A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  “You can’t afford to be like this,” said Irina. “Stop it right now.”

  He stared out the window, where an understated sun was looming politely. He stared at the table, at the sheaf of papers before him. He stared at Irina’s hands, ten inches from his face. They were durable, inelegant hands; unmanicured, but with fingers that looked like they’d been raised fluttering along a piano or a typewriter. He was staring at the hands, he would always remember, because he couldn’t stand to look at Irina’s face. And then suddenly, one of the hands jumped—“jumped” was the only word for it, because it was obvious that it had not been moved. The hand took to the air and fell again, limply, heavily, like a frog casting itself into a pond. Irina turned the color of an onion and put her hands underneath the desk as if to hide them. Aleksandr stared at her.

  “What was that?” he said, even though he knew, and the question was horrible to ask and more horrible to hear answered.

  “It’s nothing,” she said in a voice that did not sound like her own.

  He supposed he had known it already, but seeing it was surprising and gruesome and oddly more painful than he had thought it might be. He’d thought that the inevitability of the event had inoculated him, somehow, against its potency. But then again, his whole life had been about trying—and failing—to come to grips with the inevitable. He shouldn’t be surprised that the inevitable was often the worst thing; worse, even, for the fact that it had been etched so long ago, that it was an ending that had predated its own characters.

  “Irina,” he said. He tried to take her hand, but she wouldn’t let him. He could almost see the fluttering of her ravaged fist-sized heart. He could hear the raggedy slicing of her breath. “I saw it. I saw that. You didn’t mean to do that.”

  She looked down. She looked out the window. Her breathing sounded like the beating of wings. Her face looked waxy and slightly unreal, as if she were an amateur artist’s rendering of a human being. The whole thing felt too terrible, too intimate, to see—this poor young woman’s unraveling. It was a kind of honor, a kind of liability.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” he said.

  “It is,” she said. “That’s it. That is, I’m afraid, it.”

  He shook his head instinctively, although he knew that in doing so, he looked like he was mourning something small and silly, something that might be best termed a “shame.” What was the appropriate gesture? What was the appropriate response? He adjusted his glasses in a way that he hoped made him look competent, professorial. “What does this mean, exactly?”

  She looked at him grimly and didn’t answer. He sat up straighter in his chair. Somewhere, way back in the hidden chambers of his face—behind his cheekbones and eye sockets, in that central core from which he’d always felt that he was watching the events of his own life—he could feel the oncoming menace of tears. He coughed.

  “Well,” he said brusquely. “You can’t stay here, obviously. The state hospitals are horrific. We’d pay for a private one, but even so, you’d be better off in America. We’ll get you a plane ticket home.”

  “I’m not going home.”

  “Irina, you must. You have to.” He was relieved to be having this conversation—it was so enormously preferable to be debating something about which he might have a concrete opinion, to be issuing some kind of commandment with some kind of confidence. It gave him a matrix of a response. He was overjoyed that Irina didn’t want to go home, because now he could focus on the project of convincing her to go.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t. You don’t understand.”

  Although she was right—he did not understand—he found himself pressing on blindly.

  “But don’t you have people somewhere?” he said. He knew she did, and he knew that this tack was futile. He knew that bringing it up was indulging in the kind of careless cruelty that people employ when they are so outmatched by their circumstances that they would rather say something terrible than say nothing at all.

  “No,” she said. “Well, yes, I do, but I don’t want to go to them. That’s the whole thing. That’s been the point the whole time.”

  He’d known she’d come here to get away—he’d known that this experience was meant partly to discharge the frustrated energy of a truncated lifetime. In addition to all the lofty questions about grace and catastrophe, there’d been also, he suspected, the small thing of having an adventure—an adventure that might marginally distinguish this particular short life from all the others out there that were substantially like it. But he’d also thought—when he thought of it, which was as rarely as compassion allowed—that it had been, on some level, a bluff. That when this disease caught up with her—whirring over the North Pole, hopscotching the Aleutian Islands, taking a rumbling old train through the Caucasus, or flying first-class over all the twinkling continental first-world capitals—that when it caught her, she would let it take her home. To do otherwise was insanity. And he couldn’t help but think that it was a kind of selfishness: why should he have to witness a tragedy he never summoned? Why should he be responsible for its care and management?

  “Irina,” he said fretfully. “Please be reasonable.”

  She said nothing. She stood up and walked to the window: outside, a wind was riffling through the treetops. Aleksandr could hear the wheeze of their bending.

  “Why did you trust me?” she said, facing the window.

  “Trust you?”

  “At the beginning. When I showed up here. Didn’t you think I could have been a double agent or something? Didn’t you think I could have been spying on you?”

  “Not for the Americans, probably. If they have a question for me, all they have to do is ask.”

  She turned around. “No, for Putin. Or for, I don’t know, anyone. Or I could have been a random assassin, or a crazy person, or, I don’t know, a stalker with a ton of pictures of you printed out from the Internet.”

  “I wouldn’t flatter myself.”

  “I just mean you’re so careful. You’re so cautious. You won’t eat pastries from the street vendors. You won’t even go out at all.”

  He sat back in his chair. “I go out sometimes.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re careful. That’s—that’s the right thing. You should be careful. So why did you let me into your work here? How did you know I wasn’t out to get you somehow?”

  “I don’t know.” He twirled his fingers against his temples. “Maybe I hoped you were.”

  “What can that possibly mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it would have been a relief.”

  Irina smiled strangely. “You think that, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t have been.”

  He pulled her to him then. He felt the fragility of her bony back, and he thought of the daughter she’d once been to a father, and he thought of the daughter he might have had if life had gone otherwise. He found that he believed her, even though he didn’t think he could say it. So he decided not to say anything at all.

  That night Aleksandr lay in bed, thinking about Irina and listening to Nina’s shallow breathing. Somehow, Nina never seemed fully unconscious—her breath always sounded slightly wakeful, as if she were feigning sleep or playing dead. She was sleeping on top of the sheet, and he could see the severe concavity of her pelvis, the unforgiving cut of her rib cage. One denuded leg was flung over the other; they looked like a pair of pirouetting bones. In the moonlight, Nina was almost translucent—she reminded him, appallingly, of a deep-sea creature, transformed by dark and pressure and evolution into a skeletal, bioluminescent alien.

  “Nina,” he said. “The American girl is dying.”

  That wasn’t his only problem. Misha’s outburst in Novaya Gazeta had been deeply problematic; he’d checkmated Aleksandr, it seemed, and now all moves were suicide—though it was true that one of the suicides was probably literal and one was probably political. Misha’s move had quite been clever, although Aleksandr had always known that he was a clever man. He kne
w, too, why Misha’s antics had cut him so deeply. When he saw Misha, he heard the hissing accusation that the better man had died back in the seventies, and that this was Russia’s loss. The dead or dying were always so much more virtuous than the living—even if, in life, they had been petty or callous or small-minded or vain, even if they’d been rash, even if they’d been terrified. Misha seemed to think, and Aleksandr could certainly believe, that it would be a different story if Ivan had lived. Ivan would have been out in the streets, out motivating the troops, with or without a security apparatus. Ivan would have gone to Perm. Ivan might have won by now. In the end, what could Aleksandr show for the campaign? What had it accomplished? He’d filled up a few squares for a few afternoons. He’d given a terminal case some inexplicable satisfaction. And he’d offered a few hours of entertaining programming for internationally inclined television viewers who regarded the whole thing as diverting as a game of chess. He’d be lucky if Putin had suffered an anxious night or a bout of indigestion over it all.

  He would go to Perm. He’d get on the first flight tomorrow. He had to. That was all there was to it.

  “Nina,” he whispered, “I’m going away tomorrow.” She didn’t answer. Maybe she really was asleep. Or maybe she just wasn’t listening anymore.

  He woke up to thuds from the spare bedroom. When he walked in, Nina was organizing her clothes—there was a polychrome sartorial fan across the bedspread, shiny shirts and skirts with ruffles and mysterious items for which Aleksandr had no name; a spray of tops of every possible color gradation; dresses of intricately complicated and impossibly hideous prints. She did this sometimes: spent hours folding and assessing, holding the pieces up close for inspection, frowning at them as though the clothes—like everything else—were not quite as nice as she remembered them.

  “You’re up,” said Nina. “Would you mind grabbing me that suitcase?”

  “What are you doing?” He hoisted the suitcase from the back of the closet. “I need this for Perm, you know.”

  “They left without you,” she said. “Viktor and the American. I understand they changed their flight. They went in the night. One of them left a note about it. I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  She shrugged. “It sounds like you left them no choice.”

  “What?” He could feel a panicked, disgusted feeling growing behind his heart—the dawning understanding of a terrible mistake, the sickening sense of having slept through a lifetime.

  Nina started throwing her clothes in the suitcase. “They didn’t want you going, of course. They wanted to protect you, of course. That’s what this whole operation hinges on, right? That’s kind of the entire point of the whole game?” She drew her knuckles savagely across her eyes, which were inflamed with salt and resentment. “It was sort of a forced move, I suppose, in your former terminology.”

  “I have to get there.”

  “You have to get there? Your wife is leaving you, have you noticed? That’s what all this means.” She pointed to the bags. They crouched along the doorway, looking like the alligators they once had been. “Typically, when you see this, you’re supposed to try to stop me.”

  Nina was backlit by the sun coming in through the shafts in the doorway. Her red hair had never been lovelier, and he could remember the way she’d looked to him when he’d first met her—unbearably beautiful, unbearably delicate, the kind of woman you could spend a lifetime trying to satisfy and understand. He wondered why that had once seemed like an appealing project. Maybe it was a holdover need from Elizabeta. To have loved with such ardor at such a distance, to have the air charged always with a blue static electricity, to know the silhouette of the space between two people as the most palpable shape of one’s life—after that, the idea of engagement, however small and petty, however quotidian and demanding, had seemed like the only answer.

  “Typically,” said Nina. “This is where you should plead with me and ask me if there’s anything, anything, you could do to get me to stay.”

  “Nina,” he said. “Can we talk about this later?”

  Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it was that the lifelong endeavor of reform in Russia was something so abstract and impossible to achieve that the smaller thing—of making a difficult woman happy—had seemed like an attainable goal. Except it hadn’t been. Democracy would sweep the streets, a free press would open up into a chorus of snarky disapproval, a transparent and functional rule of law would bind the government, before Nina was made happy. It simply wasn’t something that Aleksandr would see in this lifetime.

  “I’m going to the airport, Nina,” he said.

  “Fine,” she said. “By the time you get back, I’ll be gone.”

  “I know.”

  He went to her then, and grazed his fingers along her cheek, and for the first time in a long while, she let him. He had to admire her for this, in a way. He’d been unhappy, but Nina was the sole constant in this isolated life. She could leave, but it wouldn’t make him independent; she could leave, and it wouldn’t let him find someone new; she could leave, and it wouldn’t mean he could do what he wanted. His one personal happiness came from the tepid satisfactions—such as they were—of a well-organized domestic life; he’d told himself that the greater, more important consolation was still ahead. For her part, he knew she was unhappy, but he had thought she liked the apartment too much to ever leave it. It made him like her a little better—marginally, retroactively—to know that this was not the case.

  “It’s no way to live,” she said, “and there’s no end in sight. The end for me is as a widow. That’s the only way this thing ends for me.”

  He saw it then, and in the way of all things that are finally made clear, he could not believe he had ever missed it. He saw how she had longed for it, in her way: the house empty of its strangers and chatter and incessant typing; the city glittering through the windows, all of its potential available for purchase via money or beauty. “Is that why you were never afraid for me?” he said.

  “Maybe it is. Maybe if we’re really honest, it is.”

  “Well,” said Aleksandr carefully. “That explains a lot.”

  She was crying then, silently, her hands wound into furious fists, her hair streaming down her back. “It’s just that I thought that you were someone else. I thought all this”—and here she flapped her arm helplessly at the vista of the apartment, the stacks of papers crowding out the fine Oriental carpeting; the antique typewriters and laptops and cords and cable connections spilling out from under the teak tables and snaking their way around the French windows—“it’s just that I thought all this would be something else.”

  “I know,” said Aleksandr. “I’m sure at some point I did, too.”

  He took her to him, and through her thin cashmere, he could feel the pitiless landscape of her scapula. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held her without the characteristic stiffening of the spine. Without feeling as if he were crossing some kind of armed border.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I don’t care about it the way you do. I can’t care about it the way you do. I think democracy will be the death of this country, if you want to know the truth. If you’d ever asked me about it, you’d know that by now.”

  He nodded his head against her hair and smelled the foreign, expensive shampoos—willow or aloe vera, jojoba beads imported from Madagascar or God knows where.

  “Maybe so,” he said. “I know you’re not the only one who thinks so.”

  She looked at him mournfully, and he could see her realizing that he was a stranger and sillier man than she’d even suspected. He could see her studying his face, preparing herself to frame the scene in her memory. Then there was a softening and a fading—it was like watching a person let go of a ledge that she’s been clinging to for so long that there’s a relief in the defeat and an acceptance in the falling.

  “The airport, Nina,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “Okay, grib,” she said. “I’ll drive you.�
��

  And so she drove him, dry-eyed now, through St. Petersburg. He slouched down in the passenger seat, wearing sunglasses, and she tied up her hair in a scarf, and they rode along the streets. Vlad sat in the back, glowering and muttering about the security risks and pleading with Aleksandr to call one of the drivers. The city was all deciduous trees this time of year, and networks of shadows skittered across the ground like spiders. Ancient air came up from the Neva and twisted into a welter of flower petals and newspaper broadsheets and brightly colored food wrappers. His wife had just left him, and his staff had just mutinied against him, and yet he felt oddly elated. He reached out and touched the glass, which the staff kept crystalline-clean. The street was choked with taxis, legal and illegal, and luxury cars the size of military tanks. In the car next to him, a woman poked her husband in the shoulder and pointed at Aleksandr.

  “Sir,” Vlad said. “Sir, you are being very, very rash.”

  “It’s broad daylight,” said Aleksandr. “It’s the middle of the street.”

  “You’re being dumb. I don’t know what’s happening to you, but you’re being quite dumb.”

  “I’m about to get even dumber.”

  Nina accelerated the car. All around them, St. Petersburg thrummed with life—the street vendors, the clotting traffic, the trees going wild in the wind. Motorcycles backfired like gunshots and the canals quivered as if they were terrified. Aleksandr and Nina flew along the gray stretch of highway, Petersburg’s ancient skyline receding behind them, and then they turned onto Pilotov Ulitsa toward Pulkovo Airport. At departures, Nina slowed the car but didn’t fully stop. “Good luck, grib,” she said. Her voice wavered slightly but recovered.

  With that, the car—her car now, Aleksandr supposed, although it didn’t matter much—was off, submerged into the honking assembly of taxis and limousines. Aleksandr looked at Vlad and told him to run for the ticket counter. They took off, disturbing an old woman with a long flea-bitten coat and a dog the size of a guinea pig, dodging a stern-looking man who waved his cane in consternation.