The pills and bottles remind me of another photograph, which I saw at the home of Kapuściński’s friends Agnieszka and Andrzej Krzysztof Wróblewski. In it, he seems thinner than in all the other photos from that era – or is that just auto-suggestion? It’s September 1964, Paris. As they walk past one of the many cafés, his friends notice a book in Polish lying on a table. Shortly after, Kapuściński appears; he has just briefly stepped away. He is there with his wife, Alicja, gathering his strength after suffering from cerebral malaria and tuberculosis in Africa. One of his rare holidays, because he doesn’t know how to relax – he gets bored, and doing nothing makes him twitchy. On their way home that night from the café, they lose their way. Kapuściński remembers a petrol station next to the campsite where they are to spend the night. Because he had no sense of direction, they wander till dawn. (‘How on earth did he manage in Africa?’ say his friends, clutching their heads.)
Only now does it occur to me that the photographs are arranged in reverse chronology, but I need to tell – and I want to understand – from what sort of place, in what way and by what road he reached the students at Bolzano, Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, how he came to his faith and lack of faith in socialism, and a hundred other things besides.
So, before the reporter sets off on a journey, climbing rocky paths and fighting his way through hostile bush, before he comes to Africans who mistrust whites, or discovers the confused world of the conquerors and the conquered, before he investigates the mysteries of rebellions and revolutions, gets to know a hundred other places and sees a thousand mind-boggling things, there is Pińsk, a house on Błotna Street, and a wooden rocking horse on which little Rysio sits, putting on a smile, making an impatient face, or squinting because of the sunlight shining in his eyes.
2
Pińsk: The Beginning
This is one of the earliest photographs. It differs from the one on the balcony of the house on Błotna Street, but again features the rocking horse, now in the yard. Little Rysio’s hair is combed slightly to the right and he wears a warm jacket but no hat, so it must be spring or autumn. He may be three or four years old. It is the essence of childhood, nothing more.
A few later photographs have survived: showing him wrapped up as he walks along a street in winter, holding his father’s hand. A shop window in the background is inscribed ‘Józef Izaak’. In a similar photo of him with his mother, on the same street, he wears shorts; it is a sunny day in the summer of 1937, when he was five years old.
These photographs were taken in Pińsk, a city then in eastern Poland and now in Belarus. His parents, Maria and Józef, were from elsewhere. His mother, whose maiden name was Bobkowa, was the granddaughter of a baker known locally as ‘the Magyar’. (Because of a dark complexion? because he was an immigrant?) Maria came to Pińsk from Bochnia, near Kraków; Józef, the son of a local civil servant, was from the Kielce region. The government of the new Polish state, which came into existence after the First World War, wanted Poles to resettle along the eastern border, where they could disseminate Polish education, but few were keen to uproot themselves and go to a distant, culturally alien region.
Polish was the minority language in Pińsk. Two-thirds of the citizens were Jews and the rest were Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians, plus a handful of Germans. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, following the influx of settlers from the heart of Poland, almost one in four of Pińsk’s 35,000 citizens was an ethnic Pole.
Going to Pińsk (or Polesie, as the surrounding region is called) from central or southern Poland was a cross between exile and missionary work. Kapuściński used to say that his parents were told, in effect, ‘If you want jobs, go to teacher training college, and when you graduate, go to Polesie.’ And that is just what Maria and Józef did.
The two young teachers arrived in Pińsk on the eve of the Great Depression. ‘I was born the child of settlers,’ said Kapuściński. It was 1932. Just over a year later, his sister, Basia (short for Barbara), was born.
Thirty years after the war, Kapuściński goes to visit the city of his childhood for the first time. It is the mid-1970s, and Pińsk now lies within the Soviet Union.
Standing in Kościuszko Street (then, as today, Lenin Street), he immediately recognizes his surroundings. That is Gregorowicz’s restaurant, where Mama used to take him for ice cream. Over there is 3 May Square and there, Bernardyńska Street. Some images from his childhood, ‘though they are covered up by other ones, still exist’. Later he will say, ‘I feel that if I don’t write about it, the world of pre-war Pińsk will cease to exist, because it probably remains only in my head.’1
Does the seven-year-old boy from the remote province dream of the journeys inspired by Pińsk’s location or by the landscape beyond the window? Does the sight of the Riverine Flotilla of the Polish Navy stationed there stir his imagination? Knowing who the boy would become, one would like to conjure up a story of this kind.
‘Polesie was truly exotic,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Lots of rivers and canals, great floodplains. If you boarded a boat, you could sail the seas without disembarking. Pińsk was connected by water to all the oceans.’2 How do you sail to the oceans from Pińsk? Along rivers to the Baltic Sea, then via the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic; or along the River Dnieper to the Black Sea, and from there via the Bosporus, the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean . . .
The folk beliefs of Polesie say more about the world Kapuściński came from than all the historical stories about dukes, wars and sacred relics. Country people tell stories about the suicide, whose soul wanders the local woods, still wearing his body:
People regard a dead man remaining on earth and wandering as a punishment imposed on his soul by the Lord God. This soul cannot get into heaven. According to folk belief, there is always a penitent soul of this kind inside a whirlwind, and if one were to throw a knife at it, blood would be shed. But naturally it is hard to hit!3
This is like an Eastern European version of Macondo, the mythical land invented by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Macondo people fly around the village on carpets, or rise and hover in the air after drinking a cup of chocolate; they also have epidemic outbreaks of insomnia and memory loss.
Kapuściński sees associations with Africa. Among his handwritten notes I find a comparison, titled Polesie found in Africa, of the land of his childhood years with the continent he described as a reporter. Apart from poverty, hunger and disease, he lists belief in a spirit world, a cult of ancestors, and consciousness of tribal identity. Also, like Africa, Polesie is ‘colonized terrain’. There is, moreover, a handful of tangible similarities: no electricity, no surfaced roads, no shoes.
In other words, a description of the city where Kapuściński’s parents came to live in the early 1930s.
Kapuściński’s enduring memories of his family home are meagre. He remembers little from before the war. His account contains more intuition, more impressions bordering on poetry and fantasy, than specific information.
In sketches for a book about Pińsk (which he planned to write but never did), he says his father was good to him, and that this was important, sacred. He admits to having had no sense of his mother as a separate being; his parents were a single entity.
The only other person able to dredge up memories of the family home before the war is his sister, Barbara. As a student of English, she emigrated in the 1960s to Great Britain and later to Canada. Kapuściński was so angry at her departure that their relationship initially cooled. He believed it was necessary to stay in Poland and help build the country’s future after the destruction of the Second World War. Then a loyal member of the Communist Party, he felt that leaving for the West was a betrayal. But he and his sister had other