Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  She literally liked to walk all over us. We couldn’t even rest after our long cuddles. She would climb on top of us with her tiny feet and balance herself on the narrow wall between my tits or hop like a spider from Jurek’s kneecaps to a shoulder, his or mine. She never favored one of us over the other, and was careful to give herself equally to our abandon. But I never saw much abandon in Gabriela, with her measured meows.

  — 24 —

  IT WAS GABRIELA WHO SCULPTED OUR GAMES with her own dark sense—her void had been as deep as Jurek’s. She was Little Red Riding Hood and we were the Wolf, disguised as her uncle and aunt. But Gabriela was much more satanic than the Brothers Grimm. Her Little Red Riding Hood was a temptress and a terrible tease. And the Wolf, split into two personas, had no wish to harm her.

  We had to stand naked in front of Gabriela like a pair of raw recruits while she, wearing a cape and hood from my closet, plucked at our skin.

  “Uncle Wolf,” she said, “why have you come to Auntie’s house?”

  “To worship every inch of you, my dear.”

  “That’s not a good enough reason. You should have planned at least a little bit of malice. I order you to bite my nipples.”

  “I can’t, my love,” said Jurek. “My teeth are too soft. They’ll fall out at the first touch.”

  “Then you should have worn your dentures, Uncle Wolf. Bite my nipples.”

  I could have stopped the game, slapped her once, and she would have been finished with Little Red Riding Hood, but I never did. And I had to watch Jurek unravel as she pecked at him like a chicken hawk.

  They’d entered some terrible void where I couldn’t go. I was out of my depth. Even Nefertiti’s Nights had a soft, sentimental heart under its debris of detail. But Jurek went into the darkness with Gabriela. And it was twice as dangerous for him, since he loved her. His tenderness could twist him into something not so tender.

  Meanwhile, he played the Wolf, or at least his half of our duel persona. He snuffed her nipples with a violent jerk of his nose.

  “Little Red Riding Hood, you smell like a peeled peach—no, a brat who terrorized a whole jail with her beauty and would like to make mincemeat of a poor defenseless wolf. But I’ve been to the same forest, my dear. I had a drink inside your well. I tasted the water, and it wasn’t sweet.”

  “What was it, then?” Gabriela asked. He was sucking her into a whirlpool—his own malevolent imagination.

  “It had the sour taste of a witch’s menstrual blood,” he said.

  “But witches don’t have periods, Uncle Wolf, and neither does Little Red.”

  “Then what do they have, my dear?”

  “Garlic in their blood . . . and gall. They have learned to fester in patience, to rot a million years before they strike a blow.”

  The Wolf had a benumbed look. His head must have been reeling from the cruel drama of the trap that was about to spring.

  “And what is that blow?” he asked in a shaky voice.

  Little Red snorted with the bitterness of a girl who had survived institutions and ogres.

  “It’s not the blow itself, Uncle Wolf. It’s the anticipation. . . . It wounds you and eats your entrails long before the million years are up.”

  Jurek sniffed his own despair. The Wolf of the Polish forest couldn’t defeat Little Red with all his learning and his language games. She started to laugh and whip her head until the hood fell off. But something deep within the Wolf must have snapped. He clutched Gabriela by the hair—like a lunatic angry at a doll. I didn’t stop him. His shoulders shook. Tears streamed down his face. I had never seen Jurek cry.

  MY MARILYN HAD DIED OF AN OVERDOSE the same week Gabriela did her number on us with Little Red. I moped and cried and wasn’t capable of looking after her. She moved with Jurek into 740 Park as his green penciler. I was out of it for a month.

  It was Jurek who cared for me, who washed my face and fed me sandwiches.

  “How is Little Red? Has she run away?”

  “No, no. Little Red is fine.”

  Martha had had an alcoholic fit and was drying out somewhere in Connecticut; Jurek coaxed me across the street to visit Gabriela. I dreaded walking up that marble staircase at 740. He’d put Gabriela into a room of her own. The Wolf had tamed Little Red—it was worse than that. He’d sucked the life out of Gabriela. Her hazel eyes were sallow. She twitched whenever he talked. He’d become the ogre who didn’t react at all, except with icy commands.

  “Little Red, you haven’t washed yourself today. What will Auntie Anya think of such a smelly girl? Do me a favor and ask Stanislaus to prepare your bath. It has to be the right temperature, my dear. You might scald yourself.”

  I lit into him the moment she left the room.

  “Are you proud of yourself, Jurek? Playing the Prince of Darkness. She’s not your little automaton.”

  “Gabriela’s free to go. She could always run away.”

  “She never runs away,” I said.

  “Ah, but didn’t she run away from college with a decrepit farmer?”

  “No,” I insisted. “She traded one institution for another. That farmer must have been familiar to her. He must have ignored her when he wasn’t beating her up.”

  “Do we abuse her here? Do we beat her up? Ask the butler. We treat her like a little queen. And she hasn’t lost the art of her green pencil. She’s edited the whole book, my dear.”

  “Then show her some kindness, Jurek. Let’s celebrate. We’ll have a dinner party at the Rainbow Room.”

  “Impossible,” said the Prince of Darkness. “She doesn’t like to eat in restaurants. She never learned how to navigate with a knife and fork. Haven’t you noticed?”

  He twisted his head away from me and spat like a snake, “Darling, come here!”

  I heard the patter of her feet. I know I have all the clumsy baggage of a pornographer—but I swear to you that it was like the sound of an angel treading on Martha Will’s hardwood floors.

  She appeared without slippers, wrapped in one of Martha’s robes—the robe was much too long, and its skirts trailed behind Gabriela.

  She clung to Jurek, as if wed to him by some invisible string.

  “Auntie would like us to go with her to the Rainbow Room—it’s a restaurant right in the sky. You can have wisps of cloud in your soup.”

  Gabriela snorted at the idea. “I might choke on the clouds, Uncle Jurek. I’d rather eat here. Uncle Stanislaus gives me all the ice cream I can swallow.”

  “And what’s the flavor you like best?”

  “Chocolate swirl. May I go now? Uncle Stanislaus says the bathwater will get cold if I linger too long.”

  She returned to her tub without even glancing at me once.

  “Anechka, are you satisfied?”

  I didn’t answer. I ran past Jurek and out of his apartment-palace, certain I’d never see him again.

  — 25 —

  I SHOULD HAVE PLOTTED GABRIELA’S ESCAPE, conspired with the butler or Martha Will, but I was paralyzed. Jurek still had a hold on me. Perhaps Little Red had been right about us. Jurek and I were part of the same creature, Uncle and Auntie Wolf.

  But the Wolf knocked on my door a month later. He hadn’t shaved. He was inconsolable. Martha had returned from the sanitarium, had seen the state of the child, and got her out of “prison” at 740 Park with the butler’s help. Jurek threatened to call the police and swear out a complaint against Martha and her accomplice for having kidnapped Little Red. But Martha looked into his eyes with her own conviction. And Stanislaus thrashed the Wolf, who had to hide in a closet.

  “Anechka, you cannot understand my humiliation. I had once thrashed my own father, after the war, while we were living on Senatorska Street, in Lodz. He, too, had to hide in the closet. He, too, was terrorized.”

  “Jurek,” I said, but not before giving him a bagel and some strong black tea. “The butler should have beat your brains out. You deserved it.”

  “I know. That’s what kills me. And I�
�ll go to the grave with the memory of my poor papa cowering in the closet. . . . Anechka, you must help me find Little Red. I’ll give you all my royalties, whatever the book will earn, after it’s published.”

  “I don’t want your royalties. Gabriela is better off without you.”

  “Then I’m lost—a blind man who stumbles all over himself, craving her smells.”

  “But you could have been nicer to her, darling, and she’d still be with you on Park Avenue.”

  “Nice,” he said, “when have I ever been nice? I would have drained all her blood if I’d had the chance.”

  “And that’s what you mean by love?”

  He wanted me to seduce Stanislaus and pluck Gabriela’s address out of him. I slapped the Wolf.

  “Jurek, you’re a contemptible man.”

  He kissed my hand.

  “You should be shot,” I said. “You took poor Gabriela and turned her into your prisoner and your slave.”

  The Wolf snickered at me. “Poor Gabriela. I was her slave, and so were you, my darling Anechka.”

  “And suppose it’s true. I’m not going to help you. Suffer, you son of a bitch.”

  The Wolf kissed my hand. He was, after all, quite clever. And we did have our love for Gabriela to bind us, and the book also bound us to her. There were other editors. And then he spent a year reshaping what the reshapers had done. There would be a brouhaha long after the book was published, nailing Jurek to the wall, but God is my witness that The Painted Bird was his—and mine.

  The “ghostwriters” couldn’t have conceived the book, couldn’t have invented its starkness or its glimpse into hell. But Jurek courted his own catastrophe. He wrote The Painted Bird as a fictional self-portrait, but the book’s earliest readers felt that it was too harsh, too baroque. They wanted The Painted Bird to be the factual story of a Holocaust survivor. He should have screamed and let it remain a book out of Hieronymus Bosch and his own wild imagination. But he let it fall into the realm of a survivor’s manual. How could the book fail with its false patina of lived events? Who cared about all the obvious inconsistencies? The Holocaust orphan whose parents were still alive. The Catholic boy who was mistaken for a Gypsy and a Jew. His own publisher was suspicious and tried to bury the book. But they hadn’t expected such an avalanche of ecstatic reviews.

  Jurek himself went into the whirlwind, became the “ghost” of that boy in The Painted Bird. And he didn’t have Gabriela to be his green pencil, to dig into the underbelly of his prose and stitch what had to be stitched. But I’m not sure that even her green pencil could have saved him. My poor Jurek became Tartuffe, filled with pious little lies about himself. It was the great disease of his life.

  I met his mother, whom he had conveniently kept behind a curtain. She came to see him in 1963. It’s not that Elzbieta contradicted Jurek’s fantastic tales about the war. She never did, but there was still a sadness in her dark eyes.

  She had become Jurek’s silent clown, nodding here and there in the middle of his horror stories—stories that had obliterated her, returned Elzbieta to the shadows. No one dared talk to her while Jurek wasn’t in the room. Elzbieta was his prize, his prize alone, and I wouldn’t have risked the Wolf’s wrath. But it was Elzbieta who sought me out, smoked a cigarette with me, while Jurek was telling guests how he had caught a German soldier copulating in the forest with a farmer’s wife.

  “I was this close, a hair away. Had I been his barber, I could have shaved his skull.”

  “Jerry,” said a drunken playwright who was the star of my literary salon. “I thought all German soldiers liked to fuck with their helmets on.”

  Jurek laughed that diabolic laugh of his. “Not this soldier. He was very polite. He put his handkerchief under the enormous fanny of the farmer’s wife.”

  And that’s when I saw Elzbieta wince.

  “Anya,” she said, “where were you born, please?”

  “I was born in Budapest.”

  “With name Anna Karenina?” Her sadness seemed to lift for the first time. “I am reader of Tolstoy. How I suffered with Karenina. She was not lucky woman—with men.”

  I was reluctant to admit that “Karenina” was my nom de plume, but Jurek must have told her I was a dominatrix whenever I could spare the time from working on various sequels to Nefertiti’s Nights.

  “Karenina should have whipped husband and lover and lover’s horse, Frou-Frou. Tell me, Anya, did you ever whip my son?”

  Elzbieta had made me blush. “No, I never . . .”

  “He should be whipped, twice a day, in America.”

  IT WAS THE FIRST AND LAST CONVERSATION I ever had alone with Elzbieta. I’d misjudged her. She was neither Jurek’s puppet nor his clown—a reluctant accomplice, I’d imagine. Nor was she as invisible in Jurek’s book as might seem at a glance. The Painted Bird wasn’t Jurek’s dialogue with the devil. It was, in fact, a dialogue with the dead. The boy’s absent parents are what really haunt the book—they are its ghosts, not the cruel farmers, the mad girls, the partisans, and the priests. They are whom the boy mourns without ever knowing it. They are its missing thread. And Gabriela must have uncovered it with her green pencil.

  There’s little point in asking what might have happened had Gabriela penciled his other books. They did not have that ghost-like presence of The Painted Bird. I’d read them all, labored over them with my meager pencil, fought with Jurek’s other “ghost-writers.” Some of these books were adored and sat on best-seller lists. But they did not dance in and out of the same darkness. They rarely danced at all.

  His legend grew and grew. He ran with Roman Polanski, whom he had known from the student cafés in Lodz. “Romek” was another painted bird—a Jewish Gypsy torn from his parents during the war—who had to dodge the bullets of German officers taking target practice in Cracow or God knows where. But Jurek was shameless after Romek’s wife was murdered by the Manson cult family in 1969. He would have died with her, he said, if his luggage had not been put on the wrong plane. He had thrust himself into the murder of Sharon Tate, when he should have kept his mouth shut.

  And he clung to his own myth—the Gypsy look-alike who wandered through the war in escapades out of Bosch. But stories began to leak, dark whisperings—his real name wasn’t Kosinksi. It was Lewinkopf, and the only wandering he had done during the war was with his parents, members of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Lodz, who took on Catholic names and identities in order to survive. Jurek Nikodem Lewinkopf, now Jerzy Kosinski, was baptized and became an altar boy. He had to hide his penis, learn to pray in Latin.

  But that was long ago, in another land. As a literary lion whose face had become its own familiar country, he went on denying what could no longer be denied. And even worse, he invented new lies. Playing polo with his rich friends, he reminisced to journalists how Soviet cavalry officers had taught him a primitive version of polo at the end of the war. And then a horse trainer appeared and said that he had given Jurek riding lessons in Central Park.

  It wasn’t all frivolous, all bravado. As president of American PEN, he delivered that organization from a diet of tea parties and championed writers who were imprisoned in the Soviet bloc. He was fearless. He would scribble notes to heads of state—I was his unofficial secretary and had to correct his grammatical errors. Did it matter that he sometimes left out a definite article and that he spelled like a bandit? He defended writers with the force of a commissar.

  But even that was finally another mask he wore—and Jurek careened out of control. He gave interview after interview where he encouraged journalists to talk about him as another Conrad, someone who had mastered all the illogic and lyrical leaps of a borrowed language. And then the ax fell. Two journalists from The Village Voice had been snooping around in Jurek’s own secretive barrels and were conducting a witch-hunt, he said.

  “That pinko paper is after me, Anechka. They want to ruin my reputation. They can’t forgive me for being Henry Kissinger’s friend.”

  They even had one of
their researchers interview me. An evil little man, a gnome who looked like Roman Polanski. His name was Max. I wasn’t obliged to talk. But I had my own strategy. I would prove to Max that no one but Jurek could ever have written The Painted Bird. Hadn’t I hired the “ghostwriters,” marshaled them like a little army? But Max didn’t ask me one question about Jurek. He even took liberties, called me “Anechka,” asked me every sort of personal question.

  “I was born in Budapest,” I said.

  He laughed in my face.

  “Budapest in the South Bronx.”

  I thought I would freeze to death—that’s how fast my blood pressure dropped.

  “Anita Goldstein of Hoe Avenue. The toughest girl on the block . . . you’re a Bronx Bagel Baby.”

  “Shut up, or I’ll bite the Adam’s apple out of your throat.”

  “I’ll bet you would. . . . Why should I trust anything you tell me, huh, Bagel Baby? You’re as big a fraud as Mr. Painted Bird.”

  And that gnome left with his malevolent laugh.

  I was a Bagel Baby born in the Bronx, my father a drunken tailor from Kiev. He was also deranged. When he wasn’t molesting me, he was beating up my mother, threatening her with the sawtooth scissors he used to cut cloth. I dreamt a million times of murdering him with the scissors. But I never had the chance. The city put him away; he died in Bellevue, after staring at a wall for twenty years, my poor papa. He kept asking for me. I broke down and visited him in the mental ward. I let him feel me up; that’s all he had left, the touch of his fingers.

  But I swore I would get out of the Bronx. I quit high school and went down to the Village. MacDougal at Bleecker was the center of the world, with its corner cafés. I was partial to the San Remo. The unwashed, unwed poets who drank bitter coffee and wine at the San Remo looked after me. I was their Bronx Bagel Baby. I fell in love with one of the unwashed poets. Her name was Marie. She was a stickup artist and a whore when she wasn’t reading her poems at the San Remo. I lived with her for five years. But that’s another story, and it doesn’t have much to do with Jurek.