Zojka’s Escapes
Kapuściński’s wife and daughter accompany him on his more than three-year stint in Mexico. Alicja works a little, and Zojka goes to high school. After a year and a half, Zojka wants to go back to Poland; she is seventeen and has enough determination to stand up to her parents. Especially her father, with whom she argues about everything.
From an interview with Alicja Kapuścińska:
Why did your daughter want to go home?
I don’t know. She had learned Spanish, and announced that she would rather be in Poland. That was her wish.
Is she like him?
No, like his mother.1
Alicja goes back to Warsaw with Zojka, thinking it is for ever, as she cannot leave her daughter on her own. A friend, Zofia Sztetyłło, offers to let Zojka live with her. ‘Do you want to stay at Auntie Zofia’s?’ Alicja asks her daughter.
She was happy, she took her school graduation exams and got a place to do Hispanic studies. I came back a year later, and Rysiek six months after, as he still had to close down the post.2
Zojka’s ‘escape’ from Mexico marks the start of a difficult relationship between father and daughter, as well as between daughter and both parents. The prelude to these complications comes a few years earlier, when Alicja travels to Africa to join her sick husband, leaving ten-year-old Zojka behind with her grandparents, against her wishes. Her mother explains that she is not going on holiday, but going to see her father, who is seriously ill.
Nevertheless, the regret and injury remain.
More than once I heard worried comments such as, ‘She still feels like an abandoned child inside. No arguments are of any use here, it has to do with some mixed-up emotions.’ The regrets and injuries manifest themselves for the first time when she is a rebellious teenager. She wants to go back to Poland from Mexico, and she does. No force could stop her.
During her student years, Zojka falls in love with a boy from Paraguay. Her parents refuse to hear of their daughter leaving for some unknown place; they have just begun to know Latin America in the era of social upheavals, revolts, coups d’état and terrible poverty.
Thanks to his connections within the Party, Kapuściński is in a position to arrange a grant in Poland for his daughter’s boyfriend. And he does so – except that the ‘son-in-law’ does not turn up, shows no sign of life, and disappears without trace. Soon it turns out that the impoverished Paraguayan simply did not have the money for a ticket, and first had to earn enough for it. Neither the ‘parents-in-law’ nor the ‘fiancée’ had thought of that.
He turns up in Warsaw a few months too late – Zojka is now in love with a Canadian of Polish origin, who has come to Poland to get to know his father’s country. That summer they hitch-hike their way to Sweden to work for a while, and then go to France on holiday.
When the new academic year begins, Alicja becomes worried because her daughter is not yet back from her holiday. Meanwhile Zojka is giving evasive answers. Finally she calls: Send my birth certificate, I’m getting married.
On Christmas Eve she gets married in Grenoble. Now she is called Zofia Grzybowska. Was Alicja at the wedding? ‘Of course not. She told me about the wedding, but she didn’t invite me.’3 It is a sort of repetition of family history: Kapuściński’s mother was not at her son and Alicja’s wedding either.
Rysiek was in Angola at the time. When he got home he was very angry. Any kind of family connections with foreign countries were very badly regarded, and could actually disqualify a journalist from going abroad as a correspondent.4
This was the second of his close relatives – his sister, Barbara, was the first – to choose life in the West. Kapuściński yells in rage that he is renouncing Zojka. Nowak smoothes his ruffled feathers; calm down, he tells the father, it’s her life, her right, her choice. Besides, she doesn’t have to give up Polish citizenship; she’ll get a consular passport.
Zojka leaves for Canada with her husband, ‘escaping’ for a second time.
Her marriage to the Canadian does not last long. Nevertheless, Zojka decides to remain in Vancouver. At one of the universities there she completes the degree in Hispanic studies that she began in Warsaw. Soon she meets another man, an American, and has a son with him, whose name is Brendan. Her relationship with her parents improves, and they exchange warm letters: it’s great that you’ve stopped smoking, Dad; is there anything you need, daughter? Zojka is helped by her father’s sister, who by a lucky coincidence lives in the same city. Little Brendan gets on very well with Barbara’s sons, who treat him like a baby brother.
Zojka signs up for a typing course, enabling her to get temporary work in offices and libraries. But smouldering inside her are artistic aspirations. She is thinking about painting and also tries to write.
When in the 1980s Kapuściński becomes a world-famous writer and starts to receive more serious fees for his work, the parents’ help for their daughter becomes more generous. Paradoxically, the tension returns to their mutual relations.
In 1984, when father and daughter meet in Palo Alto, California, there is an altercation typical of their relationship. For several hours, Zojka leaves the friends’ house where they are staying. When she returns, her father makes a scene: why didn’t she say where she was going and when she would be back? Zojka replies in a similar tone – he never bothered with her when she was little; now she is grown-up and independent; she has her own child and doesn’t need to report to her father.
‘He brought his daughter money, he was very proud of it,’ remember the friends. ‘Meanwhile, with her entire behaviour, she was communicating to him: “Don’t think you can buy me for a few thousand.” ’
At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, mutual relations take a turn for the worse. The number of grudges grows. Father explains to daughter that he is willing to help her, but he is not in a position to maintain her. He has earned a lot from several books published abroad, but it is not a bottomless pit.
Thanks to her parents’ ‘subsidies’, Zojka rents an artist’s studio in downtown Vancouver. During a visit to Canada her father comes to see the studio and gets the impression that renting a place in this location is an extravagance that neither he, and certainly not his daughter, can afford.
He calmly explains: Practising an art demands patience and humility, because in the modern day and age artistic creativity is the kingdom of excess, bursting with talent and products. To fulfil your artistic plans, first you have to earn some money; few people in today’s world – only a handful of those most outstanding and acclaimed – can afford to live on their artistic creativity alone. The rest, in other words the majority, have to work within non-artistic professions and carry out their creative ambitions in their spare time, after work.
He is shocked by what’s happening with his daughter: to tell the truth, he doesn’t know much – only as much as he can see for himself and as she herself will tell him. He does find out that she gave up her job at the university library a few years earlier, and that she was planning to study psychology, followed by ‘therapy through painting’. In Vancouver he is worried by the state of the apartment. Eleven-year-old Brendan spends days on end at home alone, in semi-darkness; he goes to school when he wants, and when he doesn’t feel like it, he doesn’t go. In Zojka’s absence, his grandson tells him that he lives mainly on tins of baked beans in tomato sauce.
At the beginning of 1992, Zojka escapes for a third time: she writes her parents a short letter in which she announces that she is severing all relations with them. She tells them she is moving but doesn’t give them the new address or telephone number. Only her bank account number remains unchanged.
Her parents cannot understand their daughter’s behaviour. They are shattered. Kapuściński suffers torment, reproaching himself for not having been at home for years on end and for not having paid Zojka enough attention during the times he was there. But the milk was spilt long ago – what can be done about it now? He has been trying for years, helping as much as he can, sending money, sometimes against his better judgement. He blames himself for putting up with her immaturity for too long; he should have put his foot down ages ago. Both he and Alicja are in agony from their sense of helplessness. For months on end, they have no news of their daughter or grandson. (Zojka also severs contact with her father’s sister, who has no idea why.)
‘He suffered because Zojka cut him off from his only grandson,’ a close friend tells me. ‘One time when Brendan was in Poland, Rysiek tried to get close to him, to tell him something about himself, about the family and Poland. But he couldn’t get his wishes across. The boy behaved just as if he had never left Canada: he tuned in to English-language channels on the TV and wasn’t interested in anything but that. Maybe he was still too small . . . And then all contact with him was broken off.’
Months later, when Zojka finally gets in touch, the family psychodrama starts all over again. Her father demands that she get a job, and that if she can’t find one, she should prove she has been trying by producing certificates from the employment agency. He is disappointed that the only topic their daughter ever brings up in their conversations and letters is money.
Some time later, Zojka presents him with the idea of an expensive journey around America, touring the famous art galleries. It is obvious who is supposed to finance this trip. Not for the first or last time, her father explains that in order to put extravagant plans into action, first you have to earn the money; he reminds his daughter that she is forty-five now and should take account of the financial resources and possibilities – her own as well as her parents’.
Now Zojka changes her name: henceforth she will be called René Maisner. She is a photographer and visual artist; she makes photographic and painted collages, and doesn’t want anyone to think she owes any interest in her work to her famous father. ‘Escape’ number four . . . five?
When from time to time she comes to Poland, her father usually disappears from home. After one of these visits, Kapuściński has had enough, and doesn’t want to see his daughter in the house ever again. For a while Alicja feels the same way, but later tries to soothe his anger. Zojka will cross the threshold of her parents’ house many more times.
After her father’s death, René Maisner, daughter of the famous writer Ryszard Kapuściński, travels around Europe. In Italy she and her mother accept prizes and meet his readers. In Pińsk in Belarus they unveil a memorial plaque on the house where Kapuściński spent his childhood. René Maisner goes on her own to Spain, where an exhibition of his photographs from Africa is on tour. In Granada she takes part in a conference about immigrants and cultural integration; she also receives the Harambee Award, which in Swahili means ‘everyone pulling together’. At the University of Navarra in Pamplona she meets with students and professors, and answers questions about her father.
She gives the press several interviews – about her father.5
He was a man who showed his emotions but couldn’t talk about them. He was a patient listener and was interested in what a person he met somewhere at the end of the world had to say, but he himself kept quiet. He treated me in a similar way. On coming home he would spend two days finding out what my life was like. Then he’d be absorbed by his work: meetings, conversations, writing . . . He was willing to pay the price for it, because in parting with the country for some time, he was also parting with his family.
My childhood memories are that encounters with him were usually unexpected. When he turned up, I was happy he’d be with us again. But on the other hand I wasn’t capable of showing regret because of the separation. He simply spent too long in the other hemisphere. Dad understood that, and tried to make up for the lost time. When I was only a few years old, he used to bring me dolls. Ten years later he used to give me souvenirs and clothes made by folk artists from Mexico or Peru. Those were the days of flower children, and things like that were fashionable. Anyway, I still wear similar things today.
In October 2006 I brought him a 2007 diary, with drawings and words of wisdom by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. My father liked beautiful diaries and used to write down his notes, appointments and thoughts in them. ‘I’m very grateful to you,’ he said. He looked at it sadly, picked it up and kept it for a long time on the bedside table within sight and reach. Only later did I realize he was aware how ill he was.
Before the funeral I met a lot of people who loved Dad. They knew things about him which I had no idea about. That was painful. In those days my grief caused by Dad’s passing was mixed with regret for the time we never spent together. I realized there were only a few shared moments. Too few.
In the autumn of 2008 René Maisner, photographic artist, has an exhibition at Warsaw’s Kordegarda Gallery entitled Elements; her collages refer to the forces of nature: earth, fire, wind and water. Gazeta Wyborcza journalist Lidia Ostałowska interviews her. Maisner answers questions about her father reluctantly, sometimes irritably. She defends herself against the reporter’s attempt to seek the source of her inspiration in her father’s work.
Once the interview has ended, she declares that the questions about her father cannot appear in the text, nor can it say in her biographical note that she is the daughter of Ryszard Kapuściński. Ostałowska gives in, and decides not to have the text of the conversation edited for publication. The interview never appears.