by Susan Sontag
Ryszard’s one advantage as a traveler over Julian: his taste for sexual entertainment. Having, by chance at sea, for the first time in his life glimpsed something of the abjection of prostitution, Ryszard determined to efface this disturbing knowledge by a jolly visit to a whorehouse on land. The evening ended memorably on an exchange with a fellow client in the lounge of the house in Washington Square where, returning downstairs from his hour with a luscious Marianne, he stopped to drink a glass of champagne and bask in pleasure’s boost to the gradual refilling of his mind.
“Can’t place the accent,” said the man amiably.
“I am a journalist from Poland,” Ryszard said by way of introducing himself.
“I’m a journalist too!” Not the profession Ryszard would have guessed for this pleasant-looking older man with the creased face and the build of a sportsman. “Have you come over to write about America?” Ryszard nodded. “Then you should read my books. I can’t resist recommending them.”
“I want to read as many books about America as I can.”
“Great! That’s the spirit! The subjects may seem a little narrow to you. I mean, I’m no Tockveel—”
“Who?” said Ryszard.
“Tockveel, you know, that Frenchman who came here, must be almost fifty years ago.”
“Right,” said Ryszard.
“But, you’ll see, in my books you’ll be learning about things most foreigners don’t know anything about. There’s the one last year, The Communistic Societies of the United States, and the one three years ago, California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence, and—”
“But this is, this is”—Ryszard, happily excavating the word from his passive vocabulary—“uncanny, Mr.…”
“Charles Nordhoff.” He held out his hand and Ryszard seized it warmly.
“Richard Kierul.” My God, Ryszard thought to himself. I’m changing my name. In America I really am going to be Rich-ard. “Uncanny,” he repeated. “Because California is where I am going and expect to stay for a while. And I am very interested in communities which live according to a higher standard, one of mutual cooperation.” He paused. “That is, I presume, what you mean by communistic.”
“Yes, and there have been plenty of them, in Texas and Pennsylvania and California, all over, though they don’t work in the end, of course. But that’s what this country’s about. We try everything. We’re a country of idealists. Or isn’t that your impression?”
“I confess,” said Ryszard, “I have not seen much of that so far.”
“No? Well, you haven’t seen the real America. Get out of New York. Nobody cares about anything here except money. Go out west. Go to California. It’s paradise. Everyone wants to go there.”
* * *
DOESN’T IT SEEM very American, he said to Julian, to whom he reported this exchange (though not its setting) on his return to the hotel, that America has its America, its better destination where everyone dreams of going?
Ryszard realized he had fully outlived his shock and astonishment only when he and Julian set their date of departure. He was no longer marveling; it was all quite real. Indeed, by that operation which an acute mind has always at the ready to master wonderment, he had decided that what stunned him with its uniqueness was not unique: this Noah’s Ark of escapees from every flood, every disaster on earth, already the third largest city in the known world, was not going to be the only one of its kind. Wherever there is promise there will be this ugliness, this vitality, this discontent, as well as this self-congratulation. On Sunday, the third day of their stay, Ryszard went to a church in Brooklyn to hear its eminent minister, the author of a recent best-selling volume entitled The Abominations of Modern Society, preach a sermon on the inhumanity and godlessness of New York. Such denunciations struck Ryszard as of a piece with the boasting about the extremes of weather. We have the greatest country. And we have the most sinful metropolis. Surely not. Immobilizing traffic, swirls of paper detritus, construction sites, homely buildings layered with shop signs and advertising, faces of every color and shape, this continual arriving, and building, and leaving—soon the world will be full of cities like this.
They left on the cross-country train a week after their arrival. Completing his article on the transatlantic trip, Ryszard had spent some hours at Castle Clinton observing the morning deposit of steerage passengers awaiting their fate in the huge hall and, amid the signs informing the immigrants in stern lettering who was welcome and who was likely to be excluded, spied this more inviting message:
HO! FOR CALIFORNIA!
THE LABORER’S PARADISE.
SALUBRIOUS CLIMATE. FERTILE SOIL.
NO SEVERE WINTERS. NO LOST TIME.
NO BLIGHTS NOR INSECT PESTS.
So read the poster with a drawing of a giant cornucopia disgorging a fall of colorful fruit, fish, vegetables, ploughs, houses, people. He saw it again in the equally crowded hall of the railway station, and pointed it out to Julian, as they looked for the platform from which the train departed. They would be seven days and seven nights on the train, which made many stops, none, except at Chicago, for more than an hour or two. Ryszard was enchanted at the prospect, Julian much less so since having learned that it was now possible to go even faster. Inaugurated on the first of June, the express train, which made few stops and went at an unimaginable fifty to sixty miles an hour, took only three days and nights to reach San Francisco. That was the train, Julian decided, that they should take. But Ryszard had balked. “There’s so much to see,” he said. “I have to see.” Ryszard had refused to agree to changing their tickets.
“No lost time,” muttered Julian, with a nod to the poster.
“The Laborer’s Paradise,” exclaimed Ryszard. “Cheer up, comrade.”
“Well, at least … all right. No blights nor insect pests,” Julian sang out, grinning. “Ho! For California,” they chanted, happily, together.
Four
Hoboken, New Jersey
United States of America
9 August 1876
Dear friend,
Yes, a letter. And you were thinking, The continent ate her. A letter I’ve been composing for days in my head, though I have taken in too much to recall everything. And what is the first thing that comes to mind? Those last moments in Warsaw. Your scowling face at the railway station. I don’t see the crowd, I don’t hear the students serenading me with patriotic songs. I see the sadness of my friend. Dear friend! We are not lost to each other, I promise. You are, you always will be, so dear to me. But have I missed you? I shall be honest, with whom can I be honest if not with you? No, not yet. I was relieved to see you slouch, turn, and quit the platform before the train departed. One more burden lifted: your sadness. You wanted to enroll me in your gloom, your conviction that life cannot be restarted, that we are all prisoners of whatever we have become. But I do not accept that, Henryk. I can change, I know it. Already I am no longer “the same person.” Illusion of an actor, you will say: of one used to changing characters, putting on the garments of another. Well, I shall show you that it can be done without being on a stage!
Did you then go off and get drunk? Of course you did. Did you say to yourself, my Maryna has abandoned me forever? Of course you did. But not forever—though who knows when we shall see each other again. Your distress over my departure makes me seem more necessary to you than ever, in your memory you will exaggerate my charms, and forget how much unhappiness my presence in your life, and your rueful affection for me, have brought you. You follow in your mind: she is on the train, she is on the ship, now she has reached America, she has begun that new life in scenery I cannot imagine. She has forgotten me. After a while, you will be angry. Perhaps you are angry now. You will feel older, and then think, she is aging, too. Soon she will not be beautiful at all. This thought will give you some pleasure.
If it consoles you, then imagine me as the train pulled away from the station, closing the compartment door, taking off my gloves and hat, pouring some water from the pitcher and buryi
ng my face in a damp cloth, which ruins my makeup, exposing the puffy circles under my eyes and the lines from my nose to my mouth, then collapsing in my seat, trembling, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. All those farewells! Were you aware how nearly I was undone by them? The tearful young actors gathered on the bare stage of the Imperial Theatre on the afternoon I went to say good-bye, the siege of reproachful devotees at the stage door when I left the theatre at twilight, on the sidewalk beneath our apartment through the last days, and then, since I couldn’t stop the time of our departure being published in the papers, the procession of university students who accompanied the carriage, shouting, singing, to the station, and the wreath of white and red ribbons signed “To Maryna Załężowska—from Polish Youth” which they presented to me as I boarded the train. “They want to make me feel guilty,” I said to Bogdan. “No,” he replied, you know how gentle he can be, “they want to make you feel loved.” But, I thought, isn’t that the same thing?
I don’t see why I should be made to feel guilty for leaving!
By the time we reached Bremen, and this but the start of our journey, I felt I had already aged a year. We had two days before the Donau sailed, two days of nothing to do, and I wanted only to rest. But don’t imagine I was ill. And no headaches, none at all. I was feeling weak because something was flowing out of me. Or I was girding myself for a final struggle. “You have passed a sentence on yourself,” you said to me in Zakopane. “Now you feel obliged to carry it out.” No, Henryk. Driven, I’ll grant you; obliged, never. But I did wonder if, at the end, I would falter. Perhaps I still thought someone would stop me. Perhaps I’ve always thought someone would stop me. So many tried. So many, yourself included, reminding me who I am, this Madame Maryna who is so important, so necessary to them. Or to the theatre. Or to Poland. When all she wants is to become no one!
In Bremen, I had to endure one last farewell. One last attempt to stop me. He was waiting at the Hotel Cordelia, he of whom I can speak only to you. And with flowers! Not one of those admirers who loiter in lobbies, usually young men with student caps, stammering, pushing flowers at me, but a surly-looking old man with an odd felt hat. That’s all I took in with my glance, as Bogdan, who doesn’t know what he looks like, intercepted the flowers. Until he spoke—“Welcome to Bremen” is all he said—I didn’t recognize him. How is that possible, Henryk, how? He has not changed that much.
I looked back but he had vanished. Piotr was behind me, with Wanda. I was shuddering, I must have been pale, I know my voice had gone hoarse when I joined Bogdan at the desk. There we found letters for Wanda from Julian, for us from both Julian and Ryszard, the last mailed from New York, for Bogdan from his sister, who was to arrive that afternoon (she insisted on coming to see us off), for me a letter from the Bremen Shakespeare Society requesting the honor of my presence at a reading of Julius Caesar by some promising young actors—and a note from the man in the felt hat. He had read in a German paper that I was going to America. He had come, all the way from Berlin, to see Piotr, he said. Surely I would not dispute his right to bid his son farewell.
You can imagine the dread I felt at the prospect of this encounter, but—you know this about me, too—I was more afraid of being a coward. I left a note with the concierge, as he asked, setting our assignation for the following afternoon on the promenade nearby, along the Weser. I told Bogdan, who had all he could do to console poor Izabela, that I was going for a stroll with the boy. I told Piotr that he was going to meet an old friend of his grandmother. (Don’t accuse me of opening ancient wounds, Henryk!) Of course he was late, and then without a word lunged at the child, hugging him to his old coat, whereupon naturally Piotr started to bawl. I told the maid to take him back to the hotel. Heinrich didn’t object. No good-bye, no fond paternal glance—he’s still a brute, Henryk, this stiff, sad old man. Then we walked on, but it proved impossible to converse side by side. “What?” he kept saying. “What??” “Have you gone a bit deaf?” I said. “What??” We went to the café in the Altmannshöhe and sat by the water. Straight off I told him that I would not permit him to reproach me. “Reproach you!” he shouted. “Why should I do that?” I said I would not permit him to shout at me either. “But I don’t hear my voice,” he whined. “You can see that I don’t hear well.” And then he described these last years in Berlin, and the woman he lives with, who has stomach cancer. “Soon I will be completely alone. Bald ganz allein, der alte Zalezowski.” He too accusing me of abandoning him? I asked him if he needed money. This provoked an extravagant show of indignation, which means that at the end he did take money from me. And yes, he did try to dent my resolve. First he evoked the dangers of an ocean voyage, as if I were unaware of these, and even reminded me of the attack last year on the Mosel, sister ship to our Donau. Do you recall reading about that? The bomb exploded prematurely, just before it left Bremerhaven, killing eighty-nine and wounding fifty passengers and crew. Then he offered his solemn prediction that I won’t like America. There’s no respect for culture, theatre as we know it means nothing to them, plebeian entertainments are all they want, and so on and so forth, whereupon I assured him that I was hardly going to America to find what I was leaving behind in Europe—au contraire! Last, he declared I had no right to deprive him of the possibility of seeing his son—as if he has ever shown the slightest interest in the boy! Feeble tirades these were, with nothing of the old force. He had a hacking cough and kept running his fingers through his thin sandy hair. I don’t think he really believed he could stop me. He just wanted to exhibit himself. He wanted my pity. He was pitiable. I did not pity him. I was free of him, at last.
And yet … I knew then that I really had loved him. Perhaps I have never loved anyone as much. I loved him with that part of me that wanted to be someone, someone who would do great things in this world.
Even this pitiable spectre could not mar the elation I felt boarding the ship.
There were dangers on the voyage, but not of the kind Heinrich had invoked. The sea was calm, our accommodations comfortable, though the ship seemed small, I suppose is small; it was built nearly ten years ago. But then there is German servility, which is meant to make you overlook the German taste for giving orders. The captain so fawned and fussed over us—he had learned I was a famous actress and Bogdan a count—you might have thought the faltering reputation of the Norddeutsche Lloyd fleet rested on our approval. At first I was irritated by the monotony of life on an ocean liner, which is so regimented and pampering. L’indolence n’est pas mon fort. But a long trip over water has its special magic, to which I eventually succumbed. It made me quite unsociable, even with the members of our party, and especially at dinner, with its obligatory light conversation to the music of a string trio playing Bizet and Wagner. I preferred to commune with the sea, which reminds one of the enormous emptiness of the universe.
Again and again I was drawn to the upper deck to stand at the railing and look down at the heaving water. Near the ship it was dirty green, farther out the color of tarnished pewter. Sometimes I saw other ships, but they were far, far away. Even when I watched them for a long time they seemed not to be moving—they looked bolted to the horizon—while our little, creaky Donau was a speeding projectile of steam and iron, ploughing the ocean. Our venture began to rhyme in my head with the inexorable thrust of the ship through the water, with my dizzying awareness that it was I who had set us all in motion: no way to stop it now! I can tell this only to you, Henryk. I was haunted by the idea that I might throw myself in the ocean. I might have done it, who knows. But I was brought to my senses by someone else’s folly.
It was the fourth evening out, around eight o’clock. We had been released from dinner half an hour earlier and I’d accompanied Piotr to the cabin he shares with Wanda to see the child readied for sleep and tucked in, and had just returned to our stateroom where Bogdan was sitting with an unlit cigar, waiting for me. I remember that I leaned over to look with him through the porthole at the newly risen moon, as we recalled
to each other, laughing, something fatuous the captain had said at table about the moon and melancholy—I had already hung up my cape, had put away my rings and necklace and earrings, had laid out my peignoir—when the ship seemed to stagger like an old trotter suddenly gone in the hamstrings. Then all went still, ominously still, beneath our feet. We could hear shouts in the corridor; Bogdan said he would go on deck to see what was amiss and I quickly followed. The ship had stopped. The crew was scurrying about, some slackening sails, others lowering a lifeboat over the side. Bogdan found me to tell me the news. The second officer had spied someone in the water. A cabin boy had found a pair of large lace-up ankle boots by the starboard railing. One of the first passengers who had hurried on deck, an Englishman at our table, remembered the shoes: a gentleman does not wear ankle boots to dinner—except perhaps an American. No doubt then about who was missing. People crowded around us, asking if we’d had any recent conversation with him which could shed light on this tragic accident. Hardly! His seat was at an adjoining table; since the introductions of the first night out we had never spoken. He was traveling alone: a tall young man with pale blue eyes, a squint, steel-rimmed glasses, a solemn face. I’d seen, as he sat down the first night, that his tailcoat was a size too small for him. I certainly hadn’t noticed the poor lad’s inappropriate shoes. We all stood at the railing in silence and watched the little boat moving round and round the ship in ever widening circles. There was still light in the sky, but the sea was black. From the bridge the captain was shouting instructions through a megaphone at the sailors in the boat. The sailors were waving their torches and shouting at the water. Then we began to shout, too, for the sky was darkening, soon the color of the sea would swallow that of the sky, already we had to strain to tell sea from sky. But the American never reappeared on the water’s surface. Another half hour, and the captain ordered the boat to return, the engine was started up again, and the ship went on.
