Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

Several heated faces pressed close to mine and commiserated with Annabelle.

  “Nita, he wouldn’t dare,” the hunger artists tittered. I didn’t even mind their mocking tone. I was too involved with Annabelle’s aromas, and with her hip bone thrust into the small of my back like a delicious knife.

  And then Annabelle went off with her little band of artists and abandoned me to all the other barracudas. I wasn’t distraught. The Painted Bird had provided a key to Kosinski, and all I had to do was turn it once or twice. He’d come out of the war as the captain of his own secret service; that was how he managed to survive. If he was a changeling, a bird-boy, he incorporated whatever peculiarities he had into his own myth. He must have been plotting to leap into a salon like Annabelle’s since the age of seven. Writing novels was only a tiny portion of his secret service.

  Once Annabelle’s hip bone vanished from my back, I bore into him like a bird-boy of my own. I watched. He was the jester king of her crowd, entertaining Annabelle’s suitors and sycophants with tales of his childhood.

  “Yes,” he said in that clipped voice of the SS captain. “I was mute during most of the war. But there was a curious reversal once I was reunited with my mother and father. They had hidden themselves, and their lives had narrowed down into the dull belief that they had disappeared. They weren’t wanderers. The war had turned them to stone. I had lost my nanny and my books. I didn’t read one word while I was on the run. But I had to read the hate in a dog’s eye and the eagerness of some ignorant farmer to annihilate me because he despised the swarthiness of my skin. It was my survival kit. And when my mother and father found me, I saw in an instant that I had become their parent, that I had sprouted a porcupine’s quills while they shrank and shrank. I was armored and they were not.”

  But there were inconsistencies in the fabric that the jester king had spun, little bumps in the fiction. And one perceptive listener began to finger his jaw.

  “But why would your parents need porcupine quills, Jerry? They weren’t Jewish.”

  It was another of Kosinski’s fables that he’d been baptized before the war, when it was apparent from the rudest reading of The Painted Bird that the little boy with the Gypsy eyes had come from an educated Jewish family in Warsaw or Lodz. I was willing to bet that a Lower East Side witch like Annabelle must have sniffed his Jewishness but allowed her jester to keep his Catholic mask.

  He gathered in his shoulders and answered his acolyte.

  “The Germans wouldn’t leave my parents alone. My father had made remarks against the Nazis. He had to hide. He was an intellectual, a mathematician, and my mother was a concert pianist. But she couldn’t play in public. She had large breasts, and they embarrassed her. They would begin to flop and jiggle while she played, and she couldn’t bear it. She retired from the concert halls, sat at home while my father did his calculations and I scratched the alphabet on my slate. . . . The sound disturbed my mother. She had sensitive ears. It was swimming that consoled her. Mama loved to swim. But she had the same predicament at any seaside resort. She was convinced that everyone, even the little girls, stared at her breasts. She would lie under her blanket until it was dark and the beach grew deserted. Then she would make a dash into the water and whisper to me across the waves. ‘Jurek, where are you?’”

  “But darling, don’t lie,” said Scheherazade, who had returned to the side of her jester king. “Jurek, how could you hear your mother whispering from the water? Was she the siren of Cracow?”

  “Lodz,” said Kosinski. “We lived on Gdanska Street, in Lodz. And my father had an automobile, an Amerikanka, it was called, because it had an American motor. He sold textiles when he wasn’t solving mathematical problems or teaching linguistics, and he had to travel from town to town, but when my mother had a sudden, irresistible lust to swim, he would drop his textiles and drive us halfway across Poland to the Zanzibar, a little resort hotel on the Baltic Sea.

  “We were pensioners at the Zanzibar. Sometimes we would remain for a month. My father would play games of chess against himself, assuming a different personality whenever he pushed the white or black pieces, and I could no longer say which self was really his. He could change his persona, according to which side of the board he was on. It was camouflage, a way of blending in. My mother did not have that gift. She was solid and willful, and wouldn’t have known how to play a chameleon.”

  “Don’t torture us,” Scheherazade said with a pout, plucking at her own curls. “For God’s sake, what happened to your poor mother on the beach?”

  He was silent for a moment, relishing the static he had created. The war had turned Jurek into a storyteller whose mission it was to reshuffle things until his entire history was obscured.

  “Nita, nothing happened on the beach. After the other bathers went away and we were alone, Mama would dance in the water without a stitch of clothes. She wasn’t ashamed when I looked at her breasts.”

  “How dare you!” Annabelle giggled and growled. “Jurek, you were too young to have an erection. You couldn’t have been much older than four.”

  “Hypocrite,” Jurek hissed at her. “I’ve seen you bare your breasts in front of your own little boy.”

  “Only to educate him, darling . . . about a woman’s parts, and not until he was nine or ten. But your mother was perverse. Seducing a five-year-old.”

  “You’re wrong. She sat in the sea and pretended to play the piano on an imaginary bench. It wasn’t seduction, darling. Mama was sharing her performance with me.”

  “And what did she play?” Scheherazade asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “Chopin,” he said. “The concerto in F minor. I caught every single sound.”

  “That’s preposterous,” said one of Annabelle’s protégés, profoundly jealous. “Jurek is trying to bewitch us. Not even the Baltic Sea can capture a sound that doesn’t exist.”

  “I trust him with my life,” said Annabelle. “Feed us, Jurek. And silence this fool. How could you tell what your mother was playing?”

  “By the movement of her hands on the keyboard.”

  “There was no keyboard,” her young protégé smirked.

  “Shut up,” said Annabelle. “And leave this house at once.”

  She took Kosinski’s hand and led him into her own labyrinth of rooms, shutting every door between her and ourselves.

  I WAS SURPRISED WHEN JASPERS HIMSELF invited me to spend the weekend at his beach house in the Hamptons. The senator and I had never met before, but we sat on his sundeck like a couple of conspirators, sipping our vodka tonics. He was goggle-eyed, like a great big frog, with spindly arms and legs and a swollen chest that beat under his polo shirt with the force of a second heart. His father had been a tailor in Manhattan who specialized in chauffeurs’ uniforms, so how did Lionel Jaspers get so rich? It was rumored that his money came from the Shah of Iran, that he was little better than a secret agent for the Shah. All I know is that he was madly in love with his wife.

  He followed her every move with his goggle eyes. His son, Lionel Jr., was away at summer camp. But Lionel Sr. couldn’t have Scheherazade to himself. She liked to live within a whirlwind of other men. And this weekend was a whirlwind of one—Kosinski.

  The senator seethed in his deck chair and suddenly attacked.

  “You’re Jerzy’s jackal, aren’t you? You help him with his filthy deeds and then dust up and get rid of all the traces. I hear you come from a long line of hit men. You know, I was the first to sponsor Jurek. I gave him his start. I introduced him to Hank.” The senator could see my perplexed look. “Hank, Hank, you idiot. Henry Kissinger. Hank is fond of that Polish Houdini, says Jurek’s a treasure, a real find. But he ignores it when Jurek and Nita play footsies under the table.”

  Jurek seemed to steer away from Annabelle’s own tempestuous path while we were out at the Hamptons. He was too involved with his “comet.” It was a miniature make-piece stove that consisted of a tin can punctured with holes and filled with smoldering leaves and wood, attached
to a length of wire that he would swing like a lasso until it shot sparks of fire into the air that resembled shivering stars. Such a tin can had been the most important apparatus in The Painted Bird. A comet had kept the little boy from starving. He carried it everywhere. With it, he could heat potatoes that he took from some farmer’s bin. He could fight off dogs and gangs of wild boys with a judicious swing of his fiery can.

  And Jurek didn’t abandon his comet, not even when Annabelle appeared suddenly in a straw hat and a one-piece black swimsuit that was meant to eat into our hearts. But she didn’t twitch her tail or smolder like a femme fatale. She walked an unwavering line to the beach and stood in the water as stern as a schoolmarm. I couldn’t fathom her little parade until I realized she was luring Kosinski away from his comet with her own bag of tricks. She didn’t conjure up an imaginary keyboard and pretend to play Chopin on the Baltic Sea with her breasts bared, as Jurek’s mother, Elzbieta, had done. She just stood there in her black tank suit and Jurek smelled his mother. He dropped his magic stove and went down to the water, as if in a trance. The power of his tale about the Baltic had emboldened her to be Elzbieta. Jurek was caught in his own trap. Scheherazade had diminished the storyteller, turned him into a child.

  The senator sniffed the sea air with bitterness, his frog’s eyes appearing to pop out of his head.

  “I can put you on my payroll . . . as my confidential secretary on the Hill. I wouldn’t ask you to spy. I’m not interested in the sordid details, Ian. I want to make sure that Nita is safe. Will you tell me if he tries to hurt her? I hear he pulled a gun on some guy who objected to the portrait of Polacks in one of his books. I could have had Jurek thrown out of the country, but the son of a bitch became a citizen a couple of years ago. I could still have him thrown out, but Nita would have a fit and find another Polack with skinny shoulders who can build a storm inside a tin can. You aren’t a novelist, are you?”

  I didn’t have to answer, and what could I have said? That I was a footloose jackal in the employ of Peter Sellers.

  The senator wouldn’t have understood a word. And how could I ever console him? Jurek and Annabelle were locked in an embrace that didn’t require tongues and spit and private parts. He might have howled with displeasure had he caught them copulating like a pair of wild dogs. But his Scheherazade would never have captured him in a primal tale of mother and child. Lionel wasn’t a storyteller. He was a politician who could swat at his opponents until they were paralyzed with fear. But I doubt that he could ever have stood in the sea with Annabelle and fallen into the same sort of trance.

  — 7 —

  WHILE JUREK WAS IN THE WATER with Annabelle, and the senator watched with his frog’s eyes, I devoured Steps, Kosinski’s second novel. It was even more frightening than The Painted Bird: The nameless bird-boy has grown into a monstrous storyteller whose disparate tales are like a series of steps toward oblivion; the narrator is trying to erase us as he erases himself, but he leaves several smudges, his own marks in the mirror, which become points of navigation put there to preserve our sanity.

  If we stare into the mirror long enough, we catch Kosinski at his sleight of hand, and realize that the war has robbed the bird-boy of his childhood: He’s become a golem without a human guide, bereft of pity and remorse; and this relentless book takes us right inside the golem’s head. We are lost, horrified, as the narrator relates to us his cruel seductions and tricks: The tale of Ewka, the goiter girl, coupling with a goat in The Painted Bird bothers us, because we know that the little boy is in love with her, and craved her touch. But the echo of that scene in Steps, where a peasant girl copulates with a large animal as part of a private show, leaves us bewildered, because we cannot locate a point of view. The narrator sees everything around him as a spectacle, and while the peasant girl screams in pain, he imagines that her suffering is part of the show.

  I wasn’t accustomed to the disconnection I had experienced in Steps. But Kosinski’s own contours become recognizable after a while—the boy who weaves his way through a deadening Communist regime in Poland and arrives in America wearing an overcoat of Siberian wolf fur that shrinks in the rain, who wanders through supermarkets stealing black caviar, becomes an outlaw cavorting with outlaws, dreams of inflicting punishment and pain, of littering highways with a load of bent nails and watching as the cars crash.

  The bird-boy lost his soul sometime during the war, just as he lost the power of speech; and the sounds that come back to him later like some ghostly boomerang have their own lamentable music. The narrator he will become in Steps begins to haunt a sanitarium for patients with tuberculosis; he makes love to one of the dying women by staring at her reflection in the mirror; he photographs her naked body, and tries to imagine his own face in the reflected image of her flesh. A nun at the sanitarium accuses him of being a “hyena,” who feeds upon the dying and hastens their death.

  And Kosinski’s staggered, unadorned music had crept out of a golem and a ghoul. It was the mark of his writing, with its sunless territories and stark furniture. Wasn’t Mr. Chance a kind of ghost who was shoved into the land of the living and finds it even more somber than his own existence? And so was Sellers. He was constantly lamenting about his own immaterial being. “I’m a ghost, love. I’m gone, departed, unless I play a part.”

  He went from role to role, but even then he was diminished and mummified. He faded more and more each time he was Inspector Clouseau. And I was hoping that Chance might revive him, that he might rediscover his own lost face inside the flesh of Kosinski’s gardener. But I couldn’t get him that role by badgering Kosinski. The best attack was no attack at all.

  I did not mention Pete’s name once in the Hamptons. I read my book, tore into the charred steaks that Jurek prepared on the senator’s fire, drank vodka tonics with Frog Eyes, watched Jurek twirl his comet, wondering if those sparks could conjure up a Polish wood? Or was it another manipulation of that man in Steps who liked to photograph dying women?

  Where was the baroness who was supposed to be his companion? Frog Eyes kept talking about her while we fed like vampires on our bloodless steaks. He was very drunk. “You’ve been hiding the baroness again, you rogue. Jurek, I can’t play chess without the baroness . . . unless you care to play.”

  The bird-boy stared at him. “I abandoned chess years ago, Senator. I played against my father in Poland. He wanted to make me into the grand master of Lodz. But I refused. He locked me in the closet.”

  “When was that, darling?” Scheherazade asked, pretending to nibble at her steak, which had the consistency of burnt cardboard.

  “Weeks before the war,” he said. “My governess would implore him to let me out of the closet. ‘Not until he promises to play,’ said Papa. And so I played with him, plotting my revenge.”

  “Darling, you can’t mean that,” said Annabelle, her own eyes swelling with mischief.

  “But I did. I picked up the game after the war. My father became a minor official in the Polish Workers’ Party. Papa so much wanted to blend in. He would rise within the party by never making a single demand for himself. We had our own car and driver. But Papa suffered several heart attacks and was soon pensioned off. He saw this as a godsend. Now he had all the time in the world to tutor me in chess. But photography was my passion, not black and white queens. I was in high school and went chasing after girls. I would win over the prettiest ones by asking them to pose for me. But Papa tried to interfere. He said I couldn’t wander around Lodz with my camera as a weapon. I had to stay home after school and memorize the moves of earlier chess champions. We got into a fight. He ran and hid inside the closet. It wasn’t the same closet where he had once locked me inside. We now lived on Senatorska Street, in the spacious quarters of an ex–party official. But I hadn’t forgotten that dark place of punishment. Papa had terrified me, had once made me whimper, and promise to become his own little chess champion. Now I heard him tremble in the closet. I would have kept him in there for months, fed him little scraps un
der the door, forced him to piss and shit on a great pile of clothes. But Mother cried that he would have another heart attack if I kept him in there too long. I couldn’t bear to watch her beg. I unlocked the closet and let the pensioner out, the mathematician who wanted to turn his own son into a chess problem.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” said the senator, “I can’t digest my food with all that palaver. Just tell the baroness that I would love to play chess with her.”

  Jurek went on grilling more steaks à la Kosinski, a skill he had picked up from Polish peasants while he was a little vagabond. He allowed the steaks to “marinate” in a bed of dried leaves that built up an archipelago of smoke and smothered the meat. The peasants must have used that trick to disguise the taste of rotten meat in war-torn Poland. But Jurek had twisted their piece of adversity into his own primitive cuisine.

  ON THE WAY HOME TO MANHATTAN in his customized Buick with tailfins and a bumper of metallic teeth, he still wouldn’t talk about the baroness. He invited me to visit him the very next evening. His front door was open when I arrived. I walked into the apartment but couldn’t find Kosinski. Manuscripts and photographs were strewn about, and though I didn’t mean to pry, I was riveted by the woman in the photographs—all were studies of the same face in varying degrees of agony. The woman possessed a stark, painful grandeur. I couldn’t discern the color of her hair or eyes; the shots were in black and white. But the photos seemed to chart the woman’s disintegration; in several of them her hair had begun to fall out; in others she had a lion’s mane and a piercing smile, as if she were showing off her defiant love for the photographer; in some her eyes were hollowed out and her cheeks sucked in.

  I panicked for a moment, wondered if I were witnessing an act of necrophilia. Was she the sick patient from Steps, the woman he had photographed in a mirror during the various stages of her “death”?