In America

by Susan Sontag

  He was confident that he would soon be able to understand them. But there was no chance they could understand him. As he had discovered while he and Julian were practicing their English with strangers in pubs and restaurants during the few days in Liverpool—and confirmed in his first mealtime conversations on the ship—foreigners hadn’t the faintest idea about Poland, its history, its sufferings. He had supposed that Poland’s near-century-long ordeal had made it known to everyone in the civilized world. In fact, he could have been from the moon.

  Over every meal he was assured by Americans that theirs was the greatest country on earth, the proof being that everyone knew about America and everyone wanted to come there. Ryszard also came from a country which considered itself chosen for a unique destiny. But election for martyrdom produces a different turning inward of a people than the self-absorption of these Americans, which stemmed from their conviction of being uniquely fortunate.

  “In America, this is the whole point, if you follow me, everyone is free,” said one of his tablemates, a gruff fellow with a freckled pate who had ignored him until, on the third evening out, he abruptly thrust his card at Ryszard while intoning, “Augustus S. Hatfield. Businessman from Ohio.”

  “Cleveland,” said Ryszard, pocketing the card. “Shipbuilding.”

  “That’s right. Since I wasn’t sure you’d heard of Cleveland, I said Ohio, because everyone has heard of Ohio.”

  “In my country,” said Ryszard, “we are not free.”

  “Really? And what country is that?”

  “Poland.”

  “Oh, it’s very backward there, I’ve heard. But so is everywhere I’ve traveled, except perhaps England.”

  “The tragedy of Poland is not backwardness, Mr. Hatfield. We are a conquered people. Like the Irish.”

  “Yes, Ireland’s very poor, too. Didn’t you see all those filthy wretches getting on when the ship called at Cork? I know White Star has to take them, as many as they can fit down there. And good business it is, for they can’t be making a whole lot from us, what with all this fancy food and so many to wait on us hand and foot. But, Lord, when I think of them all, if the ladies present will excuse my alluding to it, packed together in bare bunks on top of each other with no sense of decency at all, but you know those people, it’s what they like to do, that and drinking and stealing and—”

  “Mr. Hatfield, I mentioned the Irish because they don’t have their own state, either.”

  “Yes, the British have a hard time keeping them under control. I bet sometimes they don’t think it’s worth it, and wish they could just give up and go home.”

  “Everyone wants to be free,” said Ryszard calmly, after reminding himself that a man of the world considers expressing indignation to be vulgar. “But no people thinks so much of freedom as one that has long suffered under foreign domination.”

  “Well, they should come to America. I mean, if they’re prepared to work—we don’t need any more dirty lazy people. As I said, in America everyone is free.”

  “We Poles have been dreaming of being free for eighty years. For us the Austrians and the Germans and especially the Russians—”

  “Free to make money,” said the man firmly, ending the conversation.

  How they relished the signs of their own privilege, these Americans, never tiring of pointing out to each other the luxurious furnishings of the ship—their part of the ship. How oblivious of the life beneath their feet in that warren of unventilated spaces between the upper deck and the cargo hold where seven-eighths of the Germanic’s passengers were berthed—some fifteen hundred of them, after the ship had picked up its remaining complement of several hundred Irish emigrants before setting out across the Atlantic.

  Ryszard was hardly unaware that human populations divided into the comfortable, some very comfortable, and those who were not. But in Poland the harshness of class relations was diluted by the sentimental solidarity of the national identity, of the national sorrow. A vertical, floating world offers nothing to soften the starkness of privilege: you were here, on top, spaciously distributed, overfed, in the light, and they were there, on the bottom, crowded together, dispensed rations, in malodorous darkness.

  What were the overflow crowd of first-class passengers thinking as they listened yesterday morning in the Saloon to the Reverend A. A. Willit’s lecture, “Sunshine, or the Secret of Happiness”? Nothing, except that sunshine—and happiness—were wonderful things. And why should he be surprised at that? A man of the world is never surprised by anything.

  * * *

  AND A WRITER—comfortable assumption!—is never an intruder, or so writers believe. Ryszard had made a brief descent into the steerage maze after lunch on the second day of the voyage. (“You should also go to where the stokers are,” Julian said, when he announced his intention. “Remember what I told you about the factories in Manchester.”) Having neglected to procure a plan of the ship, he wasn’t sure where he was heading as he veered and tacked across the tilting floor. He skirted an ill-lit space reeking of food and flatulence; overriding the general din he distinguished wailing infants, the rattling of tin dishes, coughing, shouts and imprecations in a Babel of languages, a jaunty air on a concertina. The rolling of the ship seemed more pronounced below, and at the first sounds of someone vomiting he felt like vomiting, too.

  In the old days, a steerage ticket purchased a bed-sized shelf in a dank airless space shared by dozens of passengers of both sexes, but after this was discovered to be an offense to decency, newer ships such as the Germanic segregated male and female single passengers from one another and from people traveling as families. Ryszard entered one of the dormitories where close to a hundred men were berthed. “Oh, look at the toff,” he heard from somewhere in the rank dimness. And laughter. And: “He’s come to see the animals in the zoo.” From the fourth tier of the bunks just in front of him, a large very white face peered upside down into his. “You got a friend in here?” said the face. “Leave him alone,” shouted a fat woman in a kerchief at the doorway. When he left, she asked him for a shilling.

  The following afternoon he decided to try again at another entrance. He’d hesitated at the top of the stairs, eyeing the disconcerting notice posted nearby—“Saloon passengers are requested not to throw money or eatables to the steerage passengers, thereby creating disturbance and annoyance”—and then met the bold stare of a deckhand repainting a lifeboat davit nearby.

  “I am not going to throw anything at them,” he said jocularly.

  “Did you want to go to steerage, sir?” said the man and put down his brush.

  “Actually, yes,” said Ryszard.

  “And for me to take you?”

  “Why? Am I not allowed to go alone?”

  “Well, it’s up to you, sir. If I come with you, I could show you where to go.”

  Ryszard was mystified by the interest in escorting him—even more mystified when, as they were descending the stairs, he heard, “You’re one of the first gentlemen this trip to come down.” He had assumed that the visit of someone from first class would be more than a rarity. The sailor pushed open the big iron door. At first, as the day before, he couldn’t see much. “Follow me,” said the sailor. They were in the area where families were quartered, smaller rooms with berths for twenty or thirty people, each room, like each of the several families camping there, with its own distinctive degree of distress, hilarity, resignation. In one, a fiddler was playing for three dancing couples and an old man was clapping his hands to the tune; in another, dark as a dungeon, women in shawls were feeding children on the floor while from the bunks came the sound of loud male snoring; in another, four men huddled around an oil lamp were arguing over a poker game, and an old woman was rocking and crooning to a crying baby. He was led down a narrow passageway that gave onto a wider passage curtained off near the end by two brown blankets.

  “Mick,” shouted his guide. From a cubicle beside the makeshift curtain emerged an elfish man with russet, no, fox-color
ed hair—Ryszard’s hand was already in his pocket, twitching at the spine of his notebook. “Here’s the fellow you want. And now I’ll be leaving you in his good hands.”

  “Very kind of you,” said Ryszard.

  “At your service, guv’nor,” said the seaman and held out his hand. Ryszard put a shilling in it; the hand stayed open—he added another shilling. “Much obliged. And, Mick, don’t forget—”

  “Clear out, you dog!” snarled the irate elf. “And the name isn’t Mick!”

  “English bastard,” he growled at the sailor’s back. He was holding a bottle in his hand. “Have a drop,” he said to Ryszard.

  “I am a Polish journalist,” Ryszard began, “and I want to speak to some passengers in steerage class for an article I am writing about our ship.”

  “Writing an article, are you?” The elf could grin, too. “And how many would you be wanting to meet?”

  “Well,” said Ryszard, “if I could interview five or six of your friends—”

  “Five or six!” exclaimed this non-Mick. “You’re going to interview them. Interview them all at once, you are?” He stamped his foot and chuckled. Sinister elf, thought Ryszard. “Here, sit here on this.” As he was pushed onto an upturned basket next to the curtain, Ryszard felt a stir of alarm: was he about to be set upon and robbed? Not in an Apache ambush, by a statuesque brave looming over him with his tomahawk, but in a Fenian one, by a little man with fox-colored hair waving a whiskey bottle at his head? But no …

  “Do you think my nieces would do? Six is all I have, my lovely nieces that I’m bringing to America.” Oh. Ryszard was less relieved than he was annoyed at his own naïveté. “Drink up, man. I’ll not be charging you much for the booze. You’re a hale young fellow, I can see that. Ready for it, are you?”—Ryszard had stood—“Well, here you go.”

  “Some other time,” said Ryszard.

  Then the man launched into a stream of whining words to the effect that (Ryszard did not understand everything) quite a few gentlemen from the first class had already availed themselves of his girls’ services, and the foreign gentleman need have no worry, his girls were very clean and healthy, he could vouch for that. He lifted the hanging blankets. Inside, sprawled on a couch whose brocaded pillows and throw might have come from someone’s trousseau, was a tangle of red-eyed girls, none of them appearing older than eighteen. One was crying. “Very clean and healthy,” he repeated. They looked thin and miserable, not at all like the plump cheerful girls in the brothels of Kraków and Warsaw. “So what do you think of my lovely girls?”

  One was pretty.

  “Good afternoon,” said Ryszard.

  “Her name’s Nora. Isn’t it, my girl?”

  The girl nodded meekly. Ryszard took a tentative step forward. There was some low bedding in the other corner. What if he caught syphilis and—and would have to renounce Maryna forever? But he was already inside.

  “My name is Ryszard.”

  “So just one will do, eh?”

  “You have a funny name,” she said. “Are you going to America, too?”

  “On your feet, my beauties!” shouted the man. He shooed the others out and dropped the curtain.

  As Ryszard lowered himself on the bedding beside the girl, the ship listed sharply. “Oh,” she cried, “I do get afraid sometimes”—she was chewing the ends of her fingers like a child—“I never been on a boat before, and drowning must be something awful.” A wave of pity that grew and grew swept over him as the swell of the ocean subsided. She was, he saw now, even younger than he had supposed.

  “How old are you, Nora?”

  “Fifteen, sir.” She was fumbling with the buttons of his pants. “Almost fifteen.”

  “Ah, you don’t have to do that.” He took away her hand with its bitten nails and held it in his. “Have there been many other visitors from—from upstairs?”

  “You’s the first today,” she mumbled.

  “Making your way all right, boyo?” shouted the voice from the other side of the curtain.

  “What is he saying?” said Ryszard.

  “Let me be nice to you,” said the girl. She had pulled her hand free from his loose grasp, and flung herself on his chest. He held her tightly, his palm against the small of her back, and stroked her matted hair.

  “He does not beat you, does he?” he whispered into her ear.

  “Only if the mister complains,” she replied.

  He let himself be pushed over on his back and felt her chapped lips brush against his cheek. She had hiked up her cotton shift and was rubbing her bony loins against his body. He was becoming aroused, despite himself. “I would rather not,” he said, slipping his hand beneath her and lifting her torso a few inches above his. “I will give you the money and you can say—”

  “Oh, please, sir, please,” she squealed. “You can’t give the money to me!”

  “Then I—”

  “And he’ll find out you didn’t like me, and he’ll—”

  “How can he find out?”

  “He will, he will!” He felt her tears on his neck, the grinding of her pubis. “He knows everything! He’ll see from my face ’cause I’ll be ashamed and worried, and then he’ll look, you know, between my legs.”

  Sighing, Ryszard shifted the frail body to the side of his torso, unbuttoned his pants, and took out his semi-erect penis, and moved her back on top of him. “Do not move,” he said, as he gently inserted it between her scrawny thighs, just above her knees. “What are you doing?” she moaned. “That’s not the right place. You’re supposed to put it where it hurts me.” Ryszard felt tears prickling his eyes. “We are playing a game,” he whispered hoarsely. “We pretend we are not on this big horrible ship, we are on a little boat, and the boat is rocking and swaying, but not so much, and the boat has this little oar that you must hold tight with your legs because otherwise it will fall into the water and then we can never row home, but you can shut your eyes and pretend to sleep…”

  Obediently, the girl closed her eyes. Ryszard closed his eyes too, still stinging with pity and shame, while his efficient body did the rest. It was the saddest story he had ever invented. It was the saddest game he had ever played.

  * * *

  “JULIAN…” Ryszard began. He was in their cabin, watching the older man sipping some broth. “Do you ever go much to brothels in Warsaw, I mean did you go before you married Wanda?”

  “Even then not as much as you, I’ll wager,” said Julian, managing a smile. “Now? Hardly ever. Marriage has tamed me.”

  “It can be dispiriting,” said Ryszard, torn between the hackneyed desire he was feeling at this moment to confide in Julian and a wiser determination to keep this experience to himself. “Dispiriting,” he repeated, waiting for Julian to draw him out.

  “Not as dispiriting as marriage,” Julian said. “What’s the sadness of a loveless hour, compared with a lifetime of loveless cohabitation?”

  Ryszard realized that what he had unwittingly provoked in Julian was a desire to confide in him. For a moment the weakness of the young man who had never had a father (he’d died before Ryszard was born) stood off the second nature of the writer whose favorite pastime was inciting other people to talk about themselves. Then the writer won.

  “I’m so sorry to hear there is discord between you and Wanda.”

  “Discord!” Julian howled. “Do you know what I dream of alone in this cabin, vomiting up my guts all these days? Let me tell you. That we reach America, that we locate a site for the phalanstery, and then, just before the rest arrive with Maryna, I disappear. Nobody knows where I’ve gone. But I won’t have the courage, you’ll see. There will be no New World for me.”

  “You don’t love her at all?”

  “Do I seem to you to be a man who could love such an imbecile?”

  “But before you married her you must at least have had an inkling of—”

  “What did I know about women? She was young, I wanted a companion, I thought I could mold her and she woul
d look up to me. Instead, she’s simply afraid of me. And I can’t keep from showing my exasperation. My disappointment.” He groaned. “You can’t imagine how I envy you. Blessedly unmarried, you can toddle off to whores whenever you like with a clear conscience, while courting an ideal woman whom you will never win—”

  “Julian!”

  “I’m not supposed to mention your designs on Maryna, am I? Everyone knows.”

  “Even Bogdan.”

  “How could he not? He’d have to be as stupid as my Wanda.”

  “And everybody finds me quite ridiculous.”

  “Let’s say … youthful.”

  “I will win her! You’ll see. There’s sadness in that marriage, too. I could make her much happier.”

  “How?”

  Ryszard could hardly say to Julian that his intuition told him a man like Bogdan does not know how to make a woman happy sexually. “I’d write plays for her,” he said.

  “Ah, youth,” exclaimed Julian.

  It suddenly occurred to Ryszard that Julian wasn’t really sick, that he had only fallen into a fit of despondency, that he’d been hiding.

  “Dress and come on deck with me,” said Ryszard. “You’ll feel better, I promise.”

  “And flirt with the girls? You’ll share some of your conquests?”

  “Oh, my conquests.” Ryszard laughed. “Which one do you want? The Englishwoman with the lorgnette and the copy of A History of White Slavery in her reticule? The Spanish dancer with the finger cymbals? The French widow you’ll hear crooning ‘You come wiz me, my love’ to the little white dog she walks about the deck? The Roman countess bedecked with paste jewels, who hopes to restore the fortunes of her ancient family by capturing a rich American husband? The lady from Warsaw, yes, Warsaw, we are not the only Poles in Saloon class, who announces to all and sundry that she is going to America to escape the yoke of the Muscovite, or her sister, who is already so homesick (I’m afraid she reminds me of Wanda) that she will certainly want to show you the little silk bag of Polish soil she keeps between her breasts? The unhappily married German who confides that she could never be attracted to a man who did not share her adoration of Wagner? The American (Julian, you’ll not believe these American girls!) who recommends, for your health, a trip on her papa’s railroad? The sickly Irish girl who is traveling with her uncle in steerage—” He had started to laugh at his own rollicking inventiveness, of course one isn’t supposed to laugh when one is trying to be amusing, so why couldn’t he stop laughing, laughing so hard his eyes filled with tears, but he staggered on, finishing breathlessly with: “You’re welcome to all of them.”