"The boy with the soap bars" — a review of "Travels with Herodotus"

Author: Krzysztof Masłoń source: Rzeczpospolita date: 2004-10-02 ——————————————————————–

This is one of the strangest of Ryszard Kapuściński’s books, perhaps the strangest of all. A book of memory and of the present, of reportage and of history, biographical and sociological, and to some degree political too. One might say it came into being out of contrariness: here is a famous reporter who, instead of writing about the here and now, turns towards the there and then. But is that really so?

Herodotus described a war “in which Persia is to conquer Greece, and that means — Asia is to take possession of Europe, despotism is to annihilate democracy, and slavery to make short work of freedom.” Ryszard Kapuściński shows the author of the Histories as a man for whom, two and a half thousand years ago, there was no greater evil than tyranny — a man of great tolerance and immense curiosity about the world and about people. A reporter and a historian, an ethnographer and an anthropologist in one person. And yet Travels with Herodotus is not a book about Herodotus, or at least not only about him.

Kapuściński tells in it of his own journeys, of his own coming to know and discovering the world. I shall never forget the Louis Armstrong concert in Khartoum described in Travels with Herodotus, where crowds listened to the famous Satchmo in silence. I shall remember the story of the hotel in Beijing where the door could not be shut, and where the minder assigned to the author sat opposite, watching him the whole time. I was astonished — and other readers probably will be too — by the story of Kapuściński’s first trip abroad, to India, where he went knowing no English and only there began to learn the language, from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Is all this any less interesting than, say, the story Herodotus tells of Zopyrus, who mutilated himself horribly so that, as a supposed victim of Darius, he might worm his way into the favour of the Babylonians, gain their trust and at the right moment open the gates to the Persians?

In the Histories Herodotus described the world in which he happened to live. A world he came to know and one that was recounted to him. His memory must have been phenomenal; after all, transmission in his day was almost entirely oral, and Herodotus himself earned his living by reading out in public what he had written. He is said to have received ten talents in 446 BC for reciting some passage on the Persian wars in which he praised Athens — quite possibly a public reading from the first books of the Histories. That was a fortune.

A creature of the forest

What determines a writer’s success? In Ryszard Kapuściński’s case: sincerity. The writer has won a trust from his readers that many other established authors can only dream of. But the author of Travels also tends that trust carefully, coddles it, and that means that in his dialogue with the reader of his books he must cross one barrier after another, because the reader wants to know more and more. No longer only about the world Kapuściński describes, but about Kapuściński himself.

And the writer opens up. He reaches back to memories of forty or fifty years ago. And just as he uncovered the present for us, so now he shows the past. An astonishing past — but the author is astonished along with us. He asks the same question we do: so that is how it was, that is how it looked? That is what I was like, setting off for the first time into another world? Dazed, frightened, appallingly dressed. “There was no need to carry a passport,” he says. “You could see from a distance who was from which side of the Iron Curtain.”

In Rome — a stop on the way to India — he packs into his suitcase a hideous cheviot suit, a nylon shirt, a checked tie and heavy shoes with thick, stiff welts. The whole uniform in the fashion of the Warsaw Pact, 1956. Done up in a snow-white Italian shirt, a fashionable polka-dot tie and a new suit, he is still seen as someone arriving from a different world, unable to conceal what “shaped and marked him”. He is still foreign, still resembles a creature of the forest, “with wide-open eyes trying to make something out, to penetrate, to distinguish”.

Ryszard Kapuściński has more than once stressed that he knows poverty, that he knows what it means to be hungry or cold. In Travels with Herodotus he calls up the image of a boy going door to door selling bars of soap. If the trade goes well he will earn enough for shoes: “The shoes available to Poles cost 400 zlotys; they had uppers of thick drill coated with black waterproof pitch and soles made of pale lime wood.” Fashion in the Warsaw manner, 1942. When years later, in India, the reporter from Poland sees people walking barefoot, “some feeling of community, of kinship” stirs in him, and he is seized by the mood “we feel on returning to the house of our childhood”.

That reporter — for the boy with the soap bars was, of course, the future author of Travels with Herodotus — would in his books take the side of the beaten, the humiliated, the hungry. The unhappy. He comes from the part of the world into which good fortune rarely looked, something that today — for reasons that are not entirely clear — people would rather not remember. And yet the memory of who we were and who we are keeps making itself felt. When, after a dramatic and at moments tragicomic escapade to India, the writer was returning home by plane from Moscow, his neighbour began to weep over Okęcie airport: “Forgive me,” he said. “Forgive me. But I did not believe I would come back.”

It was December 1956. People were still coming back from the Gulag.

“Problem” and “no problem”

But what actually drew Kapuściński out into the world? A desire to cross borders: in space, and — perhaps more importantly — in time. Hence his interest in Herodotus, whose Histories accompanied Kapuściński on his reporting journeys. Herodotus, too, was either just back from an expedition or already preparing for the next. He, too, treated travel not as a necessity of life or as a pleasure but “as effort and enquiry, as an attempt to know everything — life, the world, oneself”. Was curiosity what decided it? Certainly, but above all a need for continual astonishment. “A person who ceases to be astonished is hollow, his heart burnt out. In a person who believes that everything has already been and that nothing can astonish him, what is most beautiful has died — the beauty of life.”

Herodotus wrote above all about the great war of his times, about the struggles of rulers and their armies, but who knows whether he was not more interested in the ordinary life of ordinary people. So he described how they farmed the land and what they believed, how they coupled and how they buried their dead. Everything interests him and he wants to tell others about all of it; this thoroughbred reporter “wanders, looks, talks, listens, so as to note down afterwards what he learned and saw, or simply to remember the thing”.

Kapuściński probes the question of memory almost obsessively. “In Herodotus’s world,” he writes, “almost the only repository of memory is a human being. To reach what is remembered, therefore, one has to reach a person, and if he lives far from us we have to go to him, set out on the road, and once we have met — sit down together and listen to what he tells us, listen, remember, perhaps write it down. That is how reportage begins; it is born of such a situation.”

Today’s human being has libraries, archives and the internet to help. So he does not have to exercise his memory in that way and grows lazy. It is another question what we want to know, which items of news are indispensable to us, which information we need. Negussie, with whom Ryszard Kapuściński travelled through the land of the Amhara, did not know the world, did not know Africa or his own country, but on the land of his tribe he knew “every path, every tree and every stone”. He knew two words of English: “problem” and “no problem”, which was entirely enough for the reporter to communicate with his guide.

Provincials and hermits

To use the language of our day, one might say that with his latest book he has promoted Herodotus. He has dusted him off, set him in the right light, brought out all his virtues. He certainly deserved it, for the Histories are indeed the first great European prose, comparable only to Homer’s poems and undoubtedly surpassing Thucydides. Herodotus’s efforts to “sell” his story as well as possible, to hold the reader’s (the listener’s) attention with interesting or even sensational information, command our admiration. And the author of the Histories does not wish to claim omniscience. He cites sources — and they are by no means anonymous — sometimes noting that something does not seem probable to him but that this is what the priests of some temple maintain. He is cautious: “Seeking an answer to the question most important to him, namely where the conflict between East and West came from, why relations between them are hostile (…) he does not cry: I know! I know! On the contrary, he hides in the shadows and puts others forward to answer.”

And why does Ryszard Kapuściński, at a moment when a world horrified after 11 September 2001 wants to understand as much as it can of what is happening now, set off on an expedition into the past with Herodotus’s Histories under his arm? Because, as Novalis said — the author of the sentence Kapuściński chose as one of the three epigraphs to Travels — “all remembrance is the present”. T. S. Eliot, in the mid-1940s, wrote bitterly of his own age, in which “men are more inclined than ever to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and try to solve the problems of life in terms of engineering…”. This, Eliot maintained, gives rise to a new kind of provincialism, no longer of space but of time; and provincialism of that kind “carries with it the threat that we may all, all the peoples of the planet, become provincials, and those who are not content to be provincials can only become hermits.”

In this respect the situation has grown worse still, and that is why Ryszard Kapuściński, so plainly longing for genuine wisdom, reminds the provincials of the twenty-first century that “the present has always existed, because history is only an unbroken sequence of presents, and the most distant events were, for the people living then, the day closest to their hearts.”

Every page of Herodotus says this, and so does every page of Travels with Herodotus, written by a man whom the time given to him has taught one thing. That everything repeats: “politics — perverse, unclean games and lies; the life of the ordinary person — poverty and hopelessness; the division of the world into East and West — still the same.” How is one to find one’s bearings in that, what is to be done? Kapuściński is right. Indeed, we stand in darkness surrounded by light. It is good that this life of ours, like the life of moles, is lit by books such as this.

Ryszard Kapuściński, “Podróże z Herodotem”. Znak, Cracow 2004.