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

by Jennifer Dubois

  Nikolai raised his eyebrows and smiled obnoxiously. “I’d ask Petr Pavlovich about it, if I were you.”

  Aleksandr zigzagged across the room. Petr Pavlovich was in a corner, telling a boring anecdote to a small coven of bored listeners. Aleksandr pulled urgently at Petr Pavlovich’s elbow until he raised one finger at his listeners and smiled indulgently at Aleksandr as though he were a loved but manic child. They retreated to a corner, where Aleksandr immediately began hissing.

  “I’m not playing in Pasadena? I’m really not playing in Pasadena?”

  Pavlovich bobbed his head and spoke without moving his lips. “Hush. You’re making a scene.”

  “How was this decided?”

  “It’s, ah. A relatively recent development.”

  “Why was it decided?”

  “Please keep your voice down. I don’t mind, you know. I don’t mind if you go. But it’s not about my preferences.”

  “You’re going to forfeit a player? For the first time ever? I don’t see how this is in the interests of Soviet chess.”

  “Again, it’s not me forfeiting a player. It’s not me doing anything.”

  “FIDE, then.”

  “Stop doing that with your jaw. You could show a little appreciation. It’s strictly about your safety.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Fine, it’s about the Olympics, then. They boycotted Moscow. We can’t send you.”

  “You’d send Rusayev.”

  Pavlovich rolled his eyes. “Enough.”

  “You would.”

  “Enough. Rusayev’s different. You’re young. You can afford to wait three years.”

  At this, Aleksandr dropped his plate. Sopping fragments of smoked fish and pickled vegetables dislodged themselves and went sliding surprising distances across the marble floor.

  “You’re all so enthralled with Rusayev,” said Aleksandr. “You know he’s only world champion technically. He inherited the title by default from Fischer. But you all worship him. You bend over backward to preserve his title.”

  “Arrogance doesn’t suit you,” said Petr Pavlovich, bending down to clean up the food with his handkerchief. “Neither does alcohol.”

  “Can’t I afford to be arrogant?”

  “You could be doing better.”

  Aleksandr scoffed. “My rating has overtaken Rusayev’s this year.”

  Petr Pavlovich stood up. “You could be doing better in other ways.”

  Aleksandr looked down into his vodka. His ears buzzed. He thought of his sneering comments about Oleg Chazov, the FIDE president, uttered within earshot of a FIDE official. He thought about rolling his eyes at a slide show about the superiority of the Russian athlete. He thought about telling that stupid joke to that bulbous-lipped, unimpressed woman, and how it wasn’t even a good joke, and how she hadn’t even laughed.

  “If you want to play Rusayev for world champion in the fall, you’ve got to start behaving yourself better. It’s not too late for you, Aleksandr. I advocate for you every day, I do. Every single day.”

  In his vodka, Aleksandr could see part of the reflection of his own globular, inelegant nose. He didn’t like to think of Petr Pavlovich defending him to the Party—in that wheedling voice, that apologetic tone, asking for more time, more leniency. Aleksandr realized that he’d become a petty, irrelevant dictator himself. There were probably entire armies of thinkers and strategists who sat around figuring out how to get him to do exactly what they wanted. And they were probably always successful.

  “Do you know that? You know that, don’t you?” said Petr Pavlovich. He sounded hurt. Aleksandr refused to respond to hypothetical questions. “You’re not going to Pasadena,” said Petr Pavlovich. “I’m sorry. You can still play Rusayev for world champion in the fall. But you need to help me out here.”

  Aleksandr did not look at Petr Pavlovich; he knew there would be that distorted, forgiving tenderness in his face, and he did not want to see it.

  “You need to behave yourself,” said Petr Pavlovich. “Please stop doing that with your face. Let’s get you another plate.”

  And, through the blowsy spring and into the horrid summer, Aleksandr behaved himself. He listened politely. He feigned attention whenever it was required, he kept quiet whenever it was possible. He made no demands. He asked no follow-up questions. At parties, he stood quietly by picture windows and shoveled great masses of gourmet food into his mouth, and when anyone from the Party tried to talk to him, he pretended to always be chewing.

  The World Championship match began in September. Moscow’s buildings groped the sky with a modern, monolithic insatiability; the kommunalki were epic, blanched white, cluttered in rows like crooked teeth in the maw of an animal. Leningrad was forced by sheer architecture to acknowledge its past, its old defeats and triumphs, its roots in rationality and Euclidean geometry. In Leningrad—in the long avenues, in the arcing canals—one could find the past’s hope for the future. In Moscow, the future had been captured, torn down, and bent to the will of the present. Enormous signs defaced the sides of buildings: HELP THE MOTHERLAND—BUILD COMMUNISM, THE IDEAS OF LENIN LIVE AND CONQUER. Marching down Gorky Ulitsa, Aleksandr saw how the street might evoke a jaunty sense of usefulness, if he were someone who was inclined to think that way.

  On the day of the first match, an escort met Aleksandr and his second, Dmitry, who had been appointed by the Party. The escort walked them through the Hall of Columns, with its ornate light fixtures and richly patterned wallpaper, and waited while Aleksandr stopped by the gorgeous, gilded bathroom to vomit. Outside, Aleksandr could hear the rustling of five hundred journalists from twenty-seven countries. He wished nobody had quoted this statistic at him. He flushed the toilet and splashed his face. The escort banged on the door.

  After climbing the steps to the main stage and tripping lightly, Aleksandr found himself sitting across from Rusayev. Rusayev was a solid man in any context, and he looked even heartier and more hostile on the other side of a chessboard. The crowd shifted and settled; they were expecting to be disappointed. Rusayev had won the USSR Chess Championship four years straight, and it was almost offensive, the crowd thought, to pair him against this obscenely young man—who was so dark-browed, so awkward and faltering in his movements. Aleksandr was a man who seemed to apologize for his own existence in every step he took. They were not a good match, the crowd thought, and the game would be an easy win. The crowd hated easy wins.

  Aleksandr wanted to touch the board before they began, to gather himself into the game, but it was not allowed. The timer was set. Rusayev mustered a look approaching respect. Aleksandr had been assigned white by the tournament directors, and as he introduced his knight’s pawn, he let everything—the audience, the great hall, his own mind—disappear into the clean chromatics of the board. They began.

  As chess journalists and students, social historians of Russia, and masters of trivia often remarked, it was Rusayev’s match almost from beginning to end. Aleksandr opened with too much sloppy aggression (the impetuousness of youth, it was whispered). He lost one game for every two draws, until he lost two games in a row. This had never happened to him, but there it was (proof that the young upstart was at least half as stupid as he looked, it was said). When the secretaries brought the transcribed score sheets back to the press room, the reporters from Sovietsky Sport stamped their feet in annoyance and pouted that the whole thing had been an unmitigated embarrassment. Nobody had been routed this squarely since Fischer’s leveling of Taimonov on his way to Spassky (and such mismatches in ability were, frankly, tedious, it was muttered). Even the board boys looked indifferent.

  Then there were seventeen draws in a row. Most of the press left. The tournament was moved out of the magnificent Hall of Columns and into the fraying Hotel Sport. Aleksandr’s jaw clicked whenever he ate. He woke up at night to horrible leg cramps that sent him jumping up and down, half asleep, to the continued disapproval of Dmitry. He wandered Moscow during the days, staring at the gorgeous O
ktyabrskaya Hotel across from the French embassy, counting the metallic muscles on the statue of Iron Dzerzhinsky outside KGB headquarters. In Red Square, he stared mournfully at the lovely lights of the State Department Store and then shuffled through a forty-minute line to admire waxen Lenin in his tomb.

  Aleksandr had never felt farther from Okha than he did in the days wandering Moscow. He could feel the vastness of Russia prickling at the back of his neck. In the white dawn, he squinted out his hotel windows at the horizon and felt sure he could see the eastern plains tapering into nothing, could see the identical villages and hamlets that pocked the landscape like craters on the moon until they became fewer and fewer and finally disappeared into the stoic, flinty face of the continental shelf. He was at the edge of the world, and the terrible enormity of outer space was bearing down on him. It gave him vertigo—like walking too close to the edge of a steep drop, or looking up at the sky and pretending that you are not looking up at all but down, down into an endless sea of illuminated sea creatures, their star-bright organs burning out of an unfathomable abyss.

  He dreamed of playing Rusayev so often that he sometimes confused mistakes he’d actually made with mistakes he’d invented in his sleep. Winter came. Two months into the match, Rusayev won again.

  And then, finally, just when almost everyone else had stopped paying attention, Aleksandr won a game. Fourteen more draws followed. And when the audience—and cerebral individuals the world over—cracked their necks and rubbed their eyes and turned back to the tournament, they found different men at play.

  Aleksandr’s incipient defeat had made him more stubborn-looking. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw that he’d adopted the half-awake gaze of a nocturnal animal. He burrowed himself further and further into the game, and everything else took on a filmy, aquatic feel. The incidentals of his life—the transport to and from the building, his state-provided meals, the cold nights in the hotel with Dmitry—came to seem utterly artificial, shadows cast by the Platonic reality of the game. Outside the tournament, he grew inarticulate, withdrawn, bleary-eyed. He gave deeply unsatisfying answers to journalists who wanted to know about his strategy. He had no insights to share, no history he felt warranted reporting, although he sometimes told them small anecdotes about his sisters on the island. More than one TASS profile remarked that in spite of being a brilliant chess mind and all, Aleksandr seemed more than a little dumb.

  Inside, though, he stayed vigorous, alert to Rusayev’s every twitch and eyelid flutter. He saw columns and rows of the board in every street; he started categorizing his own movements in algebraic notation. D3, he moved straight ahead to the lunch buffet of pork and borscht and Pepsi-Cola, timid and humble as a pawn. Qe7, he sailed stately, imperious, across the stage to his chair, his eyes locked on his target, his gaze lethal with power and surety. Nc4, he twisted—rearing, equine—out of the path of a passing government vehicle in the street.

  Rusayev was not doing as well. He’d lost five kilos over the course of the tournament; he wheezed into his handkerchief and ate almost nothing at meals. His skin had taken on a sagging, redundant quality; he looked increasingly like an old elephant on a ritualized journey to death. There were moments while making a move when he lurched alarmingly far forward, and the already still audience grew stiller as they waited, waited, for him to collapse. Although he never did, there were some who commented that peasants—in other, wilder, less modern times than these—would be inclined to attribute his transformation to sorcery, and to regard Aleksandr with more than a little dark suspicion. This was the future, however, and nobody thought those things anymore.

  The newspapers began to mutter about Aleksandr, since they loved a good mutter. Aleksandr was the youngest man to compete at this level since Mikhail Tal, they muttered. He’s almost as young as that autistic American teenager, they muttered. He will not win, of course he will not win, it’s a travesty to suggest that he might. But still, it was muttered, he might. He might.

  Then Aleksandr won the forty-seventh game. Then he won the forty-eighth. Rusayev was two games ahead, but the momentum of the tournament had shifted. Aleksandr sat up straighter. He slept better at night. Rusayev coughed into the sleeve of his shirt and glowered at Aleksandr with watery, red-rimmed eyes. Early on the morning of the forty-ninth game, Aleksandr received a phone call.

  It was five in the morning, and Dmitry answered the phone. He listened for a moment and then handed it to Aleksandr. “It’s Petr Pavlovich,” he said.

  “Of course it is,” said Aleksandr, taking it. It was warm for February, which meant it was very cold, and Aleksandr didn’t turn on a light or get out of bed. Outside, he could hear melting snow sluicing through the gutters. “What?” he said into the receiver.

  Petr Pavlovich sniffed. “Not very friendly in the mornings, are you?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Need some more sleep, do you?”

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t worry, you can go back to bed. They’ve suspended the tournament.”

  “What?” He sat up, feeling the oddly humid frigidity of the hotel air clamp down on his shoulders and torso. It was its own fucking ecosystem, this hotel room.

  “FIDE has decided to suspend the tournament. For now. Until the irregularities can be resolved.”

  “Irregularities? What irregularities?”

  Dmitry turned on the light and stared, his eyes crusty with sleep, his expression abjectly interested.

  Petr Pavlovich sneezed. “Just certain aberrations.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t agitate yourself.”

  “You mean that I’m winning now?”

  “I certainly do not mean that. And you’re not exactly winning.”

  “I was never supposed to beat Rusayev, was I?”

  “Oh, God, you’re tiresome.”

  “Why now, then?”

  “Have you taken a look at Rusayev? The man’s ill.”

  “He’s not ill,” said Aleksandr. He kicked at the edge of Dmitry’s bed, sending Dmitry scuttling toward the wall. “He’s just old. He’s just decrepit. He’s just exhausted because he’s starting to lose, and losing is exhausting. I should know. I’ve been losing for five months. You didn’t seem too concerned about that.”

  “You’re being childish.”

  “You’re being corrupt. I’ve given him forty-eight free chess lessons.”

  “This has been going on for half a year. It’s an embarrassment.”

  “An embarrassment to whom?”

  “To everyone. Not least of all yourself. We had higher hopes for you, Aleksandr.”

  “No, you didn’t. Obviously, you didn’t.”

  “There’s a press conference tomorrow,” said Petr Pavlovich. “There will be an announcement that the match will end without decision. It’s become a test of physical endurance.”

  “It hasn’t.”

  “There will be a press conference tomorrow. You’ll attend.”

  Across the room, Dmitry was pulling up the curtains, revealing a sour, underwhelming dawn.

  “I won’t,” said Aleksandr.

  At this, Pavlovich laughed. “Aleksandr, you forget that I know you. I know you better than anyone does, probably, at this point.” He sneezed again. “You will attend. You will. Of course you will.”

  The day of the press conference, Aleksandr woke up early. Across the room, Dmitry was still sleeping, mouth half open, hands curled into fists like a newborn, and Aleksandr found himself staring, wondering what the rest of Dmitry’s life had been like. It made him squirm to think that Dmitry had made similar compromises, endured similar challenges, only to sit next to Aleksandr at a table and worry over his stress levels. At least Aleksandr had sold his own soul, assuming he had one, for something a bit more glamorous.

  Dmitry opened his eyes and sat bolt upright. “What are you doing?”

  Aleksandr took a step back. “We need to get ready.”

  Then a
gain, here they were: stuck in the same hotel room, breathing the same stale air, watching the same dull programming night after night, chewing over the same chess moves—and at least, at the end of it all, Dmitry had a fiancée, another life, to return to.

  Dmitry blinked.

  “The press conference,” said Aleksandr.

  “You need me there?”

  Aleksandr didn’t like admitting that he needed Dmitry anywhere, and he wasn’t about to say so out loud now.

  “It’s protocol,” said Aleksandr. Dmitry had a worshipful regard for protocol.

  Twelve minutes later, they were hurrying down slushy streets. Dmitry’s nose ran chronically, and today was no exception: he tilted his head back and feigned interest in the sky; he surreptitiously found excuses to run his sleeve along his face. Aleksandr did not know why the nasal challenges of everyone around him should be such a large part of his own emotional life.

  At the press conference, Aleksandr stood awkwardly onstage next to Oleg Chazov, the FIDE president. On the other side of Chazov stood Rusayev. The journalists looked exhausted, vitamin D–deficient, bored beyond belief. When the cameras flashed, the light made their lanyards glitter. In the audience, Petr Pavlovich stared at Aleksandr with bittersweet fondness, like a mother proud of the military boy she was about to send to his death.

  Chazov droned into a microphone about the interminable match. He gestured to Rusayev, who smiled weakly, with the shining eyes of a religious supplicant, and licked his lips. He looked prophetic, otherworldly. Aleksandr tried not to scowl.

  “As you all know, this match has been going on for months and months,” said Chazov. “The players have pushed themselves to the point of exhaustion and beyond.”

  Aleksandr opened his eyes wide. He tried to look not exhausted, not weak. He tried to communicate to the crowd that he was young, that he was alive, that he was smart—most important, that he was winning, or that he might be, if they would just let him keep playing.