A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  In the bottom of the box was a letter. I let myself pretend for a self-congratulatory moment that I wouldn’t read it. And then I did.

  The letter was photocopied, undated, and written entirely in Russian. Back then, before I came to St. Petersburg, my Russian was weaker than my father’s had been, even though mine had come from my Ph.D., and his was primarily self-taught. It took me three reads to get the full scope of the letter, and even now that my Russian is fairly good, I wonder if there are elements I miss or misunderstand. Roughly, this is what it said:

  Dear Mr. Bezetov,

  You may find it strange to receive a fan letter from an American. Then again, you might get many a day, for all I know. There’s a lot to admire about your career, generally—the originality and radicalism of your strategy, your perseverance in the face of almost certain defeat, your remarkable intelligence. All of this is especially captivating for a person who has spent many years paying close attention to the significance of opening gestures; one suspects that you will go far. I feel a certain affinity with you, I suppose, because I’m fighting my own complicated match these days—and am, I fear, nearing the bitterest of losses. And I’m wondering if there’s a question you might find time to answer for me.

  You wouldn’t be where you are if you weren’t mostly a winner—a winner, that is, at those matches that have counted the most. And yet there have been games, matches, tournaments that you’ve lost. And among these, surely, are games, matches, tournaments that you’ve known all along you were losing. Surely there are those that have been lost from the start, those in which your intellect proved itself to be the limited and temporary and mortal intellect that it does not always seem to be. When you find yourself playing such a game or match or tournament, what is the proper way to proceed? What story do you tell yourself when that enormous certainty is upon you and you scrape up against the edges of your own self?

  Please forgive the oddity of the questions. Chalk it up to the sentimentality or the lunacy—or perhaps, charitably, the clarity—that comes from leaving too much, too soon.

  With appreciation,

  Prof. Frank Ellison

  I read it over once more and sat down on the radiator for a long minute. It’s possible that I cried the slightest bit. And then I read it again. I was struck by the formality of the tone. The bit about “opening gestures” was my approximation of a phrase that was somewhat difficult to translate—literally, I think it was “the commencing gambit”—a reference to the early signs of my father’s illness, no question, but an odd phrase for him to use. And even post-translation, the whole letter was written in a different idiolect than I remembered as my father’s—though the vocabulary he used with me, I had to remind myself, was inevitably that which one uses with a child. My father had never spoken to me as an adult because he had never known me as an adult. So it’s wrong for me to say whether any particular tone, any particular language, was or wasn’t typical for my father. The truth is, I did not know.

  Similarly, I did not know what this letter meant to my father, what kind of feature it was in the misty landscape of his life. Perhaps it was strange, or perhaps it was wholly singular, or perhaps his life had been full of letters of this kind—to chess champions, to squash players, to noted economists, to circus performers. Maybe this letter, this affinity, was one of many. Then I read it again and decided I didn’t think so.

  He knew he was going, and maybe that gave him some particular insight—some inexplicable knowledge that this, this, was the proper way to exit, the proper narrative to follow. I am approaching my own end now and am still awaiting that particular bolt of understanding, but that’s not the point. If my father found it, then I’m happy for him.

  I thought about his questions. Clearly, he must have been thinking a lot about fate when he wrote the letter, and he wanted Aleksandr Bezetov to offer some authoritative comment on the issue. My father was not a religious man—or if he was, he hid it very well—and I don’t think he saw fate as a preordained ending invented by some cruel, self-amused deity. When my father wrote about fate—which might as easily have been meant as destiny or even, perhaps, future—I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been. When one is afflicted with a genetic disaster that one has a 50 percent chance of escaping, this kind of thinking becomes prominent. One feels like a special kind of loser to lose at fifty-fifty odds.

  I wondered if my father ever received an answer. The fact that the letter was photocopied suggested that he’d sent the original. But perhaps not—maybe he’d been overtaken by embarrassment, second-guessing, time, distraction, and finally, illness.

  I rifled through the papers twice but found no response from Aleksandr. There was, however, a brief note from somebody else.

  Dear Prof. Ellison,

  Thank you for your letter. Unfortunately, Mr. Bezetov isn’t able to respond to your queries at this time. I wish you all the best with finding your answers.

  Best,

  Elizabeta Nazarovna

  I read the note again. She was a secretary, most likely, though there was something a little wistful about the phrasing, as though she’d read my father’s letter in a capacity that went beyond purely official duties. I stared at the box for a long time, listening to the silence reverberate around the house and wondering. It was clear that my father never got his answers from Aleksandr Bezetov. And that seemed an unjust thing for a person who got so little else.

  Maybe that was when I first thought of going. I was already looking for a graceful exit from Jonathan’s life, and—I’m not above admitting it—I was already looking for a last adventure. I did not want to put my mother through something she’d barely survived the first time. The thought of running to look for answers to my father’s questions had an alluring symmetry. Like a chess move, this move was an iteration of preexisting realities. Though it’s true that such a move was in no way inevitable, and finding answers—or, indeed, Bezetov himself—would be nothing short of miraculous.

  But as Nabokov’s loathed Dostoyevsky pointed out, miracles never bother a realist.

  5

  ALEKSANDR

  Leningrad, 1980

  Aleksandr kept going to the Saigon every week for the rest of the winter, and his visits there became the dull smudge of dawn against the bleak, interminable horizons of his days. It was not a warm dawn, rosy and flooded with sunshine and hope—Nikolai was rude, and Ivan was pompous, and Aleksandr quickly grew to understand that neither of them particularly liked him—but it was fundamentally better than nighttime. On Saturday mornings, when there were fewer police out, Ivan and Nikolai would take him downtown to the banned-book market, which moved every week. At night they’d sometimes go to see underground art shows at the culture club of the Kirov plant, or go to see Sankt-Peterburg play at the Saigon and then drunkenly debate the band’s purported monarchist leanings. Sundays Aleksandr spent holed up in his room, poring over sloppy translations of Kurt Vonnegut and Iris Murdoch, which interested him more than the jaunty stories about intrepid boys in challenging natural circumstances that he’d read at school in Okha. Weekdays he spent at the academy, or in the bright gymnasiums of universities, beating everybody, hitting the timers with his thumb. Passage of time seemed a product of Aleksandr’s own sheer will, as though he were exerting all his best strategy against the days, forcing them to relent and eventually disappear.

  At first Aleksandr was universally dismissed—dismissed because he was so young, and eastern, and fierce-faced; dismissed, he finally decided, because people found themselves wanting to believe he was stupid, and this desire sometimes outlasted evidence to the contrary. But slowly, the world began to take notice—first within the academy, where his amassed collection of wins, and the startling ways he’d acquired them, began to elicit attention, then suspicion, then hatred—and then outside the academy, via a moderately sized profile in Literaturnaya Gazeta. It wouldn’t be long, he could only figure, before word
of his greatness bled out completely onto the streets and became widely known. The profile was just the beginning. Once things really got going, he would have to learn to be self-abnegating and funny about it all. It was best to be modest when one’s life changed. And he loved to think about how his life would change. The steward might bring him tea and saiki in the mornings. She might brag about him to new tenants as though he were a selling point of the building, along with the location and the indoor plumbing. Some bitter night he might hear Elizabeta mention him to someone outside his door, her voice like the whisper of dried flower petals falling to the floor. “That’s where he lives,” she’d say. “Aleksandr. The chess prodigy.” He’d settle back into his dreams then, and in his head the cerulean sea would turn to black-and-white blocks that he’d skate across to the edge of the earth.

  It was only a matter of time, he’d known, until he’d play Andronov. The certainty of this was something of a standing joke among the other boys. If he tried something new or bizarre, the boys would say, “Are you going to try that on Andronov?” If he made a mistake—rarely, rarely, though it did happen—the boys would shriek and yell that Andronov would not let him get away with that. But when Andronov grabbed him by the ear one day and pulled him into the back office, Aleksandr was surprised. “Am I in trouble?” he said. He’d been playing Oleg, a bright white boy who seemed to make a game of how little he could speak.

  “Come with me,” said Andronov.

  Aleksandr shrugged at Oleg, who started to put away his pieces. Aleksandr followed Andronov down the hall to his office, where Andronov plopped into a chair. “Sit,” he said. Aleksandr did.

  Between them was Andronov’s antediluvian desk, overrun with wedges of chess books and creaking antique sets. Under different circumstances, it would have been interesting to explore Andronov’s office—in particular, it would have been interesting to see what breathlessly admiring notes about Aleksandr were contained in Andronov’s vast collection of papers. But today was not the day, and Aleksandr was beginning to understand, as he vainly tried to get Andronov to look at him, that there might never be one.

  Andronov threw a copy of Literaturnaya Gazeta toward Aleksandr. “So,” he said. “I see you’ve been talking to the press.”

  “Well, technically, the press was talking to me.”

  “I see you offer some opinions about the skill level of your peers here at the academy.”

  “They asked me!”

  Andronov shoved a wheezing set toward Aleksandr. “Play,” he said.

  “I’m white?”

  “Play.”

  Aleksandr opened with a sedate Nimzo-Indian Defense. A ritualized, bloodless exchange of pieces soon followed. Andronov hemmed; his hands grew inky and his forehead shiny, and Aleksandr saw that he was not committing to a pawn structure. Occasionally, he muttered tensely into the game, as though it were the chessboard’s audacious attitude that he’d found fault with, not Aleksandr’s.

  “After this,” said Andronov at last. “Where will you go?”

  “Go? What are you talking about?” Aleksandr felt a dry contraction in his throat that squeezed its way down his body. If he pretended not to understand, maybe he wouldn’t have to. They were headed for a draw here, he figured.

  Andronov positioned his fat elbows on the books, where their dimples winked at Aleksandr menacingly. “After you beat me, where will you go? You think you can stay here after this? You think we’ll participate in a farce like that?”

  “Oh,” said Aleksandr. “Do you think I’ll beat you?” But he was starting to worry. Andronov had sailed his bishop to h2, ignoring that Aleksandr could trap the bishop—he’d corner it between pawns, and its power would be squandered for the duration.

  “Could I, I don’t know,” said Aleksandr. “Could I help, maybe?” He flicked his pawn to g3, buttressing Andronov’s bishop in its own prison.

  “Help? With what? The cleaning? You want to do the laundry? You want to be our washerwoman?” He drew his h pawn forward, harnessing small arms.

  “I mean maybe I could teach?”

  At this, Andronov’s elbows descended onto the table with a meaty crash. “Teach? You want to teach here? You see, tovarish, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. That arrogance. Nobody can stand it. Nobody could stand it before, and nobody can stand it now.”

  Aleksandr backtracked his king diagonally before he spoke. “I’m not trying to be arrogant,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t really have anywhere else to go during the days.”

  “Find somewhere, if you’re so smart.” Andronov advanced his pawn once more. He was hoping to secure the bishop’s release. Aleksandr could see damp swirls of sweat coursing down his neck.

  Aleksandr realized then that he was angry. He usually didn’t realize he was angry until it was too late, but today he was making a note of it as it was happening. Andronov seemed to tremble in his vision, and he heard the sound of an animal crashing through the forest somewhere in the very back of his head. He moved his king laterally. It breathed down the neck of Andronov’s bishop.

  “I thought being successful was a good thing,” he said. He was keeping his voice neutral. He was making declarative statements. “I thought it would reflect well on the school. I thought you’d be—pleased.” He’d almost said “proud.”

  “Pleased? No, tovarish.” Andronov pulled at his temples, took off his glasses, and looked up at Aleksandr for the first time, maybe ever. His eyes were like little pearls in the endless nude folds of an oyster. “I’m neither pleased nor displeased by the successes or failures of my students. I’m here only to run an efficient chess academy, and your presence is not conducive to that.” Andronov’s bishop retreated by one square, futilely, and Aleksandr realized for the first time how badly Andronov had not wanted to lose.

  “I see,” said Aleksandr. He took Andronov’s bishop with his king.

  “Good,” said Andronov. “Then we’re in agreement. You will be gone by this afternoon.” He gave a nod, disturbing his chins. The game, it seemed, was at an end.

  Aleksandr walked out into the hallway and looked up at the high arching ceiling. Stingy, dirty-looking light streamed in through the great windows, giving the room a constant feeling of impending indoor rain. It was true he hadn’t really learned anything here. But he’d liked the feeling of doing what he came to Leningrad for; he’d liked, too, the anesthetizing psychic disappearance he experienced when he beat the other men. He hadn’t woken up excited to go to the academy, but at least he’d woken up knowing where he would go. He could not imagine a life in Leningrad without it. He could not understand what it would look like, how his days would organize themselves, what would prompt him to get out of bed or how anybody would know whether he was alive or what would keep him here at all, come to think of it. Surely there would be other tournaments, other successes ahead, but without the academy, there was nothing concrete tethering him to Leningrad. He could float away—into outer space, up into the hoary slopes of the forbidding north, back to Okha to kill the chickens for his mother. There was nothing keeping him here or anywhere. And in the absence of an excuse to be elsewhere, Aleksandr found himself heading to the bar across the street.

  After an hour of drinking and self-pity, Aleksandr realized that the man sitting next to him was staring. Aleksandr pretended to crack his neck so as to get a look at him. When he turned, he caught the man’s eye. His gaze was patient, and Aleksandr wondered how long he had been sitting there. “Cigarette?” said the man.

  He was well groomed, though his nails were stained with cataracts of yellow nicotine, and his breath, when he leaned close, reminded Aleksandr of his own mortality. The man was an apparatchik.

  “I don’t smoke,” said Aleksandr, moving slightly away.

  The man stared at Aleksandr bemusedly for a moment. His nose was running in a way that made Aleksandr nervous. “You don’t smoke,” he said. “Of course you don’t smoke. I feel I’ve read this about you.”

  For a bu
oyant moment, Aleksandr flattered himself that the man meant he’d read this about Aleksandr in the paper. But of course not.

  “In my file,” said Aleksandr. He’d known he probably had a file—it was even a little gratifying; it meant something about his game. But to hear it mentioned in public was startling. Its existence was understood but indecent, like the mechanics of human reproduction.

  “Myself, I don’t drink,” said the man cheerfully. “So we’re both deviant.”

  “You don’t drink?”

  “Not on the job, anyway. Even that’s unusual enough, though.” He leaned back; the miserly neon bar light made a corona around his head. “You drink, for example.”

  “I’m starting to need to.”

  “Alcoholism is a disease of capitalism.” The man stubbed out his cigarette. “Anyway, you’re young.”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “That’s gruesomely young.”

  “This is what they tell me.”

  At this, the man laughed, as though somebody had told him that Aleksandr was going to try very hard to be funny and that it was best to humor him. He made a show of dragging his arm along his eyes, as though wiping away tears of mirth. “Forgive me,” he said, offering his hand and identification. “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Petr Pavlovich Nikitin. I’m something of a liaison between the Party and the game.”