25 On the Trail of Che Guevara, Continued Further
27 A Committed Reporter, a Black-and-White World
28 Christ with a Rifle in a Czech Comedy at the Emperor’s Court
30 The Final Revolution, the Final Coup
31 Worth More Than a Thousand Grizzled Journofantasists
32 Lapidarium 4: Why Did Kapuściński Have No Critics in Poland?
33 The Reporter Amends Reality, Or, Critics of All Nations, Unite!
34 Legends 4: Kapuściński and Kapuściński
37 Lapidarium 5: Was Kapuściński a Thinker?
38 Where to from Socialism? Continued
40 Legends 5: The Price of Greatness
43 No Strength to Furnish the Face
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 wasn’t smiling, it was pensive or focused instead. Or sheepish. ‘I’m 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 someone’s 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 he’d 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, we’re 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 don’t 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, doesn’t 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 journalist’s 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, writer’s 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 they’re talking nonsense.’
The secrets of Ryszard Kapuściński. 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 Kapuściński – 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 we’d 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 Kapuściński loved to gossip.
But I never questioned him about how a career was made in People’s Poland; what strings had to be pulled, to what uses he had put his smile, and what price had to be paid. I sensed that he didn’t like questions about his past, and whenever the conversation headed in that direction, he would deftly change the subject. Sometimes he commented that, democracy or no democracy, conformism and the herd mentality are alike, even though times change. I never asked questions about which side he was on during Poland’s various political turning points of the past half-century, about what he had done and thought. Or what he had been looking for as he eagerly set off for Congo after Lumumba’s assassination, as he drove