A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  “They think you have a new boss,” he’d said, and smirked.

  Aleksandr had kicked the leg of the table. “I don’t have a fucking boss,” he said. Vlad glared him into silence. Aleksandr had never gotten used to listening to lies about himself, and he usually insisted on correcting them, even though neither Vlad nor the turncoat seemed to care in the end what was true and what was not, as long as they were paid.

  “They think the embassy has a new officer, a sort of awkward young woman, and that she’s on your case.”

  “Please,” Aleksandr had said. “It’s embarrassing to even listen to this.”

  The little shit had smiled, had scratched his beardless chin. “I’m just telling you what’s in your file.”

  Where were his notes from that meeting? Aleksandr flipped through his papers—the facts for the speech, some statistics on the depopulation of Siberia, a few fragments on the film project—and then found the notes. The officer in question was supposedly an “awkward female American academic.” How many of them could there be, running around the same city? It was probably the same woman.

  She wasn’t really CIA, he knew that much. Over the years, they’d approached him occasionally, and done him favors from time to time, and accepted some from him, but they understood, fundamentally, that he’d have no credibility with anyone if he let them own him. He wasn’t pressing their agenda, anyway. He wasn’t pressing anyone’s. As much as they liked him on CNN—because he was sarcastic and skeptical and liked to talk about civil liberties—he was a radical fiscal conservative. He wanted a flat tax. He wanted extreme deregulation. They wouldn’t like him at the American universities if he talked about that stuff, though mostly he was on about press freedom and democracy—and so they clamored for his autograph, these kids at Princeton with their Che Guevara T-shirts.

  But the rumors mattered. They mattered because when he traveled the countryside, when he listened to the concerns of the people in Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod and Irkutsk, he needed them to trust him. The people wanted to talk to him and were inclined to like him; he had a common face and an uncommon energy, and he seemed to remind mothers of their most capable son. They liked to complain to him, and they liked how he eviscerated Putin—with an impression accomplished by sucking his cheeks into vicious little concavities and making his eyes go flat and dead—but they stopped trusting him when they heard rumors. I heard he works for the Americans. I heard he’s an agent of the American CIA. He couldn’t afford it—it was too damaging, it tore too savagely through the carefully wound threads of trust he’d established across this enormous, lonely country—and he had to make this woman, whoever she was, stop whatever she was doing.

  He considered going back to bed—to hold the angular slashes of Nina’s shoulders, to run his fingers against the rocky cordon of her spine—but he decided against it. He was too awake. He flipped back to his notes on the bombing film. The first page of his notes was a photograph: a black-and-white snapshot of the first apartment-building bombing, its top twisted off, its living rooms and sofa beds and kitchen counters reduced to a collapsed pile of gray cinders. In the corner of the photograph, a small boy ran wide-mouthed across a smoldering alley.

  The boy reminded him always of the girl—his girl, his handless girl and her soundless scream. And when he thought of her, he thought of the apartment buildings exploding in stars of fibrous orange, giving off little atomic clouds that made the city barely habitable. Then came the fear: the frantic desperation of a siege, the people stockpiling, placing bets, holding out. Then came the talk: terrorism, it was called; Chechens, no doubt, it was decided; all a part of this global Islamic jihad that had taken a swipe at America’s embassies a year earlier, although America, it was agreed, had at least halfway had it coming. Then there was Putin, fucking Putin, skipping to his victory: smug, assured, issuing commandments and condemnations. The people were glad to have someone in charge. It was only because they were so afraid—chafing against the iron grip of terror, choking on the metallic stink of death (though Misha, who’d thought he was dying more times than was typical, said that the smell of death was actually something closer to sassafras).

  Aleksandr knew that fear. He’d known it back when he was a sniveling chess idiot, smiling big dumb smiles over chattering teeth at his chess chaperones and begging the God he didn’t believe in to make him less like Ivan (less brave, that is, and thus less dead). He knew that fear now, now that he was an adult and making an adult’s painful choices and taking an adult’s painful risks. It was a powerful thing.

  Putin knew that, too, of course. Aleksandr often wondered if there was something of that primordial death fear in Putin—behind his flat affect, his reptilian sneer. The man must lie in his silken sheets, knowing that he’d lied and wronged and suppressed and assassinated his way across the biggest country in the entire world, and that country was at his back as he fell asleep facing the sunset—and he must wake up sometimes gagging on the smell of sassafras.

  At the end of the day, though, it had worked. Putin had won the country. Self-satisfied, smiling that sour subsmile, walking away with the nation’s trust and democratic mandate. One had to wonder. These terrorists, these bombings. These Chechens, who had come all this way to do it. Nice of them to do such a great favor for Putin right before the election. One just had to wonder.

  So Aleksandr was going to make a film that would voice some public findings, some public wonderings. His first idea had been to publish an article about it, but Boris and Viktor—his post-adolescent but obnoxiously intelligent advisers—had looked bored when he discussed it. Their eyes had glazed over. They’d recently been watching a documentary about the origins of 9/11, they said. In it, a schlubby American filmmaker made wounded faces as he interviewed politicians and men on the street. He was polite. He asked literal-minded questions. He somehow made the other people look stupid.

  “We should do something like that,” Viktor had said. “Something accessible.”

  “You know that guy’s a socialist, right?” Aleksandr had said.

  “He makes effective films.”

  “He makes montages. He puts clips of horrifying historical events against pop songs. They’re music videos.”

  “People watch these films. These films change public opinion,” said Boris.

  “I didn’t see this film sinking Bush’s second term.”

  Boris had looked at him and said the one thing that could have persuaded Aleksandr: “When have we talked seriously about sinking Putin? Or whoever he appoints next? I’m saying that this film will make them uncomfortable.”

  They’d been at work on the film for a few months, and Aleksandr had to think that if anything would get him killed, this would be it. But he did not expect the film to have a magic effect. He did not expect it would appear and suddenly usher in decentralization, the end of censorship, the dismantling of the current regime, free and fair elections. All he could hope was that a few people would see it on YouTube, and that, as Viktor said, it would make the administration uncomfortable. All would be different if there was free television. One month of free television and there would be a coup d’état.

  Aleksandr went back to bed. Nina was asleep, her red hair a spray against the Egyptian-cotton pillow, her arms locked at her sides as if holding a yoga position. It was amazing how silently she slept, with such ferocity of purpose. The woman did nothing with nonsense. But that was why he’d married her, after all. He’d had enough of silly girls, young women who fell over themselves and spilled their drinks on their expensive blouses and laughed too loudly at the wrong part of a story. Nina was trivial, perhaps, but she was unapologetic about it, and poised, and pragmatic, and she did nothing to flatter him. At his age, at his income bracket, there was nothing better for a man.

  It was true that he still sometimes thought of Elizabeta—not often, not obsessively, but more frequently than he thought of any other woman besides Nina. It was embarrassing to admit it, even to himself, in his
own head, and remembering her was like simultaneously remembering all the worst shames of his life: the day he lost to a computer program; the fact that he’d once slept on a dirt floor and broken the necks of chickens with his bare hands; his personal conduct for the entirety of the 1980s. Why—as he lay next to a beautiful woman in classy, suggestive pajamas—did his thoughts turn to a nonromance three decades old? But they did sometimes, not often, not often, and he’d be back in the old kommunalka, watching her bang her hand against the steward’s door, listening to her shout some spirited entreaty, messy hair flying everywhere.

  Such thoughts were a waste of energy, and Aleksandr knew he needed to save his energy for more complicated difficulties, more interesting problems. He clasped his hand around Nina’s torso and held her until she shoved him off in her sleep.

  The day of the meeting with the American woman, Aleksandr entered his office to find Boris playing video games. Boris often played video games during working hours; it was, he said, when he did his best thinking. (“What thinking is that?” Viktor would often say.) Next to him, Viktor was scribbling notes on a napkin.

  “What is this drivel you’re writing?” said Boris, not looking at Viktor. On the screen, what looked to Aleksandr like a soft-featured gnome bopped across a chartreuse landscape.

  “Just thanking your mother for last night,” said Viktor.

  “I’m relieved to hear that your impotence problem has been resolved.”

  Aleksandr had found them at a protest eighteen months earlier, and he’d made them run errands until he knew they were serious. Viktor had a heavy brow and blue eyes; Boris was shorter and had a crooked nose that Aleksandr thought odd but that the women seemed to find heartbreakingly attractive. They were arrogant and brilliant and in constant competition; Aleksandr often remarked loudly that if they were his sons—if he’d had sons—he would have volunteered them for the land forces of the Russian Federation as soon as they turned eighteen. As it was, they were not his sons, thank God, and he let them bully and cajole each other as much as they wanted, as long as it kept them sharp.

  “Who bought you that pen, goluboi?” said Boris. “I’ve never seen such an affectation.”

  “You’re just jealous of my literacy.”

  Nina had thought he was crazy for taking in Viktor and Boris so readily. He often talked about how they’d kicked the energy of the outfit up a notch, and how he’d often thought that even if they were FSB, it might have been a fair trade. Aleksandr understood better—now that he was older than Ivan would ever be—how desperate Ivan must have been for a confidant in Nikolai, how greedy he’d been for reassurance. Aleksandr made Viktor and Boris work together because he knew they would fight; after having watched Nikolai’s slavish devotion to Ivan, Aleksandr believed in the importance of a certain standing hostility between co-workers. They were also young—too young to carry the weight of having behaved wrongly during Soviet times—and they annoyed everyone else with their entitled idealism, their freedom from a history of crushing moral calculations. But then, as Aleksandr often remarked, Alternative Russia needed a few people who hadn’t been ethically compromised. Among them were those who’d publicly sold out and those who quietly pretended they never had (himself among them); there were those who’d once believed and had officially come around; there were those who would always, always do whatever was most pragmatic, and who (today) found something practical in a contrarian stance. Then there were the types like Misha—Misha, who had gone ultranationalist in his old age, and who did nothing to discourage Right Russia’s more racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic edges, and who occasionally showed up at Aleksandr’s rallies to shout disruptive things and wave implausible signs.

  “You seem to be taking your time there. Are you struggling with the spelling?” said Boris. The video game issued cheerful synthesizer sounds.

  “Real men, you will find, can last longer than thirty seconds at their activities.”

  Viktor kicked Boris’s chair leg and went back to drafting the itinerary for Moscow, where the two would be heading in a week. They’d already been to Volgodonsk and Buynaksk, and in Moscow they’d be interviewing an ex-soldier who was making money in ways that Aleksandr had agreed not to scrutinize on camera. The interviews were to compose the final and most important third of the film—following an analysis of Putin’s political gain from the attacks and a delineation of the discrepancies in the press reports—and Aleksandr badly envied their going. Aleksandr couldn’t go anywhere anymore.

  Viktor and Boris went off to draft questions and follow-up questions, and the afternoon was swept quickly away. Vlad came in with a toothless death threat; one of the assistants came in with a speaking invitation at Yale University. At four o’clock sharp, just as Aleksandr was starting to lose energy, he was brought a perfect, tiny espresso that gave him the will to go on. Then the door opened and in walked Nina, a few steps ahead of the strange, startled-looking American. “Your visitor,” she said, and clicked out of the room.

  “One moment,” said Aleksandr.

  The American took off her hat, which made her hair stand straight up. “Zdryastvuytye,” she said poorly, which made Aleksandr wince.

  “Please,” said Aleksandr. “I’ve been speaking Russian long enough that this hurts me.”

  Later, he wouldn’t be sure what had made him hire her, exactly. It wasn’t pity, although he couldn’t help but feel an inexplicable lurch of empathy for her; it wasn’t that she was smart (although she was) or that she was beautiful (because she wasn’t). It was, he finally decided, the way she’d asked about Elizabeta, and the way she seemed to stumble her way into understanding something profound about him while he sat there and watched. He rationalized that it was a good quality in an employee: an ability to infer, to piece together a narrative, to take imaginative leaps into the psychology of others. And he had no doubt that she could competently fix the press releases (although Viktor, who’d studied at Oxford, could do just as well). But really, deep down, he hadn’t hired her for her fluent English. He hadn’t hired her to type or proofread or copyedit. He’d hired her to sit around and keep him company in his only undiscovered secret.

  In the evening—once the army of typers and talkers had left, and Aleksandr had eaten his dinner of vegetables and high-end fish, and the sky out the living-room window had turned the color of a mostly healed bruise—Nina clacked against the oak floors and started up some tea. Aleksandr often came across Nina’s array of multicolored teas in the cupboards—strange tinctures beyond the realm of his understanding, usually involving obscure Latin American tubers—and they were the only evidence in the kitchen, he often thought, that Nina was a carbon-based life-form, requiring consumption for survival.

  She waved a malodorous tea bag at his face. “Do you want some of this?” she said, although he had never once accepted her offer.

  “No, thank you,” said Aleksandr. “What’s this one do?”

  “It’s for digestion.”

  “What do you have to digest? You don’t eat.”

  “I eat plenty,” said Nina tiredly. “How was your meeting with the strange American?”

  “It was fine.”

  “Oh?”

  “I hired her.”

  “You what?”

  “I hired her,” he said. “I’m going to coopt her, you know? It makes sense.”

  Nina’s water started to boil, and she poured it over her tea leaves. A bitter smell flushed up, acrid and assaulting, and Aleksandr stepped away. “You’re going to pay her?” said Nina.

  “She says she doesn’t need money. I’ll give her something nominally.”

  “That’s very odd.” Nina took a sip of her tea. “What if she’s spying on you?”

  Aleksandr had considered this. But after thirty years of paranoia—of seeing spies in corners, and ghosts in shadows, and murder in public transportation, and conspiracy in terrorism—he felt sure that she was not.

  “What if you’re spying on me?” he said, and tugged
at Nina’s hair.

  “Grib, stop,” she said. “I just blow-dried it.”

  That night—again, and he hoped it didn’t suggest a trend—Aleksandr couldn’t sleep. In bed, with Nina silent beside him, he tried to keep his legs from thrashing. He took deep breaths, but they caught somewhere behind his uvula, stirring little tides of anxiety, eddying over deep pools of energy. He wanted to go to Moscow. He wanted to run a marathon. He wanted, he realized, to get out of the apartment.

  For a time, even in recent years, Aleksandr still occasionally went walking. But like American heads of state who insist on taking exercise outside, he was always trailed by a small army of his black-suited security staff. It was tiresome for him, and boring for them, and nothing in the way of freedom or reflection could be achieved. So in the last few years he’d mostly stopped. His universe had become this apartment—tastefully decorated (that was all Nina) and carefully managed, his toast and tea ready for him at five-fifteen in the morning, his afternoon espresso steaming hot at four, his laptop blinking an aquatic blue in the dark, whirling him into contact with the universe. Living in this apartment was like living in a museum, he sometimes thought, everything so immaculately clean, the objects chosen and placed with the care of a curator. Each room had a different unobtrusively pleasant smell—lemon in the kitchen, lavender in the bedroom, some sort of oceanic wind that made him sneeze in the bathroom. He walked the apartment end to end some nights, and when he put his foot down in that forgiving white carpeting, he could smell the rawness of Sakhalin dirt. In his sublime, epic, multilayered bed, he could feel the lethal cold of his room in the kommunalka.