A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  He nodded solemnly.

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s about right.”

  Then we sat quietly and began to play our usual game. My heart wasn’t in it, so he went easy on me, I realize—I came closer to beating him that day than I probably ever had. But I did not win. And now, I suppose, I never will.

  “You are almost no fun at all without language,” I said halfway through the game. Lars stuck out his tongue, I guess to convey that he was at least a little bit fun without language.

  “It’s too bad that you don’t want to talk,” I said. “Because I have news.”

  He turned his face to the side and narrowed his eyes. Lars loves to gossip, and I knew it would bother him to have to abstain from gossiping, even in the service of his noble political objectives. He grabbed a pen and flipped his petition over. What? he wrote.

  And so I began to talk. And talk. I rambled with uncharacteristic fluidity, unhinged and incoherent and even more self-absorbed than usual. What I was getting at, I guess, was that I was terrified, although I never would have come flat out and said so, to Lars or to anyone. Lars could tell, though—you don’t achieve his heights of success in life without an instinctive ability to read people—and he watched me swirl my coffee, ignore my muffin, and knock over my pawns with an expression of mounting disgust. I was midway through a monologue about the relative merits of a quiet departure from Jonathan’s life before he could see my brain break down, when Lars couldn’t take it anymore. He nearly spat out his coffee and his five weeks of silence along with it.

  “Oh, please,” he said. “Don’t you know that you like to feel this way? You like to brood. It is, I am afraid, your limited charm.”

  “You’re talking.”

  “You drove me to it.”

  “I don’t brood. I contemplate.”

  “What do you want me to say to you?” His eyebrows waggled mournfully, and he offered me his castle in despair. “You never listen. That’s why you never get any better at chess.”

  “I’ve gotten better,” I said, watching the castle, trying to catch sight of whatever gruesome trick he might be baiting me for. “Haven’t I?”

  “No,” he said. “You haven’t.”

  “Oh.” I took the castle and waited—waited for the wire to be tripped, the world to crash down on me, a plague of bishops to fall on my besieged head. But nothing happened. He skimmed his knight over into the neighborhood of my queen. For now, at least for now, I had sustained a minor victory.

  “Look, if you want to run away, run away. I’m not stopping you.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But maybe you should stay with this man for a little bit. He’s probably very dull but unlikely to be any duller than you. You have some sex, you know? It will be good for you. Sex, yes? You’ve heard of it?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “It will be good for you. It will make you smile. You are always so serious.” He made a mock-serious face at me. His cheeks puffed out and his eyes shone earnestly.

  “You look like Kim Jong Il.”

  “Or don’t. Fine. You want to be sad and sorry, you go ahead. Probably better for your game this way.”

  “That’s a primary concern of mine.”

  “Yes. I am sure. Check your king.”

  As I was on my way out of the game and the conversation, Lars actually grabbed my lapel and pulled me down, close to his graying face. He blinked at me reproachfully. “Look,” he said. “Since I’m already talking, since you’ve already ruined my petition, I’ll tell you something. You know what your problem is?”

  “I daresay I do.”

  “You are afraid to have anything you care about leaving,” he said victoriously, as though he’d just toppled my king for exactly the one thousandth time in a row—which, it’s entirely possible, he already had.

  “What?” I said. “There are a lot of things I care about leaving.”

  “No,” said Lars, sitting back down on his concrete slab, his voice thickening into something deeper, more somber. Usually, his voice tripped lightly between stories and lies, advice and aphorism—the ongoing banter of a magician who is trying, ultimately, to keep you from seeing what he’s doing. Now his voice dropped a register; his accent seemed to flatten slightly. “Right now,” he said, “the only thing you can’t stand to leave is yourself. Maybe there are other things you like. Maybe there are other people you enjoy. Your old pal Lars, for example. But the only thing you absolutely cannot bear to lose is your own—what? Self-knowledge?”

  I squirmed in my seat. “Self-awareness, maybe.”

  “Self-awareness. You are in love with your own self-awareness.”

  “I am fond of my own self-awareness, sure,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, nondefensive, restrained. “Isn’t everyone, though?”

  “Some of us more than others, maybe.”

  I scanned Harvard Square for a moment—the ebb and flow of multicolored humanity, the rotating courses of individuals with their competing agendas and dreams and plans for the day. The girls who marched through the square in business attire, making international phone calls, were starting to look heartbreakingly young to me. One of them stood still, holding a bouquet of flowers in one arm and her phone in the other, talking angrily in what I thought was Mandarin Chinese.

  “Your life has been too quiet,” Lars said decisively, and I drew my attention back to him. “Your life has been too lonely.”

  I looked into my coffee cup hard and noticed with some alarm that there was a shimmering sheen floating across the top.

  “Well,” I said, trying to fight down the minor seizure happening in my throat. “I’m thinking of going to Russia.”

  “To Russia?” He sat back. “Why? Your beloved old pedophile?” He meant Nabokov.

  I shook my head. “No.” I sucked in my cheeks and straightened up in my chair. “I want to meet Aleksandr Bezetov. The chess player.”

  “Ah,” said Lars, looking at his nails with interest. “Thinking of challenging him to a game?”

  “My father and he were correspondents, actually.” I said this huffily, in the overly offhand way that people mention things they are desperately, embarrassingly proud of.

  “Indeed?” he said. His eyes twinkled with an elfin merriment that might have been endearing were it not so self-satisfied. I waited for him to ask about the details but realized he wasn’t going to. Lars’s brush with political dissidence had made him patient, stoic.

  “They were correspondents before my father was ill.”

  Lars’s tufts of gray hair were starting to be backlit by the afternoon sun, and in silhouette they made his head look either haloed or horned. “You know,” he said, “I drove across Soviet Russia in the eighties. Nasty place. The women, though. The women there are amazing.” I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. With a wave of his hand, he relegated this trip, with whatever dangers and briberies it had involved or should have involved, to the vast vault of items deemed none of my business.

  “Well, great,” I said. “I don’t trouble myself with countries possessed of substandard women.” His face was taking on a sentimental look, arranging itself into a far-off gaze and a wistful smile, an expression worthy of double-edged regrets and state secrets. I was losing his attention. We were sinking back into the realm of the fictive—whatever shreds of reality just emerged were going to disappear under churning waves of sarcasm, speculation, and story. “Enough,” I said. “Stop that right now.” I stood up, and this time I meant it.

  His face refocused slightly with the momentary clarity of a poker player who suddenly knows that his opponent isn’t kidding around. “Irina,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s good for you to have an adventure.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “You’ll send me a postcard, won’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “And,” he said. “Just think of how many stories you’ll have to tell me when you get back.” H
e hugged me. He smelled of ash, with wilder undertones of coffee and sky and liquor before noon. And then he clapped me on the back, and I turned and walked down Mass Ave. I left him there, sitting on his block, reorganizing his pieces, and though I have no way of knowing for sure, I would imagine that he’s sitting there still.

  I shuffled forward in line at Sheremetyevo, squinting at the Cyrillic on the signs and mouthing words to myself. I proffered my papers and had them stamped glumly, suspiciously. I coursed through mobs of older, cabbage-scented women; younger women with clacking talons and color-leeched hair; shifty-eyed men who shuffled and cut the lines. Everybody seemed to know better than to complain.

  “Business or pleasure?” said the customs official, his head cocked to one side, his expression an unlikely blend of paranoid suspicion and boredom.

  I thought about it for a moment. Pleasure seemed absurd as I looked past the man and into the airport—at the fraying upholstery on the walls and the truncated skeletons of what must have, at one point, been chairs. The air was bizarrely cold. Forlorn old women squatted by the windows. Women my age manned kiosks, their gum snapping like rubber bands against skin. A dog with the size and grace of a hyena stalked one corner, and nothing in his manner suggested that he was employed by the airport.

  “Business or pleasure, please?” the man said again, his tone suggesting that he might be offering me firing squad or lethal injection.

  “Business.” As soon as I said it, I knew it to be true.

  The air outside was muggy and chilled at the same time. It was the kind of weird weather that creeps up on you, makes you sweat under your jacket and then makes your sweat turn to ice. A line of taxicabs lurked along the curb; the drivers had the fierce look of men who tamed wild things for a living. I hailed one and situated myself in its backseat. I produced from my pocket my hostel information and Elizabeta’s phone number and address. My eyes were dry and feeling slightly dislodged. This whole thing was already feeling like a suspect undertaking.

  “Maly Zlatoustinskiy, please,” I said. We peeled out of the airport parking lot. Clouds were starting to clot along the horizon, and I watched bone-colored housing units begin to take shape beneath them. The outside of the city was as anonymous and dour as rural semi-civilization anywhere; when I rolled down the window and felt the dirty rain smack against my cheek, watched the bright yellow cellphone ads materialize, and smelled the exhaust, I felt as if I might have been in New Jersey. As we got closer to the city, though, I could feel foreignness start to accumulate like weather. Along the road were stands selling pastries, with hand-printed signs in Cyrillic, stark black lettering against cardboard. Small, scoured-looking trees squatted against the wind. The wind was different, too: it had an untrammeled quality, as though it had sailed without interruption across a country frighteningly vast. I thought of the map of my father’s above the chess sets in his study: the chicken-fat-yellow USSR, hunched above the world like a jaguar in a tree, waiting to pounce. Even now, even reduced by history and one-third of its landmass, I thought I could feel something of its size as I looked out the window. The plains crashed into the white sky like an ocean on a flat earth.

  Moscow was upon us in bits, incrementally visible through the murk. The traffic was horrendous, the graffiti multilayered and emphatic. The men were light-skinned and square-jawed, with the kind of bland good looks that have always made me feel slightly menaced. In the women you could see the jostling of the centuries. The old women were Tolstoyan and nearly toothless, with gnomic features and fiercely wrapped kerchiefs. The young women were as elaborately assembled as the women of the Upper West Side, although some were elegant (swept hair and dark clothes, sparse and gleaming bits of jewelry) and some were tacky (bejeweled bosoms, tricked-out hair, the ruffled pelts of various unidentifiable Siberian weasels). They moved through the streets like the competing emissaries of various historical periods. In front of a department store, a man sat on a box with a chained and collared chimpanzee. I watched everything in a daze, retroactively registering the miracle of air travel. I’d snapped my fingers, rashly spent some money, and here I was—across the universe in a forbidding country where I knew no one, with only a scrawled and suspect address to guide me. Nobody had stopped me. Only a few people had even noticed.

  The taxi let me out in front of my hostel. I got out and buzzed the doorbell. On one wall of the hostel, SLUT INFLUX was spray-painted in big block letters. A noise that sounded like the honk of a monster indicated that the door had been unlocked. I climbed the creaking stairs and found myself at the top of the stairway, at the end of a hall, standing in a yellow orb of light. A young man with weirdly rockabilly hair sat at the front desk, tapping his foot. The reflection of the computer screen was cast onto the glass cabinet behind him, and I could see a green expanse with miniature numbers and playing cards along the bottom.

  “Wait,” he said in English without looking at me.

  I waited. He clicked his mouse. I looked around the lobby. On the walls were fraying posters of various Russian landmarks—the Hermitage, St. Basil’s, Lake Baikal. There was an incomprehensible map of Moscow, the subway system color-coded like nerves and capillaries in a medical textbook. There was an advertisement for an art show that had concluded in 2002. On the glass, a fifth shimmering card was overturned. The boy kicked the desk.

  “Blyad,” he said. He turned to me. “Name?”

  “Irina Ellison,” I said, producing my passport. He took it and flipped to my picture, which was outdated and silly—taken in college, before I’d gotten my results, when I was affecting a smile that I’d not yet realized looked affected. My hair was short, and the skin around my mouth was flat, and my eyes sat in my skull properly, without being surrounded by semicircles the color of weak tea. I looked, I saw with a start, young. And it’s only when you see how young you once were that you become, in your own mind, old.

  “Hm,” he said, and snapped closed the passport. He filed it away for safekeeping and collateral and handed me a pair of keys and a map with our building circled on it. “Here is Moscow boardinghouse.” He pointed with a marker. “Here is metro. Here is bar. You are thirteen.” He pointed down the hallway, which curved around menacingly. Smoke hung visibly in the air, making the light look greasy.

  I took the map and the keys and wound my way down the hall, my luggage thumping behind me as though I were being followed by a deformed dog. I’d splurged on a private room, and I found it much as I’d imagined it—dim and dark and cold but serviceable. I dropped my luggage to the floor. I turned the key and locked myself in. I was here, strange as it was to realize. In my wallet, I carried the letter my father had drafted to Bezetov. Tomorrow I would start tracking down the answers to his questions. But tonight all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball, turn my back to the wall, and fall asleep in my clothes. I lay on the bed and closed my eyes.

  I woke up fourteen hours later, although it took me a while to figure that out. I’d had restless, shivering dreams that disappeared immediately from memory but left me unhinged. I looked out my window and tried to discern the hour, but the outdoors looked oddly timeless. A fine film of rain was filling the air like ambient noise. The sky was white. On the street churned a sluggish river of people, moving too slowly for business and too dully for pleasure. I looked at my watch and tried to think. It was nearly two in the afternoon.

  In the light of day, I could give my room a more complete inspection. There were mysterious stains on the floor, and I soon found an apocalyptic toilet down the hall. In the shower, the smell of somebody’s gardenia shampoo floated just above the smell of wet dirt. I walked down the hall and passed the rockabilly poker player, who was shuffling his iPod with his thumb. There was a horrific smell outside the hostel’s entrance. I declined to investigate its source.

  Downstairs I found a tabac selling tiny bear pins and bottled water. Candies of no discernible national origin sported nutrition information in fourteen tiny languages. Depressed-looking pornography was so
ld alongside gossip magazines, forbidding copies of Pravda, the international edition of Time. I bought some chocolate-covered banana jellies and sat on a park bench and thought, for the first time since landing, about what I was really doing here.

  In the light of day, asking Bezetov to answer my father’s letter—a letter he’d never even read, most likely—seemed presumptuous and a few degrees beyond odd. When I tried to understand what I’d get out of it, I felt weirdly stupid, like a person trying to do a math problem in a dream. It was true that my father had wanted these answers, but it was also true that he’d managed to die without getting them. Surely I could do the same. I wasn’t sure how to approach Bezetov, even if I could find him. He was being constantly mauled by chess fans, I supposed, and maybe I could pretend that was what this was about. Maybe I could pretend that the whole undertaking was just the dying vanity project of a middle-class American—weren’t other, richer people with more mainstream interests always doing things like this? They hired professional chefs to teach them about soufflés. They learned obsolete languages. Having grown weary of perfecting the commoner abilities in life, they sought to acquire more exotic ones—windsurfing, herb growing, flower arranging. I could pretend that this was like that. I could pretend that I was vainly, fitfully meeting the demands of my own ego.

  But the fact remained: Bezetov was whom my father had written to when the hourglass was running, its sand hissing with the force of an arterial hemorrhage. Maybe there was something my father knew that I didn’t yet. Maybe there was something he knew that I would need to know soon enough. I wasn’t sure that looking for it was a sensible way to spend one’s last twelve to twenty-four months. But it would have to be sufficient.

  I took Elizabeta’s number out of my pocket and ran my finger across her name and address. I called her again, and explained who I was, and reminded her of my quest for Bezetov.

  “Oh,” she said. “I remember you.”