10
Alicja, Maminek, Zojka
He looks at her once, then a second time. He invites her to the cinema, perhaps the Stolica in Mokotów; she can’t remember which film it was. It is autumn 1951, the start of the academic year.
At ZMP meetings she sits in the corner with her girlfriends, chatting and laughing. Colleague Kapuściński, a very important ZMP activist, sits at the presidium table, sermonizing about class enemies and increased vigilance, and occasionally he hushes the giggling girl: ‘Colleague Mielczarek, stop talking!’
‘He had a naughty look in his eyes,’ she says. ‘That was how he let me know he was watching me.’
They meet at university parties. She waits for him because, after all, he’s an activist. A revolutionary is always having to rush off and see to something or advise about something – a revolution is no joke, it’s hard work from dawn to dusk. He is late for their dates, and when he finally turns up, they start to tango. Their male and female friends form a circle around them, but as they gaze at each other, they don’t even notice.
They made friends at once in the first year of history. She was totally fascinated by him. He was so handsome, with thick, dark hair, fit and athletic, with a good physique, she remembers. He used to kick a ball about – he loved playing soccer.
‘You’ve picked up the best-looking guy in the year,’ her girlfriends say enviously.
She has come to Warsaw from Szczecin for her university studies, and she feels very liberated in the big city. One time, several girls are sitting in a café with their legs crossed, each smoking a cigarette. She is laughing and gesticulating. He sits down opposite. He looks at her, staring and staring, and shakes his head in disapproval. She pretends she hasn’t seen him and goes on chatting, but she swiftly stubs out her cigarette. She never smokes again.
Teresa Torańska, with whom I conduct a joint interview with Alicja Kapuścińska for Gazeta Wyborcza,1 says to her: ‘He only had to nod his head?’
‘No, he shook it . . . He didn’t want the girl who had caught his eye to be a smoker. In those days, young girls like me didn’t smoke.’
‘But he smoked, didn’t he?’
‘For over thirty years. Too long. He only gave it up in 1980, when Professor Noszczyk got him scared about it. You have clogged arteries, he told him, so either give up smoking or I’ll have to chop your legs off.’
Alicja’s parents, Mr and Mrs Mielczarek, came from Łódź. They had been to teacher training college and met as village teachers. They taught at one-class schools, and before the war had always lived in accommodation adjoining their workplace. Not knowing what else to do with her small daughter, Alicja’s mother used to take her into the classroom. With a very serious look on her face, the child would sit among the first-year pupils in the front row – and at barely three years old she started to read. Afterwards she was always very proud of being better at parsing the grammar and logic of a sentence than her brother, who was three years older.
The war caught up with them in the village of Józefów, where her parents taught, in territory which the Germans annexed to the Reich. The Mielczareks headed for the General Government, managed to get across the border and found a place to live in the Lublin area. Alicja spent the four years of German occupation in a small village with not much more than twenty houses and two wells a few dozen metres deep. She remembers a small barrel on a chain tied to the well shaft, with two buckets fixed inside it. The water was poured into the buckets and carried on a special yoke across the shoulders, as in Africa, carefully, to avoid spilling a single drop.
In the 1960s when she visits her gravely ill husband in Africa, where he is a PAP correspondent, their close friend Jerzy Nowak, a diplomat, will say: ‘Look how they carry the water here, Ala.’ She will reply, ‘I’ve seen that before, during the war, in the countryside near Lublin.’
After the war, Alicja’s parents left for western Poland, to settle in the so-called Recovered Territories. First they lived in Koszalin, and then Szczecin. Alicja went to a girl’s high school, where pre-war discipline prevailed and the girls wore a compulsory uniform.
Alicja was a star pupil – she had top marks and was president of the student council. She was even a przodownik nauki – ‘the number one student’, in communist terminology – yet another sign of the new times.
The year before her high school graduation exams, the headmistress calls her in to her office.
‘Now then, Miss Mielczarek, you are president of the council and you’re a good student. I have received a directive from the authorities to create an education class. There is a lack of teachers in this country, so we need to train new staff. I’d like you to join this class, and then I’ll have an argument to persuade others – when you have joined, the other girls will follow your lead and willingly agree.’
Like it or not, she cannot say no.
She is already in the ZMP, which displeases her mother. ‘Why did you sign up for that?’ she complains. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ answers the daughter.
Her father, on the other hand, is pleased. Even before the PZPR came into being, he belonged to its wartime predecessor, the PPR, or Polish Worker’s Party. He and his wife were always quarrelling about it, but there was no domestic war in the Mielczarek home as a result.
Alicja’s mother had dreamed of a career in medicine, but before the war she had no chance of achieving it. She tells her daughter: ‘I’d love you to become a doctor.’ And Alicja is convinced that one day she will do just that. When at school the girls are assigned the essay title ‘Who Do You Want to Be?’, she writes: ‘I am going to be a doctor.’
Along with her high school graduation diploma, Alicja receives a state order to work at one of the schools in Szczecin. It looks as if medicine, or any other studies, will forever remain a dream. But she wants to study – very much, at any cost. She goes to see the local superintendent of schools. She is told: ‘There’s nothing we can do, you’ll have to go to the Ministry.’ She goes to Warsaw. There they tell her: ‘You can go to college, but only the kind that prepares you for school teaching.’
So Alicja chooses to study history at Warsaw University. She isn’t obsessed with the subject, but she likes her school history teacher. In Warsaw she lives in a four-person room in the so-called New Dziekanka – a university residence hall on Krakowskie Przedmieście in central Warsaw, near the statue of Adam Mickiewicz. It is attached to the old Dziekanka, which belonged to the art college.
Rysiek is now living with his parents and sister in the two-family Finnish cottage on Pole Mokotowskie (Mokotów Field, a large park in Warsaw); the Kapuścińskis occupy one half of it. At the entrance, several steps lead into a tiny vestibule, with a small toilet and kitchenette with a metal sink to one side, and a living room with an alcove to the other. In the living room there is a sofa bed for the parents, a wardrobe, a table, and a couple of chairs. In the alcove, divided from the room by a curtain, are two iron beds. Rysiek sleeps against one wall, and his sister Basia against the other.
Rysiek’s father has finally returned to work, as a teacher of handicrafts, while their mother works for the time being at the Central Statistical Office. While his parents are at work and his sister is at college, Rysiek brings Alicja to the cottage.
When Teresa Torańska and I question her about these meetings, Alicja Kapuścińska is reluctant to answer.
‘Don’t write about that,’ she says.