Aleksandr remembered the silken hands of Petr Pavlovich, he remembered the admonishment not to be foolish. Not bad advice, all things considered.
“Even though we’re not a secret,” said Ivan, “you need to behave always as though we are. Crucially, you need not to be followed, because we don’t want to let go of our details. You and me and Nikolai here, we’re worthless bachelors, and who could care what happens to us.” Aleksandr could not decide whether this level of indifference was something to admire or disdain or fear.
“But we have subscribers, we have contributors, with families,” said Ivan. “We need to minimize their chances of arrest. Thus, we need to be as discreet as possible, all the while remembering that we’re not kidding ourselves. Okay? Luckily, the KGB isn’t as artful as you might think. Sometimes there will literally be a white Volga driving slowly around the city, waiting for you at corners.” He took a swallow of kvass and grimaced slightly. “But sometimes it will be a bit subtler. The best you can do is zig and zag around the streets. Don’t take the same route habitually, and never start coming here on a routine. Find plausible reasons to be wherever you’re going—the culinary store, the footwear store. And if you think you’re being followed, bore them to death.”
“Okay,” said Aleksandr slowly. He stared at his glass. Cloudy filaments drifted through the kvass like seaweed in a briny sea. “I’m pretty sure I can do that much.”
“The bottom line is that you will be known. You will be noticed. It will go in your file. At the same time, you can never, never be followed, because we need to protect the others. You can never have any information on your person. No lists. No addresses. No maps. But this is no challenge for a man of such formidable memory, yes?”
“I think I can manage.”
“You get called in for questioning, you’re gone, okay? You think someone’s followed you here, you go sit in the park for an hour, and then you get back on the metro and go home and never come back.”
“You never come back,” said Nikolai severely. “We won’t be offended.”
Aleksandr stared at Nikolai. “I like your jacket,” he said.
Nikolai took a gulp of kvass and looked down.
“Aleksandr,” said Ivan, twirling a tether of sausage on his bent fork, “you are blessed with a face and manner that nobody can recall. I’m too tall, and Nikolai’s too ugly—forgive me, Nikolai—to blend in a crowd. You are anonymous. Not to the authorities, of course. But to the people they ask to describe you. If they harass a subscriber and ask him who brought the journal, what’s he going to say? Oh, the man was not so tall, not so short, brown hair, plain face, two eyes, and a nose? It will make it difficult for them to figure out exactly what you are doing, exactly where you have been. And nobody around you will ever suspect you. You look too dumb to be up to anything.”
“Okay,” said Aleksandr. “Wonderful. It’s nice to be appreciated.”
“Indeed,” said Ivan, returning his sausage to the plate without eating it. “Welcome to distribution.”
Distribution meant waking up very early in the morning, following carefully memorized directions to obsessively confirmed addresses, and knocking. Aleksandr wore a heavy hat for this, which took on a rich animal smell in precipitation, and he tilted it forward so that it cast dark shadows over his dark face. This was in case anyone recognized him—in case anyone looked up from his paper one morning and wondered what Aleksandr Bezetov, subject of a small feature article in Literaturnaya Gazeta, was doing riding public transportation. But, as he learned from walking around the city anonymously in the afternoons—after his route was over and his hat was off and he turned his face up toward the wilting sun—it was probably an unnecessary precaution.
He met interesting people this way—the subscriber list was small but diverse and full of people Aleksandr never would have expected. There were women, for one thing, and older people, and one or two people who’d been forced to make public self-denunciations that year. He’d been provided with detailed descriptions of their physical appearance. If anybody else answered the door, he asked directions to the metro in his best approximation of broken Russian until that door was slammed. The client list was always under twenty people. Occasionally, a new person who’d gained the trust of Ivan and Nikolai at the Saigon might be added to the list; occasionally, somebody got paranoid or got a promotion and frantically, rudely told Aleksandr to please never, never come back. And so he didn’t.
Some mornings he spent walking around the city, other mornings he spent taking the metro, and many mornings were a combination of both: riding the metro a few stops and then walking a mile only to reconnect with the metro again. This was Ivan’s idea, and it was the way Aleksandr came to feel he owned and understood the city: the constant early-morning romping that brought him down into the elegant bowels of the station, ornate and ostentatious and reinforced against nuclear attack; then up into the weak white of a Leningrad dawn, trudging into the mist while the city around him became a phantom and then a specter and then a silhouette; then back down to the metro, where the men hurried and jostled and the lights dripped like the chandeliers on the Titanic.
It was on a metro morning in what was allegedly spring that Aleksandr saw Elizabeta at work. She was standing on a subway platform at five A.M., half hanging off the arm of an enormous man who looked like a dinosaur. She was at the very end of her night, Aleksandr figured. Her black attire that moved as though it were its own system, with its own provocative ideas, looked undone somehow; her face, still almost beautiful, looked older. There were bluish pits of fatigue under her eyes, and her makeup seemed miscalculated. The man’s great forehead was like a shelf overhanging his face. He leaned close to Elizabeta and said something to her, and she laughed the same laugh she had used with the steward.
Aleksandr would tell himself later that he almost went to her. He thought about it. He really thought about it. He could go gather her up with him, bring him on his mission, pay the man back whatever he had spent on her, with interest, and then run laughing out into the street, leaving the man behind to shift his prehistoric mass in anger and confusion.
But there was work to do—for him and, he knew, for Elizabeta. And work, of course, was sacred. So he stopped watching and turned away and kept moving, up the enormous, unending staircase that led to the city and the day.
6
IRINA
Moscow, 2006
My flight landed at Sheremetyevo at night, but the line at customs was long. Angling over the landscape during our rickety descent, I’d watched the weak lights that Moscow cast up into the universe, and I was struck by how small they seemed in comparison to the rest of it: the enormity, the darkness. The flight had been long—the six hours over the churning Atlantic, the three hours chewing overpriced and mysterious British sandwiches at Heathrow, and the last restless, hiccuping leg of the journey to Russia. The flight attendants had been conspiratorial and hostile. I’d flipped through my Russian 3 book and tried to order a soda. They’d rolled their eyes and looked me up and down and asked me in English whether I might prefer a diet. I’d pressed my face against the cool window and looked out and asked myself: How? Why? For what?
What happened was Jonathan wanted me to move in with him. We were in love, I guess, and moving in together, in our culture, is part of the natural progression of that particular disease. I’d told him yes, and then I’d told him maybe, and then I’d told him I was leaving the country forever.
I knew that I could not move in with Jonathan. I knew—really, I knew—that we had been playacting. The sentiment was real enough, I suppose, but the rest was composed of gestures imitating the behavior of other people, people who had an entire future to love and fail each other. And there was something almost insulting in his asking—something patronizing at worst and willfully clueless at best. It was as though he had not been paying attention. I was thirty. I was in my last year or two of sound body and mind. I was not going to move in with Jonathan only to have him
watch whatever things he’d improbably loved about me disappear. I don’t sentimentalize love so much that I think it can endure such assault. It’s one thing to love a person who is absent; it’s quite another to love a person who is reduced and deformed and endlessly, endlessly present. I had loved my father once. Did I love the person he was when he died? I don’t know. What person was that?
I was going to leave Jonathan. Once I’d decided that, it seemed only right to leave everything else.
The night after Jonathan asked me, I came home to my empty apartment alone. I took out the letter my father had sent to Aleksandr Bezetov, and the terse reply from Elizabeta Nazarovna. I thought again about my father having to live and die with all his best questions unanswered. I thought again about Aleksandr Bezetov. I couldn’t help but hate him a little. All that energy and intelligence and, crucially, all that time—that whole average life expectancy—and he couldn’t find it within himself to answer my poor dying father’s few questions, abstract and intrusive though they were. It seemed like such a pittance for a man who had so much. It seemed so stingy to delegate a response—a nonresponse at that—to your secretary or whatever.
I looked again at the letter from the secretary. There was that vaguely sorry, vaguely sheepish tone, as though she knew that this was not the proper way of things. Elizabeta Nazarovna. Quite a mouthful, that.
I went to the computer. I typed in “Elizabeta Nazarovna” and “St. Petersburg.” I squinted through the Cyrillic and sounded out words. There was a birth announcement for a baby born in 1998. There was a reference to a dissident poet who had died in the purges. There were pictures of a very young woman from a social networking site. She had perfectly manicured hair and the long furry arms of an anorexic, and in every single photo she held a different swirly, improbably colored cocktail. There was a woman running a store selling vintage Communist paraphernalia. I clicked through an interminable number of Elizabetas: old, newborn, implicated, expatriated. And then, to my everlasting chagrin, I began calling them.
I made rules for myself: I called only people who lived in Moscow or St. Petersburg (nobody who’d ever lived in Leningrad would go back to the country, I figured, not if they could help it). I ruled out people who were too old or too young. I ruled out people who’d had professions in the seventies or early eighties. I got mostly wrong numbers and dial tones and a coldhearted, impossibly fast-speaking operator who furiously chastised me for a transgression beyond my understanding. I reached a child Elizabeta. I reached an uncomprehending Elizabeta. I reached the widower of a dead Elizabeta. Finally, I reached an Elizabeta with a faint, strangely fragile voice that said, “Da? Da?”
This wasn’t her, either, I didn’t think. She sounded like a particularly technophobic grandmother, somebody who talked at the phone as though the person she was addressing was actually inside it. What the hell, I thought, was I doing?
“Zdrastvuytye,” I said carefully. “Minya zavut Irina Ellison. Govorite po angielski?” Though I thought I could manage all of it in Russian, I figured it would be embarrassing enough in English. No need to make it worse, if that could be avoided.
There was a pause the length and temperature of the Cold War.
“Yes,” she said at last in English. “What do you want?” She sounded like she thought I was selling something, which was a reasonable conclusion. I’ve found that most people are selling something, even if they don’t always know what.
“This may sound odd,” I said. “But my father was a correspondent of Aleksandr Bezetov. Do you remember him?” I tried to keep my voice gentle and supplicating, a posture I’m not particularly good at adopting. I waited. There was another glacial silence, and I worried that I’d offended her. She was probably old, probably forgetful, and who knew what her relationship to Bezetov had been, and here I was asking her to grope for Gorbachev-era memories. I started to imagine kind ways to disentangle myself from the conversation—confusion about inverted numbers, swapped identities. But through the haze of my discomfort, which was expanding rapidly, filling up the silence, came her voice again, stronger this time, more certain.
“Aleksandr Bezetov,” she said, and I could hear her thawing out. Her voice had changed to clinking glass; behind it, I could hear the glinting echoes of laughter. “Yes. I believe I remember a thing or two about him. That dumb kid.”
I’d never thought of the esteemed Aleksandr Bezetov as a kid, and I tried to think of the kind of woman who would. She’d have to be old, for one thing—older than I was ever going to be, anyway.
“You worked for him?” I said.
“Not exactly.”
“But you knew him?”
Another pause. This one was fuller somehow—rife with silent memories that seemed to register in the crackles of the telephone wire.
“Yes.”
I hung up the phone.
When you get ready to die, you look back over a lifetime and try to unravel its enduring questions. You retroactively assign meaning to chaos, you make coincidence into portent. You scan your past for moments that might have been road signs, and then you try to see which way they were pointing. It’s an unrelenting striving for tenuous links, a dazed hunting for patterns that may or may not exist. You are a child looking for a lost thing in the sand, racing against the tide and the approaching darkness, trying desperately to remember where you might have buried it.
When I scanned my life, I found an alarming lack of loose ends. Bezetov, in a way, felt like a loose end.
So I thought about Russia: cold and vast, criminal and corrupt and possessed of an impossible language, hostile to foreigners and women traveling alone. Then I thought about trying to sort through what few mysteries remained to me.
I double-checked my savings account: large from a lifetime of modest pay but too responsible living. I double-checked my age: one year, four months until average age of onset. I double-checked Elizabeta Nazarovna’s name and address.
It was logistically easy—almost too easy. I wasn’t trying to disappear. I was just trying to wrap up. But the accumulated attachments and obligations of an entire abbreviated lifetime took, in the end, under a week to resolve. I found myself wishing to leave behind a somewhat messier life. I half hoped that something would come up—an unknown bastard child, or a court case, or a professional emergency—that would require my attention, that would grab at me with insistent hands and pull me back to Boston and my life. But nothing did. I’d lived a life of relative simplicity and organization. I’d lived a life with an eye to leaving it. And here I was, leaving it, just as tidily as a traveler who doesn’t bother to unpack at the hotel room because she knows the time there is limited.
I withdrew my stocks and my savings. I submitted my final grades for my final cast of students, and then I submitted my resignation. I left three months’ rent for my landlord. I spent some time on the Internet. I spent some time counting the number of whims indulged in a lifetime (none, discernibly, in my case). And then I spent some time saying goodbye—which, like everything, is easier if you’ve got a head start.
I told everybody—mother, doctor, college friends, co-workers—that I was going on a trip. It was going to be meandering, I said, and spontaneous and luxurious and self-indulgent and, most important, very long. I said that I wanted to see the world while I still could; I said that I wanted to have an adventure on my own while I could still do anything on my own. My co-workers were supportive. My mother, I am sure, was relieved. People who’d never spoken of my diagnosis, people who’d never asked about my father, were thrilled to have a concrete and explicable and ultimately positive way to obliquely reference it. They talked about what an important decision it was. They talked about what a self-actualizing trip it would be. If they secretly thought I’d chosen an odd locale for my final vacation, they had the courtesy not to mention it.
I gave Jonathan the same line, more or less, though he understood me well enough to know that it probably was not true, that I was probably never coming back. H
e was disbelieving, of course, grief-stricken, angry, all that. He thought I was bluffing; he thought I was losing it. He wanted me to go to counseling.
I wasn’t bluffing, although I probably wasn’t at the most mentally stable moment of my entire life. But I wanted to say—and finally did during one of those last awful nights that I will spend the rest of my life trying not to remember—look: I am not the one who’s delusional. I am not the one with a distorted vision of reality.
Ultimately, what could he do? I am an adult woman and a United States citizen; financially independent; capable of affording an expedited visa. He couldn’t stop me, the way nobody can really stop anyone from leaving them, in the end.
A few days before I left, I went to play my last game with Lars. It was May, and the air was silky. It didn’t feel like a day to play chess, but I wanted someone to talk to. This, however, was not to be. Lars raised his eyebrows at me and said nothing. “Hello, old man,” I said when I sat down. “How’ve you been?” He shrugged and gestured beatifically to the chessboard.
“What?” I squinted. “Is something wrong with you?” Lars looked the same as usual—dishwater-gray hair, a sunburned nose, the personal presentation of a person who sleeps habitually under bridges—but his eyes shone with higher than usual spirits. He handed me a card.
In response to my recent detention by the FASCIST CAMBRIDGE POLICE, for disturbing the peace by singing, I have taken a vow of silence. Please support me in my endeavors to combat the FASCIST PIGS’ attempts to abolish LIFE, ART, and FREEDOM in our hometown.
“You got arrested? For singing?” Lars’s eyes flickered, and he pointed to the word “detention” in the note. “Detained? For singing?”
A Partial History of Lost Causes Page 9