The kiss
In 1990, a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was travelling through Poland with an ancient Canon F-1. The camera had a removable top shoe with a plate-glass viewfinder, which allowed me to photograph scenes discreetly. At that time, Poland was in rapid transition. The old system had collapsed, but the new one hadn’t taken shape. Daily life seemed grey and downtrodden, and there was a sense of uncertainty everywhere; in the buildings, the conversations, and in the way people carried themselves.
One morning, while walking through a street in a residential area, I saw a man and a woman approaching each other on the pavement. They stopped briefly, kissed, and then continued on their separate ways. It was an ordinary moment, over in seconds, but because of the broader atmosphere, the greyness, the unease, and the sense that people were still adjusting to a changed world, it stood out. As I passed them I secretly took one photograph while looking down through the viewfinder. The image appears on the book cover of The Many Truths of Josef Batten.
The Kiss, Poland 1990
That photograph stayed with me. When I later began writing the novel, I still had this moment, set against a backdrop of uncertainty, fixed in my mind. It eventually became the basis for a scene in the novel where Josef, aged nine, in Katowice in 1939, witnesses something that alters the way he understands the world beyond the limits of his home.
The passage from the book reads:
“On that morning, a man got on the tram carrying a bunch of red flowers. In a city turning grey with fear, those petals burned against the gloom like tiny embers of defiance. Josef stared at them, transfixed, framing them into an exotic image as they swayed with the movement of the tram.
Then he saw something else that held him still. Outside he watched a man and a woman on the pavement walking toward each other. He in a heavy coat, she with a bag swinging at her side. They met, smiled and kissed, their bodies folding into one another, an extraordinary moment of warmth in a world growing colder by the day.
Josef was mesmerised. He had never witnessed tenderness so freely given. It was a revelation, something apart from the harshness of his home, the brutality of his father and the cold silence of his grandmother. At that moment he forgot everything, the tram stops, his school, the lessons he was meant to endure. The world outside the window became his whole existence; he let the tram carry him past his stop, past his school and everything he knew.”
For me, the photograph is a reminder of how these little moments can fix themselves in memory and later find their way into a story. It wasn’t taken with that intention, but it became part of the foundation for one of Josef’s earliest turning points in the novel.