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

by Jennifer Dubois

  In lieu of sex, Aleksandr began watching TV. He watched Yeltsin hiccup his way through a presidency, red-faced and drunk and increasingly incompetent: it was hard to believe that he was the man who’d shouted down a coup, who’d kept Russia from teetering into a total police state. The nation’s life expectancy for males was down to fifty-eight, mostly due to alcoholism and suicide. Half of the economy was run by organized crime. At night Aleksandr would pace the floors and think about his country, which seemed to have outlived its own relevance. In this, he felt that they had something in common.

  Aleksandr still followed chess; at night, while Nina was sleeping, he’d sneak onto the ever smaller computers and ruthlessly beat the best insomniac chess minds of the world. Excitement ruffled through online forums as they recognized him from a defense or an opening, and he felt an echoing twist when he remembered how he’d once been at the promising opening gambit of his own career, and his own life. Now he’d fulfilled everyone’s highest hopes, and there was nothing left for him to do but haunt the communities of online enthusiasts. His chess successes seemed like the litany of accomplishments of some Soviet leader that he’d been made to learn about in school.

  He rarely played in real life. Petr Pavlovich arranged a lackluster match in 1995 at the World Trade Center in New York. Aleksandr played an Indian champion and beat him handily. The win felt cheap, hollow, the afterthought of victory. Outside, the lemon-colored light sculpted the sky. The Twin Towers loomed with a fatal clarity through the crystalline windows.

  After that, Aleksandr didn’t hear much from Petr Pavlovich. He had other people to manage, though fewer. The FIDE was less ensnared to the bureaucracy—no longer throttled by the corruption—and anyway, there was less at stake, less to prove, less hope that the Cold War could be won through cultural triumph, through withering superiority at the finest game in the world. It was a game of missiles in the end, and diplomacy, and national pride, yes, but mostly, it was a game about who had consistent access to toilet paper and cheap protein, and at this game, Russia had decidedly lost. They didn’t need a chess champion to be the standard-bearer; Aleksandr could no longer embarrass them the way he once could. They were already embarrassing themselves enough.

  Occasionally, Nina and Aleksandr threw parties and Petr Pavlovich came, invariably resentful, usually alone. He stood in corners and grabbed at every single passing appetizer. Aleksandr’s feelings about Petr Pavlovich shifted depending on how he was feeling about his entire life that day. Sometimes he saw Petr Pavlovich as the necessary intermediary that had enabled Aleksandr’s own survival—their relationship was parasitic or symbiotic at best, and Aleksandr knew that he should feel grateful. Other days Aleksandr looked around his life—his huge apartment, his vacant heart, his shining trophy, dusted every other day by the maids—and he wondered if there was a more authentic life, a more authentic shadow self, that might have been possible. Though it was true that when he tried to envision such a life he came up blank—what else might he have done? Maybe they would have let him give chess lessons for a time, though likely not in Leningrad. He might have gone back to Okha to teach whatever promising talent the town was yielding these days; and he might have had some status as the boy who had gone off and done well, though the child who returns can never have quite the same currency as the child who stays away. His family would have been proud of him, no question, though there probably would have been some sense that he’d given away too much, and for what? For some vague principle that was as inarticulate as it was remote. Life was full of untenables, of insurmountables, of absurdities; the question wasn’t whether you could hammer your life into some kind of purity (you couldn’t) but whether you could live around the roadblocks and whether you could run with the premises (your government system, your current coordinates in place and time, your mortality) and make something of yourself anyhow. Aleksandr had done that for a while, and wasn’t that adulthood, and wasn’t that life? Wasn’t retreating from it retreating from reality? You could passively resist, sure; you could protest, of course. But wasn’t it a little like refusing to get out of bed in the morning, since you knew one day you were going to die?

  But still and all, of course, of course, they would have been glad to have him back.

  Petr Pavlovich called Aleksandr in January 1997. Aleksandr saw his name pop up on the caller ID—a new acquisition of Nina’s, which she used to avoid answering the calls of those lady friends of hers who’d fallen into disfavor that week. Aleksandr cringed and considered ignoring it, but he was ultimately defeated by curiosity. It had been many months since he’d spoken to Petr Pavlovich for any length of time. He wondered if the nasal polyps had ever gotten take care of.

  “Hi there, Petr Pavlovich,” said Aleksandr, and enjoyed the momentary disoriented silence that followed.

  “Caller ID,” said Petr Pavlovich finally.

  “Right.”

  “Very up-to-date of you.”

  “It’s all the wife.”

  “How is the wife?

  “A joy, as always.”

  Aleksandr tried to remember if Petr Pavlovich had married. There’d been a woman at a party some years ago, of this he was sure—he remembered that she was delicate and chain-smoking and smiling and seemed to make Pavlovich very happy. Aleksandr wasn’t sure whether that had been a wife or a mistress or a girlfriend or a friend whom Petr Pavlovich was trying and failing to woo. He’d guess the latter.

  “Are you married, Petr Pavlovich?”

  “I was. Thanks for asking. She died three years ago. Esophageal cancer. Quick.”

  Aleksandr cringed. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sure the card’s in the mail.”

  Aleksandr coughed his voice into something gentler and more supplicating. “Did you have children?”

  “Why, we didn’t, Aleksandr Kimovich. This outpouring of interested generosity on your part is unprecedented. I hope you’re not on antidepressants. They’ll mess with your game.”

  “I’m not on antidepressants.”

  “That’s a relief to hear.”

  Petr Pavlovich sniffed, and Aleksandr feared mightily—and momentarily—that he was crying.

  “And you, Aleksandr? Any plans for children? You and that beautiful wife of yours, what’s her name?”

  “Nina.”

  “Nina. Of course. And so?”

  “Ah, no.” Aleksandr shifted the phone to the other ear. “No immediate plans.”

  “I see. You’re much too busy, I’d imagine.”

  “What are you calling about?”

  “Well.” Aleksandr could hear Petr Pavlovich gearing up to make his pitch, stripping his voice of its endemic weary sarcasm. “I know you’re very into technology. Very up on the latest developments. The caller ID and so on.”

  “Mmm,” said Aleksandr. He eyed the stereo system nervously.

  “As you’re probably aware, IBM has been building a program that plays chess.”

  “I know,” said Aleksadr eagerly. This he actually did know.

  “Big Blue, Deep Blue Sea, something like that. It’s very good now. Been in testing for years. It beats everyone who plays it. They program all possible responses to all possible moves into its—whatever—its brain, I guess, and then they program it to know which ones are most likely to be successful in every possible scenario. It’s what your brain must do, essentially. You’re programmed for exactly the same kind of responses.”

  “Yeah, but I have to think about them.”

  “This thing thinks, right? It just thinks faster. It’s what—algorithms, right? I don’t know, it’s not my area. Anyway, they want you to play it.”

  “Should I?”

  “Of course. Can’t you beat it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a pile of tubes. You’re the greatest living chess player in the world. I’m sure these kids at MIT who made it are smart, but it’s going to be a game of Tetris for you, right?”

  “Probably. How should I know?�
��

  There was a pause. “When you were a younger man, you know, I don’t think you would have hesitated.”

  Aleksandr went to the picture window. Outside, the St. Petersburg sky was ensconced in folds of blues and grays, masking all the new construction projects, the new billboards, the new fruits of what was fast becoming a new kleptocracy. It was the future. They wanted him to play a computer. Aleksandr would not have hesitated when he was a younger man, but he was no longer a younger man.

  “It’ll be a disaster if I lose,” he said.

  “It’ll be publicity if you lose. But you won’t lose.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Aleksandr,” said Petr Pavlovich merrily. Aleksandr could almost hear him smiling. “You forget you’re the world champion. Have a little confidence.”

  Aleksandr would remember the game much as he’d remember the entire decade, when he remembered it at all, which was rarely. It came back distorted, in fragments—the puckered cheeks of the man who stood in for the computer, inflating and deflating with distraught little breaths; the silence of the crowd—still, then suspenseful, then stunned. Afterward, there was the astonished grimace of Petr Pavlovich—he’d often been surprised by Aleksandr, but never this way. Then there was the gleeful chattering of the MIT people, the Internet enthusiasts, the tech reporters—the triumphalism, everybody buzzing happily about this brand-new kind of apocalypse. Aleksandr knew—even as he was playing, even as he was losing, even as he was taking the limousine back to his apartment—that he’d have to approach this evening in the same way that he’d approached his marriage. He would try not to think about it. He would try not to remember its details, its sequences, its accumulated humiliations.

  Nina had been following online, and when he got home, he caught her, feet curled up under her, silk nightgown shimmering in the moonlight (Nina owned so much silk that he wondered whether she had an entire silkworm army somewhere in the closet)—and he knew that she’d been poring over the results, the analysis, the obsessive online speculation. She might not understand the details, but the tone—the headline, the upshot—was inevitably clear.

  “I’m sorry, Aleksandr.” She closed the computer quickly.

  “Yes.” He beelined for the cabinet and poured whiskey into a water glass.

  “I really am.”

  Aleksandr considered ice, then rejected it. “I really am, too.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  He did not want to tell her about it. He did not want to tell anyone about it. He did not even want to tell himself about it in his own head. The people who had watched had understood. What was there to say about it? Nobody would ever beat that thing. Nobody would ever again do sums on an abacus. And could he be sorry? What kind of person could be sorry to watch history march forward, and progress be attained, and problems be solved? Yes, yes, there was some romance lost when they mapped the entire globe, but still. You couldn’t root against it; that was like wishing that all the tiny villages of the world would keep their untranslatable, useless languages and their horrific hygiene practices just so we could all go and look and think that they were authentic and quaint. Aleksandr had an ego but not that kind of ego. He would not demand that the world know less so that he could know the most.

  “You look awful,” said Nina.

  He poured another whiskey. “I’m fine.”

  “You look like you’re about to kill yourself.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Or me.”

  “Never fear.”

  Nina went to the couch and produced a nail file from somewhere on her person. Aleksandr poured a third glass. On the couch, Nina commenced vigorous filing, and he watched her for a few moments. He never understood how she managed not to start filing her actual fingers. Aleksandr sat down at the computer.

  Nina looked up. “You don’t need to look at that stuff about the game.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “You really don’t.”

  “I really wasn’t.

  “There’s some stuff on there you don’t want to see.”

  “Christ, Nina,” Aleksandr roared. “I know.”

  She looked at him, eyes brimming with emotion. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Nina look sorry for him. He knew he did not like it.

  “Really, Alyosha,” she said. “It’s only a game.”

  There was a détente then—there must have been. Some benumbed years, an admission of estrangement that resulted, oddly, in more kindness. Once he stopped trying to make Nina his wife, he could better appreciate her as a friend of a sort; a person to enjoy spending money on and with. There are as many ways for a marriage to work as there are ways for a marriage to fail, and theirs, he thinks now, was working. He knows because he is sure—absolutely sure—that on the day of the bombing, he was gazing at Nina with fondness.

  It was the tail end of August 1999, and they were spending the weekend in Moscow with some friends of Nina’s. He’d been waiting for Nina to finish trying on shoes at a store in Manezh. He was standing outside the shop and watching her through the window—he could see the slight sour curve of her frown as she pressed her porcelain heel into some punishing scrap of footwear—and he knows that things must have been going better for them because he remembers admiring her, thinking how beautiful she was, how proud he was to have an exacting wife who knew what she wanted in a shoe. Striated light came sieving through the big picture windows. Nearby, a little girl shrieked on a small plastic indoor ride—it was a blue bewhiskered walrus that moved slowly up and down—and Aleksandr felt that the world was well. They were headed out that night to a sushi dinner, followed by an evening at a club, and Aleksandr was already looking forward to his sashimi and his buzz. Inside the store, the light caught Nina’s red hair, and it glinted nearly gold. “Mama, Mama, Mama, it’s a walrus!” said the little girl on the ride.

  And then somehow half the building was gone. The light was nuclear, the roar cyclonic—and all of it, all of it, seemed to come several moments after Aleksandr had shattered his clavicle on the ground. Nina staggered out of the store, still wearing her unpurchased shoe. Next to him, the little girl from the ride was missing most of her hand. Her mouth was open in what must have been a howl, and Aleksandr had crept halfway to her, his chest a crucible of pain, before he realized that he could not hear.

  His hearing was restored within the day, and the little girl lived, and only one person died that day. They went back to St. Petersburg, and Aleksandr turned on the television to watch what would happen next.

  Buynaksk was hit a week later, then Moscow once more, and Volgodonsk—malls, highways, apartment buildings. At the apartments, the timers went off at night to maximize civilian casualties. The government announced the Volgodonsk bombing two days before it happened, which Aleksandr found personally insulting: a government conspiracy, if indeed this was, should at least be executed with more care. “Are you watching this, Nina?” Aleksandr yelled from the couch, and winced. It still hurt to breathe. “Are you paying attention to this at all?”

  “What is it, Aleksandr? Do you need more codeine?”

  From the couch, Aleksandr’s collarbone healed, but he kept sitting, and he kept watching. He watched the blaming of the Chechens; he watched the commencement of the second Chechen war. He watched the pro-war party sail to the Duma, and Putin—Yeltsin’s invertebrate-smug prime minister, that mere lieutenant-colonel in the KGB—sail to the presidency. He watched the suspension of regional elections.

  “Aleksandr.” Nina coughed. “Don’t you think you might like to get out for some exercise?”

  Aleksandr hated Putin with a hatred that felt personal. When he remembered the others—Brezhnev and the decrepit, staggering parade of geriatrics thereafter—he didn’t remember a feeling so urgent as his hatred for Putin. Putin’s first act in office was to restore the Soviet national anthem. When Aleksandr heard the song again, after a nine-year gap, he saw Elizabeta walking down the aisle, applauded
by bureaucrats, and he almost threw up.

  “Aleksandr,” said Nina. “Do you think you’re taking all this a little too seriously?”

  After the bombing—after seeing the little girl’s blue penguin shirt streaked with arterial blood, and after crawling to her across a ruined marble floor—he felt less tolerant of his own life. Nina cajoled him into returning to his old ways, but they didn’t take. The caviar stuck in his throat. The nights out seemed empty. He found himself thinking more and more about Ivan and how Ivan would have lived, if he’d lived. Ivan wouldn’t have spent a decade in strenuous appeasement of the regime. Ivan wouldn’t have spent the budding years of democracy slowly poaching in hot tubs, one indifferent young woman on each arm. Every morning Aleksandr arose and looked at himself in the mirror and tried to remember who he’d been when he’d been brave.

  His friends—his rich friends, who still enjoyed their caviar—told him that if he was so bothered by it all, he should throw his weight behind the fledgling pro-reform movement. He was a national hero, after all, an icon of chess, which was purer than religion and more elegant than sport. He had money. If he had ideas, he might make himself a figure. Did he have ideas?