A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel

by Jennifer Dubois

I leaned forward. “Can you talk to us?” I said.

  Simonov stared. “I loved my daughter.”

  “Of course,” said Viktor.

  He shook his head. “I loved my daughter,” he said again. “But I have other daughters. I have a wife. I enjoy my own life, if that’s not too tawdry to say. I cannot talk to you. I’m sorry.”

  Viktor looked at me a little hopelessly. “Talk to us,” he said. “Talk to us now, for your daughter.”

  “I didn’t know what they were going to do with it,” said Simonov miserably. “I thought it was for the Dagestan incursion. I thought it was for some business abroad. I swear to you, I did not know.”

  “We believe you,” said Viktor. “We believe you.” He leaned forward. “What was her name, your daughter?” This was a little callous, I thought—but then it was also pretty smart.

  Simonov looked down. “Valentina,” he said finally.

  “That’s a pretty name,” I said. Viktor gave me a look that told me I was pushing it. There was another long silence.

  “I can’t talk to you,” said Simonov. “Though I can’t help it if you break in.”

  Viktor raised an eyebrow and looked at me.

  “I can’t help it if you break in,” said Simonov again. “But if you do, you need to make sure to really break the windows.”

  We did it at night, when Simonov had told us he’d get the guards drunk. We could hear them carousing off in the corner of the facility, singing some vigorous military songs and slamming bottles heartily on tables. Next to the office building, rows of Gelandewagens crouched half buried in the muck. Snarled bits of equipment poked out of huge squares of blue tarp. We did break the windows, and then we climbed through—first me, then Viktor. I was bleeding from above my navel, a little. The office was small and organized, with short file cabinets squatting darkly against the walls. We didn’t switch on the lights, but we didn’t need to. Simonov had made it easy for us. On the desk, he’d set out the papers that dryly noted a request by the FSB for one metric ton of the explosive RDX, signed by himself, and dated September 3, 1999.

  We grabbed the paper. We threw some other papers off the table, overturned a chair, tossed Simonov’s coat on the floor. We made the place look messy, but we didn’t do much damage. Then we folded ourselves back through the window—first me, then Viktor. I could feel a welt emerging on my back where I’d caught myself in the window. In the rec building, we could see the yellow party unfolding into ever deeper debauchery. We returned to the car shaking and triumphant, and we cut our lights, and we drove slowly, slowly, out of the facility.

  Even then, even at that late hour, I wanted to know how all of it would play out. Even then, when I should have been dragging my feet to slow everything down, to savor each moment as a precious representative of the beloved totality of life. Curiosity persists, when the answer is already on its way—even, in fact, when the coming answer is the removal of the question via removal of the questioner. So even then, in the car, when looking forward to anything was a sort of suicidal impulse, I found myself wanting to know what would happen next.

  Out the window, the moonlight was anemic. I leaned back and felt my blood, hot and temporary, run down my spine.

  We get back on the plane at six-twenty in the morning. When we drive to the airport, the sky is only beginning to leak its light, which is coming through pinpricks in the clouds in streaming, outreaching arms. This world is stranger and more beautiful than could ever be imagined ahead of time. I am struck with enormous gratitude for having gotten to see some of it.

  The night before, Viktor sat at the table in the hostel and videotaped the document. He held it reverentially, as though it were a love letter or a Dead Sea Scroll, and zoomed the camera in on every damning implication. Then he e-mailed the video to Aleksandr, along with what little footage of Lieutenant Andrei Simonov we managed to acquire. Then he scanned the document to Aleksandr for good measure. “And who knows?” Viktor said as he closed down his computer. “Perhaps we will bring him the original.”

  Halfway to the airport, it looks to me as though we are accompanied by a follower. A white car, hulking as a beached whale, is loping along the lanes behind us, and it seems to be a playing a counterpoint to our movements—slowing and accelerating when we do. I raise my eyebrows at Viktor, but he’s several steps ahead of me. He slows down, he speeds up, he pulls over, he changes lanes. Twenty feet behind us, the big white car mirrors our every move.

  “They’re following us,” I say.

  He keeps his eyes on the road. “Well, they shouldn’t bother. We’re going to the airport, obviously. Where else would we be going?”

  And this is the thing about being followed by a huge white car: you can only keep driving, even if you know it’s after you.

  We check in. The sunlight is breaking across the enormous picture windows and skittering cracked and crumbling across the floor. We wait, but now we seem to be alone. On the television screen, Putin is talking about Aleksandr, saying that his candidacy is illegitimate and ridiculous and doomed and not worth talking about, next question, please.

  We file onto the plane, and Viktor lets me have the window seat. The plane is almost empty, I’m grateful to notice. The engine heaves, and we are off—we pull up and out, and below me I can see the terrible blue of the Kama, coiling around the city. I look down at this strange, partially discovered place and think of all the others that exist, half formed and lurking, in my mind: the sheets of light wheeling over the Andes; the snaking, sculpted sand dunes of Namibia; the ancient cities cluttered with a millennium’s worth of objects left lying around—when the volcano erupted, when the city was sacked, when the plague swept through the streets and crumpled half the population in a week. There are many things I have not seen. But there are a few things that I have. Maybe living in the world for a time is enough, even if you don’t get to see all of it. Maybe it is enough. At any rate, it will have to be.

  I find myself looking forward to getting back to Petersburg—to the city that never truly felt foreign to me, though I certainly felt like a stranger there, as I did everywhere else. It’s not an original observation, and yet it’s coming at me all at once—the bitterness and beauty of looking forward to the simple thing of gulping down a different kind of air. And somewhere behind my heart there’s a fermata of feeling—a slight lifting, then a falling that somehow doesn’t feel like a resolution. I screw my eyes shut, and then I open them and look down at the ground—it gets exponentially farther away with each blink, with each heartbeat and breath. It was how I always felt about birthdays back when I was younger but after I knew the cost of a passing year. How did I let this happen? I’d think. How did I ever let this life get so far ahead of me?

  I lean back in my seat, and I feel the hoisting of the plane, its resilience against the whirring cold, the forbidding blue. The pilot banks to the side, and we are casting an improbably detailed shadow on the countryside; we look like the approach of a mythical bird or an avenging god. Beneath us there must be the rifling of grass against soil, the frenzied roiling of pale-edged leaves. But we can’t see those things anymore.

  I think, although I am not sure, that my hands are shaking more than usual, beginning to thread forward of their own account ever more audaciously. I watch. I put my hands on the pullout tray, and they tremble and jump.

  But then again, maybe it’s not pathological. It could just be reverential. It could just be the beauty of the sky and the clouds—the miracle of morning, the heresy of aviation.

  21

  ALEKSANDR

  St. Petersburg, Summer 2007–Spring 2008

  In the end, he would have to imagine it. He would never know, not exactly, what happened, or how, or what it was like for Irina and Viktor and the others, all twenty-one of them, their names and nationalities printed in tiny letters in the newspaper some weeks later, after the search was called off and the luggage was identified and the passenger list was confirmed. He doesn’t know, so he’ll have
to imagine.

  It was a bomb—a small one, manufactured by the efficient people at the FSB, a hissing coil of fiber and flame that could be attributed to technical malfunction. He doesn’t know, so he has to guess, that they were most of the way to Helsinki—just off the coast, maybe, the Gulf of Finland hissing and murky below them. They were about to turn back toward the city airport. (That, he imagines, was a mistake. If the bomb had detonated even a few moments too late—or if the flight had made better than anticipated time—there could have easily been a crash over the city, which would have caused a lot more trouble and probably raised a lot more questions).

  They thought that Aleksandr was on it, because Misha had made them think he might be; they may have trailed Irina and Viktor in Perm, and maybe they made a note of the fact that Aleksandr didn’t seem to be with them, but they may have thought that he was in hiding, or incognito, or in the trunk. There was reason enough to think he was on it, and so they believed he was on it, even though he never flew Russian airlines, ever, for this exact reason, and even though his name was not on the list. They may have thought he was using an alias. They may have decided to take their chances. And a month later, when Aleksandr got his credit card statement—with its hotel rooms and room service and alcohol, all purchased in Perm, all reflecting his presence there—he stared at it for a long time before calling to cancel the card.

  In the end, it was a calculated risk. Failure, they must have figured, would be worth little. And success would be worth quite a lot.

  On the plane, Aleksandr imagines, they fell ten thousand feet in ten seconds, and it was the usual scene: dropping oxygen masks and flight attendants shouting at everybody to get down, get down. The people clasped hands with strangers, social protocol made suddenly, aggressively irrelevant. They prayed in six languages. They shuddered, cried, threw up. Was Irina scared? Of course she was scared. But the thing was (he thinks, he hopes), she was used to it.

  They angled over the water, and there was a horrible silence from the cockpit, and then the plane came undone—a great unraveling of pieces, bits of people’s lives coming unhinged along with it. The windows exploded, and magazines and gum wrappers, teddy bears and toothbrushes, eye makeup kits and rosaries and foreign affairs magazines were whipped out and into the water. The bags were drowned, and later, what emerged was absurd and mundane—tennis shoes, self-help books, bras. Nothing as poetic and tragic as a tiny baby shoe, or a wedding ring still in its case, or an unpublished novel. People died with their lives intact, in full swing, not yet ready to be reduced to symbols or eulogies.

  And Irina? Did she die praying, or cursing, or cursing herself for praying? Did she hold the frail hand of the old woman sitting next to her, stroke the arm of the girl her own age? Did she go down flirting with a handsome stranger? Did she cry? Did she scream? Did she learn finally, abruptly, whatever it was she’d needed to learn?

  We don’t know, and Aleksandr doesn’t care to imagine that part.

  We do know the oceanic light came in gusts. It was sheer white before they hit the water. At the end, in a way—like some sad things, although not all sad things—he likes to imagine it was beautiful.

  The embassy was notified. The American press liked the story of an American girl who ran away to find an adventure and a fate. Viktor got no mention on any television program, American or otherwise, although Novaya Gazeta wrote him a nice obituary. Aleksandr cried over it—partly because that poor young man was dead, and partly because there were so many things that the newspaper had discovered that he had never asked and thus never known.

  Interest in Irina spiked and subsided in a week. The final Harry Potter book was released, and the world was momentarily awash with the kind of worldwide goodwill toward men that usually accompanies only the Olympics or international terrorism. A month after her death, her name had dropped back into obscurity, and anyone who remembered her could conjure up only the sketchiest of narratives—the story of some American girl who had run away to Russia and died there for reasons that nobody remembered or perhaps ever knew.

  For Aleksandr, there were a few drawbacks to Irina’s brief posthumous notoriety. It raised certain suspicions in certain corners, suspicions that never fully went away. But for the most part, his stock rose modestly after the crash, both at home and abroad. Everybody knew who the intended target had been, and even people who hated Aleksandr admitted that he’d been lucky to escape. (On BBC, Misha, who was now a regular commentator, called Aleksandr “almost suspiciously lucky.”) Everybody liked the notion of the government trying to kill someone and failing, and some even seemed to regard the whole project with a degree of baffled amusement. Later, on CNN, a geriatric host would compare Aleksandr to a cartoon bird who perpetually outsmarts a malicious wild dog—and for the first time on live television, Aleksandr was utterly nonplussed and did not know what to say.

  For weeks, Aleksandr thought constantly, unendurably of Irina and Viktor. Their names were in his ears, in his skull. They were in every synapse in his circuitry. He couldn’t shake them out no matter what he tried. And Viktor and Irina were not the only people to whom Aleksandr owed his tenuous continued existence: they assumed their places alongside Ivan, and the three of them gazed at him with unswerving and disappointed reproach. It was too much: there was an entire aggrieved population in his head.

  He sat and looked out the window for God knows how many nights in a row. He watched an escarpment of black descend upon the city, over and over and over again.

  Boris came back almost immediately. He arrived on a sunny afternoon to find Aleksandr still in his pajamas, letting rings of cold coffee seep onto the stacks of newspapers that were piling up around the apartment. Boris eyed him up and down and said, “None of this looks very presidential.” Through raw eyes, Aleksandr stared at Boris and thought of the long life ahead of him—the long life of a survivor. It was his penance for being right, or his reward for being scared, depending on how you thought about it.

  Then they sat in silence watching Channel One and counting the lies until the sun went down and the only light was coming from the television.

  It was some days after the crash—maybe seven, maybe ten: Aleksandr would never remember precisely because his brain stopped forming new memories for a while—that he heard a knock at the door. Even though it was foolish to have done so, he’d put Vlad on paid leave, and he was living alone in the apartment, issuing statements to the sliver of free press whenever they called him, writing letters to all the editors in the West, living around the ghosts of the many people who had lately taken their leave. Vlad had told him how stupid this was, and he’d known it was true. But he couldn’t bear the thought of living with only his armed guard—he imagined Vlad manning the kitchen with a machine gun while he made spaghetti in his slippers. He couldn’t stand it. Not now, especially not now.

  The knock came in the evening. Aleksandr had concluded his e-mails and teleconferences for the day and had settled into his new evening routine of reading his death threats and drinking a quarter of a bottle of vodka and sometimes having a hand at the elite online chess forums, though this was no challenge nor, ultimately, much entertainment. It was Boris, he figured, when the knock came again—he’d probably left something, or had a piece of news that could not adequately be conveyed by telephone. Maybe there was something depressing on television that he didn’t want to watch alone. Or maybe he was only lonely, only aimless, only bereft and roaming the streets and finding himself back at Aleksandr’s—because where else, at this late hour, would he go? Aleksandr felt sorry for Boris, but even so, he did not want to see him. He’d already spent a non-negligible amount of time with the vodka, and he was experiencing a sensation of pleasant indifference: a sneaking suspicion that the pulsing lights of Petersburg out the window were the most important thing, and everything else was quite secondary. He liked this suspicion even if he didn’t entirely believe it, and he wanted to hang on to it as long as possible. So when he opened the door, it was
probably with a bit of a scowl, and that was probably the first thing that Elizabeta saw when she looked up at him for the first time in twenty-seven years.

  His mouth filled with ash; his bones turned fragile, ornithological. For a moment, or maybe longer, he wondered whether he’d lost his mind—whether solitude and sadness and the repeated imaginings of this exact event had ultimately pried apart his grip on reality. It was true that he hadn’t thought to imagine this moment for a good long while. There’d been too much intervening grief, and lately, even his subconscious hadn’t been indulgent enough to dip into this particular fantasy—there were, after all, so many other, more dangerous, more pressing ones.

  “Aleksandr,” she said. “How are you?”

  She sounded like there was nothing too terribly odd about her asking, as though she’d gone only a few days longer than normal without speaking to him, and she was curious as to how he’d been spending his time. His arm shot instinctively to the door frame. It was possible he was seeking its assistance in staying upright.

  “What happened to the dinosaur?” he said. If he hadn’t been a touch drunk, he wouldn’t have said it, or he wouldn’t have said it precisely that way, or he wouldn’t have said it before he even said anything else.

  “The dinosaur?”

  There was a tsunami of oceanic noise in his ears, and he almost had to ask her to speak up. “The official,” he said.

  She took a slight step backward. She must have known he would ask, but she probably expected to be invited in first. “Yes. Mitya. He’s dead now.”

  “Isn’t everyone?” said Aleksandr. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not. I’m not really, either, though he wasn’t as bad a man as I expect you’re imagining.”

  He looked at her and said nothing. His temperature was coming down, and he was starting to believe that what seemed to be happening actually was.