Christ with a Rifle in a Czech Comedy at the Emperor’s Court
His Majesty liked to visit the provinces, to give the plain people access to him, to learn of their troubles and console them with promises, to praise the humble and the hardworking and scold the lazy and the disobedient.1
Now there is meant to be a ‘second Poland’, a different socialism. Enough parsimony, enough struggling to make ends meet. The ‘frugal mum’ (the old leader Gomułka) goes out to grass, and the ‘generous dad’ takes the helm – new First Secretary Edward Gierek. He introduces a new style of governance; he shows he is a benign master, a solid administrator and a bountiful guardian. He travels about the country, trying to prove that the authorities have not lost touch with the masses; quite the opposite – he comes down the hill and seeks proximity with the people.
This new turn in the history of the PRL is designed to atone for several dozen fatalities. When workers on the coast came out onto the city streets with their demands for pay rises, the previous Party leader sent out the army and the militia against them. As a result of the public shock, there is a reshuffle of the élite at the top.
Kapuściński does not watch the Polish drama from close up, because at the time he is in Mexico. When he comes home from his posting, he finds a totally different atmosphere in Poland.
There is not a trace remaining of Gomułka’s plebeian socialism. At the beginning of the new decade it is far easier than in previous years to get basic goods: food, clothing, household equipment. Life for the Poles becomes more bearable, and Gierek’s slogan in the first years of his government – ‘May Poland grow in strength and may people live more affluently’ – is not far from the daily experience of the decided majority. The miners are thrilled, because they are getting fabulous salaries and bonuses; the farmers complain less, because Gierek does away with compulsory annual supplies of agricultural products to the state at fixed prices.
The Gierek era is also a time when the PRL opens up to the West. It is easier to get a passport, and if someone goes off on a journey to the other side of the Iron Curtain he can officially buy a hundred dollars (earlier this was possible only on the black market, and was a hundred times more expensive). Previously condemned or ridiculed Western popular culture gains ‘civic rights’ – American films and serials on television are virtually one of the trademarks of the decade. Home-grown entertainment of a fairly good standard also appears; a boom in popular songs begins, and a couple of excellent cabarets open. Poland is having a good time drinking and dancing.
His Highness showed particular vivacity and keenness. He received processions of planners, economists, and financial specialists, talking, asking questions, encouraging, and praising.2
As the new leader, Gierek has ambitious plans. On the advice of Party experts he considers some sort of semi–market reform but quickly drops these complicated ideas. Why bother? Poland can live on the reserves saved up by the previous first secretary, and shortly afterwards a miracle occurs – Western credits start to pour in.
The capitalist countries of the West are experiencing a boom, there is cheap money looking for an outlet, and socialist Poland willingly accepts loans of any size. There is no need to rationalize anything: abracadabra, and goods which previously you could only dream about appear in the shops. Salaries go up, and the hope returns that finally the affluent life everyone has been waiting for is just around the corner.
If you use foreign capital to build the factories, you don’t need to reform. So there you are – His Majesty didn’t allow reform, yet the factories were going up, they were built. That means development.3
Prefabricated concrete construction takes off; people still have to wait for flats, but they are relatively cheap. Young couples get special credits, they buy fridges, washing machines, television sets and furniture – all on hire purchase, and if someone’s really lucky he’ll also get hold of a coupon for a car (still a deficit item).
One was planning, another was building, and so, in a word, development had started.4
After a year of hard work there are cheap holidays and, for those who can manage it, even trips abroad – to Bulgaria, Romania or the Crimea. Youth organizations which in the years when the foundations of socialism were being built stood for ideological zeal, altruism and personal sacrifice are now concerned with ‘fixing’: first to arrange the supply of some deficit, hard-to-acquire goods for their activists, then some foreign travel.
Something like a socialist middle class emerges – a broad group consisting of most Poles, geared to consumerism. One of the leading dissidents of the era admits years later that this was the only period when he really did fear society and felt marginalized. Because almost all Poland approves of Gierek’s socialism at the beginning of the decade, very few people are bothered by the lack of elections, the rule of a single party, or the limited freedom of speech. To live and not to die! Long live socialism and Comrade Gierek! Bravo, bravo, bravo!
[H]e even liked progress – his most honourably benevolent desire for action manifested itself in the unconcealed desire to have a satiated and happy people cry for years after, with full approval, ‘Hey! Did he ever develop us!’5
Kapuściński comes back from a world where socialism means a heroic struggle, the sacrifice of one’s personal peace and quiet. Latin America is a revolutionary volcano: Cuba sí, yanquis no; the idol of the young is the recently assassinated Che Guevara; Salvador Allende is conducting a peaceful socialist revolution in Chile, which the Americans, the local oligarchs and the middle class want to overthrow.
Over there: For their belief in socialism, the young idealists are ending up in prison, being tortured, or dying in the jungle, and are often completely misunderstood by those whose rights they are demanding. Over here: For their belief in socialism, the young wheeler-dealers are the first to get a flat, a car and a trip to Sochi. There: great ideas, the clank of rifles; here: fairly OK cash, idle gawping at the TV, having a ball. There: rebellion, nonconformism, adrenaline; here: fake smiles, making the right faces for the authorities. If that is socialism, is this socialism too? Where can a man go, where can he find a place, how can he fit into life on this other planet?
Now he is a star on a national scale. During the past few years, while he has been away, several of his books have come out, strengthening the position of the talented reporter and expert on Africa and Latin America. Despite the limitations imposed by the system, it is much easier to write significant texts about the Third World; censorship is not as sensitive to an ‘incorrect’ tone in these as it is in articles and books on national topics or the West.
Kapuściński temporarily remains jobless. He has had enough of the PAP by now; he knows the agency treadmill will never allow him to write books – and that has become his main dream, plan number one. He has several unwritten volumes in his notes, files and head, but until now he has not had the time to sit down quietly, take stock and get on with it. He considers writing a separate short book about his then idol Che Guevara, and another one on Latin America, a sort of summary of the four and a half years he has spent in the region.
But first he must get a foothold somewhere, obtain a permanent salary and find something to live on. He looks around at the press in Poland and wonders which place would be best. He doesn’t want to go where it will be hard to get permission and money for trips abroad. The choice should fall on a journal that has good connections with the decision-makers, his pals upstairs – because should problems arise, they will help solve them.
Kapuściński the romantic idealist has, at the same time, a good instinct for personal connections; he knows how to navigate the corridors of the Party court and how to secure for himself the right to realize his professional aspirations and dreams.
Whoever wanted to climb the steps of the Palace had first of all to master the negative knowledge: what was forbidden to him and his subalterns, what was not to be said or written, what should not be done, what should not be overlooked or neglected.6
He seeks the advice of his chief patron, Ryszard Frelek, who has been promoted to a high post at the summit of power – he is now head of the Central Committee’s foreign department. Frelek suggests he take a look around, wait a bit, and a good place is sure to be found.
For about a year – also on Frelek’s advice – Kapuściński takes a job at the monthly Kontynenty (Continents), for which his patron writes a column on international affairs. This is the only magazine where he accepts an editorial post, to the extent of becoming deputy editor-in-chief. He also tries teaching – postgraduate lectures in journalism studies at Warsaw University.
‘Outside the classroom there’s this thin, tanned guy in a dark, tight-fitting roll-neck top and bell-bottom jeans,’ recalls Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka. ‘Suddenly he starts to clap, like a school teacher chivvying his pupils “into class, into class, the bell has gone!” He looked so fit, I thought he was the physical education teacher. But it was him.’
The first lecture is on Latin America and Che Guevara: it is a disappointment. The great Kapuściński is not a very good speaker. The students are expecting the famous reporter who has come back from far away to tell them about his adventures. Instead he goes into the intricacies of Latin American politics and talks about figures of whom the young people have never heard. For this audience, the outside world is Yugoslavia, and of course France and Britain. But Mexico, Chile, Bolivia? They know absolutely nothing about the world Kapuściński is describing.
The lectures last for a term. Despite the chasm of experiences between Kapuściński and his small group of students, friendships which last many years are formed. Not long from now some of the female students will be his colleagues at the same newspaper office.
At more or less this point, Frelek signals to his friend that the right place has been found. The editor-in-chief of the weekly Kultura (‘Culture’) Janusz Wilhelmi, is leaving under a cloud. The new chief will be a friend of Frelek’s called Dominik Horodyński; he’ll be glad to have Kapuściński on his team.
Like most of the opinion-forming periodicals in the PRL, the weekly Kultura has its own convoluted political history. When it was founded in 1963, one of its tasks was to stifle revisionist tendencies among the intelligentsia. Its pages feature aggressive articles, and it conducts some brutal score-settling within the intellectual environment. Literary types boycott Kultura, and no one of merit wants to write for it.
In 1968, Kultura dodges its way through the student protests and the anti-Semitic witch-hunting. It does not resist the nationalist wave, but on the other hand does not support the nationalist-communists as strongly as certain other journals do. ‘We came through 1968 as not entirely rotten bastards,’ recalls one of the paper’s editors.
As the new editor-in-chief of Kultura, Dominik Horodyński has to fill in the chasm between Kultura and the world of culture which his predecessor had dug. He has social connections among people in the arts. He’s suave and likes to party. His views are liberal, and for some people his mere arrival changes the face of the magazine – his presence is a sign that Kultura will not be the organ of the Party stormtroopers.
A considerable number of young people now begin work at the weekly – ambitious reporters and commentators who are not easy to control.
‘Kapuściński’s arrival’, recalls Maciej Wierzyński, deputy editor of the weekly, ‘was like the ultimate validation that Kultura was a magazine you didn’t have to be ashamed of. Why did Rysiek choose Kultura? That’s what his patrons advised him to do, I think – here it would be easier for him to put his own plans into practice than, for example, at Polityka, which had worse connections at the heights of power in those days.’
The Kultura journalists, those young people who had just started out on their professional path, remember without any shame the magazine they created. They are convinced that Kultura, and no other periodical, had the best team of reporters in those days – reporters who describe the reality of the PRL in the lyrical style of Czech comedy, in other words with a combination of sensitivity to the absurd, plenty of satirical humour, a touch of melancholy, and a glorification of ordinary life.
Little of the atmosphere of previous decades is in evidence during the 1970s in the PRL, neither the heroic mood for believers in socialism nor the sense of dread for the few rebels. There are no great battles of ideas; there is just life from one day to the next, and the hope of making money. The staggeringly boring Party ceremonies broadcast on television are empty rituals; hardly anyone believes in the ideology, including those who preach it.
Kultura’s reporters are superb at catching the satirical side of this reality. They are rarely able to write in a direct manner, so they discover the charms of ambiguity, allusion and metaphor.
Rather than an article stigmatizing the squandering of labour and resources, a feature is written on the long journey travelled by manufactured goods from the time they are produced to the moment when they end up on display in the shops. The article illustrates how everything must be stamped and ‘accounted for’ at every stage, using tons of paper and employing an army of people in the process. ‘Paper reality’ is the title of this report. Another report is about Brzeska Street in Warsaw’s Praga district, where ‘the wife might be on the street corner and a husband a drunk, but the children have to be normal’.7
The desperately dull, grotesque sessions of the ‘Committee for the Evaluation of Toys and the Verification of Packaging’ are an allegory (as well as a parody) of the endless Party confabs which lead to nothing.
A report on illusionists sends a subtle message on the decade of illusory affluence, which ends in the bankruptcy of Edward Gierek’s Poland.
Dominik Horodyński is happy to share reminiscences of those days. He is eighty-five and quite unwell, engaged in a prolonged attempt at recovery from a broken leg (he will die a few months after our conversation).
‘Do you know that some of the editors-in-chief informed on each other?’ says Horodyński when I ask about relations between Kultura and the Party authorities.
‘How did they inform? To whom?’
‘To the censors, or to the Central Committee’s Press Department.’
‘What for?’
‘For example, to divert attention from what they themselves were doing. They’d say to some comrade: “Look here, what are they getting up to at that Horodyński’s paper?” ’
‘And then what happened?’
‘Once a lot of denunciations, complaints and quibbles had accumulated, they summoned you to the Central Committee press office and imposed a punishment.’
‘What sort of punishment?’
‘They might sack you, or they might just tell you off, give you a warning.’
‘But you had patrons within the government, didn’t you?’
‘If there was trouble, I called Staś Trepczyński, or Frelek, and they made whatever arrangements were necessary.’
‘So you could say to a censor or a press secretary that if anything happened . . .’
‘No, no. It didn’t do to be either too wilful or too servile. If they reprimanded you at the Press Department, it wasn’t wise to suggest you had support somewhere higher up – oh no! That could have done harm.’
‘Can you remember the worst situation of that kind?’
‘There were no big dramas. Don’t forget that for people of my generation, the point of departure was the war – why should I get upset about the comments of some Central Committee secretary?’ He laughs as he says this.
[M]y bows were of a functional and efficacious character . . . they served a purpose of state, which is to say a superior purpose, whereas the court was full of nobles bowing whenever the occasion presented itself. And it was no superior purpose that made their necks so flexible, but only their desire to flatter, their servility and their hope for gifts and promotions.8
Maciej Wierzyński, Horodyński’s deputy, tells me that his boss gave the staff a lot of free rein. Whenever charges were made by the censor’s office or the Central Committee Press Department, he used to shift the problem onto his deputy, saying that his young colleagues were up to no good and that he knew nothing about it. So usually it was Wierzyński who had to argue with the censor and the Press Department.
Every time there is an irreverent report in the paper, there will be a call from the Central Committee to say: ‘In your paper, comrades, the first page is at odds with the last!’
[P]eople learned . . . another language, mastered it, and became so fluent in it that we simple and uneducated folk suddenly became a bilingual nation . . . Each of the two languages had a different vocabulary, a different set of meanings, even a different grammar, and yet everyone overcame these difficulties in time and learned to express himself in the proper language.9
If an article ends up at Mysia Street (the censor’s headquarters) and is deleted there, there is usually no saving it, and it lands in the editor’s waste-bin. Quite often, however, allies are sought at the Central Committee Press Department. Sometimes the censor is afraid to let an article through that poses a risk to his own position, but the comrades higher up, his superiors, may be in a better mood right now, or may know what the flavour of the moment is, or where the boundaries are drawn, and the article manages to get rescued.
Zdzisław Marzec, deputy head of the Press Department, says that Kultura did not inspire sympathy within the Central Committee.
‘I didn’t like Horodyński and I never hid the fact at all.’
‘Why?’
‘Too much of a sharp operator.’
‘What sorts of charges were laid against Kultura?’
‘Mainly dodging.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Critical allusions, various bits of mockery, in short, an ambiguous attitude to the reality of the times.’
One tongue served for external speech, the other for internal. The first was sweet and the second bitter, the first polished and the second coarse, one allowed to come to the surface and the other kept out of sight.10
Wiktor Osiatyński recalls that each year they held a draw at the editorial office to decide who would write the text for the next anniversary of the October Revolution. And then everyone helped think of a way to pay off this collective easement so that the Party was happy and the author did not lose face.
Kapuściński finds himself in a schizophrenic situation. Thanks to his reliable contacts within the Central Committee, and to being regarded as a ‘good comrade’, he feels safe; he feels that no arrogant bureaucrat or boss can touch him. He is praised at the Press Department: an internal note states that his reports from Latin America are a model for other reporters.
He arranges his foreign trips on his own, without the mediation of Kultura’s senior staff. They are financed by the PAP, with which he continues to co-operate, or by the state publishing enterprise RSW ‘Prasa’, because Kultura, like all other periodicals, has no funding of its own for international reporters. His plans always have the support of the head of the Foreign Department, Ryszard Frelek. Everyone is happy: the PAP because it has up-to-date dispatches from the Third World, Kultura because it has the latest reports, the Party because it is receiving analyses of the political situation in the Third World from the best reporter in the country, and Kapuściński himself, because these trips are essential to his being able to keep track of events in the countries that fascinate him, and he also collects accounts, observations and impressions for his upcoming books. (‘He was our star, our pearl,’ says Janusz Roszkowski, head of the agency in the Gierek era and for a few years afterwards. ‘Rysiek himself suggested the topics, and money was always found for him.’)
At the same time, the reality with which Kapuściński collides in the Poland of the 1970s is like something from an entirely different planet. The horizon for most Poles, including many of his friends and acquaintances, stops at making money; People’s Poland is about having fun and getting drunk. Even those who do not believe in socialism are pleased about it: things are better than before. Meanwhile, as a reporter from the Third World, he is in a state of ideological tension, in a black-and-white world. Being occupied with the revolutions and civil wars of the poor South is neither a job suited to making a fortune nor a painful practical duty – it is a passion (he adored that word), an intellectual, often strongly personal commitment. For Kapuściński, socialism and revolution are not a farce at a state farm or a satire at a committee; they involve sticking your neck out, risking your life for a cause, an ideal, a better world. His horizon, his perspective and emotions are often shaped by extreme experiences.
Whenever I return to Latin America, it’s a bit like going back to a cemetery. A lot of the people I knew, with whom I spent time, are no longer alive. And when I return to Africa, it’s also rather like going back to my own personal cemetery . . . It may be that as a result I have a rather twisted view of the world – because I’m constantly moving within that reality, within those situations.
Let’s take Africa. Ben Barka [a Moroccan dissident], murdered in terrible circumstances. I had a friend called Pinto, who was shot the day after we had a conversation, as he was driving out of his yard . . . The story I described in my report entitled Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder is symbolic in a way: those seventy-seven people, boys, who went out and who all died, one after the other. It was a known fact from start to finish that they would all die. And they knew it too. Because over there it’s obvious when you set out that you’ll never come back again. But nevertheless, off they go, in the belief that they have to, that there is no alternative. Saying to themselves: up to some point we have to keep dying in order to triumph later on.11
The series of reports which Kapuściński publishes on the pages of Kultura in instalments are about exactly this type of person, fighting for the cause of a society’s liberation – and these reports form his next three books. Another Day of Life is about the end of the colonial era in Angola and the local revolutionaries from the MPLA. Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder is about Palestinians fighting for the right to their own state, Bolivian guerrillas trying to incite a revolution, the kidnappers of the West German ambassador to Guatemala (an abridged version of Why Karl von Spreti Died), people from the Mozambican liberation movement FRELIMO, and icons of the era Che Guevara and Salvador Allende. The Soccer War is a synthesis of the experiences of the decolonization era in Africa and revolutionary attempts in Latin America (here Kapuściński reproduces a number of reports from several previous volumes in slightly altered versions); among other things, it includes portraits of the heroes of independent Africa – Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and Ahmed Ben Bella, and an account of the coup d’état in Nigeria. The report that gives the book its title is about the war between Honduras and Salvador.
As one reviewer wrote about this last book:
In none of Kapuściński’s previous books has the world been perceived as a coherent whole. Only The Soccer War makes us see that the view of the street in Guatemala during the kidnapping of Karl von Spreti, the view of depopulated Kinshasa, or of Luanda shut into boxes, and the view of a sunny alleyway in Tbilisi all have something in common. And there is so much of this common factor that from among the exotic cities and countries a sort of hometown comes peeping out at us, a familiar street, the face of a friend or a well-known person . . . We know that the world has this coherence and indivisibility thanks to the people who populate, destroy and build it.12
At Kultura, Kapuściński meets a new generation of journalists, for whom stories about idealistic freedom fighters sound like fairy-tales told by someone from another planet and do not mesh with any of their experiences. What’s more, those fighters of ‘his’ are Red: why get upset about the fate of idiots, or at best naive people who want to make for themselves the sort of world we already know about, and of which we’ve had enough?
For the twenty-somethings at journalism school and Kultura, socialism is rather absurd, nothing but empty rituals and boredom. They dream of a comfortable life and the outside world: the West is where it’s at! Someone is going on a scholarship to the States, someone else is off on holiday to Western Europe. In the West these young people get a large dose of new impressions, experiences and ideas.
These people would return home full of devious ideas, disloyal views, damaging plans, and unreasonable and disorderly projects. They would look at the Empire, put their heads in their hands and cry, ‘Good God, how can anything like this exist?’13
Yet Kapuściński comes back from that outside world and speaks of the West as having enslaved the poor countries of the Third World, and of the curse of ‘American imperialism’. For the young people, the stories told by their colleague and master often sound like sheer cant, while for Kapuściński ‘American imperialism’ is not a platitude but an accurate description, something he has touched, sniffed and seen.
On his return from the civil war in Angola, there is a meeting at the newspaper office at which one of his colleagues, Tomasz Łubieński, asks provocatively: ‘What do you find so thrilling about Angola? Who are those Angolan communists in league with the Cubans fighting against?’
‘What do mean, who? American imperialism!’
For Łubieński, the answer smacks of propaganda. He and certain other journalists have a problem with Kapuściński: they like and respect their famous colleague, but at the same time they cannot understand his stubborn belief in socialism, or at least the Third World variety.
‘You don’t like America, but why do you carp at the French, too?’ Łubieński, a sworn Francophile, asks on one occasion.
‘You know the French from Paris – cultured, educated people’, responds Kapuściński, ‘but I know the ones from the colonies. They are barbarians! If you get in their way or frustrate their business interests, they’ll kill you.’
Whenever he comes back from a trip, he drops in on Ewa and Mariusz Ziomecki, who live in Warsaw’s Wola district. He brings whisky and Marlboros. Ewa Zadrzyńska, Ewa Szymańska and Maciej Wierzyński come along too. The young people sit on the carpet because the Ziomeckis have hardly any furniture, and gaze intently at their friend and mentor. Kapuściński tells stories until dawn: what he has seen and what he has lived through in the past few months on his travels – in the Near East, in Angola, in Ethiopia . . .
He narrates his future books aloud; he wants to hear them himself and test them out. When he talks about an overturned vehicle carrying a cargo of oranges, his friends can smell the scent of those oranges. When something is unclear, they ask questions – but rarely. This is not a dialogue; this is the master talking.
‘He explained to us’, recalls Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka, ‘that we might complain about the Soviet Union, but in Third World countries it is the Soviet Union that was helping oppressed societies push their way through to independence. This explanation allowed us to believe that Rysiek was on the right side.’
‘You admired him as a master,’ I comment. ‘You adored him as a friend, but at the same time there was a gulf between you – his ideals were not the same as yours, his idols were not the same as yours . . . How did you cope with this disparity?’
‘We often said among ourselves: “We should ask Rysiek if he has really let himself be taken in by all that. Because off he goes to Africa and Latin America, then comes back and tries to infect us with his belief in that sort of socialism, liberation movements and so on . . . Is he conning us, by any chance?” ’
‘And did you ask him?’
‘No, unfortunately. He said for years that he was going to write a book about Poland, about himself. I was counting on his providing the answers to many questions. I think there are lots of his secrets that we will never know – maybe for the better.’
Mariusz Ziomecki, who starts working at Kultura while still an economics student, seeks a mentor and a father-figure in Kapuściński. He rarely sees him at the newspaper office, because Kapuściński drops in there once a week at most, and doesn’t even have his own desk. If he does come, he shuts himself in the office with the editor-in-chief, so even then it’s as if he isn’t there.
They meet outside work. When Kapuściński starts having problems with his circulation (at the time he is still an ardent smoker) and with his spine, Ziomecki drags him on long walks. They try to play tennis, but without success; Ziomecki is not a good enough player to encourage his older colleague to practise regularly.
In this period the novice journalist looks up to the master. Ziomecki and a couple of other young reporters from Kultura are proud to call themselves Kapuściński’s pupils, although Kapuściński does not read their articles or comment on them. He talks in general terms: you have to keep learning all the time, even once you achieve success; a successful person who rests on his laurels and does not continue to develop will soon fizzle out. So you know two or three languages? That’s too few – you need to know six or seven! And you need to read serious, ambitious books, not give up, always keep advancing.
Fairly soon the master falls into the pupil’s disfavour. (‘After a period of intense fascination comes a stage in which the “son” distances himself from the “father”,’ says Ziomecki, smiling.) Kapuściński belongs to the Party, but Ziomecki is not even in a dilemma over joining; Kapuściński glorifies the Red revolutions in the Third World, but Ziomecki does not trust the master’s accounts.
‘Why is Africa so socialist–realist in your reports? Why are the freedom fighters saints, and the other lot bandits? The world isn’t like that.’
‘The Third World is like that!’
‘He wouldn’t enter into debate, he just dug in his heels,’ recalls Ziomecki. ‘Even when times changed and points of view changed with them, he stubbornly stuck to his line.’
During one of their conversations, Kapuściński takes offence at the lack of ideological zeal among the Poles he has met in the course of the Angolan civil war. They are trade representatives, selling the Angolans Polish lorries which work well in mountainous terrain.
‘They don’t give a damn about the war! Among the Cubans or the Russians you can see ideological commitment, but for our lot all that counts is a bit of trade and some booze!’
Frequently they discuss the master’s membership in the Party and the young people’s reluctance to join its ranks. On this issue they understand each other better.
‘It’s all right if you don’t join the Party,’ Kapuściński tells the young people. ‘But that doesn’t mean it would be a good thing if we oldies left it. There’d be a huge fuss; it would be regarded as a political demonstration, and we’d harm the paper.’
Ziomecki proposes an explanation: that in the countries of the Third World, his ‘father’ is seeking the land of his youth, the climate of commitment and ideological enthusiasm of the 1950s. The older man believes – and he works to convince the young people of this – that the Third World is purer, and the split between good and evil there more clear-cut. ‘I’d like to believe that explains Rysiek’s paradox,’ says Ziomecki.
The idealistic Kapuściński is brilliant at moving about within the labyrinths of Gierek’s non-idealistic court. Nowadays he drops in more often than in the past at his patron’s new home on the first floor of the ‘White House’, as the Central Committee headquarters is known – often enough that several establishment comrades remember the situation as, ‘He spent the whole time sitting in Frelek’s office.’
He gets a commission from Frelek to writes analyses for the Foreign Department of current conditions in Third World countries. He observes the workings of government at close quarters, not just in a general sense but also their anatomy, behind the scenes, from the inside. He sees how people change as they acquire new positions and more power.
[A] change in speech is another post-assignment symptom. Multiple monosyllables, grunts, clearings of the throat, meaningful pauses and changes of intonation, misty words, and a general air of having known everything better and for a longer time.14
He starts to understand how much in the world of power depends not on knowledge or individual effort, ideas or even ideological zeal, but on completely different attributes and circumstances.
His Majesty never made appointments on the basis of a person’s talent, but always and exclusively on the basis of loyalty.15
[O]ne was more important if one had the Emperor’s ear more often. More often, and for longer. For that ear the lobbies fought their fiercest battles; the ear was the highest prize in the game. It was enough, though it was not easy, to get close to the all-powerful ear and whisper. Whisper, that’s all.16
He also sees at close quarters the rivalries of various coteries in the Party.
I would say that slowly, gradually, three factions appear in the Palace. The first, the Jailers, are a fierce and inflexible coterie who demand the restoration of order and insist on arresting the malcontent, putting them behind bars . . . A second faction coalesces, the Talkers, a coterie of liberals: weak people, and philosophizers, who think that one should invite the rebels to sit down at a table and talk . . . Finally, the third faction is made up of Floaters, who, I would say, are the most numerous group in the Palace. They don’t think at all, but hope that like corks in water they will float on the waves of circumstance.17
Teresa Torańska remembers that when she made an appointment to interview a high-ranking Party dignitary without first confirming it with her supervising editors, Horodyński gave her a very hard time. She went to see Kapuściński, thinking she would find an ally in him.
‘But instead,’ she recalls, ‘Rysiek said I had behaved disloyally. And he started explaining to me as if I were a child: “Listen, you have to understand that the editors have a particular political arrangement. If the interview appears, someone at the Central Committee will think our weekly supports that comrade – but is that a good thing for us right now? If in turn the interview doesn’t appear, then the comrade in question will think we are against him.” I didn’t understand this complex structure or these abstract arrangements; I simply wanted to get an interesting interview.’
For Kapuściński, the Party’s internal arrangements are not abstract. He has one gang of friends at Kultura, and a completely different one with his Party comrades at the Central Committee and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They also meet at each other’s houses and out on the town. They have fun, chat and drink together. Kapuściński knows at first hand what is going on at the Central Committee, which coterie, trend or mood is on top, and who is being censured at any given moment.
Besides Frelek and Trepczyński, his gang includes colleagues he has met at embassies, consulates and commercial offices. United by their Latin American experiences and passions, these colleagues include Henryk Sobieski, a secretary from the embassy in Mexico; Janusz Balewski, a commercial adviser from Costa Rica; Józef Klasa, the former ambassador to Havana (not often present because he lives in Kraków); and Stanisław Jarząbek, attaché and secretary from the embassy in Cuba.
‘In this company the departures and arrivals of friends to and from foreign postings provided a frequent occasion for a party,’ says Jarząbek. ‘Kapuściński was always there. He liked having diplomat friends, and sometimes stayed with one of us during his journeys.’
‘We quite often ended up at Rysiek’s flat in Wola at three in the morning in a fine old state,’ recalls Balewski.
‘I remember those tunnels between the stacks of books in the tiny room where his works were produced,’ says Klasa.
Jarząbek again: ‘We were fascinated by him – I was, for sure! At some party or other I delivered a paean in honour of Rysiek. He wasn’t there at the time, and a female friend who knew him well whispered to me: “Be more realistic in your appraisals – take a closer look at Rysiek!” At the time I refused to accept that comment, which seemed to me malicious; I was enchanted by Kapuściński.’
Kapuściński has his friends from the diplomatic posts to thank for his first foreign publication beyond the socialist camp. Thanks to their personal connections with Mexico’s deputy minister of culture Javier Wimer, Klasa and Balewski bring about the Mexican publication of Another Day of Life.
‘It was Kapuściński’s first book to come out in the West,’ says Balewski proudly. ‘And it was a great success.’
Many years later, however, his old comrades will bear a grudge against their former chum for turning his back on them in the new times, after the fall of socialism.
Owing to his firm contacts with people in power, Kapuściński observes at close hand how people are put out to pasture at the Party court. One of his friends, Józef Klasa, gets into bad repute with the Party leader. At the time, Klasa is secretary of the PZPR District Committee in Kraków. At first, thanks to Gierek, he is promoted, but then co-operation between the central ruler and the provincial governor does not turn out for the best.
For example, Klasa does not like the weekly Życie Literackie (Literary Life), which is published in Kraków; he thinks it and its editor-in-chief are compromising Polish culture. He takes underhand action to have the editor-in-chief removed from his job. Gierek, on the contrary, likes the weekly’s top editor and defends him against Klasa’s designs. It seems idiotic, but the Party leader is displeased by the provincial governor’s wilful behaviour. After a couple of clashes, Klasa is sent off to the diplomatic post in Mexico – the job of ambassador being a way of sidelining a high-ranking bureaucrat.
His Gracious Majesty wanted to reserve control of promotions to himself, and for that reason he looked with a malignant eye on any dignitary who tried to promote someone on the side. Such arbitrariness – immediately punished – threatened to upset the balance that His Distinguished Majesty had established; a bothersome disproportion would creep in and His Highness would have to worry about restoring the balance, instead of occupying himself with more important affairs.18
Is it from Klasa that Kapuściński hears what the former Party secretary in Kraków now tells me a few decades later: that Gierek is lazy, never reads a thing and has no desire to do so?
His Venerable Majesty was no reader. For him, neither the written nor the printed word existed; everything had to be relayed by word of mouth.19
‘I think Rysiek started gathering criticism of our regime somewhere around 1976,’ recalls Klasa. That year, 1976, is a time of workers’ protests against increases in food prices. During the second half of the 1970s, the idyll of the first few years of Gierek’s government changes into the daily torment of standing in queues for all sorts of essential goods. The wait for a flat is longer and longer, for washing machines and refrigerators you have to ‘go hunting’, and more and more errands and items that are crucial to a reasonably comfortable life have to be ‘fixed’. The government introduces ration cards for sugar. The promises of consumer socialism begin to drift away. Once there is a lack of goods for ordinary people, the privileges start to be apparent, and the blatant unfairness of the system becomes markedly offensive.
At the tail-end of the 1970s, Kapuściński can tangibly feel what is happening to Comrade Gierek’s ‘other Poland’. He has always lived modestly – at the time in three small rooms in the Warsaw district of Wola – but in case of need, he does have ways to ‘fix’ almost everything. In those days he drives a Soviet Lada, and when the tyres wear out, he tries to buy new ones, but it’s a problem – he cannot get them anywhere. He tries to ‘fix’ the matter at the level of the Central Committee. He turns for help to Frelek, who makes the necessary call. To collect the tyres, Kapuściński has to drive to a depot at Warsaw’s Okęcie airport. When he gets there, someone shows him into a warehouse and opens a bolted door. He sees a gigantic space that is completely empty, except for one lone tyre sitting in the middle of the enormous hangar.
‘This is the maximum you can get fixed through the Central Committee nowadays,’ he tells a friend afterwards, ‘one single tyre!’
It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor’s great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor’s lap and pee on dignitaries’ shoes.20
Before writing about Lulu the lap-dog, he spends weeks lying on the floor in his flat in Wola, tearing his hair out.
‘I can’t, I can’t go on writing the same old thing! Enough!’
He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep. ‘Let them throw me out,’ he thinks. He disconnects the phone, and so his colleagues from the office send telegrams asking when the reports from Ethiopia will be ready. (This is how he tells the story in future interviews.)
Finally he presents the first instalment, just a few pages. He has an uncertain look on his face and, as ever, that apologetic smile. What will they say? This is his first article in a completely new style, an unfamiliar genre.
‘After just a few sentences,’ recalls Wierzyński, ‘I realized that here in my hands I had a brilliant piece of work. Is it reportage? More like a literary tale, a fable, or a treatise on power. We started making Rysiek bring us an instalment each week.’
The series appears under the title A Bit of Ethiopia, but everyone can sense that it is not about faraway Africa. Ethiopia and the court of the Emperor Haile Selassie are a disguise, a metaphor. Kapuściński’s series is the universal story of the distortions of any sort of power, about the people at any court – including the comrades from the Central Committee, Gierek and the absurdities of Polish reality.
‘Didn’t the censors complain?’ I ask Wierzyński.
‘They felt stupid, because censoring an allusive story about Ethiopia would have been an acknowledgement of weakness. Sometimes in a mildly reproachful tone they would say: “Do you have to keep going on about these emperors, comrades?” ’
His colleagues are amused by Kapuściński’s story. They pick up the jokes, metaphors and ironical comments – about the unconcealed ambitions of the ‘generous father’ of the nation for the ‘satiated and happy people [to] cry for years after, with full approval, “Hey! Did he ever develop us!” ’; about the two languages for social communication which have ‘a different vocabulary, a different set of meanings, even a different grammar’, and yet ‘everyone overcame these difficulties in time and learned to express himself in the proper language’; and about the fact that if you obtain foreign credits, no reform is necessary.
His colleagues even read about themselves in the series about Ethiopia: just like the young people in Haile Selassie’s empire, they come back from journeys abroad ‘full of devious ideas, [and] disloyal views’, look around themselves and clutch their heads, saying: ‘Good God, how can anything like this exist?’
Some people wonder which other Polish absurdities should be suggested to Kapuściński for ridicule. An opportunity arises when Gierek launches an ostentatious but preposterous plan to regulate the River Vistula, in order to distract people from the regime’s troubles and the country’s real problems. Kapuściński agrees to manufacture a bit of fun.
In the Palace, dejection, discouragement, fearful waiting for whatever might happen tomorrow – when suddenly His Majesty summons his counsellors, reprimands them for neglecting development, and after giving them a scolding announces that we are going to construct dams on the Nile. But how can we erect dams, the confused advisers grumble, when the provinces are starving, the nation is restless, the Talkers are whispering about straightening out the Empire . . .?21
Together, the instalments from the series called ‘A Bit of Ethiopia’ will form The Emperor, the book which in a few years’ time will make Kapuściński world famous. Some of his friends, as well as experts on his work, will hail the book as ‘a treatise on power’, and its author as a brilliant expert on the issues of power as such, rather than necessarily an authority on Africa. This opinion of The Emperor becomes widespread – a somewhat defensive reaction when, after foreign editions of the ‘treatise on power’ appear, accusations are made about the accuracy of the facts of Ethiopian history cited in it.
Józef Tejchma, a member of the Politburo and minister of culture, does not remember if Gierek ever voiced his thoughts about The Emperor. He does not even know if he ever read the book, because, on the whole, Gierek read very little.
He does remember that when a rumour went round about allusions in Kapuściński’s text, members of the Central Committee, too, began to read his series on Ethiopia as a metaphor for the workings of power and the Party court. Tejchma’s diary entry for 16 March 1978 reads, ‘It’s about Ethiopia, but just as much about today’s Poland,’ and he notes, ‘The nearer the end, the more outrageously people were tearing off a piece for themselves and lining their own pockets with total abandon . . . Palace life, though feverishly busy . . . was essentially full of silence, waiting and postponement.’22
‘Criticism of Gierek’s governments was growing,’ adds Zdzisław Marzec. ‘And along came The Emperor, which satisfied a public need to criticize the authorities. I don’t know if that was Kapuściński’s intention. It’s a fact that he never dissociated himself from the allusive interpretation of his book. But neither the book nor the extracts from it published earlier in Kultura prompted any opposition among the censors or at the Central Committee Press Department.’
Politburo member Andrzej Werblan remembers that, at the time, the interpretation of The Emperor as a work of political allusiveness was being disseminated by Party hard-liners, who wanted to compromise in Gierek’s eyes the ‘liberals’ who allowed such journalistic pranks. Yet Gierek chose to ignore these intrigues.
‘Did you read The Emperor as a book about Gierek and his court?’
‘I remember how Zenon Kliszko [who had had no government post since the fall of Gomułka] said to me: “Look here, Kapuściński has been writing about you lot!” I think he was writing about Haile Selassie, not Gierek. But he did capture the essential, recurrent features and mechanisms of any authoritarian power, including Gierek’s regime. These mechanisms are more relevant here than the stage directions of one country or another. The book didn’t have to be allusive; Polish reality saw its own reflection in it.’
‘What didn’t Kapuściński like about Gierek?’
‘At first he was a fan, but then he started being annoyed by a certain court fashion on the one hand and by the lack of ideology, the technocracy, on the other. He was more keen on Gomułka’s homespun style.’
Soon The Emperor is staged at Warsaw’s Powszechny Theatre by well-known director Zygmunt Hübner. Tejchma goes to the premiere and clutches his temples.
‘I remember sitting in the audience’, he tells me, ‘and hearing things from the stage like “It’s a wonder it hasn’t fallen apart!” People were laughing and applauding. At first I was laughing too. But after a while the thought occurred to me, “What am I laughing at? At myself, perhaps?” And I felt angry, at Kapuściński, whom many people at the Central Committee regarded as a friend, and even more at Hübner, for going much too far: he had sharpened the original text and highlighted all the allusions to the Polish situation.’
[I]t occurred to no one that such a journalist, who had earlier praised, would dare to criticize later. But such is obviously the dastardly nature of people without dignity or faith.23
I no longer remember from whom I heard the following comment, which ‘neutralizes’ the astonishment at the fact that someone so idealistic and loyal to the Party as Kapuściński had suddenly run wild: ‘Many of the ideologists of the generation which built socialism in the 1950s had been disappointed and were in the front ranks of the 1956 revolt. Then they were disappointed all over again when Gomułka backed away from reforming socialism. These people gained a positive obsession from their experiences, a sensitivity to the distortions of authoritarian power.’
Kapuściński, who in the revolutions and uprisings of the Third World seeks an ideal, moral purity, hope, and a new life – as well as his own youth – also sees there how authoritarian power can distort the loftiest ideals, transforming noble idealists into soulless bureaucrats, power addicts, and often cruel monsters. This experience makes him even more sensitive to the deformations of a regime when deprived of control.
The last year! Yes, but who then could have foreseen that 1974 would be our last year? Well, yes, one did feel a sort of vagueness, a melancholy chaotic ineptness, a certain negativity, something heavy in the air, nervousness and tension, flabbiness, now dawning, now growing dark, but how did we go so quickly straight into the abyss?24
The biggest social rebellion in the history of the PRL is just around the corner. On which side of the barricades will the romantic revolutionary, who nevertheless has numerous connections with the people of the collapsing court, find a place for himself?