by Susan Sontag
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Chapter Zero
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
By Susan Sontag
Additional Praise for Susan Sontag’s In America
Copyright
To my friends in Sarajevo
The story of In America is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland’s most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband Count Karol Chłapowski, her fifteen-year-old son Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska’s subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name of Helena Modjeska.
Inspired by … no less and no more. Most of the characters in the novel are invented, and those who are not depart in radical ways from their real-life models.
I am, however, indebted to books and articles by and on Modjeska and Sienkiewicz for material and anecdotes used (and altered), as well as—for help in getting it right—to Paolo Dilonardo, Karla Eoff, Kasia Górska, Peter Perrone, Robert Walsh, and especially to Benedict Yeoman. Thanks also to Minda Rae Amiran, Jarosław Anders, Steven Barclay, Anne Hollander, James Leverett, John Maxtone-Graham, Larry McMurty, and Miranda Spieler. I am very grateful for a month at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio in 1997.
S.S.
“America will be!”
—Langston Hughes
Zero
IRRESOLUTE, no, shivering, I’d crashed a party in the private dining room of a hotel. It felt wintry indoors, too, but none of the women in gowns and men in frock coats churning about the long dark-hued room seemed to mind the chill, so I had the tile stove in a corner all to myself. I hugged the fat, ceiling-high contraption—I would have preferred a hearthful of roaring fire, but I was here, where rooms are heated by stoves—then set to kneading some warmth back into my cheeks and palms. When I’d got warmer, or calmer, I ventured across my end of the room. From a window, through the thick scrim of soundlessly dropping snowflakes backlit by a ring of moonlight, I looked down on the row of sledges and horsecabs, on the coachmen swathed in coarse blankets dozing in their seats, on the rigid snow-dappled animals with bowed heads. I heard the bells of a nearby church strike ten. Some guests had bunched near the huge oak sideboard by the window. Half turning, I tuned in to their conversation, which was mostly in a language I don’t know (I was in a country I’d visited only once, thirteen years ago), but somehow, I didn’t question how, their words reached me as sense. It was something vehement about a woman and a man, a scrap of information I promptly upgraded by assuming that the two were, why not, married. Then with equal vehemence the talk concerned a woman and two men, so, never doubting that the woman was the same, I supposed that if the first man was her husband, the second must be her lover, chiding myself for imagining so conventionally. But whether a woman and a man or the woman and two men, I still hadn’t understood why they were being discussed. If the story were familiar to everyone, there would of course be no need to recount it. But maybe the guests were deliberately speaking so as not to be understood too well, because, say, the woman and the man, or both men, if there were two, were also here at the party. This made me think of looking one by one at the women in the room, all buoyantly coiffed and, as far as I am any judge of the clothes of that time, stylishly dressed, to see if one stood out from the others. As soon as I looked, looked with this thought in mind, I saw her, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed her before. No longer in her first youth, as people then said of an attractive woman past thirty, of medium height, straight-spined, with a pile of ash-blond hair into which she nervously tucked a few escaping strands, she was not exceptionally beautiful. But she became more compelling the longer I watched her. She could be, she must be, the woman they were discussing. When she moved about the room, she was always surrounded; when she spoke, she was always listened to. It seemed to me I’d caught her name, it was either Helena or Maryna—and supposing it would help me to decipher the story if I could identify the couple or the trio, what better start than to give them names, I decided to think of her as Maryna. Then I looked for the two men. First, I trawled for one who could be thought of as a husband. If he were a doting husband, as I imagined this Helena, I mean Maryna, would have, then I’d find him close to her, never distracted for long by anyone else. And, sure enough, keeping Maryna in my sightline, it seemed obvious now that she was the one giving the party or that it was being given in her honor, I saw her being trailed by an angular bearded man with fine blond hair, combed to the back, that left uncovered his high, powerfully arched and noble forehead, who was nodding affably at whatever she said. That must be the husband, I thought. Now I had to find the other man, who, if he was the lover—or, just as interestingly, turned out not to be the lover—would probably be younger than the amiable-looking aristocrat. If the husband were in his mid-thirties, a year or two his wife’s junior though of course he looked much older, this man would be, I guessed, in his mid-twenties, handsome enough, and with the insecurity of youth or, more likely, of inferior social position, a bit overdressed. He could be, let me see, a rising journalist or a lawyer. Of the several men at the party answering to such a description, the one I fancied most was a burly fellow with glasses who, at the moment I spied him, was being familiar with a maid laying out the hotel’s hoard of best silver and crystal on the spacious table at the other end of the room. I saw him whispering in her ear, touching her shoulder, toying with her braid. It would be amusing, I thought, if this were the candidate lover of my ash-blond beauty: not an inhibited bachelor but a dedicated rake. It’s he, it must be he, I decided with lighthearted certitude, while also deciding to keep another youth in reserve for the part, a slender fellow in a yellow waistcoat, a bit Wertherish, should I become convinced that a more chaste or at least more circumspect swain would better fit with the identities of the other two. Then I wheeled my attention to another band of guests, though after some minutes more of alert eavesdropping I could make nothing further of the story that they too were debating. You might think that by now I’d be hearing the names of the two men. Or at least the husband’s. But no one who addressed the man standing not far from me now in the group tightly surrounding the woman, I was sure he was her husband, ever used his Christian name, and so, fortified by the unexpected gift of her name—yes, I know it could have been Helena, but I’d decided that it would be, or must be, Maryna—I resolved to discover his name with or without auditory clues. What could he, I mean the husband, be called? Adam. Jan. Zygmunt. I tried to think of the name that would best suit him. For each person has such a name, usually the name that he or she has been given. Finally, I heard someone call him … Karol. I can’t explain why this name didn’t please me; perhaps, peeved by not being able to fathom the story, I was simply venting my frustration on this man with the long, pale, evenly shaped face whose parents had chosen for him so euphonious a name. So, although I had no doubt about what I’d heard, I couldn’t claim to be unsure, as I’d been with his wife’s name (Maryna or Helena), I ruled that he could not be a Karol, that I had misheard his name,
and gave myself permission to rechristen him Bogdan. I know this isn’t as attractive a name as Karol in the language in which I am writing, but I intend to get used to it, and hope it will wear well. Next, I turned in my mind to the other man, as I thought of him, who had dropped onto a leather sofa to write something in a notebook (it seemed too long to be an assignation note to the maid). Certain that I had not yet heard his name, for his name I’d been neither cued nor miscued, I would have to be arbitrary, I decided to plunge ahead and make of him a Richard, their Richard: Ryszard. His understudy in the yellow waistcoat, I was moving quickly now, I would call Tadeusz; though I was starting to think I’d have no use for him, at least in this role, it seemed easier to give him a name now, while I was in the naming vein. Then I went back to listening, trying to ratchet up my sense of the story that, ever more audibly, was troubling most of the people invited to the dinner. It wasn’t, at least this much I divined, that the woman was about to leave her husband for the other man. Of that I was sure, even if the scribbler on the sofa was in fact the lover of the woman with the ash-blond hair. I knew there had to be a few romances and adulteries at this party, as in any room filled with lively and fetchingly decked-out people who are friends, colleagues, kin. But this, though the very thing one expects when primed for a story about a woman and a man, or a woman and two men, wasn’t what was agitating these guests tonight. I heard, But her duty lies here. It’s irresponsible and without any … and, But he’s asked him to go ahead. It’s right that he … and, But every noble idea seems like folly. After all, she … and, firmly, May God take them under His protection, this last uttered by an elderly woman wearing a mauve velvet hat, who then crossed herself. Hardly the way people discuss a love affair. But, like some love affairs, it bore the stamp of recklessness; and it seemed to bring out censors and well-wishers in equal measure. And while at first the story seemed to concern only the woman and the man (Maryna, Bogdan), or the woman and the two men (Maryna, Bogdan, Ryszard), sometimes it seemed to include more than these two, or three, for I heard some of the guests standing about the room, holding their goblets of mulled wine in one hand and gesturing with the other, say we (and not only they), and I began hearing other names, Barbara and Aleksander and Julian and Wanda, who seemed not to be among the judging bystanders but part of the story, coconspirators even. Perhaps I was moving too fast now. But, conspiracy or no, the thought of conspiracy came naturally to mind, since these people for all their swank and comforts had not done better than to get themselves born in a country subjected for decades to the variously vindictive decrees of a triple foreign occupation, so that many an ordinary action, by which I mean what people in my country would consider an ordinary exercise of freedom, would have had there the character of a conspiracy. And even if what they’d done or were planning to do turned out to be legal, I had still managed to understand that others, more than a few, had roles in this story of the woman and the man or the woman and two men (you know their names), including some of those nearby continuing to dispute whether it was “right” or whether it was “wrong.” I don’t know why I’ve put these words in quotes, it’s not just because they are the words I heard spoken; it must be because in the time in which I live these words are used much less confidently, even with apology if you are not a complacent bigot or a lethal avenger, while much of the fascination of these people, of their time, is that they knew, or thought they knew, what “right” and “wrong” were. Indeed, they would have felt quite naked without their “right” and “wrong,” their “good” and “bad,” which continue to lead a plaintive, withered afterlife in my own time, as well as their, now thoroughly discredited, “civilized” and “barbaric,” “noble” and “vulgar,” their, now incomprehensible, “selfless” and “selfish”—forgive the quotation marks (I shall soon stop using them), I mean here only to give these words their proper, poignant emphasis. And it occurred to me that this might explain, partly, my presence in this room. For I was moved by the way they possessed these words and regarded themselves bound by them to actions. I heard only ardor, sincerity, in their softly voiced should we, they shouldn’t, how can he, how can she, how can they, if I were they, she still doesn’t have the right, but honor demands … I was enjoying the repetition. Dare I say I felt at one with them? Almost. Those dreaded words, dreaded by others (not by me), seemed like caresses. Pleasantly numbed, I felt myself borne along by their music … until I heard a bald man with a little pointed beard observe, with more sharpness than I’d heard so far, Of course they can, if she wants. He’s rich. That was a dose of reality. Whatever they were debating, it seemed to require money, a lot. Further, it seemed more than possible that nobody here was seriously rich, even if one of them had a title, the man I’d decided was the husband, and everybody sported signs of a conventional prosperity. More evidence of their status: that bits of their conversations regularly fell into the one foreign language I do speak well. For I knew that at this time, in their part of the world, the gentry as well as those with a liberal profession often chatted in the language of authoritative, far away France. And just as I was acknowledging that it was a relief to hear French now and then, I heard the woman with the ash-blond hair, my Maryna, exclaiming, Oh, let’s not speak French anymore! A pity, because she had been speaking the most vibrant French of all. She had a deep-toned voice, which rested deliciously on the final vowels. And she moved as she spoke, in a different rhythm from the others: with a pause at the end of each fluent gesture, each agile turn of her no longer slim body, when she passed, as if to receive their homage, from one cluster of guests to another. But sometimes she appeared irritated. And sometimes, I saw it, I don’t know if anyone else did, she seemed just tired. I wondered if she had been ill recently. She didn’t smile often, except at the little boy, I haven’t mentioned that there was a child in the room, with a ripe gaze and floury hair, whom I had to assume was Maryna’s son. He looked so much like her, there was nothing in him of the man I’d chosen for her husband, the one I’ve called Bogdan, which made me wonder whether I had picked the right man. But it often happens that someone resembles one parent while a child, then as an adult resembles the other parent just as exclusively, instead of displaying a unique, ingenious blend of the features of both. The little boy was trying to get Maryna’s attention. Where was his nanny? Wasn’t it late for a child his age, he was around seven, still to be up? These questions reminded me how veiled was my picture of their lives outside this large, chilly room. Observing them at a party, on something like good behavior, in a state of appealing alertness, I couldn’t know, for example, whether the evening would end for husbands and wives in one ample bed, two beds pushed together, or two beds separated by a carpeted canyon or a closed door. My guess, if I had to guess, was that Maryna did not share a bedroom with Bogdan, following the custom in his family, not hers. And I was still unable to name the deed or project whose rightness or wrongness the guests were debating, or so I thought—even as I was receiving a flurry of new clues, now they were going too fast, which I’ll put in quotation marks too, but only to remember them: words like “abandon her public” and “national symbol” and “crisis of nerves” and “something irrevocable” and “noble savage” and “Nipu.” Yes, Nipu. As it happens I’d once read (in a French translation) the book entitled The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, which describes Wisdom’s sojourn in an ideal, consummately isolated community, in fact it is an island, called Nipu. But I wouldn’t have expected anyone here to evoke this classic of their national literature, written exactly a century before the time when the guests were gathered in the private dining room of the hotel and I was thinking about them. Its account of life in a perfect society, artlessly influenced by both Voltaire and Rousseau, reflected all the quaint illusions of a bygone age. Surely these people would feel remote from such enlightened views, enlightened with a capital E. The history of their implacably dismembered country would, I thought, have kept them immune to any faith in human perfectibility or an ideal society. (A
nd cured, forever, of that other mighty illusion with a capital E: as their greatest poet once declared, bitter experience had taught his country that “the European word had no political value. This nation, attacked by a formidable enemy, had on its side all the books, all the newspapers, all the eloquent tongues of Europe; and from this entire army of words came not a single action.”) Yet here they were in this sumptuous room with beamed ceiling and Persian carpets in the heart of this magnificent old city, evoking Nipu, that stern blueprint for a stripped-down life of perfect, rustic comity. I began to wonder if I’d stumbled on a coven of tardy romantics (the romantic age being long over), and I feared for them, for the illusions they might still cherish. But probably they were simply patriots of an unusually grandiloquent stripe. Perhaps I should mention that I had heard, several times, homeland, but not even once the Christ among nations—as patriots of their time were wont to call their martyred nation. I knew that the memory of injustice colored every sentiment among these people, whose country had disappeared from the map of Europe. Appalled by the lethal upsurge of nationalist and tribal feelings in my own time, in particular (you can be in only one place at a time) by the fate of one small European nation, braided together tribally, and, for that, destroyed with impunity, with the acquiescence or connivance of the great European powers (I’d spent a good part of three years in besieged Sarajevo), I wondered if they could be as exhausted as I was by the national question and by the betrayal, the deceit of Europe. But what could it mean to call someone—it had to be the woman with the ash-blond hair, the woman I’d decided to call Maryna—a national symbol? If I assumed she was so distinctively treasured not because she was somebody’s daughter or widow but for accomplishments of her own, what could these be? I couldn’t rewrite history: I had to acknowledge that a woman of her time and country who was known to and admired by a large public would most likely have been on the stage. For then—only eight years after the birth of the supreme heroine of my earliest childhood, Maria Skłodowska, the future Madame Curie—there was hardly any other enviable career open to a woman (she was not going to be a governess, or a teacher, or a prostitute). She was too old to be a dancer. True, she could have been a singer. But it would have been more illustrious, more patriotic, then, if she had been, I was certain she was, an actress. And that would explain how her good looks imposed themselves on others as beauty; the skillful gestures, the commanding gaze; and the way sometimes she brooded and balked, without penalty. I mean, she looked like an actress. And I told myself I needed to make a greater space for the obvious: that, mostly, people do look like what they are. I’d been watching another man, I decided to call him Henryk, a thin man slouched in an armchair who had been drinking too much. With his goatee and careless posture and melancholy stare, he was like the doctor in a Chekhov play, which is what he could be, since there was a good chance of finding a doctor in any cultivated entourage of this time. And if my Maryna was indeed an actress, I could count on there being other theatre people here: say, the leading man in her current vehicle—I picked the tall beardless man with a ringing voice who had started, I didn’t understand why, to hector Tadeusz—although the presence of other actresses, at least of Maryna’s generation, seemed less certain (they would be rivals). Most likely, I’d find the general director of the city’s main theatre, whose season she animated each year with her guest appearances. And she would not have failed to number among her friends a drama critic, one who could be relied upon always to give her the worshipful reviews she had earned (he was a gently rejected suitor from way back). Further, as befits a worldly gathering, someone should be a banker and there should be a judge … Maybe I was moving too fast. I turned to the stove and, taking a deep breath, put my hands on the hot dark-green tiles, though really I was not chilled at all now, then went back to the window and gazed into the night. The falling snow was streaked with hail; it rattled the panes. As I turned back to look at the guests, a stout man with a lorgnette was saying, Listen. Hardly anyone stopped talking. Mes enfants, he bellowed, that’s what hail sounds like. Not like dried peas dropped into a kettledrum! Maryna smiled. I smiled too, for a different reason (I didn’t mind being proven right): so I was among theatre people. I decided that this man must be a stage manager, since he was fretting about effects. And I christened him Czesław, in honor of my favorite living poet. On then to the rest of the cast, I said to myself with renewed confidence. Having yet to identify any of the other women, I realized that six could be the wives of the leading actor, the director of the theatre, the critic, the banker, the judge, and the stage manager. The rumpled doctor, since I thought he was a doctor because he looked like Astrov in Uncle Vanya, I assumed to be not just unmarried but unmarriable. (And I needed to keep my Ryszard wifeless, too, the better to flirt and pine, though I suspected that he would turn out, when much older, to be not only the marrying but the thrice-married kind.) Then, returning to the other women, I stalled for a moment, wondering if I hadn’t misjudged Maryna. If too successful to keep an ex-mentor by her side, while not yet old enough to feel unthreatened by the young, she still might have included one younger actress in her circle of friends; and I found her quickly, a pale delicate woman with a large locket on her bosom, who kept brushing back her auburn hair with a gesture very much like Maryna’s. Oh, and one of the women could be a relative and, indeed, somebody I thought looked enough like Bogdan to be his sister was just at that moment talking to the doctor, leaning over his chair; I think she had noticed he was a bit drunk. I also wondered whether I would find a Jew, who would be a young painter named Jakub, recently returned from two years of cosmopolitan art society in Rome. But as far as I could tell there was just one painter here, and not a Jew, his name was Michal: a red-haired, stiff-gaited man around thirty, who had lost a leg at eighteen in the Uprising. Finally (for the time being), it seemed to me that at a party of this size and composition there should be at least two foreigners, but as carefully as I scrutinized the guests I could find only the one I’d already noticed: a plump man with a full beard and a diamond in his cravat, with whom some people standing near another tall window had been speaking German. He might be an impresario who was on the verge of engaging Maryna’s young protégée for some small roles next spring at his theatre in Vienna. I surmised this, that he was from Vienna, because I recognized his accent, my memory has a good ear, even though I’ve never learned to speak or understand German properly. Of course I didn’t marvel at what superior linguists they all were; to this day the educated of this country, restored to the map of Europe a mere eighty years ago, are notably polyglot. But I, with my command only of Romance languages (I dabble in German, know the names of twenty kinds of fish in Japanese, have soaked up a splash of Bosnian, and understand barely a word of the language of the country in which this room is to be found), I, as I’ve said, somehow did manage to understand most of what they were saying. Still, I had yet to understand what they were really saying. For supposing I was right, I mean about who was an actress and who a stage manager and the rest, this wasn’t helping me much to untie the knot of their argument about whether what the woman, Maryna, and the man, Bogdan, or the two men, Bogdan and Ryszard, were doing or were planning to do, was right or wrong. (As you see, I’ve dispensed with my little crutches, the quotation marks.) But even those who said it was wrong seemed to temper their judgment when it came to Maryna. It was obvious how much everyone admired her, not only her husband and the man (Ryszard, possibly Tadeusz) who may or may not be her lover. I had no doubt that all the men and several of the women must be at least a little in love with Maryna. But it was more, or less, than love. They were enthralled by her. I wondered if I could be enthralled by her, were I one of them, not merely someone watching, trying to figure them out. I thought I had time, for their feelings, their story; and my own. They seemed—and I pledged myself to be like them, on their behalf—indefatigable. Yet this didn’t strip me of my impatience. I was waiting for quick relief: to hear something, a sentence, that would bri
ng me the nub and drift of their concern. It occurred to me that perhaps I had been listening too avidly. Perhaps, I thought, it wasn’t that I had to listen harder but should mull over what I’d already heard. (The phrase crisis of nerves had started to buzz in my head.) Perhaps, I thought, I should simply take off. (And what about abandon her public?) Perhaps only if I went downstairs and out into the blizzard and walked for a while (or simply parked myself in a snowdrift near the coachmen perched on their boxes, near the patient horses) would I manage to understand what was engrossing them. I had to admit, too, that I longed for a gust of fresh air. When I’d entered the room, none of the guests seemed to mind the chill, but now they didn’t seem to mind that it was too warm. The bells of the nearby church struck eleven times, and I heard the faraway echo, raggedly synchronized, from other churches in the city. A fat, red-faced woman in a near-rhyming, tomato-red apron appeared with an armful of wood and, brushing past me, opened the little door of the stove and fed the fire. I wondered if the flue was drawing as well as it should, knowing that I could expect nothing better of the gas jets, unevenly fed and therefore leaking and sputtering as they always did then, before the advent of natural gas; but, however inevitable that I, a child of neon and halogen, would appreciate the look of gas lighting, unlike everyone else in the room I was not used to its acrid smell. And of course many of the men were smoking. Ryszard, who had been drawing caricatures of the guests to entertain the drowsy child I thought must be Maryna’s son, was puffing away on a large, ornately carved meerschaum pipe—exactly the fetish one might expect an insecure, ambitious young man to possess. Several of the older men had lit Virginia cigars. And Maryna, now installed in a vast wing chair, held a long Turkish cigarette in her languid hand—just the sort of mildly disreputable thing a celebrated actress would be given license to do. She could even wear trousers like George Sand if she liked, and I could perfectly imagine her as Rosalind; she would make a splendid Rosalind, though a bit old for the role, but that’s never stopped any famous actress: fifty-year-olds have appeared, and triumphed, as Juliet. I could also see Maryna playing Nora or Hedda Gabler, this being the period of the ascendancy of Ibsen … but maybe she wouldn’t want to play Hedda any more than she would want to play Lady Macbeth, which would mean she wasn’t a truly great actor, who’s never afraid of playing monsters. I hoped she hadn’t been made less of an artist by high-mindedness. Or by self-regard. She was talking to the impresario from Vienna, he was smiling cautiously, and others had drawn close to listen. My Tadeusz, having finally broken free of the speechifying leading actor—I heard, their last words, Sheer folly (from the actor) and Nothing is irrevocable (from Tadeusz)—now stood beside Maryna’s chair, his thumbs in the armholes of his yellow waistcoat: a most un-Wertherish gesture, but who could reproach him for falling out of type, for being happy, for becoming confident, simply because he was standing near her. Ryszard, a little apart, had taken out his notebook again. She looked up and said, What are you writing? Hastily pocketing the notebook, he murmured, A description of you. I shall put it in a novel—he shook his head—if I ever find time, with all we have now to do, to write a novel. The man I’d decided was a drama critic clapped him on the back. One more reason, young man, not to embark on this foolishness, he said jovially. But Maryna had already lowered her gaze. She was addressing the impresario with a controlling calm. Oh, that’s not good enough at all, she said. More and more I saw the imperious woman, who did not have to persuade, whose word was law. I remember the first time I ever saw a diva up close: it was more than thirty years ago, I was new in New York and seriously poor and a rich suitor took me to lunch at Lutèce, where, shortly after the first delicacies had materialized on my plate, my attention was galvanized by the (come to think of it) familiar-looking woman with high cheekbones, raven-black hair, and full, red-painted mouth eating at the next table with an elderly man to whom she said loudly: “Mr. Bing. [Pause.] Either we do things the Callas way or we do not do them at all.” And the Mr. Bing in question fell silent for some minutes—as did I. Now I knew that Maryna, my Maryna, must have had her Callas-like moments, if she was what I thought she was, though not tonight, I supposed, when she was among friends, when she would have preferred to cajole. But I could see her blue-grey eyes widen with irritation. How she must have longed, I was getting to know her, I think, how she must have longed to rise from the chair, upsetting everyone, and walk out of the room. To escape; to make an exit; not merely to get some fresh air, as I wanted to do. For I wouldn’t have minded ducking out for a quarter of an hour, even to be hailed on—though I usually do mind the cold (I grew up in southern Arizona and southern California). But I didn’t dare leave, for fear of missing something said the moment I’d quit the room that would have made everything clear to me. And, I saw, this was hardly the moment to descend into the snowy street. On the far side of the long table the headwaiter was making a discreet signal to Bogdan, as his four underlings bent over almost in unison to light the four triple-branched silver candelabra. Maryna rose, smoothing down the front of her sage-green robe with one hand while extinguishing her cigarette with the other. Dear friends, she began. You have waited so long. You have been so patient. She glanced slyly at Bogdan. Yes, he said. Adding something slothful as well as tender to the play of husbandly expressions crossing his face, he took her arm. How glad I was that I hadn’t copped out when I’d wanted to but had remained at my station. My hope was that, once the guests were at dinner, the bits of overheard conversation would unite, and I would finally grasp what was absorbing them. For I thought it even possible that everyone turning, rising, tarrying, sidling toward the long table at one end of the room on the hotel’s first floor (in my country it’s the second floor) was privy to this deed or plan whose rightness or wrongness was still being disputed, keeping in mind that however many I might eventually discover were in on it, in anything undertaken by as few as two, one person is more responsible than another (though no one is entirely without responsibility, wherever there is consent there is responsibility), and with, say, twenty—actually I’d counted, there were twenty-seven people in the room—not only would one person be more responsible than the others, but someone would have been at the helm, however much that person, if a woman, would probably, in that time, have disavowed the name of leader. To be explained, nevertheless: why anybody follows anyone else. Or, just as puzzling, why anyone ever refuses to follow. (What writing feels like is following and leading, both, and at the same time.) I watched how everyone obeyed the long-awaited command to sit and be served. I didn’t mind just watching, listening, I don’t ever mind, especially at parties; though I did imagine that, could the guests at this party have become aware of my presence, of the intrusion of so exotic a stranger, a place would have been made for me at the table. (That I might be pushed out on the snowy street never crossed my mind.) Uninvited, unseen, I could look at them as long as I wanted, stare at them even: a piece of bad manners I usually can’t practice because it’s likely to incur a stare in return. As a child, I mean like many solitary children, I often wished I were invisible, the better to watch—I mean, to not be watched. But I also played, sometimes, at not seeing at all. Around thirteen, after the family pulled up tiny stakes and moved from Tucson to Los Angeles, this walking around with my eyes shut when I was alone or unobserved in the new house became, I recall, a favorite game. (My most memorable venture in blindness was when, on a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom, there was an earthquake.) I like the feeling of being reduced to my own resources. Of having to do nothing but cope. About time, the judge murmured irritably to his wife. She smiled and put two fingers to her lips. Will there be ice cream? said the little boy. The guests were approaching the table, Ryszard edging ahead, impatient to see how close to Maryna he had been seated, with Tadeusz right behind him, but it was Ryszard, hurrying his step, who reached the table first. I saw him scan for his place card and his grin told me that he was not dissatisfied. Once the guests had occupied all the chairs, while they
were still unfolding their starched upright napkins, the squad of waiters began distributing the bounties of the first course. I had moved forward, too, and was sitting cross-legged in the embrasure of a tall window at that end of the room, and while I was trying to take in some first words at the table had to silence some words in my head: “sorrel soup,” “carp à la juive,” “sole au gratin,” “boar’s meat in cherry sauce” … the quotes are just to mark what I lack the patience right now to describe; I would have plenty of time to describe, I thought, after I’d understood the story. Though I knew they had been kept waiting (as, in another way, had I), I was a little surprised that everyone tucked in without ado. Did I expect them to say grace? I suppose I did. And, actually, one person, Bogdan’s homely sister, did mutter at length to herself before lifting her fork; I’m sure she was reciting a prayer. Though I hoped that they wouldn’t have tired of arguing, for the moment everyone seemed diverted by the sumptuous meal. What I was watching was the gamut of eating behavior, from dainty to wolfish, dotted with colorful comments about the food, and, even, the snowstorm. Good Lord, not the weather! Come back, noble idealists whom I’ve conjured up from the past. To be sure, not everyone was just eating. The doctor, I saw, much preferred the champagne and the Hungarian wine to the second courses. (“Turkey stuffed with walnuts,” “baked black grouse and partridges” …) And the young actress, who never took her eyes off Maryna’s pearly, unlined face, was chewing in slow motion; hardly anything was missing from her plate. Like her, like most of the guests, I found it hard not to keep Maryna at the center of my attention. I wondered what her real age was; after all, she was an actress. If this were happening now, I would have said she was in her mid-forties (the ample bosom and heavy jaw, the judicious movements, the bulky gown). But, knowing that even the well-off aged faster then, and that everyone not poor was, by our standards, overweight, I gave her no more than thirty-five. I haven’t said that I’ve been fiddling all along with the apparent age of everyone in the room: Ryszard, since he looked deep in his thirties, had to be twenty-five, and so forth. Traveling back to the past, I expected there to be some frustrations (the towering, fire-concealing stove instead of a waist-level, blazing fireplace) and a few adjustments (to estimate the age of anyone past his or her mid-twenties, deduct ten years), as well as the evident compensations and illuminations. The talk had evolved from pleasantries about the food to a rush of praise for Maryna’s performance this evening. She accepted the compliments with a modesty that seemed as adamant as it was charming. How splendid it was, said Ryszard, his face aglow with admiration. You really did surpass yourself, if such a thing is possible, said the young painter. She always does, the leading actor said graciously, reprovingly. Dissociating herself from all this wet appetite, Maryna sat very still, she appeared scarcely to be breathing, a cambric handkerchief to her left cheek. È sempre brava, the doctor confided to the mystified waiter who was refilling his glass. Following a lull in the voices and a return to more dedicated eating, of course I was hoping for something else, the critic rose unsteadily, vodka in hand. To you, Madame. Every glass except Maryna’s was lifted. To this evening’s triumph. The doctor eased his glass toward his mouth. Hold on, not so fast, Henryk, the critic exclaimed with mock severity. Don’t you see I haven’t finished? Groaning, the doctor returned his arm to toast position. The critic cleared his throat, then intoned: And to that sublime and patriotic art which you honor with your beauty and genius. To the theatre. Maryna nodded to him and the others, pursing her lips, then whispered something to the impresario, who was seated at her right. That wasn’t fair, that’s not one toast but three, said the doctor gaily. Three toasts, three infusions of this excellent vodka! He hailed one of the waiters. Not, dear Maryna, that I don’t subscribe with all my heart to the sentiments just uttered, he said as his glass was again refilled. Then, raising it once more: To your performance tomorrow. And he emptied the glass. Next Bogdan, at the other end of the table, rose to his feet. Not wishing to vex our thirsty friend, he said, I shall limit myself to one toast. And it is—glass in the air—to friendship. Hear, hear, Ryszard called out. Yes, said Bogdan, and to our sodality. Sodality, I thought. What does that mean? Look, he’s doing it too, the doctor had shouted, vodka already to his lips and drinking so avidly that he had spilled some on his linen shirt. He can’t help himself, cried the judge, laughing. Who, me? said the doctor, wiping his mouth. Everyone laughed except Maryna and Bogdan. I mean, Bogdan continued solemnly, to what we can accomplish together. Applause. Hear, hear, said Tadeusz. I am ready. An abashed silence, in which everyone turned to Maryna. She reached for her glass and pressed it against her brow. Then, without rising, she lifted it above her head. I really have only one toast to offer, not three pretending to be one. She directed a fond smile at Bogdan. I drink to one … divided into three. That will someday be one. Dramatic pause. To our homeland. Everyone broke into applause. Brava, said the painter. Crowd-pleasing toasts, all—whose main effect, it seemed, was to drench everyone in melancholy. The little boy (Piotr? Roman?) left his chair to tiptoe over to Maryna and whisper something I couldn’t hear. She shook her head, looking (I’m sorry to report) a bit cross, and he returned to his seat next to Bogdan’s sister, was received in her lap, and fell asleep against her neck. Of the ensuing murk of conversation, I didn’t register much. I wish I could say that I was just feeling thinky, and so had closed my eyes to mount the next rung in the dark. You have given me so much to ponder, said a glum voice. Of course I want to broaden my horizons, said a lilting voice. No misgivings, none at all? said a peppery, self-assured voice. How I admire you, said a sad voice. Irrevocable, I heard again. And opened my eyes. This might have been the doctor, who’d plunged his head into his hands. Had I missed something? Silly thoughts had started to buffet my mind. Hearing someone trail off (it was all I retained) … along with my milk brother, Marek, their son, and identifying the speaker as the man with the plump unshaven cheeks sitting next to the banker’s wife, I thought: what a greedy baby you must have been at that countrywoman’s breast! The eating seemed to me interminable, and I had not tried to follow the plot of the meal, assuming that it was, à la française, a three-act dinner, and that, whenever I wanted, I could peek at one of the small handwritten menus provided with every setting, like theatre programs, to see how much there was still to go. As if he had read my mind, even though I was here to read his, Bogdan murmured, We don’t have to eat like this. I, for one, would be happy to eat simply. I hoped they were nearing the dessert now. Bogdan had set down his knife and fork. Quo vadis? said the judge. Where goest thou? Ryszard smiled and took out his notebook. Where, yes. And how, said the banker. Everything must be thought through carefully. No reason for haste. There was a moment’s quiet, as if everyone were indeed reflecting. Then I heard, in a singsongy voice, something like: