A raftsman in the twenty-first century — an interview with a figure from "Nobody Leaves: Impressions of Poland"

Author: Paweł Stanny source: Duży Format date: 2010-01-29

The man had no idea who he was talking to

Ryszard Kapuściński came to the Brodnica Lake District as a reporter for “Polityka” before his second expedition to Africa. It was probably in the first half of 1960. Fifty years later, Roman Filipski, the head of the village of Koziary, cannot get over it: “They wrote about him in a book?”

He drives us in his Mercedes (it would be hard to get there in any other machine). After a kilometre along a winding, muddy, rutted road we pull into a small farmyard, right up to the door of a cottage roofed with corrugated cement sheet. Dogs bark. Somebody is watching us from behind a window.

A woman opens the door. She turns out to be Zofia, Jagielski’s wife. She lets us into the hall. She had been having a nap. The village head asks about her husband. He mentions the book. Astonishment on her face. In the end she goes to the bedroom to fetch him.

A slight, short man comes out of the room to meet us. Half asleep, he hitches up his trousers, glancing at the visitors with curiosity from tiny eyes.

“Were you ever a raftsman?”

“I was, sir, but that was a long time ago,” Józef Jagielski answers.

Zofia offers tea. Her husband sits in his favourite place by the window. He glances now at the yard, now at “Busz po polsku”, which I have laid on the table. I ask whether he knows that his work was described by the famous Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuściński.

“Kapuściński? No, I never heard of him, sir. Who was he?”

“A writer and a traveller. He wrote many wonderful books,” I explain.

“I don’t remember. Maybe I did talk to him once. A lot of tourists used to paddle up to us in kayaks. When we were lashing the timber they’d come along too. They’d look, they’d ask questions. A man had no idea who he was talking to. He didn’t ask for names. People came to Bachotek from all over, but mostly from Warsaw, I think. They were resting, we were working. Rest, culture? Not a bit of it. In those days we had nothing. There was no television. Nothing. Only the radio to listen to sometimes.”

I open the book. The first edition of 1962, its cover already badly worn, borrowed from the library in Brodnica. I have a bookmark at the chapter “Ocalony na tratwie” (“Saved on a raft”). I read out the first passage that comes to hand: “The timber floats to the sawmill. It floats about 120 kilometres and the raft is towed in turn by several raftsmen. Jagielski is one of them; he has his own stretch.”

“There was no work, so you went to the floating,” Józef Jagielski says. “Mostly it was pine. There were lengths as long as thirty metres. How many did we lash together? It varied, five to seven, depending on the timber. Then along the Skarlanka we pushed the timber through to Lake Bachotek and from there on down the stream at Tama Brodzka to the Drwęca. When the raft was ready we put spikes on our boots so as not to slip, gloves on our hands, took a good straight boat hook and off we went.”

He notes that he did not go rushing into rafting. First he was a storekeeper at the railway station. One day all the raftsmen were on the road and a new consignment had to be sent quickly. They sent Jagielski; he was no strongman, and the work demanded strength and agility.

“It was hard for me. Because I was too weak, too slight. It was easier for a bigger, stouter man. You need strength to push off from the bank with a boat hook,” he explains.

I read: “A slight little fellow…”

“He was always slight like that,” Zofia Jagielska puts in.

“…with thin bones and muscles like a flea’s.”

“He’s filled out since, but back then? Dear God. Even the priest said to me before the wedding that here was a fine strapping girl taking such a skinny one. I met him through my cousin. She set us up. When no other came along you had to take what there was,” Zofia Jagielska laughs. “He was slight, but hardworking. After work he’d come home and had to work off his brother’s field and the farmer’s too, for lending us a horse.”

In 1967 the director of the Timber Transport Centre took Jagielski and his colleague Brzeziński to the company’s premises on Łąkowa Street in Brodnica. In Brodnica he was employed as a gatekeeper at the centre’s lodge until he retired. His move to Brodnica coincided with the period when the river floating of timber on the Drwęca slowly began to decline. Today there are no raftsmen left in the Brodnica Lake District.

Then a second great change came in his life. He left the house in Nowy Dwór where he had spent the finest years with his wife, and moved to the village of Koziary, to live with his son.

Today he is seventy-eight, with four children, thirteen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

He is as fit as a fiddle.

Has Józef Jagielski been anywhere in the fifty years since Kapuściński’s piece?

“Of course,” his son confirms. “I’ll list it for you right away. Once Dad visited his daughter. In the village of Kowalskie Błota between Tuchola and Śliwice. He travelled by train. Two, he went to his brother-in-law’s. To the village of Koszelewy, about fifteen kilometres beyond Lidzbark Welski. For the sake of accuracy, I’ll say: by train from Brodnica to Lidzbark, and then by bus.”

The author works at the Municipal and District Public Library in Brodnica.