The Attempt (14 page)

“Why didn't you go back to Europe, then?”

“Where would I have gone?” He smiles. “Erica was American, her family was here. I could have left after she died, but it isn't my home anymore. There's nobody there alive, no one who would remember. Unless I count the walls, the cobblestones, a tree or two.”

He pauses a moment, then mutters, “Maybe they do count.”

After another moment or two, he says, “So what about you? Did you get to the bottom of your famous family tie?”

“No,” I say, “but that wasn't the point anyway. It was just an excuse.”

“An excuse? For what?”

He doesn't understand, and for it to make any sense, I'd have to go all the way back to twenty years ago, when I said good-bye to him and his wife in the entryway of their New York apartment. I'd have to tell him about Josef. About the debt I feel toward him. Love may weaken over time, but not guilt. Guilt is stronger than death.

The rain has stopped, so I decide to go back to the station on foot. The professor accompanies me as far as the front gate and stands, leaning on his walker, watching as I walk off down the road, which twists and turns as it descends toward the river. As steam rises off the trees, the valley fills with a hazy light. I realize that was probably the last time I'll ever see Professor Kurzweil alive.

—
II
—

Josef's Notebook

1

“T
HE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE,”
Andrei B. wrote in his diary.

When he stepped across the border, he knelt down and pressed his lips to the ground. The fresh, chill scent of the snow reminded him of childhood; his mother's fur collar, damp with her breath.

The deported anarchists stepped onto Soviet soil from Finland on the morning of January 20, 1920. If the group looked wretched after their month spent in the ship's damp hold on the rough winter seas, the welcoming committee the Soviets sent to greet them looked even worse: eyes sunken with fatigue, skin yellowed and drawn tight over their skulls; the women pale, severe, and dressed in black, like nuns.

For the first time since he had shot Kolman, Andrei felt that he existed in the here and now: at this intersection of space and time. The present is monumental, like a newborn infant. Screaming, overflowing with life, everything still yet to come, a lifetime of possibilities just waiting to be revealed.

(A year and a half later, when they were comparing their diaries in Berlin, Louise commented to Andrei, “That's odd. You almost never mention me. As if you were there in Russia all by yourself, and meanwhile, look, I write about you on almost every page: how you were sick, how we got separated in Moscow. . . .”)

W
HAT WAS WRONG WITH
R
USSIA?
Which characteristics best described the catastrophe?

The contrast between the desertedness of depopulated cities and the crowds constantly surging and churning, as if fleeing an avalanche. People storming trains, squeezing on, glued to windows, stairs, roofs. For every man knocked off by a tunnel, three more clambered on to take his place. Sometimes they had to shoot the passengers off in bunches to allow the railroad cars to move.

People rush about, banging into one another. Busy, one would think, but in reality wandering lost because the familiar landmarks are gone. The ground torn from under people's feet, nationwide, in a bold experiment. So that no one feels at home, safe; there is nothing to rely on. The traces of former life must be erased and reshuffled every day, and an apparatus has been created for that purpose, the central entity holding and exercising power. Its original purpose has been forgotten; the fervor is all that remains.

The subjects of the apparatus are driven to exhaustion, the demands ever changing, with no discernible logic. The only way to elude its clutches, perhaps, is to stay in motion. Like dancing under the feet of an enraged elephant, or being on a death march. To stop is to die.

The burden, the heavy load. The opposite of baggage. Baggage is something one can (with typical bourgeois flippancy) unload, put down, but with a burden, this isn't an option: Its value is always priceless; its loss, tragic.

So it happens that you return home from an errand and find a stranger in your bed, waving a rubber-stamped paper
that proves it belongs to him now. In that moment, the practicality of a cart or a sled that can be loaded with what's left at a moment's notice is fully revealed. In winter, bundles and logs of wood can be dragged by a string.

Worry, worry, worry. The frowning faces of engineers. Short on paper, short on ink, short on prison cells. Organization breaks down on multiple fronts at once, the shortcomings piling up too fast to respond to. Each new solution, in turn, produces a series of new flaws to be addressed, and so on and on. It would be wrong to say the apparatus is not workable; on the contrary, it works hard and happily, but according to its own rules.

Shoes: none available. Bare feet in snow, feet wrapped in rags. Old women in old army boots. High-heeled shoes on the bare feet of young women in Soviet offices.

A little girl with painted lips: “Hey, daddy, looking for company?”

“Hey, daddy, buy some cigarettes? I've got some cigarettes for you, daddy!” Little Nina with big eyes holding ten damp cigarettes in her outstretched hand. She picked them out of the snow after tossing them away a few moments ago when someone said the militia was coming. False alarm.

An older woman standing on the corner of the marketplace, her face pale yet still beautiful, in a long dark coat and scarf. Her nose slim and narrow, with sharply cut nostrils. Clutching in her arms a Japanese vase decorated with green bamboo leaves, her delicate, frost-reddened fingers against the green bamboo leaves.

The quickness with which the woman selling the foul-smelling cabbage soup raises the price when she hears Andrei's accent.

“A crust of bread, daddy, just a little crust. For the love of Jesus Christ!”

W
HEN WILL THE REVOLUTION COME
to America? Any day now, no? What about Germany and England? Right around the corner, isn't it? Why, that can't be right, comrade. The world revolution will happen any day now, and we'll be saved. Our foreign comrades will come to our rescue.

Moskkommune, Narkomput, Narkominodel. Rations and distribution centers. Commissars and clerks.

“Just sign right here, love. Just one little stroke of the pen, that's all. What harm can it do you? One little stroke!”

A faded, taciturn Kropotkin under house arrest in the countryside.

The Chekists in their black leather coats, naked guns tucked under their belts.

Little Vaska threatening his parents from his bed: “Better watch out or I'll tell on you!” Hunger and fear.

“What time is it?”

“Three under the old system, five under the new. But as of yesterday six, I heard.”

Four kinds of rubles: Kerensky, czarist, Ukrainian, Soviet.

In the south, women with dark eyes and olive complexions chew sunflower seeds and spit the hulls on the ground.

Even the prisons aren't what they used to be. You can't read or study there. Not like under the czars. In those days, prison was the best school you could get. Men went in ignorant fools and came out philosophers, theorists. Like Nestor Makhno.

W
HEN
N
ESTOR
M
AKHNO CONQUERS A TOWN,
the first thing he does is open up the prison gates. Then he gathers everyone together and gives a speech: “Now organize things your own way.”

His young wife, Galina, dashes out onto the street by the morning light in Kharkov: “Why should I be afraid? I'm not afraid. I've always fought alongside Nestor in every battle, and Nestor always fights at the head of his men.”

Last year, a woman like her was laughing in the springtime sun on a Moscow park bench.

Up against the wall. Fire.

The quiet of an Easter procession circling St. Isaac's Cathedral. They whisper to one another: “Christ is risen from the dead. But no colored eggs again this year.” An emaciated female child rocking side to side in a church alcove to the rhythm of a song that only she can hear.

The bureaucracy of terror, the terror of bureaucracy.

The fanatical bureaucrat Lenin in the Kremlin: “Communism boils down to a matter of proper bookkeeping.” The only thing great about him is his loneliness.

Trotsky's message to the Kronstadt sailors: “I'll shoot you like pheasants.” Soldiers in white camouflage on the frozen, cracking Neva, soldiers under the ice and dead mutineers in the streets of Kronstadt. Mass executions in the beech groves on the outskirts of Petrograd.

M
OSCOW HAS TURNED GREEN AGAIN.
Tables with white tablecloths, music streaming from cafés, new shops with freshly
painted signs. The New Economic Policy, processions of hunger-deranged ghosts. Big-eyed Nina doesn't sell cigarettes anymore. “Hey, daddy, looking for company?” Crimsoned lips and bare legs. “My mother starved to death. So did little Peter. And Masha.”

Some of his American fellow travelers from the
Buford
have joined the Party. He runs into an ex-policeman from Detroit wearing a black leather jacket and carrying a gun. The Chekists get bigger rations, with enough left over to sell. There are other advantages, too.

Andrei doesn't know which way to turn anymore. After receiving a promise that the imprisoned Russian anarchists will be deported to Germany, he looks for a crack through which to escape, together with Louise, who plods through Moscow hunched under a burden of sorrow and disappointment.

Louise takes the Soviet defeat personally, crying on the train to Sweden.

It's a warm, mild September, the birch leaves turning yellow along the route north.

2

“T
HE TRUTH IS ALWAYS IN MOTION.”
Andrei isn't sure where he heard this sentence. Maybe from one of the artists who gathered at the Romanische Café, where the revolution was still being planned and the smoke wafted up to the high ceiling and rolled slowly through the rays of afternoon sun.

At the café, Andrei meets the assistant to the pathologist who identified Rosa Luxemburg's body. He confides in everyone that the female corpse with the bullet hole in her head who lay four months at the bottom of the Landwehr Canal was definitely not her, because Rosa had suffered rickets as a child and one of her legs was shorter than the other.

The truth is always in motion.

Sunken eyes—there is hunger in Germany, too—shine through the curtain of smoke. Hunger and tuberculosis, morphine, cocaine. Dilated pupils, flushed cheeks, hands trembling, flitting, quickly, lightly, savoring each breath in and out, the sweet rush of blood. They came to Berlin after spending Christmas in a Stockholm jail. Europe has changed a lot since the war. Wherever they hole up now, they're bound to be viewed with suspicion.

A
NDREI HAD JUST TURNED FIFTY
and there were days when he felt tired. He started writing a book about Russia, but Louise
beat him to it. A publisher in America offered her a contract and an advance. Andrei set aside his work to help Louise edit her book, and offered her his notes. Louise split the advance with him, as she did all the money she got from America.

While Louise struggled with the manuscript, and with a young Swede who had moved in with her, Andrei established a committee for the relief of Soviet political prisoners and their families. He organized funding drives, wrote pleading letters, contacted underground connections to deliver money, food, and clothing to Russia. He felt similar to the way he had when he got out of prison in Pittsburgh after fourteen years. He was free, but his mind was with those who were still behind bars. He was helped with his growing agenda by a volunteer corps of sensitive young women of the sort who always materialize around aging revolutionaries. They were pretty, elegant, smelled wonderfully, and Louise couldn't stand them, because they didn't know the first thing about life, and their sympathy with workers had been sparked by romances with flowery covers gobbled up during the break between lunch and afternoon tea. Fortunately, Andrei didn't last long with any of them. The first one was some girl named Friederike. When she disappeared from the picture, she was replaced by Emma Stein, nicknamed “Mimi.”

Naïve and softhearted, Mimi Stein offered Andrei a chance to relax. He hadn't had a home since the age of seventeen, when he left for America, and the longest he had ever stayed in one place was in prison.

Mimi hadn't read Nietzsche or Marx, and was just starting on Kropotkin. She liked him because he was “kind,” but she didn't understand his idea of a society based on free association.
All of her experience up to that point suggested the opposite. She believed that some rules were a given and couldn't be created on the spot, anew every time.

On the other hand, she had a strong aversion to violence, oppression, and injustice. She felt terrible whenever she saw poverty and was ready to give away everything she possessed. She was passionate about her work with Andrei and put all her energy into it. She even had a falling-out with her family over it.

“It's so unjust,” Louise protested when the young Swede ran off with her secretary after several months of agony. “You'll always have a Mimi around, and meanwhile my blue-eyed Lars is gone. He said I'll be a lifelong inspiration to him. I don't want to be anyone's lifelong inspiration,” she complained. “I want someone to love me, to tell me I'm beautiful, even if I'm not! Doesn't Mimi see how old you are? How come she doesn't mind but Lars does? What's the difference between us?”

Andrei silently gave her a hug and Louise burst into tears.

“Even you don't want to be with me!” she wailed. “You didn't want to live with me in Russia, either. And when we were in America, you ran off to San Francisco to get away from me. Don't think I don't realize.”

She urged Andrei to apply for a Czechoslovak visa so he could go to Prague. She was leaving soon for England, where friends had been able to make arrangements for her to stay, but not Andrei, and the German authorities were making it more and more difficult for him every day. But Andrei didn't want to go to Czechoslovakia.

He accompanied Louise to the train station. Short, round, and gray-haired, she made her way to the platform and
bounded up the stairs onto the train with no need of help. A few moments later, she slammed the compartment window down with a bang. “Whatever you do, don't stay here, or they'll send you back to Russia!” The train pulled out of the station, so he didn't have to come up with a response. He pulled out his handkerchief and waved good-bye, and Louise did the same. He was too far away to see her tears, but he knew she was crying. She had been crying a lot lately.

She's getting old, Andrei thought, even if no one's allowed to say so.

N
ESTOR MAKHNO, IN A DONATED SUIT,
with a fresh haircut, no horse, and wholly unarmed, sits next to Andrei B. at a round table in the Romanische Café. His wife, Galina, whom he last saw in Kharkov at dawn, is here in Berlin with him. One day Andrei brings Mimi along, and the four of them start getting together regularly.

“The transition to self-rule is entirely natural for agricultural communities,” says Makhno. “The problem is the cities, industrial manufacturing. Communist anarchism can only be achieved in the countryside, among the peasant farmers and small craftsmen, where there is a direct relationship between producer, product, and consumer.”

Black tea topped up with boiling water, the dense smoke of cigarettes. Mimi brings food for everyone and sits patiently through the debates, which she doesn't understand.

All romance is gone. The disappointment is nearly palpable, and it will be hard for Andrei to rekindle faith in the revolution after what he saw in Russia.

Half the patrons in the café look more romantic than Makhno, the ataman they sang songs and told legends about in Ukraine.

The answer isn't to abandon revolution, but to rethink its theoretical foundations.

Gone are the endless plains and wide-open skies.

After a long series of delays, they obtain a visa to France.

Nestor finds a job in a carpentry shop, while Andrei sits in a cheap rented room, laboring over an introduction to the principles of anarchism, commissioned by a small publisher in the United States. Every month he goes to the local police station to extend his residence permit. For now, Mimi remains in Berlin.