Petr Pavlovich looked at Aleksandr with the paternalistic searching expression of a doctor who is hopeful, in a vague way, that you’ll decide to take some unpleasant but lifesaving medicine.
“These city tournaments you’re doing, they’re small potatoes, don’t you agree? For a mind like yours? You should be playing at the national level. You should be playing, quite frankly, abroad. You want to continue to play for the Soviet Union. We want you to continue to play for the Soviet Union.”
It occurred to Aleksandr that Pavlovich was talking about supply and demand.
“But it’s all up to you. If you can improve your attitude. If you can amend your ideology.”
And maybe Aleksandr would. Maybe he would. The person he loved most in the world had seen fit to marry a Party official; the person he admired most for opposition was dead; the only other two people he’d thought he could trust were treacherous and insane, respectively. Models for alternative options were diminishing. Who could judge him for this? Who was left to judge him for this?
“Otherwise?” said Aleksandr. It’s possible he knew even then that he was being theatrical.
“Otherwise, you’re done playing. For one thing. Maybe you’ll be done with other things, too. Who can say? But the chess, we know for sure, you’re done. There’s been tolerance here. There’s been patience. We don’t need to talk about otherwise, I don’t think. I think we know what you’re going to do.”
Maybe Petr Pavlovich was right. Maybe Aleksandr would go up to his room in a moment and sit on his bed and stare at the liver-colored spots on the floor and consider it. He’d tried to live honorably for a few years in Leningrad. By anyone’s standards, he had failed. Out the window, the snow would ignite in the streetlights. On the bed, the KGB officers would have left his chess set. They’d have known that he was going to take it with him; they’d have known that it was all he was going to take with him; they’d have known where he was going. On his way out, he’d walk past apartment number seven, but he’d make a point not to look at it.
“You can go up now,” said Petr Pavlovich brightly. “You’ll want to be packing, I’d imagine.”
The new apartment had flawless indoor plumbing, a brocaded mirror, and two different bedrooms (“for guests,” Petr Pavlovich had said as he gestured majestically). There was a living room with a fireplace and built-in bookshelves filled with unreadable, politically acceptable books. The refrigerator was stocked with fresh meat and imported wine. A bowl on the counter overflowed with an entire jungle of fresh produce, including a banana the shape and color of a crescent moon. Aleksandr had never eaten a banana, though he’d had an orange once, as a child in Okha, when a freight train carrying fruit to the Party elite had overturned. Outside his window that spring bloomed bell-shaped fritillarias and the exploding radiant hearts of euphorbia.
He’d never known how dirty he’d always been until he finally stood for thirty minutes in a scalding shower with limitless soap. He thought of the grains of dirt, abrasive against his skin, that had always populated his bed in the kommunalka, and he recognized guiltily that they had fallen off his person. He drank Armenian cognac. He smoked Cuban cigars even without an occasion. Losing Elizabeta and Ivan had made him vengeful, and he knew it. He felt he deserved whatever he could find. He flopped around in his new sheets, some different genus entirely from the kind he’d had before. He never knew that bedding could be so silken and unobtrusive. The rosettes of eczema that had bloomed along his ass for his entire life finally cleared up.
He signed on to the CPSU. He joined the Komsomol officially, finally. On his new internal passport, his smile was like a sneer. In his new living room, he did a joyless cartwheel just because he had the space.
He was assigned a new trainer, a man who inexplicably wore what Aleksandr took to be a woman’s scarf around his neck at all times—except during tournaments, for which occasions he unveiled a meaty, tendony neck. He was an unimaginative chess mind, and his tendons contorted acrobatically whenever Aleksandr made a move that he didn’t like or didn’t understand. And ubiquitously, intrusively, there was Petr Pavlovich, who stationed himself at the very center of Aleksandr’s life, who followed Aleksandr nervously to hotels and restaurants, and shot him warning glances if he got too mouthy, which he rarely did anymore.
And in a few weeks, Aleksandr found he’d begun a new life. He found it was not too late.
He grew fatter—slowly but with the steady inevitability of aging. He’d look in the brocaded mirror and swear he could see the setting of light wrinkles, insistent as an oncoming season, though others said that was not the case. If Elizabeta had previously hijacked his entire consciousness for nefarious purposes, now she crouched darkly in the epicenter of his brain like a many-stemmed tumor. He tried hard not to summon thoughts of her. He tried hard to be thinking about other things all the time—chess mostly, but also the most efficient rationalization for his current behavior and the best way to organize the refrigerator (having his own refrigerator was an endless source of joy). He set aside large swaths of time to think about Sakhalin—he’d remember the glinting stands of white birches; the occasional visits to Yuzno-Sakalinsk, which smelled of mud and conscripted workers; the glowering Korean ships that docked in the harbor at night and sold stealth coal for the thermal power plants. He ate enormous salads drowning in real mayonnaise (before, it had only ever been vinegar and furniture polish). He tried to do push-ups. He tried to become vain about clothing. He tried to be very absorbed in the particular details of his particular life, as inoculation against excessive absorption in the details of someone else’s.
Every day, every day, he had long one-sided conversations with Ivan in his head. He tried to explain that this was all that was left for him now. He tried to explain that it was the only pragmatic course of action—and they’d been pragmatists always, hadn’t they? It was pure ideology that got you fucked. He tried to explain that he was sorry. Sometimes he got defensive and explained, slowly and sarcastically, that if Ivan was such a terrific judge of people and of reality, he wouldn’t be the one who was dead. Then he explained that the thing about life was that you had to decide how you were going to survive it. The dead could afford to be morally self-righteous. Everyone else just had to manage.
Aleksandr explained and explained, but Ivan never seemed to be listening. He certainly never answered.
Aleksandr began winning. He developed a taste for everything he was exposed to. He met Rusayev, who’d been world champion for a decade (though only by default-winning, after all of Fischer’s histrionics), and Petr Pavlovich prattled on about what an honor it was for him to meet such a great chess mind while Aleksandr picked sluggishly at his smoked mackerel. Rusayev was older and bewhiskered, and he forgot Aleksandr’s name within minutes of their introduction. Aleksandr kept winning. He was given a more generous stipend. Memories of Elizabeta could still make him flinch from embarrassment, but no longer from pain. When he spoke on the phone to his mother, whom he had not seen in three years, he lowered his voice if there was another person in the room. He kept winning. When he met Rusayev again, he was remembered.
He attended cocktail parties, he attended dinners, he attended functions, always alongside Petr Pavlovich, who beamed at him with the proprietary smugness of a parent or a sports coach. Aleksandr was becoming a drinker, increasingly, and he liked to gaze through a veil of indifference and bleariness and monosyllabism as Pavlovich clapped him manfully on the shoulder. “I think you’ve made a terrifically wise choice,” said Petr Pavlovich at the celebration for Aleksandr’s USSR semifinals win in 1982. “I always knew you could be rehabilitated. I always knew it.” At the New Year’s party in 1983, he said, “You know, we’re modernizing. We’re all modernizing. The Party is modernizing. It’s not all ideological purity, this and that. Stalin went too far, we can all agree.” He was waving a tiny cracker, a dark jewel of caviar at its center. “We’re a practical people, and this is a practical philosophy.” At a May Day celebration
that spring, he lurched toward Aleksandr—his body melonny from sweat, his breath spicy from the tomato juice he’d been drinking—and said, “It’s about justice, am I right? It’s about a modicum of social equity.” He sniffed and blinked rapidly; his face was seized with the pleading expression of an ineffectual teacher begging a charismatic student not to lead a mutiny. “We don’t all need to be radicals. We just need to be in general agreement here, am I right? The philosophy can evolve. We can evolve. But the basic premise is unassailable. And I’m so glad you’ve come to see reason.”
Had Aleksandr come to see reason? Aleksandr had not. But he’d come to see the merits of a materialistic life, perhaps; he’d come to count the relative blessings of safety, and satiety, and solitude. He could believe he was not cut out for defiance; he could believe he never had been. He could believe in the gruesomeness of his mistake. Ivan was dead, and that was proof enough of the lethality of innocence. What had he known about it all? He should stick to chess, to knocking wood figurines around on a board. The stakes in international chess were high enough, and nobody died, most years.
He went to Interzonal. He went to the Candidates’ Tournament. He won, he won, he kept winning, and he enjoyed the attendant celebration—the chattering flash of cameras, the interviews that appeared in small boxes in the newspaper. It’s possible he even enjoyed the cloistered, petty pleasure of doing exactly the thing he was most expected to do. He was a reminder that chess was the Soviet Union’s game, even if geopolitics was not, and any dregs of national feeling he had could be animated, marginally, occasionally, by this thought. He always read his interviews, and they were always remote, always ridiculous, always vastly more self-congratulatory than he ever remembered feeling. Life was tolerable. He never thought about Elizabeta. He kept his mouth shut, for the most part. If he occasionally drank a bit too much at parties and made snarky remarks about the FIDE or the Party, few people seemed to notice or care. Officials were typically civil. If they knew his past—and they must have known—he couldn’t see it in their obsequious smiles, in their yellowed gazes. If they knew—and they must have known—they had decided, kindly, to forget.
He was doing the only thing he’d ever been good at, and he was doing it as well as could be expected. He was alone—alone, always, and never more alone than when he sat three feet away from another man and played—but he’d achieved equilibrium in his aloneness; he lived at the center of his solitude and hardly scraped against its edges anymore. By 1983 he was scheduled to go to Pasadena, California, to defeat the Americans in the world champion semifinals. There would be a fifty-thousand-dollar prize. He never thought about Elizabeta. At night he dreamed of palm trees and hard currencies.
There were women at the parties sometimes, though Aleksandr rarely spoke to them. The Party wives were mostly older, matronly, forbidding, wearing high-necked secretary blouses and giving off the faint scent of dogma and aerosols. Most of the other women were there for the officials—they were women in Elizabeta’s profession, or something like it, their clothes immaculate, their faces overdone, wearing tight-fitting stretch dresses and laughing unlikely first-soprano laughs. They were off-limits, it was understood, and Aleksandr never went near them unless he had to pass by to get a refill. One night, however, he found himself talking to a woman whose origins were unclear to him—she was too young to be a token female Party member, but not attractive enough to be one of the escorts. Her face was flushed and her lips were too full, one degree beyond erotic and veering toward grotesque. She was drinking red wine, and it made her lips currant-colored and lurid.
“You’re Aleksandr Bezetov?” she said. “The chess prodigy?”
“A prodigy?” Aleksandr was already quite drunk by that point, feeling a buoyancy slicked with careening despair, counting the coastal tides inside his head. “Aren’t I getting a little too old to be a prodigy?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“That’s not so old.”
“And how old are you?”
She turned her face to the side. There was something irritated about her eyes that made her look constantly overwrought. Her skin was bad, though her hair was terrific. Aleksandr was getting to be a discerning critic of women. “A gentleman never asks,” she said.
“And who said I was a gentleman?” Her plate was overflowing with rhombuses of continental cheese. He leaned in and stole a cracker. “You’re older than I am, probably. Twenty-four, twenty-five. You’re probably too old to find a man here, if you’re looking. How did I know that? you ask. Am I a prodigy? No, I’m not a prodigy. And not a hero, either, no matter how much you might insist.”
“I’m not insisting.” She hadn’t been smiling, so she could not now let a smile meaningfully fade.
“I mean, someone has to defend chess from the international mafia.” He hiccupped.
“Oh? And who is doing that?”
He pointed to his head and nodded gravely. “I am. Through independent thought, you know? And my subversive style of play? I might be a credible threat to Rusayev one day, you might have heard.”
“I might have.”
“Rusayev is a dinosaur. An apparatchik dinosaur. Have you ever been to California?”
“Of course not.”
“I’m going, you know. In three weeks. To Pasadena. What do you think the women are like in Pasadena, California?” He didn’t recognize his own voice. He could barely hear it.
“I’m sure I can’t imagine.”
“Do you want to hear a joke?”
“Not really.”
He raised his glass. “Adam and Eve must have lived in the Soviet Union, because they were naked, had one apple between them, and thought they were living in paradise!”
A hand grabbed him by the lapel; from its preternatural smoothness, Aleksandr knew it to be Petr Pavlovich’s. Another hand reached in to grab his drink away. “I’m sorry,” said Petr Pavlovich. “But Mr. Bezetov is needed elsewhere. Excuse us.”
One week before Aleksandr was to go to Pasadena, Nikolai appeared at a party. Aleksandr had known this would happen eventually, but he was surprised at the surreal serenity that he felt when it finally did. Nikolai emerged from behind one of the faux potted plants that comprised the bulk of the decor at these events. Aleksandr had imagined a clean, surgical terror splitting a seam down his chest; instead, he appraised Nikolai dully, with the benumbed feeling of watching one of his own recurring nightmares. Like Aleksandr, Nikolai was fatter—he looked as if he’d been spooned into his shirt—but his face was less ugly. Or maybe it was only that he seemed to have grown into his ugliness.
“Hello, Aleksandr,” said Nikolai. “Fantastic showing in Kaliningrad.”
Aleksandr looked at his plate of cornichons and herring. So many times he’d imagined asking Nikolai if he’d been running Ivan all along. And he imagined Nikolai saying, “Running him all along? I hardly had to try.” The more he thought about it, the more Aleksandr knew that the real insult of Nikolai’s betrayal was how little he’d tried to hide it, how little he knew he’d have to. He’d taken notes right in front of them, for fuck’s sake—he hadn’t even had to pay attention—and Aleksandr had thought, really, what? That Nikolai was so devoted, so committed to the cause and the written word, that he was constantly recording new influxes of inspiration? He hadn’t thought that; he’d always thought Nikolai was a bit of a philistine as well as a bit of an asshole. But he’d been so blinded by his trust in Ivan—who would always be a twenty-one-year-old kid now, smart and well-intentioned and right about a lot of things but wrong about the one thing that mattered most—that he hadn’t tried to reconcile his vision of Nikolai with Ivan’s. Ivan knew more about it, that’s all; Ivan was the mastermind, the visionary, the great brain. And now Ivan was dead and would never be able to revise his opinion—on Nikolai or on anything else. Aleksandr had accepted his own strengths and weaknesses, and he believed now in the practicality of doing one’s best at whatever it was one did best an
d leaving it at that, so he could recognize ungrudgingly that Nikolai was the only one of the three of them with any degree of competence whatsoever. And competence was the new prevailing value of Aleksandr’s life. Nikolai had outmaneuvered them, that was all; he’d won, and he’d deserved to win, and Aleksandr refused to be a bad sport about it all, personally.
“Just warming up for Pasadena,” said Aleksandr. He watched Nikolai masticate a tiny pickle for longer than seemed strictly required.
“Oh, you still think you’ll be playing there?” Nikolai said mildly. He swirled his pancake around in its sour cream.
Aleksandr bit down on nothing. “Yes,” he said. “I expect so.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“That’s not what I heard.”
Still, there it was: hatred, cramping in his mandible, amplified by the knowledge that it was wholly unwarranted. He didn’t deserve to hate Nikolai anymore. He’d forfeited the moral ground from which hatred was possible. They were colleagues, essentially. Confederates. Comrades. The differences between them were quantitative, not qualitative. If Nikolai was a few degrees more implicated than Aleksandr was, give it a year or two. And here was his comrade, Nikolai, giving him a piece of horrible but relevant information.
“What are you talking about?” said Aleksandr.
“There are political considerations, I hear.” Nikolai cringed as though sorry to be the one to say so, though Aleksandr was quite sure he was not sorry.
“What kind of political considerations?” said Aleksandr. He didn’t want to ask. If he had anything left in this life besides chess, he wouldn’t have asked. But then, if he’d had anything besides chess, he wouldn’t be here at all—he wouldn’t have been so predictably bought, and he wouldn’t have been so easily maintained, and he wouldn’t be standing here, across from Nikolai Sergeyevich, while his cornichons grew flaccid on his plate.
A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel Page 19