on a staff filled with journalists who would dominate the Polish media over the following decades.
The Poland that Kapuściński was reporting on was, from our perspective today, as ‘exotic’ as any of the Third World countries he covered. He liked to point out its similarities to new states throwing off colonialism or struggling through major social conflicts. Poland had suffered destruction and Nazi occupation in the Second World War less than two decades earlier, and was still rebuilding. Compromises between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin led to the imposition of communist rule. The country’s borders shifted – Kapuściński’s own birthplace ended up in the Soviet Union, while Poland absorbed territory that had long been German.
Polish Stalinism ended with the ‘thaw’ of 1956. A new leadership released political prisoners, eased censorship, and won fleeting popularity with gestures of assertiveness towards the Soviet overlords. People had barely begun exploring this lessening of restrictions when the Party started tightening the screws again, leading by the time these pieces were written to a ‘minor stabilization’ that attempted to compensate for diminished freedom with modest improvements to the standard of living.
Most Poles hated this alien system they were fated to live under and did not hesitate to say so in private. But such views could hardly be expressed in public, let alone in the press.
The official narrative never deviated from Soviet-style orthodoxy. Its themes were outside threats (in particular ‘German revanchism’ – American-backed West Germany was now a NATO ‘warmonger’ with a shameful Nazi past, and worst of all it refused to recognize the transfer of German territory to Poland), progress (Sputnik of course, but also domestically produced automobiles or at least motorbikes, and the electrification of the poverty-stricken countryside), and the topic that never went out of style, industrialization and the benefits it supposedly brought to the populace.
The ruling party claimed that history was on its side, and the country would prosper if only everyone joined the collective effort under its stewardship. There were holdouts, but they were denounced as a Catholic, nationalistic element that would fade away as successive waves of young people came on the scene and joined in constructing a bright future.
How did Kapuściński, an emerging star reporter for one of the regime’s leading opinion-shaping organs, write about this Poland?
He turned almost everything on its head. He sought out people who had been bypassed by the new order, or who refused to join in.
Instead of writing about the new factories and housing developments, he journeyed to remote parts of the country, to run-down villages that had been practically medieval a few years earlier or towns taken over from the expelled Germans. In ‘The Fifth Column on the March’ he discovers an elderly German mother and daughter stranded since the end of the war in a Polish old people’s home. When they happen to catch a West German broadcast on the radio, they believe that the Reich has risen again and set out to reclaim their confiscated property. This is a burlesque of official propaganda about resurgent German militarism.
‘A Farmer at Grunwald Field’ recounts a visit to the site of the 1410 Battle of Grunwald, a victory by the Polish Commonwealth over the Teutonic Knights and the occasion for an annual propaganda extravaganza. The farmer Kapuściński talks to does not know or care what all the fuss is about. He is concerned about his crops.
Penurious university lecturers riding a train to the lake country in ‘A Survivor on a Raft’ glance uneasily out of the window at private cars and motorbikes carrying the more fortunate beneficiaries of the Minor Stabilization.
‘On the Ground Floor’ does have to do with the industrial boom – but only in the sense that its vagabond characters scorn the game everyone else seems to be playing. The university dropouts of ‘No Known Address’ represent another variation on abnegation as a chosen lifestyle. The protagonist of ‘The Geezer’, once an enthusiastic activist, is burned out after all the political shifts of the past decade, and the title character of ‘The Loser’ renounces consumerist ambitions and retreats into a kind of proto-beatnik serenity. ‘Nobody Leaves’ and ‘The Taking of Elżbieta’ depict existential hells that no ideology or ruling party could ever alleviate.
How did he get away with focusing on individual dilemmas and alienation so at odds with the Party’s image of the society it claimed to be building? Kapuściński was far from being any kind of dissident. He was doing his job. Reporters under communism were not expected to be mere stenographers recapitulating Party edicts. Nor were they supposed to be ‘objective’ if that meant ignoring potential causes of public discontent. In her 1990 study Poland’s Journalists: Professionalism and Politics, researched before the fall of the old system, the American sociologist Jane Leftwich Curry notes that the press was ‘something like a “British loyal opposition” ’, a watchdog to ensure that policy was implemented properly. Moreover, she writes, it was normal for journalists to have connections among the ruling apparatus, and to use those contacts to influence policy.
Thus it is that in ‘The Dune’, when the collective farm faces bankruptcy, the reporter/narrator steps in with an offer to ‘finagle the money out of the county administration’. In ‘Danka’, he parodies a semi-literate policeman and a bombastic local Party boss who are incapable of dealing with an outbreak of faith-based violence.
Kapuściński’s main focus, however, is not on himself or his role. These are stories about the people he encounters. He sometimes pokes fun at their foibles, but never withholds his empathy. The way many of them have deliberately cut themselves off from the big worlds of ideology and consumerism accentuates their humanity. Some of them are trapped. Most of them, however, have – or had – a chance to shape their own fate, to make something of themselves. Many have squandered that chance, or never even noticed it when it came along. They become spectators, extras, losers, outsiders who will never rise above the ground floor. These are existential moments caught in a philosophical spotlight.
The discus-thrower in ‘The Big Throw’ knows how to seize his chance. The pallbearers in ‘The Stiff’ manage to form a functional collective, but only because there is no other way out, not as a response to directives from above.
Beyond these stories of individual choice, Kapuściński revels in his descriptive abilities, his ear for speech, and the earthiness of the country he is reporting on. ‘City people don’t know that you can sniff the soil. And it had a smell. “Soir de Paris”.’ His villagers might have terrible taste or an aversion to toothpaste, but there is something exubera
nt about the way they buzz around their fields on motorbikes, show off their wristwatches, or board the new Torpedo train. Here, at least, Kapuściński discerns the progress made since his own grim boyhood. He can see through the eyes of his subjects and feel how their own lives feel to them. Immersing himself in the back corners of his homeland, he absorbs details of how things work and grow – and also how they fail and die. Yet even when he describes the prolonged funeral cortège of ‘The Stiff’, the accent falls on life, with the mourners imaginatively reconstructing the mental life and sense impressions of a young man they never knew.
With the exception of ‘The Stiff’ and ‘A Dispatch from Ghana’, all of these pieces will be new to the English-language reader. In Poland, they are regarded as a central part of Kapuściński’s work and a model for the excellent domestic reporting that has flourished since the collapse of communism. They embody his arrival at the height of his powers. He surely felt that he, too, had reached the point where he had to make something of himself. He would soon set off on the prolonged foreign assignments that sealed his international reputation. Seldom again would he allow himself to write with such freedom and verve.
The Dune
Trofim discovered the Dune.
In ’59, somebody important in the county asked him: ‘Do you know how to be a watchman?’
Trofim thought about it. Why not?
To which the important person said: ‘He can go.’ They took him there on a wagon. He stood in the farmyard and looked around.
A wasted world surrounded him.
Weeds, rust-eaten machinery, doors hanging off their hinges. Heaven is beautiful, but the earth is abject, he might have thought, because that’s the philosophy he has. He walked the path down to the lake and found the Dune. The wind struck the sand and the sand trembled and sang. Trofim listened to this music.
When music penetrates loneliness, it takes away a person’s pain.
‘I lit a cigarette and thought: I’ll probably stay here.’ There was a horse, and he fed that horse. ‘I tidied up a little, but I can’t do much, because I have a stiff arm.’
Later, they sent Rysiek. ‘Where are you from?’ Trofim asked. Rysiek told me: ‘From an accident. A hole in my forehead, eight broken bones. I’ll remember something in a minute, Mr Reporter, but I can’t think of what, because my brain is shaky. I remember that I had a wife and I had a motorcycle. Drink, I drank heavily. When I couldn’t stay on my feet, my wife would drag me to the motorcycle and say, OK, go. I always sobered up while riding. But that last time – I don’t know anything. I lay unconscious in the hospital for two months.’
Thirty-five years of his life got away from him. If Rysiek happens to die at around sixty, he will pass on tormented by the thought that he is leaving the world as a 25-year-old boy, for whom things are only starting to open up. Things like that are especially hard, and Trofim the Mystic feels that it will be a just punishment for Rysiek’s sinful life, because when God opens an account of damnation for somebody, he fills it out pedantically right down to the last line. The accident left Rysiek with bifurcated vision. He sees everything double. Two faces, two women, two bowls of borscht. It’s beautiful that Rysiek sees two moons, like Mickiewicz on Lake Świteż. He has a knack for watches. People from all around bring him antiques, and Rysiek fixes them in the evenings. The piece of junk lies before him inert and unmoving. Finally, it starts ticking. Rysiek leans over and listens to how the stream of time flows through the movement like an invisible river lapping against underground rocks.
‘Maybe you were a watchmaker,’ Trofim speculates.
‘Maybe,’ Rysiek says hesitantly, because everything is so vague.
The third one at the Dune was Sienkiewicz. The Dune stands at the end of the world and at the police station they thought that the old man wouldn’t get away from there. Sienkiewicz was over seventy, and his chosen line of work was begging. The covetous soul of a Rockefeller had settled into the old-timer, the acquisitive soul of a capital-grubber. And he’s a sly one! The old man spurns church-porch poor-mouthing and walks from village to village, saying that he was burned out of his home. The spectre of conflagration hits home to the human imagination, and so Sienkiewicz has amassed a pretty pile of pennies. He always directs his steps so that his peregrination concludes in the provincial capital. There, he allows himself to be apprehended by the police, and the police carry him in their car to the Dune. In this way, the old codger reduces his travel expenses, and Edek the Party Man deposits all the profits into Sienkiewicz’s bank book. I asked Sienkiewicz to show me his bank book. He had the sum of 9,365.15 zloty there.
‘So greedy,’ says Trofim. ‘He still wants a shot at life.’
Life pinned them to the land. The world wasted away, and thistles were running wild outside the window. On the Dune, the sand was singing. One sister of the Dune is the Sahara, and another sister is the Gobi. There is no one who would ever walk from the Sahara to Trofim’s Dune. This testifies to the size of the world. Somewhere on earth fields of tulips are found, and love is given among people. Trofim has not known love, and neither has grandfather Sienkiewicz. Perhaps Rysiek has known it, but behind himself he sees only darkness. In the darkness stands a woman, but that’s not the same.
None of them know what they would see if they found themselves far away from the Dune. Trofim has been in Mława, and Sienkiewicz in Olsztyn and Białystok. Rysiek travelled the farthest, but you don’t come back from that world with any memories. This is Trofim, this is Sienkiewicz and this is Rysiek. The world is racing ahead, breaking records and firing rockets at the stars. But take a look at the Dune. Watch how a horse dies and how the doors fall off their hinges. Maybe someone will come along who thinks about all of this. Maybe that person will know how to put his mind to work, and then his hands.
In the springtime, Rysiek was building a bonfire. Two men came up to him. One was Edek the Party Man, and the other Lipko the Coachman. Now they were five, and five they remained.
‘Bastards,’ Edek cursed as he hammered up the holes in the roof. ‘Bastards,’ Lipko cursed, as he set up the trough. The tractor ploughed the field and Rysiek repaired the machinery. The world turned to face the day and face the night, but it all ran together for them as they laboured. There’s history that you read in books, and history that you carry in your bones. And so the history of that farm settled in their bones. It was a simple one. A little State Collective Farm dumped in the woods outside Ełk. Forty-six hectares. Run into the ground for five years by drunken slobs. They finally locked the gang up. But nobody new wanted to go to the Dune. And so the county rounded up people for whom it didn’t matter. Who had drawn a lousy hand of cards in life. Who had been washed out.
And Lipko was there. ‘Hey, hey, Mr Reporter, I know livestock. I looked after the horses in the biggest droshky stable in Warsaw, at Wetzel’s. In Warsaw before the first war. Our steeds pulled famous people. Actresses, Mr Reporter.’ Now Lipko can only laugh at all that. If he has a need for anything, it’s to drain a glass in the morning. To save his soul, he says. Because since the time of the war, Lipko’s been swineherding and, as he states, he reeks of it. His clothing reeks of it, and his body, but not what’s in the glass. It’s worse that his soul also reeks of it, which makes that glass necessary, because it also has a metaphysical function. Lipko loves pigs. It seems like he’s joking. But why would he? Maybe it’s not so funny that a man who went through life and met a couple of thousand people would at last give his heart to the pigs.
The old man addresses Edek by his name, but the others have to call him Mr Director. The droshky driver is proud of his boss. He’ll go far, he marvels, and purses his lips to give a little whistle that indicates a particularly lofty rung in the hierarchy. Edek’s a golden boy. Born in ’31. Headstrong, a self-starter, and a bit of a showoff. He likes to shine. That’s even the way he renders assessments: Here we had a chance to shine, and there we didn’t manage to shine. Edek took those four desperadoes by the scruff of the neck,
sowed the seed, and he’s waiting for the crop. He runs around a lot, walks the fields, does the paperwork. ‘The sparks! The sparks are flying,’ says Lipko in awe. Edek has principles. He castigates Sienkiewicz for capitalism, Rysiek for opportunistic lethargy and Trofim for religiosity.
‘Leave Trofim alone,’ says Rysiek. ‘He’s sick.’ And it’s the truth, because Trofim has epilepsy. Right after the war, a soldier was billeted in his one-room cottage. At daybreak a bandit appeared. They aimed the barrels of their automatics at each other and between them, in the crossfire, stood little Trofim. One gun barrel more than I could stand, he explains. And so he has attacks. He’s gloomy, he’s humble, and he stands at the side of the road, stands there for hours, walks away, walks back, and then sits down and weeps. If you give him a cigarette, he’ll smoke it – but then he runs off to the shop and buys a whole pack. I didn’t want to take it. ‘Take it,’ he says, ‘don’t put up a fight, because I’ll start frothing at the mouth.’ So I took it in fear of an attack. Dostoevsky sought out types like him. ‘Have you ever read Dostoevsky, Trofim?’ I asked him once.
He had never read him, because books make his head spin. Trofim is twenty-six years old, and when I measure that age against the aspect of him, I feel a throbbing in my temples.
He keeps going out onto the Dune.
The wind strikes the sand, and the sand trembles and sings.
He listens to that music, and the music takes away his pain.
The ears of rye grow heavy and the potatoes ripen, free of potato bugs. Time is on their side, and Edek is calculating the crop. And then suddenly there’s that accident with Mongol. Trofim drove Mongol to Ełk to pick up the digging machine. The digging machine was at the warehouse. The shakes came over Trofim there, and he lay on the ground for three hours without feeling anything. Mongol was a punctual horse with a mind of his own. He would always consent to wait two hours. After that, he set out on his own and trotted towards the Dune. That’s when it happened. In the evening darkness, along the road through the woods, went Mongol in harness. Around a curve came a truck, and the headlights blinded Mongol. We can assume that he died a double death, which happens to people but is exceptionally rare among animals. First, the light killed him. He was struck by the light, so that he couldn’t defend his life. When the option of life was ruled out, the option of death remained. Stunned and inert, he accepted it. It was not that life culminated in death, but that death preceded death.
Nobody Leaves Page 1