Our Friend Rysiek
Jerzy Nowak, his closest friend for almost half a century, lists several of ‘Rysiek’s essential traits’:
Above all, from when they first met, he has been characterized by strong independence of mind and self-reliance. He listens to others but does not yield readily to suggestions; he trusts his own senses, observations and evaluations. When his friends criticize details in one of his texts, he is capable of angrily tearing it up in their presence, though in the corrected version he rarely takes notice of critical comments.
He is a particular kind of pessimist – whatever evil might happen, it has to happen anyway, it has to do its thing.
He combines erudition and the approach of the intellectual reporter with a simplicity that gives some people the impression of his being a rather ignorant simpleton or an exceptionally modest man. He is neither of those. He has an inner sense of greatness, or rather a belief in the significance of what he writes.
He tends to be given to passions – personal as well as political ones.
He is sensitive to falsehood – he easily detects it in people and in the written word.
World fame does not change him one iota, at least not in relation to his closest friends.
He listens carefully, but even so he thinks and writes what he wants to.
He cannot cope with popularity. He is incapable of saying no – to meetings, interviews, invitations – although in time he will learn to. (Alicja will act as a barrier, and so will the answering machine, saying in his voice: ‘This is telephone number XXXX, please leave a message after the beep. Thank you.’)
In friendship he is guided by the principle that you forgive your friends more.
He often calls and asks what’s new or how he can help. He gives you the feeling that he will not let you down in case of need: ‘He once admitted to me that for him the measure of friendship was whether a person whom he regarded as a friend was someone with whom he could be in the trenches.’
The chief principle that guides him in life is, Never hurt anyone, even if that does harm to you yourself, even if you have to tell a lie to avoid wounding someone.
One time they do not see each other for five years – the Nowaks are in Buenos Aires, and he is in Mexico City. He cannot visit them because of the visa difficulties that Argentina imposes on correspondents from socialist countries. His letters survive – full of romantic, almost amatory terms. ‘My darlings’, ‘my dearests’ . . . There are numerous confessions of how painfully he is missing them, and lots of affection.
People, you have no idea how much I’ve missed you! Five years, God in heaven, will you recognize this old man, whom you last saw when he was still a young pup? But now he’s got a walking stick, and a bald patch, and dementia, and his eyes are misted over. Son of a gun!1
Years earlier, in a letter from hospital in Kampala, where he was sick with malaria, Kapuściński drew a heart and wrote next to it: ‘I’m sending you my heart’.
When the Nowaks are expecting their second child, he writes a separate note to Izabella:
Dearest Izabella,
I’d like to send you a cheerful message to make you feel relaxed when you go to get the new Krzyś [the name of the Nowaks’ first child], but you know I’m not good at jokes, so I’ll just wish you no pain at all, my darling, and that’s my only wish, because even without my wishes I know you’re going to give birth to something just as wonderful as Krzyś, something we’re all going to be proud of, from Tierra del Fuego to Mexico City. When I come to Buenos, I promise to spend a whole night awake rocking the creature that will be crying and weeing in its cradle.2
After the birth of the ‘new Krzyś’, who turns out to be Dorota, he writes, ‘My joy and emotion, and – frankly – my sense of relief that it all went well are without bounds.’3
On Dorota’s eighth birthday, Kapuściński writes a little poem called ‘Some Ho-Hum Lines Written on Dorota’s Birthday’:
In the sunshine birds are singing,
In the sunshine frogs are springing.
When the night is gone at dawn,
The sun comes up to greet the morn.
Then it shines much hotter,
And says hello to Dorota.4
Dorota Nowak remembers that one day when she was only a few years old and her brother was in his teens, they had a competition to see who could do a headstand. When Kapuściński sees the Nowaks’ son standing on his head against a wall, he immediately enters the contest: ‘I can do that too, look at this.’
Without a warm-up, in the middle of the room instead of against the wall like Krzyś, Kapuściński tries to stand on his head. When he is nearly there, with his legs in the air, he suddenly loses his balance, and the homegrown athlete crashes to the floor. Krzyś and Dorota burst out laughing. For a while Kapuściński is bewildered and cannot catch his breath, but then he, too, starts laughing, and the moment of danger is over.
When grown-up Dorota takes up equestrian sports and requires money to buy a horse, without hesitation Kapuściński tells her: ‘Just say how much you need.’ Dorota is coy, and then he says in a slightly louder, paternal tone: ‘You mustn’t give up your passion! Your passion is the most important thing in life!’ And then calmly adds, ‘So how much do you need?’
Dorota borrows the money, and he says she doesn’t have to pay it back. After Kapuściński’s death, she repays the debt to Alicja.
They were neighbours on an estate consisting of four-storey blocks of flats in the working-class Warsaw district of Wola. Kazimierz Bosek is a friend from a totally different sphere to Nowak. Like Kapuściński, he is a journalist, but unlike him, Bosek is ill-disposed towards the PRL.
Right at the time when Kapuściński is a ZMP (Union of Polish Youth) activist at Warsaw University, Bosek – the son of a pre-war police chief – is thrown out of college as a ‘class enemy’ (he had withheld the information about his father in a form asking for personal details). He is conscripted into a penal army battalion and forced to work in the mines, which years down the line will affect his health.
In over forty years of friendship, the two men avoid conversations on political topics, as they have almost nothing in common on that front.
Their strategies for life are different. Kapuściński knows that nothing is achieved through conflict, so he always smoothes the sharp edges, gets on with his bosses and generally avoids confrontation. When he sees that someone is talking nonsense, he doesn’t continue the conversation. ‘Yes, yes, of course you’re right’ – that’s the way he closes conversations which aren’t going anywhere. Bosek, on the contrary, is the type who always knows better and has to show it; because of this, he often has trouble at the work-place.
They are alike in a different respect, though: both are emotional. They also share similar ‘problems’ with their daughters. In defiance of her father, Zojka emigrates to Canada, while Bosek’s daughter from his first marriage, Agnieszka, goes away to France and gets married there against her father’s will. They confide these fatherly experiences to each other, support each other and have instant mutual understanding on these matters.
His friend’s flat provides Kapuściński with one of his hiding-places from the world. When Bosek and his second wife, Marzenna Baumann-Bosek, go away on holiday, they leave him the keys (to their new flat in the Sadyba district); in their absence, Kapuściński often spends several weeks there.
He consults Baumann-Bosek, who is also a journalist, about fashion and appearance – how to dress, where to buy clothes of tolerably good style in times when there are not many nice things in the shops. When he starts to go bald, she advises him not to do a comb-over to cover the bald patch because it looks pitiful. ‘Just cut it short’ is her recommendation.
‘When Rysiek started having spinal problems, he couldn’t sit down and spent whole days lying on a hard floor, and he became depressed. My husband used to come and cheer him up,’ she says. ‘In turn, when my husband and I both started to be seriously ill, Rysiek always took an interest in us, gave us psychological support and quite often financial help too.’
When Bosek starts to have exactly the same problems with his circulation (leg pains) as his friend is having, Kapuściński calls Marzenna and gives instructions.
‘He mustn’t eat fat and absolutely no alcohol.’
‘Well, you know he doesn’t drink.’
‘Ah, no one ever knows that.’
‘Rysiek was very fond of Bosek,’ says a mutual friend of theirs, ‘but he was quite forbearing towards him.’
In the new Poland after 1989, when Bosek campaigned for allowances and pensions for soldier-miners, Kapuściński regarded his friend’s efforts without understanding, with indulgence, as a bit of craziness. On the other hand, he appreciated Bosek’s passion for the Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski. Bosek discovered the site of the poet’s first burial and brought about the ceremonial interment of his remains in the city of Zwoleń. The patron of the ceremony was Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, and many figures from the world of culture attended.
Thanks to a journey they made together in the mid 1980s to Czarnolas, the village where Kochanowski lived – Kapuściński took his friend there, who had a broken collar-bone and could not drive – he wrote his first poem in thirty years. He included it in Notebook, a collection published quite soon after that. (Originally he dedicated these lines to the memory of Kochanowski.) An excerpt:
Why
did the world
fly past me
so quickly
it did not let itself be held
approached
addressed in the familiar5
Bosek, who is the same age as Kapuściński, dies six months before his famous friend. At that moment Kapuściński feels, not for the first time but very acutely, that his days are coming to an end too. He is already weak, with a bad hip and a failing heart.
Wojciech and Maria Giełżyński quickly fall silent, or rather finish their story about their friend before it has really started. He dropped in on them over the years, they ate, drank and felt as if they were having fascinating conversations. But about what? They cannot remember. What did he say, what did he like, what was he like? Now they realize they were the ones who did the talking. Rysiek kept quiet. They knew him, but they didn’t know him.
This ‘formula’ recurs in many people’s friendships with Kapuściński.
Many of his acquaintances call him their ‘friend’ because he let them believe they had made friends. In fact, they knew each other a little, and from time to time they had a nice conversation. Kapuściński created the impression of listening intently. Almost everyone came away from a conversation with him convinced the master thought of him or her as an exceptional person, the most important conversationalist in the world, a pal, a friend, a pupil.
The reporter Wojciech Jagielski tells with a smile how the most trite banalities became pearls of wisdom (in the speaker’s imagination) whenever Kapuściński was listening to them:
‘That’s incredible, how did you find that out?’
‘That’s a great thing, my heartiest congratulations.’
‘Wonderful, what you’re telling me is truly wonderful!’
Jagielski says ironically that many people came away from a meeting with Kapuściński feeling six inches taller.
The fat came away feeling thin. The reticent and the boring came away feeling like the most wonderful raconteurs. The average came away feeling outstanding, and the scribblers like virtual Nobel Prize winners.
‘Rysiek seduced women, he seduced men, he seduced old people and he seduced children,’ says Mariusz Ziomecki, laughing.
Seduction was his strategy for life. He wanted to be loved, and he put a great deal of effort into making his wish come true: he was loved.
Most of his acquaintances – the good ones and the very good ones, the even better ones and the close friends – are convinced he never said a bad word about anyone. ‘Just once in a rage he described a certain well-known writer as a “loathsome yid!” ’ says a close friend who knew Kapuściński for more than thirty years. The writer in question had behaved despicably, as he saw it. My source stresses that it was the only time he ever heard Kapuściński use such crude words about another person.
A few of his close friends challenge this legend, saying that they often heard him make critical comments about other people. ‘A hopeless hack’ was how he sometimes dismissed writers whose talents he did not value, even if he liked them very much personally.
‘Speak well about everyone’ – that was yet another of Rysiek’s masks, a strategy for conquest and seduction. Not often, and not with everyone, did he allow himself to be sincere.
Dorota Nowak remembers that Rysiek once praised the merits of a well-known writer in her presence. ‘ “Among the living Polish writers he is undoubtedly the greatest stylist,” ’ he said, as she recalls. A few days later, a friend of hers who is a book reviewer for one of the papers recounts a conversation he’s had with Kapuściński. They got onto the subject of the ‘greatest stylist’, and Kapuściński turns out to have told her friend that the ‘greatest stylist’ is a very poor writer.
Did Rysiek tell each person something different?
Did he tell people what he thought they wanted to hear from him?
Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka travelled with Kapuściński to Ann Arbor, where he was to give a lecture at the University of Michigan about the fall of the Soviet Union (Imperium had recently been published). Just before passport control they were accidentally parted: Junczyk-Ziomecka went through immigration first, and Kapuściński got stuck.
It turned out he did not have the invitation with him, nor did he know what hotel he would be staying at – he had put all the paperwork in his checked luggage. Meanwhile, Junczyk-Ziomecka, who had copies of it with her, had long since gone through passport control. The immigration official started asking Kapuściński all sorts of questions, the way they interrogate someone who seems to be trying to cheat their way into America and then stay there illegally. Kapuściński took one of his books in English out of his bag to prove he really was a writer who had come at the invitation of the university.
‘When he finally appeared,’ says Junczyk-Ziomecka, ‘he started screaming at me so loudly that the airport security people ran up to ask if I needed help. I thought he might even have been capable of hitting me.’
She adds, after a pause, that this sort of behaviour testifies to a close friendship; he would never have let himself lose control of his emotions like that towards someone who wasn’t a very good friend.
‘He was friendly in a lovely way,’ recalls Małgorzata Szejnert, who does not regard herself as a close friend of his but rather as a colleague, an acquaintance.
In the early 1980s, when the authorities had broken up the Solidarity movement, Szejnert wanted to emigrate to America. She was afraid the border guards would turn her back at the airport. Kapuściński offered his support: he would go to the airport with her and watch from a distance to see what happened.
‘If they stop you, wave at me. They all know me there, so if anything’s wrong I’ll go and try to fix it so they let you through.’
Kapuściński waits several hours at the airport. In fact Szejnert does not need his intervention, but she greatly needs his support at such an anxious moment.
A female colleague who is a well-known reporter shares the following memory:
In the early 1990s, when Imperium had just been published, a group of reporters from Gazeta Wyborcza visited Kapuściński in his study at the house on Prokuratorska Street in Warsaw. It was meant to be an informal, frank conversation between the young reporters and the master. They asked Kapuściński a lot of tricky questions and made quite a lot of critical comments about his new book on the Soviet Union. Only one reporter kept praising him; her colleagues felt she was sucking up to him and, in their view, was talking nonsense.
After the meeting Kapuściński called one of the women reporters who had been at the meeting and with whom he was on friendly terms. He was unhappy with the conversation and complained about the trainee reporters. At one point he said, ‘Only one clever girl there.’
‘That made me think,’ says the woman who was his friend. ‘Despite his position as the master, despite his worldwide success, he had a shaky sense of his own value. He liked the cheap, mindless compliments, but the serious conversation had saddened and annoyed him.’
‘He had many fine characteristics, and perhaps the finest of all was his unfeigned kindness towards people,’ says Wiktor Osiatyński. ‘His friends could count on him to listen, to go for a walk, and if he only could, he would help. He also treated the strangers who were introduced to him seriously and kindly.’
I try to confront him with a view I have heard more than once in conversations about Rysiek: he was good at pretending to be listening to others.
‘Sometimes it went in one ear and out the other. He really did listen to those who had something interesting to say, especially on the professional front, though he did not usually share his own reflections with them. But I do also remember some profound and fascinating conversations: about how the character of the media and of power in the world is changing, and about the challenges of globalization.’
Other observations by a close friend: he was the type who panics (‘What will happen, what will happen?’); he could be awkward in his relations with people, and he sublimated this deficiency in literature.
‘Were we good friends? He used to say that of me. Did his friendship make itself felt? Yes indeed, and often. Whenever I was sick he came to visit me in Konstancin. Many times, out of pure altruism he looked for the best doctors for my complaints, for which I am eternally grateful to him and which I was unable to reciprocate. But he also refused various requests – he was capable of being tough towards his close friends.’
Osiatyński feels awkward talking about it, but I know that in fact he was one of the friends who experienced that ‘toughness’: he had helped to promote The Emperor in America and took the book to Alvin Toffler, but years later when he asked Kapuściński for a short note for the cover of his own book, Kapuściński claimed to be too busy.
There were lots of strangers whom he did not refuse. Kapuściński cared about creating a good image, so that no one would think the great writer was too big for his boots, but he did say no to his friend. The books whose covers carried a recommendation from him, or which he reviewed, were often ones he did not value; sometimes he showed his friends piles of them in his study, commenting with irritation, ‘Look what they’ve brought me. Am I supposed to read that? Write about that?’
‘But even so I adored him,’ adds Osiatyński.
‘One more thing: he had a dreadful, agonizing feeling that he had to write, and that if he didn’t write, his life was worthless. The only state that justified not writing was illness. Maybe that was the source of his hypochondria? He was always complaining or dying of something, but then he’d pick up his suitcase and go abroad anyway.’
One of his final memories: less than a year before Kapuściński’s death they go on a week-long trip together to Siena, where Osiatyński is teaching a short course. They stay in an old monastery that has been converted into a university conference centre. Every day Rysiek goes for a walk in the garden, where he enjoys looking at the flowers, trees and gardening tools. Every day they eat dinner with the academics. Rysiek eats very little and very slowly, so slowly that the dinner hour goes by, and the cooks, waiters and gardeners start laying the table next to theirs for their own dinner.
‘Before then he had been engaged in our conversation, but at that point he stopped talking, and with childish delight he started watching those tired people, eating, chatting and laughing. He spoke in admiration of their straightforward manner, coupled with their attention to cleanliness and form. He sat there so intent that I had to drag him away from the table. Moments like that made me realize that his curiosity about ordinary people was full of respect, devoid of any kind of superiority. Just then I discovered something extremely important about him as a man, and also about how he worked as a reporter. Without that curiosity and respect, there wouldn’t have been a Kapuściński.’