Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski Read Free Book Online Page A

to make a living, but he seemed to lack something of the zeal and verve of others who worked that territory. In twenty years, he had published only a meager handful of books, each of them including a few sections on polo. But polo was still an exotic sport, evoking in the popular imagination phantoms of Britain and India at the Victorian high noon of empire, gentry and military alike chasing the ball and one another across the trim and decorous turf of a country estate. And most riding instructors and people who had a special feeling for horses showed little interest in polo or sympathy with it, in angry dissent from what they took to be its violence against animal and rider alike.
    Friends advised him to enter the world of state and national horse shows, not in the role of judge, which he frequently accepted, but as a competing entrant. They pointed out that the horse show had progressed from the local pleasure of the entry ofthe family back-garden horse to the big business of keen international competition, the winning horses commanding staggering prizes, their value increasing with every championship they won. His friends tried to persuade him that his prestige as a polo player, coupled with the distinction he now commanded as a writer on equestrian art, would compensate for his defects in horsemanship and would persuade some of the better-known stables and individual owners or breeders to hire him and exploit his minor celebrity to win attention for their horses at major shows and events.
    But competition of this order was foreign to Fabian. In one-on-one meets, he fought another man for supremacy in the short span of their play, submitting to rules that both contestants obeyed, without an umpire, away from the fickleness of a public that might choose favorites. Horse shows rated men and animals according to an order of excellence and accomplishment that did not interest Fabian. The essence of competition, for him, lay not in the challenge offered by others but always in the challenge posed by oneself.

Fabian lay in wait for fall in Massachusetts or Vermont, sometimes along the shallows, pleasant dunes and stretches of the coast, but mostly in the northern reaches of the East, where summer put up its fiercest resistance, until the last, to break with life.
    There the leaves defiantly clung to the trees, and the mantling shrubbery, misted by the mild noon of autumn, bristled at the frosting chill of night.
    Fabian’s thirst for this spectacle, for its prick and stir, the immolation of odor and hectic bloom that only autumn offered, would come as suddenly as any other, ignited by a whiff of bark or mealy oats, the supple aroma of leather or hide, the musk of roots trailing a wind along the highway. He took it as a longing for something apart from thought, different from memory, beyond them, something to which one could stake no claim of one’s own, a realm outside the deed of charter or possession.
    When, in that season, Fabian would find his road approaching some grand estate, a frontier of thickly wooded land dense about it, acre on virgin acre, he would drive off the highway into a clearing nearby and park his VanHome, the signs PERISHABLE clearly fixed to its sides. Avidly, like a boy on the scent of play,he would saddle his ponies quickly and, in a white polo helmet and padded knee guards that protected him from branches and underbrush, he would cut into the wood, astride one horse, the other, also saddled, on a lead rein, the ponies snorting, jostling in the promise of the run, plunging through the wiry brambles, thrusting forward, great plows scything the earth, tearing the ligaments and arteries of the stubborn thistles, the prickly shrubs, leaves in their clustering.
    Picking his way through the thicket, he would wade through layers of leaves, stalks, roots and stumps heaped in profusion, their dry, crackling billows making a sea music, soughing, the tidal lap rising about his ears, muting even the drum of the