In America (5 page)

*   *   *

“
MARYNA
?”

No answer.

“Maryna, what's wrong?”

“What could be wrong … doctor?”

He shook his head. “Oh, I see.”

“Henryk.”

“That's better.”

“I'm disturbing you.”

“Yes”—he smiled—“you disturb me, Maryna. But only in my dreams, never in my consulting room.” Then, before she could rebuke him for flirting with her: “The splendors of your performance last night,” he explained.

He saw her still hesitating. “Come in”—he held out his hand—“Sit”—he waved at a tapestry-covered settee—“Talk to me.” Two steps into the room, she leaned against a bookcase. “You're not going to sit?”

“
You
sit. And I'll continue my walk … here.”

“You came here on foot in this weather? Was that wise?”

“Henryk, please!”

He sat on the corner of his desk.

She began to pace. “I thought I was coming here to besiege you with questions about Stefan, if he really—”

“But I've told you,” Henryk interrupted, “that the lungs already show a remarkable improvement. Against such a mighty enemy, the struggle waged by doctor and patient is bound to be long. But I think we're winning, your brother and I.”

“You talk rubbish, Henryk. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Maryna, what's the matter?”

“Everyone talks rubbish—”

“Maryna…”

“Including me.”

“So”—he sighed—“it isn't Stefan you wanted to consult me about.”

She shook her head.

“Then let me guess,” he said, venturing a smile.

“You're making fun of me, my old friend,” Maryna said somberly. “Women's nerves, you're thinking. Or worse.”

“I?”—he slapped the desk—“I, your old friend, as you acknowledge, and I thank you for that, I
not
take my Maryna seriously?” He looked at her sharply. “What is it? Your headaches?”

“No, it's not about”—she sat down abruptly—“me. I mean, my headaches.”

“I'm going to take your pulse,” he said, standing over her. “You're flushed. I wouldn't be surprised if you had a touch of fever.” After a moment of silence, while he held her wrist then gave it back to her, he looked again at her face. “No fever. You are in excellent health.”

“I told you there was nothing wrong.”

“Ah, that means you want to complain to me. Well, you shall find me the most patient of listeners. Complain, dear Maryna,” he cried gaily. He didn't see the tears in her eyes. “Complain!”

“Perhaps it is my brother, after all.”

“But I told you—”

“Excuse me”—she'd stood—“I'm making a fool of myself.”

“Never! Please don't go.” He rose to bar her way to the door. “You do have a fever.”

“You said I didn't.”

“The mind can get overheated, just like the body.”

“What do you think of the will, Henryk? The power of the will.”

“What sort of question is that?”

“I mean, do you think one can do whatever one wants?”

“
You
can do whatever you want, my dear. We are all your servants and abettors.” He took her hand and inclined his head to kiss it.

“Oh”—she pulled away her hand—“you disgusting man, don't flatter me!”

He stared for a moment with a gentle, surprised expression. “Maryna, dear,” he said soothingly. “Hasn't your experience taught you anything about how others respond to you?”

“Experience is a passive teacher, Henryk.”

“But it—”

“In paradise”—she bore down on him, her grey eyes glittering—“there will be no experiences. Only bliss. There we will be able to speak the truth to each other. Or not need to speak at all.”

“Since when have you believed in paradise? I envy you.”

“Always. Since I was a child. And the older I get, the more I believe in it, because paradise is something necessary.”

“You don't find it … difficult to believe in paradise?”

“Oh,” she groaned, “the problem is not paradise. The problem is myself, my wretched self.”

“Spoken like the artist you are. Someone with your temperament will always—”

“I knew you would say that!” She stamped her foot. “I order you, I implore you, don't speak of my temperament!”

(Yes she had been ill. Her nerves. Yes she was still ill, all her friends except her doctor said among themselves.)

“So you believe in paradise,” he murmured placatingly.

“Yes, and at the gates of paradise, I would say, Is
this
your paradise? These ethereal figures robed in white, drifting among the white clouds? Where can I sit? Where is the water?”

“Maryna…” Taking her by the hand, he led her back to the settee. “I'm going to pour you a dram of cognac. It will be good for both of us.”

“You drink too much, Henryk.”

“Here.” He handed her one of the glasses and pulled a chair opposite her. “Isn't that better?”

She sipped the cognac, then leaned back and gazed at him mutely.

“What is it?”

“I think I will die very soon, if I don't do something reckless … grand. I thought I was dying last year, you know.”

“But you didn't.”

“Must one die to prove one's sincerity!”

*   *   *

FROM A LETTER
to nobody, that is, to herself:

It's not because my brother, my beloved brother, is dying and I will have no one to revere … it's not because my mother, our beloved mother, grates on my nerves, oh, how I wish I could stop her mouth … it's not because I too am not a good mother (how could I be? I am an actress) … it's not because my husband, who is not the father of my son, is so kind and will do whatever I want … it's not because everyone applauds me, because they cannot imagine that I could be more vivid or different than I already am … it's not because I am thirty-five now and because I live in an old country, and I don't want to be old (I do not intend to become my mother) … it's not because some of the critics condescend, now I am being compared with younger actresses, while the ovations after each performance are no less thunderous (so what then is the meaning of applause?) … it's not because I have been ill (my nerves) and had to stop performing for three months, only three months (I don't feel well when I am not working) … it's not because I believe in paradise … oh, and it's not because the police are still spying and making reports on me, though all those reckless statements and hopes are long past (my God, it's thirteen years since the Uprising) … it's not for any of these reasons that I've decided to do something that nobody wants me to do, that everyone regards as folly, and that I want some of them to do with me, though they don't want to; even Bogdan, who always wants what I want (as he promised, when we married), doesn't really want to. But he must.

*   *   *

“
PERHAPS IT IS
a curse to come from anywhere. The world, you see,” she said, “is very large. I mean,” she said, “the world comes in many parts. The world, like our poor Poland, can always be divided. And subdivided. You find yourself occupying a smaller and smaller space. Though you're at home in that space—”

“On that stage,” said the friend helpfully.

“If you will,” she said coolly. “That stage.” Then she frowned. “Surely you're not reminding me that all the world's a stage?”

*   *   *

“
BUT HOW CAN
you leave your place, which is here?”

“My place, my place,” she cried. “I have none!”

“And you can't abandon your—”

“Friends?” she hooted.

“Actually, Irena and I were thinking of your public.”

“Who says I am abandoning my public? Will they forget me if I choose to absent myself? No. Will they welcome me back should I choose to return? Yes. As for my friends…”

“Yes?”

“You can be sure I have no intention of abandoning my friends.”

*   *   *

“
MY FRIENDS
,” she repeated, “are much more dangerous than my enemies. I'm thinking of their approval. Their expectations. They want me to be as I am, and I cannot disabuse them entirely. They might cease to love me.

“I've explained it to them. But I could have announced it to them, like a whim. Recently, I thought I was ready to do it. At dinner in a hotel, the party after a first-night performance. I was going to raise my glass. I am leaving. Soon. Forever. Someone would have exclaimed, Oh Madame, how can you? And I'd have replied, I can, I can. But I didn't have the courage. Instead, I offered a toast to our poor dismembered country.”

*   *   *

LOVE OF COUNTRY
, of friends, of family, of the stage … oh, and love of God: love, the word, came easily to Maryna's lips—however little she expected from romantic love, the stuff of plays.

She had been a stern, dutiful child. She thought God was always watching her and recording in a large brown ledger (as she imagined it) her every thought and action. She kept her back straight and always met people's gaze. She was sure God approved of that. She understood, early on, that it was futile to complain, and best not to confide in anyone. God knew how weak she was, but forgave her because she tried so hard. In return, she determined not to ask God for anything she might not deserve, either by her own talents or by the strength of her wishing. She did not want to strain His generosity.

Granted, she could not tell the truth. But there was so much energy in her for saying
something,
and making others listen. A woman could not say much. A diva could say too much. As a diva, with a diva's permissions, she could have tantrums, she could ask for the impossible, she could lie.

It would have been appropriate if she had arisen from nowhere to become a star. It was equally appropriate that she should be the scion of a charming, vastly talented clan. The family story that she constructed, her happy though penurious childhood, artfully blended elements of the two.

She was the youngest of her mother's ten children—there had been six by a first marriage, then four more after marriage to a secondary-school Latin teacher—and, as Maryna used to say, with two of her half brothers already on the stage by the time she was four and learning to read, how could she not have wanted to follow them? In fact, Maryna had not at first dreamed of the actor's life. She wanted to be a soldier; and when it occurred to her that, being a girl, she would never be allowed to bear arms, she wanted to be a poet whose patriotic odes men would recite as they marched to demand their country's freedom. But her father, though he did not discourage her appetite for reading, seemed to think it more becoming for a girl to be musical than bookish. He, after preparing the next day's lessons, retreated from the evening's family noise by playing the flute.

From all this, what she distilled for her friends was that her father had taught her to play the flute.

Banished from telling: the frightening disharmony of her parents, her mother's tirades, her father asleep over his Caesar or Virgil, the taunts of the neighbors' children when she was six that the Latin teacher was not her father but someone who had rented a room in the flat (they'd always needed to take in boarders): someone like the older man, half-German, half-Polish, who moved into the flat with the title of boarder when she was eleven, two years after her father died, and who did not begin to visit her bed (extracting a promise from her not to tell her mother) until she was fourteen—she should count herself fortunate to have remained unmolested until such a late age, was her mother's comment.

*   *   *

“
I COME FROM
a family of many brothers and sisters, all as children in love with the theatre, though just four of us—Stefan, Adam, Józefina, myself—went on the stage. Of course only one among us had real genius, and it was not I. No”—she raised her hand—“don't contradict me.”

Maryna liked declaring that Stefan's was the more natural talent, that she had achieved everything by hard work and application: she'd never ceased to feel guilty about the speed with which her career had eclipsed his.

“And we were poor. Even poorer after our father died, when I was nine. After he died my mother worked in a pastry shop on the same street as the flat in which we all had been born, which was lost in the Great Kraków Fire.” She paused. “When I was young I thought I could not live without comfort and luxury.” A spindly waiter was pouring the champagne. “Then I thought I couldn't live without my friends.”

“And now?”

“Now I think I can do without everything.”

“Which is the same as wanting everything,” replied her clever friend.

*   *   *

SHE WAS SEVEN
when she first entered a theatre. The play was
Don Carlos.
It seemed to be about love, and then it was about being heartbroken, but then it was about something much better, when at the end the unhappy Carlos went off to fight for the liberty of enslaved Holland. (That he will never go to Holland—that in the final moment of the play the King, Carlos's father, orders his son's arrest and execution—was too horrifying to take in.) She was completely swept up by Schiller's message of liberty, so much so that, eventually, it dislodged from her mind the reason that, young as she was, she had been taken to the theatre. It was to see her half brother Stefan, performing in Kraków for the first time, in one of the principal roles. For, as the play went on, she had realized with a mounting sense of humiliation that she did not recognize him. She'd looked at all the men who came and went on the stage, and hadn't seen her handsome brother among them. One was too fat, another too old (Stefan was nineteen), another too tall. The only one who wasn't too fat or too old or too tall, a man with a silver wig and red paint on his face, playing the part of the faithful Posa, didn't look at all like him. But she couldn't ask her parents who Stefan was. She would be judged hopelessly stupid and never be taken to the theatre again.