The Attempt (4 page)

He walks me to the door and gives me a gentle pat on the shoulder.

“I'm glad I could be of some small help.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Have a nice stay in New York.”

Margaret must have been listening on the other side of the door. She returns my documents to me without a word and escorts me into the hall, where the doorman is waiting for me in the elevator. A minute later, I'm out on the street.

I spend the rest of my Saturday angrily Googling John C. Kolman III to try to find some dirt on him, some present-day Homestead or Johnstown. Not a thing. If that slimeball really is up to no good, he's keeping it under wraps. All I find out is that he has a sister. She entered a convent years ago and changed her name. The convent is in Arizona, near Phoenix. I send out a probe in her direction via e-mail.

4

S
HE SITS ACROSS FROM ME, SMALL AND DARK
. The blond, blue-eyed Kolman men all married black-eyed brunettes. Sister Michaela's eyes are the same shape as those of her great-grandmother Alice, but they aren't weighed down with pain. There's a lively shine to them.

Sister Michaela is happy to be in New York. Scanning the people, sipping her cup of coffee, turning her head in excitement as a fire truck goes wailing by outside the window. She says at home she sees the same thing every day. The mountain at whose base the convent is located shimmers like a mirage when the air is hot and in winter is coated with snow. A group of clouds can often be seen floating motionless at its peak. The surrounding plain is strewn with rocks and overgrown with prickly bushes and cactus plants. Sometimes it's a bloodred, tinted purple; at others, it's a burnt orange or pale yellow. Twice a year, after the rains, it turns green.

The convent is a pilgrimage site. People travel the dusty road from Phoenix and Tucson to visit and stay awhile. The convent puts them up in return for a contribution. They can eat and pray with the nuns, learn to make candles and soap, help out in the garden, tend to the convent's chickens, goats, and donkeys.

Sister Michaela is wearing a dark travel dress. She left her heavy black-and-white habit at home. Instead of a veil, she wears a beret. The last time she was in New York was
two years ago, for her father's funeral. She's here again now because she needs money.

“I come from a family of millionaires, but still I have to beg my brother for every dollar,” she says. “When I entered the order, my father decided that meant I was mentally unfit, and he wrote me out of his will. At the time, I didn't care. I didn't want anything from my family. But I've changed my mind since then. Not for myself, but those funds can be put to good use. After my father died, my brother contributed to the convent in his name, thinking that would get me off his back, but no such luck. We're building a new church, a refectory. . . .The money goes out as fast as it comes in. The mother superior entrusted me with a special mission.”

“Thank you for making time for me,” I say. “For being willing to meet.”

She smiles. “Seeing as you went to the trouble of finding me . . .”

She is probably in her forties, but as she eagerly drinks in her surroundings, she looks just like a little girl. Only the wrinkles around her eyes give her age away, and her hands, which are slightly red and dried out from working in the dirt, with close-trimmed nails.

I recount my meeting with John C. Kolman III. She shakes her head.

“We must seem crazy to you. It's just that my brother's incredibly touchy when it comes to our family. He feels like he took over the torch of our family honor from Aunt Ellie. He acts as if the whole world doesn't care about anything except history, when the truth is that no one could care less what happened in 1892.”

“I do.”

“You can read about it in any book. The whole thing was described in detail, ages ago. Whether my family talked to the historians or not. You can't keep the truth quiet for long, not here in America. Whether or not it changes anything is another story.”

“I tracked down everything about it I could,” I say. “How the unions called a strike at the steel works John C. Kolman ran for Carnegie. How your great-grandfather put down the strike, how many workers were killed and how many were fired. I know that Kolman took out ads on Carnegie's behalf in newspapers in Prague and Warsaw for men to replace the strikers, and that it was the first armed clash between factory owners and employees. It took the unions a long time to bounce back from that.”

“There are letters from Carnegie telling him to put down the strike by any means necessary.”

“Yes, I know. And when it was all over, Carnegie quietly got rid of your great-grandfather.”

“Kolman detested him for that. He refused to reconcile with him, even on his deathbed.”

“One thing I never could find, though, which I was hoping might be in the letters I don't have access to anymore, is how your great-grandmother saw the whole disaster. And the rest of your family.”

“And besides that?”

“The assassination attempt.”

She waves her hand.

“Are there any rumors in your family about the assassination attempt? Or the years afterward?”

“I don't know. I don't think so. It wasn't something we talked about.”

“But you all talk about your great-grandfather.”

“Sure, constantly. It's like he still controls everyone. It's awful! Especially Aunt Eleanor!”

“What about Alice?”

“Supposedly, she went insane,” says Michaela. “My greataunt always said her mother went insane. That was it.”

“Her last letters don't sound like they were written by a madwoman.”

“She suffered a shock,” says Michaela, bending and twisting a straw in her hands. “In the space of one year, she had two children die and her husband get shot, and on top of that, it was all over the papers that he was a murderer. Even back then, newspapers printed whatever they thought would sell, as opposed to following any particular political line. One week they'd back the unions, the next Carnegie. My great-grandfather was a windfall for them. He didn't have enough money yet that anyone had to fear him. Even later on, when he was more powerful, he always preferred to stay in the background. The only way he wanted to be seen was as an art collector. Have you seen his collection?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like it?”

“There are some beautiful works in it.”

“I hate it.”

“Do you mind if I ask about the past?”

“Why not? Everyone's got a right to ask. Especially when it comes to people like us. Explain and defend, that's all we do, our whole lives. Or deny, like Aunt Ellie. Why do you think I
ran away and left it all behind? I don't want to have anything to do with it, understand?”

The expression of an excited child is gone, and sitting across from me is a troubled woman clearly pushing fifty. She stares into her cup.

“First, little Martha died. That was in 1891, after the Johnstown flood. I assume you already know about that. Another interesting chapter. Martha accidentally swallowed a needle, got gangrene, and basically rotted alive. An ordinary X-ray would have saved her life. In the spring of 1892, when the strike broke out in Homestead, Alice was pregnant again. In the summer, she gave birth prematurely to a boy, who lived less than a month. My great-grandfather mourned the loss of Martha his whole life. He never even had a chance to notice his namesake, John C. Kolman. But it must have been a huge blow to Alice. It was a few more years before Aunt Eleanor was born.”

“Do you know your great-aunt well?”

“Of course. I grew up with her. She took me to Europe as a child. She was already very old, but she still had a head on her shoulders. She was the one who got me interested in art. She even wanted to—oh, it doesn't matter. I don't want anything to do with them. This is the last time I'm asking my brother for anything. After this, I just don't care anymore. Old wounds. What do you care about all this, anyway?”

“I'm a historian.”

“I don't think I can tell you anything else today. Nothing you can't find on your own.”

Sister Michaela stands from her seat.

“When do you go back?” I want to say “home,” but I'm not sure if you can call a convent that.

“Tomorrow.”

“Could I . . . could I write to you sometime? Would you mind?”

“Why not?” Michaela gives a weary smile. “But I can't promise I'll write back right away. We've got a lot of work at the convent right now. You'd be surprised. A lot of people think we just sit around all day, staring up at the sky.”

We shake hands good-bye. Her palm is rough and dry.

On the way home, I see a woman walking down the street, pulling a little girl by the hand. They're both staggering, as if in the face of a strong wind. The girl has the face of an old person and a stiff spine; she is swaying from side to side. Despite the summer heat, the mother is wearing a duffel coat, her strawblond hair falling down over her face. What basement did they crawl out of? I wonder.

People are like stars. The universe is expanding and the stars are moving farther and farther apart from one another, moving faster than the speed of light, until they cross beyond the point of visibility, until the darkness swallows them up.

5

I
N THE EARLY NINETIES,
when Václav Havel still ruled from the president's seat in Prague Castle and former dissidents went on TV to debate the meaning of truth and freedom, a young American walked into Josef's secondhand bookshop in L.

He was going back home and wanted to get rid of his books before he left. Two suitcases full. He didn't want any money for them. Josef was one of the three people in town he had been able to talk to at the pub during the two lonely years he spent teaching English at the local high school.

One of the books, published by a small university press in the United States, was an anthology of biographies of the most important anarchists. Andrei B. wasn't one of them, but he did play a supporting role in the story of Louise G., an American anarchist of Russian origin.

There were two photos of him. A portrait from 1892, when he attempted to assassinate Kolman, and a snapshot from the mid-thirties: Andrei on the promenade in Nice, wearing a light suit, cane and straw hat in hand, running to catch up with a group of friends, dominated by the short, broad frame of Louise G.

In the portrait he's only nineteen years old. He looks straight ahead, head tipped slightly back, as if shying away from the lens. Bulging Adam's apple, oval-rimmed glasses. Egg-shaped
skull, ears that stick out, a thick head of short black hair. Full lips.

I don't look anything like him. When I was little and my parents and I used to go to the Krkonoše Mountains along the border with Germany, everyone spoke German to me, assuming I was one of the blond East Germans who vacationed there. But Josef insisted that hair color didn't matter. He said I had Andrei's nose and mouth.

As evidence he showed me those photographs.

At the libraries here in New York, I found several books containing more details about Andrei B., as well as more photographs.

Toward the end of his life, he looked like Gandhi. In one photo, he sits at a desk shining with stacks of white paper, and he himself is also dressed in white, bald-headed, with wire-rimmed glasses, exuding an aura of . . . How shall I put it? Peace? Gentleness? Something like that.

“A
ND IF HE REALLY WAS
my great-grandfather?”

I'm sitting in Professor Kurzweil's living room. There are a few more books in the library and a few more wrinkles on the professor's face, but apart from that, nothing here has changed in the past twenty years.

“So what?” The professor shrugs. “Biological fatherhood is overrated. If I had to research whether my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were really my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, I wouldn't have time left to do anything else, ha ha ha.”

Professor Kurzweil put me to shame when I was nineteen,
and it's no different today. Always on the alert, ready to take a dig. He knows everything there is to know about history. His other passion is psychoanalysis.

“So how far have you gotten?”

“I got stuck on the Kolmans.”

“The Kolmans? As in John C.?”

“That's right.”

I tell him about my research at the library, my meetings with John C. Kolman III and Sister Michaela. He arches an eyebrow, bemused.

“I wouldn't have thought you had it in you. But why are you so interested? Andrei had nothing to do with them.”

“What about the assassination?”

“Assassination attempt,” he says, correcting me.

“When somebody tries to kill someone, in a way they're connected forever.”

“You make it sound romantic.” The professor snorts.

“I'd like to understand what motivated Andrei,” I say. “Why would a sensitive nineteen-year-old boy, in love, full of plans and grand ideas, decide to sacrifice his life for the sake of someone like Kolman?”

“Kolman was no different from the other entrepreneurs of his time,” says the professor. “Neither better nor worse, maybe just a little more discreet. I would look for the answer more in those grand ideas you mentioned. An ideologue can't fully grasp what it means to kill someone. To him it's just pure abstraction, like scratching out a duplicate entry.”

A teacher of mine had put me in touch with Professor Kurzweil, a Viennese native who fled to America at the age of fourteen, when Hitler annexed Austria. My teacher was
a history professor who was forced to leave the university during the purges after the 1968 Soviet invasion. He got his job back after the revolution in 1989. During the twenty years he was banned from academia, he worked as a stoker in boiler rooms, but continued his research. He even managed to maintain the foreign connections he had established during the political thaw of the mid-sixties. I had great admiration for him, and attended his secret lectures in the mid-eighties—“apartment seminars,” as they were known. My parents, who were loyal to the Communist regime, practically had a heart attack.

I remember the first time I called Professor Kurzweil, twenty years ago, from Washington, D.C., to say I was coming to New York the next day and ask if I could spend the night. He wasn't even surprised. That's how it was in those days, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Open doors, open hearts; naïveté on both sides. It was a beautiful time.

“Keep in touch,” says the professor as we exchange goodbyes. “I might have something for you. Do you know the name Malevich?”

“The historian? I've read something of his.”

“He was a good friend of mine,” says the professor. “He died last year. Left behind a huge collection of material on anarchists. In fact he was the only one who really focused on the topic. I'll find out what happened to his collection.”

We stand in the hallway outside his door. I remember it all so well: mirror, red carpet, floor lamp. . . . Suddenly it dawns on me. “Where is your wife? I didn't even say hello.”

“Erica? She passed away two years ago,” says the professor. “Now I'm learning to be alone.”