But the knocking grew louder and more frantic and then he knew: he was fucked. It was KGB at the door, and they were coming to kill or bribe or break him, and any of the three would be easy to do.
But it wasn’t. It was Nikolai, hunched in the darkness like a creature.
“Let me in,” he choked. “For fuck’s sake, let me in.”
Aleksandr did, and Nikolai half fell into the room. He was shivering, though he was generally not the shivering type. Aleksandr backed away, and Nikolai staggered toward the bed, where he sat—crunching Aleksandr’s sheets underneath him, smearing dirty snow on the bed—and spent a moment breathing loudly. Aleksandr realized how much he did not want to ask Nikolai what was wrong.
“Well,” said Nikolai. “You might as well know that Ivan Dmietrivich is dead.”
“What?” Aleksandr found he couldn’t hear himself. “What?”
“He was hit by a bus.” Nikolai was still breathing far too loudly, with great desperate wheezes that seemed to arise from some horrible oxygen deprivation—as though he’d been held underneath the Neva far too long, or been cast out of his spaceship without a helmet and had banged on the window, clutched at the door, and turned pale and stricken as his lungs collapsed, his ears rang, his body understood. “Honestly,” he said. “Can’t you offer a man a drink?”
“What are you talking about? A bus? What are you saying?”
“A bus. You know? The large public transportation vehicles? Are you familiar? Misha is in the hospital.”
“They were both hit by a bus? The same bus?”
“They were drunk. It was late. You know how much they drink.”
“This just happened?”
“Yes, it just happened.” Nikolai’s breathing was becoming more hysterical than seemed appropriate for his heft. “I don’t usually come visit you in the middle of the night, do I? I don’t usually find myself unable to sleep without a good-night from you, do I? Why would I come here now if it hadn’t just happened?”
“A bus? At night?”
Nikolai glared at Aleksandr. “It was a night bus.”
“What happened to the driver?”
“What?”
“Was he arrested? Where he is now? How did he manage to hit two people with his fucking bus?”
Nikolai blinked at Aleksandr. “It was late. They were very drunk, as I said. It wasn’t really a discussion.”
He was quiet, and then asked Aleksandr for water so wearily and pleadingly that Aleksandr found himself walking down the hall with one of his cleaner chipped cups, filling it with the water that always tasted vaguely of blood and metal and sardines, and walking back and offering it to Nikolai. They sat on Aleksandr’s bed, on the sheets that would never get warm again tonight after being turned out so long in the midnight chill. Then Nikolai began to talk.
They were coming out of the Saigon, Nikolai said, when it happened. Misha had been thrown twenty feet and was deposited on a dead bush, its frozen branches breaking underneath him and splintering his face. Ivan had been killed almost instantly, his legs and most of his internal organs cut underneath the front wheels of the bus. Aleksandr’s imagination hovered over the word “almost.” He couldn’t stand it. It made his own internal organs rebel and collapse, shrink away from the light, when he thought of it.
Misha would live. Nothing could kill Misha, Nikolai said, and attempted a laugh that sounded like a cough. Aleksandr didn’t laugh. He stared at a tea stain on the floor. Some remote part of his head wondered where it had come from. Had it been there always? Had Elizabeta noticed it? Had he done it himself one of these recent nights, after he’d come back from Ivan’s half drunk and half blind in the dark, too lonely to notice or care where his teacups landed when he scattered them? Next to him, Nikolai seemed to fade. He slumped down. His breathing became slow and shallow. Aleksandr thought he might be falling asleep.
He could almost see it. The two of them stepping into the street, the biting gray slush kicking up into their ankles, the bus a dull yellow ambush. There was something too terrible about dying in a busy street with snow that was unclean and overused. Ivan deserved to die in great shoals of clean white snow, drifted and ridged like salt from an evaporated sea. He deserved better than to die in the exhaust from inefficient vehicles, in an alley between stalls that sold bloodied fish and rotten potatoes during the day. But that was how it had been, Nikolai said, and Aleksandr’s imagination had never been such a liability as it was the night after Ivan died: he could see him, jaw unhinged, his face a melting mask, his expression otherworldly and, for the first time in Aleksandr’s imagination, afraid.
When Aleksandr woke up, Nikolai was gone. He’d left Misha’s hospital room number on a slip of paper, and his socks balled up under the bed. When Aleksandr went to pick them up, he found them crusted with blood. He dropped them in revulsion. Then he threw them out the fortochka.
Walking through Leningrad, he skirted the city’s center, cutting south on Ligovsky, giving wide berth to the Saigon. He knew that there was nothing there now; in the night, the upset stalls had been righted, the blood had been mopped up by industrial state mops, the bus had been towed away to some broken-down automobile ossuary on the outside of the city. But he could still imagine it every time he blinked: the screech of rusted brakes, maybe, the thick thud of a person falling too hard into snow.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t believe it. He could believe it, the way he could believe that there was no life after death, that the world would someday hurtle itself into the sun, that he might always live alone. It was the kind of information that, once believed, left one with almost nothing to do but lie down on the ground and believe it some more.
The hospital was a stocky flint-gray building with bars on the windows. At the reception desk sat a woman with faintly red hair and skin stretched too far over her bones, as though her skull had continued growing for several years after her face had stopped.
“Yes?” she said, not looking up.
“I’m here to visit Mikhail Andreyevich. He’s here. In room 219.”
“If you know where he is, then go,” said the receptionist. “What are you asking me for?”
Aleksandr walked down the hallway. The walls and floor were the color of a femur. Every few doorknobs were bunched with plastic flowers in leering yellows and oranges, stiff-limbed stuffed animals, tiny Soviet flags. Aleksandr thought about the people behind the unornamented doors.
When Aleksandr entered the room, he was relieved to see that Misha seemed to be asleep. He lay with his eyes closed, his face a tessellation of gashes of varying severity. Aleksandr walked toward him and leaned over to look more closely. A particularly deep laceration threaded just underneath Misha’s eye, and it was easy to tell how close he’d come to losing it. Aleksandr touched Misha’s hand lightly. His skin was the consistency of mosquito paper and the color of the unwashed hospital sheets. There was something perversely comical in Misha’s survival. Misha had, after all, already been halfway out the door—part skeleton, part mad, mostly ghost.
“Get better, Misha,” Aleksandr said. “Good luck.” He cupped Misha’s forehead briefly.
Misha’s eyes snapped open. Open, they occupied an unnerving amount of his face, as though he were a nocturnal creature adapted to looking only into darkness. “Who the fuck are you?” he said.
Aleksandr immediately removed his hand from Misha’s head and pretended to be righting the sheets, which had curled out from their corners. Bits of foam erupted from the exposed mattress, stained with substances in dark and ominous colors. “I’m Aleksandr Kimovich,” he said. “I’m a friend of Ivan’s. I was a friend of Ivan’s.”
“Are you with Nikolai Sergeyevich?”
“Nikolai’s not here right now.”
“No.” Misha sat up. He perched himself on his elbows. Through Misha’s skin, Aleksandr could see where his elbow bone bisected. He could see his jutting breastplate creating a second collarbone across his chest. “I’m saying, are you fucking
with Nikolai Sergeyevich?”
“We’ve met. At the Saigon, remember, and at Stalin’s centennial.” Misha only blinked, his enormous bat eyes shining and reproachful. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aleksandr said finally.
“I remember you.” Misha closed his eyes. Aleksandr felt much calmer around Misha when he had his eyes closed. “You’re not very memorable. But Ivan trusted you. He told me that when he came to see me a few times at my mother’s. I don’t know why, personally. You seem sort of slow to me.”
“I’m not the one handcuffed to a bed,” said Aleksandr. He stopped tugging at the sheets and let one corner come untucked. He hoped Misha would roll onto it in the night and feel the cold of the recycled mattress against his skin.
“But Ivan trusted you,” said Misha. “Come here.”
“Where?”
“Closer.”
“I’d rather not.” Misha smelled like formaldehyde and lime cleansers.
Misha’s eyes fluttered open again, and Aleksandr could see the shivering capillaries in his eyeballs. He could see the faint gesture of a heartbeat in his wrist. “Aleksandr,” said Misha almost imperceptibly. “It was Nikolai.”
“What?” said Aleksandr, although something in the back of his head was starting to shudder and grind to life. It was a feeling he knew from chess: it came in the moment when he knew what he was going to do next, before he completely knew why.
“He was behind us. He signaled the bus.” Misha’s voice was almost nothing, the sound of a skull slipping into snow.
“How? How did he signal?” Aleksandr spoke without moving his lips.
Misha’s eyes looked wet and unseeing, orbs of volcanic rock stuck awkwardly into his head. He stared at Aleksandr hard. Then he jerked his head.
“That,” said Misha, “is how he signaled.”
“If you saw him,” said Aleksandr, trying to keep his voice even. “If you saw him signal, then why didn’t you shout?”
“I didn’t know it was a signal until afterward. He jerked his head. I saw him jerk his head.”
“Okay,” said Aleksandr. “Okay.” He blinked and saw Ivan and Nikolai arguing over the Lithuanian. He blinked and saw Nikolai’s leather jacket. He blinked and saw Nikolai the night before, his bloodied socks, his ragged breaths. He blinked and saw Nikolai’s notebooks.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Aleksandr hissed at Misha.
Misha looked at him witheringly. “I’m sure I don’t know. I’d think your little advice column, or whatever, is finished. You’ve got bigger problems now, tovarish. I’m sure the smart thing to do is to lay low and behave yourself.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Me?” Misha snorted. “I’m obviously supposed to be dead. I was thinking of blowing up the Kremlin. I was thinking of assassinating Brezhnev. You hear that?” He was shouting. “I’m going to fucking kill Brezhnev. I’m going to have a day of it. I’m going to get myself killed, and I’m going to defile the corpse of Lenin first. Fuck them all! Fuck them all! You hear me?” Aleksandr could hear the rustling and clucking of a phalanx of nurses on the march down the hall, armed with sedatives for Misha.
“You’re going to get yourself put in Matrosskaya Tishina,” said Aleksandr. “You know that?”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Misha. “Try to be less stupid, okay? Just remember about Nikolai.” Then he was once more shouting, thrashing the sheets, knocking over his bedside water, and hurling profanities. The dismissive red-haired nurse from the reception desk entered and stuck Misha in the neck with an epic needle. His eyes froze in place, and his withered hands dropped to the sheets.
“The pain medication has made him crazy, perhaps,” said Aleksandr.
The nurse’s mouth twisted, and she looked at Aleksandr a little longer than people normally did.
“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps.”
The first thing Aleksandr did was break in to Ivan’s apartment. It was easy to do: he slid his internal passport between the cheap lock and the shoddy doorframe, and the door popped open. The cat was quivering and belligerent and threw herself against Aleksandr’s legs with homicidal rage. He hadn’t thought to bring anything for her, so he tossed out some linty bread crumbs from his pocket and hoped she wouldn’t notice. He pulled the light string.
The apartment, never orderly, had exploded. The mattress had been overturned. The dresser bulged with open drawers and overflowing clothes. Papers were two inches deep on the floor, and they caught at Aleksandr’s ankles as he walked through the room. The poster of Brigitte Bardot was, ludicrously, gone.
Okay, thought Aleksandr. I see.
There were some drafts for the upcoming issue underneath the couch, and he wrestled them out from puffs of dust and loose coins and a smear of something sticky and indecipherable. On the coffee table, Ivan’s ancient Leica was decapitated, all its film exposed to the unforgiving light. Underneath Ivan’s best shirt, Aleksandr found some photographs—a woman, a little boy, an old couple—but he didn’t recognize anyone. He thought again of Ivan’s regrets and wondered if any of these people counted among them. He realized that he’d never heard Ivan speak of anything besides the next or last issue, the depravity of the government, the idiocy of Aleksandr and Nikolai, the torment of Misha, or the needs of the cat. Aleksandr wheeled back through his memories of Ivan, but there was nothing else—no childhood, no loves, no personal disasters. No explanation for living alone with a cat. No moment of revelation that led him to risk his life over and over, to antagonize a system that would, realistically, remain in power forever. And that was all it had been—antagonism. They’d been an irritant, perhaps, on a good day, like a monkey pestering an elephant that can, at any time, snap the monkey underfoot and crunch its head flat. For the elephant, it’s only a question of when. It’s only a question of summoning the energy.
It was entirely possible that Misha was right.
There wasn’t much left in Ivan’s apartment to find. The KGB had taken a lot, more than they could possibly find useful. They seemed to have taken dirty socks and irrelevant receipt paper. They’d taken bits of coinage. The typewriter with the carbon paper was, of course, gone. Most notably, they had taken the books.
The cat whimpered, and Aleksandr picked her up. He could feel the whirring of her little chest and wondered what mechanism it was that kept it running.
“I guess you’re mine now, huh?” said Aleksandr.
Natasha nipped him on the thumb.
He borrowed an ancient typewriter from one of the academic subscribers. He got more carbon paper. He spent four days typing, until his thumbs and elbows pulsed in protest. He was good at sitting still and engaging in slight repetitive motions; chess had prepared him for this, if nothing else. He stapled them all together in the oncoming white light of dawn, as his last candle was melting down into a waxy pool. He left Natasha with some desiccated mushrooms on the floor.
He took the train up to Moscow alone, standing up sideways in the hallway, since all the cars were full, and watching the engineer tap the wheels for metal fatigue before the train pulled away from the station. Aleksandr wore a coat with another coat underneath. Under the second coat, he held twenty-five copies of the final issue of A Partial History of Lost Causes.
The metro in Moscow was choked with security. Men sat with their hats off, looking blankly through the windows into the whirring underground darkness. Underneath the subterranean chandeliers and light-drenched alcoves, everybody was wearing black.
Two streets from Red Square, he could hear the brass horns, too jaunty and bombastic for the occasion. He knew he couldn’t get close. There would be scores of gray-coated, grim-faced soldiers, red flags slung over their shoulders, their knees snapping in time together. They would be thronging toward the Kremlin, Brezhnev’s coffin squatting darkly in the center. In the Kremlin there would be heads of state, Arab nationalistic leaders in keffiyehs, African dictators in traditional garb. They would all bend their heads together, a
ssuming expressions of reflection and loss.
Outside the moving stand of soldiers, there were mourners: nearest the center were the ones who’d been recruited and paid; nearer the outside were coils of genuine grievers, and curious passersby, and people who’d brought their children to see history, and people who just didn’t want to go home yet. Some of them looked positively gleeful—a small vial of something alcoholic was passed from hand to hand, and an old man spat gray expectorate on the ground every time Brezhnev’s name was mentioned. One woman wept openly, her face unfolding, rubbing her brown sleeves across the delicate skin under her eyes until her cheeks became inflamed, and saying, “He was a good man. He was a good man. What will become of us now?”
When the crowds parted from time to time, Aleksandr could catch snatches of the ceremony as it progressed: the gray-and-red-clad soldiers, the brass band, the gold-limned black coffin, which, from a distance, looked like a transatlantic steamship on a pitching sea. There was something callous in its ostentation, its forbidding elegance. Something so palatial didn’t seem to want to mourn as much as parade.
Aleksandr could feel the sheets pressed to his chest, absorbing the shock of his rapid heartbeats. He wasn’t sure how he should proceed. Ivan had never done something this stupid—he’d always operated with the utmost discretion, with careful and obsessively confirmed lists made of the initial recipients. He let the pamphlets thread out of their own accord after the initial copies were distributed; other people copied them in twos and fives and sevens and passed them on to trusted friends. It was a diffusion of risk that way, he’d always said. Still, risks didn’t always get you killed. And precautions couldn’t always keep you safe.
A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel Page 16