Read Online In America by Susan Sontag - Free Book Online

across the square, sheltering at first with so many others in the door of the Dominican church, we watched our windows melt, the windows from which my brothers used to take aim with their wooden guns at Austrian soldiers—how that had frightened our mother. She said we were lucky to escape with our lives, which was all we escaped with, for everything burned, even the church, and the flat we moved to after the fire was even smaller. Still, small as it was, my mother took in another boarder—we’d always had boarders in the flat on Grodzka Street—and that was Mr. Załężowski, Heinrich Załężowski, who was very kind and gave me German lessons. Of course, Latin had come easily to me; our father had drilled us in Latin; but I didn’t know that I had a talent for learning languages. Though he was a foreigner, from Königsberg, his real name was Siebelmeyer, Mr. Załężowski had become one of us and taken a Polish surname. Mr. Załężowski was a patriot. At seventeen, he’d fought in the Uprising of 1830. My brothers worshipped him. And my mother seemed very fond of him as well, and for a while my brothers and I thought my bearded, gruff German tutor would soon become the stepfather of us all. But it turned out that he had become quite fond of me, young as I was, and though the gulf of twenty-seven years lay between us, I didn’t find it in my heart to refuse the affections of so fine a man, who could teach me so much. It was he who believed in my future in the theatre when Stefan was still discouraging me, and after I’d had a catastrophic audition with a celebrated actress in Warsaw (no, I won’t tell you who it was) who told me I had no talent at all, none. None! And he offered to launch me on the stage. For some years earlier, while hiding from the police, Mr. Załężowski had managed a traveling theatre company, and he proposed that we go to Bochnia for a time and revive that troupe with some actors he knew there who were seeking work. Thereby he would have an instrument to undertake the direction of my career.
    â€œAnd so, when I was sixteen, with my mother’s tearful blessing, for I wouldn’t have done it without that, Mr. Załężowski and I were married and left Kraków for that town where he still had his connections, and there I made my debut at seventeen, in A Window on the First Floor by Korzeniowski, in the part of the wife who, as you’ll remember, on the point of being unfaithful to her husband is saved by the cry of her sick baby. Audiences were not sophisticated then. They loved healthy sentiments and a moral. But Mr. Załężowski wanted me to do great plays, German plays and Shakespeare, and within a few months I had learned the roles of Gretchen and Juliet and Desdemona and—
    â€œWhy am I telling you all this?” she said fretfully. “I’m making it sound easy!”
    *   *   *
    â€œ OF COURSE it wasn’t easy,” said the friend soothingly.
    â€œBut it was!” she exclaimed. “For I, who was all ambition, was myself as unsophisticated as the audiences of those days. I remember the effect on me of a little book called The Hygiene of the Soul, in which the author, someone named Feuchtersleben, tries to prove that everything we wish can be obtained if we wish it strongly enough. Obedient to the spirit of this utopian, I rose from my bed—it was late at night—and, stamping the floor, I shouted, ‘Well then, I must and I will!’ This woke up the nurse, and my baby began to cry, so I crept back to bed, dreaming of future laurels.”
    â€œYou were very young then.”
    â€œI was already twenty. No, not so young. And my daughter, my baby—you know what happened. Diphtheria. While I was away on tour.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI couldn’t go to her. Mr. Załężowski, my husband, pointed out that the plays could not be