The Attempt

by Magdaléna Platzová

  “Never mind about that,” the old woman says, shooing the nurse back to the corner. She turns again to me. “So you’re interested in Bouveret? You’re writing a book about him?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “He isn’t worth it.”

  “But he’s one of the great masters,” I stammer. “A successor to Rembrandt, unjustly overlooked.”

  “It’s sheer kitsch. Can’t you tell?” Eleanor snaps.

  My face flushes red. “But then why . . . I mean . . .”

  “Why is it here? For my father’s sake, of course. He brought it back from Paris after Martha died. Because of the little girl. He bought a lot of paintings with little girls back then. I wasn’t born until much later. Just an add-on.” Her chest rattles with laughter, which turns into a cough. Diana steps in with a glass of water and whispers something in her ear.

  “Oh, never mind,” the old woman says, dismissing her again. “Why shouldn’t I talk? It’s not like it’s going to kill me.” She bursts out laughing again, followed by a long bout of coughing. Finally she gasps, “He won’t leave me alone. Even now he won’t let me be.”

  “Miss Eleanor,” Diana says, raising her voice in an admonishing tone.

  “TOM,” THE OLD WOMAN SAYS TO ME. “That whole time you left me waiting in the anteroom, and I still wasn’t upset. Remember how I assisted you in surgery? What you did to those animals was disgusting, but I didn’t mind, just as long as you played with me. Shall we go upstairs?”

  She turns to Diana. “We want to go upstairs.”

  The nurse shakes her head disapprovingly, but she dutifully pushes her out the door. As they pass me, she whispers, “You have to come, too. She thinks you’re her brother.”

  “It’s been so long since you’ve been here. I’m going to show you everything,” Eleanor promises as we ride up in the wooden elevator. “I left it all just the way you remember. What took you so long to come back, Tom? Are you still angry? Do you think I stole from you? I would never do that to you, Tom.”

  Diana pushes the wheelchair down the hall and opens one of the doors. “Our classroom,” Eleanor announces with pride. “Remember?”

  Bookshelves, blackboard, chalk, glass-doored cabinets stacked with notebooks, maps on the walls, the familiar schoolroom smell.

  “Just look at that.”

  I pick up one of the notebooks. The margins of the carefully ruled pages covered with regular girlish letters are filled with notes scrawled in pencil. I recognize the handwriting of John C. Kolman: “Why isn’t the assignment complete? Improve grammar. Excellent!”

  She leads me on into Alice’s bedroom. There, among the silver hairbrushes and stale bottles of perfume, among the cloudy mirrors, carved deer, and roses, she bursts into tears. A bubbling and gurgling comes from inside her, like water passing through a clogged pipe.

  Finally, Diana has a chance to intervene. She pulls a case with a syringe prepared in it out of her pocket. All she has to do is to unwrap it and remove the protective cap. The old woman calms down as the needle plunges into her dried-out skin. She settles back in her chair and closes her eyes.

  Diana removes Eleanor’s glasses and straightens her covers with an almost loving touch. She beckons me to follow her. Out in the hallway, she presses a button and a bell sounds in another part of the house. A few moments later, a woman appears. I think I spoke to her yesterday, too. A big black woman with a kind round face, she serves under Diana, the shadow of a shadow.

  “Put her to bed.”

  The black woman wheels Eleanor away down a long corridor and turns the corner.

  Diana escorts me out.

  “I don’t know why she agreed to your visit,” she says, shaking her head. “I suppose she wanted to talk to someone from the profession. She really does know her art. Years ago, she was working on a book, too, back when I first started here. She would write and write, for hours at a stretch. But she never finished it.”

  “How long have you been working here?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “Yes, very long.”

  “Do you remember what the book was about?”

  “The Italian Renaissance. She asked me to read it. Some of the passages were quite nice. I remember a description of a monastery in Italy. Every cell had a small window looking out on the landscape and a drawing on the wall to go with the view. I can’t remember the painter’s name.”

  “Fra Angelico,” I say. “I’ve seen the monastery. It’s beautiful.”

  “There, you see, you’ve even been there.”

  “Does Miss Kolman have these episodes often?”

  “Not too often.” Diana is surprisingly talkative. “But it comes every once in a while. Especially at night. She complains that she wants to die. She cries.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Yes, it’s challenging. A few years ago, at one point, she refused to eat. We had to put her on IV. Then somehow she just snapped out of it. Sometimes she gets confused, like she did today with you, and sometimes she talks to ghosts. Usually her father. She complains that he won’t let her die, and other things. Some nights it’s enough to drive you crazy. She wakes up crying and moaning that she was never good enough for him and he ruined her life.”

  She suddenly stops. “Why, I shouldn’t be telling you this! These are . . . confidential matters. I hope you’ll keep it to yourself. I don’t even know why I started.”

  Our brief moment of intimacy has passed and she hastily tells me good-bye.

  Outside, I stagger a little, the sandy path crunching beneath my feet.

  On the bus ride back to New York, I read through the informational materials I collected on my tour around the Iron City. One of them is a brochure from the Kolman Museum, with a section featuring Eleanor’s memories of her father.

  “My daddy,” she writes, “would have done anything to make me happy. He proved it to me every day in the most loving, intelligent, unusual way. Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the strength and gentle protection he provided. He was my fortress.”

  8

  “HERE 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 str
ay 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.

  JEFF MEYERS 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.”

  IN THE AFTERNOON, BEFORE JEFF 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 som
e 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

  THE 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.