The Attempt

by Magdaléna Platzová

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

  NESTOR 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.

  3

  LIKE THE REST OF EUROPE, postwar Paris, flooded with Russian émigrés, wasn’t too inclined toward anarchists. There was a sharp division between Whites and Reds, and anarchists fell on the Red side of the line.

  French officials were more efficient than their Russian counterparts, and also more ruthless. These weren’t the capricious, bare-legged women of the Soviet offices, but serious men in suits.

  The conscientious clerk protected the state as if it were his own home. It wasn’t his job to help beggars who couldn’t even speak proper French, but to find out what could be used against them. The moment an immigrant became illegal, the French police would arrest him, put him in handcuffs, and send him over the border on a train with an escort of two armed guards. Because he lacked any valid papers, naturally they didn’t want him in Belgium or Switzerland, either, so they sent him back to France, where the authorities locked him up in jail. Upon his release, he got a new deadline to obtain documents, which he of course failed to meet.

  Monsieur Jean-Michel Després, for example, a clerk at the police prefecture in Montreuil, had perfected a method for snaring foreigners in a trap that was near escapeproof. By means of bureaucratic procedures, he would maneuver the applicant into a situation where in order to settle his case with Mssr. Després he required a document that only Mssr. Després was authorized to issue. Thus the two ends of the rope met on Mssr. Després’s desk, and it was up to him to determine how tightly to draw the knot.

  For a Communist who couldn’t even speak proper French and was quite likely a Bolshevik spy, it might not even have been worth going back to France. Instead he could simply disappear and sink into the underground, as so many before him had done. The morally upright Mssr. Després shuddered in horror at the thought of illegality, that innermost circle of hell, leaking its foul stench into the legally consecrated structure of the state. If you didn’t have your papers in order, you didn’t exist. And no one worked the hidden trapdoor more cunningly than Mssr. Després, the clerk of Montreuil.

  This was the same Mssr. Després who every day after lunch took a nap and on Sundays rode the train with his wife and two daughters to the outskirts of Paris, where unfortunately they ran into groups of rowdy and, quite likely, intoxicated foreigners, who didn’t even speak proper French and couldn’t tell one type of cheese from another. One needed to protect oneself, especially if one had two impressionable daughters.

  But one must also know one’s enemy. And so it was that Mssr. Després, along with two other gentlemen from the prefecture, daringly, albeit with some reluctance, ventured out into the seamy underbelly of Paris. “Going on expedition,” they called it. They drank champagne in nightclubs where half-naked dancers, twisting and grinding, imitated the city’s greatest sensation, an American black woman who bared her teeth and hopped around like a monkey, exposing her breasts. Mssr. Després had also seen her in person, and found her performance entertaining, up until the moment that he imagined his daughters onstage in her place.

  Under other circumstances, Mssr. Després would have found Andrei B. quite likable. He looked less like a revolutionary than the concerned father of impressionable daughters. The two men were close in age. Andrei spoke quite decent French, and there was a kindly manner about him that led Mssr. Després to confide in him. He, too, was bald, wore thick glasses, and carried a cane. He dressed in a jacket, hat in hand; his unobtrusive manners and deep voice were as befitted a supplicant to the state. True, he was a Jew, but that could be overlooked—under other circumstances.

  As things stood now, however, Andrei B. was suspicious on all counts, and even if his looks didn’t fit with the menacing sound of the word anarchist, Mssr. Després had to take action. It wasn’t his place to question the motives of his superiors.

  With somewhat of a heavy heart, then, he set his masterful trap, and Andrei fell into it headfirst. He didn’t even resist. He politely allowed them to slap on the handcuffs, throw him in jail, and the next day, escorted by two gendarmes, bring him to the Gare du Nord to take the train to Belgium.

  4

  ANDREI’S MILD GOOD MANNERS had the same effect on the French police whose task it was to escort him over the border and leave him to the mercy of the Belgian authorities as they’d had on Mssr. Després. Over the course of the four-hour journey, they shared their food with him and told him about their families. In return, he described his meeting with Lenin in the Kremlin. They chewed their bread and sausages, marveling at Andrei’s report on conditions in Russia. At one point, the younger of them, a man by the name of Jacques Farouche, pounded a fleshy thigh with his fist and said, “It’s obvious he’s going to end up like Robespierre.”

  “Who?”

  “This Lenin fellow.”

  “Oh, Robespierre.”

  The officer softly hummed the old revolutionary ditty: “Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira! Les aristocrates à la lanterne! Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira! Les aristocrates on les pendra!”

  The traces of the recent war were more visible as they traveled farther north: fields and meadows hemmed in with warning signs, trenches overgrown with grass and deep craters from exploded mines. The crumbled walls of estates that no one would ever return to, rusting tangles of barbed wire. Under a torrent of rain, the flat, fertile land, sloping gradually to sea level in the west, quickly transformed into a sea of mud. Poplar trees and church spires gestured skyward. Andrei knew the western front from stories he had heard in New York and Berlin. The men with no legs and no arms had the same look wherever you went, the same bewildered silence whenever somebody asked about the war. At the Romanische Café, he had met Otto Dix, one of the few who made it through the war nearly unscathed. He was now recording his memories in a series of graphic prints. Sitting with him silently at his table was a veteran whose lower jaw had been blown off by fragments from a grenade. He sipped his drinks through a straw, holding a napkin in front of the bottom half of his face.

  The train came to a stop in the town of Saint-Quentin.

  “There was a big ceremony here this year,” says Farouche. “The Australian army unveiled a war memorial.”

  On the platform, they announce the departure of the train to Arras and the older policeman says, “Have you ever heard of the Red Baron?”

  “Manfred von Richthofen? They
sold postcards of him in Berlin.”

  “My cousin saw him with his own eyes.”

  Farouche stretched his face, squinted, and shook his right hand at the wrist. “Oh là là!”

  THE OLDER POLICEMAN’S COUSIN was named Vincent Grévy. He was twenty-three when the war began. His vision had been poor ever since he was a child, but he enlisted and was assigned to a supply unit on the western front, transporting food and medical supplies. In the spring of 1917, he was in charge of supplies for Britain’s Third Army, under General Allenby, who led the Allied attempt to break through German defenses near the French city of Arras.

  For months in advance of the attack, the policeman’s cousin said, the British engineers oversaw the construction of miles and miles of tunnels in the soft chalk soil underlying the city. The tunnels were dug by Bantam units of miners from northern England and tattooed Maori soldiers from the New Zealand Tunneling Company, who displayed a remarkable talent for laying traps and were able to navigate underground with ease.

  They built sleeping quarters for hundreds of soldiers, kitchens, command posts, a hospital, even an underground theater. Some of the corridors had rail tracks running through them, allowing them to move cars loaded with ammunition in one direction and wounded and dead soldiers in the other.

  Of course this frenzied activity didn’t escape the Germans’ notice. They sent scouts down into the corridors to map out the network of tunnels, but it wasn’t an easy assignment. Even the few who managed to find their way out alive were unable to give an accurate description of the underground fortress.

  The tunnels dead-ended just short of the German positions, so when the Allies launched their attack, they could blow open an exit and pop up right in the face of the surprised Germans.

  The police officer’s cousin, who didn’t have too high an opinion of his native country and emigrated to America after the war, said the plan as General Allenby had devised it was ingenious, but the French ruined everything. First of all, they refused to fight on Easter Sunday, insisting that they had to celebrate the Resurrection. That meant the Allied attack, which was supposed to be coordinated with the offensive by General Nivelle along the river Aisne, had to be put off until Monday. Then, on Sunday night, it started to snow heavily. Vincent’s supply unit should have been on their way inland by that point, but they had to wait until the storm let up.

  The attack was planned for Monday morning at five-thirty.

  A quiet set in after the evening bombing of the German trenches. The soldiers underground got a special dinner and the field chaplain celebrated Mass. Then they were ordered to go to bed so that they would be as well rested as possible for the next day. It wasn’t hard to obey, given how tired they were. The boy in the bed next to Vincent’s smiled blissfully and smacked his lips in his sleep.

  But Vincent lay wide awake. He had never been so close to battle before. His perception of time was suddenly more acute, more intense, and the nearer it drew to morning, the more it slowed down, the minutes trickling by, draining away toward the beginning. Or was it the end? He savored the new sensation, every cell in his body up and on its feet as he eagerly lapped up the sounds around him: the tossing and turning, the scratching and moaning. A distant clapping, followed by a roar.

  At first he thought the sound was coming from the kitchen, or from the generator that supplied power to the underground city. But then he realized what he was hearing were human voices. He got up, put on his glasses, grabbed his flashlight, and crept out to the corridor. He passed by the latrines on the right and came to the spot where the corridor widened into a tunnel. He continued a little farther toward the exit, then turned off into another corridor, where the noise and light were increasing in intensity.

  He saw a group of about five men. Stomping heavily, they swayed from side to side, chanting in a barking voice, like a sudden exhalation of air. They moved in a circle around a lamp that served in place of a fire, their faces covered with Maori tattoos carved out of the darkness, the whites of their eyes bulging, tongues lolling from their mouths.

  The soldiers rose at three-thirty in the morning. Everyone got a hot cup of coffee and a special ration of bread. Together, they prayed for victory and then, in full combat dress, arrayed for the assault. The snow was still falling outside, mixed with rain, and there was a strong wind blowing from the southwest—at the Allies’ back and into the Germans’ eyes.

  Within a few minutes, they were already collecting the wounded in wheelbarrows. The first line of German trenches was captured almost without a hitch, having been reduced to a sea of craters in the Allied bombing the night before. Blinded by the sleet, the Germans failed to see the enemy approaching and weren’t prepared to fight. Meanwhile the earth melted into a thick, sticky mud that sucked in their boots, so there was no way for them to flee. Some were taken hostage in their socks.

  By evening time, the Allies had taken several strategic positions and the Germans were forced to retreat farther north. The Maori quickly laid down a makeshift road across the muddy battlefield to allow the ammunition and supplies to reach the front line.

  The night before the battle and the whole following day, as he tugged the carts loaded with dead and wounded soldiers through the underground tunnels, were emblazoned in Vincent’s memory as one of the most powerful experiences of the war.

  He remembered the dying Englishman who had stopped in the midst of the attack to light his pipe when a grenade exploded in front of him. His head was unharmed, and he still had the pipe in his hand, but his chest was bleeding heavily. Vincent rushed the man to treatment as fast as he could, but he kept running into other carts carrying other wounded soldiers. The English soldier had a long, refined face with a high forehead and narrow nose, and a well-groomed mustache adorning his upper lip.

  Seeing the Englishman moving his lips, Vincent leaned in close to listen.

  “Helen . . .”

  The policeman’s cousin said it felt like the soldier was breathing his soul into his ear.

  After the war he found out the Englishman’s name, and looked up his wife in England. But that’s another story.

  “But what about the Red Baron?” asked Farouche. “Is that when he saw him?”

  “Yes, that’s right, his whole squadron. ‘The Flying Circus,’ they called them, because of their bright colors. They looked spectacular up in the sky. The British planes dropped over Arras like rotten plums.”

  The French policemen bid Andrei farewell on the Belgian border, explaining that they had to report back to Paris that evening or they would have escorted him all the way to Brussels.

  Mssr. Després had arranged for Andrei to go to Brussels in order to salve his conscience. If he could make it to the capital and vanish amid the crowds, he had a chance of remaining at large. Even if personally Mssr. Després detested the idea of living in freedom illegally, he recognized that it was still preferable to languishing in a French prison.

  5

  HAVING THE OCEAN NEARBY makes everything softer. The late-afternoon light covers the flat landscape like a coating of honey.

  By the time Andrei wakes up, it’s dark. Squeezed into a corner of the compartment, he is nearly invisible. In his pocket he has his ticket to Brussels and the ten francs he had with him when he was arrested. The French policemen also left him the rest of a baguette, a hunk of cheese, and a half-empty bottle of wine.

  He drifts off to sleep again. He is back home with his family in Vilnius, before they moved to Saint Petersburg. It is Yom Kippur and his father is taking him to temple. They lose each other in the crush outside the synagogue. He elbows his way through the crowd of men, all dressed in the same black outfits. Andrei wants to go home to his mother, but all of a sudden the streets look unfamiliar; he isn’t in Vilnius anymore, but on the cramped, damp-smelling streets off the Bowery, in Manhattan. His ears buzz with the chatter of Jews on the sidewalk outside the synagogue.

  He wakes up. Two men sit across from him, engaged in quiet conversation
. Even in the darkness, he can make out their beards and black hats.

  He closes his eyes and returns to the Bowery, no longer in a dream, but in his memory. He climbs the stairs to the first apartment he rented in New York, with Louise and Sasha.

  Sasha was his best friend. They found each other his first day in the city. Louise only joined them much later. She found her way to Manhattan by smell, with a single address in her pocket. She had run away from her husband and was just discovering anarchism. Although she was three years older than he was, in many respects he felt more mature.

  Louise was his girl, but she sometimes also slept with Sasha. Andrei didn’t mind too much; he took his principles seriously. He didn’t own Louise. Besides which, he was genuinely fond of Sasha. While Andrei was out running around to meetings or editing at the offices of the German anarchist newspaper, Sasha, who was a painter, would sit around the kitchen at home, watching Louise cook and sew. They went through periods where all three of them lived off of the brassieres and corsets she made. The apartment was littered with padded inserts and pink ribbons. Sasha sat in the kitchen drawing or just stared dreamily at Louise with his bright blue eyes as he folded the satin cuttings into delicate roses.

  The quiet conversation in Yiddish continues. The men, assuming Andrei to be asleep, are making fun of him.

  “If he had a beard,” says one, “he would look a lot like Grandpa Solomon. And Grandpa Solomon was born in Będzin.”

  “Look at his shoes,” argues the other. “Can you imagine anyone from Będzin being caught dead in such shoes?”

  “But he has the same nose as Grandpa Solomon. And the same ears, too.”