In America (20 page)

“A graveyard, Mama? A real graveyard?”

“Oh, Piotr,” she said, laughing, “you mustn't listen to everything I say.”

But they were listening, all of them, they were waiting for her to cue them, remind them, overwhelm them, steady them with her unwavering intentness. It was her certainty, compounded by her powers of self-absorption, and her impatience with their occasional lapses into faintheartedness, her barely concealed exasperation with their frailties, her never being wholly satisfied with their best efforts, above all her silences, admirable intimidating silences, her standing aside from the common chatter, not responding to a trivial observation or conventional social nicety or an unnecessary question (for that's all it was), probably not even hearing what had been said, that made them want to please her, made them feel they would not want to be anywhere else on earth than here with her, acting out her vision.

But how to create the utopian household on so cramped, so ungenerous a stage? First, by making do and putting up with—skills Maryna had mastered during the early years of touring in Heinrich's troupe throughout small-town Poland (those bare-bones theatres, those tumble-down lodgings); and the present discomforts would soon be allayed. Yes, Maryna assured everyone the morning after their arrival, there would be a second, adobe house: she and Bogdan would ask around in the village for Mexican laborers to help them build it. In the meantime … Danuta and Cyprian and their girls must have the large bedroom, she and Bogdan the second bedroom, Wanda and Julian the smallest of the three bedrooms. Piotr would sleep on the parlor sofa; Aniela on a camp bed in a nook in the kitchen. Barbara and Aleksander gamely accepted assignment to a storage shack not far from the corral; lumber, ladders, barrels of nails, paint buckets, lathes, hammers, and saws into the barn. Maryna wished she could sleep in the barn, just for the first days, alone. The space she coveted, quite separate from animals and farm equipment and hayloft, was cozily furnished with rugs, saddles, mattings, harnesses, and coyote skulls … but, no, she could not do this to Bogdan. Our two bachelors, Ryszard and Jakub, in the barn.

Leaving the unpacking and the care of the three children to Aniela, the newcomers had been shown about the land by the family renting it to them and toward the end of the first day felt they had taken possession of it with all their senses. They had welcomed into their nostrils a rich assault of barnyard and plant odors, they had tramped the amply watered earth, fingering its bounty of vines laden with Mission grapes, they had knelt at the edge of a ditch and passed their hands through the water. Just beyond the vineyard was nature in a more armored, truculent mood: a vast solemn plain dotted with cactus and scrub, steeped in silence. They gazed out at the deep-blue sky and, as the sun hovered nearer and nearer the mountain's crest, feeling the need to absorb in quiet their surfeit of new impressions, with no more forethought than precedes sinking into a chair and staring at the ceiling or taking off for a stroll in a leafy park, they drifted apart, and one by one wandered into the desert.

No landscape, not even the swampy jungle of the Isthmus of Panama, had struck any of them as this awesomely strange. And they were not being borne through it, receiving it as a view, but walking in it, on it, for it was all pale surface, the sky so lofty and the ground so level, and they had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls. Pausing, they could hear the hiss of skinny desert-colored creatures scurrying along the pebbly surface. Slithery fanged creatures (a snake!), but down there, speeding off. Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling—and nothing had to do with anything else. Each alone, each separate. The sense of jeopardy that couldn't altogether be stifled (was that a scorpion?) quickened their pace for a while, as if they thought they might soon be arriving somewhere. In the clear air the mountains looked deceptively near. And how small, when they turned around for a moment to see how far they'd gone, their little green world. They walked on, lost in the brightness of their sensations, walked and walked: the mountains came no closer. Their fears had long since subsided. The purity of the vista, its uncompromising bleakness, seemed first like a menace, then an excitement, then a numbing, then a different arousal. Their real initiation into the seductive nihilism of the desert had begun. The soundless, odorless, monochrome landscape, so drastically untenanted, had the same effect on everyone: an intoxicating impression of aloneness, which gradually gave way to a more active assent to the experience of solitude. All were visited by a yearning something like Maryna's—to be alone, really alone (what if I, what if she, what if he…?)—and allowed themselves to imagine the disappearance, without drama, without guilt, of those nearest to them, somewhere out here, too. And isn't to imagine to desire? The surrender to the desiccating of feeling was swift but it palled almost as rapidly, as something, a deeper fear, made them pull away from it, purged, chastened, and then it was time to turn around and walk back to dampened land and their moist lives.

Only one among them, wandering about in the same empty-headed daze, had excluded herself from the tapering off of this delicious, subversive fantasy, for despite the warnings to everyone by Ryszard and Julian to stay clear of the cactus plants, Wanda had been unable to restrain her curiosity about what it would feel like to touch one, and chose the downy-looking pad of a beaver-tail. “It doesn't have any spines,” she wailed. “How could I know it would have these horrible—” she whimpered. “But both hands, Wanda? You had to use
both
hands?” Julian fumed. He had brought her to the porch, to the tweezers and the candle. “Nobody on earth but you would think of touching a cactus with—” Wincing and sighing, he stood behind her, holding her shoulders, as Jakub and Danuta picked for an hour at the hundreds of tiny hairy needles embedded in her fingers and palms. When over Wanda's moans they heard an unmistakable shriek from somewhere nearby, everyone's first thought was of another cactus disaster. “Madame! Madame!” Maryna hurried to the rescue. But it was just the three huge purple eggplants Aniela had stumbled across, lolling like fat bombs dropped behind the house, and had then tried to pick up, only to discover that each was closely fastened to the stony earth. Ryszard, hacking at the cord-like vine with his hunting knife, freed them.

While they were jubilantly preparing the first meal of their new life—the eggplants, roasted over a fire in the yard, supplemented by provisions bought in the village—the luminous severe sky darkened into night, a blackness holding brighter stars than they had ever seen in Zakopane. Stars set in ebony, Jakub said. Danuta and Cyprian went indoors, Cyprian to fetch one of the telescopes Bogdan had brought from Poland and Danuta to put their little girls to bed; Piotr, feeling neglected as well as pleased at not being sent to bed, too, stationed himself on the porch and practiced answering the coyote's howl. Soon everyone was driven indoors by big-bellied mosquitoes which could bite through clothing and made sleeping that first night (and for weeks after) a torment. But even without mosquitoes they could hardly have slept well when they were so excited by their own intrepidness, and were being pulled in and out of sleep by such vivid dreams. Julian of Wanda's bleeding hands. Ryszard of his knife. Aniela of a mother she had never known, who looked like the Virgin Mary in the orphanage chapel; she often dreamed of her mother. Piotr of dead people crawling out of their graves and besieging the house. Bogdan that Maryna had left him for Ryszard. And Maryna of Edwin Booth, whom she had finally seen, just a week ago. For only hours after the
Constitution
docked in San Francisco Bay, Maryna had learned that the great Booth was performing there, at the California Theatre, and the very next day she saw his Shylock and two days later his Mark Antony. She was not disappointed. She had wept with admiration. In her dream, he bends toward her. He cups his palm on her cheek. He is telling her something sad, about something that cannot be undone, someone who has died. She wants to touch his shoulder; his shoulder is sad, too. Then they are on horseback, riding side by side, but there is something wrong with her horse, it's too small, much too small; her feet scrape the ground. He is swathed in the Oriental draperies he wore as old Shylock, he even has on the reprobate's soft yellow cap and the pointed red shoes, though he is really Mark Antony. They dismount near a giant cholla. Then he flings his cap to the ground and, to her horror, seizes a spiny branch of the cactus with one bare hand and hoists himself up with the agility of a young man. Don't do that! she shouts. He continues climbing. Isn't he being martyred by those horrid needles? Please come down! she cries. She is weeping with fear. He is laughing. Was it still Booth? He looked a little like Stefan. But no, it cannot be her brother, who is back in Poland, no, who is dead. Holding on to the topmost branch of the cholla, he begins the great speech of reproach and incitement, declaiming to the lofty air and then to her when he comes to

O, now you weep, and I perceive you feel

the dint of pity. These are gracious drops.

But there was something novel, no, unfamiliar, no, familiar, in the words streaming from his mouth. She had understood him perfectly in San Francisco, she understood him now, though the speech didn't sound the way it had at the theatre. Could he be saying it in Latin? Antony was a Roman. But Shakespeare was an Englishman. Then is this how English should sound? If so, all her studying and practicing had been in vain. That was what she was fretting about as she awoke and realized, laughing to herself, that she had dreamed Edwin Booth into acting in Polish.

*   *   *

ONE OF THE REASONS
Julian and Ryszard had chosen this site was its proximity to a community—German-speaking to boot, so there would be no language barrier—of first-generation farmers, who once knew no more than they of the grape and the cow, the plough and the irrigation ditch.

Only twenty years ago these fertile fields and thriving village were twelve hundred acres of waste, sandy land, a mere corner of a vast ranch whose Mexican proprietor, convinced that this patch couldn't support a goat, was glad to sell off. It took European immigrants, to whom the desert was not only alien but a kind of mistake, correctable by the introduction of water, to think that southern California, with more or less the same climate as Italy, had to be propitious for growing grapes.

The land rented with Bogdan's money had been worked by its owners (now relocated to a ranch in the foothills) right up to their arrival in early October, near the close of the vineyard cycle: most of the grapes had already been picked and sold. It seemed a fortunate moment to begin their tenancy, to ease into their stewardship.

They refused to allow that their inexperience was an insuperable obstacle. All that was needed was industry, stamina—humility. Maryna arose at six-thirty each morning and instantly seized her broom. Ah, Henryk, if you could see your Desdemona, your Marguerite Gautier, your Lady Anne, your Princess Eboli now!

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.