Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

“Mitka, we’ll all burn.”

  Mitka waved the rifle like a magic wand and the fire went out.

  A few of the hawk’s twisted feathers had floated down to Jurek. He captured one in his fist; it was very hot. He was about to celebrate their victory over Szatan when he heard a cry that rent his heart; it was like no other sound he had ever heard, a caterwaul from deep within the throat.

  Lech stood with the white crow in his hands; it didn’t have one misplaced feather, one string of blood. The shock of seeing that hawk explode must have killed it.

  THAT WAS JUREK’S GOOD-BYE TO SHARPSHOOTERS and the Red Army. Oh, they were around a little longer, bivouacking at the edge of the forest while German prisoners fell into the hands of the NKVD. But the white crow’s death had cast a pall over Jurek. And he didn’t have Szatan or another hawk to fuel his hatred.

  Lech couldn’t seem to recover. He had borne the deaths of his other birds. But to have this white crow die as a result of Szatan’s death was too much for him. He stopped painting birds. He was listless all the time. But Jurek could only imagine the sadness and pain behind Lech’s blank stares.

  It was Gavrila who wanted to convert the entire planet to the beauties of socialism, Gavrila who attempted to shake Lech out of his empty-eyed torpor. A prostytutka had come to the Russian camp of her own free will. There were no SS men to trap her inside a green bus. Her name was Eva, like Hitler’s kochanka. The NKVD had interviewed her first and roughed her up a little. Gavrila snatched Eva away from them, insisting that even the diabolic SS were too far gone to send a sixteen-year-old prostytutka to spy on the Red Army.

  But Gavrila interviewed her himself. And it was Jurek’s misfortune that Gavrila allowed him to attend the interview. Her face was cut where the NKVD had struck her with the rings on their fists, and Gavrila had daubed the cuts with iodine, which left enormous orange splotches. These splotches only highlighted her loveliness. She had large pink lips and eyes that shone like blue crystal. And Jurek was hopelessly in love with this Eva at first sight—that was his woe.

  They all sat at a table in the forest, as if at a summer picnic. Gavrila had given Jurek and young Eva a papieros to share. And it inflamed Jurek to puff on a papieros from Eva’s lips. Gavrila opened his cardboard case and had her read one of his pamphlets in Polish. Eva couldn’t read without moving her magnificent lips.

  “Do you believe in socialism, child, that we have no life outside the common good?”

  “Tak,” she said, like a true believer.

  “And no one coerced you to come, bribed you, or beat you up?”

  “Tak.”

  “And you understand that prostytutkis are not condoned or recognized in the Red Army, and that we cannot pay you?”

  “Tak.”

  “Then why have you come here, child?”

  “The Germans butchered my village, Pan Komisar. How can a panienka repay except with her body?”

  Gavrila began to sniffle. This panienka had made him cry.

  “But you could help bandage our wounded, you could . . .”

  “Please,” she said. “I am not so good with bandages. I will be a socialist prostytutka. But unofficial, not on your record books. Would you like to sample Eva, Pan Komisar? But the little boy must close his eyes. I am ashamed to undress in front of him.”

  Gavrila couldn’t stop sniffling.

  “It is kind,” he said, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. “And I cherish your offer—but, you see, I am a proselytizer, like a priest without his cross.”

  Eva smiled with a gentle seduction that infuriated Jurek, because that seduction hadn’t gone to him.

  “Pan Komisar, I like priests without crosses.”

  But he still would not go deeper into the woods with Eva, hand in hand. And when he offered her Lech, who was waiting behind a tree with his usual blank stare, she ruffled her nose.

  “Is he kastrat, Pan Komisar, a boy without a pępek?”

  “Silence!” said Gavrila. “Comrade Eva, he is your first case.”

  She laughed now, grabbed Lech by the rope he wore around his waist. He was bewildered but went with her willingly. Jurek watched with burning eyes until his sweetheart vanished with Lech in a tangle of leaves.

  “Gavrila,” he shouted, “I’m next.”

  “Impossible. Your father will have me court-martialed.”

  “I’m next. You’re responsible for a whole regiment. What could my papa do to you? He’s not even Russian. I’m next.”

  “Holy Peter! You heard her. She wouldn’t even undress in front of you.”

  “Then why did you bring me here?”

  “To sit in on an interrogation,” he said. “To have you learn the ways of men and women.”

  “I learned enough,” he said. “I’m next.”

  And he dashed into the woods, followed Eva’s vanishing trail. She must have heard him coming. She jumped out of the leaves, with Lech’s filthy blouse covering her nakedness. She had twigs in her hair, but he didn’t see a sign of Lech.

  “Miss Eva, I am Lech’s adviser. I should have what he has. It’s only fair.”

  “Fair?” she said, her nose ruffling like an adorable rabbit.

  She slapped his face.

  And he knew that he would be in love with her for life.

  — 32 —

  HE NEVER SAW EVA AGAIN, and he was furious with Gavrila—he prayed for some prince who could deliver him and demand that the rosyjskis leave Polish soil. And when he asked Lech to explain what had happened behind that curtain of leaves, he was more furious than ever. Lech couldn’t capture much with words. Lech looked at him with those injured, vacant eyes.

  “Soft,” he said. “She was soft.”

  “What was soft? Where was she soft?”

  “Soft,” he said.

  And Jurek was furious enough to strangle him, but it would only have magnified the fever in Lech’s brain. He stopped going to church. He decided to quit school and become a vagabond like the famous rysyjski writer, Maksym Gorky, who was a boatman on the Volga. Jurek was sick of forests and barns and the mewling cries of cats and cows. He might become a river pirate. He fought with his father, who insisted that the Kosinskis keep up their Catholic credentials.

  “Jurek, it is our way of hiding.”

  “Papa, I do not want to hide. I want to run.”

  “But we must go and listen to the Mass.”

  Moses chased him across the apartment while Jurek shouted, “Zydek, zydek,” and pushed Henio aside in his Red Army uniform. Even his mother chased him. But he had grown too strong, too supple, having to fight off other altar boys, who had tried to undress him for two years and peek at his pępek. But when his mother started to cry, Jurek ran to her and said, “Mama, mama.”

  And he went to church one last time. But he wouldn’t chant the Lord’s Prayer or receive Communion. He kept to himself. He read books.

  “Papa, teach me angielski.”

  “Why? Are you going to parachute into London with the Polish free brigade? Better you should improve your chess game.”

  “Papa, I’m tired of chess. Our whole existence has been a chess game. The Germans could never solve your defense. That’s why we are still alive. You kept your queen in a blind. But when will we strike back?”

  “And reveal ourselves? We will hide the black queen. If I have to be with the reds today, I will be with the reds.”

  “But Papa, all these hidden maneuvers have exhausted me. I feel like I’m a hundred—when will I have time to be a boy?”

  “When all our enemies are in the grave.”

  “I can’t wait that long. I will inherit Lech’s fever.”

  And while he was hibernating in his father’s house, he heard a woman serenade him in the street. He leapt with nervous joy. It’s Eva, he muttered to himself. She has come to ask my forgiveness and invite me into the woods.

  He leaned halfway out the window. It wasn’t Eva. It was a different prostytutka, with a man’s shoulders. He groaned inside hi
s head. It was the sharpshooter in a blond wig, with a smudge of lipstick on his mouth. He was very drunk. Mitka must have been entertaining his regiment.

  “Come downstairs, little brother. I miss you.”

  But Jurek ducked under the window and clapped his hands over his ears. What disturbed him most was that he was drawn to the blond wig and Mitka’s raw, red mouth.

  THE ENTIRE REGIMENT MARCHED through the village in a dust storm it alone created. Jurek wouldn’t whistle or wave any flags. He kept indoors. But after the clatter of the rosyjskis was gone, Jurek ran outside with remorse. He hadn’t said good-bye to his friends. He was like Szatan, that dead hawk, who could not love or weep, but only devour painted birds.

  He was a hawk.

  But Szatan could not believe his eyes. He saw Gavrila in a military tunic loping down a hill with his cardboard case. Jurek ran to him. He didn’t dare embrace a commissar.

  “Gavrila, I thought you had gone—forever.”

  “Would I desert my Jurek? Brother, give me a kiss.”

  And Gavrila did not demean him, did not scold him as a difficult child. He kissed Jurek the way two adult rosyjskis would kiss—on the mouth.

  “You hurt Mitka’s feelings. He loves you.”

  Jurek started to cry. “I love him, too, brother. But I think this war has given me brain fever. Take me with you, Gavrila. I won’t be a nuisance. I’ll deliver leaflets from your case.”

  “And would you make orphans out of your mama and papa? They will grieve for you, Jurek.”

  “Then let them grieve,” he said.

  “And if you have no heart, how can I trust you?”

  “But I have a heart—for you. And Eva. Where is she, brother? Did you hide her in a tank?”

  “No,” said Gavrila, the playfulness gone out of his eyes. “I could not have her become the secret whore of a Soviet regiment. It was the same as a death sentence. My boys would wear her out within a month. And then the NKVD would have stolen Eva, put her in one of their special camps.”

  “But Gavrila, at least she wouldn’t starve. You might have sentenced her to death by setting her free.”

  “No,” he said. “Our red partisan brothers found work for Eva in an orphanage.”

  “Your red partisan brothers belong to the NKVD. And even if they didn’t, she won’t have Gavrila to look after her.”

  Gavrila tapped Jurek on the shoulder. “Must I protect every stray girl in Poland?”

  “Tak,” Jurek said.

  “Would you turn me into a little saint?”

  “Tak.”

  “But I am a man who belches and breathes like every other man.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “And hide you in a tank?” said Gavrila. “You will visit me in Moscow when the war is over. But you must finish school. Do you swear not to run away from your own little father?”

  Jurek shivered with the force of his own lament. “Gavrila, I cannot swear. It would be a lie.”

  He plotted like an NKVD man. He had little remorse about abandoning the village and the mask his papa had imposed upon him—the little Catholic boy who couldn’t show his pępek. It was time to put on another mask. He would become a fatherless boy, like the little zyds who ran into the woods when the Germans raided their towns and villages; these wild boys lived on roots and bark, and they had their own lantern-stoves, perforated tin cans they filled with peat—such kometki often saved their lives. They would attach a kometka to a long piece of rope, hurl it at gangs of Christian boys who tried to capture them and collect a “ransom” from the Gestapo or the SS. They could heat a stolen potato with a kometka, knock a squirrel from a tree. But it was the light of a kometka that ruined them. Farmers could see it flicker in the forest, and so could the SS, who chased them with dogs. Not one wild boy survived the war.

  But now the SS was on the run, and Jurek had the forest to himself. He built a kometka, baked potatoes on its blackened lid. He couldn’t join up with the rosyjskis. He was much too small, but he could shadow Gavrila’s regiment if he ever found it. That regiment had become his ideal circus. You didn’t have to join this circus, just chase after it from town to town.

  But his plan fell to nothing. He hadn’t counted on his father’s ingenuity—Moses had enlisted the NKVD to help him find his own wild boy. They captured him in a forest with the help of his kometka. They were very polite.

  “How is Gavrila’s little friend?”

  He was starving, and they fed him grapes from a wrinkled sack. With all his wandering, his pioneering in the forest, his “conquest” had gotten him no further than twenty kilometers from Dabrowa.

  He arrived in a NKVD car, like a visiting dignitary. But no one clapped. Villagers gaped at him from their windows with sinister smiles. But he didn’t feel shame—he felt nothing at all. Even as Moses ran to him with tears in his eyes, Jurek dreamt of Szatan’s wings, of flying far from Dabrowa and finding another circus. And one day he will.

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