by Susan Sontag
Caught between two inclinations, to hand out tasks to everyone and to impose the principle that all work be voluntary, Maryna had decided simply to set an example. She enjoyed sweeping: the robust strokes and jabs accorded with her thoughts. And shelling beans, which she liked to do in an armchair made of manzanita branches on the porch: the mindlessness of it drew on deep calming reserves of vacuity she had made good use of as an actor. She didn’t miss being on stage. She didn’t miss anyone. Bogdan was out in the vineyard with Jakub and Aleksander and Cyprian. Ryszard was off somewhere writing. Barbara and Wanda had gone to the village to buy the day’s bread and meat. Danuta was with her little girls. Piotr came running to show her a dead lizard he had found; Aniela and he were going to bury it in the yard with a little cross. She heard them laughing together. The girl was a wonderful playmate. She’s a child herself. If Kamila had lived, she would be sixteen now, Aniela’s age. The babbling toddler she could only imagine here on her lap, in the warmth of her lap, toying with the shelled beans in the bowl … a daughter of sixteen. That memory still ached—she missed neither her mother nor her sister, neither her Good H. nor her Bad H. (as she’d dubbed Henryk and Heinrich), not even Stefan. Only her lost daughter.
To be done with mourning! To live in the present! In the sun! She was soaking up light. She thought she could actually feel the desert’s glare sealing her skin, drying up tears shed and unshed. It was almost palpable, the receding of the immense anxiety in which she had thrashed about for so many years, and the upsurge of vitality, freed from the need to husband it for performances. The exertions she had abandoned—being on stage or (in that distraction, her life) recovering from or preparing for the time on stage—had seemed so inevitable, so enclosing. She had wrenched herself away, only half convinced of the necessity of what she was doing. Now it was this new life, this new landscape and its horizon, which felt, already, complete. How easy it had been, after all. Henryk, are you listening? To change one’s life: it’s as easy as taking off a glove.
No one was shirking, everyone was eager to do something useful. Wanda told Julian she thought the house should be repainted. Several acres of grapes remained to be gathered and the vines, once stripped, needed to be fertilized—the lull in the implacable sequence of the agricultural year being only a relative one. Aleksander fabricated a scarecrow dressed like a Russian soldier to place in the vineyard. After a few days Bogdan and Jakub started gathering the remaining growth of grapes. But they had just arrived, they were just settling in, and the glorious weather seemed like an invitation to confound effort with self-improvement. Julian took to explaining to all who would listen the chemistry of winemaking. Danuta was helping Barbara do the drill in her English phrase manual. Aleksander was assembling a collection of rock specimens. Jakub had set up his easel. Ryszard offered riding lessons on the sorrel mare after his morning stint of writing. They lay in the hammocks Cyprian had strung from tree to tree and read novels and travel books; at twilight they raised their faces to the rosy sky, and watched sky and clouds and the mountain-framed vastness darken in tandem, until the bronze harvest moon came arching over the mountain and relit the clouds; one night it emerged bigger and redder, with an inky thumbprint: Julian had alerted everyone that there would be a lunar eclipse. They were waiting for it. Nothing equaled simply being still. And riding, slowly at first, then at a gallop once they learned to trust the freedoms of the high Mexican saddle, into the desert, sometimes to the foothills, occasionally all the way to the ocean twelve miles to the west.
On the eve of their long journey to California, Cyprian had been sent to Washington to spend a day at the Department of Agriculture, where he collected a box of pamphlets about viticulture in the southern part of the state. Clearly, it would make sense to follow in the footsteps of the Anaheim settlers: the village had been founded as a vineyard colony. But Bogdan thought their forty-seven acres, more than twice the stake exploited by each of the original fifty families, should also include ten acres of orange grove and another five of olive trees. If they had only one cash crop, an infestation or a cold snap could wipe them out. With several crops, something would always be flourishing.
While the men debated from house to perimeter and hammock to hammock the order of their projects, the only tasks that couldn’t be postponed—feeding the animals, feeding themselves—fell to the women. Nobody could go out to fill the cows’ trough with hay and oats or scatter grain to the hens or bring barley, corn, and clover to the horses, much less call on wine-producing neighbors about buying their grapes, until they had put away a good breakfast, a breakfast they’d enjoyed. Some wanted tea, others coffee, others milk or hot chocolate or wine soup; everybody wanted eggs, cooked three or four different ways—when there were some, for the hens were accustomed to laying everywhere and the stray dogs often found the eggs first. All those salivating palates and pink churning guts, theirs no different from the animals’, except that theirs had the accents of individual taste, of history, and the burden of fickleness.
Ensuring the communal meals took up much of the women’s day. None of them had much experience cooking, least of all Aniela, who proved as inept at common domestic tasks as Maryna had been warned. They grumbled behind Maryna’s back—and sprang at the chance to do whatever she asked of them. Wanda, whose bandaged hands rendered her useless for the first week, burst into tears when she was told she was not needed in the kitchen. Danuta undertook to feed the three children separately. Barbara was charged with replenishing the coffee, tea, sugar, bacon, flour, and other staples (invariably underestimating how much they needed) as well as purchasing most of their daily diet until they would be eating only vegetables they grew, drinking their own wine, broiling their own poultry (each had a go at chasing a hen or a turkey with an axe, and returned empty-handed to the kitchen). Their hunter, Ryszard, brought back rabbits and quail from his dawn rides in the foothills. Lingering in the kitchen if Maryna was there, when no one was looking he would slip a paper in the pocket of her apron … a poem or a story fragment; one simply read, “May I tell you my dream?” She had taken Ryszard’s attentions for granted in Poland, part of a landscape of flattering attentions; here, in the throes of learning to master the flapjack and the omelette, they distracted her. Once she looked up and saw he had returned and was standing in the doorway watching. With a gesture that was almost theatrical, wiping sweat from her brow with her bare forearm, she smiled at him mockingly. “Either come inside and help,” she said, “or go back to the barn and write.”
It would be a while before the cooking could be left to Aniela, who also hovered about, desperate to please Maryna, having nothing she could do that pleased except sing the old plangent hymns to the Madonna and to Poland. But the kitchen was already crowded and Aniela couldn’t help but be in the way. Maryna gently sent her off to play with Piotr and the girls. Then Barbara, quite uninvited, took up the singing relay. She had learned one song, just one, in English, “Suwannee River,” and she sang it over and over. What exasperated Maryna wasn’t Barbara’s ridiculous accent, well, only a little that; it was the song. Here they were in the farthest, westernmost part of America, and Barbara was yowling in her tuneless voice about some river back East, or perhaps in the South (Maryna was a bit vague about where it was), which she, Barbara, had never seen, would never see. True, Maryna didn’t have any songs about the mighty Pacific Ocean, much less about the little Santa Ana River, to propose in its stead. That didn’t stop her thinking this song an impertinence, a lack of respect for where they were, for the god Geography himself.
* * *
WHERE were they?
They were far away, yes … but far from where? It would be weak-minded, even unsporting, to aver: from Europe, from Poland. Further, that would be true of anywhere they might be in America. Better to think of themselves as far from some place in America—say, the one real city in the state (the biggest west of the Mississippi) with three hundred thousand inhabitants, flourishing theatres, and a knot of Polish émigr
és, mostly families that had fled after the failed insurrections of 1830 and 1863. Yes, they were far from San Francisco. This little Anaheim, with half the number of inhabitants of Zakopane, was nothing. Still, you could hardly call it primitive. Or a village, in their sense: a place where people had collected, immemorially, to live. This was a place people had chosen, wrested from nothingness, were zealously developing—modern.
And all that seemed very American, as the new arrivals understood their new country, even if it felt sometimes as if they weren’t really in America. They spoke Polish among themselves and German with their neighbors, indisputably a convenience for those like Aleksander who were having trouble learning English, though it seemed queer to have come all this distance and still be conversing in the all too familiar language of one of their conquerors. But—as Bogdan pointed out—that was America too, an odd country, perhaps the oddest country of all, welcoming every European nationality, and—Ryszard, who’d begun the study of Spanish, broke in—English wasn’t the language of California’s natives, either.
They had imagined a sleepy agricultural commune. This was a miniature town, its streets laid out self-importantly on a grid, full of business energies. It was the end of the vintage, and the village was crowded with those who had gathered the grapes and trampled them. Some were the Mexicans who performed most of the menial jobs in the village and lived in their own hamlet nearby. Most were Indians, Cahuilla Indians, who rarely came down from the wild mountains of San Bernardino except for the harvest and were camped just beyond the living fence of willows surrounding the village, sleeping in tents or on piles of rawhides under the night sky. The Mexicans and Indians vied with each other in drinking contests, from which the Mexicans broke off on their own, some to wander about and bellow compliments at the German girls still outdoors, accompanied by their frowning fathers and brothers, others to build a bonfire in the middle of Lemon Street and dance the bolero. The Indians watched on one side, the Germans on the other. Then the Germans went to bed, leaving their streets to the carousing vineyard hands.
When Maryna and Bogdan went to the Town Hall to introduce themselves to the mayor, Rudolf Luedke, he assured them that such public rowdiness was altogether exceptional, Anaheim being a respectable community of God-fearing hardworking families, unlike that helltown thirty miles away whose lawless, tequila-swigging denizens amuse themselves with bearbaiting and knife fights (until recently they averaged a murder a day, almost all unpunished) and, in certain houses, entertainments that can’t be mentioned in the presence of a lady … which reminded Maryna that Ryszard had intimated how much he had enjoyed his side trips to Los Angeles when he and Julian first came to Anaheim. Herr Luedke gave them a tour of the irrigation canals—interrupting the flow of German to use the Spanish name, zanjas—which interlaced the village, noting that water was always breaking out of its channels into the streets, whereupon Bogdan remarked that this need for constant maintenance and repair of canals and streets must be a great incentive to regular habits on the part of the citizenry. “Exactly,” said the mayor. He showed them the churches and the Turnverein and the Water Company, a room of which had been used as the village school, and the proper schoolhouse the community had now, two rooms, where Piotr would be going. He brought them home to meet Frau Luedke, who presented their daughters, laid on coffee and schnapps, and invited them to join the Anaheim Cultural League, which met at the Planters Hotel on Lincoln Avenue on the first Wednesday evening of every month. Maryna did not mention that she used to be an actress.
Several days later the celebrations reached their climax with the arrival of the Stappenbeck Circus from Los Angeles. In the afternoon a procession of caged and uncaged creatures invaded Orange Street: an elephant bearing a rickety tower on its back, two bears, a mangy mountain lion, monkeys, and parrots. Piotr was disappointed when Ryszard told him that a mountain lion wasn’t a lion at all, but a puma; “I thought there would be real lions in California,” he said, pouting. And Friedrich Stappenbeck’s menagerie of sad animals could not impress those who lived among free animals, whom they considered their kindred spirits. But the Indians—and everyone else—went wild over the performing humans under the tent: the fire-eaters, the jugglers with knives, the contortionist, the magician, the Uncle Sam clown, the tiny woman who hurtled through the air on her trapeze, and the strong-man, a wide sullen-looking youth with a thatch of black hair and legs like logs, in whom there was particular interest, for he was born and raised in the region. The Indians didn’t recognize him as one of their own, this offspring of a Cahuilla squaw who had left the mountains and worked for a ranching family in the foothills as a laundress (she had died when he was small) and a vaquero who had broken horses for a time on the ranch. But the villagers remembered him well, as a loner and a malcontent, though nobody could accuse him of any misdeed. His real name, U-wa-ka, had died with his mother; in the village and the foothills he was known as Big Neck. Two years ago he had simply disappeared; there had been no news of him since. And here he was again, a foot taller, with a buckskin cord around that enormous neck and a new name, a circus name: Zambo, the American Hercules. He could carry six people around the ring, three on each shoulder. He could take on any two contenders—a half dozen volunteered from the audience—and wrestle them to the ground. And he was at the center of the circus finale, with all the animals cavorting to the crack of Stappenbeck’s whip, and Matilda, the Aerial Angel, as the trapeze artist was billed, balanced on top of a pole thirty feet tall carried by the exultant Zambo, while a steam calliope that had been wheeled into the ring, Uncle Sam at the keyboard, emitted a sequence of discordant whistles approximating dear old “Yankee Doodle.” The Americans cried “Hurrah!”; the Germans, “Hoch!”; the Mexicans, “Viva!”; and the Cahuillas whooped with joy.
* * *
“TELL ME a story, Mama.”
“Once upon a time—”
“No, not that kind of story. I mean a real story.”
“What’s a real story?”
“One with bears. And people getting killed. And everyone crying.”
“Piotr! Why should everyone cry?”
“Because they’re going to die.”
“Piotr!”
“But it’s true! You told me it was true when I asked you. And Uncle Stefan died and I saw you crying. And I heard Cyprian say the mule looks sick. And if everybody is going to die then you might die someday and—”
“Piotr darling! Not for a very long time, I promise! You mustn’t think about that.”
“But I do. Once I think about something, I can’t stop. It’s there in my head and it keeps on talking to me.”
“Piotr, listen to me. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. And I’m not going away anymore. All that is finished.”
“But I am afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“That I’m going to die. That’s why I need a tomahawk.”
“Oh my little Piotr, what good will that do you?”
“Well, I can kill them back. They all have guns.”
And that was true, too. All the men had guns. And the guns were out.
The morning after the circus performance, the village awoke to startling news that only confirmed their opinion of Los Angeles and everything that came from there. Stappenbeck had been murdered and Matilda abducted, and the killer and kidnapper was the strong-man, Zambo. The show had ended, the audience had departed, and the performers were heading for the sleeping wagons to change from their motley into work clothes for the long night of striking the tent and packing up. They heard Stappenbeck’s screams for help and ran back to the tent. The circus owner was writhing on his back next to the monkey cage; Zambo, bestriding him, was shouting “Never! Never! Never!”; and Matilda was sobbing in the shadows. The minstrel trio rushed at the youth and flailed at him with their bones. Zambo slammed them aside with one shoulder and they went tumbling, unhurt, onto the sawdust, beside the dying man. Then Zambo swept the aerialist up in his arms and ran into the
night.
The contortionist tried to lift Stappenbeck to his feet. His hair was soaked with blood. He was carried to the mayor’s house, and lived long enough to curse his murderer and name the motive for the crime. He had caught Zambo rifling the chest where the box-office receipts were kept. Luedke conferred with the sheriff and at dawn a posse was assembled and sent out after the fugitive.
Where would Zambo have gone on foot? He had often talked about quitting the circus and going to live in the Santa Ana Mountains, volunteered the juggler and the fire-eater. But Zambo a thief? No. Stappenbeck had hated Zambo, though the boy’s only crime was to have gone all soft over Matilda, who was Stappenbeck’s niece (the magician said she was his adopted daughter). Stappenbeck would whip Zambo for no reason at all; and poor Zambo had never lifted a finger against his tormentor, never even flinched or cried out. They don’t feel pain the way we do, said the Uncle Sam clown.
For the villagers, who had no cause to doubt the testimony of a dying man, Matilda’s departure with Zambo proved the case against the half-breed. Theft, then murder, capped by the abduction of a white woman—a typical Indian crime. The sheriff was confident that Zambo and the woman would be found. Stappenbeck had been the only one in the circus in possession of a gun.
Maryna and Bogdan and Piotr and the others saw them riding by—grim men with Sharps rifles and Winchesters galloping into the desert.
A plot for Ryszard! He started writing it—his version would be a love story—that afternoon. He kept Zambo’s age, sixteen, but lowered Matilda’s by a decade to thirteen, and renamed them Orso and Jenny. The beloved of his strong-man was an angelic child on the eve of womanhood, and in no way related to the circus owner, who received the name of Brandt. By dinnertime Ryszard had everything but the ending, as he told the others.
“But it’s not finished,” he protested when he was begged to share it.
