used to think a real man should produce a son who would inherit his father’s duties, running the family, building a house and planting trees. Rysiek was wondering what to call our daughter when he bumped into a friend of ours. “Zocha”, he announced, “I’ve had a daughter.” Later she told me he looked pleased. “So call her Zofia,” she suggested [Zocha is a diminutive of Zofia]. He liked that idea.’
But there’s another name he likes even more than Zofia – Zojka. A girl named Zojka is the heroine of the era, a role model for young communists in the ZMP, and a sacred figure in the communist revolution. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, a Soviet schoolgirl named Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya joined a special unit in the Red Army. This unit performed acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. After blowing up a German ammunitions store, Zoya was caught and hanged.
If the child had been a boy, he would have been called Wowka (Polish spelling of the Russian ‘Vovka’), short for Włodzimierz, in honour of the leader of the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin. According to a different version of the story, ‘Wowka’ would have been a tribute not to Lenin but to Vladimir Mayakovsky, which is what Kapuściński told his translator Agata Orzeszek.
‘In those days he was captivated by Mayakovsky’s talent and the power of his voice,’ she says. ‘He was sorry Broniewski was called Władysław, and not Włodzimierz, because then his son’s name would have paid homage to both his favourite poets.’
But his dream of having a son had not come true.
Rysiek boards a train and goes straight to Szczecin. However, for the first year of their marriage they live apart. Alicja takes care of Zojka in Szczecin and wonders whether to return to her studies, while Rysiek goes on studying and running the ZMP revolution in Warsaw. He comes to visit, but he is a husband and father ‘at arm’s length’. When he comes, he sometimes goes out for a walk with the pram, but rather reluctantly. So young, and already a father. He is the eternal bachelor type and likes appealing to the girls. A baby in a pram is not well suited to this pursuit.
One time, he turns up in Szczecin in an anxious state: his mother has had a stroke. It is either a haemorrhage or a cerebral embolism. It seems truly life-threatening. There are no telephones in the Finnish cottages where the Kapuścińskis live. Rysiek runs to the hospital on Hoża Street to call an ambulance, and the doctor offers this advice: ‘The best thing to do is apply leeches to draw blood from the carotid artery.’ So he races to the market on Polna Street and buys a jar of leeches. Alicja reckons those leeches saved her mother-in-law’s life. After the stroke, Maria Kapuścińska never went back to work. She functioned fairly normally and did not need to be cared for like a disabled person, but her strength was seriously impaired.
After this incident, Rysiek tells Alicja to drop her studies in the history faculty. He says that, after graduating, he plans to become a journalist. But what about her? If she graduates in history, she will have to teach rowdy little brats. ‘Go and study medicine,’ he suggests.
Alicja passes the exams for medicine in Szczecin and gets credits for her first year of studies there. Meanwhile Rysiek finishes his history degree in Warsaw. He writes a dissertation, on the education system within the Russian partition in the early twentieth century, under the supervision of Henryk Jabłoński, later chairman of the Council of State (the PRL equivalent of a national president without any real power). Rysiek goes back to work at Sztandar Młodych and is soon allotted an employee’s flat.
After her year in Szczecin, Alicja returns to Warsaw and continues her medical studies there. Zojka stays behind in Szczecin with her grandparents. She is too small to go to nursery school. A year later her parents take her to Warsaw.
The young family is assigned a room with a kitchen and a bathroom in a block on the corner of Nowolipki Street and Marchlewski (now Jan Paweł II) Avenue. The kitchen is quite large, with a window. There they put a desk – this will be Rysiek’s workroom.
Alicja gets up early in the morning, quickly makes something to eat, then hurriedly irons her husband’s shirts, takes Zojka to nursery school – luckily, in the house next door – and rushes to lectures or practical studies at the hospital. In the evening when she comes home, the laundry is waiting for her in the bathtub, because they have no washing machine.
The constant noise coming from the other side of the walls is a daily nightmare. Their flat is sandwiched between a lift and a rubbish chute: on one side the lift doors keep crashing shut, and then the lift thunders up or down; on the other is the chute, producing yet more clatter. On top of that, the chute is connected to the kitchen by a ventilator, in order to provide ventilation for the kitchen, but usually it is the stink from the chute that invades the kitchen. Alicja seals up the ventilator, but it doesn’t help.
Rysiek is infuriated. He can’t bear being disturbed while he’s writing. He needs peace and quiet. If he doesn’t have it, everything irritates him.
So when Alicja sees Rysiek starting to twitch and pace nervously, she and Zojka sit quietly in the corner to avoid further antagonizing the lion. She knows him well enough to understand when to keep out of the way and not respond to provocation. Never does she strike her fist against the table; never does she say she’s had enough. (‘Of course not! That was my Rysio! Whatever do you mean?’)
Once the writing starts to go smoothly, he solemnly announces that now he’s making progress, that now he has the wind in his sails. He reads out the first sentence, and Alicja jumps for joy. And so on . . . to the next paragraph. He always writes slowly and barely meets the standard editorial quotas. His concern is with the quality of his writing, not the quantity, and so he earns a pittance.
Alicja’s father helps them. Both her parents are working, and although teachers’ salaries are not high, they offer to assist. Only in 1959, when Alicja finishes her medical studies and receives her first salary, does she write to her father to say that they are grateful for his support but from now on will manage on their own.
11
’56: Revolution All Over Again
Every revolution is preceded by a state of general exhaustion, and takes place against a background of unleashed aggressiveness. Authority cannot put up with a nation that gets on its nerves; the nation cannot tolerate an authority it has come to hate . . . A climate of tension and increasing oppressiveness prevails. We start to fall into a psychosis of terror. The discharge is coming. We feel it.
Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs1
‘This will never get through,’ snaps the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych. She can tell that the report about Nowa Huta that has just landed on her desk will get the newspaper into trouble.
Irena Tarłowska is not a timid boss. At thirty-seven, she is quite a bit older than the twenty-somethings who form the main core of her staff. (‘Irena Tarłowska was a strapping, handsome woman with thick blond hair parted to one side’, Kapuściński would write about her years later.2) A left-wing woman who radiated French culture, she had been in the communist youth movement during the inter-war years and in the PPR (Polish Worker’s Party) and the underground People’s Army during the war. She had personal connections with high-ranking officials of the post-war regime. Her appointment in 1954 as the editor-in-chief at Sztandar Młodych was interpreted by the journalists as a harbinger of approaching change.
‘There’s no question – the censor won’t let this through,’ she repeats firmly, leaving no hope for the poet and history graduate upon his return to work.
For the past three years, Kapuściński has been writing for Sztandar Młodych sporadically – an occasional review, a short report or a
