he embodied the independence of the reporter; and that for half a century, at risk of life and health, he monitored wars and conflicts on several continents. Nor did the jury fail to acknowledge that he was on the side of the disadvantaged.
Kapuściński was filled with pride at receiving the award jointly with the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, father of liberation theology, defender of the excluded and critic of social inequality. As a thirty-something correspondent working in Latin America for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuściński had been fascinated by the rebel movement. But he never met Father Gutiérrez at the time. For a reporter from poor, socialist Poland, with limited funds, gaining access to an intellectual star such as Gutiérrez would have been difficult. More than three decades later, he stood next to his hero as joint winner of a coveted award.
And here are some photographs with great writers, including a series with the Nobel Prize–winner Gabriel García Márquez during journalism workshops in Mexico City. García Márquez invited Kapuściński, as a master of the craft, to run workshops for reporters from Latin America. I remember his being adamant that Gazeta Wyborcza use one of these photos to illustrate an interview with him about the transformations in Latin America, and that he almost withdrew the text shortly before the deadline, when it turned out that the picture wouldn’t fit on the page. (‘This interview is worthless! It should go in the bin if no one knows the reason I was in Mexico!’ he cried in boyish pique. He calmed down when I told him that alongside our conversation would be a short piece about his workshops with García Márquez and a picture of them together.)
Another photo shows him having dinner with Salman Rushdie in the 1980s, in New York or perhaps London. After reading Kapuściński’s book about the war in Angola, and fascinated by his descriptions of the wooden city floating away, Rushdie wrote that numerous reporters had seen the wooden city, but Kapuściński was the only one to have noticed it. He called him a ‘codebreaker’ of the encrypted dark century.
One photograph attracts my attention, not because of what it depicts, but because of something written later in connection with the moment immortalized in it. It shows an open air café in San Sebastian in 1996. Here is Kapuściński with the Polish philosopher Father Józef Tischner, the Polish editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza Adam Michnik and Jorge Ruiz, Warsaw correspondent for the Spanish news agency, EFE. All four were taking part in seminars at a summer university in the Basque country. After Kapuściński’s death, Michnik wrote that he had asked him that summer when he’d stopped believing in communism. Kapuściński had replied that 1956 was decisive, though he had remained permanently on the side of the poor and the disadvantaged.
This picture has no date. Nor is Kapuściński in it – he took it himself, but it says more than many of the portraits. It shows a small table, with several necessities for his next journey lying on it: books (one of the titles, surprisingly, is Africa for Beginners), notebooks, folders, several small wallets, a camera, some pills, little bottles of heart drops and Amol (a herbal tonic). I call this picture ‘life on the road’.
The pills and bottles remind me of another photograph, which I saw at the home of Kapuściński’s friends Agnieszka and Andrzej Krzysztof Wróblewski. In it, he seems thinner than in all the other photos from that era – or is that just auto-suggestion? It’s September 1964, Paris. As they walk past one of the many cafés, his friends notice a book in Polish lying on a table. Shortly after, Kapuściński appears; he has just briefly stepped away. He is there with his wife, Alicja, gathering his strength after suffering from cerebral malaria and tuberculosis in Africa. One of his rare holidays, because he doesn’t know how to relax – he gets bored, and doing nothing makes him twitchy. On their way home that night from the café, they lose their way. Kapuściński remembers a petrol station next to the campsite where they are to spend the night. Because he had no sense of direction, they wander till dawn. (‘How on earth did he manage in Africa?’ say his friends, clutching their heads.)
Only now does it occur to me that the photographs are arranged in reverse chronology, but I need to tell – and I want to understand – from what sort of place, in what way and by what road he reached the students at Bolzano, Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, how he came to his faith and lack of faith in socialism, and a hundred other things besides.
So, before the reporter sets off on a journey, climbing rocky paths and fighting his way through hostile bush, before he comes to Africans who mistrust whites, or discovers the confused world of the conquerors and the conquered, before he investigates the mysteries of rebellions and revolutions, gets to know a hundred other places and sees a thousand mind-boggling things, there is Pińsk, a house on Błotna Street, and a wooden rocking horse on which little Rysio sits, putting on a smile, making an impatient face, or squinting because of the sunlight shining in his eyes.
2
Pińsk: The Beginning
This is one of the earliest photographs. It differs from the one on the balcony of the house on Błotna Street, but again features the rocking horse, now in the yard. Little Rysio’s hair is combed slightly to the right and he wears a warm jacket but no hat, so it must be spring or autumn. He may be three or four years old. It is the essence of childhood, nothing more.
A few later photographs have survived: showing him wrapped up as he walks along a street in winter, holding his father’s hand. A shop window in the background is inscribed ‘Józef Izaak’. In a similar photo of him with his mother, on the same street, he wears shorts; it is a sunny day in the summer of 1937, when he was five years old.
These photographs were taken in Pińsk, a city then in eastern Poland and now in Belarus. His parents, Maria and Józef, were from elsewhere. His mother, whose maiden name was Bobkowa, was the granddaughter of a baker known locally as ‘the Magyar’. (Because of a dark complexion? because he was an immigrant?) Maria came to Pińsk from Bochnia, near Kraków; Józef, the son of a local civil servant, was from the Kielce region. The government of the new Polish state, which came into existence after the First World War, wanted Poles to resettle along the eastern border, where they could disseminate Polish education, but few were keen to uproot themselves and go to a distant, culturally alien region.
Polish was the minority language in Pińsk. Two-thirds of the citizens were Jews and the rest were Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians, plus a handful of Germans. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, following the influx of settlers from the heart of Poland, almost one in four of Pińsk’s 35,000 citizens was an ethnic Pole.
Going to Pińsk (or Polesie, as the surrounding region is called) from central or southern Poland was a cross between exile and missionary work. Kapuściński used to say that his parents were told, in effect, ‘If you want jobs, go to teacher training college, and when you graduate, go to Polesie.’ And that is just what Maria and Józef did.
The two young teachers arrived in Pińsk on the eve of the Great Depression. ‘I was born the child of settlers,’ said Kapuściński. It was 1932. Just over a year later, his sister, Basia (short for Barbara), was born.
Thirty years after the war, Kapuściński goes to visit the city of his childhood for the first time. It is the mid-1970s, and Pińsk now lies within the Soviet Union.
Standing in Kościuszko Street (then, as today, Lenin Street), he immediately recognizes his surroundings. That is Gregorowicz’s restaurant, where Mama used to take him for ice cream. Over there is 3 May Square and there, Bernardyńska Street. Some images from his childhood, ‘though they are covered up by other ones, still exist’. Later he will say, ‘I feel that if I don’t write about it, the world of pre-war Pińsk will cease to exist, because it probably remains only in my head.’1
Does the seven-year-old boy from the remote province dream of the journeys inspired by Pińsk’s location or by the
