The Devil Tree (25 page)

“I’m leaving you again,” said Whalen. “I want to chase sea snakes.”

Walter smiled and Helen waved her hand. Then they both lay back, pulling their hats over their faces for a nap in the sun. As Whalen walked past the dinghy, he dropped the blowfish back into the sea and casually threw the boat’s towrope overboard. He dived into the water, and from beneath the surface he grabbed the rope and pulled it, easing the boat slowly off its perch. Once free of the sandbar, the dinghy, pushed by the wind and tide, would aimlessly drift away. Whalen began his long swim back to the villa.

•   •   •

Looking back at the Howmets, two mere spots now on the patch of sand, Whalen felt abruptly severed from the whole breadth of his past. When the Howmets were no longer in sight, he felt as if he were at last able to look toward himself, to rise up and anchor himself on a sandbar of his own.

He saw a sea snake, poised to attack as it followed him, and keeping an eye on the creature he swam submerged until the sea snake left him for another target. He rose to
the water’s surface and looked back. As the rising tide rolled over the reef, the sandbar, like a water-skier cut from a towrope, vanished under the curling waves.

Whalen emerged on Ukunda’s beach. The jungle was still, the sky cloudless, the sea tranquil. The world was in order.

Reaching the villa, he summoned the servants and instructed them to launch the speedboat and start looking for his missing guests. While he was skin-diving, he explained, the Howmets must have gone exploring in the dinghy. Now, he said, he was worried about their being out there all alone, at the mercy of the incoming tide.

•   •   •

The bodies of Helen and Walter Howmet were never found, and Whalen, like a starving man who had suddenly been nourished from an unknown source, felt new energy flowing into him. But there were often moments when he gave in to fatigue and a sense of futility, when he felt as though he were living on the far side of communicable thoughts and feelings. He fought these moments, trying to tear off the membrane that seemed to enclose his mind and inhibit his will. But he was helpless, beyond self-control.

He confronted himself. He could remain free, setting the rules for his own acts and determining the value of their consequences, with Karen as the intermediary through whom he would discover himself. Or he could try to perceive himself without Karen, as a man who knows himself only through principles set for him by the world.

Then he thought of the lesson taught by the Indian Panchadasi concerning the Self: “How shall I grasp it? Do not grasp it. That which remains when there is no more grasping is the Self.”

•   •   •

Dearest Jonathan:

I remember being in your room at Yale when we both read aloud and recognized ourselves in a passage from Rilke: “We discover, indeed, that we do not know our part: we look for a mirror; we want to rub off the paint, to remove all that is artificial, and to become real. But somewhere a bit of masking that we forget still clings to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our lips are twisted. And thus we go about, a laughingstock, a mere half-thing: neither real beings nor actors.” But now with you, I’m not a laughingstock, a mere half-thing. I’m as real as are my emotions, and of all people I know and care for, you’re the closest to me.

When I was a girl, I thought that loving was magic—magic that made one’s lover free, happy, fruitful, fulfilled. I’ve fastened all my desires on you because you’re my pleasure, my freedom, my occasion for joy. Fastening on you has given me a new gravity—the dependable force of our love. Now, free to do anything, go anywhere, be with anyone, I’m secure in the knowledge that our love will always bring me back to you. The loss of you would be a wound for which I have no balm.

Karen

•   •   •

Karen undid the top button of her blouse and with a single movement crossed her arms and lifted the thin fabric
over her head. Her breasts quivered as she shifted her body to unzip her skirt and slide it over her hips. Still looking at him, she hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her black slip and pushed it very slowly down to her ankles. Then she stepped away from the small pile of clothing.

She bowed her head, lay down on the rug, and spread her hands. Her calves tensed as she thrust out her toes. He stared at the mirror that was propped against the wall and saw himself slip into her. Soon, her skin dry and cool against him, he could not distinguish between her flesh and his own. He probed deeper. Her face glistened in the light, and as she spread her thighs wide she drew her fingers together behind his back.

Still fixed on their reflection in the mirror, he saw himself and Karen doubled up, clutching each other, thrusting, the mirror a witness of the last moment of his intoxication, of his useless passion. He looked away, then withdrew. He stood up.

He pulled her up by the arm and sat her on the chair. As he held her by the shoulder with one hand, he brought the open palm of his other hand down on her face. She recoiled; he held her fast and, his hand a fist now, struck her once again. She spun away, gasping, and he let her fall into the chair facedown. No longer could he see her eyes.

Karen remained motionless. He waited for her to scream or try to hit him, but she did not. Without looking at her, he walked across the room, opened the door to his study, entered, and shut the door behind him.

•   •   •

He lay in his bed in the Swiss clinic, fully dressed, staring at the ceiling. In pain but not knowing why, he only wanted his mind turned off. The simplest tasks—dressing or undressing, turning the light on or off, closing or opening the window—seemed beyond his will and strength.

He could sense the coming of day without opening his eyes, even when the shutters of his room were closed. Awake long before the staff, he listened for the day’s first sound: a footstep in the clinic’s corridors, the rumbling of a bus through the streets, the buzz of a motorboat on Lake Geneva.

He lay like a stone on the shore, unmoved by the waves washing over him. A heavy weight seemed to press constantly against his chest.

Once in a while he longed for change, and he knew that the longing itself was a prelude to recovery. But the longing tired him, and then all he wanted was to endure. His thoughts returned to the faraway hospital in Rangoon, to the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel: “To my heart I am of great moment. The challenge I face is how to actualize, how to concretize the quiet eminence of my being.”

One night Whalen’s body refused to sleep. He rose, left the clinic, and walked to the shore of the lake. A sheet of mist rolled along the water, hiding all but the nearest banks from view. The smell of moss spread through the air. He sniffed the dew, listened to the lapping of the water against the stones of the lakeshore, and felt the skin prickle on the back of his neck. The fog lifted. He stared across the lake and saw the blinking lights of Geneva.

Born on June 14, 1933, of Mieczyslaw and Elzbieta Kosinski in Lodz, Poland, Jerzy Kosinski came to the United States in 1957. He was naturalized in 1965. Mr. Kosinski obtained M.A. degrees in social sciences and history from the University of Lodz, and as a Ford Foundation Fellow completed his postgraduate studies in sociology at both the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and Columbia University in New York. He wrote
The Future Is Ours, Comrade
(1960) and
No Third Path
(1962), both collections of essays he published under the pen name of Joseph Novak. He is the author of the novels
The Painted Bird
(1965),
Steps
(1968),
Being There
(1971),
The Devil Tree
(first edition 1973, revised in 1981),
Cockpit
(1975),
Blind Date
(1977),
Passion Play
(1979),
Pinball
(1982), and
The Hermit of 69th Street
(1988), as well as the collection of selected essays
Passing By
(1992).

As a Guggenheim Fellow, Mr. Kosinski studied at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University; subsequently he taught American prose at Princeton and Yale universities. He then served the maximum two terms as president of the American Center of P.E.N., the international association of writers and editors. He was also a Fellow of Timothy Dwight College at Yale University. Mr. Kosinski founded and served as president of the Jewish Presence Foundation, based in New York.

Mr. Kosinski won the National Book Award for
Steps
, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in literature, best Screenplay of the Year Award for
Being There
from both the Writers Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), the B’rith Shalom Humanitarian
Freedom Award, the Polonia Media Award, the American Civil Liberties Union First Amendment Award and International House Harry Edmonds Life Achievement Award. He was a recipient of honorary Ph.D.s in Hebrew letters from Spertus College of Judaica and in humane letters from both Albion College, Michigan (1988) and Potsdam College of New York State University (1989).

An adept of photographic art, with one-man exhibitions to his credit in Warsaw’s State Crooked Circle Gallery (1957), André Zarre Gallery in New York (1988), and in the Spertus College of Judaica in Chicago (1992), Mr. Kosinski was also an avid polo player and skier. In his film-acting debut in Warren Beatty’s
Reds,
he portrayed Grigori Zinoviev, the Russian revolutionary leader.

Mr. Kosinski died in New York on May 3, 1991.