In America Read Free Page A

dark-green tiles, though really I was not chilled at all now, then went back to the window and gazed into the night. The falling snow was streaked with hail; it rattled the panes. As I turned back to look at the guests, a stout man with a lorgnette was saying, Listen. Hardly anyone stopped talking. Mes enfants, he bellowed, that’s what hail sounds like. Not like dried peas dropped into a kettledrum! Maryna smiled. I smiled too, for a different reason (I didn’t mind being proven right): so I was among theatre people. I decided that this man must be a stage manager, since he was fretting about effects. And I christened him Czesław, in honor of my favorite living poet. On then to the rest of the cast, I said to myself with renewed confidence. Having yet to identify any of the other women, I realized that six could be the wives of the leading actor, the director of the theatre, the critic, the banker, the judge, and the stage manager. The rumpled doctor, since I thought he was a doctor because he looked like Astrov in Uncle Vanya, I assumed to be not just unmarried but unmarriable. (And I needed to keep my Ryszard wifeless, too, the better to flirt and pine, though I suspected that he would turn out, when much older, to be not only the marrying but the thrice-married kind.) Then, returning to the other women, I stalled for a moment, wondering if I hadn’t misjudged Maryna. If too successful to keep an ex-mentor by her side, while not yet old enough to feel unthreatened by the young, she still might have included one younger actress in her circle of friends; and I found her quickly, a pale delicate woman with a large locket on her bosom, who kept brushing back her auburn hair with a gesture very much like Maryna’s. Oh, and one of the women could be a relative and, indeed, somebody I thought looked enough like Bogdan to be his sister was just at that moment talking to the doctor, leaning over his chair; I think she had noticed he was a bit drunk. I also wondered whether I would find a Jew, who would be a young painter named Jakub, recently returned from two years of cosmopolitan art society in Rome. But as far as I could tell there was just one painter here, and not a Jew, his name was Michal: a red-haired, stiff-gaited man around thirty, who had lost a leg at eighteen in the Uprising. Finally (for the time being), it seemed to me that at a party of this size and composition there should be at least two foreigners, but as carefully as I scrutinized the guests I could find only the one I’d already noticed: a plump man with a full beard and a diamond in his cravat, with whom some people standing near another tall window had been speaking German. He might be an impresario who was on the verge of engaging Maryna’s young protégée for some small roles next spring at his theatre in Vienna. I surmised this, that he was from Vienna, because I recognized his accent, my memory has a good ear, even though I’ve never learned to speak or understand German properly. Of course I didn’t marvel at what superior linguists they all were; to this day the educated of this country, restored to the map of Europe a mere eighty years ago, are notably polyglot. But I, with my command only of Romance languages (I dabble in German, know the names of twenty kinds of fish in Japanese, have soaked up a splash of Bosnian, and understand barely a word of the language of the country in which this room is to be found), I, as I’ve said, somehow did manage to understand most of what they were saying. Still, I had yet to understand what they were really saying. For supposing I was right, I mean about who was an actress and who a stage manager and the rest, this wasn’t helping me much to untie the knot of their argument about whether what the woman, Maryna, and the man, Bogdan, or the two men, Bogdan and Ryszard, were doing or were planning to do, was right or wrong. (As you see, I’ve dispensed with my little