In America Read Free

the newspapers, all the eloquent tongues of Europe; and from this entire army of words came not a single action.”) Yet here they were in this sumptuous room with beamed ceiling and Persian carpets in the heart of this magnificent old city, evoking Nipu, that stern blueprint for a stripped-down life of perfect, rustic comity. I began to wonder if I’d stumbled on a coven of tardy romantics (the romantic age being long over), and I feared for them, for the illusions they might still cherish. But probably they were simply patriots of an unusually grandiloquent stripe. Perhaps I should mention that I had heard, several times, homeland, but not even once the Christ among nations —as patriots of their time were wont to call their martyred nation. I knew that the memory of injustice colored every sentiment among these people, whose country had disappeared from the map of Europe. Appalled by the lethal upsurge of nationalist and tribal feelings in my own time, in particular (you can be in only one place at a time) by the fate of one small European nation, braided together tribally, and, for that, destroyed with impunity, with the acquiescence or connivance of the great European powers (I’d spent a good part of three years in besieged Sarajevo), I wondered if they could be as exhausted as I was by the national question and by the betrayal, the deceit of Europe. But what could it mean to call someone—it had to be the woman with the ash-blond hair, the woman I’d decided to call Maryna— a national symbol? If I assumed she was so distinctively treasured not because she was somebody’s daughter or widow but for accomplishments of her own, what could these be? I couldn’t rewrite history: I had to acknowledge that a woman of her time and country who was known to and admired by a large public would most likely have been on the stage. For then—only eight years after the birth of the supreme heroine of my earliest childhood, Maria Skłodowska, the future Madame Curie—there was hardly any other enviable career open to a woman (she was not going to be a governess, or a teacher, or a prostitute). She was too old to be a dancer. True, she could have been a singer. But it would have been more illustrious, more patriotic, then, if she had been, I was certain she was, an actress. And that would explain how her good looks imposed themselves on others as beauty; the skillful gestures, the commanding gaze; and the way sometimes she brooded and balked, without penalty. I mean, she looked like an actress. And I told myself I needed to make a greater space for the obvious: that, mostly, people do look like what they are. I’d been watching another man, I decided to call him Henryk, a thin man slouched in an armchair who had been drinking too much. With his goatee and careless posture and melancholy stare, he was like the doctor in a Chekhov play, which is what he could be, since there was a good chance of finding a doctor in any cultivated entourage of this time. And if my Maryna was indeed an actress, I could count on there being other theatre people here: say, the leading man in her current vehicle—I picked the tall beardless man with a ringing voice who had started, I didn’t understand why, to hector Tadeusz—although the presence of other actresses, at least of Maryna’s generation, seemed less certain (they would be rivals). Most likely, I’d find the general director of the city’s main theatre, whose season she animated each year with her guest appearances. And she would not have failed to number among her friends a drama critic, one who could be relied upon always to give her the worshipful reviews she had earned (he was a gently rejected suitor from way back). Further, as befits a worldly gathering, someone should be a banker and there should be a judge … Maybe I was moving too fast. I turned to the stove and, taking a deep breath, put my hands on the hot