Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  “Mum, I don’t—”

  “Her, her—Gabriela. Do you think the Polish one loved Gabriela more than he loved me? I doubt that he loved me at all. He’s like a swooping bird that picks up carrion.”

  “I wouldn’t call yourself carrion, Mum.”

  “Then what would you call me? A smart aleck? I get dirty looks from my neighbors when I’m sober enough to see them. They must think I kept a bordello on the sixth floor. I’m surprised the building’s lawyer hasn’t served me with a summons.”

  “They couldn’t kick you out, Mum. I wouldn’t let them.”

  “An army of two. Mimi the alcoholic and her butler . . . Of course they can’t kick me out. But if they pester me long enough, I’ll have to sell my shares in the building back to them. I’ll become a bag lady. I’ll walk the streets with my butler and my seven maids.”

  She was silent and soon fell into a sound sleep. Stanislaus covered her with a blanket. Her “episodes,” her periods of oblivion, had gotten worse and worse. The sorcerer had once called them “Mimi’s little suicides.” But Stanislaus didn’t have the sorcerer’s poetic temperament. Mum was in the middle of a voyage, her own sea of despair. The sorcerer had charmed her for a little while, loved Mum as much as a snake could love. He wasn’t a gigolo, or he would have held on to her for dear life. He was a seducer who had to crush the very carapace he had bothered to build. Mum could have been his “ticket,” but he was much too perverse. She couldn’t control him with her wealth. He might have luxuriated in the suits and cars she could buy him, but they were his props, pieces to costume himself with. Had he really been a sybarite, he wouldn’t have turned his little retreat at 740 into a monk’s cell.

  His currency was pain—pain he inflicted upon others and himself. He was like a wounded animal that thrived on the smell of blood. Mum’s socialite friends despised the sorcerer, said he was a little kike. Yet even as they mocked him, he was defiant. He carried that cardboard satchel around as a badge. He could have been throwing the dollar bills into their eyes.

  Speak of the devil! There he was on the main path of Sea Breeze sanitarium. The celebrated author in plum-colored satin pants and a new coiffure—a crown of black curls covered the sinister points of his ears. But Stanislaus knew how much of Gabriela’s green pencil had gone into The Painted Bird. She couldn’t have invented the horrors inside his head, but Gabriela had helped shape the sorcerer’s endless scream.

  “Hullo, Stanislaus. Did you forget your promise to strangle me in my bed? . . . I have been waiting three years. How’s Mimi?”

  “Asleep, Sorcerer.”

  “Her doctor told me that she’s had a very bad spell—talks to herself continuously, mentions my name. But God knows if she still can bear to look at my face.”

  “It’s not your face, Sorcerer, that troubles her. Your face is fine.”

  “Then it’s the stone in my heart.”

  “Or the hot coals you use to warm other women. But mine is only a butler’s point of view.”

  Stanislaus waved good-bye and continued along the path.

  “I have no hot coals,” the sorcerer had to shout into his back.

  “Sorry, sir, I misspoke,” Stanislaus mumbled, and kept walking.

  — 21 —

  IN FLORENCE, HE DISCOVERED A TAILOR SHOP that would outfit him with a motley of costumes, while she walked the streets of a whole city in burnt sienna, with flat-roofed buildings that were like a museum built right into the countryside—it must have been 1963. Florence was unsettling to her after the mayhem of Manhattan. It was a town of beautiful boxes. She marched into a gelateria and had a little pot of pistachio ice cream that was like no ice cream she had ever tasted—she would move to Florence and drown in a tub of green gelato.

  But her monster of a husband had put her on a diet.

  “Mimi darling, you’re getting a little too fat. I’ll have to find you a sedan chair to climb the hills.”

  “There are no hills in Florence,” she protested. That hardly mattered to him. She was condemned to gobbling lettuce leaves at the best trattoria in town. She couldn’t lash out at him, because he sat like a little saint who gobbled his own lettuce leaves. Martha had almost never seen him eat an actual meal. At dinner parties, he would swear that as a wild boy he had learned to live on roots. But Stanislaus had once seen him stuffing cheese biscuits into his face before he sat down to dinner. That tale endeared him to her—Jurek’s secret gluttony. And now she could indulge in some gluttony of her own at the gelateria.

  She wished she had never told him about that Florentine tailor shop. Martha’s friends had sworn her to secrecy—it was where they had the most fashionable uniforms cut for members of their households. But she had spilled the name of the shop to Jurek in a moment of weakness over a glass of wine. And her new husband had a field day.

  Jurek walked out of the shop wearing a general’s uniform. Martha was stunned when soldiers and policemen came to a halt, saluted him, and called her “La Grande Signora.” But that was only the beginning of his masquerade. He strolled with her into the bar at the Baglioni in a costume that had all the ridiculous earmarks of an Eastern European fire marshal—a plumed hat, a silver dagger, a short cape—and every single eyebrow wrinkled up a bit. The fire marshal ordered aquavit.

  “Darling,” he said, “once I have a sip, you’ll have to bring me back to the hotel. My temperature will drop—it could be fatal.”

  “Then I forbid you to drink it!”

  He gulped the aquavit and his face turned blue. Martha wanted to call an ambulance, but her husband insisted that she escort him to the Bristol like some baby-sitter.

  “Darling, you must get me to talk, or I might land in a coma.”

  That frozen blueness in his face was beyond melodrama. His back scrunched over, and he could have been four feet tall.

  “Tell me about Hemingway,” she said. “Wasn’t he stationed here in Florence during the First World War?”

  “No!” he said with a violent shiver. “It’s not like the Second War, when he liberated Paris in a jeep and took over the Ritz. He shot his own room with a machine gun.”

  “But we stayed in Hemingway’s room, didn’t we, darling? I remember. You tied my hands to the bedpost and we made love for three hours.”

  “Listen! He was a buffoon at the Ritz. But it wasn’t always that way. In 1918, he was an ambulance driver—not even that. He delivered chocolate to soldiers at the front. He had a charmed existence, with shells landing everywhere except on him. Then he was blown up, and he could feel all the life leave his body. But the dead man returned. He woke up at a hospital, but it wasn’t in Florence, darling; it was in Milan, and he had fifty pieces of shrapnel in his buttocks. He fell in love with a beautiful American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky.”

  “Darling, she doesn’t sound American to me. Did he fuck her on the hospital floor?”

  “Mimi, pay attention! He didn’t fuck her at all. His ass was broken, for God’s sake. And she was in love with another man, an unctuous Italian officer.”

  “Then I’m no longer interested.”

  His face turned even bluer, and his feet began to flutter. “I’m sorry,” she said, panicking as she propped him up with her arms. “Tell me—tell me, darling, why you are so mysterious about your uniforms, and why you are compelled to wear them? It’s not as if we’re utterly unknown. I’ve been staying as the Bristol for years—I could command any suite with one telephone call. And I feel a bit ridiculous running around Florence as the wife of a Serbian fire marshal.”

  He broke free of her. “I’m not a Serbian fire marshal. I’m a Polish air attaché. And you couldn’t possibly know the significance of a uniform. It’s not an indictment, darling. It’s the truth. You didn’t grow up in a whirlwind, where the landscape shifted every five minutes. You grew up with pieces of cake and postmen handing you letters that didn’t even have a stamp. But there were no bakers in the Polish woods, and the postmen I met as a boy were partisans and thieves who s
tole from everybody. But a man in a uniform—any uniform—was looked upon with wonder. If he had a chevron on his coat, he could have been a messenger from some important prince. The Nazis didn’t even have to kill a man. They wore their black uniforms with a death’s-head insignia, and entire villages surrendered without a fight. A uniform broke their will. A uniform meant sanity in an insane world.”

  “But we’re in Florence, darling, and Florence isn’t insane.”

  “It is,” he said, “if you look under its veil.”

  She was no longer listening; she had lured him into the lobby of the Bristol. Martha sat him in a green velvet chair while she secured their key from the concierge. The key was as large as her hand and had a purple glow under the Bristol’s chandelier. Hotel guests saluted Jurek even as he sat dazed, with shivering blue lips. She managed to get him up to their suite, and while she undressed him, hot coffee and Italian biscuits arrived.

  Martha had administered to him once before. She couldn’t understand his curious reaction to alcohol, but hot coffee and a biscuit would revive him from what he called his “sugar comas.” She fed him coffee from a teal blue cup and broke off a bit of biscuit for him to chew. He whispered something to her in Polish. It wasn’t a lover’s cajoling voice—it was the voice of a child.

  Then he looked into her eyes and said, “Matka, hold my hand.”

  Was he thinking of his mother? He didn’t like to speak of his parents. But he’d had one little outburst, a week or so into their marriage, when he discovered that his father had died. He cursed and screamed, wept bitterly, and then stared at the wall. Martha didn’t know what to do about this catatonic condition. She telephoned his Polish friends, other exiles who hadn’t landed on their feet quite as well as Jurek. They were a gloomy lot and called her “the little kapitalistka” behind her back (so said Stanislaus). They were envious of her marble staircase, envious of her maids, envious of Jurek’s new clothes; they would smirk and raid the vodka in the fridge, but they knew how to tease their Jurek, to make him laugh. They pilfered ashtrays, spoons, and cigarette lighters from the apartment, but Martha considered this a worthwhile hazard.

  They were poets, translators, and freedom fighters who lived on the largesse of others—foundations or rich friends; and when they couldn’t wheedle or beg, they stole. Stanislaus considered them gangsters and would have barred then from 740, but she was attracted to their recklessness; they were raw in a way Martha could never be.

  When they arrived in their own squirrel-hair coats, sniffing about, raping the walls with their greedy eyes, Jurek wouldn’t greet them.

  “Darling, they’re your friends. I thought . . .”

  “Mimi, send then away.”

  Stanislaus fed them in the kitchen, gave each one a doggie bag, and shoved them out the door. Martha assumed her husband would wander upstairs and lie down in his study. But he insisted on going to “21.” And his gloom was completely gone. He was done with mourning, or perhaps he had pulled it so deep inside himself that there wasn’t even a trace. He danced with her. He chatted with her girlfriends, who had come over to their table at “21.” She was dying to talk to him about Matka, but she never did. He wouldn’t attend his father’s funeral in Lodz, though Martha offered to accompany him to Poland.

  “I cannot go back there,” he said. “I’m a wanted man.”

  She didn’t want to hear another of his tales about the Polish secret service, with Jurek as a rogue agent who had to watch his step wherever he went.

  “I understand, darling,” she said, like a woman mouthing words in a dream. “A wanted man.”

  And then, out of the blue, Matka herself appeared.

  Now that she was a widow, Elzbieta Kosinska decided to visit her son in New York. Martha thought that Jurek would discourage her. But he was oddly passive about the visit, as if fate had him by the balls and there was little he could do about it.

  They met her at the airport. Martha didn’t know what to expect. Jurek had been so stingy on the subject of Elzbieta. “My mother was beautiful and she had big breasts.” Where was Matka while Jurek roamed the countryside and ate roots during the war? She was a concert pianist who liked to polish her nails, Jurek had said.

  Martha saw a woman in her sixties with a slight stoop. She was wearing a coat from Saks that Martha and Jurek had sent her. She didn’t look like the victim of any cold war. Her makeup was as “invisible” as Martha’s own. Her face was much softer than her son’s. She didn’t have his prominent beak. Her mouth, even with its pale gloss, had a measure of fullness that Jurek’s didn’t have. But she had the same dark eyes of a scavenger, someone on the prowl.

  Martha looked for signs of affection between mother and son, and found none. This meeting, after six years of separation, seemed rehearsed. There was a perfunctory kiss, but Madame Kosinska didn’t rub his shoulder or lean on him. Martha felt no hunger between them. It could have been the chance encounter of an estranged husband and wife. Jurek once boasted that he had made love to his mother when he was a teenager in Lodz. Martha didn’t believe him. It sounded like the rough imaginings of a pornographic novel. He had meant to excite her during their own lovemaking.

  “Darling,” he’d said, “I couldn’t stop kissing her cunt.”

  “Jerry, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Then why are you tingling?”

  Stanislaus had been right. She was married to a sorcerer. “Did she seduce you, darling?”

  “Yes—no—yes. It was sudden. My father had already had several heart attacks. He shrank into his own skin. He must have floated off to the chess club in Lodz. And I wasn’t a shy, pimply swain. I had plenty of girlfriends in high school. But it wasn’t so easy to maneuver them into bed. My sweethearts all lived at home with their mothers and sisters and brothers. And the parks were filled with hooligans. So I needed a strategy, and I found it in my camera. I would go off on photography excursions and seduce secretaries right off the street. They were more resourceful than high school girls, even if they still lived at home. I fucked them in cellars, in backyards, in linen closets, and I didn’t have to concern myself with the whiff of my own mother.”

  Martha’s throat had turned dry. “Go on, you monster. What happened?”

  “But she must have smelled these other women on my clothes—you can’t bathe, darling, after an encounter in a coal bin. She was curious at first, then a little more than curious. She came out of the bathroom wearing a towel that didn’t even cover her privates. She hadn’t oiled herself or anything, hadn’t pranced in front of me, but the musk of her breasts was maddening. Mama could see the confused fury in my eyes. I followed her into the bedroom and lived between her legs for half an hour.”

  And here was the aging diva in Martha’s duplex at 740, Madame Kosinska, come from Poland to see how her son had settled on Park Avenue with the sultry widow of the Petroleum Jelly King. Martha felt a sudden embarrassment about her sexual hunger, as if she had to vie for Jurek’s favors with his own mother—it was ridiculous and sordid, and she didn’t believe a word of Jurek’s little tale. He’d told it to enchant her, to crawl into her skin, and turn her into his slave, but he’d only half-succeeded. Her image of Jurek in bed with Elzbieta had evaporated quite quickly.

  Martha saw a fierce, wrinkled woman who might have been the lioness of Lodz before the war. But when Martha presented her at little cocktail parties, Elzbieta wouldn’t play the piano for any of the guests. “Please, my fingers . . . I forget the keys.” And then, in the middle of a meal, she would rise like a somnambulist, sit down at the piano, play half of Chopin’s heroique Polonaise, and return to her lamb chop. It was a move that Jurek himself might have orchestrated, and Martha began to suspect that Madame Kosinska was some kind of complex doll on a string. She never interrupted Jurek, or contradicted him, when he told his little fables of abandonment in the Polish forest, and all Martha could do was wonder, Where the hell were Madame Kosinska and her husband? Had they run off to Switzerland? Why, why
, why had they thrown Jurek to the wolves?

  Perhaps the very idea of The Painted Bird had begun in Martha’s living room at 740, and the tale could only have risen out of him in the presence of his mother. It might have been part of a pact they had formed a long time ago, a pact of lies—no, she struggled for a better word. Not lies, but masks or evasions. And while Elzbieta listened as Jurek told of how he had been tossed into a well of manure, or nearly had his nose bitten off, Martha realized that there was no point at all in getting Elzbieta alone in some corner. Martha couldn’t break into that relentless armor of mother and son. And it was at this moment, more than a year into their marriage, that Martha knew she would not be able to endure a lifetime with her sorcerer.

  AND WHAT DID SHE HAVE WITHOUT HIM? A romance with a bottle that ended in blackouts and oblivion. She’d even gone to AA meetings at the little church near Fifth. “Hello, my name is Mimi, the Tartar Queen, and I’m an alcoholic.” Who would have recognized her in dark glasses and a mink coat? But all the testimonials and readings of the Lord’s Prayer and the furtive clutching of hands couldn’t keep her sober. She’d had a short, brutal affair with a banker she met at AA. He was a sadistic prick, and Stanislaus had to throw him out the back door, sit him in a garbage barrel, and have him sent down to the basement on the service car.

  She’d become a kleptomaniac in her spare time. She found a man’s black shirt at Bloomingdale’s that would have been dead perfect on a fascist dictator . . . or Jurek. She stuffed the shirt under her blouse and would have escaped with it to Lexington Avenue if Stanislaus hadn’t stood near the entrance with her checkbook and a bundle of cash.

  Martha was in a rage. “I cannot bear it when you follow me around. I’m not a convict, you know. Are you listening, Stannie?”

  “I am. But I’d rather pay for your purchases than have to trot down to Greenwich Avenue, Mum, and visit you at the Women’s House of Detention.”