The Attempt (11 page)

How proud he was, how proudly he laughed, when he found out his four-year-old girl was secretly selling the moralistic pictures they handed out to children in church!

My great-grandfather Kolman knew only one kind of happiness: the happiness of winning.

When things were going his way, Eleanor was floating on air. She was his princess, and he laid the whole world at her feet.

But he had his bad moments, too, and when he did, he would knock Eleanor down from the heights with such cruelty that it baffled her. She sensed only that her daddy was suffering and so suffered along with him.

Her father had always made it clear that she was special. At meals, he made her sit across from him, leaving her mother to take one of the seats normally reserved for children. Whenever they had a visitor who asked to see his collection, Eleanor was the one who would accompany him. When they were in Pittsburgh, he would take her for walks to Martha's grave and back on a regular basis. Along the way, they would discuss whatever Kolman had on his mind, and as a result, Eleanor knew more about his affairs than anyone else.

What Kolman failed to achieve in his lifetime, he accomplished with his death.

After the nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts, a state of lethargy ensued. Eleanor refused to eat. She wouldn't even move, just lying quietly, tears streaming down her cheeks.

After the tears dried up, she entered the final stage of
mourning: the daily small-scale work of preserving her father's memory forever.

While he was still alive, she was able to be critical of him. They had different opinions on politics, especially on women's issues. After his death, she became completely at one with him.

Eleanor became one of the richest unmarried women in America. Her mother was still entitled to the use of all three homes and a lifelong annuity. Her brother got the house on Long Island, where he lived with his wife and children, and a little bit of money, but everything else went to Eleanor, according to Kolman's will. Crafty as he was, Kolman knew the only property he would never have to part with was the property he left to Eleanor. His daughter would take good care of it for him.

Eleanor didn't want to stay in the New York residence alone with her mother, so she bought a country villa with land along the Hudson River and moved her belongings there. From then on, she went to New York only to visit. She slept in the guest room, since her father's bedroom and hers were both locked shut after his death. But first she had his heavy deathbed, carved of walnut, placed next to her own.

For twelve years, until Alice died, the two beds stood side by side, fully made, behind the drawn green curtains. It wasn't until my great-aunt Eleanor was rid of her mother, of her blame and accusations, that she was able to fully devote herself to the memory of John C.

During the house's transformation into the publicly accessible Kolman Museum, Eleanor had the bedrooms reopened. She had the carpenters dismantle the beds, tear out the dark wood
paneling, rip out the door frames, and incorporate them all into the newly built reference library.

Eleanor took the door that connected the two bedrooms and used it as the door to her study. It still opened and closed with the same unmistakable creak her father used to complain about with a smile.

No man could ever make her feel as special as he had. She mustn't allow the living to threaten the dead. She mustn't betray her father.

Of course she had yearnings. Between thirty and forty, she had longed to have children. But even in death, her father demanded everything of her, so she had a dog instead. Later, during World War II, she took in some teenage girls who had been left homeless by the bombing in London, and she continued to act as their fairy-tale aunt for long after the war.

She also fell in love a few times. They were all older men: first the chairman of the board for the Kolman Museum, then a professor of art history she had appointed as director of the collection, and, finally, her personal physician. None of them ever knew how Eleanor truly felt. They interpreted her mood swings as an old maid's typical irritability, which nobody wants to take a close look at, for fear of what they might find: the embryos smothered before they could be conceived, the soulless baby birds stuffed behind the walnut headboard.

One day, my great-aunt Eleanor returned to Pittsburgh and the family home, with its green lawns in view of the cemetery in the woods. The house that, for decades, despite the family's absence, had been kept up by three maids, a caretaker, and a gardener. Nobody
there remembered John C. Kolman or my great-grandmother Alice anymore.

The resident staff had grown old and passed away. The only one who wouldn't die was Eleanor, who had been waiting for death a good ten or twenty years. At a certain point, she let go of the rope, surrendering to the murmurs and smells of yesteryear, letting herself be swept along by the current. She started talking to her childhood governess and her brother Tom, waiting outside the bedroom door for her mother to call her in. She went on pony rides, made tea for her dolls. Sunlight and birdsong streamed in through the windows of the garden shed. Even from across the meadow she could see the green treetops of the Kolman woods shaking under the surge of wings. Everything was big, vibrant, and full of life.

She sits on her father's lap, stroking his graying hair and close-trimmed beard.

“Look in my eyes. Who do you see there?”

“I don't know,” says little Ellie, feeling embarrassed.

“You.” Her father smiles. “You're my one and only little girl now. Tell me you'll always be as good as Martha. Will you always love your daddy? Rosebud died and Daddy doesn't have any other little girl.”

Ellie sobs, wrapping her arms around her father's neck. She feels so sorry for him that she thinks her heart is going to break.

When she was ninety years old, she invited me, her great-niece, Eleanor Louise Kolman, to Pittsburgh. I went to visit her often anyway, but this was a special invitation.

Of all the relatives, she liked me best, and it wasn't because of my name. In fact she had always hated her name; it struck her as
unfeminine. When she was young, I was told, she had considered changing it to Margaret or Lily.

When my parents named me Eleanor, she didn't speak to them for months. She suspected my grandfather Tom of having suggested it to his son in the hopes that it would make my father's childless aunt turn sentimental and leave everything to her namesake. I was told that for a long time she wouldn't even visit them to look at me.

Gradually, though, she grew fond of me. I had always liked paintings, and my great-aunt started walking me through the collection, showing me this and that. She paid attention to how I reacted. Then she took me to Europe with her. I was only eleven when we went to Italy, but my great-aunt and I almost always agreed about what we should see.

We went together to the Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence, where my great-aunt fell in love with the murals of Fra Angelico all over again. When we got back, she began to write a book about them.

She invited me to Pittsburgh to explain her plan to me. There was no doubt in her mind that I would agree to it. After all, she was going to make me rich. Maybe not the richest unmarried woman in America, as she had once been, but still, extremely rich. The Kolman collection was increasing in value every year.

Along with her wealth, of course, I would be taking on a burden, but she had been preparing me for it ever since I was a child.

We sat down to tea in the drawing room and I told my aunt about the university. Her influence was visible in that respect as well. I had chosen art history as my major.

Then she asked me to help her unclasp the necklace with the locket containing Martha's likeness. I went to hand it to her, but she shook her head.

“It's yours,” she said. She told me her plan.

I set the locket down on the table. “I can't.”

“What are you saying?”

“I'm sorry.”

“You might change your mind.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

What was I supposed to say? That I detest the very air in the house where I grew up? The cold loneliness that comes with money? That I'm troubled by my family's past? That I feel personally guilty?

I was still a little girl when my aunt and I traveled around Europe. It was all like a fairy tale. A lot had changed since then.

“But why, Ellie? Why can't you just let me die in peace?”

It was my secret. I hadn't told anyone yet. But what could I do at that moment? “Because I want to enter the convent,” I said, “that's why.”

Dear heaven, break open and shower her! Pain, torture her no more. All that she missed out on. All that will never come back. Bury it all in ruins, you blue, bluer than blue sky, arching like her father's Chinese bowl over the meadow of her childhood; bury her, the girl on a pony, the girl with the locket pressed, wedged deep into her chest.

Daddy, screams the wounded Eleanor, she's rejecting you!

I
WROTE
S
ISTER
M
ICHAELA A LETTER
thanking her.

I slipped her notes inside the cover of Josef's notebook,
which I had brought to New York with me. Now, besides Josef's unfinished novel, the blue envelope labeled
ANARCHIST
also contains copies of Alice Kolman's letters and the papers of Andrei and Louise that I managed to get from the archive. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with it all.

A hundred-some-year-old little girl who can't die.

I was reminded of Eleanor C. Kolman in the plane back to New York from Prague. There was a woman on the flight, probably crazy or a junkie in withdrawal. She was wearing a knit beret like the kind my grandmother Týna wore, with dark sunglasses hiding her face. She was holding her large white hands out in front of her, as if they didn't belong to her, and her wrists were wrapped in bandages. Somewhere over Canada, she decided she wanted to jump out of the plane. She got in a fight with the flight attendants, howling like a soul in purgatory. Finally, they had to handcuff her, and once we landed at the airport, the police took her away.

Like Eleanor, she kept calling for her father, begging him to forgive her.

12

I
LANA DIDN'T RESPOND TO MY E-MAILS
from Prague. She wrote back only once, to say that New York was buried in snow. The city had been totally quiet for two days, she said. Also, she had started going to group therapy.

I called her a few days after I got in, and she invited me over for dinner.

She lived in one of the old, well-preserved buildings near the university. Arriving there, I climbed the narrow stairway to the fourth floor and found the door to Ilana's apartment propped open. A deep voice and laughter echoed down the corridor.

A guy stood with his arms outstretched, hanging off the door frame to the kitchen, where Ilana was apparently making food. His feet were crossed and his ass stuck out into the entryway.

His presence irritated me right away, along with his foreign-sounding Romanian and sloppy green shirt.

It was too late to turn around, though. Ilana came out of the kitchen and gave me a kiss on both cheeks.

The guy turned to me with a full black beard and a smile, holding out his pawlike hand. “Hi, I'm Marius.”

Ilana was wearing a clingy navy blue T-shirt with a low neckline and a tight black skirt. She looked thinner than I remembered. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail,
with a silver chain around her neck and a red smile painted on her lips.

“Marius lives in Oregon, but he's here at an arts center outside New York on a three-month scholarship. Can you believe it? He's an old friend. We went to high school together.”

She clasped her arms around his waist as she spoke.

The apartment was small and dark. In one corner, there was still a stack of moving boxes. In another, there was a travel backpack, which was definitely not Ilana's.

I noticed a piece of dark velvet hanging on the wall, with rows of earrings stuck in it, each one missing its partner.

“There was this period where I just kept finding lost earrings,” Ilana explained. “So I started collecting them, just for fun. Sort of like a diary. I still remember where I found every one.”

“I didn't realize you had artistic ambitions.” I could hear how silly the word
ambitions
sounded.

“I don't,” she said. “I just felt like it.”

“You did some nice things back in high school,” said Marius. “I remember. You used to make jewelry, and clothes, too. Some of it was pretty wild.”

“I made them because there weren't any to buy,” said Ilana.

“Remember that time you recited your poems at the school assembly?”

Ilana gave a loud laugh. “That was embarrassing!”

“It was awesome! I can still see it. After all these neatly groomed little kids with slicked-back hair singing cute little songs, this beautiful, fragile girl walks onstage in a long black dress with bare shoulders—”

“Stop, please!”

“—and starts reciting erotic poems.”

“They were not erotic!”

“They were ecstatic,” said Marius. “I remember it well, not to mention that you gave me the poems to read later on. About how the sea was entering you, and you were dissolving, about your skin and your hair and your lips, and looking at yourself naked in the mirror. . . .”

“How do you remember all that? It was so stupid.”

“I was in love.” The big bear shrugged.

“Here, I brought some wine,” I said.

“So stupid,” Ilana repeated, handing me a full glass. “Cheers.”

“Do you still write poems?” I asked quietly.

“No,” she said. “Luckily, I found out in time that I'm much stronger on theory.”

“So you're from Prague?” said Marius. “I was there once. Everyone says what a beautiful city it is, but I think it's awful. All those fancy facades and bright colors. It's like Disneyland. Plus all the rabbis and golems. I wouldn't be able to do anything there. I need space. I don't care if the buildings are ugly, as long as I can see the sky. Berlin, now that's a cool city. And it was even better before they started building it up. Or Sarajevo. Ever been there? Even nasty old Bucharest is better than Prague. You know what's a shame? That they didn't drop more bombs on you guys during the war. That would have cleared it out a bit. So what are you interested in anyway, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Why would I mind?” This guy was obnoxious. I didn't understand why Ilana had put me in this situation. “I'm a historian, but I'm actually more interested in the future. I feel like
New York is sort of an observation tower. You climb up and you can see a long ways, maybe even to the end of the world.”

Marius snorted. “Everyone's going on about the end of the world these days.”

“Who's everyone?”

“Philosophers, environmentalists, artists. Everyone. It's all the rage. If you want to make a career for yourself, just babble on about catastrophe and mix in a little Lacan, some Derrida, a drop of Levinas, and a dash of Heidegger. Marx isn't so popular anymore, but you can't make do without him. Nobody yet's done a better job of describing the shit of capitalism. But don't even mention Lenin. You won't get tenure with him. Better off using Benjamin—you can slip him in anywhere. The only one with the balls to say how things really are, in my opinion, is Žižek. All of these protests and activists and resistance movements and neoanarchists are just impotent stooges. All they do is moralize. Which is exactly what the powers that be need: moderate resistance within the bounds of the law. It gives them an alibi.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“What Žižek says. Seize control of the state and use it to change its own mechanisms. Activists always talk about change from the bottom up, but it isn't going to happen. It never has and never will. Every revolution has started by overthrowing the state.”

“Revolution?”

“You think it's funny?” Marius got up, went to the entryway, and dug around in his coat pocket. A moment later, he came back with a pack of cigarettes. “Mind if I light up?” Neither one of us was a smoker, but Ilana handed him an ashtray.

“Why do you think it's funny, if you don't mind my asking?”

“I don't know. Who said I did?”

“You smirked, didn't you?”

Ilana interrupted. “I just read an interesting book. It's by an environmentalist who argues that the difference isn't so much between people in favor of violent change and people who reject it as between people who do something and people who do nothing.”

“If you ask me, violence is inevitable.” Marius nodded. “Unfortunately. The people who are in power are never going to give it up voluntarily. Nothing changes that way. You want to fight by writing petitions? Buying organic carrots? Recycling?”

“What do you do?”

He shrugged. “So far, I just paint. I humbly and shamefully confess I'm not blowing up dams or gunning down the heads of multinational corporations, even if they deserve it even more than the politicians they have eating out of their hands. I'm a painter. And I even admit, in my sunnier moments, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at. I'm not stuck in some stuffy academic department. I've got my independence. I get by the best I can, out on the street, in the mud and rain, like a dog. But it suits me. I need to feel things up close. Fight for them.”

What a clown, I thought to myself. “Didn't you say you were here on some prestigious scholarship?”

Marius didn't respond. Just ran a hand over the scruff on his face, smoking and staring up at the ceiling.

“But I do think,” he said, suddenly snapping back to life, “that my peaceful days are over. When it comes to some things, art just isn't enough.”

Ilana opened another bottle of wine. We hadn't even eaten yet.

“So it's really all going to end in catastrophe?” Ilana asked. “Is that the way it has to be?”

She turned on the radio, smooth jazz. “Jan's studying the history of anarchism,” she said. “I've given it some thought. And I agree it's tempting. It would be so wonderful. But I just can't bring myself to believe people are actually capable of becoming independent-minded enough to decide for themselves. Most people want to obey authority. They'd rather keep doing the same thing than try to break their habits. Free man is just an illusion.”

“Free man is an ideal,” I said. “Either you believe in it or you don't. But maybe the point is just to admit that it isn't always the greediest and the strongest who win, the ones who consume and destroy the most. The future actually favors people who can cooperate and build something over the long term. The point is to start thinking about how to make this model work. Can it? Maybe. Nobody yet has proved otherwise.”

Marius nodded. “American democracy is the biggest scam of all. Saying you can decide everything for yourself, but the moment you step even just a little out of line, poof, that's it. This system's got about as much compassion as old Ceauşescu had. Just look at the people riding the subway home from work. They don't give a damn. All tuned out with their headphones and earbuds. Blank looks. Running on empty. Get home and turn on the TV. What is that if not totalitarian? The final stage of brainwashing. And then there's China, my friends. We can build whatever we want here, but they're still going to have the last laugh. Maybe they'll keep a few high-minded Westerners,
for observation and entertainment's sake, just as proof of our failed experiment.”

I left around two in the morning. Marius stayed. Ilana walked me downstairs so she could unlock the front door. When we got to the second floor, I suddenly blurted out that I had left my phone upstairs. I sprinted back up the steps to her apartment. It was hanging there in the entryway. His brown leather jacket. I gathered up my saliva, spit on the sheepskin collar, and quietly closed the door behind me.

Back downstairs, I got a kiss on each cheek and stepped outside into the freezing rain.

I needed to cool off, so I walked the whole way home.

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME,
I didn't feel like going to bed yet, so I turned on my computer to see what was new. Nothing had changed in the past few days. Protests against state budget cuts were still raging in Europe. People smashing shop windows and burning cars. Hundreds of gallons of oil gushing into the ocean from a broken pipe nobody knew how to fix. Thousands of people dying in a country hit by floods, but it was the third one this year already, so no one really cared. The Chinese had taken a crew of Vietnamese fishermen hostage, and the Japanese had taken a captain in the Chinese navy.

On the Web site of
Democracy Now,
I found an interview by Amy Goodman with Derrick Jensen, the environmental activist Ilana had been talking about earlier.

Jensen, who was born in 1960, says there's no way to prevent the end of civilization.

No way of life based on exploitation can go on forever, he
says. The end is coming soon and we need to prepare for it by actively dismantling civilization. First the cities. And the dams. People have to learn to cook over a fire again and gather edible plants, restore our direct relationship with what we consume.

There's a lot of work ahead of us, for everyone. Let's stop wasting time pretending things can go on the way they are. With fewer and fewer salmon returning to the rivers every year, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that eventually there won't be any left.

The only sustainable way of living, says Jensen, was in the Stone Age, and there's no doubt we'll end up there again; it's just a question of what will be left when we get there. How many animal and plant species will have to go extinct, how many poisons we'll have to put into our systems.

We all have blood on our hands, he says.

He says he learned about violence and the dynamics of power from his father, who abused him.

It occured to me that the first generation of anarchists, the radical prophets of human freedom, were also raised by abusive fathers and teachers. Their rebellion against God and the state was the rebellion of sons and daughters against their fathers.