The whole thing began to intrigue me, so I sat down in one of the committee headquarters (pretending to wait for someone who was not there) and watched how they settled the simplest of problems. After all, life consists of settling problems, and progress is settling them deftly and to the general satisfaction. After a while a woman came in to ask for a certificate. The man who could issue it was tied up in a discussion at the moment. The woman waited. People here have a fantastic talent for waiting – they can turn to stone and remain motionless forever. Eventually the man turned up, and they began talking. The woman spoke, he asked a question, the woman asked a question, he said something. After some haggling, they agreed. They began looking for a piece of paper. Various pieces of paper lay on the table, but none of them looked right. The man disappeared – he must have gone to look for paper, but he might just as well have gone across the street to drink some tea (it was a hot day). The woman waited in silence. The man returned, wiping his mouth with satisfaction (so he’d gone for tea after all), but he also had paper. Now began the most dramatic part of all – the search for a pencil. Nowhere was there a pencil, not on the table, nor in the drawer, nor on the floor. I lent him my pen. He smiled, and the woman sighed with relief. Then he sat down to write. As he began writing, he realized he was not quite sure what he was supposed to be certifying. They began talking, and the man nodded. Finally, the document was ready. Now it had to be signed by someone higher up. But the higher-up was unavailable. He was debating in another committee, and there was no way to get in touch with him because the telephone was not answering. Wait. The woman turned back into stone, the man disappeared, and I left to have some tea.14
This is not Poland in the 1950s, but Iran following Khomeini’s revolution, during the period when one bureaucracy was replacing another. For ordinary people, too much stayed the same as before.
As I play this game of mixing texts from different times and places, I am thinking of a conversation I had with Mark Danner. This ‘major league’ American journalist, reporter and essayist, Berkeley professor and friend of Kapuściński’s has left me with this reminder:
‘If you asked me what I’d like to learn from a biography of Kapuściński, I suppose it would be to have an answer to this question: What were the experiences Ryszard had in his life that allowed him to attain such a perfect understanding of the workings of power and revolution – in Iran, Ethiopia, and Latin America, among so many other places.’
Exactly these.
Marian Turski no longer remembers who sent Kapuściński to Nowa Huta late in the summer of 1955.
‘It was many a journalist’s ambition to be sent there – it was a prestige topic. Those who were sent thought of themselves as privileged.’
Nowa Huta is not just any old conglomerate – it is the flagship, the symbol of Polish socialism. Meanwhile, here and there people are hearing rumours that all is not well aboard ship. Somebody at the PZPR Central Committee comes up with the idea of sending someone there on a special mission. The job is entrusted to Remigiusz Szczęsnowicz, manager of the cultural centre in the Warsaw district of Targówek, who works with ‘difficult’ young people. He is to look around and write a report for the Central Committee. As he recalls years later, at the time there was a story doing the rounds at Nowa Huta about some newborn babies found in lime pits there.
Kapuściński is given a different task: to take a stand against Adam Ważyk’s ‘Poem for Adults’. ‘[W]ithin the Party management they were ready to flip – “What shall we do about Ważyk’s lampoon? Let’s prove it’s all lies!” ’15 recalled the late Wojciech Adamiecki, then a journalist for Sztandar Młodych.
‘Poem for Adults’ is emblematic of the time, a landmark text from which the beginning of the thaw in Poland is often dated. In fact, the Stalinist ice has been melting for over a year when the poem appears on 21 September 1955 in the weekly Nowa Kultura (New Culture). But as a composition reflecting the spirit of the times, this, and no earlier or later literary text, is the one that passes into history. Its author is a poet who in past years has dedicated his entire soul and creative art to the cause of socialism. (‘I destroyed the mythology that I myself had believed in until then,’ he will admit years later.)
The ‘Poem for Adults’ is about Nowa Huta, the construction of which was extolled by the socialist–realist poets. Ważyk does not embellish; he sees the naked truth about socialism in Nowa Huta.
From villages and towns they come by the cartload
to build a steelworks, conjure up a city,
dig a new Eldorado out of the earth,
an army of pioneers, the assembled rabble,
they crowd into shacks, barracks and hotels,
they whistle as they trudge down the muddy streets:
a great migration, dishevelled ambition,
a string round the neck with a cross from Częstochowa,
three storeys of curses, a small down pillow,
a gallon of vodka and a yen for the whores,
a mistrustful soul, torn from near the border,
half aroused and half deranged,
reticent with words, singing folk songs,
suddenly ejected from medieval darkness,
the wandering mass, inhuman Poland,
howling with boredom on the long December nights . . .
The great migration building industry,
unknown to Poland, but known to history,
fed on the emptiness of great big words, living
wild, from day to day and in defiance of the preachers –
in a cloud of carbon monoxide, in a gradual torment,
from it the working class is being smelted.
There’s a lot of debris. But so far it’s a shambles.16
Five years earlier, in his ‘Poem about Nowa Huta’, Kapuściński had praised this showpiece construction project of People’s Poland. He went there with Wiktor Woroszylski in the summer of 1950, where Woroszylski had read his poems to the men building Nowa Huta, and the eighteen-year-old Kapuściński had listened, looked around, and become acquainted with some people. Later he wrote many critical comments about the authorities’ negligence ‘in the cultural sphere’, including that the travelling cinemas did not come to Nowa Huta often enough, that the libraries for workers were inferior, and that there was a lack of quality entertainment.
Now his job is to go there and see that everything is in the best possible order.
Kapuściński and Szczęsnowicz share a rented room in one of Nowa Huta’s small hotels. They expect to have a boring time trudging about the building site and having cliché conversations with the workers. And suddenly they discover an unknown world whose existence they have never imagined.
In his report to the Central Committee, Szczęsnowicz writes that ‘you won’t be able to educate the young people building Nowa Huta with the help of a church and a wretched pub selling vodka’.17 The image that Kapuściński paints in his report, entitled ‘This Is Also the Truth about Nowa Huta’, prompts the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych to say, ‘This will never get through.’
What won’t get through?
The story about the pimping mother, who sits in one room collecting money for services provided by her daughter in the next room. Or the one about the fourteen-year-old girl who has infected eight boys and ‘described her exploits in such a vulgar way that one felt like vomiting’. Or the young married couples who spend their wedding nights in gateways and ditches (‘whoever thought up the brilliant idea that married couples can only stay together in a hotel room until eight p.m.?’).
A worker