No Strength to Furnish the Face
This is the end of the journey. I go back to its beginning: less than a year after Rysiek’s death, when I enter his kingdom in the loft. I am to write an article for the newspaper about this study, or rather, something about its late inhabitant.
The most conspicuous thing is the books. There are books everywhere. There are press cuttings everywhere. There are exercise books, notebooks and notepads everywhere.
To the left of the entrance is the guest area: a small table and some low armchairs. People would sit here and chat for hours. He would lie on a sofa when his back hurt after prolonged writing – increasingly often during the last two years, when his bad hip kept him from sitting for long periods.
At the right of the entrance, in the depths, stands the desk. There is an Erica typewriter covered with a cloth, and a photograph in a clip frame, depicting his hands as he was writing a dedication to someone in a book – the words aren’t clear and might be in Spanish. There are two lamps, a standard lamp and an anglepoise that gives light from above. There are hundreds of ballpoint pens in mugs, erasers, sticky tape, and coloured slips of paper for marking passages in books. There are various notes – in pocketbooks and on loose sheets of paper.
One of the final notes reads:
23.12.06: The reporter turns into a PATIENT who is going into hospital for an abdominal operation. Don’t complain.1
There is a list of people he has to call before going into hospital – fourteen names.
On the desk extension there is a cloth-covered laptop, which he learned to use for writing but which he never liked. ‘No one has ever written a great book on a computer!’ he once argued quite seriously with his friends’ daughter, Dorota.
‘But Rysiek, what are you saying? So many great writers write on computers nowadays,’ she told him. ‘He gave me such a telling-off that I cried.’ It was Dorota who recommended someone who taught him how to use this modern invention – without much success.
It is the second computer he ever bought in his life. The first one, he suspected, was stolen by a photographer who accompanied a foreign reporter conducting an interview, and who was left on his own in the room for quite a long time ‘to take pictures of the master’s study’. After that visit, the laptop vanished into thin air, as did the photographer, hired via the Internet.
I have been here dozens of times before, but only now do I establish the geography of the cavernous study in the loft, full of nooks and crannies. The living quarters are on the floor below, but the real kingdom is up here.
Facing the entrance is a table where the reading matter needed for his current book in progress always lay. Because, he contended, the main thing involved in writing is reading (‘for every single page that you write, read a hundred’ – for years he had been drumming this into young reporters’ heads).
‘It’s all just as he left it when he went to hospital,’ says Alicja.
Under the table is an impressive collection of dozens of books about Latin America. Several years earlier, when he set about writing his summation of Latin America, these books were on top of the table. He would walk around them, highlighting quotations and inserting Post-it notes – until one day Herodotus shoved them under the table. After Travels with Herodotus, the small table became a complete mess.
He continued to dream of writing that book – the notes from the journey to Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia left on the desk testify to the fact that this idea had taken up permanent residence in his mind. But this plan was not immediate enough for the Latin American books to return to the table where earlier the African materials had been lying while he was writing The Shadow of the Sun, and the books about antiquity when he was working on Travels with Herodotus.
Whereas on the little table, the one to the left of the entrance, which I call the tea table – where he received friends and acquaintances – he left the reading matter on anthropology, about rituals on Pacific islands. Preparations for Travels with Malinowski.
On the shelves above the desk are all sorts of literature: philosophy, religion, history (mainly ancient and medieval), civilizations, anthropology. Further on: literary theory, modern political philosophy, and art history. Here we unexpectedly come upon the entrance to a kitchenette, where he made tea and coffee; further on is a small bathroom. Hanging there are some chest expanders and rubber rings for squeezing in the hands; on the floor are one-kilo dumb-bells and a 17.5 kilo weight!
Next to the steps leading to a mezzanine (where there is a storeroom with all the foreign editions of The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, The Shadow of the Sun, etc.) are books about Pińsk and Polesie, along with classics of reportage and travel writing. Further on, there are dictionaries and encyclopaedias, including Britannica.
And everywhere there is poetry, strewn about the entire kingdom. One might find collections by Joseph Brodsky (his portrait is pinned to a wooden post with files on it, full of notes, cuttings and quotations), Tadeusz Różewicz, Czesław Miłosz and W. H. Auden, or read stanzas by Wisława Szymborska or Anna Świrszczyńska pinned to the wall. Somewhere in there is a brief letter from Edward Stachura, Mexico City, 14 January 1975: ‘Best Wishes for the New Year and several dozen to follow, if they don’t blow up our planet’.
The scattered poets and poetry (and prose, too, which he changed into poetry by cutting out or underlining a passage, a quote, or an aphorism) say the most about the absent ruler of this kingdom. Without them it is a library – impressive, but just a library. The poems, quotes and aphorisms are the soul of this place. And many of its elements can only be described by poetry.
For example, on a shelf under the window lies a jumble of souvenirs and gadgets. What isn’t to be found here?
A piece of charoite – a purple stone with a note attached: the only deposit discovered to date is on the River Chara (a tributary of the Lena in Siberia).
A pipe for drinking yerba maté.
Some old coins from the PRL era and several from countries whose alphabet I do not recognize.
A tiny picture of the Buddha.
A little car from Cartagena (they give them away at the best hotels in this city on the shores of the Caribbean.)
A Solidarity badge.
A Lenin badge.
Figurines of little angels (gold and white – on the window-sill above the small shelf).
Some mascots: a squirrel, a little goat, a rose, and two small metal elephants.
Some rifle cartridges.
Some clay vessels, a figurine from India and a thousand other treasures.
What immediately comes to mind is a poem by Leopold Staff:
O, fairy-tale poetry of a small boy’s pocket,
Where more priceless wonders lie hidden
Than on the sea-bed, whole treasuries of assorted jumble:
Pebbles, bits of string, pieces of glass, rusty pens
And coloured crayons, where landscapes only seen in dreams
Lie sleeping, in a hundred colours but never painted.2
The landscapes of Latin America. Of the islands of Oceania. Of his hometown, Pińsk.
On the desk there is a piece of paper with a handwritten note – like a self-commentary on the ‘small boy’s pocket’ that lies scattered on the shelf and the window-sill: ‘Studies of child psychology are studies of human psychology. In actual fact, only in very few people does it change with age. Most of us remain children inside to the very end – except with more and more wrinkled skin.’
And how am I to describe the globe in the upper part of the loft? Luckily it describes itself. Each continent, with no state borders, displays one or more words or phrases.
North America: community.
South America: trust.
Eurasia has many words: inquiring nature, openness, joy, friendship, sympathy, hope.
Australia has no words.
Africa: LOVE.
He often said that writing is torment, and that more than talent it requires passion, perseverance and concentration.
Now, on a cork board on the door, I find a quotation from the diary of Kazimierz Brandys, which he often paraphrased in many ways:
I know many people who despite excellent promise, like full-fat, well-cultured milk, have curdled or never set. I think the reason is an incapacity for inner concentration on their vocation. It demands an effort. A terrible effort.
Other notes on the same theme:
In the morning at breakfast don’t think about anything except that you’ll go to your studio where the stretched canvases are waiting (Miłosz).
Not every day can bring prey, but every day must be a hunting day (Ernst Jünger).
Effort, planning, discipline. Also frustration that time is running out. If I had to pinpoint the dominant impression from this tour of the loft’s nooks and crannies, I would say: a sense of time running out. Being in a hurry, trying not to lose a single hour. Old age is catching up, there is no time for nonsense. There is still so much to read and think about, to write and to relate.
Another lesson from touring the study is that fame is not just the laurels, it also involves dread, constant anxiety. There are quotes underlined in red in Mircea Eliade’s diary, Fragments d’un journal, which he left on his desk (next to the typewriter):
Whole days spent in writing one page. . . .
I stay at my desk for seven or eight hours, but I work effectively for only three or four. For the rest, I transcribe, daydream, or read. . .
Letters, letters! . . . The day before yesterday I wrote five, yesterday nine, and today I’m on the sixth already.3
Why did Eliade never write novels? The answer is there too:
[W]ere I an excellent novelist, it would still be a great pity to spend my time writing novels. There have been, are, or will be at least a thousand great novelists in the world, whereas, at the present time, I am the only person capable of writing ‘Shamanism’ and the others . . .
As is the case with any prolific author, I carry within me several books that will never be written.4
Time is running out, so one must write at speed. More quotes and aphorisms from the wall:
After sixty he began to hurry up (Parandowski on Petrarch).5
L. N. Tolstoy said that he did not have much longer to live, but a great deal that he would still like to say and do. He is in a hurry and works without cease (Alexei Suvorin, Diary).6
A page torn from a book by the sixteenth-century Polish poet and writer Mikołaj Rej:
Nothing is dearer to man than time, and he must guard every hour not to let it go by licentiously, not to let that noble jewel, the time of his life, flow by like a leaf on water, abjectly and needlessly in vain.7
The dumb-bells and expander were meant to extend time.
‘I try to keep fit,’ he said with some pride before his final illness. ‘I go to the gym and I even have my own trainer.’8
A note on a loose sheet of paper says: ‘Perform hundreds of activities a day that demand movement – in movement there is life’. In a clip frame on the wall there is a poem by Anna Świrszczyńska (written out by hand) about the ‘wisely trained body’ – a creature ‘for whom concentration and discipline are fitting’.9
And – on rather a sour note – a bitter quotation from Eliade’s diary: ‘My best books will be written by someone else’.
Whence the bitterness in such a successful writer?
On 5 October 2005 Gazeta Wyborcza carries an article titled ‘Nobel comes on Thursday’. Here is an extract:
Who will get the Nobel Prize for literature? After decades of indulging novelists, playwrights and poets, will a representative of criticism, literary theory, philosophy or non-fiction be rewarded? Ryszard Kapuściński is being mentioned among the candidates.10
Rumours about the Nobel Prize have persistently cropped up before now, and will do so again a year from now. It is said he has a strong lobby on the Nobel jury, that it is only a matter of time and he will finally get the world’s most prestigious literary prize.
In October 2006, three months before his death, he notes: ‘This morning there was a call from Professor Noszczyk, to say: “I’m disappointed that you didn’t get the Nobel Prize.” ’ Not a word about his own reaction, though it could have been similar to the answer he gave to an almost identical phone call I made a year earlier: ‘And a good thing too! It’d be a nightmare, I’d never be left in peace.’ The tone of his voice, however, said quite the opposite. What writer wouldn’t want to be a Nobel laureate?
‘When I called him,’ recalls Wiktor Osiatyński, ‘and said “What a pity”, he tried to play down the significance of the Nobel. He said there are other prizes that matter too, which he had been generously awarded all over the world.’
‘He very much wanted to win the Nobel Prize, and at the same time he was extremely afraid of it,’ says Jerzy Nowak.
It is a recurring motif: conversations about the Nobel Prize, one of his obsessions during the final years of his life.
The best books will be written by someone else. This is not just about prizes, or even about writing, but about time, which he no longer has. The passage of time. Suffering. They do not make you wiser, they do not ‘ennoble’, and so what?
Before the reporter turns into a patient, he notes:
Old age means progressive stiffening – of the muscles and the mindset. A man sinks into himself, and grows weaker, so do his connections with his surroundings, with the world. This goes on for some time until the stiffening is total, and the connections are entirely gone for ever.
I am pleased when a younger man complains of tiredness and old age. ‘Oh, I don’t think I’m doing that badly yet!’
Old age means fear of being alone. Now I understand why Aunt Oleńka was so keen to go into an old people’s home.11
12 October 2005, when his bad hip was making itself felt:
Take small steps.
First – one, two.
And pause to rest.
Switch off.
Then the next one.
And pause.
How many times did he repeat, with quiet despair: ‘A reporter with no legs? That’s the end.’ Because of this fear, when he started having trouble with his circulation years earlier, he gave up smoking.
Illness is sticky (it’s a spider). It sucks in everything around it. It ensnares, entangles and finishes you off.12
Alicja:
In 1994 he had a stroke. He came down from upstairs into the house where we were already living – he had his study upstairs, with his books and records, and he spent days on end up there. He said: ‘Listen, there’s something wrong with my hand, I can’t hit any of the right keys.’ And I could hear he was talking strangely. He lay down, and I saw him lying there, staring at his hand, and he started to cry. Not long before, a younger friend of his had died of brain cancer, a man he liked, who was also a journalist. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘what you’ve got are the symptoms of an injury to the left cerebral hemisphere.’ It was Friday evening, I started calling the neurologists I knew, and they all told me to take him to hospital at once. ‘I’m not going to hospital at the weekend! I’m not going to lie in an empty hospital, in a cold corridor! I’m not going anywhere!’
I hung on with him until Monday, giving him relaxant drugs, and first thing on Monday I called an old trainee of mine who is head of the neurological clinic on Banach Street. ‘Rysiek, we’re going to Banach Street, Hubert will examine you.’ And Rysiek said: ‘Then why are you packing my pyjamas? I’m not staying in hospital.’ I said: ‘All right, we’ll go without your pyjamas.’ I secretly put the pyjamas in my bag and we left. Professor Hubert Kwieciński did a brain scan, confirmed a cerebral embolism and decided it should be dissolved immediately.
‘I’m not staying in hospital,’ declared Rysiek. ‘I’m due at a meeting in Berlin.’
‘Then your wife will call and tell them you can’t go because you are ill,’ Professor Kwieciński tried to explain.
‘And what will she say? That I’ve had a stroke! They’ll write me off, everyone will write me off – Kapuściński has lost his mind, he’s useless, he’ll never write again, you can’t count on it.’
To which the professor calmly said: ‘Your wife will call and say you had a minor car crash and are lying down for a few days just to make sure nothing is broken.’
So he stayed put. They dissolved the embolism and put him back on his feet, and I took him home. I had the quiet satisfaction of having got my way.
At home he told me he had been invited to the Congress of Polonia in Australia and was going. For pity’s sake, I pleaded.
And off he went. The neurologist’s explanations didn’t help. He went all round Australia and came back happy.
In 2005 he needed a hip operation. He couldn’t walk. He refused to have the operation, but agreed to rehab. Twice a week for a year and a half I took him to Bielany for exercises. He had a tough time sitting in the car, I had a Tico with hard seats, so we bought a Nissan Micra because it would be soft and comfortable. He used to have an hour’s rehab while I got all my errands done – the post office, the pharmacy, the shops.
I got him out of a lot of illnesses, but I didn’t succeed with this one. Maybe there was something I neglected?13
Did he look for God? Did God feature in his life at all?
‘My family home was very Catholic,’ he told the Dominican father Tomasz Dostatni. ‘During the war I was an altar boy. When the priest says Our Father during mass I am not able to say it in Polish, I say: Pater Noster, qui es in caelis: sanctificetur Nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie . . . And I can go on like that to the end.’
‘There is one more topic left for us to talk about,’ says Father Dostatni. ‘A very personal and dramatic one. Because you have had several brushes with death in your life.’
‘It is not pleasant. In those situations I always prayed. And I failed to stick to my pledges. I always prayed to the Virgin Mary. And I said: “If you save me now, I swear I’ll never get myself into another fix like this one.” And of course I didn’t keep the oath. I am a serial oath-breaker. But whenever anything happens, I start praying again.’
Some of his friends are surprised by this conversation (a lengthy excerpt appears in Gazeta Wyborcza after Kapuściński’s death). Rysiek and the Church? Rysiek and faith? This is an unfamiliar side of their friend.
About a dozen years earlier a Catalan journalist asked him directly: ‘Are you a Catholic?’
‘I was brought up in the Catholic faith. In Poland, just as in Iran, religion is a fundamental component of the national tradition. The roots of this lie in the days when the Church was the only keystone of the collective identity, and provided an outlet for dissatisfaction aimed at the political authorities. In a cultural sense I regard myself as a Catholic, though I am not a believer.’
His close friend from Barcelona, Agata Orzeszek, witnessed this conversation. She claims Kapuściński gave a different reply, the gist of it being, ‘I do not feel tied to the Church as an institution, I do not prostrate myself in church, but I am a believer.’
‘Did you ever talk about faith, about God?’ I ask her.
‘Often. It was always clear to me that Rysiek was a believer. He didn’t have to say it – you can sense things like that. I used to tease him, saying that for me it was impossible to understand how you could be a communist and a believer all at once. Then he would calmly explain to me that it was completely understandable, and there was no contradiction. Both Christianity and Marxism, he said, arise out of concern for the poor, and speak up for those who have no voice, and one of the values central to them is justice. Christ was a rebel against some powerful authorities.’
‘So it is faith in the style of liberation theology?’
‘Exactly.’
If he happened to be near a church and mass was being said at the time, he was capable of going up for communion without confession. It posed no problem for him.
On 9 September 2006 he writes:
There are energetic
dynamic days
and there are others –
washed-out
impotent (then the bones ache,
the heart is weaker
the legs are wobbly)
Some days, he doesn’t want to get out of bed. He takes anti-depressants. He gets up and tries to find the remains of life in himself.
Anything at all can make him fly off the handle. He is capable of hurling abuse at the cloak-room attendant who hands him his coat too slowly at the Bookseller’s Club.
Ever weaker, he flies to Italy. The journey is torture, but also provides an impetus for life. That same day, he finds out that Polish public television is preparing a programme exposing him and a few other journalists and writers (he doesn’t know the details) involved in co-operation with the intelligence service in the PRL. He is afraid.
He wants to run away from this fear, and Italy, where he is beloved, is one of the best places for a temporary escape. High-school pupils and college students from the Bolzano area greet him with enthusiasm and adoration, and look up to him like a guru, a sage. When a schoolgirl named Anna recites one of his poems for him, he cannot hide his emotion:
Only those clad in sackcloth
are able to take upon themselves
the suffering of another
to share his pain14
A record of those meetings is published after his death.
Okęcie airport, Friday, 13 October 2006
– the most important thing is to get back into the rhythm of work. The rhythm is something that brings things together, makes the whole coherent, and above all forces you to take the next step, and the next.
Caffé Greco – Mickiewicz, Norwid and Miłosz all used to go there; the six greatest Italian specialists in Polish studies are going to read their translations.15
And from the Italian notes, 22 October 2006:
There comes a moment in life when we can no longer take in new faces. This is to do with the fact that Jarek [Mikołajewski] calls: a charming couple have arrived – he is a film director with a very lovely wife. Will you come and join us for coffee? But right now I’m sitting here engrossed in Rilke. No, I’m not coming. Because I can’t anymore. Because somehow I’d have to refurnish, furnish my own face. Smile, be friendly and so on – but I no longer have the desire or the strength.16
It is hard to believe that this is the man who once hung this aphorism on his door: ‘Enthusiasm makes the world go round.’
Once the end is near, he won’t talk about it. When it was far away, he was happy to – as soon as he reached forty, he was always bringing up the subject of dying in conversation. He used to collect statistics relating to the tendency of journalists to be short-lived; he established that their average life expectancy was about sixty. Whenever he heard that one had died, he would repeat with resignation, ‘There you are – the statistics are confirmed.’
Years earlier, when he bought a raincoat, he said it was the last one he would ever get. It was the same when he bought a Volkswagen – ‘that’s the last car ever’. Indeed it was: he bought it a quarter of a century before his death.
Before his final Christmas holiday, he suggests to his closest friend: ‘You know what, Jurek, we must think about what to do if something were to happen to one of us.’ He senses he will be the first to go.
But immediately afterward he sets about planning his tour of Oceania. Making preparations for the next book or the next journey is the best medicine for depression, for coming to terms with the end.
‘It will be very hard for me,’ he tells another good friend, Andrzej Lubowski, ‘because I don’t know much about the world of Oceania. It’s a long way off, I’ll have to spend at least a few months living there. And before that, look, I have to read all this.’ (Here he points at a pile of books in various languages.) ‘Unless I digest all that, there’s no point in going.’
‘How will you get there? Have you the strength for it?’ asks his friend.
‘In April 2006,’ recalls Lubowski, ‘at a grand ball at the Waldorf Astoria in New York he received the Kościuszko Foundation award. At one point a beautiful tall girl asked him to dance. He smiled a little awkwardly, and a little disarmingly, and to my surprise he went onto the dance floor. Next day I asked him how he coped with it. “I couldn’t refuse. I’ve gradually learned to live with pain,” he said. And added quietly, with that timid smile of his, “I know I’m dying, but I so very much want to get to the place I don’t know.” That Oceania again.’
Alicja gives Agata Orzeszek a final message from him: ‘Rysiek said he won’t do the interview – you know, the one he promised someone.’
‘Only later did I realize that this was his farewell,’ Orzeszek tells me.
Wiktor Osiatyński does not say goodbye to his friend: he suspects his stories about a serious illness are just another fit of hypochondria. ‘He was always dying of something, then he’d leap up, grab a suitcase and be off to the other end of the world. So when he really did die, I couldn’t believe it.’
According to Alicja:
On 13 December I was invited to my clinic to celebrate St Nicholas Day. I said to Rysiek – he was so wretched, lying there, feeling ill, and he had no appetite – ‘Rysiek, I’m not making any dinner. They serve home-cooked meals just round the corner on Krzywicki Street, they’re very tasty. Go there,’ I said, ‘take a walk.’ ‘I haven’t the strength,’ he said. I insisted: ‘Go for a walk.’ He did. I came back from the party, and he said: ‘The food was awful today, too salty, I told them off.’ Now I knew. ‘You’ve got something wrong with your digestive tract,’ I said. ‘It’s not just the leg.’
The next day I did an ultrasound. A tumour on the pancreas.
I couldn’t forgive myself for discovering it so late. But afterwards the surgeons told me pancreatic cancer doesn’t show any symptoms for ages. It could have been developing for a year. They operated. But after the operation he had a heart attack.
And that was it.17
The end of the journey has come. The reporter goes to hospital for an abdominal operation.
A note from his desk:
Crossed out: ‘Start a diary’.
Below: ‘Bodil wants me to write a diary (a journal). I think so – otherwise, why else would she have sent me a blank notebook from France?’
He doesn’t write the diary. Just a few little notes, comments on who came to visit, less often brief thoughts:18
Wednesday, 3 January 2007:
First thing today I had a series of pre-op tests. The general result is favourable. The hospital is efficient and well-organized. The people are friendly and sympathetic . . .
I asked [Professor Wojciech Noszczyk] what my operation will involve. ‘Strictly speaking,’ he said, ‘we don’t know anything until we open up the abdomen. Only then can we see what’s going on in there . . .’
The crisis came in the evening. I suddenly felt myself getting weaker, flying downwards, into a dark fog . . .
Friday, 5 January 2007:
Today I was fitted with an extra-intestinal feeding pump. At noon I had a dehydration crisis: crisis = dehydration = I get weaker, I feel as if my remaining strength has slipped away, I’m falling into an abyss and a black fog is enveloping me.
A terrible feeling of helplessness, I’m losing touch with the world, with the light, with my surroundings, with reality, it’s all drifting away, disappearing.
The nurse puts me on an IV drip: slowly I come back to life, to strength. I can see again, but I still can’t hear.
Every minute it gets better – I feel like crying for joy . . .
How we fail to appreciate the mechanical aspect of human nature! Until finally plugged into various tubes, containers, wires and clocks a man sees that he has become nothing but a cog, and often a minor one, in this great world of machines.
He is not capable of writing, just a few sentences at a time, a few notes. He cannot read, just a little – Pan Tadeusz, the greatest epic in the Polish language. He has had enough of hospital and wants to go home to his study in the loft, his kingdom of learned volumes and poetry.
How could you
leave me like this
o mysterious force
known as life!19
Herodotus is losing his strength, his enthusiasm, his childlike optimism. Everything is drifting away, disappearing. How is he to travel in this state, how is he to open up to an encounter with the world, with the Other? How can he live without discovering something new? Hadn’t he better be going now? Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse: sailing is a necessity – life is not a necessity. Yet another aphorism from the loft wall.
Let others do the sailing. He has blazed enough trails. He has left behind enough compasses, maps and warnings about what to take on the journey.
August 2008 – January 2010
Dąbrowa Leśna – Buenos Aires – New York – Kampala – Dąbrowa Leśna