The Attempt (12 page)

It must have been all the wine I drank. As I lay in bed, sinking into sleep, I suddenly felt dizzy. I saw myself from on high, just a tiny person stuck on the massive body of planet Earth, hurtling through the dark reaches of space at 67,000 miles per hour. As the ice and rubble whizzed past my ears, in my mind I hear the end of a poem Ilana recited to me once, back in the fall: “Do you hear the bullet flying over our heads? Do you hear the bullet waiting—for our kiss?”

T
HE NEXT DAY, IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER,
suddenly spring explodes.

It's so warm when I go out for a walk in Central Park that evening, I even unbutton my coat. By the pump house on the reservoir, sitting on a bench that got enough sun during the day to dry out, is an elderly woman with curly black hair and a dark-colored poncho. I see her there often.

She always sits in the same spot. She usually has a paper sack on her lap, and when nobody is looking, she throws a handful of food behind the bench to a group of raccoons.

I talked to her once. She said she looks after the raccoons, which the city is threatening to exterminate because there are too many of them in the park and they have rabies.

“Instead of taking care of them,” she said, “they want to kill them.” She knew all there was to know about the life of urban raccoons, and when we said good-bye, she handed me a business card: M
ADAM
E
SPOSITO, FORTUNE-TELLING, PALM READING, TAROT
.

“If you ever need anything, give me a call,” she said. “Or just stop by.”

Today, instead of food, all she has on her lap is a ball of colored yarn. A pair of knitting needles flashes in her fingers—white and swollen, with red-painted nails—clinking against her rings. She looks up and smiles.

“Nothing for your friends today?” I ask.

She gives me a wink and lifts a portion of the sweater she's knitting to reveal the sack of food underneath.

“Too early,” says Madam Esposito. “Raccoons don't come out till after sunset.”

A chill rises off the surface of the water, but it's quite cozy here behind the pump house.

“Can I join you for a while?”

“Want me to read your palm, huh? Normally, I charge twenty, but I'll give you a discount.

“Left,” she commands. She gathers up the knitting and the bag of food from her lap and takes my hand in hers. She squeezes and probes it, viewing it from different angles, bringing it closer to her eyes, then moving it away, the way farsighted people do when they're trying to focus on something.

“So, what do you want to know?” Madam Esposito asks. “Love, money, health? You don't have money and never will, but you'll manage somehow. I see a pen. Do you write? Health looks good. I see something showing up after forty, but nothing serious. No operations. A few women. One of them could be for you. But there's a barrier between you that'll be hard to overcome. You see that star and cross here? That means it's time for you to start.”

“Start what?”

She gives my hand a squeeze in her soft, warm palms. “Grabbing hold of life and squeezing it for all it's worth. But that woman I mentioned,” Madam Esposito goes on, “you might want to break up with her. She's not really available and never will be. You'd have to adapt to her. Which would work, but it'd be a struggle and you'd end up losing a lot. She isn't here to have fun. She's what you call a femme fatale. See that mask? That's her. A woman like that just goes her own way and takes you along for the ride. She's stronger than you, even if she may not look it.

“Break up with her,” she says.

There's a rustling behind the bench. Madam Esposito strokes my hand, then lets it go.

“Just give me ten if you have it,” she says.

She carefully folds the ten-dollar bill into a square and slips it beneath the folds of her poncho. “Thanks. Now go. You'll just scare them off. Raccoons aren't used to company, the little sweeties.”

13

I
THINK PEOPLE SHOULD GET TO KNOW
N
EW
Y
ORK
in their twenties, not when they're pushing forty.

I can't muster the same excitement I felt my first time here. The bustling, humming crowds that once so enchanted me now seem like just a mob of lonely neurotics. With their cell phones, iPads, iPods, e-readers, and headphones, the vacant expressions that can transform in a split second into a grimace of sheer terror. Like the time I was crossing the street and a woman in front of me suddenly started backing up. She ran into my shoulder and screamed as if I'd punched her in the stomach: “Wha—Wha—What's going on?”

“Why are you backing up?”

The woman was bent over forward, fending off something invisible with both hands, gasping for breath.

“Can I help you?”

She looked at me in horror, as if I were actually threatening her. I didn't know what else to do except walk away.

Which had changed more? The city or me?

I'm thirty-nine. Just a few years older than Andrei was when Louise went to meet him at the train station in Chicago (she refused to go to Pittsburgh). The “girlfriend” he would never want again.

Louise wrote of that day:

I wait on the platform alone, apart from the others. I don't want the comrades to see what's going on inside me. I hide my face behind the bouquet, nibbling at the rose petals in nervousness. They taste bitter.

Fourteen years ago, he left me a young man, full of life. The man walking toward me along the platform now is bent and frail, leaning on his cane, squinting into the sunlight from behind thick lenses.

Two months ago, after thirteen and a half years, I was finally allowed to visit Andrei in prison. I pretended I was his sister. I spoke to him in Russian and got away with it, although I suspect they recognized me. My face is in the papers too much to have fooled them.

He didn't speak a word the whole hour, didn't even look me in the face. He just sat with his head bowed, holding my hand, weeping and playing with the pendant on my watch.

Had he gone mad?

Afterward, he wrote me a letter explaining that he had been too overcome by his feelings to speak. So instead he focused on my pendant, a shiny trinket that for him embodied all his dreams of freedom, all his desire built up over the course of those thirteen and a half years.

In prison he had seemed more powerful. Out here, in the open air, in this space, he seems shrunken and shriveled. All those strong, healthy people rushing past him with no inkling that their faces are like a revelation to him. This simple walk down the platform, the steps they are taking with no pleasure,
even with a sense of fatigue, for a long time had been nothing but a painful dream to him.

Silently, we hug. Words cannot bridge a gap of fourteen years. We will have to wait until time catches up to us, until we can settle into the present together again.

Andrei wrote:

She was waiting for me on the platform, her face hidden behind a bouquet of red roses. We hugged and exchanged a few awkward words.

I had to endure a few public appearances, first in Chicago, then in New York. Crowds of people came, celebrating me like a hero. None of it made any sense. My throat tightened up, I was shaking. All I wanted was to be back in my cell. After I fainted at one rally and had to be carried offstage, Louise finally took me home.

But what a home it was!

Louise had changed. She had turned into a loud, confident woman who took charge of her surroundings and didn't brook the slightest sign of disagreement. During the time I was in prison, she had had several lovers, including perhaps some women. She nearly married once. All of this she admitted to me quite openly, and yet she expected us to pick up where we had left off.

When I left, she was still a girl. Now she was a mother, only without children. Her apartment in Harlem, which also served as storage space and the magazine's offices, was an open-door salon, friends and friends of friends turning up unannounced at all hours of the day and night to debate, smoke, drink coffee, and wine if there was any. Louise, if she had time, cooked meals for everyone.

But I needed peace! Peace and quiet, a small, enclosed space that I could slowly, gingerly crawl my way out of, feeling my way through the terrain, so different from what I had imagined while I was in prison. I needed someone I could tell about my life in Allegheny. About the months of cold, wet solitude and darkness, about how I squatted in a heap of my own excrement and nearly went blind from the beatings.

Instead, I found myself in Louise's apartment. Everyone asked how I felt, but they never waited to hear my response. They walked around me like I was a piece of old family furniture. No use for it, but we can't throw it away. What do we do with it?

I slept with Louise's secretary, but that didn't help. I dreamed of prison every night. I wanted to go back. The world outside made no sense.

Then one day, Louise took me out of town. She borrowed a house from her friends in the hills on the Hudson. Instead of going on lecture tours, she stayed at home and cooked for me. She wanted to be physically intimate again. She criticized the habits I had developed in prison and now so fearfully clung to. She begged me to go back to being the old Andrei she knew.

We had different opinions on many things. Louise couldn't forgive me for refusing to praise Czolgosz's assassination of McKinley. She stood up for the Polish-American radical against those who claimed that his act had doomed the anarchist movement in America. Hadn't they said the same thing about me fourteen years ago? How could I defend my own actions while saying the assassination of the president was pointless? Not even fourteen years in prison gave me the right to elevate myself over anyone else.

I tried to explain (as I had in the letter to her I had smuggled
out of prison immediately after the assassination, the letter she said had “so wounded her”) that our goal wasn't simply to blindly carry out ideas. The precision of an assassination was what gave it value. Derived from a precise assessment of the situation.

If I had succeeded in killing Kolman fourteen years ago, it might actually have changed something. There was nobody who could have replaced him. Kolman's power stood or fell with him and him alone. Nobody else would have called in the army. Whoever took his place would probably have negotiated with the workers. The unions might have won a victory, serving as an example and an encouragement to other, similar attempts. In the end, who knows? America might actually have swung over to our side.

But what was gained by the death of a president? Nothing at all. He was just a puppet of the capitalists; his power was purely abstract. McKinley could be replaced, as we saw after the assassination. Not to mention he was popular, a fact that now works against us.

M
ENTALLY
, A
NDREI DIDN'T COME HOME
from prison until he felt he was needed. During the government's nationwide campaign against anarchists, the police in California planted a bomb and pinned it on two of his comrades. Andrei took up their defense, writing articles, delivering speeches, collecting signatures and money. Eventually, he moved to San Francisco and started his own magazine. He took Louise's secretary with him, but that was the least of the blows as far as she was concerned.

14

I
LANA SPENT THE NIGHT AT MY PLACE
and told me about the day she had stopped loving her husband.

She remembered clearly the morning she realized it was over.

A young woman was walking down their street, pulling a defiant child by the hand and leading a dog on a leash. The dog was rust-colored. The woman had a green beret pulled down over her head, a brown sweater tightly hugging her soft, bulging belly and hips. Her round-tipped lace-up boots ground against the small stones of white-and-blue-gray granite strewn with yellowing sycamore leaves. The woman turned and gave an inquisitive glance back at the silver car parked by the curb, where Ilana sat inside, hands primly folded in her lap, looking straight ahead. In the bright blue sky, high above, a ray of sun flashed off a pigeon's belly.

She told her husband she didn't want to live with him anymore. There was an emptiness at the center of her life he couldn't fill.

Keeping quiet isn't the same as silence. Silence is negative, the imprint of a scorched body, a black shadow on the wall. Shadows rolling over one another, dips and trenches, currents that drag her down and sweep her away. But there are places to rest, quiet glades, clearings amid the noisy underbrush, where things stabilize, even if just for a moment or two.

She didn't know how to act once it was actually over. She had never thought about what would happen when love came to an end. For years it had been there, a warm and glowing core. Like the black dot with the edge of flame that flared up before her eyes if she stared into a candle for long enough.

The fact that her love for her husband could come to an end undermined her trust in everything else.

She could end her own life, too.

Or take antidepressants, like some of her friends, and go for a fuck in Timișoara every now and then.

“Why should we break up?” her husband asked. “Do whatever you want—just don't tell me about it.” That was his suggestion, and he followed it. Perhaps he already had for some time.

She could see herself clearly: full of destructive, aimless desire. Men didn't understand what was going on, but they followed her around clumsily. Most of them were cheating on someone, straining against their short leashes.

What did she think of when she heard the word
happiness?
The day she and her boy went out in the park after a winter storm, trampling paths through the fresh-fallen snow and knocking the caps of white from the low-standing lamps lining the sidewalks, when suddenly the chef of the Bellevue came running out of his restaurant. He skipped down the icy steps, only his white coat and apron on, and as he passed, he stopped a moment and lifted the boy into the air. The slopes of the surrounding hills loomed blue, the tiny lights of windows and lanterns sparkling in the distance.

There was happiness in her daily routine, the tangible details, the smells, the regular routes she traveled together with her child that embedded themselves in her heart, as
if home were all the places the two of them had spent their time, day in day out, those first months and years. She missed them. The pond her boy threw rocks into for what seemed like forever, the frozen road she tramped along, her own impatience and boredom.

She had been as dependent on her husband as a child. Their love had been the starting point from which everything else unfolded.

One day, she woke up in the middle of the night and looked herself in the face. It was the face of death, dressed in festive summer clothes. Her own death smiling stiffly back at her.

She has dreams of New York City submerged underwater. The streets silent, not a soul around. She thinks of the icebergs, slowly melting as they drift away from the poles. The elusive images rapidly crumbling away.

She wishes she had her child with her.

Ilana fell silent. I didn't know what to say, and I was afraid to take her in my arms. She lay next to me on the bed, fully clothed, hands pressed to her face.

Pain translated into words tends to come across as banal. I suppose it's the same with happiness, except you aren't so alone with it.

She didn't move. Outside, a lone window shone through a crack in the paper blinds, so high up in the dark that it looked suspended in the sky.

“I
F
I
WENT ON A TRIP,”
Josef asked me one day, “would you take care of my papers?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don't know yet.” He shrugged. “I was just wondering.”

He talked about his “trip” fairly often after that. I didn't suspect a thing, I swear. Josef was my best friend. He may have looked like a downer, but he was actually a lot of fun. He always had been, ever since he was a kid.

Then one day, he started saying he was going to stop writing.

“Sad things are all I can write about,” he said, “and the world already has more than enough of that. Why add to it? It should be just the opposite. I should try to fill people with optimism and hope, instead of pointing out the meaninglessness that everyone goes through every day. It's perverse, don't you think? Books should either be enjoyable or enlightening. But I can't write books like that.”

That was just before he had his first success. One of his novels was translated into German and got excellent reviews. Josef bought a new sport coat and traveled abroad a few times. But it did nothing to change his views. As far as he was concerned, the fact that people enjoyed his gloomy, plodding prose was just proof that they were afflicted with the same perversion that drove him to write.

“It's like a disease,” he told me.

Over the years I got used to the fact that he lived alone. I knew he'd made a few attempts to find someone, all of which were a fiasco. Living in a small town, his choice was limited. But he didn't complain, and eventually I started wondering if he might be gay and not realize it. I had all kinds of theories.

The conversation I played in my head word by word while Ilana pretended to be asleep was from my last visit to L.

Josef made potato soup and I brought the wine. Everything
was as usual, except that he seemed anxious and excited at the same time. Like he was gearing up for something.

Other times we would talk about everything under the sun, jumping from gossip and trivial insights one minute to earth-shaking ideas the next. Each of us had a good memory, and whenever we could, we would pick up from where we'd left off the last time we got together. We even had quite a few laughs. But not this time.

Josef said he had something he wanted to confide in me. He was smiling.

As usual, Josef's smile seemed out of place. His eyes, nose, and mouth were crowded into the middle of his widespread face, as if driven there with a whip. It was a face that gave the impression of violence and an intense inner life, almost touching in its ugliness. The smile didn't belong there.

“Go ahead.”

“It can wait.”

Finally, after midnight, the time came. I was tired, a little drunk, and incapable of any serious reflection. That was probably what he was waiting for. Maybe he was too shy to confide in me while I still had all my senses. He didn't want my advice or opinion; he just needed me to hear him out, patiently—even numbly.

He said that for several years now he had been in love with a woman. She was married and from L., but he couldn't reveal who she was. He wanted to live with her, but she didn't feel the same.

“I know she loves me,” Josef said. “But she's afraid of me. She says I'm odd. She doesn't know what to think of my writing and she finds me depressing.”

“She said that?”

“Basically, yes.”

The woman he had loved for several years now, Josef went on, was pregnant. He found out about it by accident—she didn't even tell him herself. She wanted to give the baby up. She didn't want to get divorced and she didn't think Josef would make a very good father.

“Does she already have any kids?”

“No.”

“Then how come?”

“It's my fault,” said Josef. “I'm just not good enough for her.”

As if the bar weren't set high enough already. As if we couldn't just crawl under it in the end, and why not! Who would judge us for it? I got angry. At that stupid woman, but also at Josef. I was disappointed in him. I didn't expect such a banal secret coming from him.

“Is there any way I can help?” I asked.

“I don't think so,” he said. “At first I thought you might be able to talk to her. But now I have the feeling it wouldn't be a good idea.”

I agreed.

About a month later, I got a call from him out of the blue saying that he was in Prague and asking if we could get together. I told him I had to go out of town on a work trip for the day but that I might make it back in time to meet if I could get a lift. I gave him the name of a café and said if I didn't show up by ten, that meant I couldn't make it. I found out afterward he had waited for me till closing time. Three days later, he was dead.

What did he mean, anyway, when he asked me to take care of his papers? Was I supposed to find a publisher for them? Destroy them? Donate them to the National Archives? There were no instructions in his good-bye letter. He just apologized to his sister for the trouble his death would cause her, then added, “Please give all my papers to Jan. He'll know what to do.”

Josef's death weighed on me. I had to do something. Feeling sorry wouldn't help anyone, and it was too late to give my friend a hug, but if nothing else I could pick up his project where he had left off. I felt like I owed it to him. I would continue his research on Andrei B. and write the book I had found a fragment of in the notebook with the blue cover.

It made no difference if Andrei B. was my great-grandfather or not. Professor Kurzweil was right.

The crack between the drawn blinds was starting to fill with light when Ilana snuggled up to me. We hugged each other like shipwreck survivors, my face buried in her shoulder. I knew this time she was mine for real. Open and dangerously close. I couldn't be tender. I was too afraid. I entered her as if I were pushing her away.