A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel

by Jennifer Dubois

  “Okay,” I said. “Carry on.” I swiped one of Lars’s pawns out of sheer spite.

  “So we find this lovely river hours outside the city. We think, A nice place to have a picnic, have a little rest, you understand.”

  “I understand,” I said. The pawn capture, I saw now, had been a mistake. I’d opened up a diagonal onto my king. Lars was hemming me in with his usual bored calculation, letting me make my own mistakes.

  “We are thinking to lie down for a while and get to know each other a little better,” he said. Lars took my pawn with his knight. I took his offending knight with my knight, who was prompty captured by Lars’s queen.

  “Yes,” I said. “I get it.” I castled. Lars sacrified a bishop, breaking up my pawn center.

  “We are going to fuck in the grass.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I know.” I don’t know if it was a translation issue or some kind of elaborate cross-cultural mockery, but Lars always treated me as though I had no idea what he was getting at—and he was always getting at something. “For Christ’s sake,” I would say, “my brain hasn’t melted yet. You will probably be the first to know when it does.” “What do you know?” he would respond. “You’ve spent your whole life at university. When’s the last time you were with a man?” And that would usually end the conversation.

  “And so we are in the grass. The river is so blue. An insane green-blue such as we do not find in nature. What is this called?”

  “Turquoise, maybe. Aquamarine. Cerulean.”

  “You have more words than you need,” he said. He said this to me once a day, at least.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “And so we fuck like muskrats,” Lars said grandly.

  “Rabbits, maybe.”

  “What?” He frowned at me, his bushy gray eyebrows twitching.

  “I think you … fuck … like rabbits. You know. Copiously and in public?”

  He frowned. “In Sweden, this is a problem with muskrats.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Anyway.”

  “And it was lovely,” he roared. “We hear much about the politics of the Kurdish people, but not so much about the beauty of their women.”

  “This is true,” I said. Lars swung his queen regally toward my cowering king. She was imperious, immune. I scowled.

  “And when we rise—this is many hours later—Sinbil jumps. Something has landed at her feet, making puffs of dust. ‘Lars,’ she says, ‘I think somebody is throwing rocks at us?’ ”

  “You, of course, know they are not rocks.”

  “Of course I know they are not rocks. ‘Sinbil,’ I say, ‘those are not rocks. Run!’ ” Lars took my bishop with his queen. “ ‘Zig-zag,’ I tell her! ‘Zig and zag your way up the hill!’ Check your king, by the way.”

  I moved my king into the rook’s old spot, where he huddled, looking fragile and deposed. I yawned, which is my cover for everything.

  “The hill which had taken us a half an hour to pick down, suddenly we are atop of it after only moments. This is what being shot at will do to you.”

  I stared into my coffee and tried to discern what percentage of Lars’s statements, in this case, were bullshit. In my experience, he was an unusual breed of liar. He half-believed his own lies, but he wasn’t an outright lunatic, much as it pained me to admit it. He didn’t lie for gain, either, or to manipulate others, or for self-promotion. He lied, it seemed to me, to make his life larger. He started with a true thing, and then he exploded it—blew it up in all directions, made it crazier and more colorful and more disastrous. He told things not the way they had happened but the way they should have happened.

  “We make it to the car only just in time,” he continued. “I swear at those bastards in Turkish. We race away back toward the city, but it takes us hours. Just think, if one of us had been shot, we would have been really, really dead before we reach civilization. The rental car company says, ‘Oh yes, there are thieves in the hills, did we not tell you not to take the car out to the hills without your bodyguard?’ But I know better.”

  He was starting to coast, which meant that he’d seen exactly how he was going to win. He always relaxed a little bit at that point. His talk, which never stopped or wavered, grew even more abundant and luxurious. He smiled. He asked rhetorical questions.

  “What do you think I knew? Well, I knew that this was an unlikely explanation. Why would the thieves have been after us, two lowly travelers of modest means, not even Americans? Why would they be waiting out in the hills if they had not followed us there first? Why not just stay in the city and steal money the easy way?”

  I looked longingly at my own queen, rendered impotent by all the material that I’d never managed to properly launch—a knight, a castle, the black bishop. All wasted.

  “No, all that was far too simple, too suspicious. Thieves? Please. Do not insult me.” He lowered his voice. “It was Turkish intelligence.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, stalling for time even though I knew that this kind of talk was mostly useless. “What would Turkish intelligence want with you? What would anyone want with you except your passport?”

  “Shh,” he said, looking at me sternly. “You think they do not have agents here even now? They tried to kill me once. Are you trying get me murdered? This is not an honorable way to try to avoid losing. Check your king again, by the way.”

  Lars’s queen had taken a straggling pawn, and I moved my king back to his previous square. Lars advanced his knight for backup, which seemed, at that point, excessive. I brought my own knight over to the action, but it was far too late. The queen could not be taken; she stalked my king with an attention that felt like mockery. Then a waiting bishop swept in from nowhere and took my very last defending pawn. I knocked over my own king.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “An object lesson in what happens once the pawn wall in front of the castled king is breached,” Lars sniffed. “But next time, next time. You are getting better. I was fearful for several moments.” He always said this, too. It was annoying. I would truly love to beat Lars at chess before I die.

  After my results came in and my Ph.D. was earned and while my father was still dying—my father had been dying for so long that it was hard for me to remember sometimes that he ever hadn’t been—my life fell into a sort of sorry, isolated routine. On Saturdays I’d play chess with Lars. On Sundays I would visit my father, who had been relegated to a nursing home once he no longer knew who or where he was. I’d stroke his arm and feed him pharmacy-bought chocolates and uphold perky one-sided conversations. During the weeks, I taught Introduction to Composition at a technical college in the South End. My students were alternately insipid or adorable, depending on my mood. Most of them were listless, their opinions half formed and loosely held. This always mystified me, since when I was their age, I had a very serious relationship with my own opinions. I’d stay late at the office long after my colleagues had trickled home to commitments of some kind. Not children and families, usually, since they were mostly my age and younger. But they’d go back to live-in boyfriends and girlfriends, Pilates classes, cats, potted plants. Prerecorded television programs, Spanish conversation groups, tango lessons. I could have had any or all—or most—of those things, I suppose, but my major character flaw is an inability to invest in lost causes. When you are the lost cause, this makes for a lonely life.

  At home, I’d usually find a stream of voice-mail messages from my mother. They were often about antioxidants, with which she was obsessed. They’ve been proven to do something against Alzheimer’s, I guess, and certain kinds of cancers, but there’s no suggestion that they do anything about Huntington’s. Still, my mother’s life was made possible by a forced, carefully calibrated optimism—the kind that finds something to appreciate when things go badly slower than expected. She’d send me packages full of dark chocolates, fancy dried blueberries, instructions to go out and immediately purchase a specific genre of spinach—along with newspaper clipping
s about people pulling through adversity. My mother wasn’t loopy or delusional; she didn’t buy into crystals or fortune-telling or anything like that. She got through my father’s death with the pragmatism of a World War I amputee nurse. But she believed that lives can be better or worse, and that deaths can be better or worse, and that much of how you live and die is actually up to you—which I, of course, found a terrifying concept.

  After we placed my father in the nursing home, my mother moved to Sedona, Arizona, to find out if there was anything left for her in this life. She took up jewelry-making. She found a profoundly tan boyfriend. She got some sleep. She thought of it as her brief entr’acte between tragedies, I suspect. I know she always planned to come back for me when the time came. I did not relish the thought of summoning her back from her barely begun new life to ask her for another two decades of spoon-feeding. The poor woman deserved better.

  I didn’t have many friends. I could chalk it up to general orneriness, and surely it was partly that. But there was also this: it’s isolating when absolutely no one will discuss the thing at the very center of your life. My father went completely unmentioned for years by the people whom I considered my friends, and even his death, when it finally came, was substantially ignored. My own genetic status was assiduously avoided in conversation, as though it was a horrible facial deformity and everyone I knew was a stranger. People who haven’t lost anyone think that to speak of grief is to summon it. People who haven’t grappled with their own mortality think that to speak of death is to make it real. And in my teens and twenties, most of my friends had never buried anybody who wasn’t a grandparent or a dog. So nobody asked after my father. Nobody asked after me. And sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.

  My father must have felt his share of isolation and resentment, too, in the years preceding his final declension. Maybe that was what made him come to view Aleksandr Bezetov as some kind of kindred spirit. Or maybe it was something else—the idea of youth trumping obsolescence or intellect trumping entropy. My father was a man who loved his own mind and knew that one day he would lose it. That’s what made Aleksandr his hero, perhaps—here was a person whose neurological circuitry was so luminescent that it shone through seven time zones and a Cold War. Here was a person who knew the value of his own intelligence, and the shortness of its reign.

  One winter night when I was seven, I had a fever so high that the shadows became animals against the wall and the room spun slowly around me. It was snowing, and the snowflakes caught the streetlight and turned red, and I was filled with the vague generalized anxiety of being sick and a child. I went downstairs, and my father was sitting with a glass of bourbon. Through the television static, two dark, angry-looking men were playing chess at a table.

  “Dad?” I said, shivering uncontrollably through my fever.

  “Look at this,” he said. “Come here.”

  I sat on his lap, sweating into his lapel with my fevered head. The men on the television were hard to make out through the snow—they were gray and amorphous, crackling with every move, the ghosted relics of another universe.

  “Where are they?”

  “Russia. That’s very far away. It’s a huge country east of Europe.”

  “They look far away,” I said. “Is it cold there?” The room the men were in had a cold light to it. There was a silence between them that felt full and fierce, as though if you listened carefully enough, you might hear in the static silent taunts and dares and ruminations. The younger of the two men scratched his chin and sacrificed a bishop.

  “Look at him,” my father said, putting his finger right on the television, in violation of a rule of my mother’s. “He’s twenty-two, you know.” The man he touched had a face that was gray and gaunt but also tautly intelligent. He touched the pieces with a furious energy that bordered on recklessness. His opponent handled his pieces carefully, nearly caressing the bishops before moving them, letting his fingers linger for a split second on the move he had just made. The young man scratched his head vigorously, moved his queen with an offhand impatience. “He’s going to be the youngest chess champion in the world,” my father said wonderingly.

  The muted men stared at each other, and we stared at them. My father stroked my forehead and I felt tired, but I wanted to stay awake so I could remember whatever it was my father wanted me to remember. Time seemed to collapse. The only sound was the crackle of the static, and we watched for what must have become a very long time—until the final moves were made, the tipping point beyond which all was inevitable. I’ve since studied this game: how Aleksandr sacrificed his black rook, which was consumed almost greedily by Rusayev’s white knight, and then swung his other rook—which had been lurking idly on the other end of the board, huddled like a creature, forgotten by the audience and, presumably, the old man—down to the end of the board. At the time, all I knew was that my father was rapt. He leaned forward slightly. In the monochromatic Eastern light, Aleksandr cracked his knuckles. His opponent’s king lay sideways on the black tiling, dead. Maybe there was the faintest rustle of a gasp in the audience. Or maybe I’m imagining that part. But I know what my father said afterward, even though I still wonder whether he was telling me the truth.

  “You see,” he said, turning off the television with a flash that made bright spots in my eyes. The red snowflakes kept coming, slower and slower. My father spoke so quietly that I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to himself or to me. “You see,” he said, and I shivered again. “You can do a lot before you are thirty.”

  3

  ALEKSANDR

  Leningrad, 1980

  The first time Aleksandr went to the café, Ivan and Nikolai didn’t recognize him. Aleksandr had grown thinner that winter, since his mother wasn’t around to make unpalatable food endurable, and he was paler. The relentless cold had given him a wild-eyed look of defeat. It made him move awkwardly, too—with all his limbs straight, his shoulders making tense bunches at his ears, every muscle trying to burrow farther into his body. He didn’t look like himself anymore, and he hadn’t looked like much to start with. So when he showed up at the Saigon on a snowy black night in January, Ivan and Nikolai stared at him with bald suspicion. They were sitting at a table in a corner with tiny clear shots of vodka before them and an enormous bricklike ashtray between them. The curtains around their table were a dark green that had been dulled by proximity to smoke and conspiracy. Ivan was cradling a cigarette between his two long fingers and talking; Nikolai was nodding vigorously and taking notes. Aleksandr stood over them, not wanting to interrupt.

  “What do you want?” said Ivan. He was wearing a frayed Sex Pistols T-shirt and the same silver medallion he’d had at the centenary. Aleksandr pulled off his hat and let some snow fall onto the table.

  “Goddammit,” said Nikolai. A clump of snow disturbed his vodka. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m sure he’s just about to tell us,” said Ivan.

  Aleksandr looked around the smoky café. It was labyrinthine and dark, though slanting red light illuminated corners here and there—a man and a woman without rings talked with their faces very close together; several groups of young men spoke in rustles and spurts and eruptions of laughter; a man in a wheelchair sat alone, rocking back and forth, the edge of his cigarette a rotating satellite as he gestured. Aleksandr closed his eyes for a moment and let the voices make a mosaic around him. They were relaxed, he decided, in their joking or raving or romance. They sounded like people talking in a bedroom, not a public place. Later, he realized that what he was hearing was the sound of people not lying.

  “Sir?” said Ivan sternly. “Have you lost your way?”

  “I’m Aleksandr Kimovich,” said Aleksandr. “We met at the centenary. You were taking notes. I just moved here.”

  “What?” said Nikolai. His disastrously splotched face was carved into a parody of concern; he looked like a social realist painting, thought Aleksandr—The Insolence of the Youthful Alarm and Wo
rry!

  “You gave me this address,” said Aleksandr, feeling immediately stupid. “You wrote it down for me and said to stop by.”

  “When was this?” said Nikolai. The snow in his vodka was starting to melt. Aleksandr had a sinking feeling and remembered a time in grade school when he’d been passed a note to meet one of the girls under the pine tree at noon, and he went and waited and didn’t understand.

  “I remember,” said Ivan. He flecked ash into the tray. “You’re the chess prodigy, right?”

  Aleksandr turned his face to the side. “I’m just at the academy.”

  “I read about you some,” Ivan said. “You’ve been doing well.”

  “Thank you,” said Aleksandr, then didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t want it to seem as though he had come only to be congratulated on his success.

  “Please, please, sit down,” said Ivan. “Join us. Nikolai Sergeyevich, would you be so kind as to order the young man some vodka?” Nikolai gave Aleksandr a long, appraising look and disappeared into the smoky hallway, leering mildly at a few young women at the next table on his way out. “So. Aleksandr Kimovich. You’re liking the city so far?” Ivan smiled as though he were a Soviet ambassador trying to win over the dictator of a third-world socialist state.

  “It’s very nice,” said Aleksandr.

  At this, Ivan laughed. When he sucked his cigarette, his face turned to glinting angles and sharp edges. He raised his eyebrow. “Your apartment gives you no trouble?”

  “No,” said Aleksandr, although he sometimes wished it did. He sometimes wished that the steward or one of the other tenants would burst into his damp room, with its flickering and tenuous light, to see what he was doing. The winter had been so lonely that the encroachment of anybody, for any reason, would have been welcome.