Nobody Leaves

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  But he’s too wrapped up in his passion to dwell on people’s reactions. ‘These years have worked out well for me. I’ve made progress each year. What’s the motivation? Maybe not only the idea of the record, but also curiosity – how much more can I do? How much more can I get out of myself? Where’s the final limit that I can reach? Going on is increasingly difficult. But that’s what’s fascinating – conquering yourself. Who you might be winning out over who you are. That kind of struggle.’

  He doesn’t keep statistics, and he doesn’t even remember the exact date when he set the world record. ‘I don’t even know all my results. What’s past, what I’ve done, doesn’t interest me any more. What I care about is what’s now, and, even more so, what will be. What else I can do. That result that I don’t have yet, which I might achieve – that’s what’s important.’

  A man wrestling with matter, in a duel with himself: is there still time and space for something more? Years of lonely training, competition and doggedness have shaped a fighting instinct in him. Usually he’s slow, even somewhat sluggish in his movements, he speaks slowly, he doesn’t get excited. He has no time for cafés and parties, he keeps quiet at meetings. Larger groups make him feel inhibited. But let him walk out at the stadium, let him appear at the bottom of that roaring, red-hot bowl. He comes alive and fills with energy. His opponents do not give him stage fright and their results do not intimidate him. They don’t matter to him, because he’s here to get his own result. So he concentrates, thinking only of what he’s supposed to do, and he keeps an eye on the still-invisible boundary he can reach. ‘They say I’m so calm, but the day after a competition I can’t do anything, I walk around devastated and I feel uncomfortable everywhere.’

  His career hasn’t blinded him. ‘You have to reconcile yourself to the fact that you start throwing worse and worse.’ He doesn’t panic. He will take his place in the circle again, release the discus with an infernal swing, giving it a flat, rapid trajectory, aware of the limit beyond which it cannot be thrown.

  I find myself thinking again about that fan in the sweater. About him and his peers. I run into them everywhere. When they stand on the street corner looking dully around for a fight until, exasperated that nobody wants to pick one, they start up among themselves. When they sit over their glasses of tepid slurry distastefully dragging out a pointless dialogue.

  ‘There’s nothing to do.’

  ‘Nothing. Let’s go give someone a bollocking.’

  But nothing comes of that bollocking. That swearing never leads to a big throw. They buy themselves a newspaper. They read an article about how Piątkowski did. ‘Damn, he’s lucky.’ They nod and stare up at the ceiling. ‘They don’t understand, they don’t know,’ Piątkowski says, ‘how much work it takes, how much drudgery. There’s no room for anything else.’ He’s twenty-three, too. The last time I dropped in on him, he was preparing for a maths exam.

  He’s that age when people have a need to be something. When that’s more important than everything else. That’s when they look stubbornly for a model. But who’s the model? Piątkowski or Tommy Steele? Maybe they can come up with some scam or hang out with the right crowd and it’ll be ‘Okay’, as they say in English. Why work your fingers to the bone? A song, maybe a face, maybe knowing just whom to bow to – isn’t that enough? That big throw – will they miss it? In Szczecin, I saw filmmakers on the street. Cameras, reflectors – they were shooting a scene. All around stood a dense crowd of young women and men. That impatient anticipation: any minute now he’ll spot me and sign me up. That’s what everybody wants! But they don’t sign them up, somehow they fail to sign them up, and they keep filming in the ugly part of autumn, the benches are wet, and there’s nobody to punch in the face.

  And so – have we missed the big throw again?

  ‘You won’t get anywhere that way,’ Piątkowski chuckles when I tell him about it.

  The Geezer

  The road was barren. The line of asphalt dwindled away, and the air hung above it in a sweltering quiver. No vehicles. I asked the boy if he was also going to Grajewo. Yes, he was. So let’s wait together. Together, all right, he said. He went on to say that he was hurrying to Grajewo because his girlfriend was waiting there. They were from Augustów. Their school year had ended a week ago. How did it go? ‘I failed history,’ he admitted. His teacher was a stickler, what could he say, the teacher was unrealistic and eminently inflexible. There’s no way to work things out with an old geezer like that.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I asked out of reportorial routine.

  ‘His name? Stępik. Grzegorz Stępik.’

  Pure coincidence. Random.

  I knew Stępik. He graduated in history from Warsaw U. in 1955. ‘So he’s in Augustów now?’ I asked. We were no more than a kilometre outside town.

  I found the dinky townhouse on the market square and the cluttered little garret. I found Stępik there. It was him, of course. We sat at the table. He took out a box of matches and lit one after another. He had the same habit way back when. He lit matches while talking. He held the small wooden stick between his fingers and stared into the flame. When the match burned down, he took out the next one. On a nervous day he would go through a whole box. If a fire broke out in the vicinity, they’d probably lock Stępik up. I told him this, and he laughed. His eyes are grey, as if they were burned out in a fire. He always looks at people through the flame of a match. Does that let him see others better?

  Going by appearance, he hasn’t changed much. A tall stringbean of a man, and everything about him is correspondingly elongated – his legs, hands and nose. Clumsy, badly drawn somehow, which always made people uncomfortable around him.

  He’s twenty-seven.

  Geezer.

  The old geezer.

  Who was it that first sniffed him out as an obsolescent relic? I ask him. He frowns and grows impatient. He cuts short our exchange. ‘What’s the point of talking?’

  Why not talk?

  All right, fine. I might well be grasping the core hidden beneath the surface. The surface is proper. Stępik teaches in school, he’s up to his ears in work with lessons, teaching plans and reading lists, and he teaches as well as he can, he gives it his all, he doesn’t shirk, and the school administration praises him. He sublets his place, is saving up for a motorcycle, and joins the archaeologists at their excavation every summer. From these trifles he derives his life’s satisfactions, and he’s happy with them. On the other hand, he does not have an iota of pedagogical satisfaction and he cannot boast of any educational success. On the contrary! Stępik is permanently facing a pedagogical Waterloo.

  He assures me that he’s not the only one stuck in the mud. The whole teaching staff has reached rock bottom. This is understandable. The faculty is advanced in years and it’s hard for them to hit it off with the kids. The teaching staff, however, put up a united front against the students, which works to their advantage. Their corporeal attributes – grey hair, experience, their own children at the university – are also their weapons. These attributes lend them a kind of authority. People always end up listening to someone older.

  But Stępik belongs to the faculty only in a formal sense. He has his chair in the teachers’ room, takes his turn on hall duty, and writes his entries in the ledger. The faculty treat him condescendingly, as a junior colleague. One rung lower. An interloper from another generation. A teacher being broken in.

  ‘It’s not important,’ Stępik says. ‘It’s no headache for me. It’s about something else – I can’t communicate with the kids. It’s easier for me to talk with somebody half a century older than somebody five years younger.’

  At the university, Stępik was an incredible firebrand. A full-blooded activist. He held meetings, consulted, instructed. The man’s blood ran hot. He didn’t husband his strength. He lavished it extravagantly, burning up his energy, holding nothing in reserve. He lived in something like a trance, lost in his work, and his friends had to slow him down – don’
t go crazy! They made up an epitaph for him:

  Here lay Grzegorz Stępik

  But he didn’t lie here long

  They dug up his grave

  So he could run to work.

  He studied at night, slept at his desk in the boardroom, didn’t know the meaning of a vacation, and racked up mind-boggling statistics. Fifty-four meetings in a single month! People liked him for his sincerity, for his reliability, for that untrammelled, vibrant enthusiasm. He didn’t care what he ate, he didn’t care how he dressed, and he was on the run, talking, giving advice here, giving advice there, always hitting the top notes. The higher-ups milked him like a dairy cow. Do this, do that. He didn’t know how to say no. Every failure in his life stemmed from not knowing how to say no. He loaded himself down with new burdens, new responsibilities, and he was always trying to catch up, racing, going around in circles, in a frenzy, and in the end Stępik himself was one big frenzy.

  ‘I’m not the same any more,’ he says as he strikes the match head with a snap against the sulphur. ‘I don’t have that spark, that verve. But back then! Remember how we held those planning sessions at night, how we kicked off campaigns, how things started slowly, how we drew people in afterwards and when they didn’t want to, we told them this, and this, and this.’ The matches flutter between Stępik’s fingers. He summons up those images and makes them come alive with movements of his scarecrow hands until the figures step out of the picture frame, move, walk, clap their hands, beat it into the guys’ heads, beat it into their own heads. Stępik explains something to somebody, somebody explains something to Stępik, then they explain something together – and then again: images, conversations, faces, names. Stępik says it, sees it, feels it, experiences it. He gave too much of himself back then for it not to remain with him to this day – indelible, overwhelming, insistent.

  And so – a geezer?

  Those years burned him out, pumped him dry, washed him out. He gave a lot and he got a lot. He possesses a whole storehouse of seasoning, experience and wisdom. He will never find the energy in himself to start over. He has an established occupation, a job, and a predictable, unimpressive future. He exists in a given environment and, as an ambitious person, he would like to hold a prominent position. He lives among young people. He wants to bequeath to them his experience. He wants to impress, to be somebody, to be needed. He wants to somehow go on teaching, passing as an authority, sating their thirst.

  He feels young. It’s only now that he can feel young. He was too serious back then, he wasn’t impulsive, he didn’t build himself up. Now he clings to those whose youth strikes him as deliciously carefree, with no slitting of their wrists or saving the world.

  And they pin a grey beard on him.

  He’s useless to them with his skills at immediate motivation, activating the indifferent, and inspiring by his personal example. Even if they manifested an honest desire to see what Stępik has to offer, would they understand the essence, function and form of the things gathered there? Would they grasp the sense of his explanations?

  ‘For months at a time I only ate once a day,’ Stępik says.

  ‘Were you broke?’ they ask, bored.

  ‘I had some money, but who had time for food?’ he explains.

  They’re astonished. He could eat and he didn’t?

  They don’t understand what he’s talking about. He must be kidding, they think.

  ‘He went to all that effort, and what did he get out of it?’ the boy on the road asked me. ‘He never even bought himself a television set.’ The boy’s way of thinking is reasonable, logical, and should not be dismissed. ‘As much as I give of myself, so much I’ll get in return,’ the wise guy calculates. All his reckoning boils down to the issue of the payoff. With the provision that the payoff should be expressed in material terms, in a quantifiable nomenclature. What could Stępik answer to that? At best, they’d suspect him of being conceited. Of groundlessly boasting. How to prove to them that they’re wrong?

  No film and no book could capture the fate of Stępik’s generation. It has never been told. Even if that boy at the roadside were more passionate about the past than the future, it would be easier for him to understand the story of Mickiewicz’s generation, or Wokulski’s, than that of his own teacher. The first two are on record, but not Stępik.

  The boy on the road can write a six-page paper about Wokulski – what he was like. About Stępik, he is capable of saying: Geezer.

  Nothing more.

  Yet they meet every day, talk, and can ask each other questions and look for answers. They don’t do so.

  Why should they?

  ‘Sometimes I go to Warsaw,’ he says, ‘and on the streets, on the street corners, I see little groups waiting for something, as if I knew what. Or I see them getting on a tram or going into a cinema. In their attitude, in their behaviour, there’s something that I’m afraid of. I prefer to steer clear of them. It seems to me that if I said: “Excuse me”, they wouldn’t understand the words. Those faces are incapable of expressing emotions. Those hands do not know any gentle reflexes. How do I know? That’s the impression I get. I’ve never talked to them, though. I try to get inside my kids’ heads. I can’t do it. They asked me if I’ve read Joe Alex. I haven’t. I’ve read Rey, but not Joe Alex. They were triumphant. There you have it – if somebody knows Rey, can they understand contemporary life? To know what’s necessary and important now, you don’t need to worry your head about what used to be. Used to be – that means two or more years ago. Am I right?’

  How should I know?

  I listened to what he said. He struck matches and stared into the flame. He was finishing his last box when I was on my way back to the barren road.

  The Loser

  In the Ochota district of Warsaw they say: Losers go home. Everybody knows what a loser is. He’s an odd person. He lives fruitlessly, he’s always melancholy, he does not feel the passion for risk, he’s afflicted with an inadequacy complex.

  It’s a big day at the building known as ‘Peking’ on Grójecka. Two of its residents, Wilczyński and Szeryk – young engineers from the Automotive Technical Service – have bought a Fiat. Now they are getting ready for a camping trip to Mazuria. I will pass over several additional names. A car is a blessing for more than its owners. A horde of acquaintances also benefit from the vehicle. The purchase of the Fiat has therefore enhanced the reputation not only of the two engineers, but also of their friends. Among them is Misiek Molak.

  He goes to a party to celebrate the grey mouse now snoozing in the garage, still untested. The conversation covers tyres, moolah, making bacon and gearboxes. Highly edifying.

  Misiek nudges me.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’

  On the street:

  ‘There’s no living with them. They’re Talmudists immersed in the Sanskrit of technology. The world turns to a four-stroke beat, powered by a diesel engine. I can’t go on listening.’

  New elites are forming, he says later. If the old one was bonded by creative ambition, now the adhesive is the consumer principle. Satiate yourself, satiate yourself as much as possible with illusions, gambling, rushing around, inertia. An insanely attractive hobby. Every obstacle to this fun is suspect. They’re not tolerant in the least. They may not cast aspersions on their opponent, but instead they crush him with unrelenting indifference!

  The opponent – that’s him. He lays out in detail the difference between their positions, the genealogy of their enmity. They went to the same school and played on the same amateur soccer team. They were part of a group that extended over the whole district. Afterwards, he went to the university and they went to the polytechnic. The issue of political engagement arose: be active, pretend to be active, or turn up your nose? The disputes of ’56, and then the split. Misiek teaches at a school, and they work in industry. Not all of them – some hold administrative posts. It’s not important in the end. The important thing is how they’re evolving. He’s got a pack of students
on his back – noisy, shallow, ephemeral. They snort while reading the Great Improvisation. He accidentally overhears two girl students: ‘You dummy. Do it in a standing position. You won’t get knocked up.’ Life requires perpetual sacrifice – he breaks off a lecture because he sees that the class is doing a crossword puzzle.

  He feels that he lost his way. Why? And at what moment? He starts looking for an answer. Not in people – he regards them as blind. He trusts books. He spends hours at a time reading. He worms his way through the libraries. Lots of titles, and more and more questions. But the quest draws him in and the journey through the shadows savours of adventure. What’s around the corner with this hypothesis? What abyss lies beyond this page? You have to be careful: you’re on slippery ground.

  In the meantime, his friends stride across solid earth. They have a magical formula – the Big S. The S symbolizes a shock absorber. That’s their programme in a nutshell: live without shocks. Don’t expose your body to treacherous draughts. Weave a tight cocoon.

  We already know that they work. In general, they’re talented guys. Experts who keep up with what’s new in their field and can sense future opportunities. On the soccer pitch, the players can be divided into those who have a nose for goal and those who blunder around. They have precisely that instinctive nose for goal. Misiek only blunders around. The crowd overlook the blunderer and keep their eyes glued to the first kind, watching every move. That’s where the scoring comes from! Szeryk’s favourite saying is: ‘The only thing that counts in sports is the final score. For us, too.’ Misiek says that at that moment he can feel how he’s sweating. All his results are in the ‘loss’ column.

  ‘You loser!’ they shout in his face. ‘You accursed loser! Where are you going? Get on the team – we need somebody to do our fancy hand-lettering.’