Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  A few years after the article in the Voice, I listened to him on NPR. A local station in Atlanta was a far cry from Johnny Carson and the Academy Awards, but it might have been a better venue for a bird-boy in retreat. It offered him the chance to plunge right back into the maelstrom without getting hurt.

  “Of course I had helpers at the beginning,” he said. “How could I not? Conrad knew some English as a boy and he sailed on British vessels—his English was mixed with the language of the sea. But I didn’t have captain’s papers. I was a scholar and a confidence man. That’s how I had always survived. My English had a jagged edge, and I didn’t want my readers to bloody themselves over my books.”

  Then he steered the interview away from the controversy of authorship to the controversy of himself. Yes, he was Jewish, but he had been protected by priests during the war, was even an altar boy, and had had to pretend he was Catholic. “I cannot function without disguises and masks,” he said. “Sometimes I wear a mask a little too long. But it’s difficult to discard.”

  He’d married the baroness that year—1987—but talked about his first wife, Martha Will, the widow of a multimillionaire. Her friends had called him a fortune hunter. They wouldn’t allow him into their clubs, certain that Martha had made him rich. But it was Martha who had bankrupted him. They went to the fanciest restaurants and hotels—the Ritz, the Connaught—and it was Jurek who had to pay the tips. He carried “a moneybag,” a briefcase filled with dollar bills. Whatever royalties he would earn from his writing went inside this briefcase. He had to borrow from the doormen at 740 Park, or he couldn’t have gotten through the month. Martha was an alcoholic who often blacked out. She died of a brain tumor, according to Kosinski.

  The interviewer was eager to learn about Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. Jurek had met her in ’69 at Princeton, where she had parked herself after coming to America and where he had arrived to teach on a fellowship. “I was crazy about Lana,” he said. “I mean, it wasn’t a love affair. We had no sexual links. But I was addicted to her—to her eyes, the smell of her hair. We were like two lost kids in the New World. I would shiver around her, and she would hold me in her arms. ‘Lana,’ I would say, ‘I’m so sad.’ But she was the sad one, caught without her children.

  “I’d just published The Painted Bird, and the Poles had mounted a smear campaign against me, swore I had vilified their country and all its peasants. And the Soviets were smearing Svetlana, saying she was a mental case who had abandoned her own children for a life of luxury in the West. Luxury. We fed on chicken salad and bruised tomatoes, Lana and I. But I kept seeing Stalin in her eyes. I had worshiped Soviet Russia’s Little Father after the war. It was the Russians who had rescued me, with their tanks and their soldiers who smelled of onions and bitter tobacco. To this day I can’t go into a restaurant without ordering a dish of chopped onions.

  “And she’d say, ‘Jurek, why are you looking at me with your Mongolian eyes?’ What could I tell her? That I was some insane groupie? That I couldn’t believe I was sharing chopped onions and a chicken sandwich with Stalin’s daughter? I had to hide behind a writer’s wit. ‘Lana,’ I said, ‘I’m in love with you. Let’s get married.’

  “And she laughed. ‘Jurek, it would only lead to my third divorce. We’re not suited as marriage partners. Neither of us is practical. You can’t clean, and I can’t cook. We would end up living on a mountain of our own garbage. But you can still be my brother for life.’

  “Her brother for life. She moved away from Princeton and married one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices. That’s the last I ever heard of Lana. There was idle talk that she’d landed on the moon, and was incarcerated in some asylum. It sounds like Soviet propaganda—‘Who else but a lunatic would ever leave the motherland?’

  “But Lana was no lunatic. How could Stalin’s daughter, raised on apples, onions, and the Kremlin’s own soup, have thrived in the land of Snow White? She must have got lost on some American prairie and couldn’t read the exit sign. I miss her. I was much less lonely when I ate chicken salad with Stalin’s little redhead. She was the only real sister I ever had.”

  I MISSED LANA, TOO. Perhaps it’s because Jurek was a much better storyteller when he talked about someone else’s travail. I had my own troubles. I slipped into petty crime, or at least the fringes of it. I was fifty years old. My looks were going; I couldn’t afford to have my teeth fixed. I became the caretaker at a “Gestapo cellar,” an S&M club that didn’t seem to have a fixed location. Nefertiti’s Harbor catered to married couples. Its guests were all anonymous: the marquis, the admiral, the duchess. But I could have sworn that I spotted Senator Jaspers and his Scheherazade under the discreet wisdom of a black mask. They didn’t stay more than five minutes, or involve themselves with certain regulars like the marquis or the duchess, who cried with delight whenever a man or woman in a mask peed into a flowerpot.

  Nefertiti’s Harbor had its own Queen of the Night, a dominatrix named Anna Karenina, who ran the club for her best clients. She must have been seventy years old. There were all sorts of tales about Anna Karenina, that she had once made it with Marilyn Monroe, and that Jack Kennedy liked to have the soles of his feet whipped with velvet cords.

  “It humbled him,” she said. “And it had a medicinal purpose—it relieved the pain in his lower back.”

  I didn’t believe or disbelieve Anna Karenina; she paid me to listen and to keep order at the club. I never had to wear chains, and I was never whipped.

  “Ian,” she liked to say, “you’re immune to my charms. It’s a pity that you’re not a boy who thrives on pain. Can you believe I was once beautiful? Marilyn couldn’t take her eyes off me.”

  I didn’t find her seductive in the least. She had as much sexuality as an animal trainer in a circus. But Anna Karenina is the one who brought up Jerzy Kosinski.

  “Ian, have you read The Painted Bird?”

  “Yes, Anna, every page.”

  “I’m in the book. He modeled Ewka after me, that little string bean with the goiter who prefers a goat to any boy or man. Ewka broke his heart, and so did I. . . . Ian, confess. Don’t I remind you of that little string bean?”

  “Yes,” I told her without hesitation. I couldn’t have handled my rent without Anna Karenina.

  And the very next time that Nefertiti’s Harbor convened, a man appeared in a mask that was an exact mold of Kosinski’s face. It disturbed me because it hadn’t leapt out of Pluto’s forest—it was the mask of someone flaunting his own fame. The tall woman near him must have been the baroness, with her masculine features that no mask could hide. Together they seemed to rule over the séance.

  I didn’t dare approach them. I was the hired help who passed around the potato chips—alcohol was never served at Anna Karenina’s. But Jurek approached me. He was smoking a cigarette in the space between the mold of his mouth. And for a moment it seemed that the mask itself was on fire. But it was nothing more than the practiced illusion of Nefertiti’s lighting.

  “Ian,” he said between licks of the cigarette. “You’ll have to forgive me. I asked Anna to hire you. I’ve been keeping up with your career.”

  “Jurek, I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “But I’ve seen you at least six times, dear boy. You wouldn’t have noticed. I have a penchant for disguises. I followed you around.”

  I couldn’t hide my anger. I felt humiliated, defeated by Jurek’s own metaphysics.

  “Did you think so little of me that you couldn’t say hello?”

  His pupils gleamed like black marbles in the eyeholes of his mask.

  “I meant to say hello. But I was enjoying my little game too much—the pleasure of watching you.”

  “Like Mr. Chance. But I don’t want to be part of your game, Jurek. Please spy on someone else.”

  “We’re all tricksters,” he said. “But I promise to say hello next time.”

  He bowed in his Mephisto mask and disappeared with the baroness.

  I FELT
LIKE A HAUNTED MAN. I hadn’t come to terms with Jurek. He did look out for me in his own way. Perhaps I was another freak in Pluto’s forest—I would never have found Nefertiti had it not been for Jurek. And so I went up to that forest in Harlem again, to the freak show of parading prostitutes. But Jurek wasn’t there. And most of the freaks were gone.

  I could have survived on my gigs at Nefertiti’s, but I also worked the different street fairs in Manhattan. I sold secondhand books. It wasn’t very profitable, because I didn’t pay much attention to current tastes. I had twenty copies of Lolita, five of Ulysses, ten of The Painted Bird.

  And once, on an autumn afternoon, Jurek wandered out of the rain and into my bazaar of books. He wasn’t wearing a molded mask, but a watch cap that cut across one of his black eyebrows.

  “Bravo, Ian, you’re the last little soldier of literature in all of Manhattan.”

  “Jurek, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so rude at Nefertiti’s.”

  “I was the one who was rude. I involved you in my games. . . . I’ve just come back from Poland. Toured the country like a lion—and a lost son. The Painted Bird hasn’t been translated into Polish, but everyone seems to have read the book.”

  “Even the secret police?”

  Jurek laughed. “Of course. It’s a policeman’s bible, full of tricks. In Cracow, in Warsaw, in Lodz, people would come in through the window wherever I spoke and carry me into the streets . . . and here I have to wonder if people will spit in my face.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You’re not really an outcast.”

  “How can I be while you stand in the rain with my books?”

  Some customers arrived at my booth; I took my eyes off him for a moment, and the bird-boy was gone, but not for good. Jurek returned in twenty minutes wearing a sou’wester, like some fisherman adrift in Manhattan. The rain slid off his oilskin hat and coat. He was carrying a contraption that reminded me of a doctor’s bag or a salesman’s sample kit, but made of cardboard, or so it seemed. The rain beat on this bag with a terrifying intensity—Jurek could have held a drum in his hands.

  He was weeping like a little boy under his sou’wester.

  “Jurek, what’s wrong?”

  He reached into his sample kit and pulled out stacks of hundred-dollar bills. “I have ten thousand dollars,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  I was perplexed. My inventory of books wasn’t even worth a hundred-dollar bill.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I want you to kill me,” he said.

  — 12 —

  WE WENT TO A COFFEE SHOP, sat in the back, where people couldn’t spy on us. It was odd. His face itself had become a mask of skin—with bumps and gnarls of flesh all over, like a great carbuncle.

  “Look at Jerzy,” he said. “Jerzy had to stop skiing—it’s his heart. And yesterday he cracked a tooth biting into a biscuit. He’ll have to live for the rest of his life on buttermilk. Kill me.”

  “Cut it out. I won’t be your angel of death.”

  “But you need the money. And what could be simpler? You’ll sit with me. We’ll talk about women. I’ll take some pills, and when I get a little sleepy, you’ll put a bag over my head.”

  “Lovely,” I said. “You planned it to the letter. Why can’t the baroness be your helpmate?”

  “I don’t want her involved in this. She’ll start to cry . . . and I’ll get distracted.”

  That lunatic began to cackle. “Mr. Chance never used your capabilities.”

  “You mean Peter Sellers.”

  “It was playing Chance that killed him, really. He could never climb out of that role. But he should have exploited your talents.”

  “As an assassin. But Jurek, I’m only an assassin in your dreams.”

  “That’s not what Anya tells me. She says you’re the terror of her club. Her best clients are frightened of you. . . . They want to be whipped to death by Little Ian.”

  “Anya shouldn’t have given my secrets away.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Your Mr. Chance should have paid you to strangle me. I deviled him on the set of Being There.”

  I didn’t want to remind Jurek that it was Sellers who had seized the film, stolen it away.

  “Let’s have a rehearsal,” he said, “a dry run.”

  “Stop it!”

  The baroness appeared at our table. She must have been searching everywhere for Jurek. He shouted at her.

  “Why do you follow me? I’m plotting with my friend.”

  “You have no friends,” she said.

  The baroness had dark circles under her eyes. She drank from Jurek’s coffee cup. He fell against her shoulder.

  “Mr. Diggers, you must not encourage him. He doesn’t write; he doesn’t sleep. It exhausts him just to play Jerzy Kosinski.”

  THE BARONESS WAS RIGHT. A few months later, she discovered him soaking in the tub with a plastic bag twisted around his head. The obituaries hinted at a heart condition and a suicide note—it was May of ’91.

  I went to Anna Karenina, searching for some sense to Kosinski. I didn’t wait for the next séance of her club. I visited Anna at her tiny penthouse on the Upper East Side. Every one of her bookcases held a matryoshka, that mysterious Russian doll within a doll, with its labyrinthine cave where each doll had a tinier replica inside itself, like a secret hollow of pregnant dolls. Anna could feel my fascination for the matryoshka. And it was funny. Without the leather stuff of a dominatrix, she did have a strange, ethereal beauty in her close-cropped silver hair. She was dressed in a mourner’s shawl of black lace. And she couldn’t stop crying.

  “Jurek loved my dolls. He said he couldn’t have conceived The Painted Bird without them. . . . I’m his widow.”

  “What about the baroness?”

  “A devoted clerk,” said Nefertiti. “The baroness kept track of his mistresses in a little book, but Jurek was mine. He was my own little Gypsy. He would hide in the closet while I made love to other men. And after they were gone, he’d lure me into the closet and jump on me for five minutes. It was sweet. Jurek fucked like a little boy.

  “And if he was despondent, so what? That’s the national disease of Poland. He’d have black moods where he couldn’t write for a month. . . . People call him a faker who needed other writers to write. When I first met him, he had a hard time scribbling a letter to the telephone company. That’s how rotten his English was. I had to help him with it. He didn’t have ghostwriters; he had baby-sitters who held his hand.”

  No baby-sitter from here to Mars could have scratched out the icicle-covered sentences in The Painted Bird. And after rereading the book for the sixth or seventh time, I realized that suicide was built into its very fabric, as if the narrator were locked into some kind of frozen grief, and had survived the war on fierce will alone. His entire life had become a chess move or chapters pasted onto The Painted Bird. Perhaps fate itself was a Russian doll. And Jurek’s leap into the darkness was another matryoshka, a doll without end.

  LANA, 1969

  — 13 —

  BROTHERS AND SISTERS, YOU CANNOT IMAGINE how homesick I was. I did not miss the intrigue of Moscow and calls from the premier’s direct line saying how Svetlana had misbehaved again. I could not break with the nomenklatura. It was the curse of my red hair. I was noticed wherever I went. Citizens would bow and beg for the opportunity to kiss my hand. But I did not want to be their freckled princess. They had loved my father to madness, no matter what the Politburo said about him and his cult of personality. The nomenklatura was frightened to death that he might return from the grave one fine morning with his dark eyes—the dedushka of Moscow—and haunt them until they went screaming into their own graves. And so I lived under a kind of elegant house arrest—with a dacha that my Soviet brothers and sisters would have murdered their mothers to have as their own.

  I adored our one-track railroad and the graveyard next to the station, where I longed to lie down forever—I was mortally tired in a Moscow where I was watched at every st
ep. I had to join the Party, or my father’s minions would have eaten me alive. I was put on display like a museum piece, told whom to marry, whom not to see. I disobeyed them as often as I could. After their dedushka died, suffering a stroke and lying in his own piss until his minions found him, his eyes roaming like a brutal animal that could no longer bark, I thought I would be free of the whole Party apparatus. I began using my mother’s maiden name, Alliluyeva, but I was still Stalina to them, the dictator’s bad little daughter. I had no peace except when I was at Zhukovka with my old nurse, who died in 1956 and left me a little orphan of thirty years.

  I am a selfish girl, no less brutal than my father. I felt abandoned, betrayed by poor Alexandra Andreyevna. What I missed most were the pared apples I would find next to whatever seat I settled in. The freckled princess cannot pare an apple for herself. You see, Alexandra Andreyevna had been my nurse ever since I was born. She had a marvelous appetite for everything—food, people, books. The personages in Gogol and Gorky were as genuine to her as my own uncles and aunts. She would converse with them and expect immediate answers. They wore the same flesh as I did, and could be just as devious. I would hear her scream at Gogol’s poor clerk for having lost his overcoat and berate Anna Karenina after she fell in love with Vronsky.

  “Anya,” she would cry, “Vronsky isn’t worth one hair on your head!” But the problem is that she muddled the personages in Anna Karenina and War and Peace, mixed them into one big stew, and her greatest wish was to have Anna fall in love with that clumsy bear, Pierre Bezukhov. She had become a matchmaker in her old age, and was wiser than us all. Not even my father, who was a passionate reader until the end, could have equaled my nurse’s love of books.

  I’m curious what she would have done with The Painted Bird. Would she have kidnapped the mute little boy from the Polish peasants and delivered him to Saint Petersburg? But Tolstoy’s counts and countesses were just as vicious as the Poles, and she might have left the little boy where he was.