by Susan Sontag
God professes to be impatient. Which does not mean He is really impatient. He is … acting. (That’s one kind of great actor, one who feels or tries to feel nothing; to stay remote, impassive. In contrast to Maryna, who feels everything, and is so nervous.) But the people whom God the Prime Mover is shooing off to new destinies really are impatient, impatient to leave for places understood as free of inherited encumbrances, places that don’t have to be preserved but instead offer themselves endlessly to be remade, to shuck off the expectations of the past, to start anew with a lighter burden. The faster they go, the lighter will be their burden.
And God is abetting all this. This longing for newness, emptiness, pastlessness. This dream of turning life into pure future. Perhaps He has no choice—though, in so doing, God the Star is signing His own death warrant as an actor, as the star of stars. No longer will He be guaranteed the major role in any drama of consequence attended by the most coveted, educated audiences. At best, minor roles from now on—except in picturesque backwaters, where people have never seen a play without Him. All this moving the audience about will amount to the end of His career.
Does God know this? Probably He does. But that won’t stop Him: He’s a trouper.
God spits.
* * *
IN MAY 1876, when Maryna Załężowska was still thirty-five and at the pinnacle of her glory, she canceled the remaining engagements of her season at the Imperial Theatre in Warsaw—and her guest engagements at the Polski Theatre in Kraków, the Wielki Theatre in Poznań, the Count Skarbek Theatre in Lwów—and fled seventy miles south of Kraków, her birthplace, where the party in the private dining room of the Hotel Saski took place in December 1875, to the mountain village of Zakopane, where she usually spent a month in the late summer. With her went her husband, Bogdan Dembowski, her seven-year-old son, Piotr, her widowed sister, Józefina, the painter Jakub Goldberg, the jeune premier Tadeusz Bulanda, and the schoolmaster Julian Solski and his wife, Wanda. So displeasing was this news to her public that one Warsaw newspaper exacted revenge by announcing that she was taking an early retirement, which the Imperial Theatre (she was under life contract) promptly denied. Two unkind critics suggested that the moment had come to acknowledge that Poland’s most celebrated actress was a little past her prime. Admirers, particularly her ardent following among university students, worried that she’d fallen seriously ill. The year before, Maryna had had a bout of typhoid fever and, although bedridden for just two weeks, did not play again for several months. It was rumored that the fever was so high she had lost all her hair. She had lost all her hair. And it had all grown back.
Then what was it this time, friends not in the know wondered. Frail lungs were endemic in Maryna’s large family. Tuberculosis had taken her father at forty, and later claimed two sisters; and last year her favorite brother, once a well-known actor, whose claim to fame now rested on his being her brother, had fallen ill. Stefan’s doctor in Kraków, her friend Henryk Tyszyński, had hoped to send him with them to inhale the pure mountain air, but he was too frail to support the arduous trip, two days of lurching along narrow rutted roads in a peasant’s wagon. And could Maryna herself be—? Was it now her turn to come down with—? “But no,” she said, frowning. “My lungs are sound. I’m as healthy as a bear.”
Which was true … and Maryna, long inclined to recast her discontents into an ideal of health, had dedicated herself to becoming healthier still. Warsaw, any populous city, was unhealthy. The life of an actor was unhealthy; exhausting; rife with demeaning anxieties. More and more, instead of assuming that whatever time she could free for travel should be spent educating herself in the theatres and museums of a great capital, Vienna or even Paris, or practicing the ways of the world in a resort like Baden-Baden or Carlsbad, Maryna, her intimates in tow, was choosing the purifying simplicities of rustic life as lived by the privileged. The allure of Zakopane, among many other candidate villages, was its particularly ravishing setting among the majestic peaks of the Tatras, Poland’s southern boundary and only altitudes, and the dense customs and savory dialect of its swarthy native people, who seemed as exotic to these city folk as American Indians. They’d watched tall lithe highlander men dancing at a midsummer festivity with a tamed brown bear in chains. They’d made friends with the village bard—yes, Zakopane still had a bard, charged with the melodious misremembering of the lethal feuds and unhappy love stories of the past. In the five years that Maryna and Bogdan had been part-summering there, they’d reveled in their increasing attachment to the village and its dignified, uncouth inhabitants, and had spoken of one day retreating there for good with a band of friends to devote themselves to the arts and to healthy living. On the clean slate of this isolated, politely savage Zakopane they would inscribe their own vision of an ideal community.
Part of its appeal was the difficulty of getting there. Winter made the roads impassable for months on end, and even when, in May, the trip became feasible, a vehicle from the village was the only transport. This was not the familiar, homely farmer’s wagon of the more nearby countryside but a long wooden affair topped with canvas stretched over a bowed hazel frame, like a Gypsy wagon—no, more like those in engravings and oleographs of the American West. A few such wagons were to be intercepted in Kraków, at the main food market, where there were always some highlanders on a weekly run from Zakopane to the city; once voided of their load of mutton carcasses and sheepskin jackets and intricately incised logs of smoked sheep’s cheese, they would be returning to the village empty.
Merely to set out was already an adventure. Leaving the dawn light to pile into the wagon’s dark pungent interior, with the driver gallantly pressing his own sheepskin jacket on Madame Maryna for a pillow, they huddled among their soft bags, chattering and grimacing with delight as the highlander screwed his broad-brimmed hat down on his head and urged his two Percherons forward, out of the city and down the plain south of Kraków. Peace to their bones! A quaint wayside cross or shrine or, better, one of the small Marian chapels at a crossroad, would provide an excuse to clamber out and stretch their legs while the driver genuflected and muttered some prayers. Then the wagon started up the Beskid hills and, as the hills closed in, the horses’ pace dropped to a walk. With time out for a hasty picnic of food they had brought from Kraków, they would reach the hamlet at the top by late afternoon and, as negotiated by their driver, be fed by their peasant hosts and be deeply asleep, the women in huts and the men in barns, before dark. It would be dark, three in the morning, when they were pulling themselves up into the creaking wagon for the second half of the journey, which—after the long, bone-jarring stretch downhill, mostly at a trot—had a much-awaited halt a little before midday at the only town on the route, Nowy Targ, where they could wash and eat a hearty meal and drink the Jewish tavernkeeper’s execrable wine. Sated, and soon to be hungry again, they regained the wagon, which continued along meadows lush with grass and herbs and bordered by a lively stream. Beyond, ahead, rising into a bluer and bluer sky, was the limestone and granite Tatras wall, crowned by the double peak of Mount Giewont. They were munching on some dried cheese and smoked ham purchased in Nowy Targ when the valley narrowed and the wagon began its last uneven ascent. Those who chose to walk behind the wagon for a spell, Maryna was always one of them, were invariably rewarded by a glimpse, through the stands of pine trees and black firs, of a bear or a wolf or a stag, or an agreeably equalizing roadside exchange of greetings (“Blessed be the name of Jesus!” “Through all ages, amen!”) with a shepherd wearing a long white cloak and the distinctive male headgear, a black felt hat with an eagle feather stuck in it, which he doffed at the welcome sight of the quality folk from the big city. It would be another three hours before they reached the upper valley, some nine hundred meters high, where the village nested, and the weary horses, longing for home and a horse’s oblivion, picked up speed. With luck it would be just sunset when they came clattering into the village to take up their borrowed peasant life.
For
some weeks, as long as a month, they occupied a low square hut with four rooms, two of which could be used as sleeping chambers: the women and Piotr slept in one room, the men in the other. Like every dwelling in Zakopane, this hut was an ingenious sculpture of spruce logs (the region abounded in spruce forests) with the joints dovetailed at the end, while its few heavy chairs, tables, and slatted beds were carpentered from the more expensive, pinkish larch. Within minutes of their arrival they had flung open the dull-paned windows to air out the garlic reek, distributed in cupboards and on wall pegs their minimum of possessions—bringing so little was also part of the adventure—and were ready to start enjoying their unencumbered freedom. In principle, country life for city people is a delicious blank, time sponged clean of work and the usual habits and obligations. Were they not on holiday? Of course. Did this give them more time to themselves? No. The engrossing, compulsory routines of city people in the country managed to fill the whole day. Eating. Exercise. Talking. Reading. Playing games. And of course housekeeping, for another part of the adventure was dispensing with servants. The men swept and chopped wood and collected the water for bathing and laundry. Washing, beating the wash, and hanging it out to dry was the women’s task. “Our phalanstery,” Maryna would say, evoking the name of the principal building in an ideal community as envisaged by the great Fourier. Only the cooking was left to the hut’s owner, Mrs. Bachleda, an elderly widow who moved in with her sister’s family during the lucrative stay. The day was organized around her ample meals. Over breakfast, sour milk and black bread, they would apportion tasks and plan excursions. In the late morning, the whole party would set out for a collective walk in the valley, taking a picnic of black bread and ewe’s cheese and raw garlic and cranberries. Evenings, after a supper of sauerkraut soup, mutton, and boiled potatoes, were for reading aloud. Shakespeare. What could be healthier than that?
As people of active conscience, Maryna and Bogdan could not have accepted being mere summer folk, and had made a tacit contract of benevolence with the village that went far beyond the infusion of cash their annual presence brought into its near-subsistence economy. Maryna and her friends were hardly unaware that, salutary as Zakopane was for them, the health of the two thousand villagers left much to be desired. Luckily, one of the friends who had followed Maryna to Zakopane was the faithful Henryk. Soon he was spending more time there than she, confiding his practice in Kraków to a colleague for a full three months, and treating the villagers without charge. At first they were suspicious, seeing no impediment in a mouthful of rotten teeth or throat goiters or rickets and nothing unnatural in the death of infants or the sickening of anyone over thirty-five. His little speech about the principles of sanitation was city gibberish to their ears—until they saw how many lives were saved by his ministrations (and food he brought from Kraków) the second summer he was there, in 1873, when cholera struck. And he alone among Maryna and her friends understood most of what the Tatras highlanders were actually saying, even when they spoke rapidly, their dialect containing scores of words for common things which are nothing like their equivalents in standard Polish. His tutor, a grateful patient, was the village priest.
The villagers’ part of the contract (to that they’d not consciously assented) was: not to change. Their cosmopolitan visitors thought they could help in this. Bogdan had the idea of starting a folkloric society, and Ryszard of learning the dialect in order to transcribe the fairy tales and hunting stories of the village bard. Henryk was planning a scientific museum that would display for the villagers’ edification the glories of the Alpine stronghold looming above them, such as the impressive variety of mosses he had garnered on his rocky climbs. Maryna was for starting a lace-making school for the village girls, which would aid the faltering economy and help preserve an endangered local craft. The previous summer she had taken lessons from a one-eyed crone reputed to be Zakopane’s champion lacemaker and, to the titters of the village women, tried her hand at wood carving.
Difficulty of access had until now protected the village, its archaic customs and uniformity of behavior and rich traditions of oral recitation. Faces were cast from only a few molds, as there were just a few family names. The village still had one muddy street, one wooden church, one cemetery. A real community! But Maryna and her friends were not the only outsiders. There were not yet any chalets (imitating, floridly, the wooden plainness of the highlander huts) or tuberculosis sanatoria (it would be a decade more before Zakopane achieved the official status of a health resort), and a railroad link to Kraków (guaranteeing year-round access to the village) would not be built for another thirteen years. Yet it was on the verge of becoming fashionable in the summer months, because Poland’s most famous actress and her husband took their holidays there. When they first came, there was one way to stay in Zakopane: to sleep and be fed in a highlander’s hut. Two summers later, when Ryszard was first invited to accompany them, the village had one ill-kept public lodging and two cottages nearby serving expensive monotonous food and undrinkable wine. And there were tourists, a handful, to stay at the hotel and frequent the restaurants.
How different the occupations of these tourists from the healthy regimen Maryna was following. Each day, whatever the weather, began with dawn bathing in the brook behind the hut, followed by a solitary walk before breakfast. She roamed the damp meadows, plucked unfamiliar mushrooms from rotting tree trunks and dared herself to eat them on the spot, recited Shakespeare to goats. She depleted a rich repertoire of manias, enthusiastically taken up and then dropped. Some were dietary: for days on end she consumed only sheep’s milk, then nothing but sauerkraut soup. There were also breathing exercises, from a book by Professor Liebermeister, and mental exercises, too: for one hour a day she stretched out motionless on the grass and concentrated on recalling a happy memory. Any happy memory! It was the beginning of the era of “positive thoughts,” which specialists in self-manipulation were preaching to men, to make them more robust salesmen of themselves, and doctors were prescribing to women, especially those suffering from “nerves” or “neurasthenia”—when they were not prescribing to women simply not to think at all. Thinking (like city life) was supposed to be bad for one’s health, especially a woman’s health.
But Henryk was not like this, not like other doctors. He might say, Trust the good air of Zakopane to work its curative powers. Henryk was a great believer in air. But he did not say, Rest, have a mental blackout, confine yourself to womanly occupations like lacemaking. There was nobody Maryna liked talking to as much as Henryk. If only he weren’t so obviously enamored. It was one thing for young men like Ryszard and Tadeusz to fall in love with her; she knew the power of a reigning actress to inspire such reckless, perfectly sincere but shallow infatuations. But that this intelligent, melancholy older man was pining with un-avowed love was painful to her. She wished he would sneeze.
“Sneeze, Henryk!”
“I beg your pardon.”
“I like to hear you sneeze. It makes me find you ridiculous.”
“I am ridiculous.”
Maryna sneezed. “See how handsomely I do it?”
It was last September and they were sitting in a sun-filled room in the hut Henryk had rented for the summer. With one larch table, two chairs, and a bench, the walls bare except for a row of crudely colored pictures on glass of shepherds and bandits painted by local shepherds and bandits, it was scarcely a parlor, much less a consulting room. Only the cupboard’s worth of scalpels, forceps, catheters, tenon saws, specula, microscope, stethoscope, stoppered vials, and dog-eared medical books—a modest selection from his well-stocked office in Kraków—confirmed his profession.
“Are you telling me you have a cold? It would hardly surprise me since you insist on walking barefoot in the grass and bathing in an icy stream at dawn.”
“I don’t”—she started coughing—“have a cold.”
“Of course not.” He came toward the bench where she was sitting and extended his open hand.
�
��Ah, the good air of Zakopane,” Maryna said, surrendering her delicate wrist.
He shut his eyes as he stood over her. A minute passed. With her free hand Maryna reached for the plate of raspberries at the end of the bench and slowly ate three. Another minute had passed.
“Henryk!”
Opening his eyes, he grinned mischievously. “I like taking your pulse.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“So I can reassure you”—he placed her hand back in her lap—“how healthy you are.”
“Stop it, Henryk. Have a raspberry.”
“And your headaches?”
“I always have a headache.”
“Even in Zakopane?”
“All I have to do is relax. As you know, I rarely have a fullblown headache when I’m working too hard.”
He had returned to the table. “And yet your instincts are right to tell you to seek refuge here whenever you can from the hurly-burly of Warsaw and all the touring.”
“What refuge!” she exclaimed. “Admit it, friend, it’s hardly the undiscovered village it was when we arrived here four years ago.”
“When you arrived, dear Maryna. Please recall that you were the first well-known person to come here every summer. I merely followed.”
“Not you,” she said. “I mean all the others.”
Henryk tilted his head, forefinger to bearded chin, and gazed out the window at his inspiriting view of the Giewont and the distant summit of the Kasprowy.
“What do you expect, since each time you and Bogdan come a few more people discover the beauties of the place. You are the village’s biggest populator.”