Kapuściński Ryszard - Ryszard Kapuściński: a life

Ryszard Kapuciski

A Life

ARTUR DOMOSAWSKI

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

This English-language edition first published by Verso 2012

Verso 2012

Translation Antonia Lloyd-Jones 2012

First published as Kapuciski non-fiction

wiat Ksiki 2010

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

Epub ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-918-8

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Domoslawski, Artur, 1967

[Kapuscinski non-fiction. English]

Ryszard Kapuscinski : a life / Artur Domoslawski ; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84467-858-7 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-84467-918-8 (ebook)

1. Kapuscinski, Ryszard. 2. Journalists--Poland--Biography. I. Lloyd-Jones, Antonia. II. Title.

PN5355.P62K36313 2012

070.92--dc23

[B]

2012012437

Typeset in Bembo by Hewer UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in the US by Maple Vail

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

Gabriel Garca Mrquez to his biographer, Gerald Martin

All sorts of biographies enjoy great popularity (every bookshop has a large, separate biographical section). It implies a sort of self-defence reaction against the advancing anonymity of the world. People still have a need to commune (if only through reading) with someone specific, an individual who has a name, a face, habits and desires. The appeal of biography also comes from the fact that people would like to see how this great person achieved greatness, theyd like to get an inside look at his style.

Ryszard Kapuciski, Lapidarium

The merit of writers biographies continues to be disputed. For some, the work is all we need to know. Others say they love the books, so they want to know more about the people who wrote them. Then there is always the possibility that the life will throw light on the books and deepen our understanding of them.

Ian Buruma, writer and journalist

The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth should not be skimped. It may well be, in fact, that a full account of a writers life might in the end be more a work of literature and more illuminating of a cultural or historical moment than the writers books.

V. S. Naipaul, writer, Nobel Prize winner, 2001

A biography can never fully reveal the source of its subject. The commonplace that a biographer has found the key to a persons life is implausible. People are too complicated and inconsistent for this to be true. The best a biographer can hope for is to illuminate aspects of a life and seek to give glimpses of the subject, and that way tell a story.

Patrick French, biographer of V. S. Naipaul

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Smile

More than anything, one is struck by the smile. Always the same smile, everywhere, as if that face were never sad, worried or angry. And if it wasnt smiling, it was pensive or focused instead. Or sheepish. Im not disturbing you, am I? he would ask whenever, whether unheralded or even if expected, he dropped in at the newspaper office and stopped by someones desk or room. And there was that smile again: apologetic, very slightly embarrassed. It was a defensive smile that kept the door open for retreat.

How many times did I hear him effusively greet a friend he had known for half a century, a female acquaintance he saw from time to time, an editor with whom he needed to negotiate, or a student hed never met before who had come to show him her dissertation on his work and always with that same smile on his face?

Oh, how modest he is.

He always listens so carefully to what you have to say.

Oh yes, were friends.

Everyone who ever talked to him had the same impression.

And so at the start of this journey through his life I am surprised when some of his old friends struggle to fish the anecdotes and situations from their memories, and finish their story before the story I am expecting to hear has even begun.

Oh God, we knew each other for decades, but I know so little about him nothing really. How sad!

They came away from every encounter feeling that they had had a fascinating, unforgettable conversation. Now they are realising that they did all the talking. He said nothing he just listened.

The smile you mentioned was a mask that became natural to him over the years, says an old friend who really did know him well. Modesty? That was a mask too, she says. There are various things you could say about him, but not that he was modest. He had a high opinion of himself he believed he had things to say that other people have no idea about.

We agree that his mild manner and friendliness, the fact that he was not full of himself, were taken for modesty.

I say I dont know where to start my account of him; perhaps it will begin with some impressions on the theme of his smile. Because when someone has the same smile for everyone, it cannot be just friendliness there has to be more to it, doesnt she think?

He used that smile to disarm the world when it could have done him harm. Those soldiers, who let him pass through prohibited zones in Africa, but who could have shot him. The Communist Party decision-makers who sent him out into the world. The potentially jealous people, who are all too common in the journalists profession. Why not try to find out if he learned that smile during a war? Did that smile ever save his life?

Right, says one of his closest male friends, to whom I recount this conversation, but is that all there is to it? I always felt that he lived in a world of mystery, that he was hiding a lot of secrets from his friends, his loved ones and from himself; yes, yes, you can also have secrets from yourself. What sort of secrets did he have? Personal ones, political ones, writers ones. Despite his world fame, which should have given him self-confidence and peace of mind, there was something weighing him down. I could see it in his eyes, in his step; that smile, that softness, that way of giving the impression that you like everyone and are listening, even when theyre talking nonsense.

The secrets of Ryszard Kapuciski. Is that what I should call my book about the man known as the reporter of the twentieth century, my mentor and special friend, close and not so close, whom I often find myself thinking I will come to know better now?

Yes, we did a lot of talking throughout the last ten years of his life, always in the private loft-kingdom of his house on Prokuratorska Street in the Warsaw district of Ochota. I must have been there a hundred times, but as I see with hindsight, I got to know a smaller part of Mr Kapuciski who with closer acquaintance became Ryszard, then Rysiek than I thought I had. We talked about recent journeys we had made and ones we were planning; about intelligent books and stupid governments; about what was happening in politics and what wed read in the papers; about how we should never, ever give up our passions, even if someone tried to beat them out of us. And we talked a lot about people: Maestro Kapuciski loved to gossip.