Next day I was summoned by the proprietor, who explained in gestures that I had to do a different job. An hour later one of the waiters led me to a tall apartment house, where we took an elevator to the top floor. The door was opened by the woman I had seen in the restaurant
I was hired to clean her apartment after the large parties she regularly gave. The parties, catered by the restaurant where I had worked, were often attended by the underworld. I was careful not to wander too close to the rooms with locked doors. I knew of too many people who had vanished from that quarter of the city because of their curiosity. After several days my presence and the hum of my vacuum cleaner went as unnoticed as the familiar creaking of the floorboards or the intermittent rattle of the steam pipes.
While dusting the furniture I covertly watched the woman’s face reflected in mirrors: her image split into fragments as she rearranged her hair. I would smile politely when I caught her hesitant glance.
I worked undisturbed because my duties were simple and I needed no instruction. I noticed that when my new employer wanted to tell me something she became self-conscious and was upset by my violent ear-slappings.
Several times she tested me. Once when I was dusting, she silently approached the piano and struck a chord. Another time, as I was putting away the wine glasses, she came from behind and suddenly shouted. I managed to restrain even the smallest twitch. One evening, without looking at me, she motioned for me to follow her.
She forgot herself completely as she stretched under me, her eyes straining toward the headboard. Her whole body became involved in drawing breath, driven by tides and currents flowing and ebbing in rapid surges. Swaying like a clump of weed in the sea, she quivered, a rushing stream of words broke over her lips like foam. It was as if I were the master of all this fluid passion, and her tumbling words its final wave.
In her last outpouring she broke into a language I could understand, and spoke of herself as a zealot entering a church built long ago from the ruins of pagan temples, a novice in the inner sanctum of the church, not knowing at whose altar she knelt, to which god she prayed.
Her voice grew rough and hoarse as she writhed on the bed, thrashing from side to side. I held her arms and shook her, diving into her with all my weight. Like a joyous mare in its solitary stall, she cried out again and again, as though trying to detach into speech what had been fused with her flesh. She whispered that she veered toward the sun, which would melt her with its heat Her sentences poured and broke, and she muttered that the sun left only the glow of stars brushing close to each other. Slowly her lips grew parched—she slept
There were rumors that a revolution was about to break out in another country. Its central government was felling apart The country was divided into two camps: on one side the students and the farmers who opposed the President; on the other, the workers who felt the time was ripe for their party to stage a coup. The President, rumors had it, sided with the party, convinced that it would receive aid from a neighboring country where it had held power for almost two decades.
For me this was an opportunity. I had never seen or been involved in a revolution; all I had ever done was read about them or watch them on television newsreels.
I left my job and the next day was on a plane. After landing at the palm-fringed airport, I deposited my suitcase in a small hotel and mingled with the large groups of men who roamed the city. More and more of them now carried arms and banners. As I did not understand their language, I played a deaf-mute, and I played my part well.
Each group I joined claimed me as its own, handing me weapons and insignia as if convinced that it was the most natural thing in the world for a spastic to fight for the future they envisioned for their country.
Early one evening a series of explosions shook the capital. When I was ordered to a large truck loaded with assorted weapons, I knew the coup had begun. As we drove through the darkened city, our headlights outlined other armed units crossing our path and entrenching themselves behind overturned buses and makeshift barricades. Soon we saw the dead lying in pools of blood on the sidewalks, like abandoned sacks of wheat. Other bands of armed men joined us, and we raced toward the outskirts of the city. The trucks stopped and we jumped down, carrying our rifles and long knives. In a few moments we had surrounded a group of buildings. The men entered the houses; the rest of us stood expectantly in the background.
The captives were brought out one after another, many of them half naked. Not knowing what had happened, some of them tried to ask questions or say something, but were quickly silenced. Inside the buildings women screamed and children cried. The number of prisoners in front of us kept increasing, and soon there were dozens.
The commander of our group ordered the prisoners to turn and face the wall. I was certain that they were about to be shot. Not wanting to participate in the execution, I gestured to the man next to me, offering to exchange my rifle for his long knife. The man agreed. I was just about to hide behind one of the trucks when I was roughly pushed forward by men also armed with knives. Each of us was ordered to stand directly behind one of the prisoners.
I glanced around me: the armed men, tense and ready, stood at my sides and behind me. Only then did I realize that the prisoners were about to be beheaded. My refusal to obey orders would mean my being executed with those who stood in front of me. I could no longer see their faces, but their shirts were only a few inches from the blade of my knife.
It was inconceivable, I thought, that I would have to slash the neck of another man simply because events had placed me behind his back. What I was about to do was inescapable, yet so unreal that it became senseless: I had to believe I was not myself any more and that whatever happened would be imaginary. I saw myself as someone else who felt nothing, who stood calm and composed, determined enough to stiffen his arms, to grasp and raise the weapon, to cut down the obstacle in his path. I knew I was strong enough to do it I could recall the precision with which I had felled young trees: I could hear their moaning and creaking, and see their trembling, and I knew I could jump aside as they cracked and fell, their leaves brushing my feet.
WHEN IM GONE, I’ll he for you just another memory descending upon you uninvited, stirring up your thoughts, confusing your feelings. And then you’ll recognize yourself in this woman.
She looked into the room. His bed was made and the curtains were open. She turned and slowly walked downstairs.
The hall porter sat behind his desk. Embarrassed by her approach, he barely nodded. She pretended to be looking at the postcards on the swivel rack, but peered surreptitiously at the desk. On a comer of the shelf she saw several envelopes addressed by him. The porter noted her glance and picked up the letters.
“They’re all marked ‘registered,’” he said. “That’s why they haven’t been mailed yet The boy is going to take them to the post office.” He looked at her, expecting some comment When she said nothing, he shuffled the letters, and she noticed that some were addressed to banks, others to law firms. The porter put the envelopes aside. “The gentleman departed this morning,” he said. “He just left these letters, the money, and instructions. He said he wasn’t coming back.” He hesitated, then said: “Will you be staying on alone?”
She looked at his perspiring forehead. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know yet”
She undressed, entered the ocean, and started swimming. She felt the movement of her body and the chill of the water. A small rotten brown leaf brushed against her lips. Taking a deep breath, she dove beneath the surface. On the bottom a shadow glided over the seaweed, lending life and motion to the ocean floor. She looked up through the water to find its source and caught sight of the tiny leaf that had touched her before.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born on June 14, 1933, of Mieczyslaw and Elzbieta Kosinski in Lodz, Poland, Jerzy Kosinski came to the United States in 1957. He was naturalized in 1965. Mr. Kosinski obtained M.A. degrees in social sciences and history from the University of Lodz, a
nd as a Ford Foundation Fellow completed his postgraduate studies in sociology at both the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and Columbia University in New York. He wrote The Future Is Ours, Comrade (1960) and No Third Path (1962), both collections of essays he published under the pen name of Joseph Novak. He is the author of the novels The Painted Bird (1965), Steps (1968), Being There (1971), The Devil Tree (first edition 1973, revised in 1981), Cockpit (1975), Blind Date (1977), Passion Play (1979), Pinball (1982), and The Hermit of 69th Street (1988).
As a Guggenheim Fellow, Mr. Kosinski studied at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University; subsequently he taught American prose at Princeton and Yale universities. He then served the maximum two terms as president of the American Center of P.E.N., the international association of writers and editors. He was also a Fellow of Timothy Dwight College at Yale University. Mr. Kosinski founded and served as president of the Jewish Presence Foundation, based in New York.
Mr. Kosinski won the National Book Award for Steps, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in literature, best Screenplay of the Year Award for Being There from both the Writers Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), the B’rith Shalom Humanitarian Freedom Award, the Polonia Media Award, the American Civil Liberties Union First Amendment Award and International House Harry Edmonds Life Achievement Award. He was a recipient of honorary Ph.D.s in Hebrew letters from Spertus College of Judaica and in humane letters from both Albion College, Michigan (1988) and Potsdam College of New York State University (1989).
An adept of photographic art, with one-man exhibitions to his credit in Warsaw’s State Crooked Circle Gallery (1957), Andre Zarre Gallery in New York (1988), and in the Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago (1992), Mr. Kosinski was also an avid polo player and skier. In his film-acting debut in Warren Beatty’s Reds, he portrayed Grigori Zinoviev, the Russian revolutionary leader.
Mr. Kosinski died in New York on May 3,1991.
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