A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  “I’m sorry for the broken connection the other day.”

  “I’ve been sitting here waiting by the phone ever since.”

  “I think there was some problem with the international calling.”

  There was silence that went on long enough to feel like skepticism.

  “Are you a reporter?” she said finally.

  “No,” I said, wondering if I should have been a reporter.

  “He’ll talk to Western reporters. He loves to talk to Western reporters. But I don’t like to. Talking to reporters is a young man’s game, I find.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said, sounding surer this time.

  “Nobody’s ever a reporter,” she said cryptically. “What’s your interest in him, then? Are you a chess fan?” Her voice was becoming businesslike, crisp, and I was starting to hear the faint sheen of British English over the staccato of her Russian accent.

  “Yes. Sort of. Not avidly. A casual fan, you might say.”

  “Are you political?” I heard the faint click and hiss of a cigarette lighter, followed by light wheezing.

  “Also casually.”

  “Nobody’s political, either.”

  There was a pause filled with some minor puffing. Then, horribly, she coughed. The cough sounded tubercular and wrenching, as though all the delicate things in her chest were coming painfully undone. When she was finished, she said, “Look,” which struck me as a strangely American thing to say. “You could try to talk to him yourself. But you have to be credentialed. You have to be from somewhere. You can’t come out of nowhere.”

  I thought for a moment. “What about a university?”

  “Maybe. Maybe a university would be okay,” she said, and her voice became coy and a bit sneering. “Why? Are you from a university?”

  “Yes,” I said boldly, and told her the name of my school. My former school. “I’m doing research.” What were they going to do—fire me? Have me killed? “I have a letter from you. My father wrote to Aleksandr, and you wrote him back.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Could I come see you, do you think? I’ll bring it.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Her voice was receding again, becoming brittle, like glass blown too thin. “Why are you here now to do your research? If you’re not political?”

  Something about telling a lie makes it easier to tell a hard truth. The truth feels hidden in plain sight, and you start to forget which things are true and which things you wish were true and which things you conjured from nowhere just to make a story sound better. “I’m probably dying this year,” I told her.

  “My dear,” said Elizabeta, and she coughed again. “That’s no great distinction.”

  7

  ALEKSANDR

  Leningrad, 1980

  And one night, at long last and against all odds, came a knock on the door. There was a glassy clinking and the breathy almost-sound of soft things shivering up against one another. And when Aleksandr pulled open the door, there was Elizabeta: summoned to his room at last by the magnetic draw of his imagining, over and over, this very moment.

  He’d been doing his mending by candlelight, and on his bed were piles of torn trousers. He stood in the doorway with a needle in one hand, wearing his worst shirt. Elizabeta was in her usual complicated black, and her hair was flying everywhere and catching colors in the weak hall light. In her hand she held a sheaf of paper.

  “I heard this was you,” she said, thrusting it into his hands.

  It was the most recent issue of the journal, open to a smeared black-and-white photo of a pained-looking man with a beard.

  “That’s not me,” said Aleksandr. “That’s Sharansky.”

  Elizabeta laughed then, a complicated, multidimensional laugh filled with genuine appreciation for a bad joke, as well as mild derision toward its badness and a faint undertone of self-reproach for laughing. It was the kind of laugh you could write a university thesis about.

  “Where did you get that?” said Aleksandr. When she pressed the journal into his hands, he thought, her thumb lingered against his palm.

  “Nowhere,” she said. “It was passed on to me. It doesn’t matter. Listen.” Her hair was falling out of the clip; it seemed unlikely to Aleksandr that the clip was even trying to do its job. It was purely decorative—like her shirt, come to think of it, which seemed too thin to offer much protection against any kind of weather. He wanted to feel how thin her shirt was, to take its fabric between his fingers and gently pull. Just to see.

  “Are you listening?” She’d wedged her shoulder against the door. “Can I come in?”

  “Um,” said Aleksandr, because there were the clumps of clothes on his bed, which wasn’t made, and the candles had burned down, and his teacup was making a puddle on the table, but she was already in, running long fingers against the walls, brushing aside the clothes and sitting on the bed without asking.

  “This is crazy,” she said, pointing to the journal.

  “Have you read it?”

  “I did. It’s very good. It’s very smart. But what I’m wondering is, are you suicidal?”

  “Not suicidal,” said Aleksandr. “Just showing off.”

  And then, just like that, her mouth was on his, although he wasn’t sure how. One moment he’d been speaking, and another moment the space between their mouths had disappeared. He drew one hand to her face, brought the other to feel the small instrument of her rib cage. Then she was drawing back, with each beat of his heart she was disappearing from his arms, and it seemed to him that he would always remember this: a sequence of snapshots of a woman, laughing with her eyes down, in each image a little farther away.

  “Sorry,” she said. “That was just in case you’re going to be assassinated by KGB sometime soon.”

  “Oh,” he said, and then he stopped because he couldn’t think of anything smart to say. The back of his neck was running cold with the memory of Elizabeta’s fingers there, and he felt his brain frozen into an idiocy he feared would be permanent. “Who told you this was me?”

  “Nobody. I saw the chess essay, and I’ve been noticing your weird hours lately, and I just—But listen, Aleksandr, don’t get stupid, okay? People have seen this. Party people have seen this.”

  “How have Party people seen this?”

  Elizabeta shook her head. “I mean, they know everything.”

  “How do you know Party people have seen this?”

  “Aleksandr,” and now Elizabeta was twisting up her hair, cracking her neck so hard it made Aleksandr wince, and standing up. “You know I know a lot of different kinds of people. Anyway. I should go.” She was in the doorway, and her eyes were looking somewhere beyond Aleksandr’s. “I’m sorry I bothered you.” But she spent another moment not leaving, biting her lip and looking oddly mournful.

  “You didn’t bother me,” said Aleksandr, although he realized he felt bothered. He put his hand on her shoulder—self-consciously, fraternally. She plucked his hand with hers and started pulling his fingers, slowly and tenderly, until the knuckles cracked.

  For a moment the only sounds in the room were shallow breathing, the popping of Aleksandr’s joints, the hiss of candles burning down to the ceramic and then quietly, without a fuss, going out.

  “Watch out, Aleksandr,” said Elizabeta as she turned to leave. “That’s all I really came to say.”

  It went like that for a little while, then. When Aleksandr looked back and counted, it added up to only six weeks, though somehow it felt like somewhere between a day and a half and his entire lonely life. She came in the evenings. At first there were pretexts—some new item she’d seen, some new warning she had—but soon enough she abandoned them. Soon enough she stopped knocking.

  He’d slept with only one woman before Elizabeta—the daughter of the owner of Okha’s sole petrol station, who was mostly silent and smelled of wool—and with Elizabeta it was a different thing: the inversion or recapitulation of what had before been a rather stern affa
ir. With Elizabeta, it was all exuberant gymnastics and sudden right turns. They’d lie end to end for a long time, and he’d get lost somewhere there—the room seemed to rotate, and time didn’t seem quite like itself. They bit each other’s skinny shoulders. He tongued the fingerprint-sized indentation above her navel. They fell off the bed and laughed.

  Then they’d lie together and tell each other things that made Aleksandr blush to think about—not because they were obscene but because they were not. It seemed humiliating in later years to have shared so much so quickly and for so little. The fucking was one thing—this was something he later got good at, and there were many other women, many other playful romps and beleaguered beds and high-end hairstyles ruined. But all that talking. All those confidences. He shuddered to think about it. At the time, though, he didn’t know any better, and he was filled with the gleeful lurching and teeth-chattering panic of early and undiagnosed love. Elizabeta told him about her childhood in Khabarovsk—about her father, drunken and stinking and apoplectic, and her mother, drunken and silent and besieged—and how she did not like her life in Leningrad but, truth be told, she’d liked her life in Khabarovsk quite a bit less. And Aleksandr told her about arguing with his grandfather about Communism, and listening to Radio Free Europe, and playing correspondence chess with the students at Andronov’s academy until he’d finally been summoned into his own future. And he told her how chess was the only escape from loneliness, and how epic his loneliness had been here, all these months before she’d knocked on his door.

  She’d bring her slippers inside his room so that the neighbors didn’t notice her pair outside his door—though like most secrets in the building, it was no secret for long. The walls were thin. Aleksandr could hear the neighbors sneeze and toss creakily on their beds. He tried not to think about what they might have heard of him and Elizabeta, though it was hard not to wonder when the steward glowered smugly at Aleksandr in the hallway, when the man who didn’t like living near prostitutes clapped him manfully on the back. “Hope she’s giving you a discount, tovarish,” the man said.

  Aleksandr winced but didn’t answer. He was too happy.

  It was remarkable, truly startling, the way that he could be thinking about Elizabeta absolutely all the time. Other thoughts came and went, skimming along the surface of the vast reservoir of consciousness that was devoted always to her. He was surprised at his capacity to think of other things—of many other things—with some degree of intelligence and depth without ever ceasing to think about her. She’d set up a full-blown military occupation of his brain. This energized him, made him wittier and livelier around Ivan and Nikolai, made him try harder at everything, made him fix his buttons and comb his hair and pull on his pants with more attention than he ever had before. Ivan even remarked that Aleksandr seemed to have snapped out of it. By this he seemed to mean that Aleksandr had snapped out of his entire personality, which certainly felt true.

  There was a physical sensation in his chest, an internal compression that felt pathological; he felt constantly on the verge of tears or mad laughter or cardiac arrest.

  He’d never believed in any of it before, but there it was.

  It was a few weeks later that Misha made his return to the Saigon. It was a rainy night in early April—the sky was unleashed, and all the effluvia of winter were running through the gutters and out into the Baltic—and when Aleksandr, Ivan, and Nikolai reached their usual table, they were surprised to find a man waiting for them. He was a man you had to get used to looking at. His face looked as though it had been turned inside out: red sores shone through his thin hair and linked down the sides of his face like sideburns; the lights of the café made small yellow pools in the shallows of his face. The skin below his eyes seemed to conceal permanent low-grade internal bleeding. “Shit, Misha,” said Nikolai. “What the fuck happened to you?”

  They’d been planning to talk about the next issue, but when they saw Misha at the table, Nikolai and Ivan fell to silence.

  Aleksandr had met Misha only the once, so he wasn’t entirely sure what the man usually looked like. He was sure, however, that nobody could usually look like this. The veins against his temples were an alarming blue; his eyes seemed to float a millimeter or more beyond his skull. He was thin enough to provide his own anatomy lessons. He sneered, which did further violence to his face. “Care to join me, fellows?” he said.

  “Of course,” said Nikolai, pulling out a chair with a murderous scrape and jostling the table by sitting down too quickly. Aleksandr followed suit. Ivan leaned toward Misha, deep inlets forming between his eyebrows.

  Misha sat and said nothing for a long while. He looked profoundly weary and too undone by life to ever voluntarily engage it again. Ivan and Nikolai stayed quiet, and their silence started to seem like reverence—as though Misha were a deposed king coming home to reclaim his land, or a wronged god returning to survey his wrecked world.

  “Well,” said Misha after they’d all stared at him slightly longer than was decent. “How have you been occupying yourselves? In my absence?”

  “Please,” said Ivan. “What can we get you? Do you need something to eat? A drink, maybe?”

  “Nothing to drink.” Misha issued a cough that was thick and wounding. “The doctors tell me my internal organs are like tissue paper. A stiff drink could kill me here and now. Unless that’s the idea?”

  “Let me get you some bread, at any rate,” said Nikolai. “You look like shit.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing, then? Drinking? Eating bread? Having a merry old time?” Misha turned toward Aleksandr, who felt an electric bolt judder his spine. It was the way he felt when he looked at the half-formed man in the wheelchair, or when the white Volgas passed him on the street. “Who’s this?” said Misha. “This is your new friend?” He extended his withered hand, and Aleksandr saw no choice but to take it. It felt dusty and shriveled, like an organic object buried for millennia in a desert.

  “I’m Misha,” said Misha, and stared. It was amazing how a man so weak and shrunken could diminish everyone around him just by staring.

  “We’ve met.” Aleksandr felt Misha’s chicken-bone fingers curl in his palm.

  “Have we? You’ll forgive me. My memory is shot, I’m afraid. That’s the funny thing about being involuntarily committed to an insane asylum when you’re mentally sound. By the time you come out, you’re not quite yourself anymore.” Misha looked at Ivan, the whites of his eyes glinting like the abdomens of fish. Ivan, not historically a person who was easily lost for words, said nothing.

  “So,” said Misha brightly. “You’re not going to tell me, then? What’s new? Don’t tell me you’ve all been sitting on your asses all year while your old pal Misha is suffering in a psychiatric prison?”

  “We’re doing a journal,” said Aleksandr. Misha’s tone was making him feel oddly defensive of Ivan and Nikolai. They’d spent months carbon-printing the journal until their fingers turned blue; they’d risked their lives and sanity delivering it around the city. There was no way to know for sure, but Ivan said they might have a few hundred readers now. This counted for something, and Aleksandr didn’t know why Ivan and Nikolai sat with their heads slung low, twisting their napkins and ignoring their vodka and looking afraid.

  “A journal?” Misha looked amused. “What kind of journal?” Ivan and Nikolai said nothing, so Aleksandr shrugged and opened his satchel. He fumbled with the zipper under Misha’s wolfish half-smile, which was becoming more ironic by the moment, but he managed to produce a copy. He pushed the sheaves of paper across the table, drawing his hand back quickly in case Misha reached out.

  “It’s political opinion, mostly,” said Aleksandr. “Also philosophy. Chess articles. Poetry. Some visual art.”

  Misha started thumbing through the tract, the little smile frozen on his face as if he were faking it for a photograph. “A Partial History of Lost Causes?” he said. He continued to flip, issuing small exhalations like a man having a nightmare. The f
lipping became faster and faster, and Ivan and Nikolai grew rigid, and finally, Misha reached the back cover of the journal and threw it back at Aleksandr with a force that was surprising, considering his arms seemed to be missing their tendons. “Partial, indeed. Do you have a cigarette, at least?”

  Nikolai passed him a light. When Misha took a pull, his cheeks seemed to disappear entirely. Aleksandr could nearly hear Ivan and Nikolai thinking, and he was sure that if he looked up he’d see jet trails of reproach and recrimination passing between them over his head.

  “You’re doing this all wrong, you know,” Misha said authoritatively at long last. He blew white smoke and issued another consumptive cough. “It’s shit. You think—you really think—your drawings here are going to make a difference?”

  Aleksandr looked down at his hands and absorbed himself in his peeling cuticles, the calloused edges of his fingertips. Ivan said quietly, “Maybe.”

  Misha leaned forward, and Aleksandr instinctively leaned back. Up close, Misha smelled of poison disguised as medicine. When he spoke around the cigarette, his voice sounded strangled and high, like a violin played wrong.

  “I wonder if you know what they did to me there,” said Misha. Ivan spread his long fingers out on the table one by one and turned up a palm. He shook his head. “They’d scrape the rust off of old needles and use them over and over. They gave me sulfur injections. They put electric cables on my temples.”

  Aleksandr winced. Misha’s veins ran so close to the surface of his skin that his face looked like a map of underground rivers.

  “They’d wrap me in sheets, then dunk me in a bathtub full of ice, then toss me near the radiator. When the sheets dried, they’d tear off my skin.” Misha took another puff of his cigarette and blew out his smoke coolly, methodically, in the general direction of Ivan’s face. Ivan coughed and turned aside and said nothing.

  “They made me sleep in the same bed as a man who called me Stalin. At first I thought he was trying to insult me, but then I realized he actually thought I was Stalin. He screamed at night and wrote vulgarities in his own shit on the walls. And they made me sleep in a bed with him. Every night for do you know how many nights? How many nights, Nikolai, would you guess? How many nights was I gone?”