Nobody Leaves

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  ‘They arrived at the beginning of June. That was when I saw her. She wasn’t a woman. She was a miracle. Graceful, lovely, fair-haired. She introduced herself to me and said, “My name’s Danka. And you?” I couldn’t get the words out. My throat tightened up, I saw stars, and I thought I was dying. I mumbled something, but then I immediately thought: “Michał, strange things are going to start happening around here.” And look – I was right.

  ‘At first the old man stayed out of her way. He sat indoors and didn’t come out. And she acts like she’s on the beach – she strips down, blanket on the grass, and sunbathes. In her bathing suit all the time from morning till night. Believe me, you were almost afraid to look at her. Because when you looked, you wanted to cry because you were such a nothing, such an accursed zero, and you could howl until the end of the world and she’d never even glance at you. That sculptor followed her around like a puppy. He had to love her, to love her for all the men who weren’t allowed to. He was OK, a very decent guy. I helped him find wood, I sharpened his instruments, and more than once I went into town to buy wine for them. We got along. As soon as there was wood, he set right to work. He had a steady hand and he carved boldly, skilfully. That was when the old man started coming out of the rectory. He would weave in and out between the trees, and Danka was lying on the blanket. The old man wanted to get closer, but then he would immediately back away. It tempted him, but he held out. I watched him sometimes and I wanted to laugh. She would stand up and wanted to go over to him, but the old man would dash into the church. Like a game of cat and mouse. She gave him a hell of a time. He often looked in on the sculptor to see how the work was progressing. He sat down on the bench, looked around, and didn’t say anything at first. Only when he started carving the face did the old man enter into longer talks with him. I would also go in to look at the sculpture, and I saw what was going on. He was carving Danka. He carved her face, her neck, her shoulders. Further down it was a long robe, but from there up it was Danka. The old man would ask if the mouth wasn’t too wide. Because she had small lips, full, but small. I got the feeling that he wanted that Virgin Mary at the altar to be the image of Danka. But he couldn’t come right out and say it.

  ‘And in town it was already buzzing like a beehive. Guys came running to have a look, and the women gathered, supposedly to pray. It got busy around the rectory. Talking, rumours, speculation all at once, as you please. They kept asking me, too: “Michał, who is she?” And I told them the truth, because a person is stupid. A couple of women came as a delegation to the priest. He explained something to them and it was quiet for a few days. Then it started up again and got worse. At one point they summoned the old man to the curia, just when that sculptor went to Białystok to get a chisel. And that’s when those hags came around.’

  Michał S. wasn’t there. Afterwards, he helped take her to the hospital. When he came back, he told everything to the one man in town who had befriended the sculptor – Józef T., who taught Polish at the school.

  Józef T. (I call on him late at night) says: ‘We were sitting around late in the evening. “It was at the seashore, a couple of years ago,” the sculptor told me. “I was looking for a subject for my diploma work. I wandered around the beach and the days flew by. It’s easier to find a model at the beach than in the city, because people are undressed. I didn’t come across anything interesting. Once I was walking along the water’s edge, it was an empty spot, a fishing boat pulled up on the sand was rotting away. I went over to it, and a girl was sitting behind the boat. She asked: ‘Do you have to stand right there?’ ‘If you could see yourself, you wouldn’t ask such questions,’ I replied. We were very young, and that was the prevailing form in those days. A month later, Danka came to Wrocław with me, to my garret. I sculpted her there. The title of the work was supposed to mean something, so I named the statue ‘Girl After Work’ and took it to the exhibition. The jury rejected it. They said it was too sacral. I was shattered, I couldn’t get my bearings. I lay on the bed for hours in a complete stupor. Finally I got a crazy idea. I borrowed a cart from the doorman, packed up the sculpture and went to the diocesan curia. I told them: ‘Buy this, it’s a piece called “The Madonna Anticipating the Annunciation.” ’ They conferred, but in the end they didn’t take it. It was too socialist realist, they said. I couldn’t stand any more. I dragged the cart to the Oder River and smashed the plaster with a hammer. Because it was plaster. When I came to my senses, I saw that the head of the sculpture was still there. I wanted to throw it into the river. I didn’t do it. I took it with me. I carried it to the studio and dumped it in the corner.

  “ ‘It was only this year that I ran into Danka again. Everything was like before. ‘Come on, let’s go to the Mazury,’ I told her. She agreed. But I didn’t have a grosz to my name. Then I remembered that head. I thought: I’ll take it along, I’ll fob it off on some priest, and by the way I’ll find a place to hole up. That’s how I ended up here.” ’

  And today is Sunday. It’s raining, and the rain will probably never stop falling. A flood. A deluge. People are losing their homes. Severe economic damage. Out of the window of the little hotel I can see how, despite the puddles, the residents of the little town are coming out into the street and, in their Sunday best, walking at a dignified pace towards the square, to the inn or to the church. I get dressed and go out. I already know some of the faces. We bow to each other. A reporter can’t hide for long. So I don’t duck into the hidden passageways but walk down the main street, which is busy and deep in mud.

  I enter the church. In the glimmer of the candles stands a wooden statue, the figure of a lovely girl. It’s an unfinished work, but the master has already managed to render the face, head and shoulders in detail. These are details of the highest order. People come up, kneel, bend their backs. I hold my head up high. I can’t take my eyes off it.

  Nobody Leaves

  I wouldn’t want to live there. There’s a table covered with a check tablecloth. I wouldn’t want to go on sitting at that table. There are artificial flowers with unbent wire stems. I wouldn’t want to see those flowers either. Behind the wardrobe stands an axe. They gave it to me to hold so I could see whether it’s heavy. Yes, it’s heavy. With that weight, the axe hung over three heads. Over the small, grey head of the father. Over the head, surrounded by neat hair, of the mother. Over the crew-cut head of the son. If I don’t throw it at them, they’ll throw it at me, says the father. The father would like to lock the son up. The mother would like to lock the father up. The best thing would be for something to happen to them, says the son. Then life would be different. Because it can’t go on like this.

  … So as soon as I walk in, they start in on me. Immediate violence, they start in immediately. The boy is the worst. I wanted him to play for me in my old age. So I bought him a piano, I bought him an accordion. But he’s not interested in music, only vodka. I thought I’d sit there in the evening and he’d play for me. He wants to play – but on my bones. She stirs that boy up against me. She says: ‘Władzio, give it to him, let him know.’ I can’t stand it. I lie down to sleep and I don’t know if I’ll wake up. I have to be careful not to fall too soundly asleep, because if I fall sound asleep they’ll finish me off.

  … What’s he saying? I used to weigh eighty-seven kilos and now I weigh fifty-four. That’s what he did to me, my husband. At first he doesn’t say anything, just paces and paces. And then, the smallest thing, and he starts. He lets out a scream. I don’t fear that scream any more. But when he picks something up, then I’m scared. The worst thing is when he picks up the axe. No telling what he could do to me. It’s not about anything, it’s about nothing. I’ve already cried my eyes out, and my hands are shaking – see? And there’s no way out. My son’s the only one who does anything, my son loves me.

  … I won’t let him touch my mother. Forgive me for saying it, but I won’t let him touch her. If he goes after my mother, then I’ll go after him. Forgive me, but that’s how it is. He says
that I like to drink? Well, yes, sometimes I have to drink. I’m a musician, I play at wedding receptions. A musician that doesn’t drink is no musician, forgive me for saying so. Anyway, I don’t need much with my tuberculosis. After a couple of glasses, I’m in a good mood. Sometimes it only takes one glass. I’m in an even better mood after some beer, forgive me. How did I get sick? Because my father chased me out and made me sleep in the kennel. Obviously from that. But I can put up with anything, that crap in my lungs, the fact that they won’t let me study, I can put up with all of that, but I won’t let him do anything to my mother.

  … We know that house by heart. The old man is continually running to the police station to have them locked up because they’re killing him. But he’s the one who could kill them. We tell them to calm down, on orders from the police. But it doesn’t do any good. Are there a lot of marriages like this? Yes, a lot. Mostly among the elderly. One big brawl, one big hell, all you can do is go and keep them apart, because as far as catching them goes, you can catch them, but there’s no power that can keep them apart. Marriages like that – a lot of them. Mostly among the young.

  We can put that incident with a policeman from Piastów in the spotlight and wonder how it’s possible. Because the old man is a good worker. On the production line they praise him for his diligence, reliability and expertise. The old man doesn’t drink and he doesn’t shirk work. She’s a woman of exceptional tranquillity. A fastidious homemaker. A clean house, the washing done, the floors swept. The boy’s also respectable, no reports on him, never been in trouble, even though he’s young. Except he’s an unlucky boy, seriously ill. He ought to be receiving treatment, but how can he, because he can’t leave home, so he can protect his mother? And the mother won’t leave home, so she can look after her son. And the father won’t leave home, because it’s his home.

  They’re all good people. People around here like them, appreciate them, respect them. Only when each of them is taken separately. Because when they come together, you cross yourself. Right away there’s a smell of corpse. It starts with harsh words. You old beggar woman, he shouts. Me, a beggar woman? And the woman starts taking old photographs out of a box and rooting through them with nervous fingers. Here, this is my father. In a wicker chair sits an elderly gentleman with a moustache, in a good suit, with a gorgeous tie. So can I be a beggar woman? Or he says to me: You so-and-so. What do I look like, sir? He says that I’m on the lookout for younger men. Just take a look at me. So I look at that worn-out, broken-down being, and let me tell you that you’d really have to exercise your imagination to come up with the picture of those boys that she could find for herself.

  And so it goes from word to word, and from those words to the axe. A merry-go-round. The whole trio are exhausting themselves, wearing themselves down, destroying themselves. There’s no reason and they don’t know why. And that reason that they’re incapable of identifying isn’t important anyway. What’s important is the way of life that they’ve slowly become accustomed to. They’re all carrying out their worthy missions, full of sacrifice. The father sacrifices everything for them, the mother for the son, the son for the mother. They all have to live because they need each other. The father is convinced that if not for him, they would starve to death. The mother is sure that if not for her, the tuberculosis would bring her son’s life to a rapid end. The son believes deeply that, if not for him, his father would batter his mother to death. That’s why they can’t split up and depart for the far corners of the world. They’re all bound together for the long run, for their whole earthly existence. There’s a lot of marriages like that, the policeman tells me. Mostly among the elderly. And he repeats, pensively: Yes, a lot of them. Mostly among the young.

  The Taking of Elżbieta

  ‘Sister,’ I asked, ‘why did you do it, Sister?’

  We were kneeling in the snow, under a low sky, with an iron grille between us. Through the grille I saw the eyes of the nun, big eyes, brown, with fever in the irises. She was silent, looking off to the side. People who look off to the side have something to say, but fear gags their throat. Then I heard her voice:

  ‘What have you brought me?’

  But I had nothing. I had neither any words nor any things. I came here alone, waded in the snow through the forest, knocked at the convent gate, and in the end stood before the steep grille bearing the one single question that I had already asked. And it had disappeared into the stiff folds of the habit, without an echo.

  That is why I retorted:

  ‘I really don’t know. Perhaps only your mother’s scream.’

  That scream roused the village each night. Drowsy from their overheated duvets, dreams and love, the women got out of bed. They stood cautiously at the windows. They could see only the darkness. Therefore they told their husbands: ‘Go and see what’s out there.’ The peasants stuffed their feet into their rubber boots and went outside. They walked sleepily, caressing the darkness with their hands, as if the scream were something you could take hold of like a sheaf of rye and press down to the ground with your knee. In the end, at the holy figure, they found a tall, skinny woman in an old overcoat. The woman was coughing. She had a sunken chest and was holding her arms as if she were waiting to greet someone dear to her. But she enfolded in those arms not someone’s life, but her own death. She carried tuberculosis within herself. The peasants told the woman: ‘Why are you whimpering in the night? Go and sleep.’ Relieved that it wasn’t a murder, or a break-in, or a fire, but only ordinary pain, and not their pain after all, they returned to the warmth of the duvet, sleep, and women’s bodies.

  Later, that skinny woman with her shoulders in an arc was taken to the hospital, because in that scream of hers there was also blood. Now the village could sleep amidst the silence, and the peasants stopped feeling the darkness with their hands. After three months, the woman returned. People saw that her eyes were now dry and stony, and the first night they realized that there was no screaming in her lungs. The village that had previously feared the screaming now dreaded the silence. The silence drew people in like deep water. They began going around to see the woman. They entered the cottage, which was like all the other cottages in the village – with a bouquet of artificial flowers, with a tinted wedding photograph, and with a gypsum dancing girl with a daintily modelled bust. The tall woman opened the wardrobe and showed them the row of dresses hanging there. Colourful dresses, cheap and banal, because, my Lord, this was hardly Paris. She said: ‘She did not permit me to destroy these dresses. She pleaded: “Mama, I’ll come back.” ’

  Then the husband of that tall woman begged her: ‘Stop. Just stop.’

  The man lay in bed, absorbed in listening to his own heart. His heart had been struck by a second attack, and so he lay there motionless and listened. The listening was enough to make him break out in a sweat, because it was full of tension and effort. What it feels like, Mr Reporter, is that I’m not listening to the present beat, but for the one that should come next. Will I hear it, or will there be silence?

  So he lies there motionless, with hypertension – 250 – preoccupied with his own heart and nothing else, because the heart itself is a whole world, and no person can encompass two worlds at the same time. He’s already lived his life, this man with two heart attacks. He’s done day labour and regular jobs, and been in a camp and in prison. He and that tall woman had one child, their daughter Elżbieta. Elżbieta was born in 1939, a month before the war. The Germans put the husband behind barbed wire, and the tall woman was left by herself. She went out to dig beets. That work exhausts your strength because the soil that beets grow in is heavy soil. The mother laid Elżbieta down between the furrows, in the shade of the lush leaves. She herself dug in the sunshine, out of breath and coughing. Her arms dropped to her side. In the evenings she made extra money by writing letters to their boyfriends for the girls. ‘In the first words of my letter I wish to ask you, dear Władek, if you know whether your feelings pulse with the same sentiment as earlier but if
there is no lessening in your intransigence then mine towards you is the same, of which I am informing you.’ For a letter like this, she received three eggs, and if it was a letter in which the passion was supposed to explode with flaming power, then she got a hen.

  The father returned after the war and, as it often was in those years, the child had to learn to say ‘Daddy’ to a stranger. But he was no stranger to the mother of this child. Nothing came of this meeting after a long separation. Elżbieta became an only child. She started going to school, and later to high school. The man with two heart attacks and the tall woman are simple people. They know nothing about the Platonic system or the fact that Shakespeare was great and Mozart died cursing the world. But they saw an exhibition of books in a small town and perhaps someone told them that there are people in the world who have a lot of things in their head, and that such people are treated with respect. That was why they wanted Elżbieta to study. But the man with the two heart attacks could not work, and the tall woman had only a pension. And she also had tuberculosis. It was a good thing, that woman told me, that I had tuberculosis, because when I got medicine from the outpatient clinic I sold it on the sly so that I could give Elżbieta what she needed.