boy would become, one would like to conjure up a story of this kind.
‘Polesie was truly exotic,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Lots of rivers and canals, great floodplains. If you boarded a boat, you could sail the seas without disembarking. Pińsk was connected by water to all the oceans.’2 How do you sail to the oceans from Pińsk? Along rivers to the Baltic Sea, then via the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic; or along the River Dnieper to the Black Sea, and from there via the Bosporus, the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean . . .
The folk beliefs of Polesie say more about the world Kapuściński came from than all the historical stories about dukes, wars and sacred relics. Country people tell stories about the suicide, whose soul wanders the local woods, still wearing his body:
People regard a dead man remaining on earth and wandering as a punishment imposed on his soul by the Lord God. This soul cannot get into heaven. According to folk belief, there is always a penitent soul of this kind inside a whirlwind, and if one were to throw a knife at it, blood would be shed. But naturally it is hard to hit!3
This is like an Eastern European version of Macondo, the mythical land invented by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Macondo people fly around the village on carpets, or rise and hover in the air after drinking a cup of chocolate; they also have epidemic outbreaks of insomnia and memory loss.
Kapuściński sees associations with Africa. Among his handwritten notes I find a comparison, titled Polesie found in Africa, of the land of his childhood years with the continent he described as a reporter. Apart from poverty, hunger and disease, he lists belief in a spirit world, a cult of ancestors, and consciousness of tribal identity. Also, like Africa, Polesie is ‘colonized terrain’. There is, moreover, a handful of tangible similarities: no electricity, no surfaced roads, no shoes.
In other words, a description of the city where Kapuściński’s parents came to live in the early 1930s.
Kapuściński’s enduring memories of his family home are meagre. He remembers little from before the war. His account contains more intuition, more impressions bordering on poetry and fantasy, than specific information.
In sketches for a book about Pińsk (which he planned to write but never did), he says his father was good to him, and that this was important, sacred. He admits to having had no sense of his mother as a separate being; his parents were a single entity.
The only other person able to dredge up memories of the family home before the war is his sister, Barbara. As a student of English, she emigrated in the 1960s to Great Britain and later to Canada. Kapuściński was so angry at her departure that their relationship initially cooled. He believed it was necessary to stay in Poland and help build the country’s future after the destruction of the Second World War. Then a loyal member of the Communist Party, he felt that leaving for the West was a betrayal. But he and his sister had other causes of conflict. In People’s Poland the political authorities disapproved of anyone who had relatives in the West. Remaining abroad, in a capitalist country, was regarded as a form of running away and of renouncing one’s socialist fatherland. Kapuściński, who at the time had recently started working at the state press agency, was afraid that his sister’s emigration to the West might damage his reputation, undermine the trust of the decision-makers, and ruin his developing career.
‘We weren’t rich, but we weren’t deprived in any way. Both our parents worked at a school,’ recalls Barbara, whose married name is Wiśniewska, when I spend three days talking to her in Vancouver in June 2008.
Her testimony differs from that in certain of Kapuściński’s accounts which suggest he came from an impoverished background in Pińsk. It is true that teachers earned little in those days, but they belonged to a social stratum corresponding to the modern middle class; they were the cultural élite, especially in a provincial town like Pińsk. Photographs of their several-storey house also reveal that the Kapuścińskis did not live in a shack.
Yet the memories of poverty in Pińsk are a partly justified piece of literary self-creation. Little Rysio really did see poverty all around him. Although the Kapuścińskis themselves were not indigent, poverty dominated the local landscape; it was a ubiquitous element of his childhood. (‘This year’s spring,’ we read in a 1936 issue of Nowe Echo Pińskie (Pińsk New Echo), ‘fortunately quite an early one, has stirred new hopes among the unemployed masses that the tough winter is over, when frequently there were no potatoes in the house for dinner, and when gaunt, hungry children huddled together in cold, unheated hovels’).
Over the years, Kapuściński relates pieces from the book he planned to (but never did) write about Pińsk in the 1930s in interviews and chats, such as:
I think that era and Pińsk’s pleasant climate of co-existing, cooperating multiculturalism is worth salvaging in the modern, stressed-out world . . .
I was shaped by everything that shapes so-called borderlands man. Borderlands man is always and everywhere an intercultural person – someone ‘in between’. He is a person who learns from childhood, from playing in the yard, that people are different, and that otherness is simply a feature of mankind . . . In Pińsk one kid would bring a herring from home, another a piece of koulibiac, and a third a chop . . . Being from the borderlands means being open to other cultures, or more than that – borderlands people do not regard other cultures as different, but as part of their own culture . . .
It was a town full of friendly people and friendly streets. Until the outbreak of war, I never saw any conflict there. It was a place without pomp or show, a place full of modest, ordinary people. As teachers, my parents were those sorts of people too. Maybe that’s why I always felt all right later on in the so-called Third World, where people are distinguished not by wealth but hospitality, not by ostentation but cooperation.4
Was there really such an idyllic world on the borders where several nations, religions and cultures met? In that part of the world, during the 1930s, when the entire region seethed with ethnic, religious and class hatred?
It is 1930, and parliamentary elections are approaching. Piński Przegląd Diecezjalny – the ‘Pińsk Diocesan Review’, a periodical issued by the church – asks
whether the non-Christian, or unfaithful, indifferent Christian will make sure that only laws which are in accordance with the teachings of the Gospels will emerge from the Sejm and the Senate? Of course not. And if the majority of members of parliament are non-Christian or not very Christian, one can always expect non-Christian laws. Hence the final conclusion: to vote only for righteous, sincere Christians.5
And in another issue of the same journal: ‘From the pulpit one should clearly give the congregation the following instructions: . . . not to vote for the candidate lists of other denominations (Jewish, Orthodox, etc.)’.6
The Polish press issued in Pińsk and Polesie in the 1930s never stops warning of threats – from communists, Jews, Belarusians and Ukrainians.
Dwutygodnik Kresowy – the Borderlands Bi-Weekly – calls for a battle against ‘Jewishness’ and for ‘the establishment of full Polishness’. It warns that ‘despite its best intentions’, society ‘will not cope with Jewishness’ on its own; ‘the municipal authorities must insist on legislation that recognizes the precedence of Poles in Poland’.7
The overwhelming majority of citizens in Pińsk are Jews, yet the pro-government Echo Pińskie (Pińsk Echo) demands that Poles should hold the majority on the city council and should have their own mayor – and that is what happens.
Unlike cities in the Białystok region, as well as Wilno (now Vilnius) or Lwów (now Lviv), Pińsk in the 1930s never goes so far as to institute
