The Devil Tree
Page 20
She bowed her head, lay down on the rug, and spread her hands. Her calves tensed as she thrust out her toes. He stared at the mirror that was propped against the wall and saw himself slip into her. Soon, her skin dry and cool against him, he could not distinguish between her flesh and his own. He probed deeper. Her face glistened in the light, and as she spread her thighs wide she drew her fingers together behind his back.
Still fixed on their reflection in the mirror, he saw himself and Karen doubled up, clutching each other, thrusting, the mirror a witness of the last moment of his intoxication, of his useless passion. He looked away, then withdrew. He stood up.
He pulled her up by the arm and sat her on the chair. As he held her by the shoulder with one hand, he brought the open palm of his other hand down on her face. She recoiled; he held her fast and, his hand a fist now, struck her once again. She spun away, gasping, and he let her fall into the chair facedown. No longer could he see her eyes.
Karen remained motionless. He waited for her to scream or try to hit him, but she did not. Without looking at her, he walked across the room, opened the door to his study, entered, and shut the door behind him.
• • •
He lay in his bed in the Swiss clinic, fully dressed, staring at the ceiling. In pain but not knowing why, he only wanted his mind turned off. The simplest tasks—dressing or undressing, turning the light on or off, closing or opening the window—seemed beyond his will and strength.
He could sense the coming of day without opening his eyes, even when the shutters of his room were closed. Awake long before the staff, he listened for the day’s first sound: a footstep in the clinic’s corridors, the rumbling of a bus through the streets, the buzz of a motorboat on Lake Geneva.
He lay like a stone on the shore, unmoved by the waves washing over him. A heavy weight seemed to press constantly against his chest.
Once in a while he longed for change, and he knew that the longing itself was a prelude to recovery. But the longing tired him, and then all he wanted was to endure. His thoughts returned to the faraway hospital in Rangoon, to the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel: “To my heart I am of great moment. The challenge I face is how to actualize, how to concretize the quiet eminence of my being.”
One night Whalen’s body refused to sleep. He rose, left the clinic, and walked to the shore of the lake. A sheet of mist rolled along the water, hiding all but the nearest banks from view. The smell of moss spread through the air. He sniffed the dew, listened to the lapping of the water against the stones of the lakeshore, and felt the skin prickle on the back of his neck. The fog lifted. He stared across the lake and saw the blinking lights of Geneva.
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, and 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 well as the collection of selected essays Passing By (1992).
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), André 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.