New York City serves as a setting for the afterlife of The Painted Bird: a place where hostility to the book becomes an immediate threat to the narrator, but also where he offers practical support to a young poet from his homeland. The city’s Manhattan streets, apartment, parks, and skyscrapers frame these sharply different encounters, linking public controversy to private acts of intimidation and friendship.

Political Backlash in the City

Reports in the United States about attacks on The Painted Bird abroad prompted a flood of anonymous threatening letters from naturalized Eastern Europeans. The letter writers accused the narrator of slandering their countrymen and ethnic heritage, although almost none appeared to have read the book; many repeated accounts circulated secondhand in émigré publications. New York City thus stood within a wider American response to the campaign, even as the letters themselves were not all located there.

The threat became direct in the narrator’s Manhattan apartment. Alone there one day, he opened the door expecting a delivery and was pushed inside by two men in raincoats. They showed him a newspaper clipping about attacks on the novel, with a blurred reproduction of an old photograph, and threatened to beat him with steel pipes. The men said they had come to punish the author for vilifying their country and ridiculing their people, and described themselves as patriots despite living in the United States.

The narrator denied being the author, claiming that the man in the photograph was a cousin for whom he was often mistaken. He told the men that this supposed cousin would return shortly, then asked what they wanted. As they waited with their weapons, he offered them vodka. Once they had accepted it, he took a small revolver from behind a dictionary, ordered them to put down their weapons and raise their hands, and photographed them six times. He said the pictures could establish their identities if he chose to press charges for forced entry and attempted assault. After they pleaded to be spared, he let them leave, reasoning that their images had been preserved and there was no further need to detain them.

A Young Poet’s Stay

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. The operation had not achieved everything the doctors hoped, and she needed assistance during the first months of recovery. In her early twenties, she had already published several volumes of poetry and was considered one of her country’s most promising young writers. The narrator had known and admired her work for years and welcomed the chance to meet her.

During the weeks of her recovery in New York, the two became close friends and wandered through the city. The narrator often photographed her against Manhattan’s parks and skyscrapers. She applied to extend her visa, but the consulate refused to renew it. Unwilling to give up her language and family permanently, she had no choice but to return home.

The City Encounter’s Aftermath

After her return, the poet sent the narrator a letter through a third person. She reported that the national writers’ union had learned of their intimacy and was demanding a short story about her New York encounter with the author of The Painted Bird. The assigned story was to portray him as immoral and hostile to her homeland. She had initially refused, explaining that she knew no English, had never read the book, and had never discussed politics with him. Her colleagues nevertheless argued that the writers’ union had enabled her surgery and was paying for her postoperative medical care, and that she was obliged to attack him in print.

The narrator’s friends later sent him the weekly literary magazine containing her defamatory story. He tried through mutual friends to tell her that he understood the pressure under which she had been placed, but she never replied. Some months later, he heard that she had died of a heart attack. The New York friendship therefore persists in the account as both a genuine interval of companionship and an encounter later recast by institutions at home into political material.