The Attempt (8 page)

“I'm not.”

“You know what I was thinking?”

“What's that?”

“Now that you're dead, I won't think about myself so much anymore.”

“I think we've found the best-possible way to be together,” said Andrei.

I stepped outside into the bright blue and white of day. The undertakers stood in front of the morgue, waiting to close the casket, along with a few friends I had managed to pull together. We set off down the path to the open grave.

I sensed that Andrei was still with me. And he has been with me ever since.

10

J
UST BEFORE
T
HANKSGIVING,
I came down with the flu. I was sick and alone. I felt sorry for myself and homesick for Prague for the first time since I had left.

The next day, I called Ilana. Apart from her and Professor Kurzweil, I didn't know anyone else well enough to ask for help.

It took a moment before she recognized me on the phone.

She promised to come over and bring me food and medicine. It was dark by the time she arrived. She offered to cook me something to eat, but I couldn't get anything down except yogurt and a few bites of fruit.

She did most of the talking.

She said her favorite writer was Michel Houellebecq. That surprised me. I myself had lost interest in him after his second book. It just felt like he was repeating himself. Not only was his world of depressed adult children, insatiable sex addicts, and money boring, but it didn't seem real to me. As if that was all anyone cared about.

“Oh, really?” said Ilana. “Just look around you. What drives people? What excites them? It might not seem that way from Prague, but Houellebecq's world arrived here in New York a long time ago.”

“I think there are plenty of people interested in other things.”

“Like what?”

“There are all kinds of alternatives.”

“What kinds?” She laughed. “All people care about is their own gratification, that's it. Keeping the desperation at bay.”

“So what's your recipe?”

“Recipe?”

“What was your life like before you came to America?”

“I was married ten years,” said Ilana. “I've got a child, a son.”

“Where is he?”

“With his father. In Germany. His father's German.”

Ilana is thirty-four years old.

“How do you say ‘thank you' in Romanian?”

“MulÅ£umesc.”

“How about ‘love'?”

“Dragoste.”

I stayed home for two more days after she visited. I was exhausted by the high fever and coughing. I wasn't even strong enough to walk up and down the stairs. I didn't wash or shave; I just laid under the blanket, listening to the knocking of the heating in the pipes as I stared up at the ceiling. In between bouts of sleep, I reviewed in my mind everything I'd managed to track down so far.

I had promised my parents I'd go home for Christmas, but now I regretted it. It would mean losing two weeks of precious time. A year seems like a long time viewed from Prague, but it really isn't.

A year, for instance, definitely wouldn't be enough for me to feel like I'd actually lived here. For that, I'd have to live through it all at least one more time: the changing of seasons,
the local customs. I already knew that once I left, I would long for New York forever. There's no way to comprehend this city, to know it through and through. I long for it and I'm still here.

Desiring the Impossible
was also the title of a thick history of anarchism that had been lying next to my bed for several weeks now.

“I
T ALL STARTED WITH
that Hungarian poet.”

We're sitting in a Japanese restaurant on Fourteenth Street, where I invited Ilana for a good-bye dinner. I'm leaving for Prague the day after tomorrow.

“We met in Budapest at a congress organized by the university George Soros set up. I gave a presentation on Romanian literature in exile. There was also a reading by poets, which I missed. Then a party that night. I could tell he was looking at me. I wasn't that attracted to him, but back then, it was enough for me that he was someone new. And that he liked me.” She pauses.

“And?”

“I'll never forget the morning after. I got out of bed and pulled back the curtains. Outside, the sun was shining. That movement of opening the curtains was the first free thing I'd done in years. I didn't feel guilty at all. It was like a celebration, from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes.

“We got together once more after that. I lied to my husband and went to meet him in Timișoara. He came from Budapest, and I rode the train all night to get there. The whole way, the seat underneath me was wet with excitement.
In Timișoara the trees were in bloom. We met at the station at ten in the morning, and we both had to go home the next day at eleven. We got a room in a hotel and made love for twenty-four hours straight, not even going out for food. He offered to leave his wife for me, get a job in construction, whatever, he didn't care. He could baby-sit my son. As I lay there listening to him, suddenly something inside me said, What in the world would I do with you?”

“So you didn't love him?”

“No.”

“What about your husband?”

“During those twenty-four hours, I remembered the way it used to be when we were still in love. It didn't last long with the poet. His poems were bad. I had other lovers. I broke up with my husband. Then I came here.”

“And now?”

“And now I'm just . . . heartbroken,” Ilana says. “I'll never be the same again, I know that for sure.”

I pay the check and we step back out onto the street.

Looking at her from the side, she seems a little taller. Taking long strides in her new boots, head tilted backward, marching into the wind. She looks like a woman I've never met.

I pull her into a bar for a drink near my place.

Late at night, on the floor in my room, with all the lights on, Ilana kneels with her torso propped against the unmade bed, moaning.

As I thrust into her drunkenly, I think about the Hungarian poet. I don't mind treating her harshly, especially if she begs for it.

E
ARLIER THAT AFTERNOON
, Ilana and I rode the tramway to Roosevelt Island, formerly known as Blackwell's Island.

We left behind the colorful city lights, the cabin swaying high above the East River's dark surface. Even from that height, we could see the eddies swirling treacherously.

It was a weekday and the island, despite being built up with apartments, was deserted. When we got off the tram, two people boarded the bus with us, but they didn't stay on long, and we rode to the island's northern tip by ourselves.

The air had that hospital smell. I recognized the rotunda from some old photographs. It was all that was left of the famously grim insane asylum that used to be here. A stiff wind blew through the open space between the newer hospital buildings and the park at the island's tip. A week earlier, there had been a light snowfall. There was no longer any sign of it in Manhattan, but the ground here was still covered with a frozen layer. We walked to the lighthouse, built from gray limestone by local prisoners once upon a time.

As we walked back along the western side of the island, the wind now at our backs, we passed the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, once part of the penitentiary complex, which had since disappeared, along with the almshouse and the quarry where convicts were put to work breaking rock. The gutted facade of the smallpox hospital still stands at the island's southern tip, its neo-Gothic turrets covered with ivy. There was also a hospital that specialized in venereal diseases and a home for unwed mothers-to-be.

One other old building stands on the island's southern tip, the country's first pathological laboratory, which also
housed a mortuary and autopsy room. In the 1950s, when the buildings around it were knocked down, rumor has it they discovered some old bottles of formaldehyde containing pieces of human bodies.

The penitentiary on Blackwell's Island was a constant threat for the New York anarchists. Andrei B. served his time elsewhere, but Louise G. ended up there with a two-year sentence. Half of it was dismissed for good behavior, at the intercession of her influential New York friends.

During her incarceration, Louise trained to be a nurse and read every book she could get her hands on. She also developed a respect for religion, thanks to a Catholic priest of French origin, who supplied her with literature and met with her in the evenings to discuss what she had read.

“I realized that you don't need to fully share the views of another in order to feel close to him,” wrote Louise. “Father Jerome had an enormous capacity for love and compassion. He was humane. I got along better with him than with many of my puritanical anarchist comrades.”

Father Jerome also advocated poverty at a time when Protestant preachers were roaming the country, spreading word that it was a man's duty to accumulate wealth. Wealth was a sign of God's blessing, and poverty God's punishment for sins and laziness, they claimed.

“How did money come to be held as the greatest value in the New World?” Louise questioned. “Where does this greed come from, this urge to accumulate more and more? Why are people like bottomless pits that can never be filled?”

Hair, feces, and blood on the operating room tiles. The woman who just gave birth asleep, exhausted, in her bed, a child lying openmouthed on the bed beside her. A purple knot of flesh that isn't going to survive, and even if by some miracle it did, nothing good lies in store for it. Certainly not the love of this worn-out, prematurely aged mother. Who knows how many she squeezed out before this one, how many were born dead, how many she killed or left to die, how many of them are alive without ever knowing anything but hunger.

I heard that in the dustbins of London they find more murdered newborns than dead cats.

The woman sleeps fitfully, her cheeks burning with fever. She's one of the quiet prisoners. Food and pain are the only things she reacts to. If anyone ever gave her a gentle caress, it was so long ago that she has forgotten.

What they call the operating room here is a small room with a sink, a table, and a lamp, separated from the rest of the infirmary by a door. Apart from that, there's just a big walk-through room with sixteen metal beds covered with gray wool blankets, lined up side by side along the plank wood floor. Most of them are occupied. Tied to each bed is a tag stating the patient's name, age, and reason for conviction: Anne Blythe, 23, prostitution. Anne Sullivan, 20, prostitution. Kathy McCormick, 40, theft.

They beg me for alcohol and cigarettes. They pull on my sleeve and whisper, “Get rid of this thing for me! Louise, honey, do it for me. I know you know how. Do it for the little one's sake. Kill him.” And they pound on their bulging bellies.

At home, they jump off tables and sit in tubs of boiling water. Knitting needles are even more dangerous. They don't care if they
die having an abortion. At least then they'll have peace, and the city will look after any children they leave behind.

L
OUISE'S CONVICTION
—
INCITING UNREST
—set her apart from the prostitutes and thieves. As a result, Dr. White noticed her and offered her a job as an auxiliary nurse. That meant she was allowed to sleep in the infirmary instead of in a cramped cell where the water on the walls condensed into tiny droplets that inched their way down to the floor and she couldn't read even when she pressed herself up against the bars, which let in a little daylight.

When he had to operate, Dr. White called in the trained nurses from Charity Hospital, but for minor procedures—injections, measuring blood pressure and drawing blood, emptying chamber pots and wiping sweat, sitting vigil with the dying and closing their eyelids once they died, changing bandages and cleaning festering wounds—there was Louise.

After a visit from her highly placed New York friends, the warden and the prison director began to treat her more kindly, even allowing her to go on walks sometimes.

I watched the trees slowly wrapping themselves in green, the currents and eddies within the river's mighty flow, the steamboats' comings and goings. The sheer curtain of trees on the east bank thickened with new leaves, partially blocking the view of the imposing mansions of Ravenswood. I heard the roar of the wind, the distant train whistle, the clatter of hooves and the rattle of wheels on pavement. When the wind blew from the west, the
hustle and bustle of the city dominated my hearing, while the easterly wind carried to me the crow of a rooster or the bleating of sheep. Explosions of dynamite boomed from the quarry on the island's southwest side, where the convicts labored breaking rocks.