The Anarchist (5 page)

“For how much?”

“A dollar. You are disappointed it is not more?”

“No.”

After a moment, she said, “Then let me ask you to do this favor for me?”

“What?”

“Read,” she said. “Read with me. Help me. My pronunciation is—it’s not good, I have been told many times.”

“I can understand you.”

“No. I must make better.”

“What do you want to read?”

“I have newspaper, but it is a week old. You are not interested in old newspapers? What would you have me read, Fred?”

He wiped his nose again with his handkerchief. “My name isn’t Fred. It’s not Fred Nieman. It’s Leon Czolgosz.”

She smiled then. “I make false names, too. But this is America and now I know it is no matter. My real name is Motka—Motka Ascher is who I was and who I will be.” She leaned toward him. “You have the interesting blue eyes, Leon Czolgosz. They are most beautiful. Like two dreams. You almost seem in a trance, and when you stare at me I feel—powerless? What makes your eyes to be like that?”

For the first time he smiled. “Because I read a lot. I’ve always liked to read.”

“Will my eyes be like that if I learn to read good English?” “Maybe.”

“What will you have me to read?”

“There’s a book I’ve read over and over for … eight years or so—a novel called
Looking Backward
. Have you heard of it?”

“We have not time for books here.”

“It’s very popular.”

“One book for eight years? What is it about?”

“A man named Julian West. He lives in Boston, he’s well-to-do. It’s 1877 and there are strikes and workers’ protests everywhere,” he said. “Then he falls asleep—and he wakes up in the year 2000.”

“Two thousand!” She laughed. “That is ninety-nine years from here.”

“Now
. From now,” Czolgosz said. “He finds that Americans have reached a solution to all their differences, all their problems, and they’ve done it without some bloody revolution. He discovers a workers’ utopia.” He could tell she didn’t know the meaning of the word. “There is no competition between factories. No difference in salaries. Everyone has enough to eat, a decent place to live.”

Her eyes drifted up to the sloped ceiling above their heads. “Women do not work in houses like this?”

“No,” he said. “Everything is perfect. The strange thing, though, is that Julian West discovers that he has somehow lost his own identity, but he realizes that this is a necessary step, and like everyone else he is happy.”

“Do you think we are headed to this …
you-top-e-a?”

“Utopia,” he said. “Yes, maybe it’s a step.”

He reached into his pocket and took out the article he’d been carrying for the last year. Motka watched him unfold it carefully—it was about to fall apart along the creases. Slowly, she read the headline, “Bresci Assassinates King of Italy,” and then leaned away from him. “You knew him?”

“No.”

“You read this over and over, too?”

“I admire this man. Gaetano Bresci believed in utopia.” She looked confused as she reached out for the article, but Czolgosz folded it and put it back in his pocket as he got up from the bed. “I must go now.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know—I need to go. It’s not you,” he said. “I must leave Buffalo.”

“Now?”

“Yes.” He looked around the small room, its slanted ceiling. “You say you hope you don’t have to live this life anymore someday. I hope so, too. You believe in the future. I believe in the future, but the difference between us is that I don’t have one.”

“Please,” she said, looking confused. “Where do you go?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s more like I am taken.”

“Will you come to see me again—and bring this book to help me with the reading?”

“I can do that.”

She put her hand on his arm and said regretfully, “Of course, to give me the reading lesson you still must to pay three dollars to Big Maud.”

HYDE spent half an hour upstairs, talking with Bella Donna. Because he only sought the favors of Motka, he was treated differently by the other girls; some showed jealousy or contempt, while others, like Bella Donna, who was Motka’s best friend, treated Hyde as she would her brother. She was responsible for the well-being of all the girls who worked at Big Maud’s, which meant that she ran the kitchen, the laundry, and the maintenance of the house, and provided what passed for medical services—handling everything from hangovers to overdoses to abortions. Her room on the second floor had flocked red wallpaper, a green velvet fainting couch, and a Victrola on which she played scratchy Italian opera recordings. She hummed along with the aria by Giuseppe Verdi that always made her eyes well up. Her wavy black hair hung to her waist and she liked to have Hyde brush it
while she sat on the edge of her bed and looked at herself in the dressing-table mirror.

When the record was finished, he went down to the parlor and found Motka sitting on a sofa, avoiding the stares from the men at the bar.

“Where’s Nieman?”

“He’s gone.” There was a hesitance in her voice.

“He didn’t say where?”

She shook her head, distracted. “Did you know he likes to read? He is the real dreamer. He talks about …
utopia?
He would not hurt the fly.” Raising her eyes to him, she added, “You owe me one dollar.”

Hyde found a dollar in his pocket and gave it to her, and then he sat down heavily on the sofa. “I should stop making bets with you.”

“He is not like most men.”

“No, I believe you’re right.”

“He keeps his pants on, and his mind, it work like the fever. He says he has the catarrh and he takes medicines for it all the time. Maybe that is why he has beautiful dreams in his eyes. You know that he carries a—how do you say?—article from the newspaper in his pocket?”

“An article—about what?”

“Gaetano Bresci. The man that kills the king of Italy because he believes in this utopia, too.”

Hyde sat forward, his hands on his knees. “He didn’t say where he was going?”

“No.”

“I must go.”

“You must to find him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think that will be easy.”

“You are a good judge of men, Motka.”

“If they do not make talk. He said he is leaving Buffalo.”

“Not again. He say where?”

“No, but you are right. He likes trains.” Hyde started to get up off the sofa, when she said, “He did promise to come back and give to me a reading lesson.”

“But he didn’t say when?”

“He said he believes in the future, but he does not have one. Do I say that correct?”

“Yes, it’s perfect.”

They stood up and Motka took his arm and walked him out of the parlor to the front door. She went as far as the front stoop with him, her arm still curled around his elbow. “Big Maud tell us that if we step into the street with a customer at night, we lose a dollar.”

“But you earned a dollar from our bet.”

“I would only then to break even.”

“That’s true,” he said. “I missed going upstairs with you.”

“You went with Bella Donna, no? She is like the mother to all women. Is she not good to you?”

“Of course, but it’s not the same. I brushed her hair while she cried to her opera.”

“I think you be just a little jealous?”

Hyde was embarrassed and he looked away, but then he said, “Yes, a little.”

Light from the transom window above the door slanted down on Motka’s hair. Her eyes were large and sad. He had a sudden urge to kiss her, even though the one thing she would not allow was to be kissed on the mouth—like stepping out into the street and smoking in the parlor, it was against the house rules. But now he suspected that she might not resist, and would even welcome his kiss. As he leaned down to her, she lifted her face toward him, but then he heard a sound behind him, quick footsteps, and he was struck on the back of the head. A second blow caused him to see shooting white streaks. He fell off the stoop, landing on his side in the street, where he was kicked in the ribs. He managed to get to his feet and confront his attacker, a stocky man with curly hair who reeked of whiskey. He swung at Hyde but was so drunk
that he missed and staggered against the stoop railing. Hyde hit him in the stomach, doubling him over, and when he straightened up, Hyde punched him in the face, once in the nose, followed by a roundhouse to the chin. The man fell to his knees, blood gushing from his nose and mouth. Hyde moved toward him, but Motka came between them, her hands on his chest, saying,
“Please, stop!
Anton, he is my
brother!”

Hyde stepped back from her. Someone opened the front door, and the three of them were suddenly cast in the gaslight from the vestibule. Big Maud, Mr. Varney, and Bella Donna peered out, and Motka said, “It is over, it is a mistake! This is my brother and …” She began to cry as she held Anton, keeping him from falling.

“Well, get him in off the street,” Big Maud said, but then she laughed. “We don’t want to give the impression that I run a house where brawling is encouraged.” She led Mr. Varney back to the parlor, her bustle floating behind her.

Bella Donna came out on the stoop and helped get Anton upstairs to her room. They laid him on the fainting couch and sat Hyde at the small table by the front window. Both women tended to the men’s wounds, washing cuts and cleaning bruises. Though Hyde had a lump on the back of his head and his ribs ached, Anton was in worse condition. Motka wrung out the washcloth in the basin and tried to clean the blood from his face. “Anton, be
still
. You are stupid with this fighting. Always you lose.” She turned and explained to Hyde, “He has been this way since we are children.”

Her brother said, “I am defeating my sister’s honor.”

“Defending,” Hyde said. “You were defending your sister’s honor.”

“Yes, that is correct,” Anton said.

“Honor,” Bella Donna said. She had Hyde’s shirt off and she was wrapping a bandage around his ribs. “There’s another capitalist lie. It’s an excuse for losing.”

Anton tried to raise himself up on the fainting couch, and
said to his sister, “You must leave this house. Or you end up like that girl in the canal.”

Motka pushed him back down and continued to daub at the encrusted blood around his nose and mouth. “And you are not to come here every time you get drunk and—”

“This has happened before?” Hyde asked.

Motka only sighed.

Bella Donna said, laughing, “Usually he comes into the parlor, drunk, and shouts at everyone. In this moment it is like the opera,
è vero?”

“Big Maud will throw me out,” Motka said.

“Good,” Anton said.

“Then what?” Motka dropped the cloth in the pan of pink water. “I live in the street? The girls work there do not live very long.”

“You stay with me and my wife and son,” he said. “I say this before.”

She began to dry his face with a towel. “You cannot feed three mouths now, and I know how Katrina thinks for me.”

Hyde buttoned up his shirt and got to his feet slowly.

Anton watched him and said, “You pay to be on my sister?”

“You might say that.”

Anton made a little pushing gesture with his fist. “How do you like it for me to be on your sister?”

“I don’t have a sister, Anton.”

“You do not get my point.”

“Neither do you.”

Anton looked away, insulted.

Hyde went to the fainting couch and Anton stood up quickly. “Listen,” Hyde said, “I’m sorry. I wish it were not this way.”

He held out his hand, and after a moment Anton looked squarely at him. He was sober now and his nose was probably broken. He shook hands firmly, and then let go, nodding once. “You are the good fighter,” he said. “Who teaches you to box?”

“A nun,” Hyde said, and then he smiled. “A Sister of Charity.”

“This is why I never understand Catholics, maybe?” Anton said, smiling, too, though it was clearly painful. “Rabbis do not teach children how to box.”

“Sister Anne Joseph got tired of seeing me get beat up by other boys,” Hyde said. “So she taught me what she called ‘the art of self-defense.’” He went to the door and opened it, but then hesitated and looked back at Motka, her blue, woeful eyes. “You’re lucky to have such a brother.”