The Attempt (7 page)

8

“H
ERE IT IS
.”

Professor Kurzweil fishes a yellow Post-it out of a stack of papers and books piled around his computer screen and hands it to me. “Whenever I stick it somewhere, it just falls off anyway.”

I make out the name of an archive at the NYU library.

“It's all there,” says Kurzweil. “Letters, articles, speeches. Everything Malevich collected.” He turns to a young woman sitting at the round table over a cup of tea and a plate of cookies. “Viktor Malevich was the only one in this country who systematically devoted himself to the study of anarchism.”

The woman's name is Ilana.

When I called Professor Kurzweil to tell him I was coming, he didn't mention that he wouldn't be alone.

“He did it out of conviction,” Kurzweil goes on. “He believed the distorted image of anarchism that most of the public has to this day dates back to political campaigns from the turn of the twentieth century. ‘Every good person deep down is an anarchist.' That was Victor's famous dictum. Perhaps you've heard it before?”

Ilana shakes her head.

She's tall and dark, with darting eyes. At first glance nothing special, but after a while I find I can't stop looking at her. I
like the way she drinks her tea, warming her cup in her hands like an egg.

She's from Romania and came to the United States on a scholarship two years ago to get her Ph.D. at a private university. She's writing about how Romanian authors collaborated with the fascist and Communist regimes.

“Ilana looked me up a while ago,” Kurzweil says, “since I had the honor of knowing Mircea Eliade personally. She wanted a firsthand account of how he viewed his fascist past. I was of no help.” He smiles. “But we remained friends. Ilana also shares my interest in psychoanalysis.”

I don't know the first thing about psychoanalysis, and I'm always careful not to stray onto that topic with the professor, for fear he'll start throwing names at me like Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan. At least with Freud or Jung, I might still be able to get by, but even then just enough for a basic exchange.

Fortunately, the conversation moves in a more favorable direction. Ilana talks about the trips she took over the summer, and then we trade insights about New York. She speaks slowly, with a strong accent. When she's searching for a word, she lays a hand on her chest, between her breasts and her Adam's apple. She has long, slender fingers with short-trimmed nails.

Our tourist talk bores the professor. He starts to yawn openly and, not long after that, politely throws us out.

Ilana lives on the East Side and wants to walk home, so I offer to cross the park with her. I store her number in my phone. Even after more than two months in New York, there are only a few people at school I say hello to, and I haven't made any real friends yet. Everyone seems so busy, you have to make plans weeks in advance, even if you just want to get
a cup of coffee together. Coming from Prague, where I constantly run into people I know, whether I want to or not, I'm not used to social life being so complicated. At first, I didn't mind spending so much time alone, but a few days ago I decided I needed to change that.

On the corner of Madison and Eighty-sixth, Ilana suddenly comes to a stop. She says I can go back now, that she'll go the rest of the way on her own. But she asks what I'm doing next weekend. Saturday it's Halloween, and she's been invited to a party outside the city, at the country house of one of her university colleagues. She's going to take the train, and suggests I go with her. She asks if I've seen the Hudson Valley yet. We might still catch some fall colors, she says.

J
EFF
M
EYERS HAS WRITTEN SEVERAL BOOKS
and runs a creative-writing workshop. His wife, Nina, is an assistant professor in the department of East European studies.

From her father, Nina inherited her Russian surname; from her mother, a house on a lake west of New York. Her parents divorced when she was little and she grew up with her mother. She didn't learn to speak Russian until she was in college, which was also where she met Jeff. Her parents' wedding photos are displayed on top of an old piano, one of the few things her mother didn't get rid of after the divorce.

Jeff and Nina take their partnership seriously. They enjoy telling their friends the story of how they met, and wear their wedding rings with pride. They're planning to have a family.

Nina is a stern woman. She has never forgiven her father for leaving her mother alone, and even though her mother didn't
get sick and die until thirty years later, she blames him for that, too. Out of courtesy, she still sees him and his third wife, but she's angry at him. She's angry even now as she pours him a glass of vodka with orange juice.

The elegant gray-haired man with a strong, hooked nose sits on the wooden deck in a chair, watching a white heron search the shallow waters around a little island off the shore of the lake, step by step, so gracefully that it doesn't make even a ripple in the surface.

There are several other guests at the house besides Nina's father and his wife.

As darkness falls, Jeff lights candles in carved pumpkins, and eventually we move inside and sit down at the table to eat. Nina serves shrimp and French cheeses as Vivaldi plays in the background. I know from Ilana that Nina is a bit of a snob, which Jeff tries to balance out by going to pro football games.

Jeff cracks jokes at his students' expense as we sit around the table, and everybody laughs, except for Nina's father, an influential literary critic in his day. “You can't teach talent,” he snorts.

“On the other hand, talent only gets you so far,” Nina retorts.

“Let's not get into this debate.” Jeff offers a conciliatory smile. “It's the same thing every time. Your dad thinks teaching creative writing is useless, that all our graduates do is choke the market with trash, taking up space better left to real writers.”

“Am I wrong?” says Nina's father.

“What you leave out is that there's a lot of interest in creative-writing programs. Demand, as you know, creates supply, and far be it from me to turn down work just because
some of the students lack talent. How many people actually end up making a living in the field they studied in college? I know an astrophysicist who earns his living as a computer consultant, and a psychologist who works in a PR firm. It's the same thing with writing.”

“Aren't you forgetting something? Writing has to have some content, doesn't it? You need to know something first, have some ideas, don't you? Nobody these days knows anything. Students are woefully lacking in education. They don't know how to think. But they can churn out text on any topic, as many pages as you want. I've had a few of these creations come my way, but I wouldn't want to have to read them regularly. Now that's what I call hard-earned bread.” Vladimir Semyonovich chuckles at his own joke.

“There's no need to be arrogant,” says Jeff.

“There's a certain amount of arrogance that comes with intellect. Thinking people have always held authority. You just aren't old enough to remember. You and Nina have grown up in a world where ideas are for sale. If nobody buys it, it doesn't count. At least you could hide from the Communists, or run away. There's no escaping money. The deformation of commercialism is a voluntary process. It happens inside of people, and its effects are irreversible.”

“You know what I think?” Nina interjects. Her voice is trembling. “It's time to say good-bye to bitter, pompous egomaniacs who think they know better than everyone else. People like you and your great idol, Brodsky. Nobody cares about authority anymore. You say there are no more great novels being written, but you just can't see them. You see things only in relation to yourself and your own experience. And you feel
unappreciated because no one's interested in your opinions anymore. Why should they be? The world is a lot more diverse than fossils like you could ever imagine.”

“Fine, honey, if you say so. I think I've heard more than I care to.” Semyonovich deliberately wipes his mouth with a napkin and stands from his chair. He nods to his wife. “Shall we go?”

The two of them leave and Nina walks off and shuts herself in the bedroom for a while. When she reemerges, her eyes are red.

Dinner ends and the other guests gradually take their leave as well. Some of them have cars and offer us a ride back into town, but Jeff and Nina won't let us go. Surely we won't leave them there alone, they say. They ready the guest room upstairs for Ilana and make a bed for me on the couch.

Ilana is dressed for the dinner in a black V-neck sweater, with a bright red smile glued to her face. The more she drinks, the less she talks, unlike Nina, who took off the Vivaldi in favor of Edith Piaf after her father left, and now wants us all to dance.

The fiery eyes of the carved pumpkins stare in at us from the terrace as a dark yellow moon, covered in bruises, slowly rises over the lake.

As
THE NIGHT PROGRESSED,
the moon was reborn as a bright silver disk shining into the guest room through a crack in the curtains. Ilana's head rested on the pillow, eyes closed. I stroked her long, smooth legs, running my hand lightly over
the dark hairs between her thighs. As soon as we were done making love, she closed up and pulled away.

I was awakened by the first flush of a hangover and I heard Ilana crying. Fuzzily, I put together what had happened between us. We both had had a bit too much to drink. But she'd made it clear that she wanted it.

“What's wrong?”

Her back was turned to me, a tangle of dark hair.

“Ilana, what's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“I miss him.”

“Who?”

“It's none of your business.”

“Fine, then, I'll go back downstairs.”

I
N THE AFTERNOON, BEFORE
J
EFF DROVE
us to the train, Ilana and I took their canoe and paddled out to explore the lake. We spotted a few bald eagles and some gulls, the wind driving a rain of tiny yellow leaves in our faces. Dipping her paddle into the lake at the head of the canoe, Ilana sent green whirlpools spinning back to me in sets of two, and two again.

I tried to ask her a question or two on the train, but she made it clear she didn't want to talk about anything personal. She had closed up like the water's surface.

9

T
HE PUMPKINS AND SKELETONS
have disappeared from the streets, replaced by Thanksgiving decorations. I spend a lot of my time in libraries now.

I found a whole folder on Andrei B. at the archive Professor Kurzweil recommended. Article manuscripts, letters, also copies of a lawsuit he filed against the United States in 1919.

That year, the U.S. government employed a hastily adopted law to deport a group of Russian anarchists from the country. The first ones on the list, of course, were Louise G. and Andrei B.

A lawyer friend of theirs named Jeffrey Weisenkopf filed a suit against the government on their behalf, quoting from the first inaugural address of Thomas Jefferson: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

They lost the case. The fact that Louise was a U.S. citizen by marriage made no difference.

Just before dawn on Sunday, December 21, 1919, they were hustled aboard the ship, which immediately set sail. Manhattan receded into the distance, the outlines of the skyscrapers with their twinkling lights slowly shrinking in the fog. Louise cried, but Andrei was ebullient. He felt no heaviness leaving the shores
of the United States behind. The pendulum had swung back in the other direction. He was eagerly looking forward to the country he had fled like a prison thirty years earlier, but where now he would be able to achieve his dream of freedom.

December 19, two days before they were deported, John C. Kolman died suddenly of cardiac arrest.

The typed originals of Andrei's articles with his edits and corrections are sealed in plastic. But a few yellowed papers have slipped out. Maybe the librarian wasn't careful enough, or was thinking about people like me who need to touch and smell papers; these had the faint scent of cigarette smoke.

Andrei and Louise also typed their letters to each other, the only things they wrote by hand were their closing and signature. The habit of people who write a lot, who make a living by writing: banging out a letter on a typewriter between speeches or articles.

Dear Louise,

Thank you for the news of Germany. Again, I can only repeat what I have already told you in person: The only answer is individual action. Apart from that, I think there is nothing we can do. But is our network . . . capable enough? (I don't think so.) How can we get to that point? I appreciate the efforts to help people in prison, but I believe they are a waste of time.

Michel's essay on the flâneur (and your enthusiastic reaction), frankly speaking, surprised me. This “stroller of city streets,” observing everything and intervening directly in nothing, is he not the exact opposite of what we are? Of what we have been our whole lives? Did we not step across that line long ago in our youth? Did we not decide that we would not be reflections, commentators,
pocket mirrors, but the hand that intervenes? Did we even have a choice? (A question of compassion, of simple human compassion!)

Who is this “man of the crowd” of whom Michel writes? How does he earn his living? Where does he sleep? Who pays his way? This observation with which he sates himself, while never becoming oversated (or even being at risk of it), is it not a kind of cowardice? What if someone confronts him with a choice? What if they put a brown shirt on him and send him into the streets to beat Jews, what then? What position will he take? Will he simply observe and go with the crowd, or will he stand in opposition? I would like to know.

I view Michel's interest in this romantic “mission” (romanticism isn't a movement, but a need) as a concession to the young friends with whom he surrounds himself. A concession to the times, which he has ceased to understand. To say that modern man is a man without a story!

The observer has no story while he is observing. But is he, too, not part of the monumental tragedy that is taking place, independent of his will? There can be no story without irreversible decisions. I have made some myself, as have you. And the flâneur? If he does not make his decisions himself, someone else will make them for him. And soon! Like it or not, he will be dragged into a story he did not choose.

Perhaps last century, when Baudelaire roamed Paris, there was still time enough for wandering and innocent observation. But now, after the Great War, after the events in Russia, no one is innocent anymore! You cannot just observe, Louise. Monsieur Flâneur belongs to the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. Contemplation in these times is nothing but escape. And to run away now is dangerous.

To
ANOTHER UNDATED LETTER,
someone had added by hand, “From Louise, Canada, 1940?”

You ask me to remember. I would be more interested in what to do to be able to forget for a while!

I met Andrei B. fifty years ago in New York. I described our meeting in detail in my autobiography and I believe there is nothing to add to it. But apparently you have not read my book. Andrei impressed me with his enormity from the very first time we met. Not in terms of his body. Physically he was rather small. But everything about him was tall and wide; you had to take a deep breath to keep up with him. I myself am from confined circumstances. We grew up counting every potato and walking on tiptoe, speaking in whispers, gathering crumbs. My entire being rebelled against it, against the subservience, the feeling of constant fear that there is a cane over one's head, whether there is one or not. Even before I came to realize (thanks to Andrei) who I was and what was my task in life, I wanted to get away, run away, across the plains, the sea, the ocean, up and away into the clouds, just follow the singing, the noise of the blood wailing in my ears. That was passion. That was Andrei. He never desponded. Not in prison, not in sickness, not in poverty. On some issues I could not agree with him. His analyses were too cold; it bothered me. Ultimately he assessed his own situation with the same cool detachment and decided to end his life. I felt hurt by his decision. And betrayed.

Before the end, there were years in exile. I lived in a small home in the south of France that my friends had bought for me, writing my memoirs. As I finished each chapter I mailed it to the town
a few dozen miles away where Andrei had settled with his young lover. We revised the manuscript by letter and over the telephone, a process that was unnecessarily complicated and expensive, and every few days I would try to convince him to come see me. We could work together the way we used to, in the peace and quiet of my home. I could cook for him. He knew how much I liked to cook for him.

He made excuses. No money. He couldn't leave Mimi on her own. Why don't you bring her with you? I asked. She would get in the way of our work, he said. Andrei brought Mimi with him from Berlin. She came from a “good” family. She wanted to marry Andrei more than anything else in the world. Sometimes she threw temper tantrums. She was thirty years younger than him, and hopelessly jealous. Of him, sick and poor as he was.

Andrei had always attracted women. They sensed that with him they could fly free, without any hindrance of pettiness, jealousy, lies. After a while, however, they began to miss the narrow limits they were so accustomed to, and the more uncertain they felt, the more they clung to him. Ultimately they always chose to go back to the cage, which he couldn't even see. There was no way he could understand how tight a grip the claws had on the creature living beside him. How bound they were by the lack of ties.

The other option? Fly free with him as I have. And then lose him.

Only much later, in the final years of Andrei's life, when I had a chance to observe his longest love affair from up close, did I realize that at heart Andrei was the same as any other man. He didn't want a truly free woman by his side, nor did he desire to be truly free himself.

But maybe it takes several generations for the relationship between man and woman, between parents and children, to
change, for human beings to begin to love instead of owning, for personal freedom to lead to something other than loneliness and emptiness. We were the first generation to try something like it in practice, and we obviously didn't know how to live by our own ideals. Our instincts were too old-fashioned for our ideas. Our heads pulled us in one direction, our hearts in the other. In every serious relationship I have had, there has come a time when even the most enlightened man has given me the choice: Freedom or me, take your pick. And the men who didn't give me a choice didn't care about me. Maybe they saw me as a mother, a sister, a housemaid, but not a lover. How easily those men left me.

Some wise women, when they get old, prefer women to men.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. You asked about my last conversation with Andrei B., the last time we met.

It was at the morgue. I had requested a moment alone with my oldest friend.

The Mediterranean light streamed in through the round window under the roof, falling across the whitewashed walls. The weight I had felt the past few years suddenly disappeared as the light penetrated everything, making it seem to float. Andrei lay in the open coffin, dressed in his beautiful summer suit.

I stepped toward him. I didn't know what to do at moments like these. How do you say good-bye to the person who matters more to you than anybody else? How do you let go of the love of your life, your most loyal friend and comrade? I put my hand on his forehead. He smiled.

“What game are you trying to play, little girl?”

I pulled back my hand.

“That's better. You don't have to touch me. I'm probably cold and clammy, and I can't feel a thing anyway.”

“I don't want to touch you,” I said. “I'm mad at you.”

“How come?”

“Because you backed out like a coward and left me here alone.”

“Now you sound like Mimi.”

“Sorry to say, but I'm not that much different from her.”

“Emotions are hard. They disguise themselves in all sorts of ways.”

“You didn't have to go.”

“I don't regret it. I don't like clinging to things that no longer make sense. Like with the McKinley assassination.”

“Leave that out of it,” I cried. “Why do you have to provoke me now?”

“Louise,” he said after a pause. “We didn't agree on most things, did we?”

“That was your obsession,” I said. “Actually, we always agreed on the fundamental issues.”

“And that was
your
obsession.” He smiled. “In spite of our clashes, though, we stayed together until the end.”

“I didn't want to outlive you.”

“I'm sorry about that. But what I want to say is that just because you disagree with someone, doesn't mean you don't like them. In fact, you can even love them.”

“I know that,” I said.

“You see, and I didn't figure it out until just before I died. If I had felt a little better, I would have married Mimi. Don't laugh. It would have made her happy, and it would have been only a slight annoyance to me.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?”

“What do you want to do?”

“The night after you died, I seriously considered ending my life, too,” I said. “But it would have been a mistake, I think.”

“A big mistake,” said Andrei. “Solid material like you. A good woman, and strong. Nothing hurts you, does it?”

I shook my head.

“There, you see how lucky you are? You can still do plenty of work.”

“That's right,” I said. “I'll trim the sail and cruise on, straight ahead. You don't have to worry about me.”