A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  Somewhere in the sprint, Aleksandr had a moment to enjoy it—the exhilaration of being out in a public place without a route, a map, a plan for any security eventuality, an entire army of helpers and minders. In this, there was a minor lifting—not as momentous as a liberation of serfs, or the sight of an army retreating from Moscow, or a free election in some future unimaginably far—but still, it was something: this small thing of pushing your own way through the messy world, stumbling without a spotter, running the risk of taking your own falls.

  20

  IRINA

  Perm, June 2007

  Viktor and I had agreed that we would go. I’d called him that night—after he’d spent hours drinking with Boris, listening to him rant and rave and nodding miserably in agreement—and said, “We’re still going?” There had been a pause at the other end of the line, but I never felt unsure about how it would end. He said, “How about tomorrow?”

  We’d jimmied into the apartment early, before Vlad was in for the day. Viktor had been given a key, it seemed, in those days when Aleksandr knew him well enough to know that he was a decent boy, though not well enough to imagine that he might ever use that decency against him. A network of dew sweated against the panes, and an overgenerous, fractured light came in through the windows. It was the kind of light that seemed to be throwing itself at your feet to beg for mercy. Or maybe the kind that falls down on its own knife in the name of honor.

  Nina was strangely kind to me that last morning in St. Petersburg. We’d caught each other in simultaneous sneaking—she clearing out the luxury soaps from the cabinet, me sneaking a hastily written note into Aleksandr’s coat pocket.

  “You are going, then?” she’d said, and though her mouth was drawn into a fussy, disapproving shape, there was a gruffness to her voice that made me want to trust her. It made me see her, fleetingly, as a different person: younger and rougher, the kind of person who might have had to scurry about to have enough to eat or think about. It made me understand how you might grow up to be someone who spent most of your time flopping around in an enormous silken bed, or fingering the delicate buds of overpriced earrings. Nothing makes a person materialistic like severe deprivation.

  (Now, on the plane, that observation alone sends me into raptures of reflection; I parse the differing threads of my own loss, I savor the nuances of this particular disaster. How I will miss my own brand of clutching materialism, the treasured sensory joys of existence. Not only the transcendent, transporting vista or symphony or epic or orgasm, though there were those. There were also—just as much—the humble pleasures of getting enough sleep or eating a really good sandwich. Then, also, there was the possibility of observations such as the one I had made about Nina: the way that the world could tilt slightly sideways, even when you thought all of its potential positions were already known. Then, too, there was the joy of learning the destinies and back-stories of characters and countries, always stranger and more inevitable than the fates conjured by fiction. How I will miss all of this. But then I remind myself of the obvious point—realized again and again but never fully believed even now, on this plane, the country roiling cobalt black below us—that there will be no missing of anything, worthy or unworthy, at all.)

  At any rate, Nina was our accomplice that last morning, creeping into the bedroom she would no longer share with Aleksandr and blasting the air-conditioning so that he wouldn’t hear us as we ruffled through papers, and nosed through notebooks, and packed up the camera equipment, and stole the credit card that Aleksandr used for film-related expenses. Whatever this film will mean, ultimately—and as a person who will never know for sure, I am increasingly interested in guessing—the country will owe its arrival, partly, to Nina.

  Then we were careening through the early-morning city. There were still daubs of darkness on the farthest part of the sky, and the stars were paling like the face of a person who is afraid but has decided to pretend not to be. I smiled at Viktor in the darkness, though he probably couldn’t see me.

  Here on the plane, I add this to my catalog of gratitude, somewhere between the sandwich and the symphony: the feeling of getting up very early to do something of consequence.

  The engine was starting to rumble already when we first glimpsed Aleksandr running across the tarmac. He was going at an improbable rate; from afar, he was portlier and slower—older—than he seemed up close, when he was throwing his hands about in impatience or engaging in various verbal gymnastics. He was stopped by an airport employee bedecked in neon orange, and turned sternly around. We could faintly see the angry arch of his neck, and we cringed to think of what he was saying. But the plane was pulling away, and he was smaller and smaller behind us. And we knew what we were going to do.

  He could come the next day, on the next flight. Of course he could, and yes, we knew that. But I’d seen his stack of death threats, and I’d seen the way he looked at them. And I knew that by going this way, we were giving him the chance not to follow us.

  On the plane, Viktor and I looked at each other and blinked. I suspect Viktor was wondering what he had gotten himself into—whether he would lose his job; whether in a wiser, more abstemious age, he would come back to look at this bad decision as the one where everything started to go disastrously wrong. I was beyond this kind of worrying. I didn’t know how the trip would go, or what it would mean, or whether it would be a mistake. But I did know that I wouldn’t look back on it with anything—pride or regret or misery or guilt or misty-eyed nostalgia—from some unimaginable vantage point. Who I was now was who I would always be. And what I did would have to be admired or despised or corrected by someone else.

  The landscape below was quickly tapering off into countryside: dull stamps of beige and eggshell; clusters of villages; long patches of phlox and silver grass, sliced by the occasional vein of a creek. I’ve always loved flying, watching the earth resolve into its most basic elements: clean, subdued colors; starkly geometric designs. When you watch it all from an airplane, it’s difficult to take anything too seriously or too hard. From above, the world and its teeming civilizations looked like nothing more complex than a series of cave drawings.

  I thought of my flight into Moscow all those many months ago. The person I was before I touched down in Russia, the person who walked around Cambridge and fell in love and played chess with a strange Swede for whimsy—that person felt so thoroughly remote to me that it was as though she were a memory from a previous lifetime, or an identical twin with whom I had a troubled though persistent psychic connection. I could look back on her—and look back on that life—with something approaching indifference. I could recognize that there had been value there, and that there were memories that the other woman had clung to with the tragic self-importance with which we all cling to ourselves and our cherished little souvenirs. But that woman wasn’t me anymore. Or if she was, she wouldn’t be for long.

  After a few minutes on the plane, Viktor twisted toward me and issued a frank and unnerving stare.

  “Yes?” I said. “What? Having regrets? Too late now.”

  He continued to stare at me, long enough that I started to wonder what Aleksandr had told him about me.

  “Look, now that we’re in this mess together, I need to know some things,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said carefully. I was thinking that I needed to know some things, too, but that didn’t mean I ever would.

  “Who are you? Who are you really, I mean?” I looked at him. Maybe he’d always wanted to ask that. Maybe he’d been afraid that doing so would offend Aleksandr or antagonize Boris. Or maybe it’s simply the sort of question that you ask only once it’s too late for a proper answer.

  “What can you possibly mean by that?”

  “I mean.” He sighed and pressed his eyes shut. I could see him trying to frame his interrogation in some kind of civility. “I mean, why did you come here? What was this? Besides running away. Anyone can run away. Anyone can run away from anything, in fact. You don’t need to
be dying to want to do this. I just mean, why here? Why this?”

  All at once I was telling him—telling him things I’d never told anyone, telling him things I hadn’t even known I knew until I said them, and they became unequivocally true in retrospect. I told him about my last chess game with my father, how that was simultaneously a benediction and bewilderment; it had announced the arrival of my adulthood as it had prophesied the onset of my father’s obsolescence. After my father had substantially disappeared from us but before he had died, I looked back and tried to find some of the clues to who he had been, to what had mattered to him, to how he had made sense of the world, to how he had addressed his own end. Sifting through the morass of information that was left to me was like pawing through a riverbed and trying to figure out which things are fossils and which things are just stones. But I’d pulled out the fragment that was Aleksandr, and I’d squinted at its flinty sheen, and I’d decided that there—there—was a treasured clue, or a missing link, or a splinter left to me by a divine prankster intent on testing my faith.

  And then there was the unendurable pressure of having to die gracefully in front of people I knew. There was the childlike suspicion that this thing chasing me was something that could be outrun; there was the sneaking sense, only three quarters ironic, that Huntington’s might not qualify for a visa. Even more primal and even more shameful was the fleeting question of whether my father had ever died at all. I’d watched him die from superego down to cells, but even as a child, I’d had the good sense to darkly scrutinize what I was supposed to be taking at face value. How was the man in front of me—the man who flailed and shouted, threw things across the room, shat on the piano—how was this man the same one who had composed choral arrangements for Bach, and had the capacity to carry on simple conversations in a truly unfathomable number of languages, and followed geopolitics like other men follow sports? Even as a teenager, I suspected that the whole thing might be a sham. This man’s leprous face was not my father’s face; his syncopated animation was not my father’s gestures. If this man was not my father, then my father wasn’t here. And if he wasn’t here, he was somewhere else—perhaps he’d outmaneuvered everybody, as he always outmaneuvered me at the chessboard in the days before he couldn’t anymore.

  I told Viktor all this. And then I told him something simpler and just as true: sometimes there are things we don’t understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we’d never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that—even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them—we still wouldn’t know.

  It was only four hours to Perm, and I slept most of the way. We touched down and shuffled out and rented our car glumly, with the air of hungover teenagers who know that, in a burst of inebriated inspiration, they’ve done grim damage to their future lives. I let Viktor drive.

  We didn’t speak as we skimmed along the Kama River. I rolled down the window and looked at the water—blue as a femoral artery, running off to five different seas. Somewhere beyond the thicket of trees lay the ruins of Perm 36, but we didn’t have time to go looking for it. Even if we did, there probably wouldn’t have been much to see: a ghostly archipelago of stones, a husk of barbed wire, and withered trees. Through the window, the air came at us mossy and dense and rich with the complicated, metallic scent of industry. The city skyline was strangely ridged, which made the horizon feel askew: buildings jumped at us in weird ways as we approached, and off in the distance we could sense the hulking presence of the Urals, their humped backs like fossilized ogres guarding the entrance to Asia. And between them, perhaps: snatches of weak intercontinental light, backlighting the contours and making paper lanterns of the foothills. And beyond that, seven more time zones. You could squint and almost see it: tens of thousands of fields of wheat, overgrown collectives where nature had clotted over agriculture. Unrelenting taiga pocked by the occasional relic of the odd, enormous universe: a putrefying missile silo, the void left by a comet. And beyond that: a smattering of volcanic islands and then America. I could close my eyes and give myself vertigo just thinking about it. I am not ready to die. I’m not. I am not even bored of the fact that the world is round.

  Outside the window, the sun was brutal, bright and horrible as an exposed organ.

  We checked in to a hostel that was similar to my old hostel. I thought of my things back there in the building that had been something like a home—my pile of myriad clothes and books, all the lingering things that I would soon have to grimly assess and stow, like a pathologist at an autopsy. Better to leave nothing behind than to leave behind so little—just enough evidence for people to know that you only made it two thirds through War and Peace, and you were overly fond of shirts with collars.

  We found our room wordlessly and thunked our bags onto our hospital-cornered beds. Across the room, Viktor turned to face the wall and change. I eyed him with what I realized was a version of lust, even if was a bit bleached out, a bit bloodless. It wasn’t particular to him, I didn’t think—although he had nice eyes, I suppose. It was just that he was a man, and we were at a sort of hotel, and I was dying. And sex is supposed to put you in contact with the enduring, or the infinite, or whatever, although I wondered if, in this context, it might have the opposite effect. Maybe the smack of skin on skin would remind me only of our stubborn corporeality. Maybe it would make me start thinking about evolution, and genetics, and continuity, and the future, and maybe I would think about how sex was an inherently hopeful act, and maybe the whole thing would leave me in worse shape than I was when we started. And anyway, Jonathan was somewhere else—a life with him irretrievable now, even if I turned around the very next morning and flew home, even if I spent the night clutching at another man’s bones.

  I had just about talked myself out of it when Viktor grabbed my hip and stared at me hard. He leaned in. And then we were tearing at seams and hair and skin, and I was on top of him, and we wrestled each other as though we were fighting with our own mortalities: it was high-stakes sex, it was execution-day sex. We clung to each other’s bodies: unfamiliar because we were strangers in this way, familiar because we were both human and both still blessedly alive. He smelled like basil. We yelled into each other’s shoulders, and it was terror, I’m sure, as much as it was joy. It was like shouting into the apocalypse.

  Afterward, he tapped me on the shoulder. “Another question,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “All this stuff about wanting to know how to face defeat,” he said. “You think you learned something from Aleksandr about that?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? We both are.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.”

  Outside, bats made shadowy filaments against the sky. I burrowed into Viktor’s shoulder and tangled in the scratchy sheets. It was still early, for a certain demographic. Down on the street, the city geared up like a rusty engine, and I heard mirthful hilarity in the streets all night long.

  For the conversations with Simonov, we’d booked a hotel room in downtown Perm. The day after our arrival, Viktor and I drove there in silence. Outside the window, the town petered into white fields and enormous white sky. The sun emerged and began sweating tenuous light. I rolled down the window and smelled cold mud and the bloody smell of rusted automotives.

  At the hotel, we promptly ordered decadent room service on Aleksandr’s credit card. After half an hour, Simonov arrived. He knocked on the door. “You’re the film students?” he said.

  We let him in. He had a weathered, tumorous face, spackled with a stingy assortment of zinc-colored teeth. A Kalashnikov rifle was hanging from his hand, limp as a dislocated elbow. It was an odd way to hold a gun.

  “Thank you for meeting with us,” we said, and then we watched Simonov eat and drink and smoke for a while. He po
ked at his pork and sucked on his shots. We set up the camera, and it stood splay-legged in the corner. Simonov eyed it and began tapping his knee with the wretched repetition of an autistic child. It was possible, I realized, that he had stage fright.

  After we’d all done a couple more shots, we started to ask Simonov our questions. We asked him about his childhood, his rise to power, his thoughts on the greatness of the Russian armed forces. He drank. We drank. We turned off the camera, and Viktor made off-color jokes. Simonov laughed. We turned the camera back on and asked him his thoughts on tensions with Georgia. At one point he banged on the table and started yelling about how Russia was the number one exporter of weaponry in the world. We turned the camera off. He got misty about his children, about his wife. “She looks like a potato,” he said. “But God help me, I love her.” I glanced at Viktor. We turned the camera back on.

  “You’ve been working here at Perm for a long time,” said Viktor carefully.

  “Yes,” said Simonov. He leaned back. “Ten years.”

  “So you were here in 1999, then,” I said.

  “That’s what ten years means.”

  “So you were here on September 3, 1999, then,” I said.

  He stiffened. “Yes,” he said slowly. In the silence, it felt as though the camera were emitting its own tiny sound—the barely audible breathing of febrile ground, or of something waiting to capture something else. “I suppose.”

  “Were you aware of the disappearance of a significant amount of RDX in the middle of the night on that date?” said Viktor.

  Simonov laughed, but it sounded like a warning. “That was a very long time ago,” he said.

  “You might remember it,” said Viktor, “as the night before the bombings started.”