The Attempt (13 page)

15

T
HE SUN SETS BEHIND THE TOWERS
of the old apartments on the west side of the reservoir. To the northeast, the moon hangs, a thin strip of pale light tacked onto a sweep of dark blue. The first star. As the darkness reaches under the bushes, smells rise to my nostrils, unwinding with the easing of the summer heat.

The runners chat as they make their way around the reservoir, the women's high voices carrying across the surface. Some wave their arms like wings; some bob side to side. Some run stiff-legged. Some snort loudly, spraying sweat. A runner with perfect form flashes past. I can't tell whether man or woman; the narrow hips and slender limbs could just as well be either. They run with a light step, lifting their knees high, hair fluttering despite the lack of wind. They hold their crossed arms tightly to their chest, head tipped slightly back, eyes half-closed.

I walk over to the pump house on the dike. On the bench, out of reach of the lanterns' orange glow, I can just make out the generous silhouette of Madam Esposito. I wave hello and walk toward her quietly, so as not to scare away any raccoons.

“How are you doing?”

“Good, thanks,” says the psychic. “And you?”

“I'm good, too. Lovely evening, isn't it?”

“Beautiful.”

I open and quickly close my hand, as if I'd caught an insect.

She smiles.

“See you tomorrow, then,” I say.

“Yes, see you then.”

I
LANA AND
I
ARE
“
FRIENDS
”
NOW.
It happens to me more often than I'd like. As soon as a woman starts to confide too much in me, I know how it's going to end. As far she's concerned, I'm no longer a potential partner, but more like a friend or brother.

I think she's going out with Marius. His scholarship at the arts center on the Hudson ran out, but he moved to New York to be near her.

Professor Kurzweil practically hasn't left his house since winter. I go see him twice a week. I don't understand how he can be so isolated after spending more than seventy years in the same city.

We talk about all kinds of things, including suicide. The professor says he can easily imagine it. We talk about how Andrei B. ended his life and I tell him about Josef.

God played no role in the life of either man. They weren't interested in any notion of a higher power. They based their decisions solely on their assessment of the situation here in the world of physical laws, of cause and effect. Professor Kurzweil says he believes the true cause of Josef's suicide wasn't his struggles with love, but the extreme need for inner purity, which he was probably born with. And which is a greater hindrance to normal life than any physical defect.

“I don't believe in God, either,” he says. “Not that I'm
so brave. I dabbled in it a fair amount myself, before I met Erica. It's almost impossible to face that emptiness alone, and I was alone. Completely alone, except for an uncle who came to America back in the early thirties. My parents, grandparents, younger siblings, they all died in the war. Though I'm not sure family can really protect you, either. Maybe they just soften the blows a little. You can be rescued only by someone who attaches himself to you by choice. That bond between two unrelated people,” he said, “is a miracle. I didn't take into account the fact that Erica was mortal. I always thought she would outlive me.”

We listen to music together. The professor loves Janáček and Mahler. He guided me through all of Mahler's symphonies, up until the unfinished Tenth, which he doesn't like.

He said he used to like to listen to it when he was younger. He was fascinated by the final, interrupted tone. But it wasn't exciting to him anymore. In fact, nothing was more familiar to him, more real, than the broken note, the word he would one day, maybe tomorrow, fail to finish saying, writing, hearing.

He stopped the record and pointed out its unique lack of unity, the fragmentary nature of Mahler's music, how it seems to be constantly falling apart, the motifs butting heads with one another, fighting to be heard, a heroic struggle for unity that now, however, belongs to the past, since even the best experiments perish in a vacuum. That was the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe before World War I. From Mahler on, no one would be able to think or write coherently. “Do you hear the fragments of all those beautiful melodies, forever lost to everyone who comes after Mahler?

“And yet,” he continued, “ultimately Mahler always finds
the way to redemption. After all the struggles and empty promises, his music is saved by something extremely tender and intimate. A single note or a quiet human voice.”

I'
LL BE GOING BACK TO
P
RAGUE SOON.
My friends send e-mails, asking if I'm looking forward to coming home and what I got out of my stay. Did I write the book I was talking about? Did I at least start it?

I reply that I'm still in the research phase. Josef's notebook has gotten a lot thicker since I've been in New York, but it isn't clear how all the parts fit into a whole.

Professor Kurzweil is right. What's the use in pretending there's unity where there isn't any? Why make things up? Why not let the individual fates rub up against one another as randomly as the sheets of paper stuck into the blue notebook?

John C. Kolman and Andrei B.

My great-grandmother Friederike and Eleanor C. Kolman.

Professor Kurzweil and I. And Ilana.

On my last visit, the professor announced that he was selling his gorgeous apartment on the west side of Central Park and moving to a retirement home outside the city.

Eleanor C. Kolman died. Sister Michaela wrote to let me know, saying she thought it might interest me. She had stopped eating and passed away in the early spring.

The letter from Sister Michaela sounded mystical.

She wrote that the night her great-aunt died, she suddenly woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. She got dressed and quietly crept outside, so as not to wake the other nuns. It was cool and so bright that she could see the puffs of air coming
out of her mouth condensing in little clouds. She walked through the garden, across the lawn, and down the driveway to the gate, passing the building that was going to be the new canteen. From the north, the convent was shielded by a concrete wall about two meters high; from the south, there was just a fence of wooden planks with narrow cracks revealing glimpses of the sky. The wind whistled through the cracks, carrying grains of orange sand and dust. The gate in the middle of the wall was locked, but Michaela, as one of the older sisters in charge, had a key. To her right towered the rough-hewn edifice of the church, its concrete walls shining eerily, and past them, the peaks of St. Peter's, still white with snow.

She left behind the convent and the church, walking along the dirt road through the sagebrush and cactus plants.

The landscape around her was taut with silence as it slipped into the gap between night and day. The animals of the night crawled back into their holes, clearing the way for the dead. This time belonged to them.

She heard the sound of her own footsteps, the creak of tiny pebbles under her soles, the rustle of her habit's heavy fabric. She knew she was not alone; her great-aunt was walking with her.

A wind kicked up and the eastern sky turned gray. A morning bird called out from an acacia bush.

She turned to make her way back. By now she could clearly make out the woods on the mountainside, the crest of peaks, rising and falling through a cover of clouds. The mountain has its own rainfall, Michaela wrote to me. It fills the streams that spring from its sides, feeding thousands of rare species of herbs, trees, and animals.

Twice a week, the sisters drive to one of the springs in a pickup truck, its bed full of plastic barrels. They use the water to make the dough for communion wafers, which they supply to half of the eighty parishes and missions in the diocese of Tucson. They bake every day except Sundays and holidays. They have machines for mixing and kneading, but the rolling out and everything else they do by hand.

Sister Michaela also wrote that although she had been a disappointment to her great-aunt, Eleanor had left her a lot of money. She said she was donating part of it to the convent, but most of it she planned to divide between a few select charities. She didn't want to set up her own foundation, since she didn't want her gift associated with the name of her great-grandfather Kolman. She wanted the money dispersed with as little attention as possible.

16

I
WOULDN'T HAVE BELIEVED IT POSSIBLE
in a city of twelve million people. I ran into them in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood where none of us lives. All of a sudden, they came out of a side street in front of me, just walking along holding hands. Ilana slightly taller than Marius, slender, in a summery red T-shirt and bright-colored shorts, hair pinned to her scalp in an improvised bun leaning precariously to one side.

I caught up with them at the intersection, where they had stopped to wait for the light. There was no way to pretend I hadn't seen them.

“Well, well, well, if it isn't our anarchist.” Marius smiled. He was always that obnoxious; I'd gotten used to it by now. Ilana didn't seem bothered. “What are you doing here?”

“I was at a gallery. What about you?”

“Oh, just taking a walk around.” He laughed, as if he'd said something witty.

“We're going to see some friends,” said Ilana. “Want to come?”

“Why wouldn't he?” Marius said, turning to her. “At least he'll meet some other people.”

I shrugged. “Why not?”

We stopped in front of an old house made of brick. Marius reached through the bars on the gate and opened the latch
from inside. We stepped up to the green-painted front door and rang the bell.

A short blond girl came to answer, between twenty and twenty-five, I'd say. She gave Marius and Ilana a kiss on both cheeks, then greeted me the same way.

“I'm Mia.”

“This is Jan,” Ilana introduced me before I could do it myself. “He's writing a book on anarchism.”

“For real?”

“I'm a historian,” I said.

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “Come on in.”

We walked down a dark, narrow hallway and out an open door into a shaded backyard, where most of the guests were gathered. Maybe twenty people in all. I was clearly the oldest.

Young men and women sat smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, drinking beer and tea. They helped themselves to the latter from a large pot resting on one of the concrete steps. Mia, acting as hostess, asked what we wanted to drink. She said there was beer in the kitchen fridge if we wanted, and if we'd brought anything, we could put it in there.

I blushed, but luckily Marius pulled two six-packs of bottled beer from his knapsack and padded off into the house with them.

Ilana looked around. “Is he here yet?”

“Not yet,” said Mia. “But he called to say he was sorry for being late.”

The backyard conversation moved along at a low hum, every now and then one of the guests looking up toward the door, as if expecting someone. It reminded me of the atmosphere under communism in Prague, back in the eighties, when I was
in high school and we would go to illegal seminars taught by professors in people's apartments.

“Is someone special coming?” I asked Ilana in a hushed voice.

“Yeah,” she said. “An amazing guy. I'm really glad you're going to meet him. Actually I don't know why I didn't invite you in the first place. I should have called you. He's a true revelation, in my opinion.”

“What does he do?”

“He's a philosopher,” Marius answered for her, emerging from behind us with three chilled bottles of Brooklyn Lager. “My new guru.” He laughed.

“So no more Žižek?”

He laughed again. “Žižek? He's obsolete. I'm tired of the same old right-left rhetoric. Nobody would do anything if it were up to him. He's all talk and no action.”

We sat down on a concrete step warmed by the sun, sipping our beers as we eavesdropped on the conversations around us.

“Capitalism's got another fifty years, max. The accumulation of capital can't go on forever. There are physical limits, and sooner or later it's going to run up against them.”

“The question is, What comes after?”

“It might be even worse.”

“Personally,” said a hardy-looking young man with a blond beard and a ruddy face, “I don't plan on being around for it. Whenever I have any free time, I take off for the mountains. My brother and I head up there and practice survival techniques. Plus, I also signed up for a gardening course.”

“That's great,” said a girl with a pageboy cut and a silver
stone in her nose. “But instead of preparing ourselves for the worst, shouldn't we be thinking about how to keep it from coming to that?”

“I just want to be ready.”

“We should all be ready.”

“He's here,” Ilana said, jabbing me in the side.

I'm going to call him Daniel. Tall, skinny, arms covered with a light layer of blond hair and dotted with freckles sticking out of his short-sleeved plaid summer shirt. Close-cropped blond hair, thinning on top. Silver-framed glasses. Straight, narrow face. Strong chin. Maybe a little bit older than I was, somewhere between forty and fifty. Maybe closer to fifty. Wearing a little backpack. Standing next to him, a short, heavyset woman with a mop of rust-colored curls. They looked like a pair of English tourists.

Everyone lined up to shake his hand, one by one.

They arranged their chairs in a circle. Daniel accepted an open bottle of beer from Mia, took a sip, set it down on the ground, and started digging through his backpack, trying to find something. The bottle fell over and he blushed, flashing an apologetic grin.

“Daniel,” said Mia, and I suddenly realized how genuinely kind she was. “We're so glad you could be with us today.”

Everyone smiled and nodded their heads. Daniel visibly relaxed.

“Maybe,” he said, putting his papers away in his backpack, “we could start with some questions.”

“Should we raise our hands?” asked an Indian-looking young man with long hair.

“That would be better,” said Mia.

His hand shot up in the air. All I understood of his question was that it had something to do with personal identity. He talked a long time, stuttering and saying the word
like
repeatedly.

Everyone there except me knew something about Daniel's theory already, so he didn't bother rehashing the basics. I was a little bit lost.

If I understood correctly, Daniel was arguing that personal identity as such doesn't exist. The only thing that remains constant about an individual over time is a certain degree of continuity in thinking and our connection to a network of external relations.

“We fear the future because it's
our
future,” said Daniel, “but by the time we reach that point, which we can only guess at today, it won't be us anymore. All that we'll have in common with the person we are today is a few memories, some reference points, some of the content of our thoughts, but nothing any deeper. The world doesn't stand or fall with us. It was here before we came, and will be here long after we're gone. The network exists independent of our physical existence, and we will remain plugged into it, in some form or other, even after we die. A form of immortality, if you will.”

Nothing deeper exists beyond the loose bundle of perceptions, needs, desires, and alliances that we call the self, said Daniel. No core, no mystical center, no mysterious homogeneous entity. Once we realize that this assumption about our identity—as something that needs to be protected and in whose interest we need to act—is false, we'll automatically start to care more for our surroundings. Not only for humans, but also for animals, plants, microorganisms, the whole
incredibly complex tissue that binds it all together, from the tiniest level all the way up to the largest, everything we can positively confirm.

Abandoning this false notion of the subject means abandoning the theory that everything we do, we do for our own benefit. It means admitting we are capable of sacrifice and self-denial for the benefit of the whole. Putting real issues before self-serving ones, life before death.

“You ask, what really matters? What can I do? Reduce or eliminate suffering by any means possible. Lift the floodgates. Allow the sap to flow freely into every part of the organism. As living beings, we are part of a universal experiment. Our consciousness cannot be separated from it, nor can it fully reflect it. Compassion begins where knowledge ends. Everything else is hubris, including the concept of God.”

D
ANIEL MIGHT SOUND LIKE A
B
UDDHIST,
but he's not, Marius explained on the way back to Manhattan. Though there were some points of overlap. Daniel had written two books so far; each one had taken him ten years. He proved his conclusions through a series of strictly logical steps. Originally, he was a mathematician.

Rather than sidestepping the economic and political structure that all the other contemporary thinkers exhaust themselves trying to analyze, his theory simply left it out altogether. Other philosophers were too married to their hierarchical vision of society, with its concepts of authority, center, and power.

Daniel, explained Marius, described an order of relations
that was inherently democratic. You could even say anarchic, but not in the sense of chaotic.

“In January you were still preaching the dictatorship of the proletariat,” I said, needling him.

“Ha-ha,” Marius snorted. “You can think what you want, but we mean it!”

“What about you?” I asked Ilana. She had been walking along beside us without saying a word. She glanced up with a puzzled look on her face. She wasn't even listening. Apparently, she couldn't have cared less about the problems of global capitalism.

I touched her arm.

I wished I could make love to her. Slowly and gently, in some quiet, deserted place.

B
EFORE
I
LEAVE FOR
P
RAGUE,
I go to visit Professor Kurzweil one last time. He's in a nursing home now, in a little town on the Hudson.

The train ride along the river, its surface dotted with drizzling rain, reminds me of my Halloween weekend with Ilana. It was a beautiful, clear morning and Ilana was taking pictures from the train. She had a manual camera that shot film, the kind nobody used anymore. She told me she loved the click of the body snapping shut when she loaded a roll of film. The whir of the spool as she advanced to the next frame. She liked setting the aperture and shutter speed, the smell of the camera's leather case. She saved all her prints with the bent corners, along with her paper letters and postcards, ticket stubs from
galleries and concerts, punched train tickets. She couldn't throw any of it away. Evidence that she had actually lived.

The rain keeps coming down, the gray curtain of water and mist shrouding the view of the opposite bank. I take a cab from the train station.

The retirement home looks like a hotel, except for the handrails and buzzers installed all over the place. The hallways smell like a hospital. The professor invites me into his room. It has a kitchenette and everything is bright and clean, if a little bit cramped. I recognize a few pieces of furniture from his old apartment in Manhattan, as well as part of his library, but most of his things he had to get rid of.

I praise the beautiful view from the window, the fresh air and nature so close by.

He shrugs. “I would have preferred a café, believe me. Smoke-filled, as it should be.”

He says it was hard getting used to the new environment, but he hasn't let it get him down. There are a few people here he can talk to about history or psychoanalysis. They also listen to music together. On days when he feels up to it, he tries to work on his memoirs. A sure sign of vanity, but it isn't as if he is forcing anyone to read it. He just wants to get it all straight in his mind. His own memory surprises him sometimes. All kinds of details come back to him when he is writing—colors, smells. As a matter of fact, when they called him from the reception desk to come and get me, he had been in a village in the Pyrenees, on the run from Hitler. It was the month of May and he was fourteen years old.

“The truth is,” he says, “I never did get used to living here. Maybe if I had had children.”