I had just about stopped looking when I found Elizabeta’s store, above which she claimed to live. It was hidden in plain sight amid houses with Russian flags snapping from the windows, pools of standing water congealing in front yards, men with cigarettes sitting wordlessly on front stoops. At the end of the street, a coterie of young men were jumping their bikes off a low concrete ledge, and their periodic shouts made the whole neighborhood seem like the innocent bystander to some sort of crime.
Elizabeta’s door, once I found it, was implausibly skinny. I knocked, and in the lengthy silence that followed, I wondered whether I would have to endure the indignity of walking in sideways. Muffled sighs began to issue from behind the door. Getting up seemed to require an enormous effort from Elizabeta, and I once again felt a crashing suspicion that this meeting was, on the whole, not a good idea. I heard a fierce cough that sounded as if she was trying to expel something that her body was not willing to part with. But instead of a withered babushka, with a worried face and a mouth collapsing where teeth used to be, the woman who opened the door looked healthy enough. She was pretty in a matter-of-fact way, with bright eyes and good bone structure—she had the kind of beauty that endures reasonably well, since it’s not overdoing it—and she wore makeup that was subtle but that you weren’t supposed to miss. She was dressed all in black, though her expression wasn’t mournful. There was something mocking right around her mouth, I noticed, a squiggly near-eruption of smiling. I recognized it because my own face does the same thing sometimes—mangles itself most unattractively when I’m most trying to look serious, if something strikes me as funny or strange or stupid.
“Ah,” she said. “You are Irina. The girl who is not a journalist.”
“Yes.” I couldn’t remember the last time somebody had called me a girl—anyone who was inclined to do so in the States was probably too afraid of getting sued. Even Lars, who you’d think would be a likely candidate, never called me a girl—convinced, as he was, of my unseemly old age and overly chaste dealings with men.
“Come in, then,” she said. “If you keep standing out there looking so hopelessly American, you’re liable to get sexually assaulted.”
She led me through the store. It was cramped and dusty and papered almost wall-to-wall with Soviet-era propaganda; in a poster above the cash register, athletic farmers in a bright green field worked underneath a banner proclaiming YOU ARE THE MASTERS OF THE NEW LIFE! I followed Elizabeta up a claustrophobic back staircase to her apartment. Inside, the living room was clean and almost bare, with a few black-framed photographs on the walls and shelves neatly arranged with books organized according to color. The greens swept along one corner, the blues faded to blacks along another. A rickety rocking chair sat at the center of the room, moving just enough to look inhabited by a particularly undernourished ghost. A birdcage was hanging in the back corner of the room with a small jewel-colored bird looking out through its ribs.
“Are you going to want tea or something?” she said, looking me up and down with some suspicion.
I nodded. I was relieved by the extent of her English; the ability to communicate scorn should be the true test of fluency in any language.
She swung the door of the living room open into a yellow kitchen, where I could just glimpse a hissing gas stove, purple bouquets on ragged wallpaper, a few dull photographs taped to a small nonmagnetic refrigerator. I waited. The living room smelled like dust and artificial cinnamon—the kind that comes from candles, not from cooking. The little green bird ruffled its feathers huffily, and I got up to look at it. Its eye was stern and mottled like igneous rock.
“That’s Fyodor,” said Elizabeta, coming back into the living room with a tray.
Fyodor blinked at me. “He’s very nice.”
“Not really,” she said. “And he sure is taking his time to die. He’s outlived many of my better human companions.”
She put down tea and some dusty-looking biscuits and then sat down in the creaking rocking chair. I sat on the sofa, which was threadbare and swirled with garishly ugly fabric roses. On the wall across from me was tacked a dark-toned portrait of a solemn, well-dressed woman.
“Do you have a pet?” said Elizabeta, her chair making silvery clacks against the wood floor. I knew then that I must seem more pitiful than I’d realized, to have elicited a level of small talk this tragic so early in our acquaintance. “They are quite a commitment.”
“I don’t really do commitments,” I said, sounding childish even to myself. I took a bite of biscuit to avoid saying anything else. It exploded in my mouth like a sandstorm. I put the biscuit back down and folded my napkin over the edge of my plate.
“Sorry,” she said, looking at my neglected pastry and not sounding too terribly broken up. “I am not domestic, you’ll notice.”
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” I said, sipping my tea.
Elizabeta shrugged. “Like you, I do not really have commitments. Just the damn bird.” She dunked a cube of biscuit into her tea, then flung it at Fyodor, who gobbled it greedily. “At least he likes my cooking.” The bird bobbed its head mildly, as if in half-ironic agreement.
“So,” I said, suddenly feeling the awkward absurdity of flying across the world to sit and make small talk in a Russian living room with an old woman and her pugilistic pet bird. “You said you didn’t work for Aleksandr Bezetov, exactly.”
She gave me a wry look. “Not exactly, no.”
“So how do you know him?”
“I don’t, really. We lived in the same building, back in the day.” Her voice, which had been relatively strong throughout the conversation, was starting to sound tangled by vines. “Excuse me,” she said, and disappeared into a fit of coughing so long and intense that I looked away. Her thin shoulders shuddered brutally. Evil tearing noises issued from her chest. Her coughing became wild and inconsolable, a howl of some permanent, universal grief. When she recovered slightly, there were small clots of blood in her handkerchief.
“Are you okay?” I said, even though she was clearly not okay. I’m intimately familiar with the irrelevancies generated by extreme distress—the platitudes of consolation, the clichés of kindness. I was annoyed at myself for having nothing better to say.
“Fine,” she croaked.
“Is it—are you—I mean,” I said, deploying in one go my whole personal arsenal of halting idiocies. I experienced a flash of sympathy for Jonathan, for my mother, for the doctors, for everyone who had tried with me, and failed, and endured the exacting judgment of my disappointed, dying gaze.
“It’s not tuberculosis,” she said. There was a dewy thread of blood hanging from her mouth, but I didn’t know her well enough to say so. “It’s not contagious. It’s emphysema. Damn cigarettes.”
“Should you—should we—go to the doctor?” I said, gesturing to the blood-flecked handkerchief.
“Not yet. They don’t do anything about the blood. I’ll go when I can’t breathe at all. It’s better now.” My face must have suggested some pale horror, because she said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
I’ve spent enough time in hospitals to know that this is generally never true, but I appreciated the sentiment.
“What were we on?” she said.
“Bezetov.”
“Ah. Bezetov. Right.” Her voice seemed to fully emerge from its cloud of coughing—wry, feathery, nearly unscathed. “Nice young man. As I recall. What’s your interest in him?”
“Well,” I said carefully. “I’m trying to get a meeting with him.” It seemed inappropriate to bring up now, I thought—it was like visiting your dear old grandmother for tea only to ask her probing questions about the will.
“Trust me, friend. If it were so easy to get a meeting with Aleksandr.” She stopped talking, and I tried to figure out if the midsentence halt was an issue of translation. “Why do you want this meeting, exactly?”
“My father admired him, and they’d had some kind of correspondence,” I said stupidly. �
�Actually, my father tried to have a correspondence. Bezetov didn’t write back. You did.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”
I produced the letter and handed it to Elizabeta. She stared at it for a few moments.
“That’s you, right?” I said. “That’s your signature?”
“Yes. God, I had terrible handwriting. But I don’t remember writing it. Or reading it. Sorry.”
I looked down.
“What do you want him to say to you?” said Elizabeta, handing me back the letter.
“I have this—diagnosis, and I like chess,” I said. Elizabeta’s face registered no understanding. She blinked, rustled in her black layers, and waited for me to start making sense. “I couldn’t stay home,” I concluded.
“So you came to Russia to chase a dissident through the snow? You picked a weird vacation. He’s surrounded by security all the time. You understand the situation, don’t you?”
“Sort of,” I muttered. I felt violently foolish, an idiot American tearing a destructive path through a rain forest or a Graham Greene novel.
She squinted at me. “You know he’s running for president?”
“Oh yes, I know that,” I said. “Of course I know that. You must be pleased for him.” I’d been reading this in bits and pieces all year—usually in colorful text boxes at the bottom of the international sections of newsmagazines, headlined by self-satisfied wordplay. “State Strategy: A Chess Genius Turns His Mind to Politics,” they read, or “Check Your King: Former Chess Champion Takes on Putin.” It had occurred to me—somewhere between crumpling my life into plastic bags and getting my visa stamped, between leaving my lover and losing him—that this presidential campaign might create challenges for me, and that meeting a bewildered young woman, flailing in every sense of the word, might not be Aleksandr Bezetov’s absolute highest priority. But I’d chosen to mostly ignore this, like many of the more inconvenient facts of my life.
“Not so completely pleased, maybe,” said Elizabeta, her mouth becoming a curt little comma. “He can’t win, and it makes a lot of important people want to kill him. A lot of people who know how to do it with relative discretion. Poisons, you know, or plane crashes. Putin has basically put it on the government’s agenda for the year. Aleksandr never flies Aeroflot, even internally. Especially internally. Although the more famous he gets in the West, the more uncomfortable it gets for the FSB to try it. That’s part of why he likes to talk to you reporters all the time.”
“I’m not a reporter.”
“Okay. Whatever you’re calling it. But the problem is, like I said, people are always trying to kill him. Not often women, it’s true, and never Americans yet, but one never does know.”
“I’m not trying to kill him,” I said, mildly offended.
“Even if you weren’t, I can’t help you. He won’t remember me. I don’t have his information.” Her voice was starting to break apart again, like a single note opening up into a four-part chord. I thought she was about to start coughing, but she didn’t.
“Oh,” I said, and I felt that that perhaps could be that. This had been an elaborate scheme, psychologically costly and financially disastrous, and it was most definitely too embarrassing to go home with that as my excuse. People would say, “Oh, you’re still alive? Weren’t you supposed to die dramatically in some vast eastern expanse, and weren’t you supposed to learn or find or do something first? I suppose you can have your job and boyfriend back, if you want, but I’m sure you understand that this is extremely awkward.” Going back would be like going too late to a party thrown by people you hardly know, then getting stuck sitting there with them, with the lights up, drinking warm beer and talking about mutual acquaintances who already left. It would be like showing up at the chilly apartment of some half-dead Russian woman, then browbeating her for information about a forgotten friend, then choking up and staring at the ceiling for some length of time when she didn’t have it.
But what was the alternative? Roam the bridges of St. Petersburg until the time seemed right to jump into the Neva? Engage in full-throttle stalking of this chessman, throw stones at his window, leave little notes in his mailbox, get myself shot by his burly unmerciful companions? All of that, too, seemed anticlimactic.
The sharp edges of my silence must have been starting to make Elizabeta uncomfortable, because she gestured at the grim-faced woman in the portrait. “You know the story of Solominiya?” she said. Solomoniya glowered disapprovingly at me from underneath heavy brows.
“No. Who was she?” Tortured to death, no doubt, for some point of principle or virginity. Female saints always got that way by choosing death over sex. Maybe I could get myself canonized, I thought. That would at least keep me busy.
“She was the wife of Vasily the Third.”
“Ah, of course.”
“She couldn’t produce an heir—that’s always the way with powerful people, isn’t it? The wrong women produce the heirs, and then somebody has to get banished or killed. Anyway, Solomoniya was banished to a convent so Vasily could take another wife. But lo and behold, nine months later, she bears a son.”
I raised my eyebrows, trying to look scandalized, although I am basically incapable of being scandalized. Elizabeta tossed another chunk of biscuit to the bird.
“Solomoniya fears for the life of the child and promptly declares him dead. Nobody knows what became of him. And there the matter rests until the excavations of 1934, when they dig up Solomoniya—and next to her body lies a tiny dummy baby.”
“So the baby lived.”
“He lived, and his line technically would have produced the rightful heir to all of Russia—not that that’s much to claim, and not that any modern person believes that anybody’s the rightful heir to anything.”
“So why do you keep her up there?”
“She doesn’t look happy to be there, does she?” said Elizabeta. Solomoniya’s scorn seemed to rain down on us, her dark eyes communicating all the mute, immobile rage of people denied, confined, disappeared.
“She doesn’t.”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’ve always been interested in how things could have gone differently. Moments when things might have gone one way and instead went another.”
I thought of my father’s letter and his concern with the moment when one realizes that though there are many ways things might be, there is only one way that they are—and that no matter what, one will have to stand it.
“Aren’t all moments like that, though?” I said.
“Some more than others, I have come to believe,” Elizabeta said lightly, before coughing again. When she came up for air this time, I let a respectful beat pass—a moment of mourning or solidarity—and then said, “What was Aleksandr like?”
“What was he like?”
“Well, you know. What did he do?”
“Oh, who knows? What does anybody do? He fiddled around with his game, I always supposed. He was into the samizdat thing. They published a journal that a handful of people read. Sometimes my friend and I—I lived with my girlfriend Sonya then—would sneak past his door and put our ears against it and listen. Sonya had all these theories about him; thought he was a secret sex maniac or a sort of idiot, or a serial killer, or KGB.” Elizabeta turned to Fyodor and puckered her lips at him, and I could tell she was trying to keep her face from doing something involuntary and revealing. I’ve had too much experience with facial sleights and emotional misdirection not to notice this type of thing when I see it. It occurred to me, briefly and casually, that Elizabeta and Aleksandr had been lovers.
“And what did you think?”
“I guess I just thought he was a very nice boy. No, not nice. Sort of interesting and confusing. I liked him.” Elizabeta’s face turned a marginally different color, and she looked up at Solomoniya, who stared back bleakly. “But our acquaintance was short-lived.”
“What did you do in those days?”
“I was a secretary,” she said, and looked away, an
d I was struck flatly across the face with the uncomfortable reality that Elizabeta had probably worked for the Party. She was so irreverent that it hadn’t yet occurred to me. But everybody, more or less, had been implicated—the smart people and the cynical ones, the listless survivors and the true believers. So she’d typed stuff for men with misguided economic notions. What did it matter? What did I understand about it? I noticed that Elizabeta still wasn’t looking at me.
She took a sip of tea. “Our friendship was short-lived, and then it was too late.”
“Too late?”
“I mean by then he was famous. This was a different time, remember. Being a secretary involves a great deal of massaging of the male ego, even in the offices of our great social utopia. I couldn’t do it when I wasn’t being paid to.”
“That’s a principled stance,” I said. It came out worse than I’d meant.
There was a horrid pause. “You must need to get back to your hostel,” Elizabeta said, standing up. I stood up, too, so as not to be left idling with an angry Russian woman dressed in black—even a weak, miserably coughing one—hovering above me. Elizabeta was small, but she was the type of person whom you didn’t want looking at you in a certain way.
“I’m sorry if I upset you,” I said. This was a phrase I learned from college boyfriends.
Elizabeta laughed, and this time her laugh sounded like buckling ice on an undiscovered planet. “I am not so easily upset. But listen.”
She disappeared into the kitchen and then returned with a yellow index card. She handed it to me. “This is the information of a man in St. Petersburg.” She’d written the name in an underconfident, overly careful Latin alphabet.
“Is this a friend of Aleksandr’s?”
“This is a man who has been trying to get in touch with Aleksandr. A man in your line of work, I think. Calling, calling, calling. Maybe by now he has managed to do it.”
I didn’t know what she meant by my “line of work.” Was he a fugitive non-tenure-track professor? A person who stumbled blindly through foreign countries and degenerative diseases as a career? I looked at the name. Nikolai Sergeyev, 132 Vasilievsky Ostrov, St. Petersburg.
A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel Page 13