In America (3 page)

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:

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.