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

by Jennifer Dubois

  From the podium, he could see the neon flashing of text messages. In the back, two shaggy-haired men swapped a crossword; in the front, a young man and a young woman whispered madly, audibly.

  Aleksandr tried anyway. He wanted to impress upon them the virtues of democracy, the dangers of apathy. “In this nation,” he said, “the profits are privatized, the losses are nationalized.”

  Across the room, he could see eyes glass over; he could hear knuckles crack. One man in the front row looked up with shining and irrepressible eyes. He leaned forward. He appeared to be taking notes. Aleksandr decided to direct the rest of his speech to this young man.

  “Putin,” boomed Aleksandr, “is motivated by nothing as pure as a wrongheaded philosophy. He’s motivated by money, by self-protection, by indifference—which can be quite as dangerous as ideology.”

  Across the audience went muffled yawns. In the front row, the young man’s eyes shone. Aleksandr looked down at his notes. Usually, he paused for cheering; now the whole speech was going more quickly than it should, more quickly than had been advertised.

  “He is the most humorless leader we’ve had in quite some time,” continued Aleksandr. “You will remember that Kukly, our former beloved puppet-comedy television program, was allowed to skewer even Brezhnev. But when they came out with a Putin puppet, they were promptly canceled. When our freedom to mock has been curtailed to such a degree, how can we pretend that we’ve made real progress since Communist times?”

  In the back row, a woman spat out her gum, rolled it up in a tissue, and put it in her purse.

  “But if Putin is a tyrant, we are perhaps complicit in his tyranny. Fifty-eight percent of the population, when polled, said that if they made a decent salary, they would immediately emigrate. This alarming statistic no doubt contributes to the sense of apathy among our nation’s young people when confronted with abuse after abuse.”

  The audience looked down; they looked away. The young man grinned with fervor, with seriousness of purpose.

  “And so,” Aleksandr concluded, “we have become a nation of people who are happy to sit on our backsides in our warm kitchens. We will be happy to do so until they take our kitchens away. Thank you.”

  The audience applauded in staccato hiccups. In the back row, somebody sneezed.

  Afterward, a desultory line of students waited for Aleksandr to sign their books or their chessboards. A long-haired woman asked for Aleksandr’s autograph “for her friend”; a stout young man asked for one “for his teacher.” Finally, the young man from the front row approached, clutching a chessboard under his elbow and looking nervous.

  “Hello,” he said gravely.

  “Young man,” said Aleksandr. “It’s good to see you. I think you were the only person awake out there.”

  The young man smiled. “Mr. Bezetov,” he said. “You are my favorite chess player of all time. Would you do me the honor of signing my board?”

  “Of course.”

  Aleksandr smiled, reached for his pen, and felt a blunt wedge slam against the side of his head. A wash of red came over his eyes; there was a moment of numbness and then pain with a surprising edge. Aleksandr clutched his head and turned back to the young man just in time to see him holding the unsigned chessboard and gearing up for another swing.

  “I admired you when you were a chess player,” he snarled. “Now you’re just a dirty politician.”

  A woman shouted, and Vlad lunged at the young man, scissoring him into submission. The young man was shaking with rage, still clutching the chessboard in one trembling hand, the bony finger of the other pointing at Aleksandr.

  “You are a traitor to Russia and a traitor to chess,” he said, and Aleksandr would always remember it was the second insult that counted, a little.

  “Shush,” bellowed Vlad.

  “You are!” screamed the man. There was a webbing of saliva between his top and bottom lip; his eyes—which a moment ago had seemed promisingly idealistic, bursting with a longing for democracy and a free press and governmental transparency—now seemed mildly insane.

  “Shut up,” said Vlad, elbowing the man in the gut.

  “It’s okay,” said Aleksandr. “Let him shout.” Because, really, that was the whole point.

  And so the man shouted hoarse admonitions as Vlad marched him out of the auditorium. And when he was out and the door was shut, all the remaining students took out their phones and started to text.

  Later that night, Nina held a compress to Aleksandr’s head and made him a bowl of ice cream, even though she usually didn’t like him eating sweets.

  “My mushroom,” she said. “You’re so brave.”

  And he almost had to feel that it had been worth it for this moment, for the sympathy in Nina’s voice, for the feel of her cool fingers against his neck.

  “Look,” Aleksandr said a few weeks later. “We need something different.”

  Irina, Viktor, and Boris were sitting around the table. Boris was holding a remote control and flipping compulsively between Rossiya, NTV, and Channel One. Irina was staring vacantly, spinning a kopeck around and around. Lately, she’d seemed to fade some, her skin paling almost to translucence, her eyes hardening into a grim dullness that reminded him of sepia photos of Siberian mothers in shawls, surrounded by their half-dozen living children. Aleksandr didn’t know if this was a function of poor health, or loneliness, or the interminable stretch of a Russian winter—the unendurable combination of cold and dark and the omnipresent abuse of salt and sand.

  “Just because you get hit on the head with a chessboard once,” said Viktor.

  “It’s not about the chessboard,” said Aleksandr. “Boris, can you turn off the TV? Irina, can you stop spinning that?” She looked at him balefully and stopped. Recently, Aleksandr had become increasingly uncomfortable in Irina’s presence, and not only because her color and demeanor seemed to suggest the proximity of death, which he was already exhausted by thinking about. More so, he was uncomfortable with the extent to which he’d failed to answer her questions. He had looked through letters, diaries, notes from that time, and Irina’s father did not appear—he was a specter, haunting the pages of A Partial History of Lost Causes (now as frail as dried leaves) and Aleksandr’s silly, flummoxed poems about Elizabeta (as trite now as they had ever been). Aleksandr painfully wanted to give Irina something of her father—some omen, some benediction. But what could you say when you had nothing to say? The man had written a letter to him, apparently. This Irina had already known.

  Then there was the broader question—the question of what one does, of how one plays, when one is facing certain doom. Irina might not have known, when she first came to St. Petersburg, how explicitly the totality of Aleksandr’s current existence would be an answer to that question. But it was not a satisfying answer, and Aleksandr could feel Irina’s disappointment, and it hurt him. What do you do in the face of certain doom? You try to make a little movie, you try to take sensible precautions, you try to enjoy your espresso and your frigid wife and your breakfast. Is this inspiration? Is it noble? You brush your goddamn teeth. This, he suspected, Irina also already knew.

  Viktor smirked and cracked his knuckles. “It’s a little bit about the chessboard, I think, sir.”

  Aleksandr felt the knob on his head. It was taking a surprisingly long time to disappear; when he thrashed his head against his pillow on these recent sleepless nights, it throbbed so much that he swore until Nina looked at him reproachfully and took her blanket into the living room.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it’s partly about the chessboard. But it’s indicative of a larger problem, yes?”

  “You’ve been happy with the rallies, haven’t you? The turnout has been good, hasn’t it?” said Boris. “This was really just this one incident.”

  “Yes, yes, the rallies,” said Aleksandr. He scratched his head again. It was true that the chessboard signing had been an anomaly, an aberration due to incompetent promoting. Typically, the turnout at the
rallies was hearty but not astonishing; he knew that people would show up to see him, but interest had in no way reached a critical tipping point, the juncture from which everything would flow easily and exponentially forward. Still, they came. They came right after Putin had accused Aleksandr personally of being a puppet of the United States; they came and stood outside with placards reading WE ARE THE WEST’S FIFTH COLUMN. They came, often in the cold, which impressed Aleksandr, especially when he thought of the bitter implausibility of his first winter in St. Petersburg, before he’d been able to buy protection from the cold at almost all times. The presence of such cold was like the absence of oxygen—it quickly became the only relevant fact about reality—and Aleksandr knew that the people who came out and endured it were serious people. But still, he thought.

  “The rallies are fine,” he said. “But I’m thinking it’s time to try something new. An infusion of new energy, right? At least give our supporters something new to support. At least give Putin something new to condemn.”

  Boris clicked his pen open and shut his eyes.

  “We want people to watch this film,” said Aleksandr. “I know everybody’s working hard on it, but nobody’s seeing us working, you know? So we need to keep generating interest in the movement in the meantime. We need to be engaging in guerrilla marketing.”

  “Well,” said Boris. His voice sounded indulgent, like he was placating a child or a paranoiac. “There are always hunger strikes. If you can’t speak, you can go on a hunger strike to show that you’ve been silenced.”

  “Khordokovsky did one in prison,” said Viktor. “He refused even water.”

  “We could do that,” said Boris. “People pay attention to those.”

  “A bit unoriginal, don’t you think?” said Aleksandr.

  “You just like your dinner too much,” said Boris.

  “Maybe Nina could go on a hunger strike on our behalf,” said Viktor. “I’m pretty sure she’s already got one under way.”

  “Enough,” said Aleksandr, and Viktor stopped smiling. “Any other ideas?”

  There was a pause. The clicking of Boris’s pen sounded like an insect placing its pincers delicately together. In the corner, Irina shook herself. “Well,” she said.

  “Yes?” said Aleksandr. He was surprised she was talking. Her desolation hovered around her like an electron cloud.

  “It’s going to sound silly.”

  “I don’t doubt it at all,” said Boris.

  “Try us,” said Aleksandr.

  “Lately, I’ve been thinking about a funeral.”

  For a moment Aleksandr did not know what she meant; and then, for another horrible moment he thought he did. “A funeral?” he said carefully.

  “Yes,” she said. “A Funeral for Democracy.”

  Aleksandr exhaled and realized he’d been holding his breath.

  “A Funeral for Democracy?” said Viktor. “A bit bleak, isn’t it?”

  Aleksandr leaned forward. “What do you mean, a Funeral for Democracy?”

  “Well,” said Irina. “You could get a life-sized dummy representing democracy. You could have it lying there, dead—I don’t know, maybe under placards complaining about various things. And then you could march it through the street on the way to burial.”

  “A little melodramatic, yes?” Boris sniffed. “A little bit obvious, don’t you think? A little bit much?”

  “It was just a thought.”

  “Interesting,” said Aleksandr. “I think it could be interesting.” Offhand, he sort of liked it. It was outlandish, yes, but he had nothing against outlandish. It was confrontational and bizarre. He thought young people would respond to it.

  “It just strikes me as somewhat hysterical,” said Boris. “That’s all. But maybe that’s what we’re doing now? Hysterical?”

  “I think what I like about it is that it would make for a good visual,” said Aleksandr. “One snapshot of that is pretty powerful, don’t you suppose? As opposed to the rallies, where someone would have to sift through a transcript, which would never be printed anyway, in order to get the main point.”

  Viktor dragged a fingernail against the dry skin on his hand. Boris chewed on his lower lip.

  “Right, my men? You can tune out a person talking—you’re all doing that right now. And you can refuse to read something that’s put before you. But if your eye happens to land on a photograph, you can’t decline to understand it. It’s imported directly into your head, whether you like it or not.”

  “Yes, but don’t you think it’s a little theatrical for us? A little histrionic?” said Boris. “I wouldn’t want our supporters to get the idea that we’re into stunts now.”

  “Maybe a stunt is what is needed now. Maybe some political theater is in order. I, for one, have been getting bored of our usual tricks. Irina, I’d like you to write up a plan of action.”

  “Me?” said Irina. Viktor and Boris exchanged dark, inscrutable looks, but Aleksandr didn’t care. Every time Irina had something useful to do, she seemed to brighten; her depression, as far as he could tell, seemed to be a pragmatic kind. This might be good for her—not that he knew what was or wasn’t good for a person in her position, whatever that was, exactly.

  “You,” said Aleksandr. “Get out of here.”

  That evening Aleksandr paced in his study and thought about the future. Against the sky, a tiny airplane flashed its cosmic green lights. He thought about what would happen when the film came out. When it came out, he figured, he’d be able to get the formal nomination from Alternative Russia. And that would make the Kremlin afraid of him, and he’d still be afraid of them, and they would hold each other in some nervous mutual regard. Like a two-way Zugzwang, in chess, when it was disadvantageous for either player to make a move.

  Except that wasn’t quite right. Playing Putin was more like playing that awful computer—there was nothing you could think of that he hadn’t thought of first. The election was already decided, Putin’s successor already picked and groomed; the only questions were which of his lackeys it would be and when the decision would become publicly known. No Russian theaters would show the film, and Aleksandr had no delusions about getting it on television. But he did have some modest hopes for the Internet, for YouTube, for pirated DVDs, for word of mouth. For people passing contraband hand to hand in the streets. It had worked for him, almost, once before.

  The airplane made its way to the center of the city’s sky. There was something lonely about the scene: the plane’s cold flashing colors, the snarl of buildings below, and all that tremendous sky in between.

  That was it, he thought: there would be a week, maybe ten days, when it would look like he had a chance. He wouldn’t, of course he wouldn’t, but maybe—for a week, for ten days—he’d trick enough people into thinking he would. Maybe they would get angry at long last, and maybe they would start causing some real trouble.

  But maybe, he thought, not. Maybe the week would come and go, and the movie would be seen and dismissed, and his nomination would be ignored, and the handpicked successor to Putin—the man who would babysit the post for four or eight years before Putin came back for another round—would calmly, confidently sail to victory.

  Out the window, the office lights were blinking like beacons, and the Neva was turning silver in the winter dusk. The small airplane was slipping out of Aleksandr’s line of vision—out of the edges of the city, out of the cast of the lights—and off into a different, deeper dark.

  18

  IRINA

  St. Petersburg, March 2007

  Viktor and I began promotion for the Funeral for Democracy a full two months before it was scheduled. We used the Internet—Vkontakte, mostly—and that generated some interest among students. We made a video that went marginally viral. The essential part, though, was the posters. We thought it would be funny to make posters with sort of haphazard pictograms of dead democracy—democracy with a knife in its back, a bullet in its brain, X’s for eyes. We printed them out and passed
them around cafés, student centers, dormitories. The posters were ironic-looking, and they actually generated a certain degree of cachet for Aleksandr. Soon enough, students started to tear them down for their dorm rooms, so that I had to run out to the same places I’d already been and issue replacements.

  The Funeral for Democracy was the first element of the three-part plan that Aleksandr outlined for the summer. After the Funeral, Viktor and Boris and I would go to Perm to try to talk to the lieutenant whom Valentin Gogunov had spoken of. If the lieutenant admitted military cooperation in the thievery at Perm, the case prosecuting the government for their involvement would be closed. The film would have made its point. And then—as a response to that anger, riding on a swelling wave of intense populist feeling—Aleksandr would win the formal nomination from Alternative Russia. There was no talk of winning the actual presidency.

  What after that? What would we do once Aleksandr had the nomination? Once he’d positioned himself as an alternative candidate in a country with no real elections? Once he’d put himself firmly in the crosshairs of an enemy who had a monopoly on the ammunition?

  We simply didn’t know. Which is another way of saying we thought we did know and were too polite to talk about it.

  At the hostel, I remained an odd, slightly inconvenient reality of the building, like the drain that never drained properly and the coffee cups in the cupboard that always looked dirty. I don’t know what the managers made of me. They’d never had a guest stay longer; I’m sure they expected that I would never leave. In the time I’d been at the hostel, I’d watched hundreds of young people come and go. I’d watched people flirt and fight and get to know each other in a dozen different languages; they debated literature, and showed off about philosophy, and offered searing opinions about the political development of each other’s home countries. There was a Belorussian stripper (“I’m in club work,” she said. “You understand?”). There was an engaged couple who broke up loudly outside the hostel in the middle of a horrifically cold February night. There was an older Japanese woman who shared no language with anyone, and wore the same outfit every day, and slept curled around her backpack every night. There was a young woman who lost a baby she didn’t even know she was carrying. There was a tiny twenty-three-year-old, eyelinered, multilingual, forever awaiting her visa to go study at the Sorbonne. There was a pair of slick-haired Italian men who stared at me ceaselessly—keeping them from ever seeing my breasts was ultimately a losing battle. There was a young man who rocked himself against a wall and stole sugar packets from the communal tea-and-coffee station near the door. He’d been traveling, he claimed, for fourteen months.