by Susan Sontag
From the mountains, carrying their heavy, awesome crosses,
They could see in the distance the promised land.
They could see the blue light in the valley,
Toward which their tribe was heading—
from the elderly woman in the mauve hat. We need a piano, interrupted the stage manager. I can no longer hear this poem except in Chopin’s setting. The elderly woman, I had never decided whether she was somebody’s wife or a maiden aunt, perhaps Bogdan’s, looked offended. Please go on, said the young actress, Krystyna, I forgot to mention that I’d figured out her name. I had every intention of doing just that, said the elderly woman tartly. How does it go? Exclaimed the painter, How does it go? You know very well. And he continued in his ringing baritone:
And yet they themselves will never arrive!
They will never sit down to the feast of life,
And perhaps be forgotten, forgotten, forgotten.
He was a fine elocutionist. Exactly, said the elderly woman. Then something happened that was mildly confounding. Maryna lifted her arms and declaimed in her warm alto tone:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
And for a few moments I didn’t realize that she was reciting in English. I can’t say what I thought at first I was hearing, since I wouldn’t have been startled to hear any language spoken at this gathering (any except Russian, the language of the most hated of the nation’s three oppressors). Another foreign language I don’t know but somehow, tonight, was able to understand? Meanwhile, the young actress had burst out with:
Therefore devise with me how we may fly,
Whither to go, and what to bear with us.
And do not seek to take your change upon you,
To bear your griefs yourself and leave me out;
For, by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale,
Say what thou canst, I’ll go along with thee.
Her shiny voice trembled, stopped. If you were familiar with As You Like It, you would have recognized the lines—of course, she would be Celia to Maryna’s Rosalind—though they were barely intelligible, her accent being even thicker than Maryna’s. She, Maryna, was not looking pleased. I butchered Shakespeare’s glorious English, I heard her say to the drama critic, who was sitting on her left. Not at all, he exclaimed, you said it beautifully. I did not, Maryna answered sharply. And, in truth, she had not. I hoped they would do better when they spoke more English, as I suspected they were going to do, if I’d understood anything about what was being discussed. Undoubtedly, they will continue to speak English with an accent, as do many people in my country, as did my great-grandparents (maternal) and my grandparents (paternal), though naturally their children did not. For it should be mentioned, why not here, that all four of my grandparents were born in this country (hence, born in a country that had ceased to exist some eighty years earlier), indeed, born around the very year to which I’d traveled in my mind in order to co-inhabit this room with its old-timey conversations, though the folks who engendered the couple that engendered me were quite unlike these people, being poor unworldly villagers with occupations like peddler, innkeeper, woodcutter, Talmud student. Having assumed that nobody here was a Jew, I hoped, this was a new thought, that I wouldn’t hear an anti-Semitic outburst from someone; I hadn’t, and somehow intuited that they were, if anything, philo-Semites. That this was the country my forebears chose to leave by crowded steerage hardly links me to these people, though conceivably it might make the name of this country resonate for me, might draw me to a room here rather than elsewhere; having tried conjuring up a hotel dining room from the same era in Sarajevo, and failed, I had to accept where I had alighted. But the past is the biggest country of all, and there’s a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that’s an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live. And this past will also be the present, because it was I in the private dining room of the hotel, scattering seeds of prediction. I did not belong there, I was an alien presence, I would have to lean very close to hear, and I would not understand everything, but even what I misunderstood would be a kind of truth, if only about the time in which I live, rather than the one in which their story took place. We must always ask more of ourselves, I heard Maryna say sternly. Always. Or am I speaking only for myself? Ah, that was an endearing note. I have a weakness for the earnest, the strenuous. If I thought of Maryna as a character in a novel, I would have liked her to have something of Dorothea Brooke (I remember when I first read Middle-march: I had just turned eighteen, and a third of the way through the book burst into tears because I realized not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon), yet there was nothing submissive or self-effacing, I could see that, in this woman with the ash-blond hair and the candid, intense blue-grey eyes. She would want to do good for others, but she would never be seduced into forgetting herself. For someone whose ambition was to go on the stage, being female was not an obstacle: she had lived the competitive life, and she had won. But I thought I could put up with a good deal of vanity and self-love as long as she kept the desire for self-improvement, which I guessed she would as I studied the contrast between the impatient, overwatchful expressions crossing her face and that peculiar way she had of holding herself very, very still. Odd to think that somebody could have described me, snugly ensconced in the deep recess of the window, as I’m describing her. In fact, I’m rather impulsive (I married Mr. Casaubon after knowing him for ten days) and have something of a taste for risk-taking, but I’m also prone to the long, drawn-out huddle in a corner that caring about duties brings on (it took me nine years to decide that I had the right, the moral right, to divorce Mr. Casaubon), so it was easy for me to feel indulgent toward these people mired in their dinner, in their debate about what some of them were going to do. And easy for me to become exasperated with them. No one fidgeted. I hadn’t spied any hanky-panky under the table. No one had faded, except of course the little boy curled up on another woman’s lap, rubbing his eyes, instead of home tucked in his bed. He must be an only child, his mother must have wanted him near tonight, even if I hadn’t seen her pay any attention to him for these last two hours at the table. They did seem to me, for all their flashes of agitation about the subject engaging them, a bit too sedate. To what could I attribute their immobility? The overcooked food continuing to be urged on the table? The perennial ineffectuality of the thinking classes? The ponderousness of the late nineteenth century? My own reluctance to imagine anything livelier? True, there was still time for something really vivid to happen. Someone might have a heart attack or whack a dinner partner over the head or sob and groan or toss a glass of wine in an offending face. But this seemed as unlikely as my charging out of my window seat to dance on the table or spit in the soup or fondle a knee or bite someone’s ankle. Humid thoughts: I needed some air. On Bogdan’s signal, one of the waiters opened the window at the other end of the room, where I’d been lurking when I arrived. I heard an eruption of street shouts and neighing horses. It was just after one o’clock by the church bells (and, yes, by my watch; I’ve admitted to turning restless). I hadn’t been at the theatre at seven o’clock for tonight’s performance, of course I wished I had seen it, as they had. Some of them must have been restless, too. But no one would stand until Maryna did. I’d almost given up hoping that their argument about the rightness or wrongness of whatever they were discussing would reach a climax this evening, no matter how long they stayed at the table and I remained nearby, gazing at them, listening to them, thinking about them. For it’s the nature of such debates, the debate about rightness
and about wrongness, that you can always have misgivings and a new thought the next day, that looking back on the evening’s conversation you may exclaim, what a fool I was to say that, or agree to that. Was I under the influence of so-and-so, or just being dopey or thoughtless, my moral thermostat turned down? So the next morning, you are of the opposite mind (perhaps you think the opposite precisely because of what you argued for the night before, that opinion having needed an airing in order to make way for this, the better one), you have something like a moral hangover, but you feel calm because you know now you’re on the right track, while uneasily suspecting you could still think something different tomorrow; and meanwhile, the time for the decision you are weighing, the course of action you may or may not follow, is approaching. It may be right now. Then Maryna did rise, and took a cigarette from her gold-beaded reticule and glided to the center of the room. The others stood up, and I assumed they would all leave now. But only Ryszard exuberantly kissed Maryna’s hand, then made the rounds, touching his lips to the wrist of each of the other women in the room, I supposed that he was looking forward to capping the evening with a stop at his favorite bordello. Then the director of the theatre and his wife took their leave, followed by the banker and the judge and their wives, then the leading actor and the stage manager and a few others. Nobody else seemed about to go. The doctor opened the bottle of Tokay on the sideboard. The little boy, Piotr (so I belatedly named him), who had been awakened and made ready for departure, was set to wait on the wing chair. Maryna leaned with a fetching show of languor against the back of the chair, surrounded by Bogdan, Tadeusz, the young actress, the impresario, Bogdan’s sister, the doctor, and the one-legged painter. Here was one last chance for the conversation to ripen and their decision to be cinched like a purse. Well, of course, said Maryna, laughing emphatically, I don’t always agree with myself. An encouraging thought. They went on talking quietly. I would go on listening. As a child, while I did concede that I was good at learning, I was sure I wasn’t “really intelligent” (please ignore the quotes) as I understood what that meant from books, from biographies, there being no one in my vicinity who seemed “really intelligent” (same request) either. Still, I did think that I could do whatever I set my mind to (I was going to be a chemist, like Madame Curie), that steadfastness and caring more than the others about what was important would take me wherever I wanted to go. And so, now, I thought if I listened and watched and ruminated, taking as much time as I needed, I could understand the people in this room, that theirs would be a story that would speak to me, though how I knew this I can’t explain. There are so many stories to tell, it’s hard to say why it’s one rather than another, it must be because with this story you feel you can tell many stories, that there will be a necessity in it; I see I am explaining badly. I can’t explain. It has to be something like falling in love. Whatever explains why you chose this story—it may, indeed, draw sap from some childhood grief or longing—hasn’t explained much. A story, I mean a long story, a novel, is like an around-the-world-in-eighty-days: you can barely recall the beginning when it comes to an end. But even a long journey must begin somewhere, say, in a room. Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head. You can hear the fire crackling or the clock ticking or (if the window is open) the cry of a coachman or the vroom-vroom of a motorcycle in the alley. Or you may not hear any of this, if the room is full of voices. Raucous or soft-mannered people may be sitting down to dinner, saying something you don’t quite understand, let’s hope not because the television is on, and full blast, but you’ll catch the gist. First it will be only phrases, or a name, or an urgent whisper, or a cry. If there are cries, no, screams, and you see something like a bed, you can hope that this isn’t a room where someone is being tortured, but, rather, where someone is giving birth, although these sounds are also unbearable. You can hope that you have found yourself among largehearted people, passion is a beautiful thing, and so is understanding, the coming to understand something, which is a passion, which is a journey, too. The servants were bringing Maryna and the others their wraps. They were ready to leave now. With a shiver of anticipation, I decided to follow them out into the world.
One
PERHAPS IT WAS the slap she received from Gabriela Ebert a few minutes past five o’clock in the afternoon (I’d not witnessed that) which made something, no, everything (I couldn’t have known this either) a little clearer. Arriving at the theatre, inflexibly punctual, two hours before curtain, Maryna had gone directly to her star’s lair, been stripped to her chemise and corset and helped into a fur-lined robe and slippers by her dresser, Zofia, whom she dispatched to iron her costume in an adjoining room, had pushed the candles nearer both sides of the mirror, had leaned forward over the jumbled palette of already uncapped jars and vials of makeup for a closer scrutiny of that all too familiar mask, her real face, the actress’s under-face, when behind her the door seemed to break open and in front of her, sharing the mirror, hurtling toward her, she saw her august rival’s reddened, baleful face shouting the absurd insult, threw herself back in her chair, turned, glimpsed the arm descending just before an involuntary grimace of her own brought down her eyelids at the same instant it bared her upper teeth and shortened her nose, and felt the shove and sting of a large beringed hand against her face.
It all happened so rapidly and noisily—her eyes stayed closed, the door banged shut—and the shadow-flecked room with its hissing gas jets had gone so silent now, it might have been a bad dream: she’d been having bad dreams. Maryna clapped her palm to her offended face.
“Zofia? Zofia!”
Sound of the door being opened softly. And some anxious babble from Bogdan. “What the devil did she want? If I hadn’t been down the corridor with Jan, I would have stopped her, how dare she burst in on you like that!”
“It’s nothing,” Maryna said, opening her eyes, dropping her hand. “Nothing.” Meaning: the buzz of pain in her cheek. And the migraine now looming on the other side of her head, which she intended to keep at bay by a much-practiced exercise of will until the end of the evening. She bent forward to tie her hair in a towel, then stood and moved to the washstand, where she vigorously soaped and scrubbed her face and neck, and patted the skin dry with a soft cloth.
“I knew all along she wouldn’t—”
“It’s all right,” said Maryna. Not to him. To Zofia, hesitating at the half-open door, holding the costume aloft in her outstretched arms.