A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  Mikhail Andreyevich chewed some more on his lip, which looked abused, macerated. This was unbecoming. “What do you know about him?”

  “He’s—Well, he’s the chess champion.”

  “Yes. Very good.”

  “And he’s running for president.” I felt like a child.

  “But you know his campaign is a stunt, right? You know he knows he will not win.”

  This man, it was becoming obvious, was disgruntled—and so the strange, sharp-edged defensiveness that was emerging in me was, I told myself, obviously unwarranted. Bezetov’s moral credentials were impeccable. I tried to sound light, unguarded, as though I were arguing a point of politics or philosophy, nothing personal, nothing brutal. How much I’d loved to argue about those things once.

  “Sure, he knows he won’t win,” I said, “but that’s what’s impressive about it. That’s what’s brave about it. That’s the point.”

  “Is it? I don’t know about that.”

  “What is the point, then?”

  “The question isn’t whether you like your revolutions fast or slow—it’s whether you like them temporary or permanent. Bezetov absorbs the attention, the money, the support from more pragmatic people—people who might have an actual shot at election and who could reform moderately from within. Bezetov gets the limelight because of his fucking chess career, and everyone thinks, Oh, how spectacular! How dazzling! Chess strategy at the state level, and all that makes for a compelling narrative. I will never understand that man’s public relations situation. It’s extraordinary. No matter what he does, he gives the entire Western world a boner. But what’s the best thing for Russia, really? Is it losing their chances again on some aging chess star’s vanity project? Or is it electing some serious people who will pull and tug and compromise their way to a more humane life? What’s the brave thing, really?”

  My defensiveness was collapsing into something else, something miserable and small. Aleksandr Bezetov was a man whom my father had deemed important. I didn’t want to hear him slandered. My quest was absurd at its absolute best, this I knew. It was misdirected, it was odd—even if Aleksandr were a hero, even if he were a saint. I found I desperately did not want to hear about it if there was more to him than that: if his colleagues had complaints, or if they’d found him wanting in one way or another. His job was to deliver me the wisdom of a lifetime. If he couldn’t do that, I had no reason to be here. And I had no reason to be anywhere else. I was quiet, eyeing Mikhail Andreyevich’s posters.

  “But, I mean—I’m looking at your posters and, forgive me, but I read your Wikipedia page, and—”

  “And?”

  “And you’re not exactly a moderate yourself, right?”

  He laughed. “I’m not anything anymore.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t really believe anything. I’m just trying to make the conversation more interesting.”

  “Is that a worthy goal? Making the conversation more interesting?” I didn’t disagree. I was interrogating him reflexively because I’d decided not to like him.

  “When you’ve had seventy years of no conversation, yes, I think it’s a very worthy goal.”

  We were silent. I was cold, and I rubbed my hands together to kick up the circulation.

  “You know about the film he’s making?” said Mikhail Andreyevich after a moment.

  “Of course.” Then, “Remind me.”

  “He’s trying to establish a link between the apartment bombings and the regime.”

  That sounded familiar. I remembered something about the commencement of the second Chechen war: a series of odd coincidences that looked, on the surface, somewhat sinister. Still, my impression up to that point had been that this was the kind of paranoid silliness that led my shriller liberal comrades in Cambridge to make dark intimations about George W. Bush and September 11.

  “The thought was that it was a political move?” I said.

  “To usher Putin into power. He came in on a hard-line security platform.”

  “Do you think it’s true?”

  “I’m not sure it’s true. I certainly hope it’s true. That might be egregious enough to make all the difference.”

  “Make the conversation more interesting, you mean.”

  “Right.”

  He cupped his chin in his hand—it was an oddly dainty, feminine gesture, and maybe it made him feel confiding. “To be honest with you,” he said, “I’m pretty impressed with the film idea.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes. And I’m not impressed by everything Bezetov does.”

  “I’ve gathered.”

  “But this, I think, will raise some interesting questions.”

  “What’s your involvement with the film?”

  He coughed. “That’s, ah. At this point. Somewhat unclear.”

  I sat back. “You’re not invited to be a part of it?”

  “It’s not a question of invitation, you know? It’s a large organization with a lot of auxiliary elements, a lot of different functions, a lot of different roles. It’s a bureaucracy, really.”

  “I see.”

  “So maybe Right Russia isn’t involved, you know, directly, but we’re involved in the movement, you know, so in a broader sense, we’re involved in the making of the film?”

  “Like in the same way that everybody’s involved with everything?”

  “Don’t be difficult. Don’t be dense.”

  “Would you like to be more involved in the film than you are?”

  He smiled tightly. “Like I said, we’d all like things we don’t get.”

  It was interesting to have stumbled into the knowledge of a rift within the camp, first thing—like walking into a field and stepping directly into a sinkhole. Of course I should have imagined pettiness and infighting, resentments and reactionaries. Of course I should have imagined schismatic nuances. I didn’t know what I had imagined, really, and the more I realized that, the more I realized that I hadn’t thought to spend a lot of time imagining anything at all.

  So I leaned forward. I knew—I must have known—that this would annoy the man.

  “Tell me what Aleksandr was like in the eighties,” I said. “He ran a samizdat journal, right?”

  Mikhail snorted again. I was beginning to wonder if that was a trademark. “ ‘Ran’ is perhaps a strong word. He was involved. I’ll grant him that. He was involved.”

  “He delivered it himself? Door-to-door?” This was well known—even in the limited research I’d done, it had come up. “That must have been dangerous.”

  “Dangerous. Yes. Assuredly. The man might have been the target of an assassination attempt or something.”

  There was a twist to his words, but I said, “Exactly.”

  I could immediately tell I’d driven him to the edge of apoplexy. He slowed his breathing, I could see him counting to decet in his head. He leaned back. “Let me ask you a question. This is a good opportunity for me. To learn about how Bezetov is broadly perceived.”

  “You mean elsewhere?”

  “I mean elsewhere,” he said severely.

  “I don’t know.” I tried to think. I tried to parse what my father thought of Bezetov, and what I thought of Bezetov, and what CNN thought of Bezetov, and what the world generally thought of Bezetov. “I guess it’s thought that he did a lot for the dissident movement—”

  “A lot how?”

  “Well. Just his involvement with this paper.”

  “Which was what, exactly?”

  I felt I had already addressed this, so I ignored the question. “And in spite of the costs—”

  “Costs? What were these costs?”

  “To his career,” I finished lamely.

  “Well,” said Mikhail after a moment. “It didn’t seem to hold him back much in the end, did it?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  He probed his lower lip with his tongue. “So he’s seen as a hero, you’re saying?”

  “Va
guely.” I squirmed. “To the extent that he’s seen at all.”

  Mikhail leaned back. “I guess that’s not surprising.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think the West is paying that much attention. You know, generally.”

  “I see.”

  “Where were you during that time?”

  “I was in a psychiatric prison. For disseminating statements not officially recognized as truth.”

  “Oh.” I was beginning to understand.

  Andreyev stood up abruptly, nearly upsetting the trash can again. “I don’t think I can help you any further,” he said, going to the computer. He typed exclusively with his forefingers. “This is the contact information for his spokesman, the media relations guy. He deals with inquiries formally.” He copied down a name—Viktor Davidenko—and a mobile number and handed it to me.

  I stared at the name. “Don’t you have anything else? I mean, this is the person everyone goes through, right?”

  “And you’re not everyone?”

  “No, I just thought—” I stopped. I stood up. I didn’t know what I’d thought.

  “Listen. You can do this one of two ways. You can call him, arrange a meeting, see if he’ll talk to you, which he most likely will not. Or.” He eyed me. “You could put on some eye makeup and comb your hair and swing by the Pravda Bar around five-thirty any afternoon and see if he’ll talk to you then. He’s always there. I’d suggest the latter option. If you can remember to comb your hair. But it’s up to you.”

  Mikhail Andreyevich was marching me to the door, past the interns, who looked up, alarmed, and then returned to their clacking. The door opened onto ludicrous cold, the falling of an implausibly early dusk. Mikhail peered at me. “And if you do manage to reach Bezetov,” he said, “tell him to call me, okay? I have some things I need to discuss with him.”

  I walked down Nevsky Prospekt, away from the river. The encounter with Mikhail Andreyevich had left me feeling sour, uncertain. And then, strangely, angry—I was full of the narcissism of needing the world to bend to you, and the petty outrage you feel when it does not. I felt a frantic energy, the odd sense that I could run all night or put my hand through glass or strip down naked in the cold and survive. I knew that whether Aleksandr was who I thought he was, or who my father thought he was, was not the question. He needed to be good for Russia, for the people to whom he belonged, and not on behalf of a senile music professor now six months dead. It was a gross sense of entitlement—and yes, of course, a grossly American kind of entitlement—to feel otherwise, to try to lay claim to this person somehow.

  And yet. When I thought of my life, it seemed contoured primarily by the vast number of things I had wanted and not gotten. My demands had been relatively modest; I had not wanted an extraordinary life. I’d wanted an ordinary life with an ordinary life span and ordinary consolations and an ordinary love that would, inevitably, degrade in ordinary time. These were not outrageous requests. Perhaps I’d thought that my one outrageous request—to meet this man, to absorb his wisdom, to go to my grave with one interesting stolen secret—would be granted in lieu of all the others. Though it’s true that when I caught myself thinking this, I realized I was essentially supplicating an entity that kept track of such things—requests granted, requests denied—and that this was a kind of stealth religious belief. So I told myself to quit it.

  Still, one had to wonder. I’d doubted my mission; I’d questioned my motives, and reconsidered my hopes, and examined my unexamined privilege until my eyes glazed over. But I hadn’t entertained the idea that perhaps Bezetov was an unworthy target of all this angst, all these hopes. I was an unworthy supplicant, perhaps, silly, misguided, arrogant, undeserving. But Bezetov was assuredly unassailable. If he could not offer wisdom, there simply was no wisdom to be found.

  Humiliatingly, I found myself walking toward Kazan Cathedral, though not for any reason beyond the aesthetic (the Implicit Attitude Test had revealed me to be consistent in my indifference to all major world religions). I walked inside. The crown of the cathedral was nearly as grand as St. Peter’s. Crenellated light streamed through the cupola. A black and white cat lolled, insensate, on a box in a corner. In another corner, richly colored saints gazed out from gilded frames, trapped forever in two dimensions.

  Typically, blasphemously, I thought of Jonathan. It’s not the great tragedy of life to wind up without another human being. Half of marriages end in divorce—what a boring, obsessively repeated statistic this is—and I don’t flatter myself that we would have been any different. Dodging that particular bullet leaves me with something to feel good about, anyway: one major life failure avoided, if nothing else. One can become so sentimental about a person’s absence, but it’s impossible to be consistently sentimental in his presence—when you’re confronted with the quotidian selfishness and silence that, I’m given to understand, comprise most of a life. But we were just so new. We were at that ruthless, lovely edge, all the indignities as yet unimagined and unseen. We didn’t know yet what would have ever made us stop loving each other.

  At first I’d tried to see the devastation of leaving him as possibly salutary; I’d hoped the pressure of it would make me stronger, better, like a diamond compressed from coal, a pearl emerged from the constant nick of sand on sand. But in the end—especially now, especially after talking to Mikhail Andreyevich—I found it exhausting.

  I sat in the church for a while. I stared at the candles in their red glowing holders, burning on behalf of hopes or prayers or lost causes. And I remembered walking along a different river—carved up by a different kind of tenderness, a different kind of terror.

  11

  ALEKSANDR

  St. Petersburg, 1982–1986

  When Aleksandr finally made it back to St. Petersburg from Moscow, there was a man waiting for him in front of his building. Aleksandr had spent a paranoid, insomniac night on the train, Nikolai’s face leering into his dreams every time he dozed, and he froze when he saw the figure standing underneath an emaciated tree branch, a few meters from the building’s collapsing doorstep. But it was not Nikolai. It was Petr Pavlovich Nikitin, hunching into the wind.

  Petr Pavlovich stared at Aleksandr. He tossed his cigarette on the ground and watched it hiss and curl against the snow. But he did not come over. Aleksandr understood that Petr Pavlovich was waiting for Aleksandr to come to him.

  Aleksandr considered turning around. He considered getting back on the train and going—to where? To what? Back to Moscow to hide? Back to the Saigon to drink?

  And then he didn’t. He walked toward Pavlovich, terror snarling in his teeth. “What do you want?” said Aleksandr.

  “Take a guess.”

  Aleksandr looked up. In his fortochka, he could see the distorted silhouette of a man—arm and back and misshapen head—engaged in a methodical activity that looked a lot like searching. Aleksandr could only imagine the steward twisting her hands and biting her lip and trying to remember anything, anything, that she could say against him. He’d kept odd hours, she might say. He’d run with a strange crowd. He’d been fucking a prostitute and hadn’t even been discreet. Aleksandr knew the steward would be sorry she hadn’t thrown him out earlier.

  “That was a nice little performance in Moscow there,” said Petr Pavlovich. In the austere light, he was sallow-cheeked, vaguely jaundiced; his nose ran unbecomingly. Overall, he did not look like a man with the power to ruin a life.

  Aleksandr craned his neck and looked around.

  “What, expecting someone else?” said Petr Pavlovich.

  “Where’s Nikolai?”

  “How should I know? I’m not his nanny.” Pavlovich sniffed vigorously. “I was sorry to hear about your friends.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It was regrettable. Young men. Most regrettable.”

  “Regrettable by whom? To whom? I mean, who regrets it?”

  Pavlovich pinched himself on the nose and looked at Aleksandr magnanimously. Bits of
snow blew onto his eyebrows; they looked like the furry legs of an albino tarantula. “It is to be regretted, surely,” he said. “By anybody.”

  At this, Aleksandr turned from Petr Pavlovich and began marching through the snow toward the building. The ice made an empty sound under his feet.

  “I wouldn’t go back up there if I were you.”

  Aleksandr turned. “No?”

  “They’re not quite through.”

  Aleksandr thought of them rifling through pants and chess sets, books and letters (of these there were few): the paltry accretions of a lonely life. He wondered what else they might sense, standing there, looking for samizdat; he wondered if they might grimly assess and photograph and stow the accumulated mass of solitude and longing and explosive frustration that had been his one true possession in this life.

  “There’s nothing up there.”

  “No? Maybe not.” A thick gurgling issued from the back of Petr Pavlovich’s throat. “Excuse me. Nasal polyps. A great hassle.”

  The gurgling made Aleksandr bold. “How long has Nikolai been with you?”

  “Don’t be crass. You’re never going to have the career you deserve if you keep talking like that.”

  “How long had you been planning to kill Ivan?”

  “That was an accident.”

  “Right.”

  “It was an accident. And that’s not my purview, anyway. I hope you understand that. I stick to sport and propaganda, strictly.”

  Aleksandr said nothing and stared numbly at the expanse of the yard—the gunmetal flank of the building, the frozen and brittle clothing on the line. Above them, the light was bleeding out of the sky.

  “I have to admit,” said Petr Pavlovich, “I’m impressed by your willingness to live in this shithole. We all are. I didn’t think it was a palace you had here, but when you were so adamant about staying, I imagined something a little more tolerable.”

  Aleksandr studied his window. He could still see the men, backlit by the marginal light of the failing lightbulbs. He could not tell what they were doing.