to read. It was from Nigeria, in 1966, just after a coup d’état:
I was waiting for them to set me on fire . . . I felt an animal fear, a fear that struck me with paralysis; I stood rooted to the ground, as if I was buried up to the neck . . . My life was going to end in inhuman torment. My life was going to go out in flames . . . They waved a knife before my eyes. They pointed it at my heart.13
The editor, Wiesława Bolimowska, went to the head of the department, Michał Hoffman, and insisted: ‘We can’t let this go out, because Mrs Kapuścińska will die of a heart attack if she reads it.’ In order to stop the newspapers from reprinting the article, they blocked its publication in all the agency’s bulletins, which was a frequent practice. A decade later, it appeared as ‘The Burning Roadblocks’ in Kapuściński’s collection of reports titled The Soccer War. Maria Kapuścińska was no longer alive; she died in 1974 at the age of sixty-three.
The father, by contrast, enjoyed making fun of his son. Whenever Rysiek was keenly studying something, he always underlined important sentences in books – a habit he continued throughout life, initially as a renowned reporter and then as a world-famous writer – and his father would provoke him by saying: ‘Go to bed, Rysio. I’ll have the whole book underlined for you by morning.’
He also used to joke that Rysiek was of medium height, causing Maria to burst out, ‘What do you mean, medium? Rysio is tall!’ His father would laugh and say, ‘Rysio is medium taller and I’m medium smaller’, at which point his mother would end the debate by shouting, ‘What are you on about, old man? You’re small, and my son is tall!’
Rysiek could not look to his father for inspiring conversation about culture, books, politics or the world. For years he suffered from feeling he was a poorly educated provincial who had been given little at home and had had to achieve everything through hard work. Once he told me that as a young reporter, whenever he used to meet his fellow writers Kazimierz Dziewanowski and Wojciech Giełżyński, both of whom came from truly intellectual homes, he was ashamed to speak up. ‘They knew all about everything; they used to exchange names and book titles I had never even heard of,’ he said, perhaps with a note of pride at having outdistanced these colleagues. Yet many years earlier, as he sat with them not knowing what and how to contribute to the conversation, he must have felt pain rather than pride.
Józef Kapuściński only dimly understood his son’s occupation. He was outraged to see newspapers featuring the name ‘Kapuściński’ spread across the floor to be trodden on or used to line the waste bin. A conscientious and dutiful man, he claimed to have never once been late for a lesson. He found it irritating that his son shut himself in his room for hours at a stretch doing goodness knows what (in other words, writing) instead of going to work and earning a living for his family. In Józef ’s mind, someone who went to work was working, while someone who sat at home for days on end was not.
Once when he came to visit his son and daughter-in-law, he inquired, ‘Were you at work today, Rysio?’
‘Yes, Dad, I was.’
‘What time did you have to be there?’
‘At eight, Dad, eight o’clock,’ lied his son, to avoid a pointless argument.
Another time, Józef Kapuściński waxed indignant when a female friend of his son and daughter-in-law mentioned that her double surname consisted of her maiden name combined with her husband’s. ‘Where is your respect for your husband?’ he bristled.
As Kapuściński’s sister told me, to the end of his days their father, who died in 1977, never fully understoond what Rysiek did or who he was.
3
War
I am seven years old, I am standing in a meadow (when the war began we were in the countryside in eastern Poland), and I am staring at some dots moving ever so slightly in the sky. Suddenly nearby, at the edge of the forest, there is a terrible boom, and I can hear bombs exploding with a hellish bang (only later will I discover that they are bombs, because at that moment I still don’t know such a thing as a bomb exists – the very idea is alien to me, a child from a remote province, who isn’t yet familiar with the radio or the cinema, doesn’t know how to read or write, and has never heard that wars or deadly weapons exist), and I see gigantic fountains of earth flying into the air. I want to run towards this extraordinary show, it stuns and fascinates me, and as I haven’t yet had any experience of war I cannot connect into a single chain of causes and effects the shining silver aeroplanes, the boom of the bombs, the plumes of earth flying up as high as the trees and death threatening me. So I start to run towards the forest, towards the bombs falling and exploding, but a hand grabs my arm from behind and pulls me over onto the meadow. ‘Lie down,’ I hear my mother’s trembling voice say, ‘Don’t move’ . . .
It is night, and I want to sleep, but I’m not allowed to sleep, we have to go, we have to escape. Where to, I do not know, but I understand that escape has become an absolute necessity, a new form of life, because everyone is escaping; all the highways, roads and even the field tracks are full of wagons, carts and bicycles, full of bundles, cases, bags and buckets, full of terrified people wandering helplessly. Some are escaping to the east, others to the west . . .
We pass battlefields strewn with abandoned equipment, bombed-out railway stations, and cars turned on their sides. There is a smell of gunpowder, a smell of burning, and a smell of rotting meat. Everywhere we come upon the dead bodies of horses. A horse – a large, defenceless animal – doesn’t know how to hide; during a bomb attack it stands still, waiting for death. At every step there are dead horses, either lying in the road, or in the ditch next to it, or somewhere further off in a field. They lie with their legs in the air, shaking their hooves at the world. I do not see any dead people anywhere, because they are buried quickly, just endless corpses of horses, black, bay, piebald, chestnut, as if it wasn’t a war between people, but horses.1
Fifty years later, on reading this description of the scene, the American author John Updike writes in a letter to Kapuściński that only now does he understand the significance of the figure of the horse in Picasso’s Guernica.
After days of wandering we are near Pińsk, and in the distance we can already see the town’s houses, the trees of its beautiful park, and the towers of its churches, when suddenly sailors materialize on the road right by the bridge. They have long rifles and sharp, barbed bayonets and, on their round caps, red stars . . . they don’t want to let us into town. They keep us at a distance – ‘Don’t move!’ they shout, and take aim with their rifles. My mother, as well as other women and children – for they have already rounded up a group of us – is crying and begging for mercy. ‘Plead for mercy,’ the mothers, beside themselves with fear, implore us, but what more can we, the children, do – we have already been kneeling on the road, sobbing and stretching out our arms, for a long time.
Shouting, crying, rifles and bayonets, the enraged faces of the sweaty and angry sailors, some sort of fury, something dreadful and incomprehensible, it is all there by the bridge over the river Pina, in this world that I enter at seven years of age.2
In Pińsk there is nothing to eat. Maria Kapuścińska stands in the window for hours, watching. In the neighbours’ windows Rysiek sees people gazing at the street in the same way as his mother. Are they waiting for something? But what?
Rysiek spends hours roaming the streets and courtyards with his friends. They play a few games, but in fact they’re hoping to find something to eat.
Sometimes the smell of soup comes wafting through a door. Whenever this happens, one of my friends, Waldek, thrusts his nose into the gap in the door and starts urgently,
