‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘I don’t like talking about private matters in public.’
‘Are we asking?’
‘Don’t you think anyone will guess, Teresa?’
‘The Finnish cottage has to be in there, Ala.’
‘With restraint, then, please.’
The Finnish cottage still stands in the same spot. In 1988 Rysiek and Alicja go for a walk to Pole Mokotowskie during the time when the National Library is being built there. They see that of the original fifteen or so cottages, two are still there, transformed into storerooms for workmen. One is the Kapuścińskis’. They peep through the window. The round, black table made by Rysiek’s father still stands in the middle of the room, with papers spread out on it. When Józef moved in the 1970s, he didn’t take it with him, because it wouldn’t fit into his new flat.
Maria Kapuścińska is not thrilled by her son’s relationship with Alicja, especially as a wedding and a child are soon on the way. She thinks they are too young to get married – he is twenty and she is nineteen. Maria dreams of an unusual future for her son, though she is not entirely sure what kind. She is afraid that too early a marriage will obstruct him in his career, whatever that may be. And she bears a grudge against Alicja for falling pregnant – in those days, the girl was always to blame.
Once Alicja starts coming to the Kapuścińskis’ cottage as the official fiancée, Mrs Kapuścińska gives her her son’s socks to darn. Alicja darns, launders and irons Rysiek’s shirts. Under Mrs Kapuścińska’s tutelage, without a word of protest, she learns the duties expected of her beloved Rysieczek’s wife. She is to be meek, industrious and supportive to her husband. Alicja tries to mollify her future mother-in-law and to show her that her son has not made a bad choice. She is grateful to be allowed into the house at all.
At Alicja’s family home in Szczecin, Rysiek quickly makes a good impression. He immediately announces that they are planning to get married, but don’t know when because they do not have a place to live. Alicja asks her mother if she would be surprised if they soon had a child. Her mother is neither surprised nor shocked; she knows what’s going on.
On 6 October 1952, at Ryszard and Alicja’s registry office wedding, besides the witnesses and a few friends, the only close relatives present are Józef Kapuściński and Rysiek’s sister, Basia. Maria Kapuścińska boycotts the ceremony. She invites them to dinner afterwards, but Rysiek wriggles out of it. Of everyone involved, his beloved Maminek is the least willing to accept his marriage. Only when she was dying would Maria Kapuścińska admit to her daughter-in-law: ‘Ala, you have been a daughter to me.’ Alicja reckons this is the highest distinction she could possibly have received from her mother-in-law. After more than twenty years of marriage, she deserved it.
Alicja’s parents did not come to the wedding either. The young couple deliberately decided to tell them about it too late – they sent a telegram the day before the wedding – so there would be no confrontation between the parents. They were afraid that an altercation or an exchange of sour looks on that particular day would affect relations between the families for years to come. After that, there was an appropriate relationship between the two sets of parents.
As a result, when Alicja, in a modest navy blue dress with a white collar, and Rysiek, in the black suit from his high school graduation ceremony (the only suit he had at the time), take their seats before the registrar, several of the most important people in their lives thus far are not present.
The registrar recites the dull official formulae about the family as ‘the basic social cell’, while Rysiek takes the rings from his pocket, nudges Alicja and says: ‘Put it on my finger.’ Later they do not wear the rings. Alicja explains that while working at a hospital she had to keep washing her hands, and the ring got in the way; Rysiek simply loses his.
Soon after the wedding, Alicja takes dean’s leave from college and goes to Szczecin. While waiting for the baby to be born, she works in the library at Szczecin’s Palace of Youth. On 2 May 1953 Alicja’s mother sends her son-in-law a telegram saying: ‘You have a daughter.’ Rysiek would have preferred a son.
As Alicja recalls: ‘People used to think a real man should produce a son who would inherit his father’s duties, running the family, building a house and planting trees. Rysiek was wondering what to call our daughter when he bumped into a friend of ours. “Zocha”, he announced, “I’ve had a daughter.” Later she told me he looked pleased. “So call her Zofia,” she suggested [Zocha is a diminutive of Zofia]. He liked that idea.’
But there’s another name he likes even more than Zofia – Zojka. A girl named Zojka is the heroine of the era, a role model for young communists in the ZMP, and a sacred figure in the communist revolution. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, a Soviet schoolgirl named Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya joined a special unit in the Red Army. This unit performed acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. After blowing up a German ammunitions store, Zoya was caught and hanged.
If the child had been a boy, he would have been called Wowka (Polish spelling of the Russian ‘Vovka’), short for Włodzimierz, in honour of the leader of the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin. According to a different version of the story, ‘Wowka’ would have been a tribute not to Lenin but to Vladimir Mayakovsky, which is what Kapuściński told his translator Agata Orzeszek.
‘In those days he was captivated by Mayakovsky’s talent and the power of his voice,’ she says. ‘He was sorry Broniewski was called Władysław, and not Włodzimierz, because then his son’s name would have paid homage to both his favourite poets.’
But his dream of having a son had not come true.
Rysiek boards a train and goes straight to Szczecin. However, for the first year of their marriage they live apart. Alicja takes care of Zojka in Szczecin and wonders whether to return to her studies, while Rysiek goes on studying and running the ZMP revolution in Warsaw. He comes to visit, but he is a husband and father ‘at arm’s length’. When he comes, he sometimes goes out for a walk with the pram, but rather reluctantly. So young, and already a father. He is the eternal bachelor type and likes appealing to the girls. A baby in a pram is not well suited to this pursuit.
One time, he turns up in Szczecin in an anxious state: his mother has had a stroke. It is either a haemorrhage or a cerebral embolism. It seems truly life-threatening. There are no telephones in the Finnish cottages where the Kapuścińskis live. Rysiek runs to the hospital on Hoża Street to call an ambulance, and the doctor offers this advice: ‘The best thing to do is apply leeches to draw blood from the carotid artery.’ So he races to the market on Polna Street and buys a jar of leeches. Alicja reckons those leeches saved her mother-in-law’s life. After the stroke, Maria Kapuścińska never went back to work. She functioned fairly normally and did not need to be cared for like a disabled person, but her strength was seriously impaired.
After this incident, Rysiek tells Alicja to drop her studies in the history faculty. He says that, after graduating, he plans to become a journalist. But what about her? If she graduates in history, she will have to teach rowdy little brats. ‘Go and study medicine,’ he suggests.
Alicja passes the exams for medicine in Szczecin and gets credits for her first year of studies there. Meanwhile Rysiek finishes his history degree in Warsaw. He writes a dissertation, on the education system within the Russian partition in the early twentieth century, under the supervision of Henryk Jabłoński, later chairman of the Council of State (the PRL equivalent of a national president without any real power). Rysiek goes back to work at Sztandar Młodych and is soon allotted an employee’s flat.
After her year in Szczecin, Alicja returns to Warsaw and continues her medical studies there. Zojka stays behind in Szczecin with her grandparents. She is too small to go to nursery school. A year later her parents take her to Warsaw.
The young family is assigned a room with a kitchen and a bathroom in a block on the corner of Nowolipki Street and Marchlewski (now Jan Paweł II) Avenue. The kitchen is quite large, with a window. There they