Nobody Leaves by Ryszard Kapuściński

Author:Ryszard Kapuściński
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141962801
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Geezer

The road was barren. The line of asphalt dwindled away, and the air hung above it in a sweltering quiver. No vehicles. I asked the boy if he was also going to Grajewo. Yes, he was. So let’s wait together. Together, all right, he said. He went on to say that he was hurrying to Grajewo because his girlfriend was waiting there. They were from Augustów. Their school year had ended a week ago. How did it go? ‘I failed history,’ he admitted. His teacher was a stickler, what could he say, the teacher was unrealistic and eminently inflexible. There’s no way to work things out with an old geezer like that.

‘What’s his name?’ I asked out of reportorial routine.

‘His name? Stępik. Grzegorz Stępik.’

Pure coincidence. Random.

I knew Stępik. He graduated in history from Warsaw U. in 1955. ‘So he’s in Augustów now?’ I asked. We were no more than a kilometre outside town.

I found the dinky townhouse on the market square and the cluttered little garret. I found Stępik there. It was him, of course. We sat at the table. He took out a box of matches and lit one after another. He had the same habit way back when. He lit matches while talking. He held the small wooden stick between his fingers and stared into the flame. When the match burned down, he took out the next one. On a nervous day he would go through a whole box. If a fire broke out in the vicinity, they’d probably lock Stępik up. I told him this, and he laughed. His eyes are grey, as if they were burned out in a fire. He always looks at people through the flame of a match. Does that let him see others better?

Going by appearance, he hasn’t changed much. A tall stringbean of a man, and everything about him is correspondingly elongated – his legs, hands and nose. Clumsy, badly drawn somehow, which always made people uncomfortable around him.

He’s twenty-seven.

Geezer.

The old geezer.

Who was it that first sniffed him out as an obsolescent relic? I ask him. He frowns and grows impatient. He cuts short our exchange. ‘What’s the point of talking?’

Why not talk?

All right, fine. I might well be grasping the core hidden beneath the surface. The surface is proper. Stępik teaches in school, he’s up to his ears in work with lessons, teaching plans and reading lists, and he teaches as well as he can, he gives it his all, he doesn’t shirk, and the school administration praises him. He sublets his place, is saving up for a motorcycle, and joins the archaeologists at their excavation every summer. From these trifles he derives his life’s satisfactions, and he’s happy with them. On the other hand, he does not have an iota of pedagogical satisfaction and he cannot boast of any educational success. On the contrary! Stępik is permanently facing a pedagogical Waterloo.

He assures me that he’s not the only one stuck in the mud. The whole teaching staff has reached rock bottom.

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