In America by Susan Sontag Page B

of Zakopane, where she usually spent a month in the late summer. With her went her husband, Bogdan Dembowski, her seven-year-old son, Piotr, her widowed sister, Józefina, the painter Jakub Goldberg, the jeune premier Tadeusz Bulanda, and the schoolmaster Julian Solski and his wife, Wanda. So displeasing was this news to her public that one Warsaw newspaper exacted revenge by announcing that she was taking an early retirement, which the Imperial Theatre (she was under life contract) promptly denied. Two unkind critics suggested that the moment had come to acknowledge that Poland’s most celebrated actress was a little past her prime. Admirers, particularly her ardent following among university students, worried that she’d fallen seriously ill. The year before, Maryna had had a bout of typhoid fever and, although bedridden for just two weeks, did not play again for several months. It was rumored that the fever was so high she had lost all her hair. She had lost all her hair. And it had all grown back.
    Then what was it this time, friends not in the know wondered. Frail lungs were endemic in Maryna’s large family. Tuberculosis had taken her father at forty, and later claimed two sisters; and last year her favorite brother, once a well-known actor, whose claim to fame now rested on his being her brother, had fallen ill. Stefan’s doctor in Kraków, her friend Henryk Tyszyński, had hoped to send him with them to inhale the pure mountain air, but he was too frail to support the arduous trip, two days of lurching along narrow rutted roads in a peasant’s wagon. And could Maryna herself be—? Was it now her turn to come down with—? “But no,” she said, frowning. “My lungs are sound. I’m as healthy as a bear.”
    Which was true … and Maryna, long inclined to recast her discontents into an ideal of health, had dedicated herself to becoming healthier still. Warsaw, any populous city, was unhealthy. The life of an actor was unhealthy; exhausting; rife with demeaning anxieties. More and more, instead of assuming that whatever time she could free for travel should be spent educating herself in the theatres and museums of a great capital, Vienna or even Paris, or practicing the ways of the world in a resort like Baden-Baden or Carlsbad, Maryna, her intimates in tow, was choosing the purifying simplicities of rustic life as lived by the privileged. The allure of Zakopane, among many other candidate villages, was its particularly ravishing setting among the majestic peaks of the Tatras, Poland’s southern boundary and only altitudes, and the dense customs and savory dialect of its swarthy native people, who seemed as exotic to these city folk as American Indians. They’d watched tall lithe highlander men dancing at a midsummer festivity with a tamed brown bear in chains. They’d made friends with the village bard—yes, Zakopane still had a bard, charged with the melodious misremembering of the lethal feuds and unhappy love stories of the past. In the five years that Maryna and Bogdan had been part-summering there, they’d reveled in their increasing attachment to the village and its dignified, uncouth inhabitants, and had spoken of one day retreating there for good with a band of friends to devote themselves to the arts and to healthy living. On the clean slate of this isolated, politely savage Zakopane they would inscribe their own vision of an ideal community.
    Part of its appeal was the difficulty of getting there. Winter made the roads impassable for months on end, and even when, in May, the trip became feasible, a vehicle from the village was the only transport. This was not the familiar, homely farmer’s wagon of the more nearby countryside but a long wooden affair topped with canvas stretched over a bowed hazel frame, like a Gypsy wagon—no, more like those in engravings and oleographs of the American West. A few such wagons were to be