The High Ones Die, They Die (and "People have had enough of Paris")
Sad news from Warsaw this week: the death of writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of Poland's national treasures. He was 73: a heart attack after an operation on the intestine. Fine writing. The record of a magnificent, compassionate, poetic mind plunked deep in the world-- in some lovely, and as he himself called them, some really wicked places too. A few titles: Another Day of Life; The Soccer War; The Emperor; Shah of Shahs; Imperium; Travels with Herodotus (new, in Polish only now, coming in English translation later this year). Apparently, he was readying himself to write a new book encompassing the whole globe, a sort of a report from one day of life on earth, starting from a description of a sunset over Lima, The Sahara, Florence and Tibet.
A friend in Kraków wrote this week," in Kapu's first book of poems from 1986 there was a line where he said that only he will survive who created his own world."
Ryszard Kapuscinski will survive, then.
These excerpts are from Imperium, his moving journey through the post-Soviet Union. The story at the end about the bathroom and the French newspaper I have re-told (roughly, not so elegantly) to countless people since I read it last spring. The chapter is called "Jumping Over Puddles"--it's short, but like the best of RK, this ordinary encounter, with a girl in the street jumping puddles, with the taps in a bathroom in the Siberian town of Yaktusk, embrace the entire reality of our entire world. I'll give you two bits, one short, one fairly extended. Here's something Kapu learns from a chat with ten-year-old Tanya who lives in this oil-rich, Siberian "Kuwait" (Yaktusk)--
**One can recognize a great cold, she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in this mist. The corridor has the shape of that person's silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist. A large man makes a huge corridor, and a small child--a small corridor. Tanya makes a narrow corridor because she is slender, but for her age, it is a high one--which is understandable; she is after all the tallest in her class. Walking out in the morning, Tanya can tell from these corridors whether her girlfriends have already gone to school--they all know what the corridors of their closest neighbors and friends look like.
Here is a wide, low corridor with a distinct, resolute line--the sign that Claudia Matveyevna, the school principal, has already gone.
If in the morning there are no corridors that correspond to the stature of students from the elementary school, it means that the cold is so great that classes have been canceled and the children are staying home.
Sometimes one sees a corridor that is very crooked and then abruptly stops. It means--Tanya lowers her voice--that some drunk was walking, tripped and fell. In a great cold, drunks frequently freeze to death. Then such a corridor looks like a dead-end street. **
And later in same chapter, this scenario:
**I return to Oktiabrska Street, to my hotel. I'm in room number 506. To open the door, one must try turning the key a number of times. It takes from eight to sixteen attempts. Expecting results at attempt number 8 is optimistic, for by the sixteenth time the door will open for sure. The worst thing is that it cannot be locked from the inside, and it is hung is such a way that, unlocked, it opens of its own accord on the corridor. I had no choice but to ask the tenant from the adjoining room (a Buryat, technician) to lock my door for me. (We developed a ceertain ritual: I would knock at his door, my neighbor would come out, together we would open my door, my neighbor would lock it.)
In the little bathroom, there is both cold and hot water form the faucet above the washbasin, but in the shower there is only hot. Not knowing this, I turn on the shower. Seething, boiling water gushes forth with a roar. Because it is cold in the bathrrom and in the room itself, thick clouds of steam form instantly. I cannot see. I throw myself at the shower, but it won't turn off. I make a dash for the window, to let out the steam, but the window does not open; it is sealed up with adhesive plaster--and, anyhow, the handle for opening it has been removed. If I open the door of the room, the steam will burst out into the corridor; I will create confusion and scandal. But why scandal? How am I at fault here? I'm already thinking about how to explain and defend myself. Everything in this country is somehow thought out, arranged in such a way the the man on the street--no matter what he is doing, in what situation he finds himself, in what straits and difficulties--will always have a feeling of guilt. Because (as I said) it is cold in my room, the steam immediately condenses on the walls, on the windowpanes, or the glass of a little picture frame, and on the sliver of a mirror. I make a final, heroic effort and turn off the shower, swearing to myself to touch nothing else. It is damp, water is everywhere, but for a moment it is also warmer.
I walked out into the corridor to check whether anyone had noticed the cataclysm that had just shaken my room. But it was empty, dead. A television set was on in the common room, but no one was watching. The writer Vladimir Solouhin was saying: "Because of Lenin a river of blood flowed in the Soviet Union, an ocean of blood was spilled." He said that sixty-six million people died, not counting the victims of the Second World War. "All this," said Solouhin, "was done in the name of creating paradise on earth." And he concluded: "Paradise! Ha Ha! And today we are walking around without pants."
After a laborer came on, who, despite the fact that Lenin no longer counts, announced with pride that he had just read five volumes of Vladimir Ilyich in just several evenings. "It's very simple," he said, clearly pleased with himself. "I read each volume for no longer than one hour. I simply knew that Lenin wrote the most important things in his texts in italics. I recommend it to everyone!" he encouraged the empty room at the Hotel Yaktusk.
At the end of the program, Yuri Lubimov, the director of the Moscow theater Taganka, said in a critical but also depairing tone: "We have lost our minds, we have lost our conscience, we have lost our honor. I look around and I see barbarity!" Lubimov's powerful, theatrical voice filled the common room, spilled out into the corridor and lobby.
At the newstand in the lobby, the only foreign newspaper on sale was the French L'Humanité. I bought it for the sake of one photograph, to which normally I wouldn't have paid the least attention. But now I sat in my room and stared at this picture on the last page. It showed an elegant and clean highway, L'Autoroute A6, along which stretched unending lines of elegant and clean cars. All this suddenly fascinated me: the white stripes on the road and the large, distinct road signs, and the bright light of the lanterns. Everything was washed; everything was clean; everything went with everything else.
"Le grand week-end pascal," said the caption, "est commencé."
People have had enough of Paris; they want to rest.
This is so far away, I thought, looking at the photograph. As if on Venus.
And I started to mop up the bathroom floor. ***
A friend in Kraków wrote this week," in Kapu's first book of poems from 1986 there was a line where he said that only he will survive who created his own world."
Ryszard Kapuscinski will survive, then.
These excerpts are from Imperium, his moving journey through the post-Soviet Union. The story at the end about the bathroom and the French newspaper I have re-told (roughly, not so elegantly) to countless people since I read it last spring. The chapter is called "Jumping Over Puddles"--it's short, but like the best of RK, this ordinary encounter, with a girl in the street jumping puddles, with the taps in a bathroom in the Siberian town of Yaktusk, embrace the entire reality of our entire world. I'll give you two bits, one short, one fairly extended. Here's something Kapu learns from a chat with ten-year-old Tanya who lives in this oil-rich, Siberian "Kuwait" (Yaktusk)--
**One can recognize a great cold, she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in this mist. The corridor has the shape of that person's silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist. A large man makes a huge corridor, and a small child--a small corridor. Tanya makes a narrow corridor because she is slender, but for her age, it is a high one--which is understandable; she is after all the tallest in her class. Walking out in the morning, Tanya can tell from these corridors whether her girlfriends have already gone to school--they all know what the corridors of their closest neighbors and friends look like.
Here is a wide, low corridor with a distinct, resolute line--the sign that Claudia Matveyevna, the school principal, has already gone.
If in the morning there are no corridors that correspond to the stature of students from the elementary school, it means that the cold is so great that classes have been canceled and the children are staying home.
Sometimes one sees a corridor that is very crooked and then abruptly stops. It means--Tanya lowers her voice--that some drunk was walking, tripped and fell. In a great cold, drunks frequently freeze to death. Then such a corridor looks like a dead-end street. **
And later in same chapter, this scenario:
**I return to Oktiabrska Street, to my hotel. I'm in room number 506. To open the door, one must try turning the key a number of times. It takes from eight to sixteen attempts. Expecting results at attempt number 8 is optimistic, for by the sixteenth time the door will open for sure. The worst thing is that it cannot be locked from the inside, and it is hung is such a way that, unlocked, it opens of its own accord on the corridor. I had no choice but to ask the tenant from the adjoining room (a Buryat, technician) to lock my door for me. (We developed a ceertain ritual: I would knock at his door, my neighbor would come out, together we would open my door, my neighbor would lock it.)
In the little bathroom, there is both cold and hot water form the faucet above the washbasin, but in the shower there is only hot. Not knowing this, I turn on the shower. Seething, boiling water gushes forth with a roar. Because it is cold in the bathrrom and in the room itself, thick clouds of steam form instantly. I cannot see. I throw myself at the shower, but it won't turn off. I make a dash for the window, to let out the steam, but the window does not open; it is sealed up with adhesive plaster--and, anyhow, the handle for opening it has been removed. If I open the door of the room, the steam will burst out into the corridor; I will create confusion and scandal. But why scandal? How am I at fault here? I'm already thinking about how to explain and defend myself. Everything in this country is somehow thought out, arranged in such a way the the man on the street--no matter what he is doing, in what situation he finds himself, in what straits and difficulties--will always have a feeling of guilt. Because (as I said) it is cold in my room, the steam immediately condenses on the walls, on the windowpanes, or the glass of a little picture frame, and on the sliver of a mirror. I make a final, heroic effort and turn off the shower, swearing to myself to touch nothing else. It is damp, water is everywhere, but for a moment it is also warmer.
I walked out into the corridor to check whether anyone had noticed the cataclysm that had just shaken my room. But it was empty, dead. A television set was on in the common room, but no one was watching. The writer Vladimir Solouhin was saying: "Because of Lenin a river of blood flowed in the Soviet Union, an ocean of blood was spilled." He said that sixty-six million people died, not counting the victims of the Second World War. "All this," said Solouhin, "was done in the name of creating paradise on earth." And he concluded: "Paradise! Ha Ha! And today we are walking around without pants."
After a laborer came on, who, despite the fact that Lenin no longer counts, announced with pride that he had just read five volumes of Vladimir Ilyich in just several evenings. "It's very simple," he said, clearly pleased with himself. "I read each volume for no longer than one hour. I simply knew that Lenin wrote the most important things in his texts in italics. I recommend it to everyone!" he encouraged the empty room at the Hotel Yaktusk.
At the end of the program, Yuri Lubimov, the director of the Moscow theater Taganka, said in a critical but also depairing tone: "We have lost our minds, we have lost our conscience, we have lost our honor. I look around and I see barbarity!" Lubimov's powerful, theatrical voice filled the common room, spilled out into the corridor and lobby.
At the newstand in the lobby, the only foreign newspaper on sale was the French L'Humanité. I bought it for the sake of one photograph, to which normally I wouldn't have paid the least attention. But now I sat in my room and stared at this picture on the last page. It showed an elegant and clean highway, L'Autoroute A6, along which stretched unending lines of elegant and clean cars. All this suddenly fascinated me: the white stripes on the road and the large, distinct road signs, and the bright light of the lanterns. Everything was washed; everything was clean; everything went with everything else.
"Le grand week-end pascal," said the caption, "est commencé."
People have had enough of Paris; they want to rest.
This is so far away, I thought, looking at the photograph. As if on Venus.
And I started to mop up the bathroom floor. ***
posted by Alice Lyons at 3:03 PM
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