Aleksandr stepped back from the crowd, letting the people become a seething mass of dark-colored coats that shivered and peered as one. The wind began to pick up, its icy fingers drumming against his spine and taking liberties with his pants. Dead leaves, the color of rust and flint, whipped along the ground. In the street skittered programs commemorating Brezhnev, his gloomy face gazing sternly from underneath his single monstrous eyebrow. Delicate plumes of snow materialized from nowhere and cast themselves through the air.
Aleksandr took out the papers. He waited. He could still hear the tinny clanging of the band, the thick thudding of feet stamping in unison against the cobblestones. The wind seized upon him with the aggression of a vengeful arctic ghost, and he felt himself let the papers fly. They whirled outward in four directions, spinning through the air like weather. They were beautiful as they caught on the wind—they looked like white long-winged birds, maybe, or shivering bridal veils. He knew that soon they would come back to earth to be muddied and ripped, tramped underfoot by men in heavy boots. But maybe a few people would be curious enough to pick them up.
He turned quickly to go, his two coats billowing out behind him and his lungs overwhelmed by the influx of air. It was descending into the particular kind of cold that belongs to a Russian late afternoon: the kind of cold that threatens, that intimidates, because it is going to get so much worse. And, at some distance, leaning against a streetlamp, was Nikolai.
Bits of snow were catching on sideways drafts to make eddies in the air. They were turning Nikolai’s hair white, Aleksandr would always remember, as though he were witnessing some supernatural shock. He was looking at Aleksandr. Aleksandr was almost sure of it. He stood looking until the watching people started to disperse, propelled by the harsh pings of the national anthem, and he was engulfed by the thickening snow and the gathering crowds.
Aleksandr didn’t find Nikolai again. But once he went looking, he started seeing him everywhere.
10
IRINA
St. Petersburg, 2006
And then the summer was over, and I did not know where it had gone. There were listless courses around the city, respectful and silent visits to the chilly long-abandoned houses of great writers, voracious reading of the chronically postponed Russian classics. I wrote scraps of pointless poems on the backs of napkins. I developed a taste for tea. I practiced making Russian statements about what had happened in the past, about what would happen in the future, about what might happen and what should happen. I learned to properly decline my nouns. Around me, the leaves paled and fell, leaving stark black branches that forked against the snow. It grew cold, a kind of cold that made me understand that I’d never understood cold before this—certainly not in those shallow Boston winters, mitigated by the churning Atlantic, uncomfortably brusque but leaving you with just enough composure to walk upright, to look around, to admire the way the seagulls seemed to shiver and how the tufts of snow on all the trees made the city beautiful and ornate.
The cold, that winter in Russia—it was striking in its absoluteness, its bracing singularity. It was an astronomical cold, otherworldly and menacing, and it left me bent, submissive, muttering curses to I don’t know who. But there was something I liked about it, too. There was some wisdom, it seemed, in coming to terms with the fact that there could be something beyond what felt like nothing. That there were realities outside of imagination.
The Neva marbleized and turned still. Through the frost, the moon grew three haloes. Attempts at communication—from my mother, from Claire—slowed and then staggered, like a relenting hemorrhage from a severed limb. They kept at it periodically—my in-box, when I bothered to check it at the Internet café, was peppered with pleas, rants, the odd attempt at normalcy, as though I could be tricked by feigned casualness into responding—though I didn’t answer. It was cruel. I know I was being cruel. But I didn’t have the energy not to be.
I felt myself growing passive and immobilized. The cold pinned me down; I could feel in my bones a fatigue, an oncoming frailty. I felt lucky for the chance I’d had to disappear from everyone else. I started to wonder if I hadn’t disappeared from myself a little, too.
I began writing to Jonathan, long-winded and inarticulate letters that I knew I’d never send. I talked to him about the beginning, about how the days after seeing him were always a little like heroin withdrawal, about the shaky, wrung-out feeling of having all the serotonin in your body explode and disappear at one burst. I said that he was a wholly singular occurrence in my life. I said that I wasn’t asking him to understand anything else, but I needed him to understand that. I said that he was the most implausible plot point in the fairly implausible narrative of my life. I said that we do not know ourselves, so how could we ever really know each other? I talked about biology and pair-bonding and pheromones. I talked about Rilke’s idea of love as the bordering of two great solitudes. I talked about the subject-object problem. I talked about the arbitrary mythology of romance, the post-Arthurian nonsense we still cling to, nationally and culturally. I talked about divorce rates. I talked about my mother’s metastatic grief. I talked about my own cellular, atavistic, visceral fear. I talked about suicide and how many Huntington’s patients commit suicide—usually once they’ve lost some mobility but before they’ve lost their minds. They wrestle themselves into their cars to breathe in carbon monoxide; they shoot themselves in the head if they live in a state where that is easy to do. Their hands shake, their arms jerk. Sometimes they need to ask for help in this, their final act of independence. I told him that I had always known I was not cut out for terminal illness. I told him that I had always known about him, that the first time I’d seen him I’d known about him, that this was not just the retroactive sentimentalization of an ordinary day, that I had known. I told him that this was not possible. I told him that he was the single most beautiful human I had ever seen. I told him that this was due to uncontrollable evolutionarily wired neuron firings in my brain, my still-functioning brain. I told him I was sorry for what I was doing. I told him there was no such thing as free will. I told him I loved him. I told him there was no such thing as love.
I wandered the city—through the epic emptiness of Palace Square, past the filigreed willow-colored Winter Palace, to the rotunda of St. Isaac’s, spiking up through the mist. I walked to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood and stared at the gorgeous schizophrenia of its spires. I traced the canals and counted the houses, all done up in cupcake pastels. I walked past Kazan Cathedral, turning the color of manganese in the November light. I watched adolescent daughters walking hand in hand with their mothers. I watched the passersby in the metro bend down and actually give money to the beggar women.
I began to research Bezetov. As far as I could tell, his coalition, Alternative Russia, served as an umbrella organization that included several subgroups, such as Pomerancovo and Right Russia. Pomerancovo was apparently the more conventionally liberal of the two—pro-West, pro-trade, pro–civil liberties, pro-democracy, anti-corruption, pro-reform. Right Russia was a bit more complicated—they were reactionary, contrarian, uneasy with the status quo but with vague, slightly alarming ideas about what should be happening instead. They’d harnessed resentment from all corners, played on xenophobia and nationalism, and were as willing to exploit frustration with Central Asian workers as they were to exploit frustration with the regime. It wasn’t entirely clear to me why Alternative Russia counted Right Russia as an ally, though I stumbled across a YouTube video of Bezetov answering that exact question—muttering something about the virtues of a broad tent, the power of a diverse coalition. A man named Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov headed up Right Russia. Further research revealed that their offices were located on Konyushennaya Ulitsa, a block from the Moika, where I went every day to throw coins.
I thought about going to see him. I walked by, and I walked by again, and I approached and examined the doorbell, just to make sure they had one, I told myself. I meandered past the windows,
slowed down, looked in—expecting to see what? I wondered. Aleksandr Bezetov himself, at the office for some kind of intergroup summit, staring idly out the window and just hoping to be accosted by an aimless American? I caught glimpses of dour young people and the luminous glow of computers. I didn’t see Aleksandr Bezetov. Neither did I see Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov.
One day I did it. I hadn’t necessarily planned for that day to be the day; I walked by and peered, as usual, but then some sliver of self-disgust caught me, and I marched to the door. I rang the doorbell and skittered back quickly, as though my distance from the door would absolve me from any reprimands that might be forthcoming.
The door opened. A sallow man stared out at me. There was something wrong with his face, though I couldn’t quite figure out what—the angles or contours seemed off somehow, by some nearly imperceptible degree.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello.” The meat of his eyeballs was inflamed, blood-colored. I wondered why they let this guy answer the door.
“These are the offices of Right Russia?”
He cocked his head impatiently toward the sign.
“Is Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov available, please?”
He stood aside and gestured for me to enter. Inside, the office was dank, piled to the rafters with papers and paraphernalia. Two interns clacked desultorily at two oversize, outdated computers. The computers wheezed and whirred alarmingly; they seemed on the verge of giving up the ghost entirely. A phone rang forlornly, but nobody answered it.
The man who’d answered the door led me into a back room. He flicked on the light. A trash can was overturned, and the man stooped to right it. When he did, his shirt rode up to reveal a wedge of pale flesh spidered with black hair. I grimaced. He spun a chair around for me. “Sit,” he said. “Please.”
I sat. Closer, I could see that he had a silver sickle-shaped scar running from eye to jowl. It was an odd scar; one couldn’t quite decipher what might have produced it, though I thought briefly of small-arms combat. On the wall behind him, a tattered poster proclaimed that RUSSIA IS FOR RUSSIANS!
“Is this where I’ll wait for Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov?”
“I’m Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov,” he said. “You can call me Misha.”
“You are?” I said. “Oh. You are.”
He stared at me, an unwavering, unnerving gaze. I shifted in my chair. I wondered again about the scar. Maybe he’d been a soldier, though this had not turned up in my Google searches.
“And this might be a good time to tell me who you are,” he said.
His pants were too short. When he leaned back, I saw a slab of hairy, bright white ankle. I decided to go with the short answer first.
“I’m Irina Ellison,” I said. “I’m trying to arrange a meeting with Aleksandr Bezetov. I met with an old friend of his in Moscow, and she suggested I might try to contact some of his colleagues.” I would have added something about hoping I wasn’t imposing, if it hadn’t been so evident that I was.
“You met with—who, exactly?”
“Elizabeta Nazarovna. She was his secretary, I think.”
Mikhail Andreyevich—I was having trouble thinking of him as Misha—snorted. “His secretary? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
I chose to ignore this. I stared at the poster above Mikhail’s head. “I understand you and Aleksandr Bezetov are colleagues?”
“We are.” He straightened up in his chair, and his sneer softened marginally. “We absolutely are.”
“You can get me a meeting, then?”
“A meeting. Well.” He coughed. “A meeting is difficult.”
“Just a short one.”
Mikhail Andreyevich sat back in his chair. He chewed his lip for several long moments while looking at me curiously—trying to decide, I guess, how much of his time I was worth. “Bezetov is a chickenshit,” he finally declared.
I had not been expecting this. “I thought you said he was your colleague.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s not a chickenshit. I’ve never met someone with a more maudlin attachment to his own life.”
I blinked. “Is this why you can’t get me a meeting?”
He sneered again, making his scar zigzag. “He surrounds himself with this army of handlers. He’s in full-body armor every time he leaves the house.”
I pictured bulletproof vests. I pictured chain mail. “Well,” I said. “Doesn’t he need it?”
Mikhail Andreyevich snorted again. “Yeah, well, we all need a lot of things. Only a few of us get them.”
I was suddenly miserable. The conversation was twisting aggressively, wrongly; some odd torque was at work that I couldn’t quite fathom. I’d assumed that Bezetov was beloved by everyone, as he’d been beloved by my father. This was the essential premise, the only one. I shifted in my seat. “So Right Russia is—not affiliated with Alternative Russia?” I said.
“Affiliated, sure. We’re all very affiliated. But they don’t like us. We’re the embarrassing bastard stepchild. They keep their distance from us as much as possible. We’re not their type. They prefer Pomerancovo. You know. Fuzzy-headed, idealistic. Western-backed. Insane.”
I decided not to act surprised that he was bothering to tell me all this. “And your position is what, exactly?” I asked, though the posters had given me more than a few clues. “You have—policy differences?”
“We have aesthetic differences.”
“That’s kind of shallow, isn’t it?” All at once I felt absolutely sure that bullshitting my way through this conversation was the correct course of action.
“Spiritual differences, then.”
I scoffed, just to scoff. Mikhail Andreyevich sighed witheringly. “We think change needs to be authentic, permanent. We think it needs to come from within. We think it needs to be populist. Bezetov is a dreadful elitist.”
“Is he?” I brightened momentarily. I found I was more comfortable with elitism than abject cowardice.
“Absolutely. He doesn’t even like the Russian people. You couldn’t pay him to interact with them. He’s up there in his castle, typing up his press releases, and he doesn’t know anything about the nation he’s trying to run.”
“Isn’t he just trying to stay alive?”
“Whatever. Any idiot can stay alive. Any fucking amoeba can stay alive. That’s just evolution. It’s what you do once you’ve managed to stay alive that counts.”
I pondered this. He made it all sound so easy.
He leaned back in his chair with some decisiveness. “You know,” he said, “I’m not surprised you’re here.”
“You’re not—What?” I was surprised I was there.
“It’s what I’ve always suspected about him. The Americans are in charge of everything. He doesn’t have an original thought in his head.”
“What are you talking about?”
He waved his hand at me with exasperation. “I understand, I understand. The need for discretion and all that. Of course.”
“I don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”
“Right, right. Me, neither.” He stared at me with a creepy knowingness, then smiled a smile that was nearly kind. “You’re a fan, then? That’s the story?”
“Sort of.”
“Well,” he said grandly. “Of course. We’re all terrific fans of Bezetov’s. And you want to see him, particularly, why?”
I told him, or I tried to. I was learning how to say it better. He listened. His face, if possible, seemed to turn even yellower. “Really?” he finally said.
“Really.”
“Really?”
I glared. Mikhail Andreyevich squinted. “You sound like you’re looking for a therapist.”
I flinched. “No.”
“A priest, then.”
“Even worse.”
“He has symbolic value to you.”
“He has, uh, literal value to me, too.”
“You think he’s going to be able to tell you somet
hing you don’t already know?”
“Anybody could tell me something I don’t already know.”
“The right something, though?”
I was exhausted. I felt a dull cinder of pain behind my eye. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe not.” I coughed feebly into my shoulder for effect.
Mikhail Andreyevich chewed some more on his lip, which looked abused, macerated. This was unbecoming. “What do you know about him?”
“He’s—Well, he’s the chess champion.”
“Yes. Very good.”
“And he’s running for president.” I felt like a child.
“But you know his campaign is a stunt, right? You know he knows he will not win.”
This man, it was becoming obvious, was disgruntled—and so the strange, sharp-edged defensiveness that was emerging in me was, I told myself, obviously unwarranted. Bezetov’s moral credentials were impeccable. I tried to sound light, unguarded, as though I were arguing a point of politics or philosophy, nothing personal, nothing brutal. How much I’d loved to argue about those things once.
“Sure, he knows he won’t win,” I said, “but that’s what’s impressive about it. That’s what’s brave about it. That’s the point.”
“Is it? I don’t know about that.”
“What is the point, then?”
“The question isn’t whether you like your revolutions fast or slow—it’s whether you like them temporary or permanent. Bezetov absorbs the attention, the money, the support from more pragmatic people—people who might have an actual shot at election and who could reform moderately from within. Bezetov gets the limelight because of his fucking chess career, and everyone thinks, Oh, how spectacular! How dazzling! Chess strategy at the state level, and all that makes for a compelling narrative. I will never understand that man’s public relations situation. It’s extraordinary. No matter what he does, he gives the entire Western world a boner. But what’s the best thing for Russia, really? Is it losing their chances again on some aging chess star’s vanity project? Or is it electing some serious people who will pull and tug and compromise their way to a more humane life? What’s the brave thing, really?”
A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel Page 17