Grace Paley, Isak Dinesen, Alejandro Zambra and Etgar Keret are knocking at the front door … But I left the back door open and this one, which I happened to be reading at the time of making this list, snuck in. Nobody Leaves is a collection of Kapuściński’s early domestic reportage in post-Stalinist but still Communist Poland, bulletins from a place that, as the translator notes in the introduction, “was, from our perspective today, as ‘exotic’ as any of the Third World countries he covered”. Fact, but it reads as fiction. Elżbieta was born in late 1939; her father was imprisoned by the Germans, her mother dug beets (“the soil that beets grow in is heavy soil”); after the war her father suffered two heart attacks and couldn’t work, her mother sold the medicines she was given for her tuberculosis “so that I could give Elżbieta what she needed”. The girl becomes a schoolteacher but instead of going to university she enters a convent: “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.” The mother travels to the convent and is rebuffed; writes to her daughter and the letter is not delivered; writes to the Primate of Poland and is told “we advise you to keep quiet”. The narrator: “It strikes me that this is not bad advice … I also think that centuries of experience have gone into this reply.” The narrator visits Elżbieta – “we were kneeling in the snow, under a low sky, with an iron grille between us” – and is asked what he has brought for her. “I really don’t know. Perhaps only your mother’s scream.”

For more Polish reportage-as-story, see Hanna Krall, The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories (translated by Madeline G. Levine, Other Press, 2005).

Published in Nobody Leaves, translated by William R. Brand, Penguin Classics, 2017