Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

“Lana, why do I confess such things to you?” he said, with that jackal’s smile. “I never discussed Henryk with another living soul. It’s your freckles. I can’t resist them.”

  We were sitting in our usual corner at the Nassau Inn—it was a cellar aboveground called the Yankee Doodle Tap Room; Jurek told me that Paul Revere and other patriots had once sat in our corner booth during the American Revolution. I wasn’t so impressed.

  “Jurek, I’ve had enough of revolution and Yankee Doodle. Did Albert Einstein ever sit at our table?”

  “He wasn’t a complete imbecile, Lana dear. It’s the best table in the house.”

  “Did he flirt with many women while he was here?”

  “Thousands—no woman could resist his white mustache.”

  We laughed in our own dark corner, holding hands like lovers. But Jurek was too lazy to seduce me—it’s more complicated than that. He was a little frightened of the tsarevna. He was in awe of Stalin. The Russians had saved his skin. His heroes weren’t Patton and Eisenhower, but ordinary Russian soldiers, as I could tell in The Painted Bird. The Red Army had captured and slaughtered rebellious Kalmuks, who were even more dreadful than the Germans. The Kalmuks would wipe out entire Polish villages, raping women and children, robbing the eyes of old men, until the Red Army broke their necks.

  And for a little boy liberated by Stalin and growing up in a satellite country ruled by Stalin, what else could he have imagined? Stalin was his little father, a god who had his own earthly paradise called the Kremlin. America was some afterthought, a secondary dream, a tiger he didn’t have to chase by the tail. And when my father died, Jurek must have mourned him as much as I ever did. It made him even more delirious over Moscow. He saw his future in my father’s land, as a pioneer in Russia’s great social laboratory. All of us believed in some craziness like that. He first visited Russia in 1951, as a student. Brothers and sisters, what could the pioneer have found in Moscow and the provinces? A bureaucracy even more crippling than the one in Poland. Fat commissars in fast cars. A morbid fear of foreigners. A grayness that was close to gangrene. From that point on, he turned his attention to the United States.

  A pioneer in a land of pioneers. What could be better? But Jurek’s face was as sad as mine. We couldn’t find our own hearts in this heartland. We were two of Stalin’s children, laughing as hard as we could in a corner of the Yankee Doodle. I’d already had whiskey sours and white wine. But Jurek couldn’t drink wine. It was poison, he said. He drank buttermilk. And I was nibbling on a monstrous piece of strawberry shortcake, which was as close as I could ever get to a charlotte russe. We occupied what Jurek liked to call “the conspirator’s table,” since it was in the darkest and deepest part of the taproom, where not a soul could recognize me. He was a genius at finding hidden nooks and crannies. We were, he said, the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang—outlaws with allegiance to nothing and no one.

  “Lana dear, let’s rob a bank. The guards in Princeton don’t even bother to wear a gun. And they can’t arrest you. You’re too much of a prize in the propaganda war.”

  “But why go through all the bother? If you want a Buick, like Brezhnev, I’ll buy you one. It’s much, much easier to write a check. My lawyers say I have enough dollari to choke a hundred horses.”

  Whiskey sours and shortcake must have been a potent cocktail. My head was about to fall off. But I wasn’t blind. Jurek’s Gypsy-Jewish eyes smoldered in the dark. I’d upset my darling bank robber.

  “It’s not the same thing. We won’t wear masks . . . or carry toy guns. The tellers will ask for your autograph while they hand us the bank’s money. Lana, you’ll be on the cover of Time.”

  Now I was the one who bristled. I grabbed his nose, but not with affection. I pinched it as hard as I could. “We are outcasts, my little Polish brother, in the land of strawberry shortcake. I dream of literature and wine, and all you can think about is the cover of Time magazine. But I love you, and if you wish to become a bank robber, I will join your Hole-in-the-Wall Gang . . . but no violence, with or without toy guns. And we must not frighten the tellers. I do not wish them to suffer heart attacks—I will not go to jail with a bad conscience.”

  “Lana, please,” he said, “you are hurting my nose.”

  I pinched it one last time.

  “Well, bank robber, when do we begin? But I warn you. I will donate my share of the loot to a charity that fights tuberculosis.”

  He smiled like a jackal. “If we give away what we steal, then it is not a robbery, but a bazaar. Besides, this isn’t Moscow, Lana. There’s no more tuberculosis in America. Tuberculosis has been wiped out.”

  “Pah,” I said. “A country without tuberculosis does not have much of a soul.”

  I could no longer find his face. He shrank into the dark like some local Dracula. And then he started to laugh and cry at the same time, and he emerged from the shadows without his jackal’s grin.

  “Lana, you’re impossible. You’ll be the Kremlin princess until the day you die.”

  “I suppose so. That is my sad fate.”

  And both of us started to laugh and cry, until the noise bounced off the walls and brought a little bedlam to the Yankee Doodle. Bozhe moy, now we no longer had a place to hide.

  — 15 —

  WHAT DID HE DO ALL DAY? He didn’t write, didn’t teach, even though he was an honored lecturer, the genius who had written The Painted Bird. We never chatted on the phone, never conspired to meet at his own dacha, which was less than a hundred yards from my house. He was always at the Nassau Inn, where he seemed to hold court with students or professors and townspeople, his back hunched over as he whispered and intrigued. But when I arrived in my babushka and dark glasses, he would part company with the others and come over to our corner booth.

  And that’s how my day would begin. We were both terrible paranoiacs. I was convinced that the KGB had spiked the salads I shared with Jurek, and was plotting to kidnap me right out of the Yankee Doodle. And Jurek felt he was a marked man. The Polish secret police would never forgive him for The Painted Bird.

  I had acquired a foul mouth in America. Jurek said I cursed like a stevedore. I considered that a compliment.

  “I piss on the Polish secret police. Those govnyuki”—shitheads—“should congratulate you. You’ve put Poland back on the map with your book.”

  And now he decided to play Hamlet at the Nassau Inn. “You don’t understand,” he said, clutching his scalp of curly hair that reminded me of Harpo Marx. “I was one of them.”

  “Govnyuk, I don’t believe you.”

  “But it’s true. I was a swan for them while I was still in high school.”

  “Swan,” I said. “What swan?”

  “A stool pigeon.”

  “Jurek, I can imagine you as a mass murderer, a bigamist, a charlatan, but not a stool pigeon.”

  “But I was arrested, Lana—after a prank. I was always doing pranks. I telephoned people, pretending to be a minor official in some ministry, told them they would have to move to another town, and that they had twenty-four hours to pack.”

  “Couldn’t they tell it was a joke? How many people listened to you?”

  “Practically all of them,” he said. “That was Poland in 1950. The telephone was God to them. And God never lied. But I miscalculated. One of the women I telephoned was a member of my ministry. I was arrested, put in an isolation ward. My captors conducted their interrogation with all the clichés of a Polish cop—lamp in my eyes, a fist in my face. I confessed in five minutes. And then the Polish Gestapo arrived, the UB. The other cops were frightened. I don’t think the UB had ever been on their premises before. The secret police took me out of my cell, shared a cigarette with me, washed my bloody face with a clean handkerchief. These men didn’t disapprove of what I had done. They called my telephone games a clever trick. They asked if I would work for them. Their neckties were made of silk. That’s what I noticed first. And their cuffs weren’t frayed like the other cops.

  “They sai
d I didn’t have to spy on my family or friends. I should just write things down in a notebook. What things? I asked. Anything that entered my mind, they said. It was enough for them that I kept a notebook. The UB would pay me once a month.”

  “In rubles, dollars, or zlotys?” I asked, like a member of the KGB.

  “Dollars,” he said. “No other currency mattered.”

  “And what did you write in your golden notebook?”

  “Exactly what they wanted. I spied on everyone—my father, my fellow students.”

  “Jurek, you’re not a govnyuk. You’re a snake.”

  “Ah, but your kind of snake, Lana. An intelligent, pragmatic snake. I manufactured conversations; I lied with a little twist. To accuse someone of slight treason is not to accuse them at all. No one was ever arrested from the material in my notebooks. An outburst, a temper tantrum, an ambiguous word—Lana, I could ride on my writings for six years. And the UB helped smuggle me into Mother Russia, forged whatever documents I needed. They let me have one of their own beaver hats. I came to Moscow like a Polish commissar.”

  “Jurek,” I said, gulping wine and buttermilk. “I disown you. Wherever I walk, you must walk on the other side of the street.”

  That was the first time we ever kissed. He reached over while I reprimanded him and took hold of my mouth. I waited until his lizard’s tongue vanished into the middle of his face.

  “Skopetz,” I said, meaning a castrated man. “I did not give you permission to kiss me.”

  “Lana dear, if I had to wait for permission to kiss a Soviet princess, I would have to live two thousand years.”

  “Twice two thousand,” I said, “before I would grant you a second kiss. But tell me more about your adventures with the UB.”

  “There were no adventures. I took notes in Moscow, pretended to interview people, traveled on the train, had one or two romances, and returned to Lodz in my beaver hat.”

  I did not want this skopetz to see my jealous nature.

  “Comrade Kosinksi of the Polish secret service, consider me your case officer. Did you acquire a mistress in Moscow or Leningrad, or in the Ukraine, a married woman who was bored to death with a husband who drank himself into blindness every night?”

  “No, dear,” said the skopetz. “I met a young student from Odessa on the train.”

  “A little Jewess?”

  Bozhe moy, I was beginning to sound like my father! That’s what jealousy will do.

  “Her name was Mashenka. And she—”

  “Comrade, I wish not to hear about it.”

  “But she had your looks, Lana. She was a freckle face with hair that flamed in the sun.”

  “Pah,” I said. “Now he talks in poetry. I do not wish to have the details, Jurisha. What did your brothers in the UB say after they read your Russian notebook?”

  “They said I was a born sphion. I wrote reports . . . about student unrest, loyalty to the regime. That was my beginning as a novelist—lies, lies, lies. And they decided to transport their new ‘product’ to America and test him there. It wasn’t so easy to accomplish. I required an American university to sponsor my research. They had to troll in foreign waters. And when they couldn’t find enough Polish professors to support my documents, the UB had me invent professors of my own. It was a brilliant strategy. They supplied the official stamps and letterheads. I was very modest about myself, outlining all my weaknesses. And it worked. But I’m not a fool. I couldn’t afford to be discovered in America as a Polish spy. I disowned my masters, fed them nothing. And in all fairness, they left me alone . . . until The Painted Bird.”

  “But the UB should have rejoiced. You were their creation.”

  “That is the heart of the problem. Now they are taking the heat.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I am not familiar with such an expression—taking heat. What does it mean?”

  “Their feet are caught in the fire. They must have considered me their mole in America, someone who could lie at rest until summoned back into service. But their mole had played a trick. His notebook was now a novel that turned their own countrymen into devils. And so they have spread all sorts of lies about Jerzy Kosinski, that he is a Jew. . . .”

  “But you are a Jew, Jurisha.”

  “Lana, listen, please. That’s not the point of their smear campaign. They’re the ones who are the devils. They congratulate the book’s style and wealth of detail but insist that an ungrateful zhid like myself does not have the right to accuse Polish peasants who saved his life and the lives of his family.”

  “Jurek, you told me yourself, a few nights ago, that you did hide out during the war, that your father had enough cash to buy you and your mother a whole new Catholic identity. . . .”

  “But that is our secret, Lana—I could not lie to Stalin’s daughter. And I love your funny little nose and your red hair.”

  “My nose isn’t funny. And I do not want to be told secrets just because I am Stalin’s daughter. Move to another table, Jurisha, or I will scream.”

  “Scream your head off,” he said as he slid away from me and disappeared into the darkness of the Yankee Doodle.

  I missed him the moment he was gone. I didn’t feel alive until I could dream of tearing Jurisha’s eyes out. But I couldn’t seem to find him. He wasn’t holding court at the Nassau Inn the next day or the day after that. And when I knocked on the door of his dacha, no one answered my knocks. I scratched a note with my favorite green pencil—my father was fond of green pencils—and folded it under Jurisha’s door.

  Where the devil are you, govnyuk?

  But he had the gall not to answer my note. I seethed with anger and resentment. I was swollen with bile. I took my green pencil, crossed him out of my life, and went looking for him at the Nassau Inn. There wasn’t a sign of my black-haired Harpo. No one, not even my father, the rudest man alive, had ever been so rude to me.

  I put on lipstick and painted my eyes like Lana Turner, and then I ran across Nassau Street, into the maze of Princeton University. I was frightened of so many brick and stone buildings—it was a little Kremlin without the high walls.

  I did not have Jurisha’s address at the university. I had to ask and ask, twist like a dervish, until I found the building where he kept an office. I went up to a secretary and said, “It’s urgent. Life-and-death. I must speak with the maître.”

  She did not recognize Svetlana, even without the babushka. And this was the first time I had needed my new celebrity.

  “I am Stalin’s daughter,” I said.

  It made no impression. The clerks here must be imbeciles.

  “But are you related to him, ma’am?”

  “Yes. I’m his wife.”

  Now I understood how potent matrimony was in America. This same clerk was suddenly solicitous. She accompanied me to Jurek’s classroom. I knocked on the door and marched in like a prima ballerina with freckles. I did not recognize him. He wore a cashmere jacket that broadened his shoulders, a brutal white shirt, and a necktie with blinding colors. His students were sitting around a long table and never took their eyes off the maître.

  “Lana, what’s wrong?” he asked, without his jackal’s grin. “I’m in the middle of a class.”

  “Come outside, Jurisha. The class can wait.”

  What choice did he have? He bowed to his students like one of my father’s Russian generals and stepped outside into the hall.

  “Jurek, you must not abandon me again. I am a creature of habits. You disappear and never answer my notes.”

  “But I did not read your notes. I was in Manhattan, and I had to run to my class from the train station.”

  “Then how much would it have cost to tell me your plans? Is this how you treat the only other living member of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang?”

  He grabbed my hand and kissed it. I wasn’t pleased. My hands are not beautiful.

  “I was remiss,” he said. “It will not happen again. Does Princess Lana give her subject permission to teach his class?” />
  “No,” I said. “Not yet. You could dismiss your students and have buttermilk with me at the Nassau Inn.”

  He bowed—I did not like such ceremony from him.

  “As Her Highness commands,” he said.

  He spent five more minutes with his students and then we escaped from his little Kremlin and returned to our dark corner at the Nassau Inn, my heart beating to its own silly music.

  — 16 —

  IF ONE OR TWO MEN LOVED ME, it wasn’t because of my Lana Turner legs. I was pretty in the right places, but no matter how often we kissed or fumbled with our hands, Jurek never invited me into his bed. I was the dictator’s daughter. And he couldn’t glide above the ghost of my father. But that doesn’t mean we were not lovers in every other way.

  I sat with him through his bouts of depression, held him in my arms, serenaded him with songs my nurse had taught me. He had won a prize for his second novel, but the prize did not console him; it darkened his mood. I had no love for this novel called Steps. It was a heartless book. I could feel Jurek on every page. It was his own portrait of the artist as an invisible man. But for me, the novel was a masquerade, a disguise he wore to prevent himself from screaming. I wanted to hear the screams.

  “Lana, the UB trained me too well.”

  “Idiot, they didn’t train you at all. You scribbled nonsense for them and they lapped it up. That’s how it is with all secret services.”

  “But the problem is that I’m still a secret service man. I lie even while I speak the truth. And I cover my traces with yet another trace. I’m like that guy in Gogol’s story who has lost his nose and keeps running after the little monster.”

  “Jurisha, you have a beautiful nose, and it will never leave your face.”

  “But it isn’t my nose, Lana dear. I’m a fraud. I cannot write my own novels without a helper.”

  “Who is she? I’ll tear her eyes out.”

  “Yes,” he said, laughing amid all his gloom. “And then Gogol’s nose will take its revenge on the two of us.”