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

by Jennifer Dubois

  Aleksandr took the first of his two shots. He didn’t usually drink Stoli, but all the state-produced vodka tasted the same. He wanted to tell the man to fuck off, though it would be a shame to give up his career when it was just starting to take off. Anyway, Aleksandr had never told anybody to fuck off. Politeness was his paralysis, and he would have to abandon it someday. But not, he thought, just yet. “Thank you,” he said.

  “I notice that you haven’t yet joined the Party.”

  Aleksandr rotated his shot glass between his fingers. He looked at the reflection of his thumb in the alcohol, lumpy and distorted. “No,” he said. “I guess I haven’t.”

  “An oversight due to youth, no doubt.” Petr Pavlovich, still smoking too loudly for comfort, smacked his lips in satisfaction at this pronouncement.

  Aleksandr said nothing, which was—along with chess—one of his great strengths in life.

  “You live in the kommunalka, am I correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Crowded there, I’d suppose. Plumbing issues, I’d imagine.”

  Aleksandr thought of the worms in the faucet. “Some.”

  “You’d probably like a private apartment, I’d think?”

  “I have my own room.”

  “That is indeed very fortunate,” said Petr Pavlovich grandly. “But surely you’d like a little more privacy? A little more space? You have, what? Eight meters? Nine?”

  Aleksandr thought of his room. He thought of its cramped dampness, the infrequent hissing of its atavistic radiator. He thought of his piles of chess magazines and how he was always sleeping on them by accident.

  “A young man like you,” said Petr Pavlovich, “you probably have a special woman in your life. You’re probably thinking about starting a family.”

  Aleksandr said nothing. If only the man knew how inappropriate this particular approach was.

  “Or maybe I’m getting it wrong,” said Petr Pavlovich. “Maybe not one special woman but several? Even so, more space would be nice. More privacy, undoubtedly. A nice little dacha out in the woods, maybe. A gorgeous view and wildflowers in the summer. A place to play chess with designated visitors. Holidays on the Volga. Sound nice?”

  Aleksandr embarked mournfully on his second shot of vodka.

  “They said you were quiet,” said Petr Pavlovich. “But you’re practically catatonic. I’ll make a note of it in your file.”

  “I’m quite content in my room.”

  “I highly doubt that. But even if you are, you know there’s a lot else we can do for you. Travel. Exit visas for vacations. You can shop at the Party stores. Better meat, maybe? You like food? You like women? You like anything?”

  Aleksandr thought of the mustard-yellow tins of stringy reserve beef at the state store; he thought of the bruised eggplants, rotting on the side that didn’t show through the packaging. He thought of the air of the kommunalka, stale with the smells of old cooking and feet wrapped in too many socks. Then he thought of a dacha in a shady woods during a cool summer; he thought of caviar and wine and fresh produce, all laid out on a table under a gently heaving tree. He thought of beautiful women who were the perfect inversions of Elizabeta—they’d be blond, where she was dark; they’d be fawning, where she was indifferent; they’d be generically interchangeable, where she was stubbornly singular.

  “You understand me, I think,” said Petr Pavlovich. “You’re a magnificent chess player. But you can be better. You can be a credit to the Party, and we can be a credit to you.”

  Aleksandr contemplated his empty shot glasses. “I don’t know that that’s the case.”

  “Listen,” said Petr Pavlovich abruptly, and all of a sudden Aleksandr could feel the man’s energy shift gears. “You should probably stop hanging around with that Ivan Dmietrivich.”

  Aleksandr put down his glass too loudly. “What?”

  “Another, sir.” Petr Pavlovich tapped the bar, and Aleksandr downed another shot. His eyes watered shamefully. The lozenges of light coming through the window looked fatalistic. Petr Pavlovich stood up.

  “Don’t be foolish, Aleksandr. Don’t get mixed up in all that.”

  Aleksandr stood up, too, shakily. He reached for his wallet, but Petr Pavlovich stopped him with a soft hand.

  “Please, Aleksandr Kimovich,” he said. “Think about what I’ve said. But the drink—accept it as a token of our hearty congratulations. It’s on us.”

  Twenty minutes later, Aleksandr stumbled to the Saigon, where the bartender eyed him skeptically but said nothing. As usual, the café was filled to the rafters with smoke and conspiracy. The man in the wheelchair had positioned himself near the doorway this time; patrons picked their careful way around him and scurried past his dark pronouncements. When Aleksandr walked past, he saw that the man’s hair was flecked sparsely with bits of bread. Nobody asked him to leave. It was an unjust world.

  When he saw Aleksandr, the man turned gray with excitement and leaned close, opening the black globe of his mouth. “Leonid Ilyich is here, oh, God, he’s here,” he shrieked, and Aleksandr tried hard not to stumble in surprise. He’d been expecting a whisper, some secret insane confidence, not a shriek, and the man’s shouting voice was unexpectedly shrill. It turned Aleksandr’s heart inside out in the way of ancient, irrational fears—the sight of things that crawl and skitter, the feel of a presence behind your neck.

  “What?” said Aleksandr. He tried elbowing past the man, who groped for Aleksandr’s hands and missed. Aleksandr wondered momentarily whether the man could still see.

  “Brezhnev. He’s right there.” The man gestured toward the depression in the wall where Ivan and Nikolai were sitting, their smoke unfurling into dust-colored fronds. “He’s here. I promise you that. He’s everywhere.”

  Aleksandr disentangled himself from the man’s searching hands, from his long fingers that fluttered through the air as though playing an enormous pipe organ, and scrambled away in revulsion. At their usual table, Nikolai and Ivan were sitting with an enormous stack of newspapers between them. Blue overheard lights caught their vodka and splashed marine onto the table. Nikolai was scratching into an enormous notebook and laughing, his legume face contorting into strange creases. He was wearing a new leather jacket. Aleksandr was not sure he’d ever seen Nikolai laugh.

  “That man,” said Nikolai, gesturing to the man in the wheelchair, who still sat shrieking at his invisible audience, “is clinically insane.”

  “He’s a prophet, maybe,” said Ivan. “Descended from Rasputin. What say you, Aleksandr? Do you believe that stuff in the east?”

  “Please,” said Nikolai. “Give the boy a break. He’s important now, you know.” He stubbed his Iskra into the ashtray. It curled like a giardia against the others.

  “In the great Soviet states,” said Ivan, “no man is more important than another. So what’s the story with you, Aleksandr? Aren’t you famous yet? Shouldn’t you be off knocking back shots with Party officials? Getting to know a better class of prostitute?”

  “Okay,” said Aleksandr. Fuck Andronov. Fuck, quite possibly, everybody. “I’ll leave, then.”

  “Stay, stay,” said Nikolai solicitously. “Ivan, you must be gentler with the boy.”

  “You’re getting to be a pretty big deal, yes?” said Ivan blithely, ruffling the newspapers. “We just saw something about you. Nikolai, didn’t we just see something? In Literaturnaya Gazeta, yes? Is that possible, Aleksandr?”

  “I don’t know,” said Aleksandr. He hadn’t meant to sound as miserable as he felt. He found himself putting his head on the table, letting his forehead absorb the cool of the wood. He imagined the tree that the wood came from—in a great forest on the Black Sea, maybe, its roots strangled by salt water, its pale green leaves shifting savagely in the wind. Maybe it came from the north. Maybe it was a small tree, demented by the lacerations of tundra gales, standing shriveled and bent against the odds. Aleksandr squinted and saw the bottles above the bar make a smear of watery gemstones.

 
; “Are you drunk?” said Nikolai. He turned to Ivan. “Is he drunk?”

  “That would be unprecedented. He’s clearly just lost his mind. Aleksandr, have you perhaps lost your mind?” In Ivan’s voice, Aleksandr noted a certain hapless tenderness, as though Ivan were an awkward father trying to handle a sickly baby. Aleksandr could hear Nikolai’s jowls stirring in curiosity.

  “I got expelled from the academy,” Alexandr whispered into the wood. He wanted to keep his face on the tabletop as long as he could. It was possible, he realized with horror, that he was crying.

  “I told you,” said Nikolai. He lowered his voice to a solemn baritone rasp. “I told you he was a bit unstable. I told you he didn’t warrant confidences.”

  “I’m fine,” said Aleksandr. “I am completely fine.” But his neck felt unbearably heavy, as though filled with sand or guilt. Had he been arrogant? He hadn’t thought so; he’d always been the one with an extended hand left out after his opponent had turned away in an odd swirl of disappointment and derision. But when he tried to think of going back to Okha—to live among his chickens and his sisters, to let Leningrad and chess become the ever fading memory of a dream or hallucination—he couldn’t quite stand it. He had to admit to himself that he’d liked the feeling of winning. He’d liked having something to be humble and gracious about.

  “I thought you didn’t like the academy,” said Ivan. “I thought you were bored by it.”

  Aleksandr dug his chin harder into the table. Above him, he could hear words mouthed and a head vigorously shaken. Finally, he felt an anonymous hand on his shoulder; from its fleshy coarseness, he figured that it had to be Nikolai’s.

  “I didn’t, really,” said Aleksandr. “I was bored.” The wood was cooler now; its surface seemed to provoke small eddies in the air, and he could feel himself falling into a pleasing emptiness. “I just don’t really know what I’m going to do now.”

  Another pause—filled with some sort of silent negotiation and punctuated by a guttural grunt from Nikolai—concluded with Ivan saying, “You’ll come and work for us, I suppose.”

  Aleksandr’s head filled back up, and he saw his life turn precariously on its axle and round a corner. Sprigs of sweat burst out on his skin, and he gulped hard at the redness consuming his throat. He was afraid to look up.

  “Nikolai, honestly,” said Ivan. “Please give this man your vodka.”

  Ivan and Nikolai, it turned out, wrote a monthly pamphlet, and they brought Aleksandr over to show it off to him. Ivan’s room was tiny, the floor covered wall-to-wall with imbricate books and papers and bits of trash. In certain corners, Aleksandr caught the faintly arctic smell of mold. A typewriter sat atop a stack of books in the center of the room. Above the television, Brigitte Bardot gazed knowingly out of a poster, her midsection creased from multiple moves. Ivan had been a lecturer at a university before he’d been fired for anti-Soviet agitation—“the dissidents are the only unemployed in the Soviet Union,” he said as he poured Aleksandr a tumbler of kvass. He’d only just moved into this apartment after five years of waiting for a propiska, and he was convinced that it wasn’t bugged yet. Ivan had an enormous number of books, though the quotas meant he had to buy five political tracts for every one Turgenev. They stood in great multicolored stacks, arranged as carefully as tables and chairs. A one-eyed tortoiseshell cat stood among them, assailing them with nuzzles and purrs.

  “That’s Natasha,” said Ivan, petting the cat with his toe. “My one true friend in this life.” He set down a plate of shashlik on a stack of old Sovetskaya Kultura and winked at the cat. Nikolai crouched on the carpet and busied himself with the shashlik, and Aleksandr did the same. It was odd to see Nikolai and Ivan outside the café—in broad daylight, squatting, smacking their lips, eating sausage—when he’d only ever known them at the café, haloed by smoke and illegal ideas. Above them, the typewriter loomed. It seemed like the chassis on which the entire apartment was holding itself up.

  “You do the pamphlet on the typewriter?” said Aleksandr.

  “Right,” said Ivan.

  “You stole that from the university?”

  “I bribed a customs official. The university has all the typewriters registered.”

  Aleksandr took a bite of shashlik, which was salty as blood, and looked around some more. There were fist-sized clumps of dust in the corners, and the glass that Aleksandr was drinking from, when he held it to the light, was pocked with remnants of milky drinks long gone.

  “And you type up the pamphlet here?” said Aleksandr.

  “That’s the idea,” said Ivan. “We get submissions from friends. Poetry, prose, accounting of arrests. The accounting of arrests is the most important part. No offense meant to the poets, of course. We type up the original and make carbon copies. You can only get about eight before the quality is too degraded to use. We do that a few more times until I’m out of ink or out of my mind. Each recipient is supposed to make a few more carbon copies and pass those along. With each iteration, a couple of people fall off the rails, but it gets respectably far that way.”

  “How often is this?”

  “Every three weeks or so.”

  Aleksandr looked at Nikolai, who was staring out the window and gumming his shashlik meditatively. He wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps he was pretending not to pay attention. He was still wearing the leather jacket, and Aleksandr wondered about that, fleetingly. It looked well-made, which meant foreign-made—Italian, perhaps—though that was impossible.

  “Can I see it?” said Aleksandr to Ivan.

  Ivan opened a drawer fast enough that Aleksandr knew he had been waiting to be asked. “Of course,” he said, producing a pamphlet. “Here.” When he leaned close, Aleksandr could smell the kvass—somehow acrid and dusty both—on his breath. Ivan flushed as he handed Aleksandr the journal. It was strange to see Ivan want something, and stranger still that the something should be Aleksandr’s approval.

  The cover was dull, with oddly small black font. It didn’t look like the kind of journal a person would idly pick up; there was no promise that anything of interest lay within. In fact, the cover seemed to suggest that the contents might include an essay on metaphysics, or a survey of current breakthroughs in agricultural technology. Aleksandr opened it anyway. The first page was an anonymous introduction, clearly written by Ivan. (“Friends,” it read. “We convene in these pages, once more, to take stock of our situation and ourselves.…”) Then there was an oblique poem that Aleksandr read three times and still didn’t understand, though it seemed to be dwelling on the subject of “capitulation” at some length. There was an essay about rereading Bulgakov for modern times. And then a grim report of arrests, detentions, searches around Leningrad in the past month. This was the longest section of the journal—pages and pages of dates and names and abuses, without comment, in tiny lettering. The section was called “A Partial History of Lost Causes,” which was also the name of the journal.

  “It’s incomplete,” said Ivan. “We don’t even try to get it complete. It’s just a sample, really. You get the general character of the month—what they were most interested in and what they got.”

  Aleksandr stared at the account. Here there were arrests for misuse of state machines (he thought of the ill-gotten typewriter lurking in the living room), and here there was a detention for “disseminating falsehood” (he thought of how the very line that accounted that detention might be considered officially false), and here there was an imprisonment for “malicious parasitism” (this meant unemployment, which Aleksandr was, by any measure, afflicted with), and here there was a midnight search on the grounds of conspiracy (he looked around at the contracting tendons of Ivan’s neck as he swallowed hard, the inflamed stare of Nikolai as he looked at everything except Aleksandr, and wondered how much he trusted them). He put the pamphlet down. He leaned toward Ivan. “I got approached by an official tonight,” he said. “They offered me a dacha.”

  Ivan nodded. “They want you to join.”
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  “Yes.”

  “You have a file.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you said no to them?”

  “Of course.”

  “There must be something very compelling about that building of yours.”

  “He told me not to hang around with you.”

  “Very sound advice.”

  “They know about this?”

  “It’s not a secret. Nothing is a secret. Maybe exactly who we are, what we’re about, that might be a secret. Who our contributors are and who all of our subscribers are—those are secrets, too. The details are a secret. But the fact is not. We are not a secret. Your involvement, quickly, will not be a secret. KGB has asked you a question, and here you will be giving an answer.”

  Aleksandr remembered the silken hands of Petr Pavlovich, he remembered the admonishment not to be foolish. Not bad advice, all things considered.

  “Even though we’re not a secret,” said Ivan, “you need to behave always as though we are. Crucially, you need not to be followed, because we don’t want to let go of our details. You and me and Nikolai here, we’re worthless bachelors, and who could care what happens to us.” Aleksandr could not decide whether this level of indifference was something to admire or disdain or fear.

  “But we have subscribers, we have contributors, with families,” said Ivan. “We need to minimize their chances of arrest. Thus, we need to be as discreet as possible, all the while remembering that we’re not kidding ourselves. Okay? Luckily, the KGB isn’t as artful as you might think. Sometimes there will literally be a white Volga driving slowly around the city, waiting for you at corners.” He took a swallow of kvass and grimaced slightly. “But sometimes it will be a bit subtler. The best you can do is zig and zag around the streets. Don’t take the same route habitually, and never start coming here on a routine. Find plausible reasons to be wherever you’re going—the culinary store, the footwear store. And if you think you’re being followed, bore them to death.”