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.
‘What mustn’t we write about?’
‘That when they were out, Rysiek and I used to meet at the Finnish cottage.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘I don’t like talking about private matters in public.’
‘Are we asking?’
‘Don’t you think anyone will guess, Teresa?’
‘The Finnish cottage has to be in there, Ala.’
‘With restraint, then, please.’
The Finnish cottage still stands in the same spot. In 1988 Rysiek and Alicja go for a walk to Pole Mokotowskie during the time when the National Library is being built there. They see that of the original fifteen or so cottages, two are still there, transformed into storerooms for workmen. One is the Kapuścińskis’. They peep through the window. The round, black table made by Rysiek’s father still stands in the middle of the room, with papers spread out on it. When Józef moved in the 1970s, he didn’t take it with him, because it wouldn’t fit into his new flat.
Maria Kapuścińska is not thrilled by her son’s relationship with Alicja, especially as a wedding and a child are soon on the way. She thinks they are too young to get married – he is twenty and she is nineteen. Maria dreams of an unusual future for her son, though she is not entirely sure what kind. She is afraid that too early a marriage will obstruct him in his career, whatever that may be. And she bears a grudge against Alicja for falling pregnant – in those days, the girl was always to blame.
Once Alicja starts coming to the Kapuścińskis’ cottage as the official fiancée, Mrs Kapuścińska gives her her son’s socks to darn. Alicja darns, launders and irons Rysiek’s shirts. Under Mrs Kapuścińska’s tutelage, without a word of protest, she learns the duties expected of her beloved Rysieczek’s wife. She is to be meek, industrious and supportive to her husband. Alicja tries to mollify her future mother-in-law and to show her that her son has not made a bad choice. She is grateful to be allowed into the house at all.
At Alicja’s family home in Szczecin, Rysiek quickly makes a good impression. He immediately announces that they are planning to get married, but don’t know when because they do not have a place to live. Alicja asks her mother if she would be surprised if they soon had a child. Her mother is neither surprised nor shocked; she knows what’s going on.
On 6 October 1952, at Ryszard and Alicja’s registry office wedding, besides the witnesses and a few friends, the only close relatives present are Józef Kapuściński and Rysiek’s sister, Basia. Maria Kapuścińska boycotts the ceremony. She invites them to dinner afterwards, but Rysiek wriggles out of it. Of everyone involved, his beloved Maminek is the least willing to accept his marriage. Only when she was dying would Maria Kapuścińska admit to her daughter-in-law: ‘Ala, you have been a daughter to me.’ Alicja reckons this is the highest distinction she could possibly have received from her mother-in-law. After more than twenty years of marriage, she deserved it.
Alicja’s parents did not come to the wedding either. The young couple deliberately decided to tell them about it too late – they sent a telegram the day before the wedding – so there would be no confrontation between the parents. They were afraid that an altercation or an exchange of sour looks on that particular day would affect relations between the families for years to come. After that, there was an appropriate relationship between the two sets of parents.
As a result, when Alicja, in a modest navy blue dress with a white collar, and Rysiek, in the black suit from his high school graduation ceremony (the only suit he had at the time), take their seats before the registrar, several of the most important people in their lives thus far are not present.
The registrar recites the dull official formulae about the family as ‘the basic social cell’, while Rysiek takes the rings from his pocket, nudges Alicja and says: ‘Put it on my finger.’ Later they do not wear the rings. Alicja explains that while working at a hospital she had to keep washing her hands, and the ring got in the way; Rysiek simply loses his.
Soon after the wedding, Alicja takes dean’s leave from college and goes to Szczecin. While waiting for the baby to be born, she works in the library at Szczecin’s Palace of Youth. On 2 May 1953 Alicja’s mother sends her son-in-law a telegram saying: ‘You have a daughter.’ Rysiek would have preferred a son.
As Alicja recalls: ‘People used to think a real man should produce a son who would inherit his father’s duties, running the family, building a house and planting trees. Rysiek was wondering what to call our daughter when he bumped into a friend of ours. “Zocha”, he announced, “I’ve had a daughter.” Later she told me he looked pleased. “So call her Zofia,” she suggested [Zocha is a diminutive of Zofia]. He liked that idea.’
But there’s another name he likes even more than Zofia – Zojka. A girl named Zojka is the heroine of the era, a role model for young communists in the ZMP, and a sacred figure in the communist revolution. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, a Soviet schoolgirl named Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya joined a special unit in the Red Army. This unit performed acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. After blowing up a German ammunitions store, Zoya was caught and hanged.
If the child had been a boy, he would have been called Wowka (Polish spelling of the Russian ‘Vovka’), short for Włodzimierz, in honour of the leader of the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin. According to a different version of the story, ‘Wowka’ would have been a tribute not to Lenin but to Vladimir Mayakovsky, which is what Kapuściński told his translator Agata Orzeszek.
‘In those days he was captivated by Mayakovsky’s talent and the power of his voice,’ she says. ‘He was sorry Broniewski was called Władysław, and not Włodzimierz, because then his son’s name would have paid homage to both his favourite poets.’
But his dream of having a son had not come true.
Rysiek boards a train and goes straight to Szczecin. However, for the first year of their marriage they live apart. Alicja takes care of Zojka in Szczecin and wonders whether to return to her studies, while Rysiek goes on studying and running the ZMP revolution in Warsaw. He comes to visit, but he is a husband and father ‘at arm’s length’. When he comes, he sometimes goes out for a walk with the pram, but rather reluctantly. So young, and already a father. He is the eternal bachelor type and likes appealing to the girls. A baby in a pram is not well suited to this pursuit.
One time, he turns up in Szczecin in an anxious state: his mother has had a stroke. It is either a haemorrhage or a cerebral embolism. It seems truly life-threatening. There are no telephones in the Finnish cottages where the Kapuścińskis live. Rysiek runs to the hospital on Hoża Street to call an ambulance, and the doctor offers this advice: ‘The best thing to do is apply leeches to draw blood from the carotid artery.’ So he races to the market on Polna Street and buys a jar of leeches. Alicja reckons those leeches saved her mother-in-law’s life. After the stroke, Maria Kapuścińska never went back to work. She functioned fairly normally and did not need to be cared for like a disabled person, but her strength was seriously impaired.
After this incident, Rysiek tells Alicja to drop her studies in the history faculty. He says that, after graduating, he plans to become a journalist. But what about her? If she graduates in history, she will have to teach rowdy little brats. ‘Go and study medicine,’ he suggests.
Alicja passes the exams for medicine in Szczecin and gets credits for her first year of studies there. Meanwhile Rysiek finishes his history degree in Warsaw. He writes a dissertation, on the education system within the Russian partition in the early twentieth century, under the supervision of Henryk Jabłoński, later chairman of the Council of State (the PRL equivalent of a national president without any real power). Rysiek goes back to work at Sztandar Młodych and is soon allotted an employee’s flat.
After her year in Szczecin, Alicja returns to Warsaw and continues her medical studies there. Zojka stays behind in Szczecin with her grandparents. She is too small to go to nursery school. A year later her parents take her to Warsaw.
The young family is assigned a room with a kitchen and a bathroom in a block on the corner of Nowolipki Street and Marchlewski (now Jan Paweł II) Avenue. The kitchen is quite large, with a window. There they put a desk – this will be Rysiek’s workroom.
Alicja gets up early in the morning, quickly makes something to eat, then hurriedly irons her husband’s shirts, takes Zojka to nursery school – luckily, in the house next door – and rushes to lectures or practical studies at the hospital. In the evening when she comes home, the laundry is waiting for her in the bathtub, because they have no washing machine.
The constant noise coming from the other side of the walls is a daily nightmare. Their flat is sandwiched between a lift and a rubbish chute: on one side the lift doors keep crashing shut, and then the lift thunders up or down; on the other is the chute, producing yet more clatter. On top of that, the chute is connected to the kitchen by a ventilator, in order to provide ventilation for the kitchen, but usually it is the stink from the chute that invades the kitchen. Alicja seals up the ventilator, but it doesn’t help.
Rysiek is infuriated. He can’t bear being disturbed while he’s writing. He needs peace and quiet. If he doesn’t have it, everything irritates him.
So when Alicja sees Rysiek starting to twitch and pace nervously, she and Zojka sit quietly in the corner to avoid further antagonizing the lion. She knows him well enough to understand when to keep out of the way and not respond to provocation. Never does she strike her fist against the table; never does she say she’s had enough. (‘Of course not! That was my Rysio! Whatever do you mean?’)
Once the writing starts to go smoothly, he solemnly announces that now he’s making progress, that now he has the wind in his sails. He reads out the first sentence, and Alicja jumps for joy. And so on . . . to the next paragraph. He always writes slowly and barely meets the standard editorial quotas. His concern is with the quality of his writing, not the quantity, and so he earns a pittance.
Alicja’s father helps them. Both her parents are working, and although teachers’ salaries are not high, they offer to assist. Only in 1959, when Alicja finishes her medical studies and receives her first salary, does she write to her father to say that they are grateful for his support but from now on will manage on their own.