Nobody Leaves

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Elżbieta passed her final school exam in 1957 and became a schoolteacher. A good teacher, going by her reputation. I pick up a picture taken in those days. In this picture, Elżbieta is smiling, but the man with two heart attacks and the tall woman stand there very solemn. They are solemn because they are bursting with pride. Leave aside for a moment your admiration for the creators of electronic machines, for the constructors of rockets and the builders of new cities. Think about the mother who left her lungs to rot and the father who wore out his heart so that their daughter could become a teacher.

  Elżbieta is a teacher and now she will go to university. But Elżbieta does not go to university. In 1961, she joins the order. The blow was crushing, it was murderous. The mother wandered along the road at night and the woken-up peasants caressing the darkness with their hands finally found the tall woman at the edge of exhaustion and then, 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 their cottages and the warmth of the duvet, sleep, and women’s bodies.

  The tall woman was left alone. She was no stranger to solitude. Even when Elżbieta was going to high school, the sisters were drawing her in. At Elżbieta’s home it was cold, the pot was empty, and her mother lay there spitting clots. At the nuns’ it was warm and they fed her well. She sat there whole days.

  Later I asked: ‘Sister, in those times did any of the nuns ask the sister whether her mother had a glass of water at her bedside?’

  She responded: ‘No.’

  ‘And did any of the nuns tell the sister: “Daughter, before you come to us to nibble at the chicken, at least bake your mother some potatoes in their jackets”?’

  She responded: ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, in order to maintain civility within the framework of general state policy towards the Church.

  After her final exam, the nuns stepped up their pressure on Elżbieta. She was an affectionate girl, introverted and submissive. Her mother said there was something strange about her. She would have attacks of fear and cry.

  ‘What did they tell her?’ I asked the tall woman. They talked to her in general terms, which is always dangerous. The word condemnation, and the word eternal, and the word remember, and the word accursed. Elżbieta came home with a fever. I recited to the mother Éluard’s poem about Gabriel Péri:

  There are words that give life

  And they are innocent words

  The word fire and the word trust

  Love, justice, and the word freedom

  No, she answered. None of those words. In the end, Elżbieta disappeared from home. The first letter that arrived from the convent began with the salutation ‘Through Mary to Jesus!’ There are several of these letters. I sense the hand of the censor upon them, but telling phrases nevertheless slip through, such as ‘I beseech you O Lord to give me the grace to persevere to the end.’ Or ‘Have you already excluded me from your memory? I beg you not to do so.’

  The tall woman wanted to fight. With what weapons can a woman like that fight? All that she had was the X-ray of her lungs. I look over that smoky image of the coal-black cavity. With that film, the tall woman travelled halfway across Poland to the convent. The Mother Superior, who was not a doctor, picked up the X-ray, looked it over, and burst out laughing. ‘There’s nothing there!’

  The mother came home but her husband was gone. Her husband was in the hospital. He had suffered that second heart attack. The doctors doubted that he would make it. The mother sent Elżbieta a letter, asking her to come at once. But Elżbieta never showed up. The letter was not delivered to her. Instead of her, two nuns appeared in the hospital where her father lay unconscious, to check whether there was really anything wrong with him. ‘Is one of you sisters the daughter of the patient?’ the department head asked.

  ‘No, we’ve been sent here,’ they replied, and withdrew their faces into the shadows of their starched wimples.

  And so the mother sent a letter to the Primate of Poland. I read that letter, too. I also read the reply. It is a little correspondence form, on the letterhead of the chancellery of the primate, which states that ‘accusations directed at this office are untrue and we advise you to keep quiet’. It strikes me that this is not bad advice. After all, it’s a good thing to remain quiet in cases of tuberculosis and heart trouble. I also think that centuries of experience have gone into this reply, and that it’s even known what kind of experience this has been. I may also think one thing or another, but what I think has no significance here. I can say that I feel sorry for that tall woman and that man with blood pressure of 250. I feel sorry for those peasant men whose sleep was interrupted and who went out caressing the darkness with their hands, as if the scream that came out of the darkness were something that could be grasped in a handful like sheaves of rye and crushed down on the ground under their knees. That woman and that man did not have much of a life, although they gave it their lungs and their heart. After that, they tried to fight. But when solitary people try to fight for their cause, it is only at that moment when they naively forget that right must yield to might. In the end, that moment always passes. And what’s left is what’s left.

  That is why I told Elżbieta: ‘I really don’t know what I’ve brought you. Maybe only your mother’s scream.’

  And that scream, which after all cannot be taken by the handful like a sheaf of rye and pressed to the ground under your knee, seems to me something completely real. I could hear it, see it and touch it. It was authentic, even if it lasted but a moment. Many people heard it and those people knew why that tall woman screamed. Those people could reflect upon it. And that’s a lot, if you really do reflect upon it.

  Standing at the grille, Elżbieta and I were silent. Nuns started coming down the stairs. First there were three of them, then five, and finally I stopped counting. They moved Elżbieta to the rear. In the end I couldn’t see her. I saw many unmoving faces, but the face of Elżbieta Trębaczyk, a teacher from outside Kalisz, was gone.

  And so I turned around and walked back in the snow, through the forest, to the station.

  Us against the Trees

  At first we didn’t like it, but later we got used to it. Later, after we wiped the warm sweat away with our sleeves so many times, after we polished our boots to the point that the sun extinguished itself out of envy, after we dug trenches one-two-three, when these and many other things were behind us, all that crazy drilling, that whole tempestuous metamorphosis that changed one civilian after another into a soldier until our hearts were bursting! And despite this we couldn’t make the lieutenant happy. ‘Troops!’ he complained in front of our taut rank. ‘With troops like this you wouldn’t get very far!’ Yet he never confided exactly where he’d want to get to with us. But we knew that he was speaking rhetorically: there was nowhere to go.

  We were surrounded by the forest. That forest was immeasurable, impenetrable, unfathomable. It must have ended somewhere, there must have been a boundary to it, but we never got to the edge of the trees. We saw only the forest and we lived within it, in brick barracks with a corridor on the right going all the way to the end. We didn’t like the trees, the smell of them, their predatory branches and treacherous roots, but above all we didn’t like their almost bureaucratic indifference, their stony immobility, the mocking laziness that they maintained when we – with much shorter lifespans than theirs – had to waste our time on frontal marches, on cleaning our weapons and singing the song ‘They sa-a-a-ailed over the ocean and waves’. The trees were always against us. They obscured the sun and dropped snow down our collars. They led us astray and allowed our opponents to set ambushes. They knocked their branches against the window panes and howled all night so that they haunted our uneasy sleep. We cursed the trees. They imprisoned us in their labyrinth and obscured the sight of the boundary beyond which began that other world.

  We all shared the same opinion of the place where it had befallen us to serve. Orders, tasks, cloth
ing and even the food made us resemble each other. Aware of the uniformity that was mandatory here, we knew that it covered not only how we dressed, but also our gestures and our words, and perhaps even our thoughts. You don’t put on a uniform as a child. You have years of life behind you, in which you have learned good things and bad, wise and idiotic. Everybody has learned something different, and to varying degrees. Along the way they’ve acquired various customs, habits and manners. All of this makes up positive or negative individuality, outstanding or mediocre. People value the fact that they’re different from others. And they especially love their own ways. When they find themselves in a barracks, they have to give them up. It’s understandable that they drag this out, that this diminution is a painful, drastic process.

  We had that behind us. We discovered with awe characteristics within ourselves that should have pleased the lieutenant. ‘What are you doing, going to bed,’ one said to another, ‘when you’ve got a dirty rifle?’ We were soldiers – say what you will.

  But those shared thoughts, reactions, and moods of ours fell apart at the edge of the forest world. When our imagination ran beyond that world, all of us again became someone else and – I dread these words – strangers to each other. That external world, which had shaped us and waited to receive us back, presented itself to us – in contrast to the military standard – as a planet with an unheard-of wealth of landscapes, colours, sounds and scents. Life there was something we could all fathom for ourselves: joys and sorrows, rain and sunshine, the tram, the sputnik, the first snowdrop flower, Chopin’s Études, a woman in bed, the film Le Salaire de la peur, Utrillo in his white period, a quarter litre of pure spirits in one gulp, a walk with the kids, a bumper crop of wheat in the summer, Lollobrigida’s bust or Hanka’s, Kryśka’s or Stefa’s, farewells and homecomings, Berlin, Nasser’s plans, a washing machine, an argument with the boss, a pair of presentable boots for 340 zloty, jealousy, an engineer’s diploma, the death of an uncle, a bathtub full of hot water, an annual miner’s bonus, a mug of beer, once again you’re mine, the Dictionary of Foreign Phrases (second edition), a person walking down the street.

  That world drew us in or outraged us, but everything in it was tangible, had a nature of its own that we could somehow connect with to create new values or alter the character of existing values. Everything there pulsated, shifted its location, and submitted to the eternal laws of motion and energy. There was a lot of light out there for which we, doomed to the gloomy shadow of the forest, longed. Many desires and many satisfactions, temptations and disenchantments – everything that goes to make up the life deliberately or involuntarily given to us.

  Escaping together to that world, we already knew how it would differentiate us. Instinctively, we looked around at each other: That one will go back to being a farmer, that one an engineer, that one over there a manager and the other one a janitor. When would we meet again? And in what circumstances?

  We were friends. We had exchanged vows in the school of adversity. We had extirpated the evil in ourselves and that had sometimes been a painful operation. There was no living outside the collective. But entering that collective meant contributing some value, something that would enrich the others, that would be useful. The world beyond the boundary of the forest beckoned, but we were fated to exist among the trunks, under the green canopy of branches, and we had to make that existence tolerable and palatable.

  We sometimes got irritated. ‘Man was once free,’ we would say. ‘He could hang out wherever he wanted and as he wanted. After work, his time was his own. All over the world, time belongs to people. Everyone can choose what to do with it.’

  ‘Not everyone,’ someone suddenly protested. ‘Soldiers can’t. Nowhere.’

  It was evening and the woods, tormented by a gale, were acting up horribly. We thought about other soldiers. About the common soldiers in all the world’s armies. About our Bożym who was on sentry duty that infernal night, about Vanya who was now buffing his automatic in Chukotka, about Fidel Castro’s soldiers who were drinking themselves into a stupor that evening because they had had a hell of a workout. We thought about the Indian riflemen standing in line for the soup kettle, and the Ghanaian conscript scouring the swamp with his belly on the command: ‘Hit the dirt!’

  We, the rank-and-file soldiers from all over the world, are the ones who get up at the same time and do calisthenics at every degree of geographical longitude, shoot at dummies, hitting or missing them, march without knowing where to or why, make a tight bed, clean the latrines, yearn for a pass, answer: ‘Yes, sir!’ and salute according to regulations written in the most varied languages.

  We understand the paradox that we are caught up in: we are carrying arms, while people dream of a world without a single rifle. We also know that we stand under different flags. That borders and systems divide us, and that for this very reason there can be no brotherhood among us despite the fact that we share the same barracks existence, an identical necessity of obeying, and the duty imposed by the uniform.

  In the morning we went out on the training ground. It was located in a large glade that had been completely churned up by older recruits honing their sapper skills. We also furrowed that glade industriously. The lumpy ground did not want to yield and we had to drive our pickaxes into it. We had trouble digging a line of trenches. Before we even started on that, however, we had to choose a position.

  The man entrusted with this role stepped forward and said impetuously: ‘Our defensive line will run from that bush to that stump.’

  We liked his choice. We thought it would be the best position to fight from. But the lieutenant was disgusted.

  ‘Give me a break,’ he said. ‘You can’t do it that way. You have to crawl that line on your gut, metre by metre. You can’t stand up – after all, the enemy’s firing. The bullets are flying and people are dying. Imagine it,’ he urged.

  But that was what we couldn’t get into our heads. Not then, and not at any later point. We were not able to imagine warfare. We looked around. The forest was soughing, white fluff carried on the wind, the glade was silent, and at the bottom of it our boots crunched in the snow. Our imaginations could not give birth to any images of terror and struggle. We were unable to evoke even the vaguest vision of collective slaughter, the scraping of bayonet against bone, or human scraps in a puddle of sticky blood. All we saw was the forest, the glade and the snow. Nothing more.

  Was this mental laziness? A particular kind of passivity, fatigue and apathy? I’m trying to find an explanation, because it makes me wonder. Perhaps some instinctual protest arose in us against setting a panorama of war in this landscape. Some kind of biological resistance against seeing ourselves – even in our mind’s eye – with bullet holes in our skulls, with our legs blown off. I think, however, that this lack of military imagination stemmed from a certain disbelief in the possibility of the kind of situation that the lieutenant wished to present to us. Secretly, we imputed a certain naivety to him. We had the conviction – which we had absorbed from the writings of politicians and scholars – that in the event of a conflict, the world was in danger of annihilation. There could be total destruction on an almost cosmic scale. This, too, we could not imagine, but in our lack of scientific knowledge we spun unfettered fantasies. In our discussions we managed to establish that an eerie death would await us, a death like something in a laboratory. Some kind of chemical process, instantaneous and terminal, would take place – something in the form of a blast or an invisible change in the composition of the air, and we would melt or evaporate. What was the use of trenches, barbed wire or camouflaging our firing positions?

  Would it matter then that we had given our boots a regulation shine? That we had the correct number of rounds in our ammunition belts? Would there be enough time to check? That was what tormented us. We knew the warnings issued to the world by the scholars and politicians: Don’t have any illusions. This war will not come down to a clash of bayonets. Its style and techniques have no historical
parallel. The fact that both sides possess weapons of mass destruction places a question mark over using experience gained in the Second World War or all the wars recorded in the annals. This is confirmed by dozens of books written by the highest authorities. Where does the truth lie? Perhaps the authorities are wrong and the lieutenant is right. Perhaps they’re both right. We’d really like to know. But it was not the time for asking questions. We dug away at the trench, wondering in spite of ourselves whether it would save us.

  Military technology is the most highly developed technology in the world today. Every great scientific discovery immediately falls under military secrecy, which is like a bushel basket. Humanity is defending itself against total annihilation. It dominates humanity’s consciousness. One of us tells about something that happened in his small home town. There was a textile mill there. The employees were village girls. On the day of the American intervention in Lebanon, they stopped working and went home. The same thing happened during the Taiwan conflict. The girls would not even be able to find Lebanon on a map. Is it far away or near? On what continent? Wherever in the world fighting breaks out, the smell of gunpowder reaches our nostrils. Specialists have increased the range of missiles, and rockets can circumnavigate the equator in a fiendishly short time.