Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  “Svetochka,” he had said, gripping my arms with his fat fingers, “there are angels in the attics at Rockefeller’s Center.”

  But it was Jurek who scattered the angels and broke the calm. He could not sit still. He introduced himself at other tables as General Gogol, my military aide.

  “I live my life for Lana,” he said. “I have to protect her from foreign agents. The Kremlin would love to have her back. It has made a pact with other governments and their provocateurs to steal her off the street.”

  “But aren’t you yourself Russian, General Gogol?” asked a lady doctor from Iowa who was in Manhattan for the first time.

  “Yes,” he said, “but we are the rasputniki, dissidents inside and outside the Soviet Union who have formed our own secret empire, a parallel government that disrupts Moscow wherever it can—we have chess masters and military men within our ranks, and we are dedicated to reviving the Russian monarchy, with Stalin’s daughter as the new tsarina.”

  I sat there, a freckle face who couldn’t stop blushing. A rasputnik in Russian was a lecher and a lout. And Jurek would have his rasputniki rule the world, with poor Lana on the throne. I was furious with him.

  “General Gogol,” I shouted, “we must leave right this minute.”

  He was so busy finding converts for his fable that he did not have much time for the fable’s queen.

  “Gogol, I command you.”

  His back bristled, and for a moment his uniform lost its perfect line.

  “Majesty,” he said, turning on his heels so that I could get a glimpse of his rage. I was ruining the concoction he had spun. The rasputniki were realer to him than a lonely redhead who would have to find her way back to Princeton Junction.

  “Majesty, enjoy your dinner. I have to plead our cause.”

  I walked to the cloakroom and retrieved my winter cape. He followed me out to the elevators in his forage cap. His neck was pulsing under the collar of his tunic. For a moment I thought he would slap my face. I smiled. It was very cruel of me.

  “Gogol darling, would you disfigure your own queen?”

  My remark must have rescued him from his own ridiculous fable. Now he was able to laugh at himself.

  “Gogol apologizes. Your general was carried away.”

  He kissed my hand in the elevator and wouldn’t allow me to ride back to Princeton on the train.

  “Lana, the dinky doesn’t run late at night. You could be stranded at the station . . . please.”

  We took a cab to the garage where his Buick was parked. And when I wanted to sit up front with him, he started to cry.

  “Please—it will be a form of punishment.”

  “Jurek, I won’t be your punisher.”

  But I was tired and let him have his way; I played the tsarina until we arrived at my dacha behind Nassau Street.

  He was still sobbing. “Lana, say that you forgive me.”

  I held him by the nose and caressed his face with my free hand.

  “I forgive you, darling.”

  Then I ran out of Brezhnev’s car. Perhaps it was reckless of me to break away from my one foreign friend in this land of Yankee Doodle. But I did not have a choice. I had to cut off the heart of my own addiction, or I would have ended up in a madhouse. I was prone to Jerzy Kosinski, just as my father was prone to Boris Godunov, an opera that could have killed him.

  He would take me with him to the Bolshoi, the Boss and his little freckled tsarevna in their private box, with all his bodyguards in unbearable blue suits. And what was the opera about? A fake tsarevitch, Dmitri the Pretender, who wants to steal the crown away from Boris Godunov—and poor Boris, who had the real tsarevitch murdered, lives in a trance while the Pretender gains more and more control, and dies broken with remorse. And the people welcome their new tsar in abject silence.

  Bozhe moy, this was not an opera for a Soviet tsar to share with his people. It questioned who he was and how he came to be. But he went back to the Bolshoi again and again, and would watch Boris with tears in his eyes. His minions at the opera were confused. Was he crying for Boris, or the Pretender, or himself? They kissed my hand and looked for answers in my eyes.

  I knew their meek, miserable ways. They worried what would happen to them if my father fell? Why did he encourage rebellion, attend an opera about a false tsarevitch? Was the Boss losing his mind? He was addicted to Boris Godunov, had let the opera crawl under his skin, but the moment Hitler was on the march and rumbles could be heard in Moscow, the Boss stopped going to the Bolshoi—Boris was mounted less and less, until it vanished from the repertoire during the war.

  And Jurek was my Pretender, my devil of a false tsarevitch. I was drawn to his masquerades and despised them. Perhaps I was my own Pretender, who wanted to be coveted as Stalin’s daughter while I sought to erase his memory. But if I clung to Jurek and Jurek’s disguises, his devils would wear me down. He could not rest. He picked at whatever sores and wounds I had—his love was shot through with hate. He clawed at my weaknesses while he held my hand.

  In my dreams, he appeared with a mustache—and his nose turned into my father’s nose, with the nostrils of a wolf. Jurek had come out of the Polish forest, and he would have lured me back inside. I didn’t want to live in the dark.

  DOWN ON THE FARM, 1967

  — 18 —

  OH, THEY INDULGED HER, ALL RIGHT. It’s where she always ended up after one of her blackouts. They would sweat the alcohol out of her system with “a cocktail of pharmaceuticals,” as her doctors were fond of saying. It was a detox center for the superrich called Sea Breeze Farm, though there wasn’t much of a breeze on its hundred acres outside New Haven.

  The Farm wasn’t even in the telephone book—it was both a country club and a prison. You couldn’t leave the grounds unless you were released, and you couldn’t hope to get in unless you had a certain pedigree. “Dear Martha,” as she was known at Sea Breeze, was a bit of a maverick. She had been cast out of the Social Register after her recent marriage to a Polish parvenu. They never called her Mrs. Kosinski. She was always Mrs. Cuthbert Will, widow of the late CEO and founder of Will Industries, the foremost producer of soft paraffin in the world. She had inherited half his fortune.

  “Mr. Cuthbert” was well remembered here. The Petroleum Jelly King was forty years her senior, but whenever she was despondent and couldn’t come out of her alcoholic haze, he’d fly her in from headquarters on his personal plane, carry her into Sea Breeze in his own arms. She’d been his devoted secretary, and would have remained loyal, but Cuthbert had to beg her to marry him (after she divorced her spouse and he divorced his). She wanted to keep working for him, but he couldn’t have his wife sit behind a desk, like a paid sentry in a polished chair.

  It was Cuthbert’s mistake; Martha retreated within the walls of the French chateau he had rebuilt near Galveston. She traveled with him from time to time, redecorated his mansion on Robber Island, his hacienda in Santa Fe, but she lost her balance with so little to do. She began suffering blackouts. He bought her a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, a fourteen-room duplex at 740 Park.

  She studied modern literature, became a patron of the arts. She studied antique furniture, but she had no passion to trade antiques. She was faithful to her husband, though she saw him less and less. She would sit in her fourteen rooms on Park Avenue, with butlers and maids who had nothing to do but dote on her. She would eat an apple, drink a quart of gin, and spend a month or two at Sea Breeze. She might have committed suicide if the Petroleum Jelly King hadn’t succumbed to a heart attack in his eightieth year. His death seemed to rouse her from her stupor. She traveled on her own, stayed in the hotels where she had gone with her husband. Men pursued her. She was the ninth-richest woman in North America.

  She had not been to the Farm in a year. She was a devoted widow who performed good deeds and kept away from the sauce. She didn’t seem susceptible to fortune hunters and shady men. In fact, there hadn’t been the slightest rumor of a love affair. She traveled by herself
or with other women of her social set. She was attractive, in her forties, and had the figure of a movie star. The entire staff at See Breeze hoped she would find another “billionaire” like Mr. Cuthbert.

  And then this Polack appeared on the scene with his cardboard satchel and his Salvation Army suits. How did he ever get past the doormen at 740 and sneak into her boudoir? He was worse than a gigolo, said Stanislaus, her butler. He was a Jew, though Stanislaus was convinced that he had escaped the slaughterhouses of Europe by pretending to be a pious little Catholic. “I bet you won’t find a hair shirt under his jacket, but a Hebrew prayer shawl,” Stanislaus had told a therapist at the Farm. And there they were, running around Manhattan and traipsing off to Europe on her wealth, while he was busy paying the tips with wrinkled dollar bills from inside the dark well of his cardboard purse. He went nowhere without that satchel, whether it was the Rainbow Room or the “21” Club. He wouldn’t leave it with a hatcheck girl. It sat between his legs during the entire meal.

  By now he was Manhattan’s new Beau Brummel. Martha had tossed his beggar’s wardrobe into the incinerator at 740. She delivered him into the hands of the best Italian tailors. He wore red tuxedos to dinner parties, ruffled shirts, and shoes of exquisite calfskin. But no matter how many Moroccan leather briefcases Martha bought him, he wouldn’t get rid of his satchel. And whenever she asked him about it, he would roll his dark eyes and declare, “It’s a gift from Gavrila. I cannot betray him, Mimi.”

  That was his pet name for Martha. Mimi. But it didn’t explain who Gavrila was. Stanislaus solved the mystery. He discovered that Martha’s gigolo had a pseudonym, Joseph Novak, and this Novak was the author of two books about his travels in the Soviet Union. Gavrila appeared in the second book as a political officer and Communist Party boss in Moscow. But Stanislaus didn’t believe in Novak’s travels or in Gavrila—this Gavrila felt like a false prophet, a voice that an author would invent to give some flavor to his lies.

  But Stanislaus was confused: The cardboard satchel seemed authentic enough, and whenever the Polack talked about Gavrila, his eyes lit up with a fever that would have been hard to fake. The butler would listen to him during dinner parties that Martha gave at 740, listen while he decanted the wine. Martha’s other guests were in wonder of him and his war stories; they shivered at the horrors he described.

  “The Kalmuks raced through the village, killing and looting and tearing the necks off little children. They wore German uniforms, but with their own strange insignias that looked like a wizard’s wand. And they didn’t have helmets, not a one of them. They had bowler hats with shrunken rooster heads hanging down from the brims. They fit their fat fingers into a child’s mittens. Everything about them was maddening to a little boy. But I wasn’t so little. I was ten or eleven when the Kalmuks appeared on their ponies. They had all the skills of a saltimbanque—they could ride and shoot, rape a woman and eat a winter pear in one motion. I was appalled and couldn’t take my eyes off them. They wanted us to admire them, even while they butchered us, and they would have butchered us all.

  “It was almost by accident that the Red Army ran into them—a communications regiment with telegraph equipment as well as guns. They moved so rapidly, like ghosts with telephone wires, that they seldom had to fire a gun. And here were the Kalmuks on a rampage, slaughtering whoever was in their path. The ponies stopped in their tracks when they saw the red stars on the trucks, while the Russians were bewildered by bandits in German uniforms and bowler hats. And then these telegraph boys in their brown tunics let out a war cry and started to slaughter the slaughterers. All the fight had gone out of the saltimbanques. They had raided villages, burned down huts, performed for their victims with the cruelty of consummate clowns, but none of them or their ponies had ever faced a line of guns.”

  “For God’s sake, Jerry,” said one of the guests, “where does Gavrila fit in?”

  “Oh, he saved my life. A Kalmuk had been about to brain me with the handle of a sword, when Gavrila shot out of nowhere and swatted him off his pony—just like that. I lived with his regiment for months. I was even given a uniform to wear, sewn especially for me by the regimental tailor. But I was more than Gavrila’s mascot. He let me borrow books from the little library he had in his rucksack. He said that Comrade Stalin was the greatest reader in the motherland, and that he, Gavrila, would abandon me to the Kalmuks if I didn’t become a reader overnight. He taught me all the little knots of Russian grammar in his spare time, and I never wanted to speak a word of Polish again.”

  “But Jerry,” said another of Martha’s guests, all flushed with the wine that Stanislaus had decanted at the table. “I thought you were mute during the war?”

  “I was, but my voice came back gradually with Gavrila. He would have taken me with him to Moscow if my parents hadn’t found me—it was the biggest disappointment of my life.”

  Martha nearly leapt out of her chair, Stanislaus recalled to the staff at Sea Breeze.

  “That is heartless and cruel,” she said. “And I won’t listen to another syllable of your story.”

  The Polish charmer smiled and kissed her hand. “But it’s the truth, Mimi, so help me God. From that moment I dreamt of one thing—moving to Moscow and having Gavrila as my teacher for life. But the Gavrila I visited when I was still in high school wasn’t the same guy who could destroy Kalmuks with a swat of his hand. He’d grown fat in peacetime. I loved him, but Gavrila seemed lost without his regiment, without his boys. He smelled of garlic. He wore a blue suit that must have been sitting on a warehouse shelf with a thousand other suits for minor Soviet chiefs. It seemed to rot on him . . . and it’s because of Gavrila’s garlic and blue suit, ladies and gentlemen, that I’m with you here tonight.”

  Stanislaus was still suspicious. He wondered if there had ever been a Gavrila. But it didn’t really matter as long as his own mistress was amused. She traveled with her gigolo, went on long trips, and one morning she arrived at 740 married to him—it was in January of ’62. And even Stanislaus had to admit that Martha had a sudden radiance; she shimmered like the softest of lanterns. Her servants “forgave” Martha for being in love with “Jerry,” as she called him. They had not seen her this happy in a long time. There were no more alcoholic binges where she wouldn’t bother to dress, no more visits to Sea Breeze in the middle of the night. But it didn’t last.

  By the end of ’63, most of the radiance was gone. She had the frazzled look of a drunken millionairess who was fast approaching fifty. The binges had returned, and the blackouts. Martha’s new husband had to drive her to Sea Breeze in the Lincoln Continental she had bought him, with the cardboard satchel still at his side. He wasn’t harsh with his wife. He would hold her hand and read her Russian fairy tales. The night staff was amazed at his tenderness. He could calm her whenever she had a fit, scold her when she had to be scolded.

  But he was always bribing people with his dollar bills, and he seduced one of the night nurses. There might have been a scandal, but Sea Breeze couldn’t afford to lose Martha as a client—it was her benefice that had paid for a new wing. And so they tolerated his lecheries and his dollar bills. She had divorced him a year ago, in ’66, and the staff hoped they were rid of the Polack for good. But the blackouts were more and more frequent; she lived between Manhattan and New Haven in a kind of hypnotic trance. And when she was utterly out of control, they had to call Kosinski.

  He was driving a Bentley now, and he would often appear with one or two women in the car—they looked like prostitutes, or transvestites, several of the nurses noticed. He would always leave them in the Bentley while he rambled into Sea Breeze, wearing a velvet suit. He no longer had a pen name. He’d become a celebrated novelist, had written The Painted Bird, a tantalizing book in the opinion of those staffers who had read past the first ten pages.

  But there he was, clutching his cardboard satchel, like someone with half his history secreted inside. He was the miracle man of the moment. He was the one who could quiet her. Som
etimes he would comb her hair, and even with the medication that had disfigured her—swelled her mouth and turned her tongue a little green—her eyes would glisten and a little of her radiance would come back.

  “Mimi, you mustn’t break any mirrors. It will bring you the rottenest luck. And if you threaten to bankrupt this institution, where will you go when you misbehave?”

  “Inside your pocket,” she said.

  “And what will you do in there?”

  “Play with your prick.”

  “And if the doctors hear you say that?” he said.

  “They’ll think I’m perfectly sober. A wife who cherishes conjugal relations with her husband.”

  “But Mimi, we’re not married anymore.”

  “That’s a minor detail,” she said. “Call the chaplain, Jerry, and I’ll marry you again.”

  “Then why did you divorce me in the first place?”

  “Because I had a husband who liked to wander far afield. I didn’t mind your having a mistress on the side, and fucking two or three whores at a time, arranging your little sex parties, but you never included me. Darling, don’t I have a cunt?”

  “Where did you ever get such a filthy mouth?”

  “From you,” she told him.

  “But it’s bed talk. It shouldn’t go beyond the satin sheets.”

  “I prefer bed talk outside of bed—Jurek, will you fuck me or not?”

  “In front of the nurses, darling?”

  “Who cares? I support this nunnery.”

  “Nunnery? It’s a rehabilitation center.”

  “A nunnery,” she insisted. “It doesn’t give a shit about my sex. All I am is a machine who writes the checks. And if you don’t fuck me this minute, darling, I’ll leave you out of my will.”