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By Root 613 0

grasses, and ox-drawn ploughs, they were still the peasants I had known. They seemed to have stepped out of the pages of The Painted Bird, and for a moment I felt very possessive about the pair. If indeed they were my characters, it was only natural that they should come to visit me, so I amicably offered them vodka which, after an initial reluctance, they eagerly accepted. As they drank, I began to tidy up the loose items on my bookshelves, then quite casually drew a small revolver from behind the two-volume Dictionary of Americanisms that stood at the end of a shelf. I told the men to drop their weapons, and raise their hands; as soon as they obeyed, I picked up my camera. Revolver in one hand, camera in the other, I quickly took half a dozen photos. These snapshots, I announced, would prove the men’s identity, if ever I decided to press charges for forced entry and attempted assault. They begged me to spare them; after all, they pleaded, they had not harmed me or Kosinski. I pretended to reflect on that, and finally responded that, since their images had been preserved, I had no more reason to detain them in the flesh.

That was not the only incident in which I felt the repercussions of the Eastern European smear campaign. On several occasions I was accosted outside my apartment house or in my garage. Three or four times strangers recognized me on the street and offered hostile or insulting remarks. At a concert honoring a pianist born in my homeland, a covey of patriotic old ladies attacked me with their umbrellas, while screeching absurdly dated invectives. Even now, ten years after The Painted Bird’s publication, citizens of my former country, where the novel remains banned, still accuse me of treachery, tragically unaware that by consciously deceiving them, the government continues to feed their prejudices, rendering them victims of the same forces from which my protagonist, the boy, so narrowly escaped.

About a year after the publication of The Painted Bird, P.E.N., an international literary association, contacted me regarding a young poet from my homeland. She had come to America for complicated heart surgery, which, unfortunately, had not accomplished all the doctors had hoped it would. She did not speak English and P.E.N. told me she needed assistance in the first months after the operation. She was still in her early twenties, but had already published several volumes of poetry and was regarded as one of her country’s most promising young writers. I had known and admired her work for some years, and was pleased at the prospect of meeting her.

During the weeks while she recuperated in New York we wandered through the city. I often photographed her, using Manhattan’s park and skyscrapers as a backdrop. We became close friends and she applied for an extension to her visa, but the consulate refused to renew it. Unwilling to abandon her language and her family permanently, she had no choice but to return home. Later, I received a letter from her, through a third person, in which she warned me that the national writers’ union had learned of our intimacy and was now demanding that she write a short story based on her New York encounter with the author of The Painted Bird. The story would portray me as a man devoid of morals, a pervert who had sworn to denigrate all that her motherland stood for. At first she had refused to write it; she told them that, because she knew no English, she had never read The Painted Bird, nor had she ever discussed politics with me. But her colleagues continued to remind her that the writers’ union had made possible her surgery and was paying for all her post-operative medical attention. They insisted that, as she was a prominent poet, and as she had considerable influence among the young, she was duty-bound to fulfill her patriotic obligation and attack, in print, the man who had betrayed her country.

Friends sent me the weekly literary magazine in which she had written the required defamatory story. I tried to reach her through our mutual friends to tell her that I understood she had