The Attempt
Page 1
PRAISE FOR
The Attempt
“Magdaléna Platzová’s lively prose keeps readers on tenterhooks while tracing the troubled history of an industrialist’s family and fortune and the rise and fall of anarchism.”
—Edith Kurzweil, former editor of Partisan Review, and author of Full Circle: A Memoir
“[A] carefully crafted story, written in a lucid and refined language. . . . The Attempt examines the perennial questions of social order, sacrifice and self-sacrifice, freedom, and acceptability of violence as the conditions for change. These questions catch us by surprise in our post-utopian times, especially when an East European author of Platzová’s generation raises them. But [she] succeeds in her attempt to bring these questions to life and show their relevance; she does it without ideology and with urgency, which make the novel a pleasure to read.”
—Veronika Tuckerova, Preceptor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
PRAISE FOR
Aaron’s Leap
“Beautifully written, with masterful creation of atmosphere and sculpting of the main characters. The translation . . . is excellent and true to Platzová’s artful prose.”
—World Literature Today
“The characters in this book are multi-dimensional. . . . Art and modern thought are at the center of [their] lives and they find ways to seek truth through art, love, and friendship, inviting the reader to join them on this journey of self-discovery.”
—Jewish Book Council / Jewish Book World
“A moving, humane tale of life lived in history’s long shadow.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Platzová’s prose is as sharp and effective as the angles of an expressionist monument. . . . [A] powerfully elegiac novel.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A Czech novel about art, death and sex set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and never-ending war. . . . The reader comes to connect with and care for [Platzová’s] characters as more than mouthpieces for history.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Aaron’s Leap takes you on an epic journey, which is also a very intimate and personal story—entertaining, touching and brutally honest. Her characters are full of compassion and tenderness, but are never sentimental. It’s a great book.”
—Agnieszka Holland, Academy Award-nominated writer and director of Europa Europa and guest director of HBO’s The Wire and Netflix’s House of Cards
“This young author’s book immediately caught my interest for its narrative mastery and remarkably skillful identification with the complex atmosphere of the interbellum era. . . . [A] brilliant novel.”
—Ivan Klíma, Franz Kafka Prize-winning author of Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light and My Crazy Century
“Told in clear and beautiful prose, Aaron’s Leap is a deeply moving portrait of love, sacrifice, and the transformative power of art in a time of brutal uncertainty.”
—Simon Van Booy, author of The Illusion of Separateness
First Published in the United States in 2016 by
Bellevue Literary Press, New York
For Information Contact:
Bellevue Literary Press
NYU School of Medicine
550 First Avenue, OBV A612
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 2016 by Magdaléna Platzová
Translation Copyright © 2016 by Alex Zucker
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
The Attempt is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, incidents and places are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Originally published in Czech as Anarchista © 2013 Torst and Madaléna Platzová.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request.
Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.
This publication is made possible by grants from:
This translation was made possible by a grant from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.
first edition
135798624
ebook ISBN 978-1-942658-09-2
For Jiří
To be a man, a complete MAN.
— Alexander Berkman
Contents
Prologue
Part I: American Footsteps
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part II: Josef’s Notebook
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
BY THE TIME I GOT TO THE CAMP, it was already dark. I went straight from the airport. It was a cool October night, drizzly, with a wind blowing in from the west. The wind was stronger toward the southern tip of the island, swirling through the old tenements with their strings of tiny lighted windows.
I had a backpack, a warm coat, and a sleeping bag.
I breathed in the damp smell of underground and fog that always lets me know I’m in Manhattan.
I stopped at the outer edge of the encampment, on the border where it ended and the police zone began: service vehicles with flashing lights, vans, extension ladders. Dozens of raincoated cops.
The camp was set in the ground below street level. I walked down the stairs. At first, all I could see were dark sheets of plastic, billowing and snapping in the wind like sails.
Once my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I was able to make out the people squeezed in at the eastern end, where the stairs formed a kind of amphitheater. They stood calmly and quietly, letting the water run over them. Nobody had an umbrella. A girl was explaining the voting rules. Her voice kept getting lost in the gusts of wind, but the ones closest to her repeated her words loudly after each sentence, so even the people all the way in the back could hear.
I walked down the main path, which ran from east to west through the improvised shelters. I passed the kitchen, where homeless people lined up for food; an information table and a station distributing warm clothes; a tent with a sign on it proudly proclaiming LIBRARY. At the lower end of the square, I found myself alone. Across the street, cranes jutted skyward around the floodlit skeleton of the unfinished new World Trade Center. I found the tree, encircled b
y a ring of granite benches.
I picked up two sheets of the cardboard that was lying around everywhere. I put my backpack down on one and sat down on the other. The rain was letting up. I spotted a few stars in the cracks between the scudding clouds.
I pulled out my phone and texted: “I’m here. Waiting at tree. Jan”
A moment later, an answer beeped back: “Five min. Marius”
— I —
American Footsteps
1
I’D ALWAYS WANTED TO LIVE IN NEW YORK. Right in Manhattan, in one of those high-ceilinged gloomy apartments lined with bookshelves that were ingrained in my memory during the short trip I took there as a teenager and which I’ve associated with intellectual life ever since. Dark apartments with a view into the windows of the apartments across the way, where the ghosts of old Europe lounged about beneath yellow lamp shades and in purplish clumps of dust. Where the damp smell of the subconscious wafted up from the drainpipes and ventilation shafts.
I couldn’t tell you the origin of my desires. The images I identify with, where did they come from? Family legends? Books? Childhood memories? In times of crisis, our secret longings emerge, hurling us forward, drawing us in like a planet sucking up a handful of cosmic dust.
Around the time of my thirty-fifth birthday, I felt like a horse harnessed to a cotton gin. I always made a point of taking the tram in to work, to make the trip last as long as possible, and one day on the tram I decided to write down a list in my notebook of all the things I would never do. Just to give myself some perspective, get it all down in black and white.
1. I will never write a novel.
2. I will never make love with another woman again.
3. I will never move from one friend to another, with nothing except a backpack of books and a toothbrush.
4. I will never learn proper French.
5. I will never live in New York City.
That was just four years ago. I smile when I think back on it now. You’ve got to keep hope alive. That and faith in others, who, like my ex-wife, have plans of their own.
One day my wife decided to find someone else to provide for her, and suddenly I was a free man. I applied for a scholarship to a university in New York. Gave up my job at the paper. Cut down my workload at school to part-time. Moved in with friends. Decided to take up history again. And write. But before any of that, I made love with a woman who wasn’t my wife. I crossed that off my list first.
There’s actually a theory I have connected to my image of New York. It goes back to 1925, when my great-grandmother Friederike married a man from a town in northern Bohemia. With one edge, one corner of my heart, it also relates to my best friend, Josef, who planted two fixed ideas in my head: one, that writing is the best vocation in the world, and, two, that I’m not actually the great-grandson of the factory owner Emanuel Schwarzer, as I’ve always assumed, but the great-grandson of the Russian-American Jew and anarchist Andrei B., with whom, in 1924, my great-grandmother Friederike had an affair in Berlin.
I WAS BORN IN PRAGUE in the early seventies. By that point, my family’s upper-middle-class origins were ancient history. My grandfather, being half German, had his property confiscated by the Czechoslovak government after World War II. They told him he should be glad they hadn’t run him out of the country. The only thing they let my family keep was a caretaker’s apartment in the north Bohemian town of L., in a villa we got back—one of the few things returned to us—after the revolution in 1989.
The house had been built before World War I, with glassed verandas and Art Nouveau friezes on the walls, and a half-timbered gable that my great-grandfather had had decorated in the mid-twenties with a sign in elegant script reading VILA FRIEDERIKE. Till the day she died, my grandmother Týna tended to the garden, which no longer belonged to her. For as long as she could grip the pruning shears, she trimmed the rhododendron and azalea bushes and poked around the rock garden, her pride and joy. The space tucked away under the old yew trees, with the red trunks of the pines tilting precariously over them, seemed mysterious to me as a little boy. Every summer I built my bunkers in a different place, together with Josef, who lived with his proletarian parents on one of the upper floors of our villa. He was four years older than I was and had already read a great deal.
Nothing changed when the villa was returned to us. My parents were still young and had too many ambitions of their own to pour money into the upkeep of a ramshackle house. But they weren’t ready to sell it yet, either. I visited L. to see my grandmother, until she died, and later on to see Josef. In 1999, the year I got married, Josef published his first book. His parents passed away and his sister got married, so he was left on his own. He moved out of the beautiful third-floor apartment into the caretaker’s apartment my grandmother had been living in. By day he worked in the local secondhand bookstore and by night he wrote, slowly blossoming into a true eccentric. When he published his second book, I used my contacts in Prague to help him get a review in one of the papers. It had no impact either on sales or on Josef’s fame.
The last few years before he died, Josef was obsessed with Andrei B., a Russian anarchist who, he claimed, was my real great-grandfather.
Over and over, he read and reread the few letters from Andrei that Friederike had neglected to destroy, searching for clues and hints. Written in English, they clearly highlighted the one area where, despite their strong sexual attraction, there was friction: Friederike merely flirted with the idea of equality. Flirting was her life philosophy. She was also much younger than Andrei, who at the time had been in his fifties.
Josef was fascinated by anarchism but still couldn’t quite fathom it. He had read Bakunin and Kropotkin in the original, studied the legacies of Nestor Makhno and Emma Goldman.
It can’t just be dismissed, he maintained. Even Sartre in his twilight years declared himself an anarchist. It was the only label he was still willing to claim.
Speaking of labels: Among the stacks of unfinished projects, in one of the boxes Josef had confided to my care, which his sister helped me load into the car immediately after his funeral (she wanted to be rid of his things as soon as possible), I found a notebook labeled ANARCHIST. It was an unfinished text, apparently notes for a novel that Josef had planned to write at some point. Inscribed in green ballpoint on the cover of the blue notebook filled with finely ruled graph paper, it said: Compassion as a chest wound. There is no way of life that accords with our conscience. The anxiety. Everything was easier under totalitarianism. Freedom opened up an abyss too deep for me to see its bottom.
2
SUMMER, NEW YORK, RAIN. At the ticket counter of the Kolman Museum, I purchase an overpriced ticket from one of the ladies you see volunteering at every New York museum. With their surgically smoothed faces and wrinkled, gold-laden hands, they look like antiques themselves.
The lobby is dark, a set of French doors giving on to a garden where the rain drizzles into a marble pool overgrown with water lilies. The wooden floor creaks beneath the luxurious carpet; the showcases along the walls are filled with porcelain. A cord blocks the staircase leading to the upper floors. Everything above the first landing is drowned in darkness. Green velvet drapes cover the windows inside the rooms. When I draw them back, I can see Central Park.
I’ve been in New York two weeks now and still can’t believe it. I feel like an actor on a movie set. Central Park, the Metropolitan Opera House, Fifth Avenue. Last Wednesday, at the suggestion of one of the other students from my university, I took the ferry that shuttles back and forth between lower Manhattan and Staten Island. It’s free and as good as any sightseeing tour you can take. I didn’t expect to be so moved seeing the smoky blue of the Statue of Liberty.
ONE GORGEOUS VERMEER, two El Grecos, some Renaissance Italians, and The Education of the Virgin by Georges de La Tour. The rest is mostly kitsch: idyllic landscapes, a fluffy Fragonard, portraits of languid ladies by Burne-Jones and Whistler. An odor of dust issues from the tapestries and
shelves of antique books. The whole opulent mansion feels like a prison, a den where some old rodent comes to deposit its prey.
Kolman’s daughter Eleanor, who after her father’s death had the building converted into a museum, is painted next to her father in a dual portrait that hangs above the fireplace in what used to be the study. His manly profile stands out sharply in the foreground: a white-bearded chin jutting forth dynamically, a straight, short nose, a low-hanging brow, and a small round head of meticulously groomed white hair. Half-hidden behind him, as in a fog, is the face of a young red-haired woman, wrapped in a light muslin veil of the sort ladies used to wear to shield themselves from the sun.
The museum also has a cinema screening a film titled J. C. Kolman: Collector and Philanthropist every thirty minutes. There’s only fleeting mention of the assassination attempt; nobody is named. On the other hand, there’s plenty of footage of a sparkling pond with ducks paddling across the surface—to evoke a feeling of serenity, I assume. The credits list Eleanor C. Kolman as chief consultant on the project. Her mother, Alice, appears only once, in a wedding photo from 1882. After that, not a single mention. Where did she go? What happened to her? Why isn’t there a single trace of her in the house where she lived for thirty years?
I come home from the museum and sit by the window a long time, looking out at the street. It has stopped raining and the air is thick with humidity. I watch as a man in a bright-colored shirt, with carefully smoothed gray hair and a strong nose that reminds me of Josef, pulls the remains of a sandwich from a trash can, removes the foil wrapping, and lays it out tidily on a concrete pedestal. He crosses himself and eats standing up, a look of deep satisfaction on his face.
THE WOMAN IN THE REFERENCE LIBRARY of the Kolman Collection suddenly got her guard up when she realized what I was looking for.
“How did you know we have that here?”