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PARTISAN REVIEW
book, at the war's end, the boy is befriended, temporarily adopted by a
unit of Russian occupation soldiers, but the dark-painted bird is still iso–
lated from the flock.
The Painted Bird
is unique in the literature of the Holocaust, arous–
ing shudders more than empathy - Hell is not to be depicted in human–
istic terms. Of course, the tiresome cliche arises: is it autobiography or
fiction?
The Painted Bird
is as fantastic as the grotesques in a painting by
Hieronymus Bosch, painfully real as cautery.
This work and a second novel,
Steps,
made Jerzy Kosinski a celebrity.
He could be seen at New York City's literary gatherings, still outstand–
ing, as though his fellow writers and acquaintances had cut a swath
around him. Urbane, impeccable, he wore smartly tailored, made-to-or–
der suits, pinched here, flared there, to accentuate his swaggering grace.
Although his height was average, his glossy black head, with waves of
hair clustering around his pointed ears, and his swarthy sardonic face
seemed to top the company. He was difficult to know, and just as a
performer is concealed by his roles, Kosinski was elusive through many
guises and his tall tales of pursuit, international espionage, and torture.
By turn, he had been impoverished, homeless - or rich, with an apart–
ment in every city of Eur.ope, complete with a duplicate wardrobe so
that he could take off free of baggage at a moment's notice. He played
polo and skied with the jet set; hobnobbed, disguised as a professor, with
academics in secluded quadrangles; he wandered, alone, at dawn, through
slum streets and along dock-sides festering with vice.
He described to me several versions of his whirlwind courtship of the
young widow of a millionaire Pittsburgh industrialist. The contact had
been made soon after Kosinski, a penniless emigre, had arrived from
Russia; through his right-wing books on economics written under the
pseudonym Joseph Novak. The marriage was of short duration.
"We were an ill-matched pair," he had mused. Yet when she died,
he mourned, and during her final illness, though divorced, he recalled
that he lay on the floor outside her hospital room "like a dog."
Was he grieving for the pretty, blonde woman and her untimely
death, or for her fortune, gained and lost? Perhaps both, and for a long
time he treasured her memory.
Jerzy Kosinski, Katherina (Kiki) von Fraunhover (later to be his sec–
ond wife), Carlos and Sylvia Fuentes, my husband and I were on holiday
in Venice, an unreal city, a lovely bubble, unsubstantial, amnesiac, a
beachcomber's paradise. Bedecked in decay, it is drowning, slowly, in the
polluted waters of its canals. On this visit I was to share my vision with
friends native to different parts of the old world (Carlos and Sylvia to
Mexico City, Kiki to Germany, Kosinski to Poland). Perhaps, through
