Читать книгу Ryszard Kapuscinski - Artur Domoslawski - Страница 8

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Pińsk: The Beginning

This is one of the earliest photographs. It differs from the one on the balcony of the house on Błotna Street, but again features the rocking horse, now in the yard. Little Rysio’s hair is combed slightly to the right and he wears a warm jacket but no hat, so it must be spring or autumn. He may be three or four years old. It is the essence of childhood, nothing more.

A few later photographs have survived: showing him wrapped up as he walks along a street in winter, holding his father’s hand. A shop window in the background is inscribed ‘Józef Izaak’. In a similar photo of him with his mother, on the same street, he wears shorts; it is a sunny day in the summer of 1937, when he was five years old.

These photographs were taken in Pińsk, a city then in eastern Poland and now in Belarus. His parents, Maria and Józef, were from elsewhere. His mother, whose maiden name was Bobkowa, was the granddaughter of a baker known locally as ‘the Magyar’. (Because of a dark complexion? because he was an immigrant?) Maria came to Pińsk from Bochnia, near Kraków; Józef, the son of a local civil servant, was from the Kielce region. The government of the new Polish state, which came into existence after the First World War, wanted Poles to resettle along the eastern border, where they could disseminate Polish education, but few were keen to uproot themselves and go to a distant, culturally alien region.

Polish was the minority language in Pińsk. Two-thirds of the citizens were Jews and the rest were Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians, plus a handful of Germans. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, following the influx of settlers from the heart of Poland, almost one in four of Pińsk’s 35,000 citizens was an ethnic Pole.

Going to Pińsk (or Polesie, as the surrounding region is called) from central or southern Poland was a cross between exile and missionary work. Kapuściński used to say that his parents were told, in effect, ‘If you want jobs, go to teacher training college, and when you graduate, go to Polesie.’ And that is just what Maria and Józef did.

The two young teachers arrived in Pińsk on the eve of the Great Depression. ‘I was born the child of settlers,’ said Kapuściński. It was 1932. Just over a year later, his sister, Basia (short for Barbara), was born.

Thirty years after the war, Kapuściński goes to visit the city of his childhood for the first time. It is the mid-1970s, and Pińsk now lies within the Soviet Union.

Standing in Kościuszko Street (then, as today, Lenin Street), he immediately recognizes his surroundings. That is Gregorowicz’s restaurant, where Mama used to take him for ice cream. Over there is 3 May Square and there, Bernardyńska Street. Some images from his childhood, ‘though they are covered up by other ones, still exist’. Later he will say, ‘I feel that if I don’t write about it, the world of pre-war Pińsk will cease to exist, because it probably remains only in my head.’1

Does the seven-year-old boy from the remote province dream of the journeys inspired by Pińsk’s location or by the landscape beyond the window? Does the sight of the Riverine Flotilla of the Polish Navy stationed there stir his imagination? Knowing who the boy would become, one would like to conjure up a story of this kind.

‘Polesie was truly exotic,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Lots of rivers and canals, great floodplains. If you boarded a boat, you could sail the seas without disembarking. Pińsk was connected by water to all the oceans.’2 How do you sail to the oceans from Pińsk? Along rivers to the Baltic Sea, then via the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic; or along the River Dnieper to the Black Sea, and from there via the Bosporus, the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean . . .

The folk beliefs of Polesie say more about the world Kapuściński came from than all the historical stories about dukes, wars and sacred relics. Country people tell stories about the suicide, whose soul wanders the local woods, still wearing his body:

People regard a dead man remaining on earth and wandering as a punishment imposed on his soul by the Lord God. This soul cannot get into heaven. According to folk belief, there is always a penitent soul of this kind inside a whirlwind, and if one were to throw a knife at it, blood would be shed. But naturally it is hard to hit!3

This is like an Eastern European version of Macondo, the mythical land invented by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Macondo people fly around the village on carpets, or rise and hover in the air after drinking a cup of chocolate; they also have epidemic outbreaks of insomnia and memory loss.

Kapuściński sees associations with Africa. Among his handwritten notes I find a comparison, titled Polesie found in Africa, of the land of his childhood years with the continent he described as a reporter. Apart from poverty, hunger and disease, he lists belief in a spirit world, a cult of ancestors, and consciousness of tribal identity. Also, like Africa, Polesie is ‘colonized terrain’. There is, moreover, a handful of tangible similarities: no electricity, no surfaced roads, no shoes.

In other words, a description of the city where Kapuściński’s parents came to live in the early 1930s.

Kapuściński’s enduring memories of his family home are meagre. He remembers little from before the war. His account contains more intuition, more impressions bordering on poetry and fantasy, than specific information.

In sketches for a book about Pińsk (which he planned to write but never did), he says his father was good to him, and that this was important, sacred. He admits to having had no sense of his mother as a separate being; his parents were a single entity.

The only other person able to dredge up memories of the family home before the war is his sister, Barbara. As a student of English, she emigrated in the 1960s to Great Britain and later to Canada. Kapuściński was so angry at her departure that their relationship initially cooled. He believed it was necessary to stay in Poland and help build the country’s future after the destruction of the Second World War. Then a loyal member of the Communist Party, he felt that leaving for the West was a betrayal. But he and his sister had other causes of conflict. In People’s Poland the political authorities disapproved of anyone who had relatives in the West. Remaining abroad, in a capitalist country, was regarded as a form of running away and of renouncing one’s socialist fatherland. Kapuściński, who at the time had recently started working at the state press agency, was afraid that his sister’s emigration to the West might damage his reputation, undermine the trust of the decision-makers, and ruin his developing career.

‘We weren’t rich, but we weren’t deprived in any way. Both our parents worked at a school,’ recalls Barbara, whose married name is Wiśniewska, when I spend three days talking to her in Vancouver in June 2008.

Her testimony differs from that in certain of Kapuściński’s accounts which suggest he came from an impoverished background in Pińsk. It is true that teachers earned little in those days, but they belonged to a social stratum corresponding to the modern middle class; they were the cultural élite, especially in a provincial town like Pińsk. Photographs of their several-storey house also reveal that the Kapuścińskis did not live in a shack.

Yet the memories of poverty in Pińsk are a partly justified piece of literary self-creation. Little Rysio really did see poverty all around him. Although the Kapuścińskis themselves were not indigent, poverty dominated the local landscape; it was a ubiquitous element of his childhood. (‘This year’s spring,’ we read in a 1936 issue of Nowe Echo Pińskie (Pińsk New Echo), ‘fortunately quite an early one, has stirred new hopes among the unemployed masses that the tough winter is over, when frequently there were no potatoes in the house for dinner, and when gaunt, hungry children huddled together in cold, unheated hovels’).

Over the years, Kapuściński relates pieces from the book he planned to (but never did) write about Pińsk in the 1930s in interviews and chats, such as:

I think that era and Pińsk’s pleasant climate of co-existing, cooperating multiculturalism is worth salvaging in the modern, stressed-out world . . .

I was shaped by everything that shapes so-called borderlands man. Borderlands man is always and everywhere an intercultural person – someone ‘in between’. He is a person who learns from childhood, from playing in the yard, that people are different, and that otherness is simply a feature of mankind . . . In Pińsk one kid would bring a herring from home, another a piece of koulibiac, and a third a chop . . . Being from the borderlands means being open to other cultures, or more than that – borderlands people do not regard other cultures as different, but as part of their own culture . . .

It was a town full of friendly people and friendly streets. Until the outbreak of war, I never saw any conflict there. It was a place without pomp or show, a place full of modest, ordinary people. As teachers, my parents were those sorts of people too. Maybe that’s why I always felt all right later on in the so-called Third World, where people are distinguished not by wealth but hospitality, not by ostentation but cooperation.4

Was there really such an idyllic world on the borders where several nations, religions and cultures met? In that part of the world, during the 1930s, when the entire region seethed with ethnic, religious and class hatred?

It is 1930, and parliamentary elections are approaching. Piński Przegląd Diecezjalny – the ‘Pińsk Diocesan Review’, a periodical issued by the church – asks

whether the non-Christian, or unfaithful, indifferent Christian will make sure that only laws which are in accordance with the teachings of the Gospels will emerge from the Sejm and the Senate? Of course not. And if the majority of members of parliament are non-Christian or not very Christian, one can always expect non-Christian laws. Hence the final conclusion: to vote only for righteous, sincere Christians.5

And in another issue of the same journal: ‘From the pulpit one should clearly give the congregation the following instructions: . . . not to vote for the candidate lists of other denominations (Jewish, Orthodox, etc.)’.6

The Polish press issued in Pińsk and Polesie in the 1930s never stops warning of threats – from communists, Jews, Belarusians and Ukrainians.

Dwutygodnik Kresowy – the Borderlands Bi-Weekly – calls for a battle against ‘Jewishness’ and for ‘the establishment of full Polishness’. It warns that ‘despite its best intentions’, society ‘will not cope with Jewishness’ on its own; ‘the municipal authorities must insist on legislation that recognizes the precedence of Poles in Poland’.7

The overwhelming majority of citizens in Pińsk are Jews, yet the pro-government Echo Pińskie (Pińsk Echo) demands that Poles should hold the majority on the city council and should have their own mayor – and that is what happens.

Unlike cities in the Białystok region, as well as Wilno (now Vilnius) or Lwów (now Lviv), Pińsk in the 1930s never goes so far as to institute pogroms against the Jewish population, and the influence of the nationalist camp is small. However, according to the Jewish historian of Pińsk, Azriel Shohat, the city’s political landscape is far from idyllic:

This discrimination was strongly felt in Pinsk. Despite the fact that it was a Jewish city for the most part, the city’s mayor was a Pole and, until 1927, the city was run by an administrative body appointed by the Polish authorities. The city council included only two Jews and they, too, were appointed by the Polish authorities.8

In the 1930s, Polish nationalists are often heard proclaiming ‘each to one’s own for one’s own’, which serves as a form of incitement to boycott Jewish shops. This campaign, and the accompanying rise in anti-Semitism, does not bypass Pińsk. People talk about it at home, on the street, at work and in church.

Years later, the same Jewish historian will write,

Anti-Semitic students who came from outside the city plotted attacks against the Jews. However neither of these attempts succeeded. The Polish businesses could not compete with the Jewish ones and the Jewish youth knew how to silence the Polish hooligans and caused them to flee the city. 9

In interviews and conversations, Kapuściński idealized the land of his childhood, depicting Pińsk as a perfect, harmonious place, where tolerance reigned and people regarded mutual dissimilarity as a treasure. Yet in his notes for the book on Pińsk, that image becomes complicated, full of stains and flaws. Here, for instance, is an extract titled ‘Good Manners for Christian Children’:

[W]hen I look into the depths of time towards my childhood, the first thing I see is the dog catcher’s wagon coming down our bumpy road, Błotna Street, later called Perets Street and now Suvorov . . . when the dog catchers see a dog, they rush towards it and surround it, emitting wild shrieks, and then you hear the swish of a lasso and the terrified animal howling as they drag it away and throw it in a cage. Soon after, the wagon moves on.

Why these nasty, scruffy men are catching the poor dogs is something every Christian child will discover if he gets up to any mischief. Be good, he or she will then hear Mama or Grandma warn, or the dog catchers will take you away to make matzos! And so thanks to the constant presence of the dog catchers on the streets of our town, the Christian children are well brought up – not one of them wants to be eaten as an anonymous piece of brittle kosher flatbread.10

Are tales about Jews performing the ritual murder of Christian children so as to extract their blood and add it to their matzos – a monstrous myth, repeated in churches and Catholic homes, which for centuries was at the root of intolerance, pogroms and crimes against Jews – something little Rysio hears on the street, from neighbours, from his relatives?

His sister, Basia, a year younger, remembers stories of this kind. Here is one she told me: ‘An old Jew with a long beard once accosted me in the street. “Wait here,” he said, “I’ll go indoors and fetch you some sweets.” So I stand outside his house, waiting. A neighbour appears, and she says: “What are you doing here, Basia?” “I’m waiting for him,” I say, pointing at the Jew’s house. “He promised to bring me some sweets.” “Run away from here at once, child! He wants to kidnap you for his matzos!” ’

She then added, ‘In those days people used to say the Jews needed children’s blood for their rituals.’

In the summer of 1942, the army of the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union, taking Pińsk in the process. Eleven thousand of the city’s Jews were killed at once in two mass executions. The rest were driven into a ghetto, where a year later a resistance movement formed and a revolt occurred. A few of the Jews managed to escape and hide in the forest. Some joined partisan groups; others were finished off by the locals.

Years later, Nahum Boneh, a witness to that place and time who, after the war, headed the association of Pińsk Jews in Israel, wrote that

it was very dangerous for a Jew to be a member of a partisan group. In those days any Gentile who encountered a lone Jew could murder him or hand him over to the Germans. Among the partisans too there were anti-Semites who exploited every occasion (and there were many) to kill Jews, even though they were partisans.11

Among the accounts gathered by Boneh, there is also evidence that some Poles from Pińsk helped their Jewish neighbours, but Boneh’s verdict leaves no room for illusion: ‘the entire Gentile population waited passively and even happily for the extermination of the Jews and the opportunity to steal their possessions.’12

Kapuściński’s Pińsk, ‘a town full of friendly people and friendly streets’, was a wonderful Arcadia, the harmonious world that in adult life he desired for Africa, Latin America and all the inhabitants of the poor South. Was it also an element of his literary self-creation? A bit of myth-making to underpin the biography of an ‘interpreter of cultures’, as he wished to be seen at the end of his life? It would usefully point to the roots of this predisposition: here is a man of dialogue and many encounters with the Other, who has lived and breathed multiculturalism since childhood and has it in his blood.

Between the Pińsk of the home archive – the Pińsk of the dog catchers, where Poles murder Jews themselves or turn them over to the Germans to be murdered – and the idyllic Arcadia of Kapuściński’s casual talk and interviews lies a yawning chasm. Indeed, the chasm is so broad that it is hard not to wonder whether these two images of the city never came together in the long-heralded book simply because they were so contradictory and so mutually repellent.

Their father taught practical technology; Barbara cannot remember what their mother taught. She may have given lessons on everything – reading, writing and arithmetic for the youngest schoolchildren.

During the day, Rysieczek (the diminutive name his mother gives him) and Żabcia (‘Froggie’, as she calls little Basia) are looked after by a nanny, the hunchbacked Masia. Following her own mother’s death, Maria Kapuścińska takes over the care of her teenage sister, Oleńka. Barbara’s glimmers of childhood memory indicate that her parents had a large circle of friends and acquaintances, and that social life flourished in their home.

To say that Rysieczek is the apple of his mother’s eye says nothing about their feelings or relationship. She loves her daughter, but she worships her son. He is the loveliest, the cleverest, the most intelligent. Maria Kapuścińska’s faith in her son’s genius – according to family friends who knew her after the war – goes much further than the average mother’s idolizing of a talented son. ‘My son, my son’ – she spoke of him adoringly, in a sort of elation, as Kapuściński’s widow, Alicja, described it.

His mother’s youth coincided with the period between the wars, an era when patriotism was often associated with a uniform. For Pińsk’s Polish minority, the main centre for parties and gatherings was the officers’ casino. There the Kapuścińskis attended elegant balls, with Maria – her hair styled like the film star Jadwiga Smosarska – wearing a little hat and looking proud of belonging to the élite. When twenty-something Rysiek, as a student at Warsaw University, came home from military training in a field uniform, he clicked his heels together and cried, ‘Second Lieutenant Ryszard Kapuściński reporting at home!’ whereupon his mother burst into tears and declared, ‘My son is an officer!’

Maria found it hard to bear her son’s long absences when, as a correspondent for the Polish Press Agency (PAP), he would disappear for months on end, sometimes spending more than a year at a time in Africa or Latin America and occasionally offering no signs of life for several weeks. Whenever he went away, he asked his friends to ‘keep an eye on my parents’. From afar he wrote loving letters to ‘Maminka’, as he started calling his mother when he returned from one of his first trips abroad, to Czechoslovakia.

To know at least where he was, what was occupying his thoughts, and what he was witnessing, his mother would go to the PAP’s head office on the corner of Jerozolimskie Avenue and Nowy Świat Street to ask for her son’s reports. Often she received his articles before they were issued in PAP bulletins. Only once was she deliberately not given a report to read. It was from Nigeria, in 1966, just after a coup d’état:

I was waiting for them to set me on fire . . . I felt an animal fear, a fear that struck me with paralysis; I stood rooted to the ground, as if I was buried up to the neck . . . My life was going to end in inhuman torment. My life was going to go out in flames . . . They waved a knife before my eyes. They pointed it at my heart.13

The editor, Wiesława Bolimowska, went to the head of the department, Michał Hoffman, and insisted: ‘We can’t let this go out, because Mrs Kapuścińska will die of a heart attack if she reads it.’ In order to stop the newspapers from reprinting the article, they blocked its publication in all the agency’s bulletins, which was a frequent practice. A decade later, it appeared as ‘The Burning Roadblocks’ in Kapuściński’s collection of reports titled The Soccer War. Maria Kapuścińska was no longer alive; she died in 1974 at the age of sixty-three.

The father, by contrast, enjoyed making fun of his son. Whenever Rysiek was keenly studying something, he always underlined important sentences in books – a habit he continued throughout life, initially as a renowned reporter and then as a world-famous writer – and his father would provoke him by saying: ‘Go to bed, Rysio. I’ll have the whole book underlined for you by morning.’

He also used to joke that Rysiek was of medium height, causing Maria to burst out, ‘What do you mean, medium? Rysio is tall!’ His father would laugh and say, ‘Rysio is medium taller and I’m medium smaller’, at which point his mother would end the debate by shouting, ‘What are you on about, old man? You’re small, and my son is tall!’

Rysiek could not look to his father for inspiring conversation about culture, books, politics or the world. For years he suffered from feeling he was a poorly educated provincial who had been given little at home and had had to achieve everything through hard work. Once he told me that as a young reporter, whenever he used to meet his fellow writers Kazimierz Dziewanowski and Wojciech Giełżyński, both of whom came from truly intellectual homes, he was ashamed to speak up. ‘They knew all about everything; they used to exchange names and book titles I had never even heard of,’ he said, perhaps with a note of pride at having outdistanced these colleagues. Yet many years earlier, as he sat with them not knowing what and how to contribute to the conversation, he must have felt pain rather than pride.

Józef Kapuściński only dimly understood his son’s occupation. He was outraged to see newspapers featuring the name ‘Kapuściński’ spread across the floor to be trodden on or used to line the waste bin. A conscientious and dutiful man, he claimed to have never once been late for a lesson. He found it irritating that his son shut himself in his room for hours at a stretch doing goodness knows what (in other words, writing) instead of going to work and earning a living for his family. In Józef ’s mind, someone who went to work was working, while someone who sat at home for days on end was not.

Once when he came to visit his son and daughter-in-law, he inquired, ‘Were you at work today, Rysio?’

‘Yes, Dad, I was.’

‘What time did you have to be there?’

‘At eight, Dad, eight o’clock,’ lied his son, to avoid a pointless argument.

Another time, Józef Kapuściński waxed indignant when a female friend of his son and daughter-in-law mentioned that her double surname consisted of her maiden name combined with her husband’s. ‘Where is your respect for your husband?’ he bristled.

As Kapuściński’s sister told me, to the end of his days their father, who died in 1977, never fully understoond what Rysiek did or who he was.