Rysiek is popular with the girls. One of his schoolmates is madly in love with him, but he is in love with her younger sister. This is the time of first loves and conquests. The boys show off in front of each other. One has the following experience:
One day the boy turns up at a friend’s house, slightly embarrassed, but at the same time proud of a conquest. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘she’s in the family way. Could you possibly help?’ The friend’s aunt is a gynaecologist with a private surgery on Słupecka Street. The friend writes her a note: ‘Dearest Auntie Niusia, I’m sending a girlfriend of mine to see you.’ The aunt doesn’t actually know who got the girl into trouble but feels certain it was her nephew.
Meanwhile, the real troublemaker is not at all perturbed by what has happened. He has been boyishly reckless. The others rather envy him – not for what has happened, but for the fact that he has already experienced something that still lies ahead for them. As for Rysiek, one school friend remembers that he loved boasting about girls.
Unlike the high times at the Kapuścińskis’, at Czcibor-Piotrowski’s home on Filtrowa Street there is no drinking. The friends sit politely at table, listening to the maths coaching given them by the host’s brother, Ireneusz. But they have no passion for maths – their thoughts and imaginations have flown to a very different realm. All thanks to the Polish teacher, Witold Berezecki. He has infected them with a love of literature, poetry. He’s given them the weekly Odrodzenie (Renaissance) and other cultural periodicals to read at home. Czcibor-Piotrowski remembers one occasion when the homework was to write a sonnet.
Staszic is a remarkable school; until 1950, when they take their school-leaving exams, the most highly qualified pre-war teachers will still be teaching here. Lectures on Latin are given by a female professor from Warsaw University. ‘In the humanities class’, notes Andrzej Wyrobisz, who was at the top of the class then and is now a retired professor of history at Warsaw University, ‘we were taught to “think mathematically”; in history lessons no one ever asked about dates, but about why and where from. You won’t find any dates in Kapuściński’s books either.’
A telling story from Teresa Lechowska: ‘The Polish teacher was discussing our homework and called on Kapusta [cabbage], as we used to call Rysiek, to read his aloud. It turned out to be a poem! A bit socialist–realist, a bit lyrical. I remember there was something about a mason who builds a window, which is a frame for the sky. I was surprised Kapusta had revealed a talent for poetry, because I associated him with nothing but football, which he was totally mad about.’
With Berezecki, the pupils discuss books they have discovered outside the classroom. Each one wants to show off how much he has read beyond the required minimum – that is how they impress each other. Many book collections were destroyed during the war, but a fair number have survived – the library on Koszykowa Street, for example. The Staszic pupils make use of lending libraries which are spontaneously appearing on the streets and in private flats. The young men with literary aspirations organize a school literary circle, run by Czcibor-Piotrowski. They invite well-known writers and critics to discuss literature.
Kapuściński and Czcibor-Piotrowski are crazy about the French poets. They manage to get hold of An Anthology of Modern French Verse, translated by Adam Ważyk. They know most of the poems by heart and recite them aloud. Rysiek declaims the first verse, Andrzej adds the second, and so on.
‘Once we were chatting about Paris in the 1870s and someone mentioned the “revolt of Parisians storming heaven,” ’ recalls Czcibor-Piotrowski. ‘Rysiek was planning to write a story about Rimbaud and Verlaine, about their journey from the countryside to the city to stand on the barricades of the Commune.’
The two boys also recite Pushkin and Lermontov, Yesenin and Mayakovsky. Both being from the eastern borderlands, they can read Russian in the original. As Czcibor-Piotrowski tells me: ‘I remember how one day Rysiek came to see me, clearly excited. At the Czechoslovak Information Centre he had got hold of a volume of poems by František Halas. This poet’s verse, though actually he didn’t understand much, almost nothing, made a huge impression on him – the metre, the richness of the language . . . He quoted me something from memory and suddenly stopped on the word koralka, which he associated with the Polish word koralik, a coral bead. Years later, when I became a Czech scholar and translator of Halas’s poetry, I found out that koralka simply means the same as our Polish gorzalka – homemade hooch.’
Rysiek, predictably, makes his own first attempts at poetry and sends his work to Odrodzenie and also to Dziś i Jutro (Today and Tomorrow), a journal issued by PAX, the Catholic association licensed by the PZPR. In August 1949 this journal publishes two of his poems, ‘Written by Speed’ and ‘The Healing’. His friends, the high school literati, are secretly jealous that Rysiek is the first to enter the literary world.Years later he will say, ‘I sent them off half-heartedly, just as an experiment.’
Into the city, where joy lay buried under bricks,
Feeling thorn-sharp sorrow came
a man.
His eyes saw tortured ruins burned to sticks,
His hands shot through with pain were portents of
a plan . . .
And now the streets are paved in sunshine bright
And high among the trees rise red-tiled roofs.
As stars roam through the shallow dark
of night,
People are taller than houses. For in them grows
the Truth.2
Does the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school student fully understand what is happening in the country? He knows there was a different political system before the war, and that now Poland is to be socialist; that the former enemy – the Soviet Union – is now a ‘fraternal country’. Does he grasp what it all means?
At the beginning of Rysiek’s high school days, the socialist revolution which is starting to occur in Poland still lies beyond the horizon of interests of the boy from ‘the deep and indigent Polish provinces’, from the ‘impoverished gentry’. It is also doubtful whether he perceives a connection between the new order and his own chances in life.
Indeed, he does join the communist youth organization, the Union of Polish Youth (ZMP), but this is not a conscious ideological choice. Whole classes and schools were enrolled in the union collectively, without asking the young people if they wanted to join. Religious instruction was still given at state schools, and sometimes the pupils went straight from a lesson in religion to a ZMP meeting.
Kapuściński has described the atmosphere within the school organization several years later when, by now conscious and politically committed, he applies for acceptance into the Communist Party: ‘The attitude of group members at the time when I took on the presidency was for the most part alien to our organization. Many people had joined it for careerist reasons. At the meetings they used to play cards or do their homework, or else they didn’t turn up at all. Wanting to eradicate this behaviour, I threatened them with expulsion from the organization. That gave them a shock.’ For this reason, he submits a self-critical report, declaring that he should have been attracting his fellow pupils to the ZMP, encouraging them rather than scaring them with expulsion. Regrettably, as he admits in his hand-written curriculum vitae, he used ‘leftist methods of managing the organization’.
Deep in his soul, the recent altar boy and now freshly baked ZMP member is still experiencing his ‘religious and mystical’ phase. He offers a friend a small collection of his own poetic and prose miniatures, God Wounds with Love, the title of which he took from Verlaine. He bangs out the text on a typewriter and signs it with the publisher’s name ‘Leo’, in honour of Lwów,