In America by Susan Sontag

good air of Zakopane,” Maryna said, surrendering her delicate wrist.
    He shut his eyes as he stood over her. A minute passed. With her free hand Maryna reached for the plate of raspberries at the end of the bench and slowly ate three. Another minute had passed.
    â€œHenryk!”
    Opening his eyes, he grinned mischievously. “I like taking your pulse.”
    â€œI’ve noticed.”
    â€œSo I can reassure you”—he placed her hand back in her lap—“how healthy you are.”
    â€œStop it, Henryk. Have a raspberry.”
    â€œAnd your headaches?”
    â€œI always have a headache.”
    â€œEven in Zakopane?”
    â€œAll I have to do is relax. As you know, I rarely have a fullblown headache when I’m working too hard.”
    He had returned to the table. “And yet your instincts are right to tell you to seek refuge here whenever you can from the hurly-burly of Warsaw and all the touring.”
    â€œWhat refuge!” she exclaimed. “Admit it, friend, it’s hardly the undiscovered village it was when we arrived here four years ago.”
    â€œWhen you arrived, dear Maryna. Please recall that you were the first well-known person to come here every summer. I merely followed.”
    â€œNot you,” she said. “I mean all the others.”
    Henryk tilted his head, forefinger to bearded chin, and gazed out the window at his inspiriting view of the Giewont and the distant summit of the Kasprowy.
    â€œWhat do you expect, since each time you and Bogdan come a few more people discover the beauties of the place. You are the village’s biggest populator.”
    â€œWell, at least they are my friends. But now there are people I don’t know in that so-called hotel old Czarniak has opened. Zakopane with a hotel!”
    â€œWhere you go everyone follows,” he said, smiling.
    â€œAnd the foreigners. Don’t tell me they are here because of me. English, God be praised.” She paused, she dramatized. “If one must have tourists, let them be English. At least we don’t have any Germans.”
    â€œJust wait,” he said. “They’ll come.”
    *   *   *
    THIS YEAR’S stay was different. For one thing, they had arrived much earlier, and they were not on holiday. Bogdan had proposed they assemble everyone involved in the plan—their plan: it had not been hard to bring Bogdan around again. Maryna thought they should invite just a few friends, those who were wavering. Ryszard and the others on whom she already knew they could count need not come.
    After journeying to Kraków, and recovering Piotr—two years earlier Maryna had sent the child away from Warsaw, where the language of instruction in schools was Russian, to live with her mother in Kraków, where the more lenient Austrian rule permitted Polish-language schooling—Maryna and Bogdan spent a week of afternoons in Stefan’s flat, often joined by the guardedly reassuring Henryk. Stefan was now confined to bed much of the time. The morning after their arrival Bogdan himself went to the food market square to arrange everything with one of the highlanders sure to be loitering there after selling off his load of mutton and cheese. Familiar faces crowded around him, offering their services, their wagons. Bogdan picked a tall fellow with lank black hair who spoke a shade more intelligibly than the others and, in his comical farrago of educated Polish and highlander patois, instructed the man to tell the old widow whose hut they’d rented last September to ready it now for the arrival of himself and his wife and stepson with five others. The man, a Jędrek, was to be prepared to bring them to the village one week from today. He declared that it would be an unforgettable honor to carry the Count and the Countess and their party in his wagon.
    They had known only the summer, when the mountains above the tree line look clear of snow