seeking a father substitute, who may for example be a cult political leader with whom he can identify.’
Salecl knows nothing about Kapuściński’s relationship with his father. Only after hearing her theoretical explanations do I tell her that the father was not an inspiration for Kapuściński. No doubt unconsciously and with no ill intent, Józef belittled his son’s efforts and achievements; truth be told, he did not fully comprehend either what his son did or who he was.
‘It is possible that in adding this strong element of Poland’s heroic, martyrological history to his father’s biography,’ Salecl then speculates, ‘Kapuściński as it were created him over again, built an authority which never existed, but which he so greatly needed.’ In fact, these comments harmonize quite well with what I have managed to establish about the son’s relationship with his father.
5
Inspired by Poetry, Storming Heaven
Although this photograph is undated, it was certainly taken no earlier than September 1948 and no later than the spring of 1950, outside the Polytechnic building in central Warsaw. It shows four friends from the Staszic High School: the one with the biggest shock of hair is Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski, and the one on the right, standing up straight and smiling, is Rysiek Kapuściński.
September 1948 was their first encounter. The pre-war Staszic High School building on Noakowski Street had not yet been reconstructed following war damage, so the Staszic boys are being put up at the Słowacki High School for girls on Wawelska Street. Here the window panes have already been replaced, but not all the floors are finished. In the gym, the pupils exercise on compressed clay.
For those of us born circa 1930 in the deep, poor Polish provinces, in the countryside or in small towns, in peasant or impoverished gentry families, the period immediately following the war was characterized above all by a very low level of knowledge, a complete lack of wide reading or familiarity with literature, history and the world, a complete lack of good manners (my pitifully miserable reading matter in those years: A History of the Yellow Poulaine, by Antonina Domańska, published in 1913, or Memoirs of a Sky-Blue Uniform, by Wiktor Gomulicki, published in 1906). Earlier, during the occupation years, either we were not allowed to read or there simply wasn’t anything to read.
In our class at the Staszic High School we had one old, torn copy of a pre-war history textbook. At the start of the lesson the teacher, Mr Markowski, would tell our classmate, a boy called Kubiak, to read out an extract from this book, and then he would ask us questions. The point was for us to retell in our own words what had just been read out . . .
So we were still victims of the war, even though its sinister noises had long since fallen silent, and grass had grown over the trenches. Because limiting the concept of a ‘war victim’ to those killed and wounded does not exhaust the actual list of losses that society incurs. For how much destruction there is in culture, how badly our consciousness is devastated, how impoverished and wasted our intellectual life! And that affects a series of generations for long years afterwards.1
Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski reads this extract from his school friend’s memoirs and shakes his head.
‘Is there something wrong?’ I ask.
‘This is literary self-creation.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Rysiek was very well read, but towards the end of his life he emphasized the things he lacked in those days purely to show what a long road he had travelled. It was long, that’s a fact. But the story about the only two books he had read makes it much longer, doesn’t it?’ says his friend from high-school days, smiling.
In the renovated Staszic High School building, boys and girls studied together for the first time – co-education.
‘Oh, what a lovely, chocolaty boy he was, with dark eyes and thick, dark hair,’ his classmate Teresa Lechowska (years later a translator of Chinese literature) says of Rysiek.
The ‘chocolaty boy’ sits at a desk right behind Piotrowski. They soon find a common language: poetry. Two other fellow lovers of the arts, Janek Mazur and Krzysiek Dębowski, later to graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts as a graphic designer, complete the gang.
They are teenagers – hungry for each other’s company, conversations, antics, and just being together. To spend as much time with each other as they can, they meet up half an hour before classes. They sit on the desk tops, smoke cigarettes and chat about everything, most of all about poetry. They sing. Kapuściński taps out the beat on the teacher’s chair and, with the ardour he later applied to everything he did in life, sings Lermontov’s poem about Queen Tamara, set to a tune:
In that tower tall and narrow,
Tsarina Tamara did dwell:
As fair as an angel in heaven,
As sly as the devil in hell.
His friends sing along, and when they lose the thread, Rysiek prompts them with the first lines of the verses they have forgotten. They go on wailing until the bell rings for the first lesson. At the end of the school day, they drop in at the Finnish cottage on Wawelska Street where the Kapuścińskis live, very nearby.
Just after the liberation, the family had to cram into one small room next to the construction materials warehouse which Józef Kapuściński was running. When the rebuilding of Warsaw got underway, and the Finns started sending prefabricated cottages for the capital’s builders, the Kapuścińskis were allotted one. Barbara recalls that after the misery of living in a virtual rabbit hutch, the two-family Finnish cottage seemed palatial: there was a small living room with an alcove, a kitchen, and a lavatory, as well as a little garden where their father planted vegetables, flowers and fruit trees.
When Rysiek’s parents are out, the Finnish cottage is a fine place for the high school boys’ first carousals. They crack open a bottle of vodka – a quarter litre of ‘red label’ (the cheapest kind, as they haven’t the money for anything better) – and play bridge. The empty bottles end up in a small attic space above the lavatory. Rysiek’s friends are all the more willing to come by because several of them have taken a fancy to his younger sister (‘Oh, that Basia, what a beauty she was!’).
Rysiek is popular with the girls. One of his schoolmates is madly in love with him, but he is in love with her younger sister. This is the time of first loves and conquests. The boys show off in front of each other. One has the following experience:
One day the boy turns up at a friend’s house, slightly embarrassed, but at the same time proud of a conquest. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘she’s in the family way. Could you possibly help?’ The friend’s aunt is a gynaecologist with a private surgery on Słupecka Street. The friend writes her a note: ‘Dearest Auntie Niusia, I’m sending a girlfriend of mine to see you.’ The aunt doesn’t actually know who got the girl into trouble but feels certain it was her nephew.
Meanwhile, the real troublemaker is not at all perturbed by what has happened. He has been boyishly reckless. The others rather envy him – not for what has happened, but for the fact that he has already experienced something that still lies ahead for them. As for Rysiek, one school friend remembers that he loved boasting about girls.
Unlike the high times at the Kapuścińskis’, at Czcibor-Piotrowski’s home on Filtrowa Street there is no drinking. The friends sit politely at table, listening to the maths coaching given them by the host’s brother, Ireneusz. But they have no passion for maths –
