The Smile
More than anything, one is struck by the smile. Always the same smile, everywhere, as if that face were never sad, worried or angry. And if it wasn’t smiling, it was pensive or focused instead. Or sheepish. ‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’ he would ask whenever, whether unheralded or even if expected, he dropped in at the newspaper office and stopped by someone’s desk or room. And there was that smile again: apologetic, very slightly embarrassed. It was a defensive smile that kept the door open for retreat.
How many times did I hear him effusively greet a friend he had known for half a century, a female acquaintance he saw from time to time, an editor with whom he needed to negotiate, or a student he’d never met before who had come to show him her dissertation on his work – and always with that same smile on his face?
‘Oh, how modest he is.’
‘He always listens so carefully to what you have to say.’
‘Oh yes, we’re friends.’
Everyone who ever talked to him had the same impression.
And so at the start of this journey through his life I am surprised when some of his old friends struggle to fish the anecdotes and situations from their memories, and finish their story before the story I am expecting to hear has even begun.
‘Oh God, we knew each other for decades, but I know so little about him – nothing really. How sad!’
They came away from every encounter feeling that they had had a fascinating, unforgettable conversation. Now they are realising that they did all the talking. He said nothing – he just listened.
‘The smile you mentioned was a mask that became natural to him over the years,’ says an old friend who really did know him well. ‘Modesty? That was a mask too,’ she says. ‘There are various things you could say about him, but not that he was modest. He had a high opinion of himself – he believed he had things to say that other people have no idea about.’
We agree that his mild manner and friendliness, the fact that he was not full of himself, were taken for modesty.
I say I don’t know where to start my account of him; perhaps it will begin with some impressions on the theme of his smile. Because when someone has the same smile for everyone, it cannot be just friendliness – there has to be more to it, doesn’t she think?
‘He used that smile to disarm the world when it could have done him harm. Those soldiers, who let him pass through prohibited zones in Africa, but who could have shot him. The Communist Party decision-makers who sent him out into the world. The potentially jealous people, who are all too common in the journalist’s profession. Why not try to find out if he learned that smile during a war? Did that smile ever save his life?’
‘Right,’ says one of his closest male friends, to whom I recount this conversation, ‘but is that all there is to it? I always felt that he lived in a world of mystery, that he was hiding a lot of secrets – from his friends, his loved ones and from himself; yes, yes, you can also have secrets from yourself. What sort of secrets did he have? Personal ones, political ones, writer’s ones. Despite his world fame, which should have given him self-confidence and peace of mind, there was something weighing him down. I could see it in his eyes, in his step; that smile, that softness, that way of giving the impression that you like everyone and are listening, even when they’re talking nonsense.’
The secrets of Ryszard Kapuściński. Is that what I should call my book about the man known as the ‘reporter of the twentieth century’, my mentor and special friend, close and not so close, whom – I often find myself thinking – I will come to know better now?
Yes, we did a lot of talking throughout the last ten years of his life, always in the private loft-kingdom of his house on Prokuratorska Street in the Warsaw district of Ochota. I must have been there a hundred times, but as I see with hindsight, I got to know a smaller part of Mr Kapuściński – who with closer acquaintance became Ryszard, then Rysiek – than I thought I had. We talked about recent journeys we had made and ones we were planning; about intelligent books and stupid governments; about what was happening in politics and what we’d read in the papers; about how we should never, ever give up our passions, even if someone tried to beat them out of us. And we talked a lot about people: Maestro Kapuściński loved to gossip.
But I never questioned him about how a career was made in People’s Poland; what strings had to be pulled, to what uses he had put his smile, and what price had to be paid. I sensed that he didn’t like questions about his past, and whenever the conversation headed in that direction, he would deftly change the subject. Sometimes he commented that, democracy or no democracy, conformism and the herd mentality are alike, even though times change. I never asked questions about which side he was on during Poland’s various political turning points of the past half-century, about what he had done and thought. Or what he had been looking for as he eagerly set off for Congo after Lumumba’s assassination, as he drove into the middle of a revolution begun in the name of Allah, or toured a rebellious Poland in the carnival era of 1980–81. His ideas and motivations seemed perfectly clear back then, though now perhaps I understand them better. I never inquired whether he might occasionally have embellished or invented anything, as some foreign critics claimed. Did he feel fulfilled? I think he did.
Now as I spend my time in libraries and other archives, among the books and documents he kept at home, as I travel in his footsteps through Africa and Latin America, and above all as I talk to his close friends, acquaintances, and people who shared episodes in his life, I am discovering a Kapuściński who almost seems a stranger. Would anyone who ever saw, heard, or met him believe that this mild-mannered man with the permanent smile once seized an official by the lapels, pinned him to the wall, and grappled with him, yelling, ‘How dare you, you bastard!’ (I will return to this story later.)
We often discover him through a joint effort, as we swap observations and try to put names to things we can only just discern. To some degree, all my interlocutors are co-authors of this book, even if they do not agree with all of it or with its conclusion.
Some of the people who know some of Kapuściński’s secrets ask, ‘So, will this be a biography or the portrait of a saint?’
A woman who was once in love with him says, ‘I hope you aren’t writing a hagiography. Rysiek was a wonderful, colourful guy: a reporter, traveller, writer, husband, father. And lover. He was a complex man, living in tangled times, in several eras, in various worlds.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I answer. ‘I owe him a great deal, but I won’t take part in the “beatification process”.’
We’re both smiling. Do admiration and friendship have to kill off inquiry?
They probably don’t help. I won’t pretend – I do have a problem with this, and writing this book has been a struggle between competing loyalties.
I’m still looking for a tone for my account, trying to devise its architecture. Will the master’s narrative inventions come to the rescue?
The worst chaos is on the big round table: photos of various sizes, cassettes . . . And more posters and albums, records and books acquired or given by people, the collected remnants of an era just ended . . . Now, at the very thought of trying to put everything in order . . . I am overcome by both aversion and profound fatigue.1
As a way of sorting things out, I have put several cardboard binders on the windowsill and labelled them: ‘Pińsk and the war’, ‘High school, college, first poems’, ‘ZMP (Union of Polish Youth), PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party), Stalinism, revisionism’, ‘African controversies’, ‘Fiction – non-fiction’. Before making my final selection of notes, cuttings and books, I review the photographs – I almost always do this before sitting down to write a major piece. A photograph stirs a chord that words cannot set in motion. (I’m falling into a trap, because I’m sure the photograph of Kapuściński’s smile will seduce me as easily as the original did, leaving me incapable of pursuing a proper investigation.)
I’m sitting alone looking through notes and pictures on the table, listening to taped conversations.2
I’ll try to start like this . . .