A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  “I know,” I said. “Thank you for your help.”

  She sniffed and turned away, for which I was grateful, because the vista before me—the roiling crowds with their tiny flags and their indecipherable shouts and their enormous gall—was starting to smear, and I didn’t want anybody watching me as I tried to make my way through.

  I took the long way home—across the embankment, past the cannon at the Peter and Paul Fortress, the sphinx’s humped crown a misshapen shadow in the distance, before heading across Dvortsovvy Proezd to my island. My mind streaked with war and revolution. I thought of the assault on Nicholas II—the murderous clawing at the palace doors, the shots sailing through the sternums of the men, the women crumpling and crying in their taffeta. I thought of Stalin’s purges—the shivering red-faced intellectuals, the ones who wept, the ones who spat at their captors. I thought of the lines of Jews waiting for their exit visas in the eighties, turning around to look at the bleak landscape that once was their home; I thought of Yeltsin on a tank, screaming down a military coup; I thought of the school siege, the terrorism, the brinkmanship, the bluffs, of the last decade. And then I thought of Aleksandr’s rally, the way a thousand heads turned if he pointed and another thousand shouted if he spoke.

  I went home, nodded to the icy-eyed night manager, and sat on my bed. I watched the chilly stars grow sharper as darkness fell. Over the weeks, I’d started to feel a certain sense of belonging in my room: my beach towel, decorated with fish whose lurid blues had faded into gray, had taken up a permanent residence in the communal bathroom; my salt-stained boots sat in the hallway outside my room like the relics from an atrocity. I’d stared so hard at the floor that I’d started to make an absurdist geography from the stains: near the bedside table was an Indian subcontinent; near the window was an entire Africa, complete with satellite Madagascar.

  I thought of my father’s map, with its jaundiced Soviet Union; I thought of how I was now in its vast midst. It was as though I had climbed up on my father’s desk, kicking away his papers and disturbing his souvenirs, and crawled into the map. It was as though I’d been sucked through the television to the other side: a place where time held the world in unending potential energy, and the static broke the air into pieces, and everything was the color of a chessboard.

  Aleksandr’s apartment was sunny and enormous, decorated with the slightly oblique tastefulness of a modern-art museum. There was a black and white sofa in the parlor, and the complicated chords of a sonata for piano—dissonant, in a minor key—floated faintly from somewhere above my head. Sharply dressed women and slightly frumpier men walked in and out of the main apartment with great purpose. When the door swung open, I could see a flat-screen TV turned on mute to a government news channel. I could hear the shriek of an espresso machine.

  I was patted down by a brawny security guard who lingered indecorously on my inseam. Then, as Nina had promised, there was a wait. Every time the door opened, I looked up expectantly and confronted suspicious looks from whoever was leaving—a goatish woman in thick glasses, a very young man with a clipboard, a few meaty gents with earpieces and grim expressions. Viktor did not appear. Nobody called for me. Nobody spoke to me. It reminded me of my doctors’ visits back in college, when I’d been given pamphlets on vitamins and management and “living with” Huntington’s and had waited for eons, epochs, watching the occasional nurse shoot me a sympathetic wince.

  Finally, Nina emerged. I was half sleeping by that point, my head bobbing me savagely awake every thirty seconds. My hair, always unfortunate, had been done no favors by the time spent waiting. Nina frowned at me. Today she was wearing a beige blouse with an intricately scalloped neck and had her mouth done in orangey lipstick. She was paler than I remembered, and her hair was pulled back in an unforgiving bun. Her cheekbones jutted from her face like installation art.

  “You’re still here?” she said.

  “Apparently.”

  “Very well, then. Come in.”

  She led me into a high-ceilinged hallway. The walls were white, decorated with tiny prints of Moscow and St. Petersburg done in reds and blues. Above me, the Neva snarled in inky cobalt; St. Basil’s reared, strangely menacing, above a sanguine horizon.

  “Nice apartment,” I said. I could feel her roll her eyes, even though she had her back to me.

  “Mr. Bezetov has about fifteen minutes for you,” said Nina. “I told him I had a strange American waiting for him, and he seemed interested. I trust you’ll be able to explain yourself more thoroughly. He is very busy.”

  “I understand,” I said, and then the hallway opened up into a room. It was epic and echoing; lacy cords of sunlight struck down from a snowy skylight in one corner, and a baby-grand piano squatted in another. In the center of a room, at a black desk, Aleksandr Bezetov sat typing furiously on a laptop.

  “Aleksandr,” said Nina. “Your visitor.”

  “One moment,” Aleksandr said in Russian. Nina was already gone. He was dressed more casually than he’d been at the protest and was wearing wire-rimmed glasses that looked Western and a tad self-conscious. His face—which, on the stump, had been energized, animated, his thick eyebrows casting as though looking for political contraband—held a vaguely bored expression. His tongue probed thoughtfully at his lower lip. His sleeves were rolled up.

  After a moment, he looked up at me. He raised one eyebrow. I took this as my cue.

  “Hello,” I said in Russian, and Aleksandr made a face.

  “Please,” he said in English. “I’ve been speaking Russian long enough that this hurts me.”

  His English was flat and professional and very clear. It reminded me somehow of stones skipping on a river.

  “So,” he said. “You probably wonder why I agreed to meet with you.”

  “I suppose,” I said, although I hadn’t. I’d hoped he would meet with me; I appreciated that he’d decided to. But I hadn’t thought it could be anything more than a kindly indulgence, because today he had the time for it.

  “Well,” he said. “I know you probably don’t realize this, but you’ve been causing trouble for me. You can sit, you know.” He gestured to the spindly chair across from his. He resumed his typing as I unwound my scarf and took a seat.

  “I have?” I said.

  He stopped typing. “Yes.”

  I said nothing, waiting for clarification. I didn’t know how I’d managed to create trouble for Aleksandr Bezetov without even managing to create any trouble for myself.

  “Have you possibly been approached by a Nikolai Sergeyevich?”

  There was a dull ding in the back of my head. “Yes.”

  “And perhaps he’s tried to convince you that the two of you have some interest in common? Perhaps he’s tried to suggest that he’s a friend of mine?”

  The ding was resolving into a dissipated vibrato. I was already starting to feel like an idiot. “It’s been confusing,” I said.

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  This wasn’t how I’d imagined our meeting going. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but I suppose I thought Aleksandr would be kindly and gentle and maybe a tad professorial; that he’d patiently answer my questions and then inquire politely about my own interests and then blandly dismiss me with the most generic of best wishes for the future. In my most involved fantasies, he’d be able to answer some questions close to my still-functioning mind and heart—he’d be able to reveal some deep wisdom about proceeding with grace toward doom, and that wisdom might somehow illuminate my future or my past. Either way, I hadn’t expected to be cross-examined.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “All I did was approach an old friend of yours to see if I might get your contact information. I didn’t realize that would be troublesome.”

  Aleksandr issued a weary sigh, as though he’d been asked to coach a high school chess club. “No, of course you didn’t. I’ll be quite clear. The Russian government suspects I am a pawn of American intelligence. They’ve always thought that. Now you’re
here, looking for me, making a spectacle of yourself, and you attracted their attention. They think you’re running me, or trying to, or something. Do you understand?”

  His breath was becoming thick with the strain of remaining civil. Sarcasm buckled to the surface of his voice, like the eruption of some long-suppressed subterranean substance. “As it is, in case you’re wondering, I am not run by your CIA. But if I were, they’d be a lot subtler about it than you are being.”

  “So who is Nikolai?”

  “He’s a well-regarded bureaucrat in our very legitimate government.”

  “Oh.” I was getting it. “Okay.”

  There was a pause in which Aleksandr resumed typing, and I wondered if our conversation had somehow come to a cryptic end. I tried to remember what I had been doing when Nikolai appeared at the café those weeks ago. Had I been doing something suspicious, something that denoted sinister and illegal activities? I didn’t see how I’d managed it without noticing. I could barely remember any moments of import in the last few weeks—and those that shuffled to the surface, when I groped for them, were small and personal and oddly sentimental: watching a snow flurry blur out the stars through my hostel window, buying pastries from a woman who always gave me an extra bialy “for my children,” walking around the Neva until my skin was raw and my eyes were leaking and my head was filled with a symphony of Russian poetry.

  “I don’t understand this,” I said. “I don’t see how I got anybody’s attention. I don’t do anything. All I do is sit around in cafés and read.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They don’t quite know what to make of you. But they think you’re a representative of the American government, if an unwitting one.”

  “An unwitting one?” I was insulted now.

  Aleksandr eyed me, and I could see him registering my half-open coat, my ill-fitting sweater, the gauzy bits of hair that flew away from my head as if they were fleeing political persecution.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I fingered the seam of my coat and looked down. I felt very tired. There’d been a bone-deep fatigue of late, coming in dark waves that made my eyes feel as if they were orbiting my skull. I didn’t know how to interpret it or how hard I should try to. It wasn’t a physical harbinger of onset—I’d read enough accounts to know—but it seemed a psychological readying, and I was mostly grateful for it.

  “All of this,” he said, “creates some further difficulties for me. And for you, I might add. More for you, I would suppose. I have many bigger difficulties already.”

  “So do I,” I said, still looking down.

  Aleksandr sniffed. “I’m sure you didn’t have any intention of causing trouble.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “I wholeheartedly believe you did not.” He stared at me. He seemed to be keeping his eyes self-consciously wide and still, which was as good as rolling them. “If not for trouble,” he said, “why are you here?”

  A good question, this.

  “Do you remember,” I said carefully, “a letter from an American academic in the early eighties?”

  He sat back in his chair. “I’ve received a lot of letters in my life.”

  “I’m sure,” I said quickly. “I understand that. But it was a pretty odd letter.”

  “Odd how?”

  “It wasn’t about chess, exactly. The letter was asking you how you proceed when you know you’re losing.”

  “When I’m losing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I known primarily for losing?”

  I hadn’t expected him to be arrogant. It shouldn’t have been surprising—he was the best chess player of all time. The best hamster trainer of all time probably has an ego, too. But a part of me had been hoping that, upon my request, he would sit up straighter, reach into his coat pocket, and produce a typed manifesto. Here, he might say. I’ve been waiting for you. There is so much here that you need to know.

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. It’s just that he knew that in your long career, there had certainly been … moments when you knew you must lose. And he wanted to know how you kept playing.”

  “I can’t imagine I responded to such a letter,” he said. “If I got it.”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  He looked at me for a long moment. Then he took off his glasses and pinched the skin between his eyes. “When did he die, your father?”

  I looked at him.

  “You wouldn’t be here if he weren’t dead, right?” It was a challenging thing to say, I suppose, but he managed to say it kindly.

  “He died in February,” I said. “But he’d been sick for a very long time.”

  Bezetov nodded. He put his glasses back on. I tried to make myself say something politely admiring about the modern art on the walls, but my gaze faltered on the dark-coated men hulking in the doorway. “I notice you have a lot of security,” I said.

  “I do,” he said, waving his arm at them. “They cost me tens of thousands of dollars, and they will probably fail me in the end anyway. I can minimize my risk, but it’s an ultimate futility. It’s only a question of time.”

  “I know something about that,” I said. The radiator started to kick up, making spitting sounds and giving the room an overcooked smell. Aleksandr looked out that great picture window, even though there wasn’t much to see: in the late-afternoon dark, there was only the reflection of the gilded orbs of his lamps, the sharp glint of light on his computer, the frightful paleness of my own face.

  “You mentioned you saw an old friend of mine,” said Aleksandr. “And which friend was that?”

  “Elizabeta Nazarovna. Do you remember her? She lived in your building. She said you might not remember.”

  He said nothing and kept looking out the window. I thought I noticed a minor tightening in his neck muscles. Out the window, a cascading wash of headlights filtered through the gloom.

  “I remember something about her, I think.” He let the sentence sit, lightly buffered by silence. “And how is she doing now?”

  I thought of the murderousness of her coughing, the way her hunched shoulders shook like trees in a cyclone. I thought, too, of the way her voice glinted; how listening to it was like looking down a hall of mirrors.

  “She does not seem well.”

  “I see.” He waited. I could feel him hoping for me to offer more, but I didn’t know what was expected. “She is alone?”

  I thought of the clasp of her hand in mine, the nudity of her thin fingers. I thought of the size of the apartment, how the birdcage seemed to dominate the decor. I realized that there was no bedroom—just the cramped living room, the toy-sized kitchen. She must be sleeping on the couch.

  “It seems so.” Then I understood, from the way Aleksandr clenched his jaw and the way he erased his eyes and the way his words seemed to shiver on a tightrope, that he had loved her. And I was struck by the unforgivable stupidity of refusing love. And I was further struck by the violence of my own mistake, and I felt lucky for the limited time I would have to live with it.

  “You should see her,” I said. Then I felt presumptuous. “Maybe. If you want to.”

  “Maybe. I’m very busy these days.”

  “That I see,” I said. I realized that there was an approach I had not tried. “Maybe I could be of help to you?”

  He stood, and I was struck again by the reality of his shortness. His authority came from his thick eyebrows and vigorous jaw, the muscled compactness of his shoulders, the tired intelligence of his eyes. He didn’t look like a man who’d spent a lifetime flitting toys across a board.

  “You want a job,” he said brusquely.

  I coughed. “Not a job. I just want to be of use.”

  There was an impatient silence. I stood up, too, because it seemed the thing to do. He looked at me. “You are an academic at home, yes?” he said finally.

  “Formerly.”

  “You can write in English, yes?”

  “Yes.”

&n
bsp; “You will not be speaking any more with our friend Nikolai?”

  “No.”

  “Very well,” he said. “You can help us with the American press. You can send them e-mails. Okay? You can type things up. Okay? Not sexy, not glamorous.”

  “I don’t need sexy.”

  “Good, then,” he said. “Since they already think you’re causing trouble, you might as well, right? You can come in on Monday. How long will you be expecting to stay in the country?”

  I thought about how to answer. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But probably not that long.”

  “All right,” he said, orienting me toward the door. “We’ll use you while we can.” He opened the door for me, and I was confronted again with the smell of gourmet coffee and a beach of white carpeting stretching door-to-door. I held out my hand to Aleksandr. He took it.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. And Irina?” He was ushering me out. “When you know you’re losing, I am told it is sensible to resign.”

  The next week dissolved in much the same way as the others had: in a dreamy, almost drunken suspended animation, impinged upon by the faintest fragments of memory and hallucination. Often I felt clinically numb, and I watched myself with the third-person detachment of a person on heavy painkillers. Occasionally, I felt strangely exhilarated, my head filling with snatches of speech and irrelevant images. Out of nowhere, I remembered the cartoon skunk on the cover of a coloring book from the late seventies; one day at an apple orchard with a boy I loved in middle school; the yellow dog across the street from my childhood day care that had one day mysteriously disappeared. And I marveled over the mind’s ability to record so much information that it would never, ever need.

  I wrote more to Jonathan, more unsendable, unreadable, unforgivable letters. I told him I knew these past months were months I’d lost with him. I told him I knew I’d missed dinners and walks and sex and laughter and showers and earnest, whispered discussions and the kind of fights you pick because you think it’s sexy when the other person is a little bit mad at you. But then I told him about the other thing I was missing, the other thing I was making him miss. The first jerk of an elbow or a hand. The spiraling loss of competencies. My brain’s grim retreat across a sealed border. I told him about his mounting resentment, and the way he’d feel guilty for it, and the way it would consume him. It would consume him, I told him, whether he ever believed me about this or not. The living always resent the claims of the dead, especially when the dead are still living. I told him I spoke with authority. I told him I knew I’d made the right decision, even if I would have to know it for the both of us.