A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  Through my window in the mornings came pink light: if I woke up at a certain time, the whole room would be infused with the pink of the Sistine Chapel, the pink of a face brought back from the dead. I’d sit and wait to hear the plucking of harps, the stirring choir, and when I heard nothing, I would roll over and try again to sleep. I was always struck by how unafraid I was of sleep, even though it was the closest approximation.

  Strange things were starting to happen with time. The moments started to bunch and buckle; whole hours could disappear into staring fits from which I’d emerge lost and unstrung. Then there would be an agonizing eon distilled into the stirring of a coffee, the turning of a page.

  Nights became restless and feverish. I’d skim the edge of sleep, hearing the echoes of sarcastic laughter and the clicking of keys. On the wall, shadows made filaments and lace. I’d wake up muttering, recovering from dreams that followed me around in the day. In them there were more mute memories: my mother and father leaning against a tree, surrounded by leaves, slow-falling and yellow. There were chessboards from Boston, melting into the chessboards of my childhood. I remembered the triumph of my father’s ever conquering queen. I remembered the crack of the skull of my father’s king against the board.

  Then, too, I remembered the crack of my father’s arm against the stove, his head against the bathroom tile.

  When I went back to Aleksandr’s apartment the following week, Viktor was there. He eyes flitted to me momentarily. Then he went back to shaking his head savagely at what a shorter man was writing in a notebook. “Nashi will kill that,” said Viktor. “They’ll surround us. You need a better layout.”

  “Hush,” said the other.

  “Look what they did at G8. You’re wasting your fancy pen.”

  “Please hush.”

  Viktor glanced at me, then nodded to the sitting man. “Assistant,” he mouthed.

  I immediately retreated to the foyer and busied myself by looking at the prints. Though I’d been told to come by, I was aware of how lost I looked. I had a flash of myself at fourteen, my first day of ninth grade, wandering the halls in a hopeless quest for the geometry classroom. On the wall, I squinted into an amber-colored Nevsky Prospekt and tried to look engrossed.

  A moment later, something changed in the air. Aleksandr was behind me. “You like those?” he said.

  “I do,” I said, turning around.

  “They were done by a friend of ours. A very rich man. He was in oil. He did printmaking to civilize himself.”

  “Is he here?” I said.

  “He’s in a penal colony in Siberia for eight years,” said Aleksandr. “He was funding us. But Putin has a sharp sense of how to prioritize. He’s not interested in stopping everybody. Only everybody who he thinks might actually count. This friend of mine, the printmaker, he was very, very rich. He had billions. Do you know how rich you have to be to put a billionaire in jail?”

  “Pretty rich,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Aleksandr. “Pretty rich. Nobody ever talks about how indecently rich Putin is, but I like to bring it up a lot. Do you how many billionaires we have in Russia?”

  “How many?”

  “Sixty-one. Sixty-one billionaires, and Putin could put every last one of them in jail if they threatened his business interests. That’s what people don’t understand about him. He’s not an ideologue. He’s just pragmatic. He’s just greedy. He could be liberal or conservative—he doesn’t care. He supports Syria and Iran because tension brings up oil prices. And you let him get away with it.”

  “Me?”

  “The West. You’re easily impressed by staged democracy. We have something here we call an election, after all. But that doesn’t mean we’re not a police state. And there’s money here now. So the West lets our oligarchs export their questionable assets, and they grant Putin democratic credentials in order to do it. If the U.S. was serious about restraining Putin, they’d start denying visas. The oligarchy can’t afford a new Cold War.”

  I looked at him. “What would you do about it as president?”

  He waved his hand. “It’s not a campaign the way you’re thinking of it—like, oh, I’d support this and that legislation. I’m not winning. I want to coordinate a broad platform, not promote my own ambitions.”

  “That’s a little vague, isn’t it?”

  He raised his eyebrows at me, and I knew then, if I hadn’t before, that the way to get him to like me was to push back at him. “Since you asked, then. Extreme caution must be used when assessing the components of the existing mechanism that may still be used in establishing the new state. Otherwise, chaos would ensue.”

  I took a breath and plunged forward. “Existing mechanism? That all sounds very prudent.”

  “It is prudent.”

  “Do your supporters know it’s prudent? Do they know it’s extremely cautious? They don’t seem like the most cautious of people, from an observer’s perspective.”

  He looked at me, and I thought he might call security to frog-march me out the door. I would have, if I’d had a security apparatus at my disposal. But he didn’t. He smiled as if he’d discovered a chess opponent who was somewhat better than expected, though still fairly terrible.

  “We must have a return to gubernatorial elections. We must draft a new constitution, since the current one is baldly authoritarian.”

  “Isn’t single-handedly scrapping the constitution a tiny bit authoritarian?”

  His eyes flared slightly. He was amused. “It will arise from a national consensus.”

  “What percentage of Russians consider themselves fans of Stalin?” I said. “Is it forty-five percent?”

  He smirked. “It’s fifty-five percent, actually. So you can see what I’m up against.”

  “Yes,” I said. I leaned in toward the prints again. One, in rich greens, was of a little café at the end of a long street.

  “That’s the Saigon,” said Aleksandr. “We used to hang around there. Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s a hotel now. I think its rooms go for something like six thousand rubles a night. So. You’re ready to start?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can copyedit these,” he said, handing me a stack of papers. “They’ve already been translated, but we need a native speaker to catch the subtler problems.”

  I scanned the top page. Aleksandr Bezetov, in assistance of the Democratic Union, will spend public debate at the St.-Petersburg university, addressing to a question of to what degree the state should soften oil monopolies in modern economy.

  “Okay,” I said. “I can fix this.”

  “I used to do that kind of thing,” he said. “Mindless errands. My job was to run around the city and shove illegal newspapers into people’s hands.”

  “Did you ever get caught?”

  “We were always caught. We were caught before we even really knew what we were doing. But we thought we were being clever.”

  “Were you being clever?”

  “Not very,” he said. “I was a notable figure then. Less so than now, perhaps, but even so. I was on some list before I even knew my way around the city. They had us the whole way through. So this time”—he straightened up—“I know that much. I know that I am already caught. I am not hiding. Also, I am not flattering myself. No matter how you look at it, it’s a futile endeavor.”

  “Why do it, then?”

  “Nothing much else to do. Chess tires me now.”

  “Do you still play?”

  “Not so much. I needed a new hobby.” He put his hands in his pockets and frowned, as though an unhappy possibility had just occurred to him. “Do you play?”

  “I used to sometimes. I played with my father when I was small.” I looked down. “And I had a friend I played with sometimes in Boston. I was never very good. I could never think more than a move ahead.”

  “Count yourself lucky. Thinking more than a move ahead never got me anywhere in life. Only in chess. And even then it was sometimes a burden. I saw fifteen moves ahead once
, in Norway, but there was a much easier path to victory, and I missed it. Looking into the future too hard, I’ve found, can be paralyzing.”

  “I’ve found that, too.”

  Aleksandr looked at me suspiciously. “Anyway,” he said, clapping me on the back. “I’ll let you get to work.”

  I took the reams of paper—the press releases, the drafted e-mails, the artlessly phrased leaflets—and sat in a corner. Around me there was arguing and joking and the sound of words clacking fiercely onto pages. I started to skim the first e-mail, catching the first misspelling and the first inelegant turn of phrase. I felt more awake than usual. There was something satisfying about doing a small, good thing after all these weeks of living in a morass of uselessness. I thought about what Aleksandr had said about chess, about the paralyzing effects of imagination. I knew that to be true. Any time I let my mind wander more than three steps into the future, it reached the limits of comprehension and fell off the edge. But for now there were concrete concerns—small, surmountable problems: typos, grammatical irregularities. I could live with these. I bent my head over the pages, and I started to work.

  15

  ALEKSANDR

  St. Petersburg, December 2006

  Aleksandr stood on top of a box in Gostiny Dvor and shouted into the crowd. It was a sizable turnout—maybe not the biggest group he’d seen since he began, but near it. He’d have to ask Nina about the head count. Today they were a bit more frenetic than usual: boys kicked bits of hail like footballs; the crowd clunked their feet against the unyielding snow like a group of ungulates getting ready to stampede. He should be thankful for the energy, he knew. But the wind angled itself through his clothes—it always managed to do this; no matter how many layers he wore, it laced its fingers together and then ran them up and down his pant leg and collar provocatively—and he was again struck by the thought that he was beginning (already!) to be tired of this. The crowds, the slogans, the shouting at the sky, as though it would count for something in the end. He was committed to it, he was, he was, and he would keep at it until they caught up with him somewhere—sneaked polonium into his imported sushi, dismantled the engine of his airplane, shot him dead in the stairwell of his own apartment building as they had done to Anna Politkovskaya in October. But there were times—like now, and now wasn’t a good time for it—when it all felt preordained. They weren’t the first crowd to clot and yell, to issue demands.

  He took a gulp of icy air. “We are running to lose,” he shouted. This line always got the biggest shouts, which had to make him wonder. “And in the losing, we are running to be noticed. We are running to be blocked. We are running to be opposed. We are running to be assassinated.” He cast his eyes around the crowd. This line was his dare—or maybe his invitation—to the universe. It was coming, he knew it was coming, so it might as well look artfully stage-managed. But the flags fluttered in unison, and the crowd cheered. Today was not the day.

  He looked at his notes. He tried to make his speeches different every time he delivered them—on this day, did you know, Pushkin completed Eugene Onegin, and Poland declared independence from Russia for the first time?—so that people could listen to him now and again and still expect to hear something new. He tracked his eyes back up to the crowd; he arranged his face into an expression of surprised interest so that he could convincingly sell the fun of knowing that today was the anniversary of the day that Khrushchev sent a dog to die in outer space. And as he did, he caught sight of a young woman standing kitty-corner from his box and taking notes. He delivered his line and looked back. He always noticed when people took notes at his rallies—it was a habit, he was sure, from Nikolai—although Nina often reminded him that note-taking wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: it could be a citizen journalist, or a European blogger, or the real Western press. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d say, tossing her long leg over his in their giant black and white bed. “Don’t you want people to be paying attention to you?” And he’d say he did, he did, although he knew that at least some of the people who were paying attention were doing so for very bad reasons. “You worry too much,” Nina would say, making her face into a monstrous mock pout (apparently what he looked like to her when he was worried, which he always was). And because it was insulting to try to make a woman worry for you when she was naturally disinclined to do so, he usually just shrugged and rolled over and fell asleep facing the wall.

  But this woman—what was it about her that didn’t seem journalistic? She seemed so unassuming, so unsure of herself, that one wondered whether it might not be a pretense. She looked like she could be Russian—she had brown hair and a grim expression and skin the color of table salt—but he knew immediately that she was not. Something in her stance was half off; she stood too far apart from everybody else to seem comfortable but too close to seem actively hostile. She was not pretty—she was too monochromatic, too self-conscious, he thought, in the way she moved and glanced—but her eyes held a wry intelligence that made him look at her twice. She was approaching Nina. Nina would dismiss her quickly, he knew; Nina’s greatest strength in life was a capacity to dismiss, and Aleksandr relied on her to be rude on his behalf. Somebody needed to be, and Aleksandr was a little too polite even after all the decades and all the women. It was good for Nina to have something to do besides click around the apartment on high heels and dye her hair red and keep her body in such a state of hygienic starvation that Aleksandr sometimes wondered how she could have been a product of natural selection. Nina was talking, he saw, to the woman with the notepad.

  He could see Nina shaking her head and turning around to look at Vlad—the head bodyguard, the best because he was the biggest—then turning back to the woman. There was a current of desperation in the woman’s eyes, he could see, not abject pathos, exactly, but the quiet suggestion that here was a person who had not gotten something that she’d wanted very much. Aleksandr pulled on his gloves. He found himself hoping that Nina could give her whatever she was asking for.

  After the rally, in bed, Aleksandr ran his cold feet up and down Nina’s leg.

  “Stop that,” she said. “You are a cruel man.”

  “Did you think the rally went well?”

  “As well as always,” said Nina, which was no answer at all. Aleksandr wished he could care a little less about what Nina thought of him; they were married, and he was rich, and she was beautiful, and that should be enough, but he often found himself restlessly worrying at the gaps between them, sticking his fingers into the fissures and prying them farther apart. Tonight he managed to say nothing.

  “I wish you would cut that line about assassination,” said Nina.

  “I thought you said I worry too much.”

  “You do worry too much. That line is you worrying in front of the whole crowd. It’s not manly.”

  “Do you want to see me do something manly?”

  “I’d rather not tonight.” She kissed him dryly on the cheek and rolled over. “Sorry, grib.” He had never liked that she called him “mushroom”—first because he worried that he looked a little like a mushroom (dark, lumpy-faced, on the stout side now) and then because he worried that he behaved like a mushroom (brooding furtively in the dark when nobody was looking). But Nina always said that was nonsense—that she loved mushrooms and she loved him—and she kept calling him “mushroom” and he stopped asking her not to.

  “Who was that woman with you at the rally?” said Aleksandr.

  “I don’t know, exactly. A very odd American.”

  Aleksandr turned over and propped his head with his hand. “A fan?”

  “I guess so,” said Nina, wrinkling her nose. Here, too: she might show the faintest tremor of jealousy at the idea of a young American woman traveling internationally to get to meet him; she might reflect fleetingly on the fact that there were many, many women who would pay for that opportunity, who would be grateful to talk to him, who would not roll over in bed if they were next to him.

  “Was she chess or p
olitical?” said Aleksandr.

  “I couldn’t tell.” Nina’s voice was becoming creaky and reluctant, dislodging into sleep. “I scheduled you a meeting for Wednesday. Bring Vlad.”

  “I always bring Vlad,” said Aleksandr. An American visitor was odd. His chess fans were usually Russian and almost exclusively male. Yet he’d have known her if she was a delegate from an NGO; she would have had a more professional approach and outfit and wouldn’t have scared his nice wife by shivering at her pitifully in the snow.

  “She’s an American professor,” said Nina.

  “Oh yes?” Aleksandr sat up. Something was snarling in the back of his head—some meaning taking shape, like tea leaves settling into symbol.

  “What’s wrong?” said Nina, although he could hear in her voice the profound indifference of fatigue. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll be back.”

  He went to his study, flipped on the light, and started riffling through his notes. There had been something about an American professor at his security meeting the week before. Some years ago, Aleksandr had paid to turn a low-level FSB man—Grigorii, a baby-faced clown from Nizhny who’d sat shaking in his boots the first time and tried to demand a higher sum—who had been photocopying Aleksandr’s file ever since. For the most part, the endeavor had proved a stupendous waste of money. But at the most recent meeting, Grigorii had said something strange—it was obvious from the get-go that he’d had something beyond his usual predictable babble, because he’d looked a little more smug and obnoxious than usual—and he’d stuck out his feet and leaned back in his chair.