Читать книгу Ryszard Kapuscinski - Artur Domoslawski - Страница 9

3

War

I am seven years old, I am standing in a meadow (when the war began we were in the countryside in eastern Poland), and I am staring at some dots moving ever so slightly in the sky. Suddenly nearby, at the edge of the forest, there is a terrible boom, and I can hear bombs exploding with a hellish bang (only later will I discover that they are bombs, because at that moment I still don’t know such a thing as a bomb exists – the very idea is alien to me, a child from a remote province, who isn’t yet familiar with the radio or the cinema, doesn’t know how to read or write, and has never heard that wars or deadly weapons exist), and I see gigantic fountains of earth flying into the air. I want to run towards this extraordinary show, it stuns and fascinates me, and as I haven’t yet had any experience of war I cannot connect into a single chain of causes and effects the shining silver aeroplanes, the boom of the bombs, the plumes of earth flying up as high as the trees and death threatening me. So I start to run towards the forest, towards the bombs falling and exploding, but a hand grabs my arm from behind and pulls me over onto the meadow. ‘Lie down,’ I hear my mother’s trembling voice say, ‘Don’t move’ . . .

It is night, and I want to sleep, but I’m not allowed to sleep, we have to go, we have to escape. Where to, I do not know, but I understand that escape has become an absolute necessity, a new form of life, because everyone is escaping; all the highways, roads and even the field tracks are full of wagons, carts and bicycles, full of bundles, cases, bags and buckets, full of terrified people wandering helplessly. Some are escaping to the east, others to the west . . .

We pass battlefields strewn with abandoned equipment, bombed-out railway stations, and cars turned on their sides. There is a smell of gunpowder, a smell of burning, and a smell of rotting meat. Everywhere we come upon the dead bodies of horses. A horse – a large, defenceless animal – doesn’t know how to hide; during a bomb attack it stands still, waiting for death. At every step there are dead horses, either lying in the road, or in the ditch next to it, or somewhere further off in a field. They lie with their legs in the air, shaking their hooves at the world. I do not see any dead people anywhere, because they are buried quickly, just endless corpses of horses, black, bay, piebald, chestnut, as if it wasn’t a war between people, but horses.1

Fifty years later, on reading this description of the scene, the American author John Updike writes in a letter to Kapuściński that only now does he understand the significance of the figure of the horse in Picasso’s Guernica.

After days of wandering we are near Pińsk, and in the distance we can already see the town’s houses, the trees of its beautiful park, and the towers of its churches, when suddenly sailors materialize on the road right by the bridge. They have long rifles and sharp, barbed bayonets and, on their round caps, red stars . . . they don’t want to let us into town. They keep us at a distance – ‘Don’t move!’ they shout, and take aim with their rifles. My mother, as well as other women and children – for they have already rounded up a group of us – is crying and begging for mercy. ‘Plead for mercy,’ the mothers, beside themselves with fear, implore us, but what more can we, the children, do – we have already been kneeling on the road, sobbing and stretching out our arms, for a long time.

Shouting, crying, rifles and bayonets, the enraged faces of the sweaty and angry sailors, some sort of fury, something dreadful and incomprehensible, it is all there by the bridge over the river Pina, in this world that I enter at seven years of age.2

In Pińsk there is nothing to eat. Maria Kapuścińska stands in the window for hours, watching. In the neighbours’ windows Rysiek sees people gazing at the street in the same way as his mother. Are they waiting for something? But what?

Rysiek spends hours roaming the streets and courtyards with his friends. They play a few games, but in fact they’re hoping to find something to eat.

Sometimes the smell of soup comes wafting through a door. Whenever this happens, one of my friends, Waldek, thrusts his nose into the gap in the door and starts urgently, feverishly inhaling the smell, rubbing his stomach with relish, as if he were sitting at a table full of food, but moments later he loses heart and sinks into apathy again.3

He will constantly return to the admission that the war – as for everyone who lived through it – was a decisive experience; for the growing boy, the period which shaped his view of humanity and the world came between the ages of seven and thirteen.

Those who lived through the war will never be free of it. It has remained in them like a mental burden, like a painful growth that even as excellent a surgeon as time will never be able to remove. Listen to a gathering of people who lived through the war when they get together and sit down at table one evening. It doesn’t matter what they start to talk about. There may be a thousand topics, but there will be only one ending, and it will be remembering the war . . .

For a long time I thought this was the only world, that this is how it looks, and this is what life is like. That is understandable – the war years were the period of my childhood, then of my early adolescence, my first understanding, the birth of my consciousness. So it seemed to me that not peace, but war is the natural state, or even the only one, the only form of existence, that wandering, hunger and fear, air raids and fires, round-ups and executions, lies and screaming, contempt and hatred were the natural, eternal state of affairs, the meaning of life, the essence of existence.4

What do these words mean? That fear is a principle of the world and the most basic human emotion? That danger is another one? Instincts like these – maybe not yet thoughts, not so fully formulated – must have been aroused in the seven-, eight- or thirteen-year-old by ‘the natural state of war’.

Now, as I look through various texts by Kapuściński – whether spoken abroad, when he was already famous, or written – I find that the war continually recurs; if only as a brief memory, a reference, a starting or finishing point, it always finds room for itself. Somewhere he wrote that war reduces the world to black and white, to ‘the most primitive battle between two forces – good and evil’. How, then, do we emerge from it? How do we recover?

I’m trying to do some bookkeeping: what, where, when. As far as possible, I want to do it item by item. The only person who can help me with this is Barbara. In the course of our conversations I establish, unsurprisingly, that the siblings remembered certain events in the same or a similar way, and others in an entirely different way. Many Kapuściński never mentioned. Did he not remember them? Did he think them unimportant, or too traumatic?

I compare their accounts, even the ones about trivial events, and am often unable to determine which is closer to the truth – these are the truths of two children’s memories. Below I alternate Barbara’s story with fragments taken from Rysiek’s published accounts.

‘When war broke out, we were in the countryside near Rejowiec, which is not far from Chełm in southeastern Poland. We were on holiday there at our uncle’s place. I can’t remember much of the journey home. In Pińsk, which was under Soviet occupation, Rysiek went to school, and I was still too small.’

In school, starting in the first grade, we learn the Russian alphabet. We begin with the letter s. ‘What do you mean by s?’, someone asks from the back of the classroom. ‘It should begin with a!’ ‘Children,’ says the teacher (who is a Pole) in a despondent voice, ‘look at the cover of our book. What is the first letter on this cover? S!’ Petrus, who is Belorussian, can read the whole title: ‘Stalin, Voprosy Leninizma’ (Studies in Leninism). It is the only book from which we learn Russian, and our only copy of this book . . .

All the children will be members of the Pioneers! One day a car pulls into the schoolyard . . . Someone says that it’s the NKVD . . . The NKVD people brought us white shirts and red scarves. ‘On important holidays,’ says our teacher . . . ‘every child will come to school in this shirt and scarf ’.5

‘Soon people start talking about deportations to Siberia. The Polish teachers and policemen are going to be deported. Our father, who was a teacher and a reserve officer, decides to escape, which means illegally crossing the border into the General Government – the part of Poland under German occupation. He sets off at dusk, first to the house of his friend Olek Onichimowski, also a teacher, who lives near the railway station; they are going to escape together.

‘That same night the NKVD comes for my father. They are armed with rifles fitted with bayonets. They shout at Mama, Where’s your husband? Every five minutes Rysiek runs into the bathroom – he must have understood what was happening better than I did, and was more afraid; I was six and he was seven. Finally, perhaps out of spite at not finding my father there, the NKVD men stick their bayonets through a reproduction of Matejko’s painting Batory at the Battle of Pskov, which is hanging on the wall. They leave Mama in peace. Next day we discover that my father was in Pińsk that night, because he and Olek missed the train. Luckily he spent the night at his friend’s place.’

Several of them burst in, Red Army men and civilians, they barge in nervously and with such lightning speed, as if enraged wolves were chasing them. Rifles immediately leveled at us. A great fear: What if they fire? And what if they kill? . . . And to Mother: Muz kuda? (Where’s your husband?) And Mother, pale as a sheet, spreads her trembling arms and says that she doesn’t know . . . What are they searching for? They say that it’s weapons. But what kind of weapons could we have? My toy gun, which I used to fight the Indians with? . . . They want to take Mother away. Why, as a punishment?

[O]ne of the Red Army men, probably the eldest, probably the commander, hesitates for a moment, then puts on his cap, fastens the holster of his pistol, and says to his people: ‘Pashli!’ (‘Let’s go!’)6

‘For the next few nights we didn’t sleep – we were waiting for the NKVD to come back again.

‘Deportations of entire families began. That fate befell the family of my friend from next door, Sabina, whose father was a policeman. At five in the morning a wagon full of soldiers drove up to their house. The soldiers loaded their things onto the wagon, and allowed Sabina’s mother to cook a little buckwheat for the journey. I heard the noise and asked Mama if I could go to their place. Mama probably didn’t realize the danger I was in, and said yes.

‘The train they were using to deport them consisted of at least a dozen coaches, and loading them with people took several days. With our nanny Masia, Rysiek and I managed to smuggle in cooked buckwheat several times. It was winter and terribly cold, about thirty degrees below. Before the train set off, Sabina’s younger sister froze to death.’

In school, during breaks, or when we are returning home in a group, the talk is of deportations. There is now no subject more interesting.7

‘I remember that the whole time people talked about food, that something had to be obtained, or when would something be brought. One night it was my turn, and I had to stand in a queue for broken eggs. People pushed me out of the crowd, I didn’t get anything, and on top of that I broke the clay pot.’

Once, hungry and desperate, we approached the soldiers guarding the entrance to the barracks. Tovarishch, said Hubert, day pokushat, and mimed putting a piece of bread into his mouth . . . Finally one of the sentries reached into his pocket and instead of bread pulled out a little linen sack and handed it to us without a word. Inside were dark brown, almost black, finely chopped stems of tobacco leaves. The Red Army man also gave us a piece of newspaper, showed us how to twist it into a cone and pour into it the damp, foul-smelling tobacco gruel . . .

We began to smoke. The smoke scratched our throats and stung our eyes. The world started to swirl, rock, and was turned upside down. I vomited, and my skull was splitting from pain. But the all-consuming, gnawing sensation of hunger eased, weakened.8

‘Our Mama was lovely, we were never spanked, but just one time when she came back from the broken egg queue she hit us. Maybe she was feeling desperate and frustrated because she hadn’t got anything? It was about cigarettes. While she was out, Rysiek and I had found a box and smoked them all – about a hundred of them. We threw the dog ends and ash behind the bed, thinking Mama wouldn’t notice. She was really angry with us – I can’t remember her ever being like that again.’

‘It was warmer by then, probably the start of spring 1940, and we left Pińsk for good. They announced that anyone who wanted could go across to the German side, taking thirty kilos of luggage with them. Mama didn’t hesitate for a moment, despite the fact that she was leaving a fully furnished house, surely realizing she would never return to it. She put me and Rysiek on the wagon and we set off on our way. I remember a train ride after that. Before we crossed the border, first we went to Przemyśl, where my father’s parents lived. My grandfather was fairly fit, but for years my grandmother had suffered from paralysis in both arms and needed to be looked after on the arduous journey.

‘On the Soviet–German border we had to hand over money, jewellery and any valuables. On the German side they shaved our heads, because the Germans thought everyone coming from the East had lice. First they smeared some white paste on our heads, then they cut our hair. The boys were shaved bald, and the girls had their hair cut short.

‘I cannot remember how we met up with my father, but in any case we all went to live together in Sieraków outside Warsaw. It was a two-storey house, with one room downstairs, where my father ran a one-class school; he was the only teacher. Up thirteen stairs, there were two rooms with sloping walls under the roof. My grandparents, Rysiek and I slept in one, and my parents in the other.

‘My father was a strict teacher, and used to whack the pupils on the hands with a ruler; he told me to write a word out twenty times which I had written wrongly.

‘Did we suffer from hunger? Not at that point, but it was tough, and we were all pretty thin. At home there was a large cast-iron pot in which Mama used to make soup. There was soup every day – after all, we were living in the countryside. The children used to bring something as “payment” for school, a litre of milk, or some potatoes . . . Sometimes there wasn’t enough soup for everyone, and then Mama would say she wasn’t hungry.’

Hunger followed us here from Pińsk, and I was always looking for something to eat, a crust of bread, a carrot, anything at all. Once my father, having no alternative, said in class: ‘Children, anyone who wants to come to school tomorrow must bring one potato’ . . . The next day half the class did not come at all. Some of the children brought half, others a quarter of a potato. A whole potato was a great treasure.9

‘Rysiek and his friends invented a game which involved sprinkling gunpowder into a small metal pipe, and then throwing the pipe as hard as you could at the ceiling – that’s how I remembered it. There was a fiery explosion – luckily it didn’t burn our faces, or our eyes; there could have been a tragedy.

‘After about a year living in Sieraków we moved to Izabelin, where we had fabulous conditions for those days: a house with two rooms, a kitchen, hall and veranda. We also had a garden, where we grew vegetables, a few fruit trees – apples and plums – and in a wooden outbuilding there were rabbits and hens, which meant we had eggs on a daily basis. Dad rode a bike to the school in Sieraków, and Mama babysat the local children, for which she got jam and honey. Rysiek and I went to school in Izabelin.’

‘There were often at least a dozen bikes “parked” outside our house. Underground meetings were held there – my father was in the Home Army [Armia Krajowa, or AK – the Polish resistance] – which unfortunately was evident to all. And dangerous. Our neighbour Grothe, the shop owner, was Volksdeutsch [an ethnic German]. He had a wife and three daughters, one of whom, Iza, I befriended. One day, when I had come home from seeing her, an operation began at Grothe’s house. The AK had passed a death sentence on him, though luckily they hadn’t appointed my father to carry it out. We heard shouting and cries for help. There was nothing we could do. Later we found out that in trying to defend himself, Grothe had thrown acid at one of his attackers and barricaded himself into the shop. They had shot him through the door.

‘The next day a nightmare began. A lorry full of gendarmes drove into the village. There were cars, motorbikes, dogs – a general uproar. They dragged out our neighbour Wojtek Borzęcki, who was someone in the area, a handsome man who went about in jodhpurs and knee-high riding boots; I think he was a count. They started torturing him in full view of everyone. They stuck nails under his fingernails, and he howled so loud I can still hear that howling now. Rysiek and I are watching this, glued to the window. Then they drag out the teacher, Franciszek Pięta. They drive him about the village by car, strip the skin off his face and sprinkle salt on it. Mama and I kneel down and pray at an accelerated rate, as if a rapid prayer were going to bring him aid faster.

‘We were afraid for my father. He had gone to Sieraków that morning and he wasn’t back. It turned out the Germans had launched a crackdown throughout the district. In Sieraków, as he was closing the school, they were already waiting for him. From what he told us afterwards, somewhere by a roadside cross they divided the men they had rounded up into two groups. They took some with them, but luckily our father was in the group of men they let go. During the selection he had managed to throw to the ground some small pieces of paper containing secret information and bury them with his foot.

‘By the time he came home, it was night. We hadn’t slept a wink; we were terrified. That night my parents made the decision to run away. In the morning our father went to work in Sieraków, but didn’t come back – afterwards he went straight to Warsaw. He spent the next few nights in various places, staying with friends. Every night he had a problem, because he had to organize a different place to stay.’

At night the partisans come . . . One time they came, as usual, at night. It was autumn and it was raining. They talked to my mother about something in a whisper (I hadn’t seen my father for a month and I would not see him until the end of the war, as he was in hiding). We had to get dressed quickly and leave: there was a round-up in the district, they were transporting whole villages to the camps. We escaped to Warsaw, to a designated safe house. It was the first time I had been in the big city, the first time I ever saw a tram, high multi-story tenements, and rows of big shops.10

‘Rysiek, Mama and I spent several months living with a friend of my parents from Warsaw, Jadwiga Skupiewska. My father occasionally dropped in for the night, but he was not usually there. Where exactly the flat was, I don’t know; I remember a tenement with a central well. We weren’t allowed to go up to the windows, because staying with someone without being registered was strictly forbidden. So both we and the friends who gave us shelter were taking a risk.’

We were living in Warsaw then [as the winter of 1942 approached], on Krochmalna Street, near the gate to the ghetto, in the apartment of the Skupiewskis. Mr Skupiewski had a little cottage industry making bars of green bathroom soap. ‘I will give you some bars on consignment,’ he said. ‘When you sell four hundred, you will have enough for your shoes, and you can pay me back after the war.’ People then still believed that the war would end soon. He advised me to work along the route of the Warsaw–Otwock railway line, frequented by holiday travellers; vacationers will want to pamper themselves a little, he counselled, by buying a bar of soap. I listened to him. I was ten years old, and I cried half the tears of a lifetime then, because in fact no one wanted to buy the little soaps. In a whole day of walking I would sell none – or maybe a single bar. Once I sold three and returned home bright red with happiness.

After pressing the buzzer I would start to pray fervently: God, please have them buy something, have them buy at least one! I was actually engaged in a form of begging, trying to arouse pity. I would enter an apartment and say: ‘Please, madam, buy a soap from me. It costs only one zloty, winter is coming and I have no shoes.’ This worked sometimes, but not always, because there were many other children also trying to get over somehow – by stealing something, swindling someone, trafficking in this or that.

Cold autumn weather arrived, the cold nipped at the soles of my feet, and because of the pain I had to stop selling. I had three hundred zloty, but Mr Skupiewski generously threw in another hundred. I went with my mother to buy the shoes. If one wrapped one’s leg with a piece of flannel and tied newspaper on top of that, one could wear them even in the worst frosts of winter.11

‘We moved to Świder, outside Warsaw, on the other side of the Vistula [River]. It was a house with four flats, and we occupied one of them. Rysiek and I went to school in Otwock, seven kilometres one way, on an almost empty stomach; in the morning we barely drank a mug of chicory coffee. At school our dinner snack was a bowl of hot soup. After coming home and doing our homework, Mama usually said: “Children, go to bed, there won’t be any supper today”. So it went on almost until the war ended.

‘Our father was then working as a tax collector in Karczew – about a dozen or more kilometres from Świder – under a false name. He visited us once a week and sometimes brought a bit of sausage. These were the presents people with no money had given him to buy themselves off; they had asked him to come back some time later for their dues.

‘Then our father tried to work as a handyman. He advertised that he could solder pots, for instance, but no one wanted to employ him. People had no money, or even food to pay him for the work. My father sewed me dresses and made us shoes.’

Throughout the war my big dream was about shoes. To have shoes. But how could I get them? What could I do to have some shoes? . . . A strong shoe was a symbol of prestige and power, a symbol of command; a wretched, worn-out shoe was a sign of humiliation, the stigma of a man stripped of all dignity and condemned to an inhuman existence. To have strong shoes meant to be strong, or even simply to be.12

‘Other memories? I remember the tragic story of a Jewish woman who was hiding in one of the four flats in our house. She gave me maths coaching. I don’t think she taught Rysiek, because he didn’t have any problem with maths. We used to share our soup with her. She had a beautiful fur coat and a woman she knew wanted to . . . get it from her? Buy it? The Jewish woman refused. One day she went to see that other woman, wearing the fur, and never came back. Did the other woman betray her for the fur? That was what was said afterwards . . .

‘The Warsaw Uprising meant little bits of burned paper blowing our way from Warsaw, and the death of our uncle in the fighting.

‘The Soviets were getting nearer, and the Germans were taking all boys over the age of sixteen to dig trenches. Those taken away for this work never came back . . . That fate befell Janek, whose own father, our janitor, bundled him off because he himself was afraid to go. Thank God, Rysiek was barely twelve, and didn’t look too solid, so they left him alone.

‘We were living near the front line and we could hear the noises of fighting. We often went down to the cellar, which served as our shelter. Everyone prayed that no bomb would hit the house, and God heard us . . .

‘At that time Rysiek was very religious; he would stay like that to the end of the war, and perhaps a year or two after it as well. In Izabelin he also served at mass as an altar boy. One time I noticed a pool of saliva by our bed. “That’s so I’ll be on an empty stomach for Holy Communion,” he explained to me very earnestly.’

In 1944 I became an altar boy. My priest was the chaplain for a field hospital. There were rows of camouflaged tents hidden in a pine forest on the left bank of the Vistula. During the Warsaw Uprising, before the January offensive was launched, there was feverish, exhausting activity here. Ambulance cars kept rushing in from the front, which roared and smoked nearby. They brought the wounded, often semi-conscious, hurriedly and chaotically piled one on top of another, as if they were sacks of corn (but sacks dripping with blood). The orderlies, themselves only half alive from exhaustion by now, fetched out the wounded and laid them on the grass, then took a rubber hose and doused them in a strong jet of cold water. Any of the wounded who started to show signs of life were carried into the tent housing an operating theatre (on the ground outside the tent, every day there lay a fresh pile of amputated arms and legs), but anyone who wasn’t moving anymore was taken to a large grave situated at the rear of the hospital. It was there, over the never-ending grave, that I stood for hours next to the priest, holding the breviary and the stoup for him, repeating the prayer for the dead after him. To each person killed in action we said: Amen, dozens of times a day, Amen, in a hurry, because somewhere nearby, beyond the forest, the machine of death was working away relentlessly. Until finally one day it was silent and empty – the ambulances stopped coming and the tents were gone (the hospital went west), and the crosses were left in the forest.13

According to one hypothesis about the ‘psychological inheritance of war’, war has created the conviction that those who stick their necks out – the brave ones – are the first to come to grief.

In notes from a conversation I had with Wiktor Osiatyński, one of Kapuściński’s closest friends, I see that he echoes this thought: ‘The brave children in war were killed, the less brave had a better chance of surviving. It’s that simple. The experience of war, the sight of death and suffering, the poverty, hunger and terror – all this changes a person’s attitude for ever, his approach to life.’

In talking about brave and less brave children, Osiatyński is not directly referring to his friend, but rather suggesting a possible key. ‘I never judge anyone whose youth coincided with the war and then Stalinism,’ my notes read. ‘I don’t know how I would have got through that time myself, or how I would have behaved.’

Later in the conversation, Osiatyński says: ‘He wasn’t a man of great courage, though several times he managed to say no. For example, following the introduction of martial law on 13 December 1981, when he gave up his PZPR [Polish United Workers’ Party] membership card – that must have been hard for him. I have no reason to challenge his stories of how he was going to be shot several times when he was a correspondent in Africa and Latin America, or rather I have no solid proof to the contrary. But nor could I ever resist the impression that he created his courage in literature. He knew he was different.’

To have experienced the privations, suffering and danger of war has a paradoxical flip side: it facilitates adaptation to the tough conditions of work as a foreign correspondent during wars, revolutions and unrest on various continents, when there is nothing to eat and you sleep anywhere you can. The point is not that it was easier for Kapuściński than for other reporters, or that he suffered less, but that he probably had a different ‘internal limit’ of resilience, a greater capacity to adapt, perhaps also to cope with fear, than those journalists who had not had a taste of war in childhood and grew up in relative peace and prosperity.

‘Rysiek never openly admitted it, but he was fascinated by images of war. I feel exactly the same,’ says Mirosław Ikonowicz, a friend from the same generation. They met as students in the history faculty at Warsaw University and spent many years working for the same press agency. Like Kapuściński, Ikonowicz was a PAP correspondent during the civil war in Angola. ‘War, revolution, dangerous places were necessary to him for “life on the edge,” ’ he told me. ‘I would compare this need of his – and of mine as well – to the needs of people who go in for extreme sports. Though he used to say he wasn’t looking for extra adrenalin, I think this need lay deep inside him – we talked about it a number of times.’

Another note from my conversation with Ikonowicz reads, ‘Rysiek didn’t like being confronted.’ To what extent can his war experiences be involved in this dislike of confrontation? Is it that when it comes to conflict, a squabble or a clash, a person can get hit? And yet throughout his professional life he was eager to go to dangerous places.

I shall answer these questions later, and also return to the question of personal courage. I note in the margin: ‘Establish everything possible on Kapuściński’s several near-executions by firing squad’ – extreme confrontations which he described in books and interviews.

But in response to the question ‘How did the war shape Kapuściński?’ I offer Hanna Krall’s short answer: ‘He was a child of the war, and like many people of his generation the war made him eager for life.’

When Imperium was published, readers from Pińsk corrected and sometimes challenged some details of Kapuściński’s account of their city under Soviet occupation. One wrote that only Russians, and not even all Russians, were accepted in the Pioneers’ organization; apparently Polish children could belong to the Pioneers as long as their parents immediately took out USSR citizenship. Another correction was that the Pioneers received the white shirts and red scarves from that organization, not from the NKVD at school.

Memory, especially a child’s memory, affected by knowledge gained years later, is always subjective. Inevitably it blurs the borders between hard facts and impressions, family stories and gossip. But can there be another truth which a person is capable of telling about himself?

Kapuściński may have got some details wrong. Perhaps his memory encoded the same events differently than did the memories of his Pińsk reviewers. In the CVs he attached to applications for college, and later to join the PZPR, Kapuściński wrote that he belonged to the Pioneers – a detail in his memoirs that has been challenged. By now, his membership is impossible to verify.

Yes, the question of whether Kapuściński embellished his own life story is legitimate. As I read, converse with Barbara, friends, and colleagues, compile facts and dates, and do the biographical bookkeeping, I come upon clues that make it impossible not to have doubts. As he told stories about his life, was he ‘writing’ yet another book? Is Ryszard Kapuściński – the hero of Ryszard Kapuściński’s books (and he is the hero of almost all his own books) – a real person? To what extent is he also a literary character? Did Kapuściński create his own legend? How? Why?