Manhattan is where the narrator’s public life after The Painted Bird enters his private space: an apartment becomes the scene of a confrontation, while the city’s parks and skyscrapers frame a brief friendship with a poet from his homeland. The contrast makes Manhattan more than a backdrop; it is both a place where hostility follows the narrator home and a setting for a connection later constrained by political pressure and the poet’s return home.

Apartment and Public Hostility

One day, alone in his Manhattan apartment, the narrator opened the door expecting a delivery. Two men forced their way inside, carrying a newspaper clipping about attacks on The Painted Bird and a blurred photograph of the narrator. They said they had come to punish Kosinski for the book, which they believed insulted their country and people. The narrator denied being its author and claimed that the man in the photograph was his cousin, who had just stepped out. The men waited on the couch, still armed, as the narrator studied their appearance and recognized in them the rural world he had known.

The narrator offered the men vodka, then took a small revolver from behind a dictionary and ordered them to put down their weapons and raise their hands. With the revolver in one hand and a camera in the other, he photographed them. He told them the pictures could establish their identities if he chose to pursue charges for forced entry and attempted assault. After they pleaded with him, he let them leave, reasoning that their images had been preserved and there was no longer a reason to keep them there. The episode turns the apartment from private refuge into a place where the campaign against the book can arrive at the door; the camera, rather than force, gives the narrator a means to document the encounter and end it.

The City as a Wider Setting for the Campaign

The apartment intrusion was not isolated. The narrator describes being accosted outside his apartment house or in his garage, and strangers recognized him on the street to make hostile or insulting remarks. At a concert honoring a pianist born in his homeland, a group of patriotic older women attacked him with umbrellas. These incidents extend the pressures surrounding the book beyond Manhattan’s domestic interior into public encounters, though the account does not specify the location of every incident.

The narrator also places Manhattan within a broader dispute over how The Painted Bird was received. Years after publication, the novel remained banned in his former country, where people accused him of treachery. He argues that government deception continued to nourish the prejudices behind those accusations, making the novel’s reception part of a larger pattern of political manipulation. In this account, Manhattan is the narrator’s base amid a campaign whose reach crosses borders.

Parks, Skyscrapers, and a Brief Friendship

About a year after the book’s publication, P.E.N. contacted the narrator about a young poet from his homeland who had come to America for complicated heart surgery. She did not speak English and needed assistance during the first months after her operation. During her recovery in New York, the two became close friends and wandered through the city. The narrator often photographed her against the parks and skyscrapers of Manhattan, recording a more companionable use of the city than the apartment’s tense encounter.

The friendship could not continue there. The poet sought an extension of her visa, but the consulate refused it; unwilling to leave her language and family permanently, she returned home. Later, she reported through a third person that her country’s writers’ union was pressuring her to publish a defamatory story about the narrator and their New York encounter. She had initially objected, explaining that she had never read The Painted Bird or discussed politics with him, but the union invoked its support for her surgery and medical care to demand a patriotic attack. The narrator received the story through friends and tried to send word that he understood the pressure she had faced, but she did not respond. Some months later, he heard that she had died of a heart attack. Manhattan thus holds the beginning of their friendship, while the forces that ended their time together operated across the distance between the city and her homeland.