“Our players have played honorably. Aleksandr Bezetov here, despite some faltering beginnings”—and here the crowd laughed lightly, knowingly, and Aleksandr stopped trying not to scowl—“has proved a—well, an astonishingly enduring opponent. And Igor Rusayev is, of course, our cherished current champion. He has played some of his best games during this match, and watching him play has been a privilege and an honor for us all.”
Rusayev bowed humbly. This felt false to Aleksandr—only the victorious were allowed to look so self-abnegating. Wasn’t there any shame (just a little, just a little) in having earned the title so sloppily once, then defecting from his chance at properly defending it? Aleksandr had been doing him a favor by playing this match; he’d been giving Rusayev an opportunity to retroactively justify his whole ludicrous career, and that wasn’t something he could do on his own.
“But now,” said Chazov grandly, “we must conclude this exercise. It has become absurd.”
Rusayev smiled bravely.
“It has become a test of physical will, more than mental agility. It is no longer a fair arena in which to judge these men’s chess capacities.”
Maybe it was the reference to “fairness”—abstract nouns, of late, had a tendency to make Aleksandr feel savage. Or maybe it was the way Rusayev just stood there, looking sallow, overly polite.
“Excuse me,” said Aleksandr. “I’m just—Excuse me.” The journalists swiveled to look at Aleksandr, as if remembering for the first time that he was there. They raised their cameras, they raised their notepads.
“What?” Chazov looked horrified.
“Well,” said Aleksandr. “We both wish to keep playing, if I’m not mistaken?”
“What are you saying?” Above Chazov, Lenin and Gorbachev gazed evenly out of framed portraits. Gorbachev’s birthmark was the color of raw meat and the shape of the kingdom of Thailand.
“Well,” said Aleksandr. His voice was coming out strangely—too solicitous, half an octave higher than was typical. “It’s not clear to me why the FIDE should intervene and disrupt play when both players are willing to continue.”
The journalists began to scribble. Pavlovich shook his head furiously. A camera flashed in Aleksandr’s face. It was too late to retreat.
Aleksandr cleared his throat, trying to maneuver his voice back to its normal pitch. “We all know he didn’t win his title honorably. Perhaps he’d like to honorably defend it?”
“Enough,” said Chazov severely.
“I’m just wondering,” said Aleksandr. He looked at the video cameras. He remembered something about following the one with the light. Pavlovich was glaring in disbelief. “I’m just wondering if there’s something a little corrupt about this. Maybe we should ask Rusayev directly what he’d prefer.”
Chazov was gesturing to the journalists to turn off their cameras. He mimed cutting his own neck; he mimed unplugging technology from walls. He edged his way in front of Aleksandr and the microphone. “We’re having some confusion here,” he said. Petr Pavlovich held his head in his hands, and Aleksandr hoped momentarily that no trouble would befall him because of this outburst. “Everyone break for lunch,” said Chazov hurriedly. “We’ll be back with updated information shortly.”
Petr Pavlovich called the next morning. Out the window, car horns bleated; a mossy smell kicked up from somewhere. Aleksandr could barely remember what it was like to live in the world.
“Well, Aleksandr,” said Petr Pavlovich. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Isn’t it your job to know exactly what to tell me?”
Aleksandr could hear Petr Pavlovich lighting a cigarette. He breathed noisily into the phone.
“In their magnanimousness, they have seen fit to allow you to continue to play.”
“Because it was on television.”
“You must never, never do anything like that again. I know you don’t really understand what my job is. I know you think I’m out to get you. But I am telling you as a colleague—I won’t say friend—but as a colleague who respects your game. You must never, never do that again.”
“On television?”
“Anywhere. Anywhere at all. It’s completely unacceptable.”
“I don’t see why they care so much about who wins. They get their fifty percent of the winnings either way.”
“You have been so much more trouble than you’re worth.”
“But I am going to be world champion, aren’t I?”
“You’re not fit to be world champion. You’re not fit to represent Soviet chess.”
“But I am going to be world champion, aren’t I?”
“Don’t you understand anything?”
“Aren’t I?”
“Don’t you understand anything? Someone has to be.”
Aleksandr mulled this for a moment. “And you guys really want it to be that obsolete clown?”
There was a sniff, and Aleksandr tried to assess its emotional content. Over the years, Aleksandr had come to know the vast variety of Petr Pavlovich’s sniffs and snuffles; he could diagnose and interpret them; he knew them the way a mother knows the subtleties of her newborn’s various cries. Petr Pavlovich had a sniff when he was irritated and a sniff when he was disappointed—he even, bizarrely, had a phlegmy, chuckling sniff when he was satisfied. He also had a sniff that meant he was feeling passive-aggressive. This was the one he employed most often, and it was the one he issued now.
“Are you going to be fired?” said Aleksandr.
“Not by you, friend. That’s not your prerogative.”
“By the Party.”
“Every time you have a temper tantrum, you know, they give me a raise. They see how hard my job is, and tovarish, that’s a good thing.”
His words fired like pistons. Aleksandr flinched.
“Every time you come across as an ungrateful, temperamental child, they understand better what a delight—a pure delight—it is for me to wrangle you. So please, if that’s your concern, have at it.”
Silence. Aleksandr waited for Pavlovich to sniff again, but he did not.
“What you’ve never seemed to understand is that I’m genuinely concerned about your career. I see a talent like yours, and I want to protect it. I want to help it. I want to be instrumental in its navigation of the system. I want to mitigate its exposure to certain corroding effects.”
Out the window, Aleksandr watched a car splash mud on the side of a building.
“But it’s not you I care about, tovarish. It’s only your brain. Let’s get that straight.”
Aleksandr, who’d long thought that he and his brain were one and the same, did not know why he found this insulting. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t think I was confused on that point.”
“So you can go back to playing,” said Petr Pavlovich. “That’s the upshot. I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re overjoyed.”
“Thrilled.”
“Good. I’d hope so. Your happiness is just such a radiant thing, you know? It lifts us up and makes us better people. It’s truly a joy to witness. It’s an inspiration to all generations.”
“All right. Enough.”
“The match will resume on Tuesday.”
“Noted.”
“You’re welcome in advance,” said Petr Pavlovich, sniffing sadly. “I’m sure there’s a thank-you card already in the mail.”
The match resumed, and Aleksandr found himself gripped by caustic paranoia. He began to regard Dmitry with grave suspicion. He watched as Dmitry chewed his lips unconsciously or shaved his stupid face (needlessly, always needlessly) or talked inanities into the telephone—to his tedious girlfriend, allegedly, though Aleksandr no longer felt sure that was the case. There were a few openings in which Rusayev responded a little too quickly, a little too cleanly, and Aleksandr began to wonder whether Dmitry had been bribed to pass on his opening moves to Rusayev. As soon as Aleksandr wondered, he was convinced. The theory moved in his head like a mechanical apparatus. The gears shifted; the pulleys pul
led.
When Aleksandr went to the Party doctor—to be weighed and assessed and prodded like a piece of prize cattle—he was asked about his stress level, his nightmares, his anxieties, his fears. Aleksandr sat on the edge of his seat and refused to answer. These questions were too pointed; Aleksandr wouldn’t be surprised if this guy, too, was in on it. No matter: he wasn’t a chess prodigy for nothing. Aleksandr swung his knees and spoke brightly about the satisfactions of the game: the consolations to be found in triumph, the wisdom to be found in loss. The doctor’s mouth went flat as a blade. He made a note on his paper.
In the end, the match took fifty-three games—an unending, unthinkable number. The journalists were alternately awed and gleeful and bored and disbelieving. When the final moves were made—when Aleksandr sacrificed his queen to the ready arms of Rusayev’s waiting bishop—the audience leaned forward, intent, breathless. The cameras snapped like offended turtles. Aleksandr cracked his knuckles and shuffled his fingers. He realigned his shoulders. He was the first to see when Rusayev’s gaze started to swim—not with tears but with the blurry confusion of a child who has been asked to explain how he solved a copied math problem. The audience didn’t see, though, so they hunched forward and held still and wondered collectively at the nature of what they were witnessing—insane, suicidal, miraculous? Out into the universe, the taut figures of Aleksandr and Rusayev were cast on beams of light that dodged checkpoints and disregarded diplomatic protocol. Bits of dust fell from the ceiling and caught the limited glow of the lamps, making the room frosted and dreamlike. Aleksandr drummed his fingers, which he knew was cruel and theatrical. Rusayev’s face hemorrhaged momentary disbelief before easing into the nearly grateful expression of someone whose bitter disappointment is outmatched in the end by his profound fatigue. He had seen. He took his next turn with a resigned graciousness. The rest was ritual, the stately etiquette followed by a retreating army. Rusayev smiled slightly and swallowed. Aleksandr blinked and saw his future flash before his eyes. His hands shook, his head emptied, a cable ran arctic-cold from his throat to his stomach, and he was surprised even then by how the best moment of his professional life could feel so much like absolute terror.
And then it was over. Rusayev’s king was idling on the tile, and Rusayev was signing the score sheet, and Aleksandr’s ears were failing him. A man was loping up the stage with a cavernous smile, an outstretched hand, and a trophy.
Afterward, Aleksandr sat at the hotel bar while Dmitry went to pack. On state television, an ugly news reporter was talking about Aleksandr’s win. His youth was much remarked upon, as though the best thing that could be said of him was that he’d had the courtesy not to be around for very long.
The next morning Aleksandr woke, as he often did, to a ringing phone. “Get it, Dmitry,” Aleksandr groaned, until he remembered Dmitry was gone; he’d left the night before, pink-eared and elated to be finally done with his job and returning to his silly fiancée—Galina, was that her name? Aleksandr realized he’d never asked. He stood up. On the floor, Dmitry had left some scattered belongings, the accrued bits and pieces of his half a year as a glorified refugee butler. There were pens and coat hangers and mysterious scraps of paper—receipts of purchase that Aleksandr did not recall being present for, though they’d been side by side the whole time. Who was Dmitry? Where was he now? Why wasn’t he answering the phone?
For a short, buoyant moment, Aleksandr thought of who might be calling to congratulate him—his mother, most plausibly, though she usually waited for him to call her these days. It was unlikely to be anyone from the chess academy; their undisguised resentment had bothered him back when he felt he deserved better. Now it seemed appropriate. He did not wonder whether it might be Elizabeta, because he never thought of her anymore.
The phone kept ringing. He knew—and really, he’d always known—that there was only one person it could possibly be.
Petr Pavlovich sniffed happily into the phone. “Congratulations, friend,” he said.
“No thanks to you.”
“Quite a lot of thanks to me, if you think about it.”
“I don’t.”
“How does it feel?”
Aleksandr went to the window and looked out at the graying morning. The day already looked like a dirge. There was a horrible taste in the back of his throat. “Like nothing. It feels like nothing.”
“Oh, come. Don’t be bitter.”
“It feels the same.”
“It surely does not.”
Petr Pavlovich was right. It did not feel the same. Now that he’d gotten what he wanted, he had justified his entire life—every isolated and selfish and odd childhood habit, his lack of friends, his lack of romance. His decision to stop the journal, his decision to hang around these people for the past four years and eat every imported delicacy they fed him. It had all paid off; it had all been warranted. He’d chased his own ego across an enormous country, and here, in Moscow, in Hotel Sport, he’d finally caught it. He was the best chess player in the world for now—though every moment he crept closer to the day when this would no longer be the case, and who was to say (even now, even right this second) that there wasn’t somebody out in the vast world who could beat him? Some wild-eyed prophetic prodigy in a cave somewhere, perhaps, or some nobler version of himself in some alternate universe who hadn’t had the stomach to make the compromises he’d made. The victory, such as it was, was bitter—that was to be expected. How odd that it also felt elusive. He watched the second hand flinch its way across the face of the clock, and in each moment, he wondered. Was he world champion now, really? Was he world champion now? You couldn’t ever be sure. Funny that he’d never thought of that when he was deciding whether to cash in the entire rest of his life for a chance at this. He’d never be able to be sure of his success. Even if he were world champion, truly, the man who would someday beat him (and of course it would be a man) had already been born, no doubt—he was already making puzzles in the sand, or tearing chess games out of the newspaper, or staring silently at the wall for hours on end. He was already lonely. He was already worrying his parents. They were already seeing in him the radiant seeds of greatness or lunacy or both; they saw their child driving a wedge into the world and opening up a new rift where he would someday sit, anointed, applauded, when Aleksandr was old and forgotten.
“Are you there?” said Petr Pavlovich.
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t be philosophical.”
Outside, the leaves on the trees turned pale side up. They looked as if they were admitting defeat.
“This is what you’ve been working for your whole life. You should be doing cartwheels in the streets. What has everything been for if not for this?”
Aleksandr did not believe that Petr Pavlovich meant this kindly. Still, there was nobody else to whom he could say this—this or anything.
“I don’t know,” he said. The window was cool against his forehead; it communicated a calming, pragmatic presence somehow. Aleksandr thought briefly of his mother. “I don’t know what it was for.”
Petr Pavlovich was silent. “Are you dressed? You need to come out for pictures.”
“What pictures?”
“With your trophy, of course.” Petr Pavlovich sniffed cruelly. “A family portrait.”
12
IRINA
St. Petersburg, 2006
And so, entirely out of ideas, I put on my only revealing shirt and went to the Pravda bar. Inside, the place had an atmosphere of unrelenting grime; the air felt opaque with grit and an obdurate unwholesomeness that was, in a strange way, refreshing. I squirmed on a barstool, drinking white wine and mouthing my way through Kommersant and eyeing possible candidates for Viktor Davidenko as they entered. It felt decadent, profligate, pathological to be drinking before nightfall. I fluttered my fingers against the bar. This was what I’d come for, no? To sit in bars and await the arrival of strange men? It wasn’t what I’d come for, exactly.
After a few
false alarms, the man who had to be Viktor Davidenko entered the bar. He was tallish, six-two or something, the kind of height that could seem epic or almost normal depending on one’s biases. He had a beard, but I somehow didn’t begrudge him that. I wondered if someone looking for me would have trouble figuring out who I was. Or was I the only possible candidate for myself in the entire bar? I didn’t like to think that; I liked to think that I could be anyone. But then I looked around—at the butcher lesbians, at the femmes fatales with their immense scaffoldings of eye makeup, hanging all over everywhere—and I had to level with myself. I was the only nervous-looking, polite-looking person in the whole establishment, and if anybody had been looking for me, he would have found me immediately.
I walked over to Viktor Davidenko’s table. I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them. Then I said hello.
“Yes?” His voice was a bit gravelly, a bit sullen—exactly the sort of voice you’d imagine. He had a heavy brow and, underneath it, fairly astonishing blue eyes. His hair was curly and, you could tell, barely subdued.
I introduced myself. He looked me up and down, as Misha had promised he would.
“You’re a journalist?” He’d switched to English. His accent—you could tell from even one word—was a complicated affair, incorporating multiple experiences and existences and institutions of higher learning.
“No.”
“Are you a blogger?”
“No.”
“Are you on social media?”
“Not really, no.”
He sighed. It was a profoundly aggrieved, hectored, performative sigh, and it made me immediately like him.
“Can I have a few minutes of your time anyway?” I was beginning to panic mildly. This was my first interaction with an ambassador of Bezetov’s actual team, and I feared I was wildly failing to say the thing I needed to say.
A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel Page 21