Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  That article in the Voice did him in. Half of it was rumor and hearsay, but it left him with little ground. It produced disgruntled scholars and hacks who swore they had written The Painted Bird. I couldn’t even protest now that the Voice had pegged me as a serial liar.

  Jurek would publish only one more book, The Hermit of 69th Street, without a single penciler or “ghostwriter.” He wouldn’t even let me have a peek at the book while it was in progress.

  “Anechka,” he said. “My Hermit will redeem me.”

  It was tedious. Even I, who loved him, couldn’t read it. Filled with footnotes, it took his hero—a pompous replica of himself—fifty pages to get from his apartment to the street. Portraits of Jurek’s mother and father appeared in the new novel. But I preferred them as ghosts, like the ghost my papa had become. Had I loved Jurek more, I might have finished the book. But it was an excellent tonic. Reading five pages put me to sleep.

  WHILE JUREK HAD PECKED PAGE AFTER PAGE of his opus, the Bronx continued to burn. And then the burning stopped—landlords must have tired of torching their own buildings. Jurek was despondent over the reception of his Hermit. Critics either ignored the book or crucified him.

  “Anechka,” he said. “I need some recreation. Let’s go to the Bronx.”

  I panicked. I didn’t want to return to that Sahara I had escaped from fifty years ago. I was still a Bagel Baby at heart. My veneer of Anna Karenina might rub off the minute I stepped onto those mean streets, but I couldn’t keep ignoring his somber mood.

  “Jurek, I have a confession to make. I wasn’t born in Budapest. I come from the eye of that firestorm in the Bronx.”

  “I know,” he said, and seemed to hop out of his own dark storm.

  “But how did you find out?”

  “I never believed your little escapade on the Orient Express. Those hussars would have trampled you and thrown you off the train. Darling, let’s go to the Bronx.”

  I braced myself and rode into the Bronx with Jurek in his new Cadillac. It was such a conspicuous car. I feared that the street gangs would smash all his lights. And he wouldn’t even travel in the afternoon, like a sane person. He had to arrive on Hoe Avenue after midnight. He dragged me out of the Cadillac. There wasn’t a house that was left standing on Hoe. I saw nothing but husks and little mountains of debris.

  I should have been appalled, but those husks sat right under the moon.

  I started to cry. It wasn’t out of bitterness. I stopped fearing the Bronx. And Jurek understood my odd exhilaration. He’d returned to Poland six months before, had visited Lodz, had walked the streets of his childhood, sat in cafés. The pariah had become a crown prince. The Poles, who had been suspicious of him and his books, now accepted The Painted Bird as a Polish masterpiece. He was mobbed wherever he went. People clutched his hands and wouldn’t let go. A police car had to escort him from town to town.

  “It was the smells, Anechka. Nothing had changed. I could sniff the memory of my own armpits.”

  And he wandered in the rubble of the Bronx, climbed the little mountains of Hoe Avenue, the master of whatever hill he cared to imagine.

  Meanwhile, I had to watch myself wither. My priceless tits became potato sacks that reached the ground. I’d lost the art of writing porn. Anya had to earn a living—I opened a punishment palace, Nefertiti’s Harbor, moved it to different spots, paid off whatever rackets squad was around. Who could have figured that I would be such a roaring success? Even the literary crowd dropped in, all those starving writers from Elaine’s. . . .

  Jurek was the only customer I ever cared about. And then he was gone. I couldn’t stop crying. I remember now; it was 1992, a year after Jurek had killed himself, and I was mounting a revue at Nefertiti’s. I must have interviewed a hundred girls. That’s how tight the titty market was. No one was hiring. And there she was in her glory. She could still break the heart of an old hag who hadn’t seen her in thirty years. Her brow had wrinkled, and a bit of hazel had gone out of her eyes, but she would have turned every head at the Women’s House of Detention if it hadn’t been torn down.

  “Auntie Anya, are you hiring? Or do I have to shake my tail farther downtown?”

  “Little Red, this life isn’t for you. Getting pinched by geeks in SS uniforms.”

  “I’ve had worse,” she told me.

  I wondered if she could hear the pounding in my chest. But I took my time with Little Red. I didn’t slobber all over her. I gave her the key to my apartment.

  And she moved in, just like that, without a suitcase or a backpack. She hasn’t strayed. We eat at home or at a little Italian dive on Lex—Gabriela does my bookkeeping. Numbers are her religion. She tells me how much we ought to spend or save. But it doesn’t matter where our conversations start—they always end up with Jurek.

  “I still love him, Auntie.”

  “Damn you, girl. Don’t you think I miss him every day?”

  “But it’s not the same thing—that hunger, like I had a wound, a constant leak.”

  And she fell into a fit of crying, but that fit didn’t distort her face or darken the wrinkles. She shed thirty years, and she could have been that waif who walked into our arms at the Women’s House.

  “I miss him, Auntie. I miss him a lot. I guess he had a way of crawling under your skin.”

  “Oh, he was a master at mixing up kindness and cruelty. Did you ever write to him, child?”

  “No, but I read his books, and I liked to think of them as love letters.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I couldn’t find much love in his later books. They were loveless skeletons that could have used your green pencil.”

  “His green pencil. I only borrowed it, Auntie. And aren’t loveless skeletons a cry for love? We’re all painted birds, freaks with our own eccentric coloring, and wherever we fly, the unpainted birds peck at us and drag us to the ground.”

  “Then we’ll disguise our feathers.”

  “And be like every other unpainted bird? Thank you, Auntie, but I’ll keep my color.”

  She nestled in my arms and bumped me playfully with her crown of short hair. “Painted birds,” I muttered, and went to kiss Little Red.

  MOSES AND GAVRILA, 1944

  — 26 —

  THEY WERE HIDING IN THE WOODS, not from the Gestapo or the SS, who seemed indifferent to the villagers and their plight, but from the Kalmuks, who had been unleashed upon them by some invisible German high command. The Kalmuks had plundered nearby villages, raping women and also young boys in their maddening lust, stealing horses, and setting fire to houses, barns, and huts. The Kulmuks had nowhere to hide. They were deserters from the Russian army; the rosyjskis were advancing everywhere and would soon be upon them; and he would have to watch the rosyjskis rip out their eyes and roast their hearts.

  Jurek had recently turned eleven. He feared the Kalmuks, who might rape him, along with the young girls and wives of the village, even rape his mama, but he couldn’t help feeling sorry for those wild men. He had seen one or two wandering in the forest in their war paint—streaks of red and blue that ran like gashes from their left eyebrows to their chins, leaving them blind in their one painted eye. They had also painted their ponies. And Jurek, who had seen the polished boots and splendid caps and coats of the Gestapo and SS, with silver buckles and lightning bolts, was transfixed by the crazy uniforms of the Kalmuks; horsemen who rode in slippers, wearing torn Gestapo breeches and tunics stolen from Russian officers, they sniffed the wind like hunters rather than common soldiers looking for someone to rob and kill.

  Reports had come back from the village, whose elders had to abandon the old, the lame, and the ill. The Kalmuks who fell upon Dabrowa Rzeczycka must have been a sorry lot. They scavenged for food, leapt with their ponies into houses and barns, but they plundered no one. They even fed a starving old woman and played cards with her. Jozef Stepak, boss of the elders and “mayor” of the region, thought it was a trick.

  “They are trying to lure us back. We mus
t wait.”

  “You are wrong,” said Jurek’s father, Moses, who was called Mieczyslaw in Dabrowa, as part of the village’s own game with the Germans. The village didn’t dare expose Mieczyslaw Kosinki as a Jew. The Gestapo would have burnt Dabrowa to the ground and sent each villager to a death camp. And so the elders had to shield Moses and his little tribe of Jews, pretend he was a Catholic and a Pole. And Moses didn’t even kiss their hands and ingratiate himself to their wives. Rather than hide, he appeared in the village, became a “professor” who offered lessons to backward students, and worked for the village’s tax assessor. And now he considered himself one of the elders. It was their priest, Father Okon, who had brought the little tribe here less than two years ago in a Gypsy wagon. They ranted at the priest. “This Jew will get us all killed.” But Father Okon swore to the elders that he would destroy the village with his own hands if they didn’t hide the zyd.

  “Father,” they said, “we are your flock. You should not speak to us with violence in your heart.”

  He cursed them, called them pieces of shit—their own priest. They took in the zyd. And now Father Okon himself was a renegade, running from the Gestapo. And they were stuck with Mieczyslaw-Moses. He was valuable to them, they had to admit. Zydek as he was, he could write letters in perfect Polish. And when they had to consult a specialist in Warsaw, it was Mieczyslaw who crafted the letter. It was Mieczyslaw who had a way with arithmetic, who instilled a love of numbers into the numbskulls they had for sons. He didn’t tremble in front of German officers and SS men, but spoke to them in their own harsh tongue.

  And he contradicted Jozef and the other elders.

  “The Kalmuks have no tricks. They are desperate. And their desperation makes them kind.”

  The elders wouldn’t listen to such infernal logic.

  “We will stay here, Brother Mieczyslaw.

  And so they all waited in the woods, but they were not guerilla fighters who could devour the landscape and steal food from the weak and the lame. Caught as they were between two partisan camps—the nationalist “whites” and the “reds”—while the Kalmuks and their German masters retreated and the rosyjskis advanced, the elders of Dobrowa Rzeczycka hadn’t been able to scrounge enough food for an entire village; they had to send their own children to hunt for pigweed and wild berries, warning them not to stray into the hands of the Kalmuks.

  But Jurek wasn’t permitted to join this little party of foragers.

  Jozef Stepak wasn’t an utter idiot. He understood the children’s cruel tricks. They would stuff wild berries down Jurek’s throat and call him “Christ killer.” Jozef couldn’t have cared less about children’s games, but what if a German sentry beside the train station heard their taunts? The SS would miraculously appear and wipe Dobrowa off the map. But why did the little zyd look at him with such smolder, such heat?

  “Mieczyslaw, please, you son is giving me the evil eye. You must tell him to stop immediately.”

  Jurek turned his head away. He was smoldering. Couldn’t he have been a Kalmuk for five minutes, with red paint in one of his evil eyes? He would have plucked out Josef’s heart, held it in his hand, and eaten it raw with a chopped onion. How they would have feared him, these villagers! They did not fear his father, but gave him a grudging respect. Moses had joined the red partisans, the PPR, and the whites had put him on their death list. But Moses did not carry a gun or a knife; he walked around clutching a chess piece, a black queen—that was his weapon. He was the very best chess player in the district. He often played with a Polish prince, who had his own castle in Charzewice. They would sit for hours over the chessboard in Moses’ tiny apartment at Dobrowa. The SS had taken over the prince’s castle, and he was as much of a wanderer as Moses.

  And then one night, six months ago, the SS knocked on Moses’ door. Jurek’s mother was in mortal terror; Elzbieta Kosinska rarely stepped outside the apartment. She looked like Queen Esther, with her full-throated beauty and bewitching black eyes. No one, not even a half-wit, could have mistaken her for anything but a Jewess. And Moses, who had lived by his wits, with false papers, a new name, and a tiny fortune of dollars sewn into his pants, had to hide not only traces of his Jewish past but also his Queen Esther of a wife. She plucked her eyebrows and painted her nails. She read books. What else did she have to do? She was practically an heiress, had come from the Weinreichs, a family with far more wealth and culture than his own. And he had this unconscionable feeling that he always made too much noise in her presence, that he smacked his lips whenever he ate, that his footsteps were much too heavy. He wasn’t the Jewish prince that the Weinreichs had imagined for their only daughter. But how many Jewish princes could have gotten Elzbieta out of the scrape of having an SS captain in her foyer?

  He hadn’t come to arrest anyone. He was a certain Flotner, who had a hunger for chess. He must have heard from the Polish prince, whose castle he occupied, that Herr Professor Mieczyslaw Kosinski was the only reliable chess “companion” within a hundred kilometers, other than the prince himself. He did not wear any medals or death’s-head insignias. He wore a modest, unadorned uniform. He’d even brought cognac and cake.

  But Elzbieta couldn’t stop trembling. The apartment was filled with crucifixes and statues of the Holy Matka, but Captain Flotner did not even glance at them. He shook Jurek’s hand without taking off his kidskin gloves. Then he smiled at Henio, Jurek’s mysterious “half brother.” Henio was four years old; he had blue eyes and blond hair, and Moses had picked him up in Sandomierz, after they had fled from Lodz. At first, Jurek couldn’t understand why Moses would burden an overburdened family with a stray child. But all Jurek had to do was think of chess. Henio was part of their elaborate camouflage. He had the Gestapo recipe of irresistible blondness. And Moses was using him as his own form of “Sicilian defense” against SS captains and Polish farmers, to hurl them off guard and then mount his own curious counterattack. The invisibility he sought came from moving among his enemies; that’s how Moses blended in.

  Henio came with his own nanny, a devout Catholic named Katarzyna, who added luster to the camouflage. But Moses wasn’t harsh with Henio, didn’t treat him as a stepchild. Moses treated him with a tenderness he couldn’t seem to spare for Jurek, until Jurek plotted in his dreams to murder Henio. It was Elbieta who saved him, Elzbieta who ignored Moses and Henio and the nanny, and had Jurek polish her toenails while she combed his hair.

  The SS captain couldn’t keep his eyes off her. He watched her through the amber glow of his cognac. He asked her questions in Polish.

  “Madame Kosinska, you must be bored to death in this dreary village.”

  “I am,” she said; now it was Moses’ turn to tremble; he worried that the SS captain would stumble upon their Jewish past.

  “But surely, madame, you could visit us at Charzewice castle. My wife has learned to make the most elegant Polish dishes. And there isn’t one intelligent face to hold her attention—nothing but Polish blockheads. Promise me that you will come.”

  Moses leapt in. “My wife is tired, Herr Kapitan. She has a rare blood disorder. Nothing fatal. But it is difficult for her to travel—even to Charzewice castle.”

  It was Elzbieta who suddenly knew how to gamble with this SS man. “I will make the effort . . . for Frau Flotner.”

  And the chess game began. Moses could have beaten him with his eyes closed. But he had to play into the captain’s strengths, let him grab a sudden victory.

  “Herr Professor, that was magnificent. I congratulate you. I used every trick . . . but next time please don’t let me win.”

  He picked up Henio, carried him on his back, kissed Elzbieta’s hand, bowed to Jurek and Moses, and was gone.

  Elzbieta began to scream as soon as Captain Flotner’s motorcade left the village.

  “Moses, we must run—he knows, he knows. He will be back with his butchers.”

  But her husband bounced Henio on his knee. “It doesn’t matter what he knows. He’s lazy. He’d rather
play chess than hunt for Jews. But confound that captain. He’s a better player than I had figured. He let me think I was letting him win—Jurek, don’t you agree?”

  Jurek wasn’t pondering the complexities of this new match between the SS and his father, or the danger of his mother disappearing into the maw of Charzewice castle—there was none. He was dreaming of the captain’s kid glove, so soft it could smooth away the little bumps and wrinkles on his own hand. Jurek no longer cared about a life of adventure as a high-wire artist or a bomber pilot. He wanted to earn enough of a fortune to buy pair after pair of kidskin gloves.

  — 27 —

  IT WAS THE SECOND DAY IN THE FOREST, and their stomachs growled. Jozef Stepak had wild, unpardonable dreams of dining on the flesh of the village half-wit. The children he had sent out to forage had accomplished very little—a fistful of squashed berries and some rotten pigweed.

  “Brothers, it’s much too quiet. The Kalmuks might have set a trap for us. I will not lend them our wives and daughters.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Moses whispered in the elder’s ear. “But the Kalmuks are frightened of the Russians. They have lost their pępeki in the woods.”

  “It’s nothing to laugh at, Brother Mieczyslaw. They are vile men, with or without their pępeki.”

  “They are shadows,” Moses had to insist. “If the devil does not help them, nobody will.”

  Jozef and the other elders spat three times and crossed themselves. Moses smiled under the mask of his face. They are ignorant farmers, he mused. Their superstitions weigh on them like shit in their pants. The rosyjskis will have no use for the elders of Dobrowa.