Nobody Leaves

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  You want to know about the Jacks, right? That’s what they call the dropouts who still hang around the university. Student clochards, like that sparrow out of St Francis, he doesn’t plough, he doesn’t sow, but he gets fed. The one called Jack of Diamonds is a real dropout. They expelled him in his second year when he failed three exams – the song was over. When they expel a student, he loses his dormitory privileges. But he has to live somewhere. He’s not from Warsaw, he has no home here. Home is far away, in Olesno or Iława, and why would he go back there? To go from Warsaw back to a hole like that? Here, you understand, there are contacts, careers. Life is here. So he hangs around. In the dormitory, his friends will always take him in, give him something to eat, and everything’s OK. Except that he has no address. But is that important?

  Homer always says: Boys, what kind of people are you? I see what you do. I see you, Jack of Spades, and you, Jack of Diamonds, and you, Jack of Clubs. There, on that wall on Krakowskie Przedmieście, near the intersection of Kopernika. That street, the traffic, the bustle, everybody hurrying like a panting dog, and you all sit there from morning to night. Not moving a muscle. You sit there – that’s all. Do you talk – no, what’s the point? Maybe you’re waiting for something? No. Silent and inert. Once in a while one of you opens his mouth: I need two zloty. Who’s going to chip in? They root around listlessly in their pockets. Here’s a zloty, here’s fifty grosz. They add it all together and they go to the kiosk. They take three bottles of beer. They pour it out into six mugs. They drink, fall silent, spit. Silence. They return the mugs. They go back to the wall. Further silence. An hour later one of them starts speaking: I have to go and take a leak. Another one pipes up: Take one for me while you’re at it. I’m the boss around here, right? The day passes, and at twilight a girl walks past. The Jack of Clubs says: She’s hot as a pistol, isn’t she? They nod, dig around in their pockets, and – silence. Sometimes a bus pulls up in front of the Harenda Hotel. Then they all jump, they grab the tourists’ suitcases and carry them. They get those five or ten zloty. That’ll take care of the beer. They can keep going. That’s right, I see what you live on. Beer! And the Jack of Clubs looks him in the eye and says: When somebody talks too much, they always say something they shouldn’t.

  The one called Jack of Clubs is a philosopher. He’s a sharp one. Except he doesn’t have any strength. It seems to me that none of us has any strength. Did it just slip away or what? Jack of Clubs is good at cards. An authority. You know, you have to do something in the evenings, at night. Nobody reads books, the theatre is expensive, and how often can you go to the movies? So there’s cards. As much as possible – poker, bridge. Jack of Clubs has great luck. They meet up in a dormitory room, it’s an incredible sight, a casino. Imagine it. Dark with smoke, the rustle of cards, a crowd of spectators. They’re playing poker, until dawn, until morning. Sometimes they play for money, but they don’t have much money. So they play for cafeteria coupons, for dinners. Or for clothes. In one little room those clothes were piled a metre high. Some guy lost his sports jacket, abandoned it, bowed politely, and left. There are fanatics who wager their scholarship money as soon as they get it. Then a month-long fast follows. Well, cards are cards, gambling, no joking around. Cards are emotion, it doesn’t take any effort but it’s an experience. The day hasn’t been wasted. Pleasure. Franek is the banker. Franek pays out, we play, July and May in the hot sand. There’s a poem, but I don’t remember any more of it.

  When the Jack of Clubs wins, he invites us out for wine. Life is sweet, la dolce vita. We savour it methodically. First we march proudly to the Harenda. Two hundred in pocket – millionaires! A brief conversation around a table there, a small order, and then we make our way to the ‘House at the Sign of Christ’. There’s always a crowd. Have you ever been there? We have some porter and then off to the ‘Chapel’. Here, the wine begins. Two glasses, a little chat, best regards to the neighbouring tables, the members of the brotherhood know each other. The requisite courtesy. The Jack of Clubs guard of honour behaves politely.

  If the one called the Jack of Hearts is buying, we’re the Jack of Hearts guard of honour. And so on. Only the Jack of Spades never buys. The Jack of Spades represents poverty. He’s never had a guard of honour, even once. From the ‘Chapel’, the next stage is Fukier’s. Or Café Kicha. Or the Dean’s. Everywhere that acidic scent of fermentation, the smoke, the hubbub – a delight! Sometimes they go to Grandma’s on Oboźna. A strange suite of rooms. An old building, a little shop, a few sweets in the display case. And abstract paintings on the walls. Works of talent. Students from the Academy give them to her for beer. Grandma extends credit. Wagon drivers sit on their parcels and drink with young women painters. A horsewhip stands in the corner, and a girl, and a drayman. The wagon drivers have money – you know. We went in there once and a painter was sitting there crying. She was beautiful. Everybody knows that when somebody’s beautiful, they have to be miserable.

  Sometimes there’s a grosz left over because somebody receives something from home or for some hackwork. Some of us do printing jobs in various places and that means a few zloty. Then we buy wine and go to the dormitory. Everybody knows what happens next. Somebody tells a joke and then another one. If you know some gossip from the literary world, that’s a plus. The usual stuff, you know, who’s with whom and so on. The talk is mundane – so pour another one! Bam! Bottoms up! Somehow, the evening goes by. When the girls want to get good and drunk, they go off by themselves. They lock the door and whatever they do there, we don’t know about it.

  Homer will remark: The only time it’s possible to talk with you bunch is when you’re drunk. There’s no life in you, no ambition, no fire. Boredom clings to you like a wet cocoon. What have you ever done in life, Jack of Hearts, you little piss-pants? What do you know about the world? Whenever I talk to you I have the impression you’re asleep. You come out of it for a little wine, your beady eyes open, you take on a bit of verve, some idea starts knocking around inside your head, any minute now and your heart will start beating, and then as I look on in horror you go back to sleep. You walk, talk, make faces, laugh, but it’s all done in your sleep. You doze off, the image of lethargy. It’s a horrible feeling, like trying to hold on to a slippery fish. You’re there and you’re not there. I keep thinking where to poke you so that you’d amount to something great, something beautiful. I always used to think there was something like that in every young person. Now I’m not so sure. When Homer gets on his high horse like that, the one called Jack of Clubs has to shut him up again.

  It’s Jack of Clubs I’m closest to. A universal mind. You always see him with a book, always a different one. WFM Service Manual. I’m Expecting. Introduction to the Holy Bible. One Hundred Meals for Lovers. He doesn’t read them, but he carries them around. Appearances count now. Jack of Clubs makes a good appearance. He dropped out of journalism, but he’s still got the spark. You’re a journalist, too, aren’t you? Fraternal spirits. Jack of Clubs writes different pieces when he’s not playing poker. Over the summer he worked in the cultural field, he played records over the internal radio network. Everybody tries to do something. The one called Jack of Diamonds worked for the nuns. The nuns have a shelter for blind children in Powiśle. Jack of Diamonds chops wood there, fixes the lights, repairs furniture. Somehow he comes out ahead. Jack of Hearts was a porter. I get some jobs at the Art Academy. Different things. I scrub the floors, carry coal, beat rugs. Do you have anything for me? The Jack of Spades will take anything. Because the Jack of Clubs is an aristocrat. In general, the dropouts are an aristocracy. An elite. An exotic accent in their surroundings. We’re at the top. And at the bottom – the mass of earnest students. Why do they work so hard, anyway? A student who hits the books is a misunderstanding, a tragic mistake. They work hard at the Polytechnic, but they’re slobs at the Poly, upward mobility from the village, no liberal arts student with a head on his shoulders will study all the time. What – paper for recycling? They envy us! They quake before the
ir professors, rush off to lectures, slave over their term papers – and we couldn’t care less.

  Of course, you have to create something. A true dropout should be creative. Poetry, plays, prose and in general literature. Fame and bread. The Jack of Diamonds sets an example. He writes stories and takes them to some room in the dormitory. If they’re sleeping, he wakes them up. He says: I’ll read you my new prose if you’ll give me something to eat. He reads, and he always gets a piece of bread. Sometimes even with lard. Others do the same. The poets are best off. They’re popular, people listen. But Homer gnaws at them: What literature is that? What do the bunch of you have to say? What truth do you aim to shout out? Jack of Diamonds, I was younger than you when two Ukrainian insurgents tied me to a tree, sat down next to me, lit cigarettes, took out a file and started sharpening a saw. They said that it was a humanitarian act because they wanted to cut me into neat pieces. I don’t know how to describe that, but it’s something to describe, isn’t it? Have you ever seen death? Do you know what love is? Have you ever died of longing? Been eaten up by ambition? Choked on jealousy? Wept for joy? Bitten your finger out of pain? What are you telling me? Jack of Diamonds, I know how the bunch of you live. In goose down. Go ahead, laugh, but I’m telling you: in goose down. I don’t resent it, but I don’t envy you, either. Once I went looking for you in the dormitory. And it was noon. I go into one room – they’re sleeping. Another one – they’re sleeping. The next one – sleeping. What is this? You want to write books? Make films? Tell me this – about what?

  But he’s going too far. Because with us, we don’t so much want to make films as to be extras. It supposedly used to be like that – everybody wanted to create great things, invent marvels, be a director, govern. Now they prefer to be extras. That’s enough.

  There are sufficient troubles as it is. We have difficult problems. Take them in turn – how to get into the dormitory? We have no right of residence there, because we’re no longer students. We have to get around that. In various ways. The Jack of Hearts and the Jack of Clubs do it like this: they go in, one of them occupies the attention of the porter, and the other one makes a run up the stairs. She takes off after him, at which the first one vanishes up the second stairwell. And they’re both in. Now they have to find a room. We go around to the people we know. They like us. Everybody helps. Either there’s an empty bed, or they put a mattress down on the floor. Buddies share their blankets. A great night’s sleep. Sometimes the authorities stage a raid and go around at night checking up. The boys hide us in their wardrobes and cover us up with coats. If we get caught, well, that’s the end and they throw us out on the street. But there are also times when one of the raiding party is an illegal dropout himself, and then he covers for the other ones. Because we all know each other.

  The worst thing is feeding yourself. In the morning you have to get your hands on breakfast at the cafeteria in the dormitory. Friends give up half of theirs, and there’s always bread. Somebody will always lend you money for cigarettes. Dinner is soup. You don’t need a coupon for soup. You can get two bowls or, if you’re lucky, three. There’s bread on the table. Somehow you fill yourself up. If not, there’s beer. You can live on beer, too.

  Maybe one more small one, OK? Why do you want to talk to me? I never talk like this. Or think, either. It’s as if I’m thinking like Homer, but then I’d be an old fart. I’m young, right? Please tell me, because a person never knows for sure.

  The Big Throw

  He’s always first. The one in the grey sweater is always first and that’s why he has to wait. He sits down under a tree, rests his bored face on his knees, and indolently chews a blade of grass. The training field is empty – a motionless rectangle of grass inside the oval frame of the running track. So the fan in the sweater waits.

  He doesn’t even liven up when Piątkowski arrives. Now the fan follows the training routine. He sees how the athlete’s silhouette tenses for a moment before the throw and how the discus, released from his hand, flies a flat, swift trajectory, settles to the ground, and subsides into the grass. The swing of the arm, the flight and the fall of the discus, will keep repeating for an hour, unvaryingly and monotonously. The one in the sweater sits there motionless with a wry face, but his eyes gaze attentively.

  ‘Might as well go now: it’s the same thing over and over,’ I tell him.

  ‘No, no. Let’s wait. He’s going to have a big throw any minute.’

  So I stay, we both stay, and others who have come along in the meantime also stay to see that throw that’s going to be a big one, the sixty-metre throw. We wait for it, because we always wait for something that will be big, extraordinary and splendid, that will bring us great joy and fill us with pride while also reminding us that there exists something greater than locking and unlocking the office at the same hour, collecting chicks, flattering the boss, petty swindles, loveless embraces, downtime due to poor work coordination, the songs of Rinaldo Baliński, or vodka spilled on the table.

  But on the field, ordinary things are going on, the toilsome drudgework of the competitor, a workout in shades of grey, mundane, which infuriates and bores us, and yet we don’t know what to do about it. The fan in the sweater starts getting impatient, the discus flies in a short arc, too short; when will the big throw happen, the sixty-yarder?

  We look at Piątkowski. He’s calm. That splendidly powerful youngster throws as if he didn’t want to and then, at a slow pace, as if he were out for a stroll, he ambles after the discus, locates it, and throws again, without straining, without that tension that we regard as necessary for squeezing out a big throw. Someone off to the side says that he’s not throwing for distance now, that he’s polishing his technique. Once you’ve set a world record, you have to pay attention to that. But the one in the sweater keeps waiting. It’s bound to happen, that one throw. What is it to Piątkowski?

  No, nothing doing. The discus has stopped flying. It’s lying on the track. The champion dresses and, sluggishly, slightly hunched over, walks away, the ritual concluded. Only the trainer remains, who had been sitting down until then, unnoticed by anyone. Now all those present gather around him. We walk over there. We hear the trainer saying that those last two throws were sixty metres. And so it happened! And we missed it! The fan in the sweater is embittered, he suspects a ruse. Is this just another con trick? No, those last two throws were a sure thing, a new world record, except it’s a shame that it’s in training, and so it’s not official. The fan is consoled, but only a little, because he saw it but he didn’t see it. He can say he did but he knows he didn’t. He walks towards the gate, probably feeling unsatisfied, sour somehow, silent and alone.

  I feel bad for the one in the sweater. I don’t know him, but we’ve run into each other several times at this training ground. We’ve exchanged a few sentences. I know what brings him here. He doesn’t come here to admire Piątkowski. If there’s anything he wants to see, it’s himself, what he never became. What he’ll never be. Because the fan is one of those who, at a certain point, missed his chance. It’s not that he ever set about doing something and it didn’t work out, but that he never even tried. That’s the worst thing, because it leaves you permanently resentful. And you can never break free of it. People have many opportunities in life, but the chance only comes along once. You can have it, and waste it. The worst thing is that you might not even notice it. That’s the big throw – it happened, and we didn’t notice.

  The fan talks in rather vague terms about what he does. Maybe he’s a debt collector, or a clerk, or a bookkeeper. Or maybe he doesn’t do anything. Probably, however, he does one of those thousands of colourless jobs from which you can’t derive a spark of satisfaction. Reconciled to that anonymous existence, he nevertheless seeks, in moments of bitterness, the point at which he made his mistake. But is it really about a mistake, or about the fact that no mistake was even necessary, because nothing ever happened? Never happened? Why not? Which day was it when something should have happened that never h
appened in his life?

  Because this Piątkowski had just such a day. He was living in Konstantynów, outside Łódź. A small town, about which there’s nothing to say. He was going to school there. He was fifteen and he was a small, skinny boy. A friend gave him a discus. He started throwing that discus. He’s still doing it today, eight years later. In that time he passed his final exams at school, served in the army, and is now a student at the Central School of Planning and Statistics. This is information from a thousand curricula vitae: school, work. But here we’re talking about a life shaped by an absorbing passion, intransigently persistent and full.

  I wondered whether he was attracted by other temptations, whether he gave in to other passions, ever wanted to try something else, or in the end was bored by that hunk of metal and wood shaped into a flattened circle. No! That fifteen-year-old boy told himself, back in Konstantynów: ‘This is what I’m supposed to do. From now on, this is what I’ll always do.’ And he stuck to it. ‘I don’t like to spread myself too thin,’ Piątkowski tells me. ‘That doesn’t make sense. I think that out of a thousand possibilities you always have to choose one, keep at it, and do everything, give it everything you’ve got, to achieve a result. Otherwise, you’ll hold it against yourself later that you didn’t do what you wanted to do.’

  The successes that come year after year are troublesome for him, because he moves awkwardly when surrounded by acclamation. Applause makes him impatient, and he’s even suspicious of it: ‘There’s always that admiration when you’re on the way up. When you start going down, the acclaim falls silent and all eyes turn away. It gets empty.’