In America (2 page)

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 bring 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.