The Attempt

by Magdaléna Platzová

  December 19, two days before they were deported, John C. Kolman died suddenly of cardiac arrest.

  The typed originals of Andrei’s articles with his edits and corrections are sealed in plastic. But a few yellowed papers have slipped out. Maybe the librarian wasn’t careful enough, or was thinking about people like me who need to touch and smell papers; these had the faint scent of cigarette smoke.

  Andrei and Louise also typed their letters to each other, the only things they wrote by hand were their closing and signature. The habit of people who write a lot, who make a living by writing: banging out a letter on a typewriter between speeches or articles.

  Dear Louise,

  Thank you for the news of Germany. Again, I can only repeat what I have already told you in person: The only answer is individual action. Apart from that, I think there is nothing we can do. But is our network . . . capable enough? (I don’t think so.) How can we get to that point? I appreciate the efforts to help people in prison, but I believe they are a waste of time.

  Michel’s essay on the flâneur (and your enthusiastic reaction), frankly speaking, surprised me. This “stroller of city streets,” observing everything and intervening directly in nothing, is he not the exact opposite of what we are? Of what we have been our whole lives? Did we not step across that line long ago in our youth? Did we not decide that we would not be reflections, commentators, pocket mirrors, but the hand that intervenes? Did we even have a choice? (A question of compassion, of simple human compassion!)

  Who is this “man of the crowd” of whom Michel writes? How does he earn his living? Where does he sleep? Who pays his way? This observation with which he sates himself, while never becoming oversated (or even being at risk of it), is it not a kind of cowardice? What if someone confronts him with a choice? What if they put a brown shirt on him and send him into the streets to beat Jews, what then? What position will he take? Will he simply observe and go with the crowd, or will he stand in opposition? I would like to know.

  I view Michel’s interest in this romantic “mission” (romanticism isn’t a movement, but a need) as a concession to the young friends with whom he surrounds himself. A concession to the times, which he has ceased to understand. To say that modern man is a man without a story!

  The observer has no story while he is observing. But is he, too, not part of the monumental tragedy that is taking place, independent of his will? There can be no story without irreversible decisions. I have made some myself, as have you. And the flâneur? If he does not make his decisions himself, someone else will make them for him. And soon! Like it or not, he will be dragged into a story he did not choose.

  Perhaps last century, when Baudelaire roamed Paris, there was still time enough for wandering and innocent observation. But now, after the Great War, after the events in Russia, no one is innocent anymore! You cannot just observe, Louise. Monsieur Flâneur belongs to the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. Contemplation in these times is nothing but escape. And to run away now is dangerous.

  To ANOTHER UNDATED LETTER, someone had added by hand, “From Louise, Canada, 1940?”

  You ask me to remember. I would be more interested in what to do to be able to forget for a while!

  I met Andrei B. fifty years ago in New York. I described our meeting in detail in my autobiography and I believe there is nothing to add to it. But apparently you have not read my book. Andrei impressed me with his enormity from the very first time we met. Not in terms of his body. Physically he was rather small. But everything about him was tall and wide; you had to take a deep breath to keep up with him. I myself am from confined circumstances. We grew up counting every potato and walking on tiptoe, speaking in whispers, gathering crumbs. My entire being rebelled against it, against the subservience, the feeling of constant fear that there is a cane over one’s head, whether there is one or not. Even before I came to realize (thanks to Andrei) who I was and what was my task in life, I wanted to get away, run away, across the plains, the sea, the ocean, up and away into the clouds, just follow the singing, the noise of the blood wailing in my ears. That was passion. That was Andrei. He never desponded. Not in prison, not in sickness, not in poverty. On some issues I could not agree with him. His analyses were too cold; it bothered me. Ultimately he assessed his own situation with the same cool detachment and decided to end his life. I felt hurt by his decision. And betrayed.

  Before the end, there were years in exile. I lived in a small home in the south of France that my friends had bought for me, writing my memoirs. As I finished each chapter I mailed it to the town a few dozen miles away where Andrei had settled with his young lover. We revised the manuscript by letter and over the telephone, a process that was unnecessarily complicated and expensive, and every few days I would try to convince him to come see me. We could work together the way we used to, in the peace and quiet of my home. I could cook for him. He knew how much I liked to cook for him.

  He made excuses. No money. He couldn’t leave Mimi on her own. Why don’t you bring her with you? I asked. She would get in the way of our work, he said. Andrei brought Mimi with him from Berlin. She came from a “good” family. She wanted to marry Andrei more than anything else in the world. Sometimes she threw temper tantrums. She was thirty years younger than him, and hopelessly jealous. Of him, sick and poor as he was.

  Andrei had always attracted women. They sensed that with him they could fly free, without any hindrance of pettiness, jealousy, lies. After a while, however, they began to miss the narrow limits they were so accustomed to, and the more uncertain they felt, the more they clung to him. Ultimately they always chose to go back to the cage, which he couldn’t even see. There was no way he could understand how tight a grip the claws had on the creature living beside him. How bound they were by the lack of ties.

  The other option? Fly free with him as I have. And then lose him.

  Only much later, in the final years of Andrei’s life, when I had a chance to observe his longest love affair from up close, did I realize that at heart Andrei was the same as any other man. He didn’t want a truly free woman by his side, nor did he desire to be truly free himself.

  But maybe it takes several generations for the relationship between man and woman, between parents and children, to change, for human beings to begin to love instead of owning, for personal freedom to lead to something other than loneliness and emptiness. We were the first generation to try something like it in practice, and we obviously didn’t know how to live by our own ideals. Our instincts were too old-fashioned for our ideas. Our heads pulled us in one direction, our hearts in the other. In every serious relationship I have had, there has come a time when even the most enlightened man has given me the choice: Freedom or me, take your pick. And the men who didn’t give me a choice didn’t care about me. Maybe they saw me as a mother, a sister, a housemaid, but not a lover. How easily those men left me.

  Some wise women, when they get old, prefer women to men.

  But that’s not what I wanted to write about. You asked about my last conversation with Andrei B., the last time we met.

  It was at the morgue. I had requested a moment alone with my oldest friend.

  The Mediterranean light streamed in through the round window under the roof, falling across the whitewashed walls. The weight I had felt the past few years suddenly disappeared as the light penetrated everything, making it seem to float. Andrei lay in the open coffin, dressed in his beautiful summer suit.

  I stepped toward him. I didn’t know what to do at moments like these. How do you say good-bye to the person who matters more to you than anybody else? How do you let go of the love of your life, your most loyal friend and comrade? I put my hand on his forehead. He smiled.

  “What game are you trying to play, little girl?”

  I pulled back my hand.

  “That’s better. You don’t have to touch me. I’m probably cold and clammy, and I can’t feel a thing anyway.”

  “I don’t want to touch you,” I sa
id. “I’m mad at you.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you backed out like a coward and left me here alone.”

  “Now you sound like Mimi.”

  “Sorry to say, but I’m not that much different from her.”

  “Emotions are hard. They disguise themselves in all sorts of ways.”

  “You didn’t have to go.”

  “I don’t regret it. I don’t like clinging to things that no longer make sense. Like with the McKinley assassination.”

  “Leave that out of it,” I cried. “Why do you have to provoke me now?”

  “Louise,” he said after a pause. “We didn’t agree on most things, did we?”

  “That was your obsession,” I said. “Actually, we always agreed on the fundamental issues.”

  “And that was your obsession.” He smiled. “In spite of our clashes, though, we stayed together until the end.”

  “I didn’t want to outlive you.”

  “I’m sorry about that. But what I want to say is that just because you disagree with someone, doesn’t mean you don’t like them. In fact, you can even love them.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “You see, and I didn’t figure it out until just before I died. If I had felt a little better, I would have married Mimi. Don’t laugh. It would have made her happy, and it would have been only a slight annoyance to me.”

  “So what am I supposed to do now?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “The night after you died, I seriously considered ending my life, too,” I said. “But it would have been a mistake, I think.”

  “A big mistake,” said Andrei. “Solid material like you. A good woman, and strong. Nothing hurts you, does it?”

  I shook my head.

  “There, you see how lucky you are? You can still do plenty of work.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’ll trim the sail and cruise on, straight ahead. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “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

  JUST BEFORE THANKSGIVING, 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?”

  “Mulţumesc.”

  “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.

  “IT 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.

  EARLIER 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.