by Susan Sontag
Their chance to show their visitor around. First things first: they took him for a tour of Anaheim’s irrigation system. “I see,” he chortled, “a Rhineland village with Dutch canals. We’re in Holland here.”
They showed him their two cows, their three quick-tempered saddle horses, and the sickly mule. He asked them how they got on with their neighbors.
“We don’t see much of them,” said Cyprian.
“I should hope not,” said Halek. “What would you have in common with these moneygrubbing farmers and shopkeepers? Contrary to the legend spread by that journalist Nordhoff, another German, who came here a few years ago and wrote a lot of nonsense about Anaheim, there was never, as you know, anything ‘communistic’ about this village.”
Of course, he was right—to the disappointment of the Polish settlers, their heads full of Fourier and Brook Farm. The Germans in San Francisco had been recruited by a land surveyor working for two of their compatriots who owned vineyards and a wine company in Los Angeles and were looking to expand their business. With the money put up by the fifty investors, a parcel of land was bought and made fit for settlement: Chinese and Mexican workers were engaged to dig the irrigation ditches, Mexican workers to plant the vines, Indian workers to build the adobe houses where the fifty families would live. When they arrived two years later the houses and vineyards were waiting for them. At first the society owned everything, but after a few years, when the place was showing a profit, the cooperative was dissolved, and each of the original settlers recouped his investment and became the owner of his own stake. Anaheim was never, not even at the beginning, an experiment in communal living.
“Now you, Madame Maryna, you and the esteemed Count Dembowski and your friends, with our irrepressible Polish idealism, have decided to make the legend a reality. And for that I take off my hat to you. But I implore you, do not forget the stage, still in mourning for the departure of its queen. I suppose you would not consider, after a year or so of this adventure, again—”
“Not you, too! I didn’t expect to endure the same reproaches in America, even from a countryman. No, this is not an adventure, my friend. It’s a new life, the life I want. I don’t miss the stage.”
“You don’t miss the comforts to which you were accustomed, Madame Maryna?”
In reply she tossed him, in English:
Ay, now am I in Arden: the more fool I; when I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Shakespeare, Mr. Halek. As You Like It.”
“And so I do, which is why—”
“But I am teasing you, Mr. Halek! I repeat: I don’t miss the stage.”
“You are very brave,” he said.
He was delighted, delighted to see his friends so lean and healthy. Undoubtedly it was all the exercise they were getting, which his girth ruled out for himself, alas, although, he admitted, even when he was young and slender, yes, he had been slender once, he said, staring at Wanda (much of this was directed at Wanda, who looked stunned that Halek was flirting with her), even slender he loved nothing more than loafing. Eating, talking, and playing chess (he would sing as he pondered his next move) were favorite pastimes. “It’s your little rustic Athens that seduces me,” he said. “Not your little Sparta.” They enjoyed regaling him with stories of their ineptitude—actually, Halek made them feel like seasoned country folk. “I like the views,” he said from the hammock that had been specially reinforced the day after his arrival. “And the animals too, as long as they keep their distance.” He was as disconcerted by the charming young badger that Ryszard had captured and made into a household pet as by a truly terrifying giant scorpion scooting across the yard. “I confess to being as afraid of animals as a Jew is of water,” he said. And, turning to Jakub: “I haven’t offended you, I hope.”
For their turkeyless first Thanksgiving—Piotr wept and the shrieking bird was spared—Maryna laid out the damask linen she had brought from Poland and allowed herself to be exempted from kitchen chores. All the other women shared in the cooking, and Halek astonished them by volunteering to prepare the dessert. “How do you think an old bachelor like me would ever get what he wanted if he couldn’t do something for himself?” It was called, he told them (a sliver of English), a shoofly pie—“Shoo fly, shoo fly, shoo fly,” Piotr began to chant—because one will have to shoo away the flies attracted to its molasses and brown-sugar filling.
“Shoo fly, shoo fly—”
“Stop it, Piotr,” said Maryna.
“Sweet on the inside,” crooned Halek. “Stuffed with sweetness. Can’t keep the flies away.”
“It’s very tasty,” said Wanda. “I’d be grateful if you wrote out the recipe for me.”
“Do, Mr. Halek,” said Julian. “This will keep her mind occupied for at least a week.”
After dessert, when nothing remained but the crumbs on the cloth and the sticky plates and the empty coffee cups, Bogdan recalled that they had neglected the ritual with which this most American of dinners should begin. “I give thanks that we are all here together,” he said. “Who will go next?”
“Piotr darling,” said Maryna, “tell us what you’re thankful for.”
“That I’m taller,” he said joyously. “Aren’t I taller now, Mama?”
“Yes, darling, yes. Come here and sit in Mama’s lap.”
“I give thanks to America,” said Ryszard, “a country insane enough to declare the pursuit of happiness to be an inalienable right.”
“I give thanks that the girls are healthy,” said Danuta.
“Amen to that,” said Cyprian.
“Barbara and I give thanks to Maryna and Bogdan for their vision and their generosity,” said Aleksander.
“Friends,” murmured Maryna, holding Piotr tightly and burying her face in his hair. “Dear friends.”
“Mama, I want to sit in my own chair.”
“I give thanks for America’s dream of equality for all its citizens, however far that dream must go to be realized,” said Jakub.
“I give thanks to Mr. Halek for the dessert,” said Wanda.
“Trust my wife to lower the tone,” said Julian. “I suppose that I should give thanks that in America it is legal to divorce.”
“Don’t, Julian. I beg you!” cried Jakub.
“Aniela,” shouted Maryna.
“And I thank Mrs. Solski for her gracious compliment,” said Halek, grinning. The girl emerged from the kitchen.
“Aniela,” said Maryna in a furious tone, “we are giving thanks for our blessings.”
“Blessings, Madame? Blessings? Have I done anything wrong?”
Julian buried his head in his hands, then looked up, grimacing. “I apologize, Maryna. I don’t mean what I say. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not just Maryna to whom you owe an apology,” said Bogdan.
“Husbands”—Halek roared—“husbands!”
“Are the blessings over, Madame? May I go back to the kitchen?”
“And I shall come with you, child,” said Halek, “and you can say your blessing to me.”
Of course, he had been brazenly paying court to Aniela as well as to the wretched Wanda (which enraged Julian), but he had his comeuppance the following day. When he took his erect penis out and lunged at Aniela in the kitchen, she bolted and he lumbered after her, trousers agape, as far as the field beyond the barn, where he slid into an irrigation ditch. Aniela halted a little downstream and stared in amazement at the penis bobbing in the water. The wide ditch was only a foot and a half deep but the near-supine Halek, for all his grunting and sloshing about, was incapable of righting himself. “Your hand, child!” He was wetter than a sea lion. “Your lovely hand!” Sure that this was all her fault and that she would be punished—for having been attractive to the fat man or for having fled his attentions, which caused him to fall in the water, she wasn’t sure which: all she knew is that she felt guilty, which meant that she must have done something wrong—A
niela turned and ran back to the kitchen.
The barking of the house dog, a stray they’d adopted which Bogdan, to the puzzlement of their German neighbors, had named Metternich, brought Ryszard and Jakub to Halek’s rescue.
“I’m an old scamp,” he sputtered after they hauled him out of the water. “Madame Maryna, what must you think of me now? Can you forgive me?”
She did. It was easy for Maryna to pardon Halek his scabrous antics: he was ludicrously obese, he was returning to San Francisco in a few days. He became more difficult to pardon when they discovered, an hour after seeing him off at the depot, that their merry friend was a kleptomaniac. Bogdan was missing the brass knuckles he’d brought from Poland, Julian his compass, Wanda her book of recipes, Danuta and Cyprian their older child’s christening cup, Jakub a volume of Heine’s poems, Barbara and Aleksander a bottle of black currant vodka, Ryszard a leather belt hung with bears’ claws and snake rattles he’d bought on one of his trips into the San Bernardinos from a Cahuilla trapper. Halek even went off with Piotr’s favorite jigsaw puzzle, The Smashed Up Locomotive. Only Aniela was spared, unless one counts the jar of sugar he filched from the kitchen. And Maryna lost a matching necklace and pair of pendant earrings of oxidized silver: Polish women of fashion had worn such mourning jewelry, as it was called, after the failure of the 1863 Uprising. A present from Bogdan’s grandmother, they were among her most treasured possessions.
Bogdan’s indignation at the theft of the necklace and earrings dimmed her own sadness. “Don’t mourn jewelry, dear heart. Old Halek may cherish them even more than I did. He has been living in America so long.”
“You are too generous,” Bogdan said icily. “It’s unnatural.”
“It’s he who was too generous, more than his own nature could tolerate.”
“You compare those trinkets he brought with—”
“Oh, Bogdan, let’s not mind. One should always be ready to part with anything.”
Possessing things was a technique of consolation. The silver-backed brushes, the damask tablecloth and napkins, the four large trunks containing a thousand books (where would they ever put them?), the sheet music of Moniuszko and Chopin songs no one had played on the upright piano in the parlor (it was hopelessly out of tune), the costumes she would never wear again—anything brought that was not of purely practical value signified a desire to keep faith with the old life, and the need to be consoled for having abandoned it. But why should she need to be consoled?
She didn’t miss their dark Polish woes, or even the dark weather, although the fabled southern California climate, which seemed to them to consist in an absence of weather, had not ceased to surprise. There seemed to be only two seasons here: a hot dry summer, followed by a long temperate spring called winter. They kept expecting something more, a violence of nature, an obstacle. By now, back in Poland, fields and mountains, churches and theatres lay under the wide wet grey sky of real winter—the road to Zakopane would once again be impassable—while Sunnyland’s azure days and starry nights augured easier and easier transit from one place to another, one life to another.
Health is a promise of more future, while possessions reinforce ties to the past. Each day, Maryna was feeling stronger, more fit, which is what the boosterish books about southern California guaranteed to everyone who would make the trip, settle here, fill up empty land. To begin with, there had been gold; now there was health. California bestowed health, California encouraged working at being healthier. But you’ll be at your most fortified, your fittest, when the furor of need subsides; when needs give way to a soothing, vigorous indifference; when you are simply grateful to be alive, alive again. As you are when just awake, those first unhinged moments—dawning to light, grazing in a thicket of pristine feelings, your body still sodden with sleep while your mind, even as it disentangles itself from a dream (whose plot diverged so alarmingly or comically from the life you recall that you live), your mind floats free.
It’s not that you don’t know where you are, or what you’ve settled for. There’s Bogdan’s tousled head on the next pillow, thought Maryna. There’s that sound: the dear man grinds his teeth when he sleeps. It could be Heinrich with his open mouth and reedy snore, or Ryszard, who would be rubbing his eyes and reaching for his glasses on the night table, or any one of a dozen other men, though it is not. And for this moment, this moment only, it would not even matter. For as you look about, your feelings toward both bedmate and bedroom furnishings are equally accepting, equally anesthetized. The iron bedstead with the four copper-ball finials; the plain wardrobe with the sagging door; the mottoes on the walls, E PLURIBUS UNUM worked in beads and HOME SWEET HOME embroidered in wool and trimmed with flowers made of human hair—these seem just right, impersonal and unchosen like the décor of a hotel room where someone has retreated to write a book or pursue a clandestine love affair: a perfect setting for transformation.
But how ungovernable the impulse to add some personal touches, to improve things, to expand the zone of possession. From the beginning it had been clear that they must create more space for themselves and the others. By building one small adobe dwelling for Danuta, Cyprian, and the children, then another for Wanda and Julian where they could conduct their miseries out of earshot, and putting in a new floor and walls in the shack Aleksander and Barbara occupied, they would have a real phalanstery. Of course it would be foolish to sink more money into a property that was rented, whose option to buy did not come into effect before six months of tenancy. Perhaps the owner would be willing to sell it to them now.
Like the bride who, standing in church beside the groom, realizes that while she does love this man and want to marry him, it’s not going to last, it’s going to prove a mistake, envisages this before her finger receives the ring, before her mouth shapes the “I do,” but finds it easier to banish foreknowledge and continue becoming wed, Maryna thought: It is frivolous to interfere with what has been so ardently conceived, so wholeheartedly undertaken. She had to go through with it, because everything had led to this. How could she be standing anywhere but here? And skepticism can coexist with confidence. With all this character-building hope and exertion, how could they not succeed? Hope and exertion, like desire, were values in themselves. Their community would still be a success even if it failed.
Ryszard brought along his lucky sea-green marble inkstand to be used at the ceremony. After Bogdan signed the deed of purchase and handed over the envelope with the four thousand dollars to the farm’s owner in the presence of Herr Luedke and the town clerk and Piotr’s schoolteacher (a comely Gretchen from San Francisco who had obviously caught Ryszard’s fancy), they returned to the house to celebrate. Maryna gazed at Bogdan with sovereign tenderness.
“Wanda, you can’t wait until we’re all sitting down?” whispered Julian.
“Beef and onion stew!” said Aleksander, helping himself to a large portion from the bowl Aniela was passing around the table.
“It’s not beef and onion stew, it’s guïsado,” said Piotr. “I’ve had it after school at Joaquin’s house.”
“Let’s celebrate today by speaking English,” said Maryna.
Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live i’ th’ sun,
Seeking the food he eats
And pleased with what he gets,
she sang. And, as if on cue, Ryszard chimed in with the chorus’s
Come hither, come hither, come hither
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
“Bravo,” said Maryna. Bogdan frowned. Outside, the sun was shining fiercely.
Six
PRUNES, PAPA, potato, prism.
“I beg your pardon,” said Jakub.
“Prunes, papa, potato, prism. You needn’t say them all. Prism is the one that counts, that gives the mouth a pleasant expression. But it helps to get a running start with prunes, papa, potato. Are we ready?”
The photographer had planted the camera b
ox near the live oak at the rear of the house.
“Ready,” said Maryna from some twenty feet away, her hands resting on Piotr’s shoulders. Bogdan, Julian, and Wanda had gathered on her right. To her left were Danuta and Cyprian and their little girls, each clasping a pet bunny.
Knocking back her flat-crowned Spanish hat (it was secured by a chin strap), the photographer ducked under the black cloth and emerged a moment later.
“Can you not find some boxes for those in the second row to stand on?”
“Aniela, something to make you and the others taller,” said Maryna in Polish without turning her head.
“I’ll help,” Ryszard said. “There’s just what we need in the barn.”
The girls dropped their bunnies and went scampering after them. Piotr ran ahead to the barn and returned with Ryszard and Aniela atop their wheelbarrow’s worth of milk pails. Barbara, Aleksander, Ryszard, Jakub, and Aniela regained their places in the second row.
“You remember what I told you?”
“Piotr, prunes, papa, potato, prism,” shouted Piotr. “Piotr, prunes, papa—”
“Excellent, little man. Now if you could just get your mother and father and their friends to say it…” Eliza Withington stared judiciously at the group. “Eyes wide open, that’s right. Now I would like to see a pleasant expression. You’re going to be very glad to have this record of yourselves in the years to come.”
And so they will be. And the brash light of the hot March afternoon will become the sepia grace of bygone days. Then we were like that. Young and innocent-looking. And so picturesque. Maryna barely recognizable in frontier garb, a dark calico dress with a long overskirt, her hair parted in the center and knotted snugly at the back of her head. Bogdan in his natty corduroy sack jacket and wool trousers tucked inside his new Wellingtons. Piotr in plaid shirt and short denim pants, his blond hair blunt-cut at ear level and combed to one side—a little American boy. And look, Ryszard in a sombrero! “The pants were red,” Ryszard will say to his wife (his second wife), fingering the picture and staring back at his own old-colored stare. “And the flannel shirt fastened with a hook and eye, that was my favorite shirt. Try to guess what my attire had cost me, all together? One dollar!” Aniela will recall the thrill of putting on the white bibbed apron Maryna had bought for her a week before.
