Stories about the końcowi contain a hint of nostalgia for the grand years of building socialism, even if the mirror image of the solemnity of those years are now people who don’t give a hoot about socialism. In his pieces about the końcowi, Kapuściński records the climate of apathy and post-October decadence, portraying a Poland he hardly knew – as a young ZMP activist, he never paid attention to it. But the moment is coming that will mark the end of rebellion, the exhaustion of strength, a collision with the pervasive presence of those who hated socialism. By the same token, his stories about ZMP members describe the atrophied hopes of those who wanted to repair socialism.
And afterward? What happened afterward? What should I write about now? About the way that a great experience comes to an end? A melancholy topic, for a revolt is a great experience, an adventure of the heart. Look at people who are taking part in a revolt. They are stimulated, excited, ready to make sacrifices . . . But there comes a moment when the mood burns out and everything ends. As a matter of reflex, out of custom, we go on repeating the gestures and the words and want everything to be the way it was yesterday, but we know already – and the discovery appals us – that this yesterday will never again return. We look around and make another discovery: those who were with us have also changed – something has burned out in them, as well, something has been extinguished. Our community falls suddenly to pieces and everyone returns to his everyday I, which pinches at first like ill-fitting shoes – but we know that they are our shoes and we are not going to get any others. We look uncomfortably into each other’s eyes, we shy away from conversation, we stop being any use to one another.
This fall in temperature, this change of climate, belongs among the most unsettling and depressing of experiences. A day begins in which something should happen. And nothing happens. Nobody comes to call, nobody is waiting for us, we are superfluous. We begin to feel a great fatigue, apathy gradually engulfs us.27
So he will write many years later, in his book about the Iranian revolution. (Can we be certain it is just about Iran?)
And so begins the period in Polish history known as the ‘minor stabilization’.
But Kapuściński, the romantic, cannot come to terms with what he sees and describes in his reports: ‘We should continue to take up the task of liberating the world anew, even if it means falling over dozens of times along the way.’28 Were it not for a certain journey, from which he has recently returned, he would not have written this manifesto.
12
The Third World: A Clash and a Beginning
[W]hen I saw that in India millions of people have no shoes, a sense of community responded in me, a sense of fraternity with these people, and at times I was even overcome by the mood we feel when we go back to our childhood.
Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus1
An Indian face smiles out of the poster. It’s a girl, standing in the shade of the palm trees, and in the distance is the dark silhouette of an ancient temple. Underneath runs the inscription: ‘VISIT INDIA!’ The Indian girl is beautiful, and you can’t say no to beautiful people.2
Before he reaches the point of delighting in the beautiful Indian girl, the palm trees and the ancient temples in the poster, there is major panic. The newspaper wants him to go to India – but he doesn’t know a single thing about India. How can he write about a country of which he’s completely ignorant? He doesn’t even speak English. How is he going to communicate? In Polish? In Russian? How? With whom? A quick dash to the bookshop, the second-hand one, to buy something about India. Do they even have anything? Perhaps at least a dictionary, or a map.
When in the summer of 1956 the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych calls him in and announces, ‘You’re flying to India,’ Kapuściński is twenty-four years old. He has plenty of experience as a journalist fighting for socialism, as a reporter covering ZMP conferences, writing about the lot of the workers at major industrial plants. He’s made a few trips abroad – to Prague and to youth festivals in Moscow and Berlin – but he knows nothing about the work of a foreign correspondent and even less about the place where he is to go. Rysiek is a provincial boy from a modest family of teachers – a novice reporter and activist whom they are sending off to a distant, alien world without preparation, without the language, and without refinement.
Why India? Because it’s the thaw. In the Soviet Union they are settling accounts with Stalinism, Moscow’s international policy is changing, and the rulers in the Kremlin are beginning to open up some of their doors and windows. The socialist camp is looking outwards towards the countries of the so-called Third World which are escaping from colonial dependence on the West. In the era of the Cold War divide, even if they are not Red, liberation movements struggling against colonialism are frequently engaging in some form of co-operation with Moscow as a rival to the West – and later also with Peking. The emerging countries offer large markets for goods from countries in the Soviet orbit, above all for major industrial products such as machinery, fertilizer and weapons. Leaders from the socialist bloc are paying official visits, while the leaders of those newborn countries are coming to see how progress and socialism are doing in Eastern Europe.
Exactly one year earlier, Kapuściński covers Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Poland for Sztandar Młodych. ‘Prime Minister Nehru is a politician fighting for important issues for humanity: for the peaceful coexistence of nations, co-operation and friendship’, he writes in a predictable welcoming article.3 (Meanwhile, the following joke is doing the rounds: ‘Why did Nehru come to Poland in his long johns?’ – a reference to the tight white trousers he wore – ‘To show that India is building socialism too.’) Kapuściński is the paper’s natural candidate when someone from the Central Committee Press Office decides that, in the spirit of friendship between the socialist camp and the Third World, Polish reporters will go abroad and write about the countries of the far South. The future star journalists of their generation set off on their way. One will go to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq; another to Indonesia; someone else to Morocco. Kapuściński is to go to India.
As a result, he misses the era of greatest revolutionary fever in Poland – he is not there in October 1956, when Soviet intervention is a whisker away, or in the period afterwards, when amid cheering crowds Gomułka assumes the post of Party leader. Indeed, during the coming quarter-century he will not witness any of the major political breakthroughs in Poland – right up to the strikes on the Baltic coast in the summer of 1980, when the Solidarity trade union is born. He will not be there in 1957, when Gomułka closes the weekly paper Po Prostu and cracks down on the movement for the renewal of socialism – instead he will be travelling in China and Japan. During the student protests of March 1968 and two years later, when the Party ruthlessly suppresses the workers’ protests on the coast, he will be working as a PAP correspondent in Latin America. In 1976, when once again the Party deploys force against the working class, in whose name it has supposedly been governing, he will be writing a weekly account of the war in Angola, and will be in Africa for months on end.
For the young reporter whose horizons are tedious Party confabs, factories in small provincial towns, or possibly youth festivals where he can communicate in Polish or in Russian, the trip to Asia is frightening but, to a greater degree, thrilling. Everything on the journey is large and amazing. The aeroplane is massive: a four-engine giant Super-Constellation that flies from Rome to New Delhi and Bombay. The distance to be covered is incredible – eight thousand kilometres! And so many hours in the air – twenty!
Also incredible is the lake of lights that stuns the fledgling globetrotter when the plane stops to refuel in Cairo. With some surprise, he finds that the Egyptians are black and that they dress in white – as he writes – ‘cassocks’. With childlike satisfaction, he notes that he has now set foot in Africa. These are the comments and emotional responses of a greenhorn traveller.
His associations and thoughts on landing in India are amusingly gauche too, including his mention of the fact that Columbus tried to reach India and failed, whereas he, Kapuściński, has succeeded. He makes the