9
ALEKSANDR
Leningrad, 1982
A year passed, although Aleksandr would never be able to fully account for it. He began playing independently, he knew; he acquired a useless second, Dmitry, who’d been expelled from the academy for relentless mediocrity; he registered in some tournaments around the city, where he avoided the gaze of any academy students who were playing or, increasingly, watching. During the spring and summer, he played brilliantly, apparently, on more than one occasion—he knew because he could look the games up on microfiche and, later, on the Internet. At the Leningrad City Chess Championship, he’d done tricks nobody had seen coming, he’d outwitted people who were older and more accomplished and more applauded. But his chess games had become like the functions of his autonomic nervous system—no more joyful or willful just because they were miraculously complicated. He regarded chess as his very best party trick. Something about living around the edges of the journal had made Aleksandr lose chess. And something about losing Elizabeta had made him not care.
It was startling how completely an absent person could fill the empty spaces in your brain—how all the uncharted dark matter could illuminate to reveal nothing but the same face, the same voice, carbon-copied over and over like a piece of underground artwork. It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility. It was nonsense, he’d be the first to admit, to pine for a year for a woman whose moment in his life had been incidental, glancing, as implausible as a meteor shower or a brain aneurysm. She had bobbed to the surface of his life, then disappeared again. She’d hovered for half an hour above his personal lake of loneliness, a sea monster in a smudged photograph, probably not even real. She’d been abovewater for minutes. She’d barely even waved.
But still: when he looked back on that year, in spite of how horribly it ended, the thing that he remembered most viscerally was the feel of a woman’s phantom fingers against his neck, keeping him from turning his head to look back at her.
She’d come to him once before she moved out of the building—to say goodbye, he later understood. When she knocked, it had been several months since someone at the door had made Aleksandr hopeful. Recently, knocks had been from the man next door, who increasingly wanted Aleksandr to drink with him; once the steward came by and gave Aleksandr an improbably constructed stew, which had grown a thick epidermis by the time he thought to eat it. It had been mildly embarrassing to have his happiness overheard, but it was a misery to have his solitude so widely noted. The neighbors felt sorry for him, he realized—and as soon as he knew it, he felt even sorrier for himself and tried to avoid everyone. So when Elizabeta’s knock came in early September, his first impulse was to stay very still and quiet and pretend that he had disappeared or died.
But Elizabeta was having none of it. He could hear her rustling outside the door, and he knew that he would not be able to avoid opening it. Still, he was going to make her wait. “Aleksandr,” she said. “Open up.”
He did not, though he did sit up in bed. Through the fortochka, thick threads of sunlight illuminated the room’s slow-moving dust.
“I see your slippers,” said Elizabeta. “I know you’re in there. Open up. It’s me.”
He stood up and went to the door. He rested his hand lightly on the doorknob. He remembered the first time he’d opened the door to find her there. He felt the alarming way that life turns quickly and then quickly turns back. He opened up, and there she was. She looked the same. He probably looked ugly; he certainly felt ugly. And he didn’t mind her seeing, since she had made him that way.
“It’s you,” he said. “So it is. And who is that, exactly?”
“Can I come in?”
“Nice of you to ask.”
He stood aside so she could enter. Normally, he would have brushed aside the copies of 64 so that she might sit on the bed, but this time he didn’t bother. She looked awkward, and he was glad of this. “Why are you here?” he said.
She touched her hair, then her forehead. She crossed her arms. She was holding a letter in one hand. “You heard, I guess,” she said.
“I heard.”
“I hope you understand why I’m doing this.”
“I do not.”
She squinted and turned her head to the fortochka.
“When is the blessed union taking place?” he said.
“He’s a good man.” The side of her face looked incarcerated in shadow.
“Good? No, I doubt that. You can tolerate him, maybe.”
“I can tolerate him.”
“Terrific. We should all have a life we can tolerate.”
She started fiddling in her pocket for a cigarette. “Do you have a light?”
He fished around in his pocket and leaned over to bring the flame to her lips. He took three steps back again, so she would know that this gesture had not brought them any closer.
“What’s that?” he said, pointing to the letter. He hoped it was from her—full of tender and tearful explanations, proclamations, apologies. Abject pleas for forgiveness. Declarations of enduring love. He had never told her he loved her, but she wasn’t stupid. Then again, maybe she was. Most of his initial assessments about her had been proved exactly wrong, so now he was withholding judgment. He hoped that she’d offer him the letter and beg him to read it so that he could have the petty pleasure of refusing.
“You got a letter,” she said. “From the United States. The Leningrad City Chess Club forwarded it.”
He was sorry that it wasn’t a letter from her, but he still held irrational feelings about it, and he didn’t want to take it. “Oh yes?” he said. “That’s nice.”
“I thought I’d bring it up for you.”
“Nice again.”
“Do you think it’s a fan letter?”
“I can’t imagine.” She was still looking out the window, still smoking—just standing there, avoiding his gaze, waiting for what? What a sorry coda this was; he’d had enough respect for their acquaintance that he felt it deserved a cleaner end. The months of silence, in retrospect, seemed more fitting, less pitiful. It was the difference between being decapitated in an instant and being clubbed to death for hours—while pleading for your life, while trying to stand up. He was suddenly disgusted with both of them. “You should go now. I’m busy.” He gestured vaguely to his bed, which he hoped suggested that he’d been busy thinking through chess problems and not busy staring at the wall.
She held up the letter. It looked like a white flag in her hand. “You’re not going to read it?”
He sat on the bed. He picked up a copy of 64 and stared at it. He’d already done all the problems. “Keep it for me, why don’t you?” he said, not looking at her. “I don’t feel like reading any letters right now.”
He thought she might say something else. He waited for her to say something else. But she didn’t. She only stood there dumbly a moment longer. And then she left, closing the door behind her with a care that, he had to figure, she was faking.
The wedding was in October at a downtown wedding palace, and Aleksandr showed up uninvited just in time to watch Elizabeta walk down the aisle to the national anthem. For the rest of his life, Aleksandr would grimace whenever he heard the song. Other people would notice and remark on how genuinely Aleksandr must have loathed the regime. But it wasn’t the regime that came to mind for him when he heard the song—not Stalin’s twenty million dead or men falling down in the skull-white gulag or Misha’s piss-soaked psychiatric prison. It was Elizabeta walking down the aisle toward a Party official, his face smooth and expectant in the wan, faintly buzzing light.
Aleksandr stood at the back of the palace along with a few people from the building and a few people who’d come in off the street to get warm and a few women who, from the look of them, were probably Elizabeta’s colleagues. Elizabeta’s hair was coiled in rings around her ears. The man was as the Belgian had described him, looming and lurching even a
s he stood perfectly still. Elizabeta looked strange in white, when Aleksandr had always seen her in black. She was like a domesticated flower, bred through the centuries to be the wrong color. If she saw him, she pretended not to. Sonya, her roommate, stood holding limp roses and looking bewildered. Nationalistic prayers were said, papers were stamped, bride and groom were read the conditions required for legal marriage. Aleksandr turned around and walked away while the photos were being taken.
Afterward he went to the Saigon. Through his grief, the bobbing green lights looked like the phosphorescent residue that clings to the inside of your eyelids. Nikolai and Ivan were fighting about something—in the next issue, Ivan wanted to publish a petition in defense of some hapless Lithuanian, and Nikolai vehemently opposed the idea—but Aleksandr wasn’t listening. For the first time ever, he was hoping to be caught—just for the theatrics of it, for the self-martyrdom. It was a cheap longing. But there was something compelling in the image of getting himself tangled in some kind of public heroism when Elizabeta was entering into the most personal kind of villainy. Maybe it would make her see. But then—see what?
Later, he would be sorry he’d thought these things. Though he wasn’t superstitious, he never forgot that he’d spent Ivan’s last night at the Saigon lost in great abscesses of self-pity. He never forgot that he’d found himself ready to trade in everything for a moment of regard from a girl. And that was why in low moments, on future dark nights, he could think of Nikolai and almost forgive him.
The last evening Aleksandr spent with Ivan was snowy. It was the second week of November, and snowflakes careened madly around like drunken doves. After Elizabeta’s wedding, Aleksandr had found staying in his apartment during the evenings nearly unbearable. He could stand his apartment only if he came home terribly late, terribly inebriated, or both. He’d taken to buying Volzhokoe wine out of the red vending machines, since wine from the markets was usually raw alcohol, apple juice, and petrochemicals. He’d developed an approximately four-minute tolerance for his apartment at night with the lights on—enough time to throw his chess books off the bed and onto the floor, to run down the hall and splash his face with cold water, and to wrestle himself out of most of his clothes before collapsing. Any more time made him anxious and sick and sad; the look of the candlelight on his bed made the room look darker than no light at all. So he’d taken to going over to Ivan’s during the evenings to drink shot after shot of vodka and listen to jazz on Voice of America or watch terrible state television. That fall Traders of Souls was on Channel One, over and over and over, and sometimes they’d watch and laugh at the lurid anti-Semitism, and other times they’d just get quiet and drunk.
Ivan seemed to tolerate Aleksandr’s visits with an attitude ranging from bemused indifference to near-fondness. Although Ivan lived alone, too, something about his apartment didn’t seem to register or reflect loneliness. Maybe it was the cat, or the books, or the constant copying and researching and typing, or the ongoing hostile conversation with the radio, or the phenomenal number of journals that Ivan somehow acquired—Sovest’, the pro-Communist Leningrad newspaper; America, the U.S. government’s propaganda organ; Woman and Russia, the first and, as far as Aleksandr knew, only feminist samizdat. However he did it, Ivan seemed to live in the very center of his own life—not around the margins, at an awkward distance, never quite knowing where to look.
When Aleksandr reached Ivan on the last night, he was sitting in front of his tiny television, jotting notes for the next issue while watching a miniseries. The syncopated antics of the actors were a little frantic, a little desperate. Still, Ivan slapped his bony knee and smiled and offered Aleksandr a swig of vodka. The cat vibrated as loudly as the typewriter. On the television, through the static, came broad misunderstandings and wild stereotypes and unfortunate physical mishaps. It was an almost homey feeling, like some of Aleksandr’s better nights in Okha, before his father died, when he was very small. Aleksandr caught himself thinking such thoughts and straightened up, cracked his neck, and swigged his vodka. Sometimes he felt as though Ivan could hear him thinking, and he didn’t want Ivan to hear him thinking that.
“Are we going to include the Lithuanian, then?” said Aleksandr.
Ivan shrugged. “We probably will. Despite the objections of our dear friend Nikolai Sergeyevich.”
On the television, a grim-faced man was falling-down drunk. His frantic, coarse-faced wife made hapless efforts to conceal it as she served dinner to a well-dressed man and his wife.
“Why doesn’t Nikolai want to use the Lithuanian?” asked Aleksandr.
“Kolya is a continued mystery to me.” Ivan barked a brief laugh at the television. “He is a man of many strong, inarticulate opinions.”
On the television, the drunk man looked queasy and doubled over in the direction of the well-dressed man’s shoes. The wife screamed. Ivan laughed.
“He thinks it’s too provocative,” said Ivan. “Don’t involve the Baltics, that’s what he’s always said. He thinks it’s one step too far. But what does he know? He’s not exactly running the show, is he? Not exactly a creative driving force, huh?” He stood up and started to pace, running his fingers along the stacks of books and papers. “He keeps the records, he incurs the risks. But he doesn’t really care. Nikolai Sergeyevich is my friend, but I’ll tell you this: he’d get caught up in whatever it was that surrounded him. He’s a radical in search of a cause. We’re only lucky it’s ours.”
Aleksandr thought about this. Outside, the snow was making feathery white fingers against the window. Pieces flew away into the orbit of the streetlight, spinning slowly and turning the color of embers.
“So,” said Ivan after a moment. “I hear your girl got married?”
“Yes.” Something about looking out the window at the snow made him not mind as much; it was like being able to control the pain of some gruesome internal injury by keeping impossibly, inhumanly still.
“Better to him than to you, though.”
Aleksandr dragged his gaze away from the snow. “What do you mean?”
“With a girl like that, it’s better to stay one of her regrets. Better to stay on that side of the ledger, you know? You don’t want to be the man standing between her and her ghosts. You want to be one of the ghosts.”
“Maybe,” said Aleksandr, and he thought he could like that formulation. Right now, maybe, he was standing in the back of Elizabeta’s head, etched in black and white, flickering like a hologram, muted and waving. Right now, maybe, at this very moment, they were haunting each other.
Ivan sat down, jostling the sofa and scattering his papers. “You haven’t lived in a place unless you have at least one major regret there,” he said. Aleksandr experienced a charge in the air, a flash of prekinetic energy, and wondered if Ivan would say something about it. The moment passed, and Ivan sat back and pounded Aleksandr on the shoulder. “So welcome to Leningrad officially, tovarish.”
Aleksandr was about to sarcastically thank him when the comedy program cut out, the television hissing to a black-and-white buzz before crackling back to life. When the image rematerialized, the comic actors were gone, replaced by a somber and dark-clad newscaster who unleashed a spattering of language like rubber bullets on an unruly mob.
“Why are they doing that?” said Aleksandr.
“Shh.” Ivan clicked up the volume and stood close to the television.
“What is it?” The newscaster was introducing a program about Stalin’s strategic genius during World War II.
“Shh.” Ivan’s eyeball was almost against the screen. “Be quiet.” Together they listened, but the newscaster was only expounding on the glories of the Russian nation.
“That’s very strange,” said Aleksandr.
“He’s dead.”
“What?”
“Brezhnev’s dead.”
“Did they say that?” Aleksandr wondered if maybe he’d missed something. He listened harder.
“No,” said Ivan. “But look at ho
w he’s dressed. Look at his expression. Why are they cutting in to a comedy program with this pseudo-historical shit?”
There was a sheen of panic to the newscaster’s expression, Aleksandr noticed. Something dark and knowing seemed to bob to the surface of his face from time to time before being forced down again.
“He’s dead,” said Ivan. “I would bet on it.” He stood up and started pacing the room, swinging his head slightly, like an annoyed horse. He clasped his hands behind his back. “Well.” He stopped walking, swore in victory, and started walking again. “Well. This is going to be interesting.”
“Are we covering it? Before it’s announced?”
“We’ll start, anyway. It won’t stay unannounced forever. A week, tops, I’d say. But they’ll want to get succession sorted out in quiet.”
Aleksandr nodded and looked out the window again. The snow was coming in quicker currents, crystalline spirals that swirled tighter and tighter until he felt almost dizzy. He wondered what would be coming next.
“The funeral is going to be something,” Ivan was saying. “They’ll really do it up right. It will be the greatest show they’ve put on for a while. The security will be very, very tight.”
“So what are we going to do about it?”
Ivan looked almost dreamy. His eyes were becoming iron-colored in the low light; his expression was stricken and oracular, as though he were seeing through Aleksandr and all the way into the forbidding future.
A Partial History of Lost Causes Page 15