A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  The Funeral for Democracy was the first element of the three-part plan that Aleksandr outlined for the summer. After the Funeral, Viktor and Boris and I would go to Perm to try to talk to the lieutenant whom Valentin Gogunov had spoken of. If the lieutenant admitted military cooperation in the thievery at Perm, the case prosecuting the government for their involvement would be closed. The film would have made its point. And then—as a response to that anger, riding on a swelling wave of intense populist feeling—Aleksandr would win the formal nomination from Alternative Russia. There was no talk of winning the actual presidency.

  What after that? What would we do once Aleksandr had the nomination? Once he’d positioned himself as an alternative candidate in a country with no real elections? Once he’d put himself firmly in the crosshairs of an enemy who had a monopoly on the ammunition?

  We simply didn’t know. Which is another way of saying we thought we did know and were too polite to talk about it.

  At the hostel, I remained an odd, slightly inconvenient reality of the building, like the drain that never drained properly and the coffee cups in the cupboard that always looked dirty. I don’t know what the managers made of me. They’d never had a guest stay longer; I’m sure they expected that I would never leave. In the time I’d been at the hostel, I’d watched hundreds of young people come and go. I’d watched people flirt and fight and get to know each other in a dozen different languages; they debated literature, and showed off about philosophy, and offered searing opinions about the political development of each other’s home countries. There was a Belorussian stripper (“I’m in club work,” she said. “You understand?”). There was an engaged couple who broke up loudly outside the hostel in the middle of a horrifically cold February night. There was an older Japanese woman who shared no language with anyone, and wore the same outfit every day, and slept curled around her backpack every night. There was a young woman who lost a baby she didn’t even know she was carrying. There was a tiny twenty-three-year-old, eyelinered, multilingual, forever awaiting her visa to go study at the Sorbonne. There was a pair of slick-haired Italian men who stared at me ceaselessly—keeping them from ever seeing my breasts was ultimately a losing battle. There was a young man who rocked himself against a wall and stole sugar packets from the communal tea-and-coffee station near the door. He’d been traveling, he claimed, for fourteen months.

  Then they all left, and then new ones came. Once I overheard one of them asking the night manager about me. “The woman,” he said. “The older woman who’s been here the whole time. Who is she?”

  I think he said “older woman.” He might have said “old woman.” And who could blame him? Who could say that I had not earned the title?

  “Oh, her,” said the night manager. “We don’t know. She lives here.”

  It was startling to hear, in a way, although of course I did live there—as much as I could be said to live anywhere, anymore.

  At first, walking home from Aleksandr’s late at night had bothered me—rare was the night when I didn’t encounter a leering drunk or an aggressive panhandler or a person in clear need of hospitalization for one reason or another. I was a target for all kinds of harassment—I was visibly female, visibly foreign (especially at the beginning), and I walked around unaccompanied at all hours of the day and night. But at some point in the winter, the walk stopped alarming me. Maybe it was that something about me subtly changed—maybe something in my bearing started looking more comfortable, more aggressive, less afraid. Maybe it was that the cold made me believe, on any given night, that I was more at risk from the weather than from anything else. Or maybe it was that I started to feel—more acutely than I had felt before—that it didn’t matter what happened to me, and this indifference offered a quasi-ironic protection against any real trouble. Whatever the reason, on all my walks, on all the nights, nobody ever truly scared me until Nikolai found me again.

  It was early evening in late March, the time of year when you feel absurdly grateful that the sky has started staying pallid into the late afternoon. It’s a time of counting the smallest of blessings, which is never something I’ve excelled at. But that day I was, perhaps, trying—I’d left Aleksandr’s apartment early and taken a long, lingering walk along the river, finally finding myself down by the Hermitage and, hours later, watching the night raising of the bridge. It wasn’t until late that I hopped on the metro, sailed underneath the Neva back to Vasilevsky Island, and picked my chilled way back to my neighborhood. When a man emerged from the shadowy side of one of the buildings on my street, I was almost too tired to jump.

  “Irina?”

  I felt a twist against my wrist, like the slithering of a dessicated eel. In my throat, an entire life cycle of a scream ran its course.

  “Who is it?” I hissed.

  He moved, and the synthetic light from the nonstop market caught a snatch of red-raw skin. I remembered.

  “Young lady,” said Nikolai. “I believe we have met before.”

  “I know you,” I said. I remembered him from the day at the café last fall, before I had properly met Aleksandr. It occurred to me, horribly, that he couldn’t have followed me all the way home—through the labyrinthine metro, along the three million art pieces of the Hermitage—without being noticed. It was worse than that. He had waited for me here.

  “That’s a bit presumptuous,” he said. I stared at him and tried to figure out what was going on with his face. It looked like the epidermis had been pulled off, carefully, precisely, perhaps as part of some medical experiment.

  “You’re working for Aleksandr Bezetov now,” he said.

  “I’m not answering that.”

  “I’m not asking.”

  I looked away. A hunched old woman passed by us, muttering to herself. I tried to lock eyes with her, but she didn’t look up.

  “Look,” said Nikolai. “I don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe the Americans have taken to spying on Bezetov, and if that’s the case, then by all means, carry on.”

  I said nothing.

  “But lately, I’ve been suspecting otherwise. We’ve been suspecting otherwise. We think you’re just sort of—an independent agent, might be the charitable way to put it? Or a loose cannon? It seems as though you really are just here on your own, for your own inscrutable reasons, as implausible as that still sounds. As such, we have to wonder if we might persuade you to reconsider your approach.”

  I said nothing. I couldn’t believe that people talked like this, and I didn’t have any response—nobly indignant or otherwise—that wouldn’t sound canned.

  “Not talking? All right,” said Nikolai. “You can buy most people, but I suppose it is true that you can’t buy everyone.”

  I tried to move past him then, but he boxed me out with his sizable chest.

  “Not yet,” he said. “We’re not done talking.”

  That was when I got scared. It occurred to me that if Nikolai thought that what he wanted—whatever he wanted—wasn’t going to be gained through talking, he might try changing his tactics.

  “You must think Aleksandr very brave, yes?” said Nikolai. “Living life in the rifle’s gaze? And all for his political ideals. Very poetic, yes? Very courageous? You admire him. And why he grants you this access, I don’t know. Maybe he’s fucking you, though I don’t know why he would. But for whatever reason, here you are. You respect this man. You find his moral judgment impeccable. You’d make sacrifices for him. Undoubtedly, you already have.”

  I looked down. It wasn’t true, exactly. I hadn’t made sacrifices, at least not any that I hadn’t already been looking to make.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about Aleksandr. For example, his best friend from the seventies got himself hit by a bus. Did you know that? His best friend and colleague, the man who protected him, guided him through everything in his first days here. The man who got him interested in politics originally. The man who ran that journal originally. You knew that, right? You knew that Aleksandr was just a c
hess prodigy, right? He barely knew his left from right. He didn’t know what to do. All he did was shuffle these pieces around on a board and pine after this whore he knew from his building. It was pathetic by anyone’s standards. And then his best friend, Ivan, was killed by a night bus. Horrific accident. He was crossing the street carelessly, no doubt; terribly drunk, I shouldn’t wonder. The man was an incorrigible drunk.”

  I stared at Nikolai.

  “He never told you that, did he?” said Nikolai.

  “What is your point.”

  “Didn’t you ever find it odd that Aleksandr hasn’t had a similar accident yet? He’s been careless in his own way, nobody would argue.”

  “You mean, do I wonder why you haven’t killed him yet? I imagine it’s not for lack of trying.”

  Nikolai tsked and drew his cheeks together in a way that seemed oddly mannered and affected. “Please,” he said. “There’s no reason to be vulgar.”

  I closed my eyes. I waited for him to go, but he did not. He leaned in closer to me. He stank of undercooked meat, of cheap alcohol, of the threat of violence. I thought I might faint from sheer character weakness.

  “Look,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you. This is the truth, Irina: your friend Bezetov wants to have his little rallies, his little public fits or whatever, that is fine. That is okay with us. That is, frankly, good for us. He wants to sit up there in his barricaded castle, stroking his own ego? Okay. Your funeral thing that’s coming up? With the quirky little posters? Very cute. Fine, wonderful.”

  He clenched and relaxed his fingers like an animal exercising a protractible claw. “But this film. It’s a bit much, don’t you think?”

  “Much?” I was becoming—retroactively, impotently—terrified. My knees began to actually shake. My spine was wracked with a great seizure of fear.

  “It’s pushing it. There has been tolerance.” He pulled me close to him, and his face caught the light again. I could see where he’d sliced himself shaving. I could see hairs between his eyebrows, looking like the legs of massacred beetles. “There has been tremendous tolerance and patience on the part of the Kremlin. The Kremlin has been magnanimous, has looked the other way and endured the slanders and silliness. But know this, Irina, and tell your boss: this generosity is not infinite. The film is much too much. And your Aleksandr may be famous. He may be well regarded. But even famous people can become careless in the roads. Even the famous can have accidents.”

  I tried to back away, and this time he let me.

  “I think you do understand. But Aleksandr seems to have forgotten. Remind him, wouldn’t you?”

  I took a step, and then another, and then my knees bent, and I was running.

  “You will,” called Nikolai. “I know your type. You will.”

  The next day I was out before sunrise, making my way through the streets as the bakeries were turning on their lights. In the station, drunks sat shivering in the alcoves until police came and prodded them away. On the metro, dead-eyed young people were returning from long nights out, their pupils the size of thumbs.

  I got to Aleksandr’s as the sky was turning a mottled gray. I waited outside the apartment until I saw the light go on, and then I waited fifteen minutes more. Vlad buzzed me in, and I knocked on Aleksandr’s door, and I heard a voice, and I went in.

  Nina was holding a shoe in her hand, her jaw set in a furious determination. Maybe it was the way the light was catching her, but her red hair and the fury of her energy and the heaving of her chest conspired to make her unbeautiful. Anger, I’ve been told, can make some lovely women even lovelier, but with Nina, this was not the case. Rage deformed her face and made it somehow hers and yet not hers—there was the same elegant arrangement of the same objectively fine features, but now it all somehow amounted to ugliness. It was like stepping back from a painting and letting the clots of color take a horrible new meaning.

  “You,” Nina said, “are a pitiful man.” She sounded like she meant it.

  Aleksandr was sitting with his head down, his shoulders hunched over. I instinctively covered my eyes with my hands. I tried to back away, and in so doing, I knocked over an antique wooden bowl depicting an Orthodox cathedral.

  Nina looked at me. Her faced changed almost imperceptibly—there was a brief bleed of contempt, followed by a speedy recovery. And on Aleksandr’s face: sheer humiliation. I should know what it looks like. Then Nina gave me a brief nod and quietly dematerialized in the doorway.

  “Well,” said Aleksandr too carefully. “Good morning.”

  “I’m sorry. I knocked. I thought I heard someone answer.”

  He waved his hand at me as though batting away the implied question. “It’s okay. It happens.”

  “You’re not happy,” I brilliantly observed.

  I found myself thinking of Jonathan then. I thought again that there was some value in never seeing the bad things—the small, ugly facts you come to know about a person no matter how hard you try not to. The petty compromises, the self-promotions, the self-protections. The tiny tics of ego or of callousness. The eventual—inevitable—failure of comprehension.

  “Happy? Oh, is that supposed to be the idea?” It was an oddly personal thing to hear, like listening to someone talk in his sleep. He tapped his pen against his papers and spun around joylessly in his chair. “Should we use this unexpected time to talk about Perm?”

  “Aleksandr, I—”

  “The guard will meet you at a café. You won’t go near the actual facility. As you know, I will not be going with you.”

  “Aleksandr.”

  “I’ll just be here, enjoying the joy of my domicile. Basking in the glow of my wedded bliss.”

  “Please.”

  “Please,” he repeated, waving his hand at me. “Please. We don’t need to discuss this. It’s a rather banal problem, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are more important things to talk about.”

  “Yes,” I said emphatically.

  Aleksandr raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Nikolai stopped me on the street again. He told me to tell you.” I thought again of Nikolai’s face and how close to me it had been. “He smelled terrible,” I said.

  Aleksandr took off his glasses. He squeezed the flesh above the bridge of his nose. He looked a little more beleaguered, a little more embattled, a little more tired than I normally thought of him.

  “He was threatening me, or you, or something?”

  “How does he always know where I am?”

  Aleksandr squinted at me. “You have been at the same hostel for a year. You’re not exactly making it hard for him.” He pressed on his forehead with his index finger until a small weal appeared. “What does he say?”

  “The film is going too far, he says.” Suddenly, I realized how terrified I was for Aleksandr. This was striking, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been terrified for a person who was not myself.

  “I’ve gone too far before,” he said tiredly. “I’ve always been too far.”

  It was true, I knew. He went too far, and he lived with what it meant. Not in the same way I did—his threats were external, and they would take his mind and his body at the same time. But in more ways than one, we were alike. Death stalked us; every day we caught glimpses of it out of the corner of our eyes, a grinning hyena through a thicket. We never knew when it was coming, and on good days, we could convince ourselves that it wasn’t coming at all. Aleksandr could talk himself into believing that no one would ever follow him home; that the things in the corners would stay shadows, and the loud noises would always be motorcycles backfiring, and the head injuries would remain minimal and vaguely comic. And I could believe that the tests were, perhaps, mistaken; that the cataracts on some printed-out sheet ten years ago had nothing to do with my actual mind, my actual memories; that the prophesy was misinterpreted or perhaps reversible. I could believe that if I had to be the type of person who was prone to statistical anomaly, then
I could perhaps become the kind of person who could access statistical impossibility. I could cut out articles about the only known survivor of full-blown rabies (medically induced coma, steroids); I could cut out articles about the resurrection of the clinically dead. I didn’t believe in miracles, per se. But somehow, believing in your continued existence doesn’t feel like the miracle. It’s the alternative that defies logic, that beggars belief.

  “They’re going to kill you,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t say that.”

  “He talked about ‘accidents’ with a rather unnerving emphasis.”

  Aleksandr was nodding vacantly, as though I’d been going on about some petty grievance for hours already. He looked out the window. “You know, you’d think my wife would worry about me,” he said.

  “She doesn’t?”

  “It’s a funny thing, you know. She doesn’t. She really, really doesn’t.”

  “Maybe she can’t stand to think about it. Maybe she has faith that you’ll be okay.” I knew how shallow a thought this was. I’d encountered it myself—from friends of friends and aged aunts who clasped my hand in theirs and said, Irina, you’ll be okay, I know it, I just know it. What this means is: I haven’t properly thought about it—I haven’t subjected it to any kind of clean, brutal scrutiny—because it is unpleasant, and at the end of the day, I do not really care that much.

  “Faith doesn’t enter into it with Nina. Neither does denial. She knows what we pay in insurance premiums. At any rate, I don’t expect that this business with Nikolai is anything more to be worried about than the kind of thing I’ve had to contend with already.”

  “But that’s it,” I said. “He’s saying it is. He’s saying they’ve been letting you off the hook on purpose. He’s saying they’re going to stop doing that.”