Nobody Leaves

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  In the meantime the voices that Wiśnia detected become distinct and draw closer. We can hear snatches of melody, laughter, shouts. We listen attentively. Amid this dark wilderness our caravan has found traces of mankind. The voices are quite close now. Finally we pick out the silhouettes. Two, three, five.

  They’re girls. Six, seven.

  Eight girls.

  The girls – at first afraid, uncertain – end up staying. As the conversation gets off the ground, they start settling down around the fire next to us, so close that we could reach out and put our arms around them. It feels good. After everything we’ve been through, after a day of hard travelling, an exhausting march, the nerve-wracking tension, after all of this, or perhaps in spite of all this, it feels good.

  ‘Are you coming back from a hike, too?’ they ask.

  ‘Yes,’ Gruber says, lying. ‘Beautiful evening, isn’t it?’

  ‘Beautiful. I’m just starting to appreciate it. Like everyone.’

  ‘Not everyone,’ Gruber says. ‘There are some who don’t appreciate anything. Now or ever. Never.’

  We’re all watching the girls closely. In colourful dresses, their shoulders bare and sun-bronzed – in the flickering light golden and brown by turns – their eyes seemingly indifferent but in fact provocative and vigilant at the same time, accessible and unreachable, they stare into the blazing fire and appear to be surrendering to the strange and somewhat pagan mood that a night-time forest bonfire evokes in people. Looking upon these unexpected visitors we feel that, despite the numbness, sleepiness and exhaustion, we are slowly being filled with an inner warmth – and, while wanting it, we sense the danger that comes with it. The edifice that holds in place the purpose and justification for making this extraordinary effort on behalf of a dead man is suddenly tottering. Why bother? Who needs it when an opportunity like this presents itself? Only negative feelings link us to the dead man: in our new mood we could break away from the stiff so completely that any further toil of carrying the coffin would strike us as downright idiocy. Why make fools of ourselves?

  Woś, however, has remained gloomy after the incident with Jacek, and has not joined in the flirting. He draws me aside.

  ‘There’s going to be trouble,’ he whispers. ‘One or the other of them is sure to go off after a skirt. And if we’re a man short, we won’t be able to carry the coffin. This could turn into a stupid hassle.’

  From this remove, our calves almost touching the sides of the coffin, we watch the scene in the clearing. Gruber will go for sure. Kotarski, Pluta – no. And Jacek? He’s a question mark. He is, at heart, a shy boy, and wouldn’t initiate a thing unless the girl made the first move: he’d turn tail at her first ‘No.’ Yet because his character affords him few chances, he would grab avidly if one presented itself.

  ‘It’s a dead cert Jacek goes,’ Woś says.

  ‘Let’s get back to the fire,’ I tell him. ‘We’re not going to solve anything here.’

  We return. Pluta has thrown on some more wood. ‘Remember, it was autumn,’ the girls are singing. We feel good, and we feel uneasy. No one has breathed a word about the coffin, but the coffin is still there. Our awareness of its existence, of its paralysing participation, makes us different from the girls.

  Stefan Kanik, eighteen. Someone who is missing and at the same time is the most present. Reach out and you can put your arm around a girl; take a few steps and you can lean over the coffin – we are standing between life at its most beautiful and death at its most cruel.

  The stiff came to us unknown, and for that reason we can easily identify him with every boy in the world we have ever happened to meet. Yes, that was the one, that one for sure. He was standing in the window in an unbuttoned checked shirt, watching the cars drive past, listening to the babble of conversations, looking at the passing girls – the wind blowing out their full skirts, uncovering the whiteness of their starched slips, so stiff that you could stand them up on the floor like haystacks. And then he went out into the street and met his own girl and walked with her, buying her sweets and the most expensive lemon soda – Moorish Delight – and then she bought him strawberries and they went to the movie Holiday With Monica, in which an actress with a difficult name undresses in front of an actor with a difficult name, which his girl has never done in front of him, not even once. And afterwards he kissed her in the park, watching from out of the corner of his eye from behind her head, through her careless loose hair, to make sure that a policeman wasn’t coming who would take down his name and send him to school, or would want twenty zloty when they didn’t have more than five between them. And afterwards the girl would say: ‘We have to go now’, but she wouldn’t get up from the park bench; she would say: ‘Come on, it’s late’, and she would cuddle against him more tightly, and he would ask: ‘Do you know how butterflies kiss?’ and move his eyelids close to her cheek and flutter them, which must have tickled her, because she would laugh.

  Perhaps he would meet her many more times, but in our minds that naive and banal image was the only and the final one, and afterwards we saw only what we had never wanted to see, ever, until the last day of our lives.

  And when we pushed away that other, bad vision, we felt good again and everything was a joy to us: the fire, the smell of trampled grass, that our shirts had dried, the sleep of the earth, the taste of cigarettes, the forest, our rested legs, the stardust, life – life most of all.

  In the end, we went on. The dawn met us. The sun warmed us. We kept walking. Our legs buckled, our shoulders went numb, our hands swelled, but we managed to carry it to the cemetery – to the grave – our last harbour on earth, at which we put in only once, never again to sail forth – this Stefan Kanik, eighteen, killed in a tragic accident, during blasting, by a block of coal.

  A Dispatch from Ghana

  The fire stood between us and linked us together. A boy added wood and the flames rose higher, illuminating our faces.

  ‘What is the name of your country?’

  ‘Poland.’

  Poland was distant, beyond the Sahara, beyond the sea, to the north and to the east. The Nana repeated the name aloud. ‘Is that how it is pronounced?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the way,’ I answered. ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘They have snow there,’ Kwesi said. Kwesi worked in town, in Kumasi, and he had come here on vacation. Once, on the movie screen, snow had fallen. The kids applauded and cried merrily, ‘Anko! Anko!’ asking to see the snow again. That was great – the white puffs fell and fell. Those are lucky countries. They do not need to grow cotton: the cotton falls from the sky. They call it snow and they walk on it and even throw it into the river.

  We were stuck there by chance. The driver, my friend Kofi from Accra, and I. It was already dark when the tyre blew – the third tyre, rotten luck. It happened on a side road, in the bush, near the village of Mpango in Ghana. Too dark to fix it. You have no idea how dark the night can be. You stick out your hand and you cannot see that hand. Here they have nights like that. We walked into the village.

  The Nana received us. There is a Nana in every village, because Nana means boss, head man. The head man is a sort of village mayor but he has more authority. If you and Maryna want to get married back home the village mayor cannot stop you, but the Nana can. He has a Council of Elders. These old guys meet, govern, ponder disputes. Once upon a time the Nana was a god. But now there is the independent government in Accra. The government passes laws and the Nana has to execute them. A Nana who does not carry them out is acting like a feudal lord and they get rid of him. The government is trying to make all Nanas join the party, and many Nanas are the secretaries of their village party organizations. In such cases the party dues always get paid because the Nana takes them out of people’s taxes.

  The Nana from Mpango was skinny and bald, with thin Sudanese lips. Kofi presented us: my driver and me. He explained where I was from, and that they were to treat me as a friend.

  ‘I know him,’ Kofi said. �
��He’s an African.’

  That is the highest compliment that a European can receive. It opens every door for him.

  The Nana smiled and we shook hands. You always greet a Nana by pressing his right hand between both of your own palms. This shows respect for him. He sat us down by the fire, where the elders were just holding a meeting. He said boastfully that they met often, which did not sound strange to me. This bonfire was burning in the middle of the village and to the left and right, along the road, other fires were burning. As many fires as huts, because there are no kitchens in the huts and people need to cook. Perhaps twenty. So the fires, the moving figures of women and men, and the outlines of the clay huts were visible, all immersed in the depths of a night so dark that it felt like a weight, oppressive.

  The bush had disappeared, yet the bush was everywhere; it began a hundred metres away, an immobile massiveness, a tightly packed coarse thicket surrounding the village, and us, and the fire. The bush screamed and cried, it stamped and crackled, it was alive, it existed, it bred and gnawed, it smelled of wilted greenery, it terrified and tempted, you could touch it and be wounded and die, but you couldn’t look at it; on this night you couldn’t see it.

  Poland.

  They did not know of any such country.

  The elders looked at me uncertainly or suspiciously; some of them were interested. I wanted to break their mistrust somehow. I did not know how and I was tired.

  ‘Where are your colonies located?’ the Nana asked.

  My eyes were closing, but now I regained consciousness. People often asked that question. Kofi had asked it first, long ago. I explained it to him. It was a revelation to him and from then on he always lay in wait for the question about the Polish colonies so that he could make a concise speech demonstrating its absurdity.

  Kofi answered: ‘They don’t have colonies, Nana. Not all white countries have colonies. Not all whites are colonialists. You have to understand that whites often colonized whites.’

  That sounded shocking. The elders shuddered and smacked their lips: tsk, tsk, tsk. They were surprised. In the past, I would have been surprised that they were surprised. But not any more. I can’t bear that language, that white, black, yellow. The myth of race is disgusting. What does it mean? Because somebody is white, is he more important? So far, the majority of scoundrels have had white skin. I cannot see how anybody is either happy or upset about being this or that. Nobody gets to choose. The one important thing is the heart. Nothing else counts.

  Kofi explained later: ‘For a hundred years they taught us that the white is somebody higher, super, extra. They had their clubs, their swimming pools, their neighbourhoods. Their whores, cars, and their burbling language. We knew that England was the only country in the world, that God is English, that only the English travel around the globe. We knew exactly as much as they wanted us to know. Now it’s hard to change.’

  Kofi and I stuck up for each other, we no longer spoke about the subject of skin, but here, among new faces, the matter had to come up.

  One of the elders asked, ‘Are all the women in your country white?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘Are they beautiful?’

  ‘They’re very beautiful,’ I answered.

  ‘Do you know what he told me, Nana?’ Kofi interjected. ‘That when they have their summer, their women take off their clothes and lie in the sun to get black skin. The ones that become dark are proud of it, and others admire them for being as tanned as Negroes.’

  Very good! So, Kofi, you hit the bull’s eye! You got to them. The elders’ eyes lit up at the thought of those bodies darkening in the sun, because – you know how it is – men are the same all over the world: they like that sort of thing. The elders rubbed their hands together, smiled; women’s bodies in the sun; the fire here was driving away their rheumatism; they snuggled up inside their loose kente robes modelled on Roman togas.

  ‘My country has no colonies,’ I said, ‘and there was a time when my country was a colony. I respect what you’ve suffered, but we had it horrible: there were trams, restaurants, districts nur für Deutsch. There were camps, war, executions. You don’t know camps, war and executions. That was what we called fascism. It’s the worst colonialism.’

  They listened, frowning and closing their eyes. Strange things had been said, which they had to digest. Two whites and they could not ride in the same tram.

  ‘Tell me, what does a tram look like?’

  The concrete is important. Perhaps there was not enough room. No, it had nothing to do with room; it was contempt. One person stepping on another. Not only Africa is a cursed land. Every land can be like that – Europe, America, many places in the world. The world depends on people. Of course, people fall into types. For instance, a person in the skin of a snake. A snake is neither black nor white. It is slippery. A person in a slippery skin. That is the worst.

  ‘But Nana, we were free afterwards. We built cities and ran lights into the villages. Whoever couldn’t, learned how to read.’

  The Nana stood up and grasped my hand. The rest of the elders did the same. Now we were friends, przyjaciele, amigos. I wanted to eat. I could smell meat in the air. There was no scent of jungle, of palm, or of coconuts, but only of our sausage that costs 11.60 złoty at an inn, in the Mazury. And a large beer.

  Instead of that, we ate goat.

  Poland –

  – snow falling, women in the sun, no colonies, there had been a war, building homes, somebody teaching somebody to read.

  At least I had told them something, I rationalized inwardly. It’s too late to go into details, I want to go to sleep, we are leaving at dawn, staying to deliver a lecture is impossible.

  Suddenly I felt shame, some sort of shortcoming, a sense of having missed the mark. What I had described was not my country. Now, snow and the lack of colonies – that’s accurate at least. But it is nothing, nothing of what we know, of what we carry around within ourselves without even wondering about: nothing of our pride and despair, of our life, nothing of what we breathe, of our death.

  So, snow – that’s the truth, Nana, snow is marvellous and terrible, it sets you free with your skis in the mountains and it kills the drunkard lying by the fence. Snow, because January, the January 1945 offensive, ashes, everything in ashes: Warsaw, Wrocław, and Szczecin, a brick, a brick, freezing hands, warmth-giving vodka, people laying bricks, this is where the bed will stand, and the wardrobe right here, people filtering back into the centre of the city, ice on the windowpanes, ice on the Vistula, no water, holidays at the waterside, at the seashore, the sand, the woods, the heatwave, sand, tents and Mielno, I’m sleeping with you, with you, with you, somebody’s weeping, not here, it’s deserted and it’s night so I’m crying, those nights, our meetings till dawn, tough discussions, everybody having his say, Comrades! the sky lit up and the stars, because Silesia, blast furnaces, August, seventy degrees Celsius in front of the blast furnaces, the tropic, our Africa, black and hot, hot sausage, why did you give me a cold one, hang on friend, is this your solo, not jazz, but a speech, Sienkiewicz and Kurylewicz, cellars, damp, the potatoes are rotting, get a move on, woman, and turn those spuds over, the market women at Nowolipki, keep moving along, there are no miracles, what do you mean there aren’t, what a lovely little war, shut up about the war already, we want to enjoy things, to be happy, I’ll tell you something, you are my happiness, an apartment, a television, no, a motorcycle first, the noise when it revs, the children in the park wake up instead of sleeping, what air, not a cloud in the sky, no turning back, if Herr Adenauer thinks, too many graves, we can fight and we can drink so why can’t we work, unless we learn how, our ships are sailing on every sea, successes in exports, successes in boxing, youngsters in gloves, wet gloves pulling tractors out of the mud, Nowa Huta, we have to build, Tychy and Wizów, cheery bright apartment houses, up with the country, upward mobility, a cowherd yesterday and an engineer today, sliding through the polytechnic, do you call that an engineer, and th
e whole tram bursts out laughing (tell me what a tram looks like), it’s very simple: four wheels, an electrical pick-up, enough already, enough, it’s all a code, nothing but signs in the bush, in Mpango, and the key to the code is in my pocket.

  We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, to other people, and it is the key of our pride and our powerlessness. We know its configuration, but there is no way to make it accessible to others. We’ll never get it right, even when we really want to. Something, the most important, the most significant thing, will remain unsaid.

  Relate one year of my country, it does not matter which one, let us say 1957, just one month of that year, take July, just one day, let us say the sixth.

  No way.

  Yet nevertheless that day, month and year exist in us, they have to exist, because after all we were there, we were walking along the street, we were digging coal, we were cutting the forest, we were walking along the street, and how can you describe one street in one city (it could be Kraków) so that they can feel its movement, its atmosphere, its persistence and changeability, its smell and its hum, so that they can see it?

  They cannot see it, nothing can be seen, the night, Mpango, the dense bush, Ghana, they’re putting out the fires, the elders are going off to sleep and so are we (departure at dawn), the Nana is dozing off, snow is falling somewhere, women like Negroes, he thinks, they are learning to read, he said something, the Nana thinks, they had a war, whew, a war, he said, yes, no colonies, no colonies, that country, Poland, white and they have no colonies, he thinks, the bush screams, what a strange world.