A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  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.

  “Might I come in?” she said.

  It was strange that he wanted to say no. He wanted to close the door and collapse against it in exhaustion; his apartment was already haunted enough, and if he let Elizabeta in, even for an hour, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep living there.

  “I’m sorry about your employees,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I saw on the news.”

  “Yes, you can come in.”

  He stood aside and held the door open for her, and when she passed by, he was struck by the incredible strangeness of her proximity. There was his body, and then there was hers, and he could reach out and pull her to him if he wanted to, which he always had. But he couldn’t tell if this was better, or worse, or, depressingly, exactly the same. He gestured emptily to the chairs in the office. He then realized that they were covered in papers, and he went and swept them onto the floor.

  “Do you want anything? Tea or”—he noticed her notice the vodka bottle melting onto the death threats, and he knew what an odd evening all that added up to—“or anything?”

  “Tea,” she said. “Please.”

  He stared at her helplessly, then went to make the tea. Nina had left her arsenal, and he selected something he hoped was especially bitter and unforgiving—something that tasted like missing a chance and realizing it far, far too late. Didn’t she know how relentlessly she’d harassed him these past decades? Was her cruelty not satisfied? It occurred to him briefly that she might be here to kill him—she wouldn’t be the first person to try, and she had, after all, been married to a Party official for some time, and he’d probably been intimately linked to the current government in some way. Once a Chekist, always a Chekist, as Putin himself had said. There was also the small matter that Aleksandr had never really known this woman—not really, not at all—and he’d be a fool to be surprised by anything she might do. And it would be embarrassing, it would be mightily embarrassing, to have dodged a fairly expensive and technically involved plane crash only to be murdered a week later in his own apartment, while wearing slippers, while making tea.

  He stayed in the kitchen until the kettle screamed, then brought her a cup on a tray.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He wanted to be monosyllabic and coy, like she was being. He wanted desperately to make her wait excruciatingly for the accusations that she must have known were coming. But he couldn’t. The words were out of him before he’d given them a once-over. “I wouldn’t have let anybody else in the world into this apartment, you know,” he said. “Unaccompanied and without a meeting. Maybe my bodyguard. Maybe some of my staff. I don’t think there’s anybody else right now.”

  She took a sip of the tea. If it hurt her, she didn’t let on. “You trust me?” she said.

  “I don’t trust you. It’s not trust that got you in here.”

  She looked out the window. “You don’t trust me. That’s funny.”

  He scoffed. It was outrageous that she was here at all—after all the time, and after all he’d gone through on her account, although he supposed she couldn’t fairly be asked to know all that. But regardless, he was an important man now, and he’d run important risks, and there was no reason that he had to tolerate unwanted visits from anyone, let alone her. She’d known a different man in a different lifetime, and even that man, only very casually.

  “You married an official.” He kept his voice flat, as though this were a neutral fact and he was helpfully reminding her. He hoped he was being cruel. He wanted to be cruel.

  “I did.”

  “You didn’t love him,” he said. He didn’t know this. She could have loved him. Sometimes, over the years, in his more generous moments, he had hoped that she did.

  “I didn’t.”

  “But you married him.” He was surprised that he had to keep pointing this out.

  Her face became cloudy then, and he thought with terror that she was going to cry. It would be an incredible thing to see a woman like Elizabeta cry—like witnessing a freak meteor shower or the exhumation of a sea creature that was thought to be long extinct. Even though it would be a spectacle, he didn’t want to see it—he didn’t want to see it because he never wanted her to cry, ever, even now, even when he thought that maybe she deserved it.

  All this was irrelevant, because she didn’t cry. She started to cough. It was a hopeless, wretched, horrible cough, and immediately he wished that she’d cried instead.

  “Don’t feel bad,” she said when she emerged and saw him staring. “That would have happened even if you hadn’t brought up poor Mitya.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  She looked at him witheringly. “You mean—generally?”

  “Your cough.”

  She shrugged. “Cigarettes. Never start, Aleksandr. It’s a nasty habit.”

  He didn’t remember her smoking in the kommunalka, and he immediately, quietly, decided to believe that this, too, was the fault of the dinosaur.

  “You have a nice view up here,” she said. She was trying to move them past the coughing, past the dreadful thing that it seemed to suggest.

  “Everyone says so.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “No, it’s quite lovely. It’s a slightly different view when it’s all you’ve got, but yes, it’s lovely.”

  She watched out the window, and he wished he could know what the view looked like to her.

  “So,” she said. “You don’t trust me because I married poor Mitya.”

  “Essentially.”

  “Why do you think I did that?” She was standing up and moving closer to him.

  “Because it was easy.” He stood up, too, just in case there was going to be hand-to-hand combat. He didn’t want to die sitting down.

  “Partly that,” she said.

  “Because you were tired of what you did.” She was close, and the only thing to do was to stare straight into her face. It was an odd thing, this aging. It was there as a fading around the eyes and a severity around the chin. But the young person—the real person—was so present, so undoubtedly alive. It was as though the rest—the netting across the eyes and the pursing of the mouth—were a shoddy disguise, not meant to be taken seriously.

/>   “Partly that, too,” she said.

  “Because you were afraid.”

  “No,” she said carefully. “No, not that.” She smelled like oatmeal and lilac—and yes, cigarettes, but they were the cigarettes of prewar Paris, the cigarettes of Ingrid Bergman, not the cigarettes of zeks in the gulag or common people anywhere.

  “What else?”

  She looked at him then with a look that was more complicated than some people’s entire hearts or lives. It was a look that was part resentment and part tenderness and part inarticulate fury. Behind that, maybe, there was something else—something he wasn’t sure he was in any position to see or to judge or to believe anymore.

  “Aleksandr,” she said. “Did it ever occur to you to wonder why you weren’t killed along with your friend?”

  She didn’t ask to stay, and he didn’t invite her, but somehow she was still there a week later, and she was showing no signs of leaving. They took cautious walks occasionally, along the Neva—Vlad trailing them at a prenegotiated distance—and they told each other their entire lives: the parts that had happened before the kommunalka, and the parts that had happened afterward, and the unseen parts that had happened while they were living around each other. He told her that after he’d first met her, he’d gone and lay on his bed, delirious with a new, improbable, striking thing. She told him that after she talked to him in the hallway, she spent the afternoon asking the steward questions about him until she chased Elizabeta from the room and never dealt with the worms in the faucet. She also told him—never directly but obliquely, unbelievably—that maybe she had married to protect him. Not totally, not entirely, but maybe partly. In the days after the discovery of the pamphlet, she’d pleaded with the dinosaur man (who’d been slow, and not mean-spirited, and hopelessly in love with Elizabeta) and he’d agreed to protect Aleksandr, within reason, if Elizabeta would marry him. And so—because she didn’t want to be a prostitute forever, and she was poor, and it was a time when everybody, everybody, had done something of which they were now ashamed—she’d agreed.

  They talked also, finally, about Irina—the nominal reason for Elizabeta’s visit to him in the first place. She told him how the girl had come to see her—funny, to hear Elizabeta call Irina a girl when Irina had been thirty-one and Elizabeta, even now, even when he squinted, could never be too much older than nineteen. Aleksandr saw now that Elizabeta might feel guilty, too—she’d sent Irina chasing Nikolai, which had gotten her summoned to Aleksandr, which had gotten her killed. He saw that Elizabeta might have thought him an unworthy steward of the young woman she had circuitously sent him. He saw, too, that this was something else they might share.

  The bottom line was this: he loved her, he’d always loved her, and he couldn’t entirely forgive her, he could never entirely forgive her. She knew this, and they could live with it—live with the best years lost, and irretrievable, and unknowable now, always. Then again, maybe they’d traded those years for these—maybe her protection had bought him his whole life and whatever would one day come of it, if anything at all. He didn’t know, honestly, if it were a trade he would make again—but then it wasn’t his to make. And when she stayed, and kept staying, and he kept waking up to her, there were moments when he could only feel grateful. There were moments when he could almost believe she’d been there all along.

  A few nights after Elizabeta’s return, Aleksandr finally looked at the material from Perm. The e-mail from Viktor had been sitting in his in-box, crouching sinisterly like a prank left by a poltergeist, and Aleksandr had been half afraid to open it—he feared that it might unleash a duo of swirling, self-righteous ghosts who would point at him with ghoulish fingers and ask him why he hadn’t done some things (maybe everything) differently. But when he opened it, it was only what it purported to be. The footage was as damning as anything Aleksandr could have hoped for; nothing short of an audio recording of Putin clapping his hands and giggling about the attacks could have been better for the film. It was the clincher. It was the closing argument. Along with the footage came an e-mail message from Viktor, now three weeks dead:

  Sorry we had to do it this way. But I know you understand.

  Aleksandr never deleted it. In later years, it moved farther and farther into the recesses of his in-box, but he never let it go. It was a signal, a semaphore. It was a beacon across an incomprehensible gulf, and as long as it was there, Aleksandr felt that somebody was still swinging the lantern.

  The documentary came out in the middle of the summer. It was shown in indie movie houses in the United States, in Western Europe. In Russia, it was pirated and passed along on DVD, though it was viewed mostly by the usual people—the intelligentsia with their wire-rimmed glasses, showing the film to their dinner-party guests and clucking over the things that they were going to cluck about anyway. It was available in nine parts on YouTube, and nearly one hundred thousand people watched it. Aleksandr sent it to the Moscow Film Festival just to antagonize the close buddy of Putin’s who ran the thing. Novaya Gazeta gave it some coverage and wrote a review, giving particular attention to the findings from Perm. The film was never spoken of on television. At the end of August, the page editor responsible for the film review suffered a tragic fall down some faulty stairs. In October, the editorial writer who’d offered a scathing analysis based on the investigation contracted an implausible, incurable disease and died in a state hospital, where his remains were confiscated by the authorities.

  Aleksandr would never know (how could anyone know?) whether it was worth it—worth the death of those two, plus an entire airplane of people, not all of whom were dying of terminal illnesses. But there were times when he walked along the river and felt sure that it was not. There’d been twenty-three people on the flight—twenty-two if you discount Irina, who was already on her way out—and then the two newspapermen, and when Aleksandr fully rejoined the land of the living, he spent his first few trips counting twenty-four people from a crowd: a rubbery-faced old woman with a nose like a toe, a dark-eyed young beauty, two well-dressed young men giving each other a wide distance, a mother with a passel of small children of indeterminate genders who tumbled around her like puppies, an entire grade-school class out for a day. It was not worth it. In the world of painful trade-offs—in a life spent calculating risks—it was not a wise sacrifice; it was a rook for a pawn, a bishop for a rook, a queen for a far-off victory, admittedly improbable.

  Aleksandr disappeared into work, and he took Boris with him. Through the rest of the smothering summer into the ruddy fall, they worked: they collected signatures, they gave interviews, they brought up the Moscow bombings whenever it was appropriate and, quite often, when it was not. Aleksandr wrote articles for The Wall Street Journal to be read only by people who already agreed with him. He spoke to crowds that were not smaller but also not discernibly larger. Putin unveiled his successor, Medvedev—a skittish-seeming man with no appreciable credentials—who immediately announced that he’d make Putin his prime minister if he were elected. The week of his coronation, he polled at 79 percent.

  To the crowds, Aleksandr unveiled his best lines yet: here in Putin’s Russia, the government is reviving the idea of collective guilt for dissidence. Here in Putin’s Russia, we put people on trial in cages in the courtroom. Here in Putin’s Russia, commercial airlines are exploded for politics. Do we want four more years, at least, of Putin’s Russia? Because with Medvedev, there is no doubting that is what we will get. And the crowds said no, they didn’t want that.

  At the end of November, one of the rallies got ugly, and Aleksandr was beaten by a small mob. The Kremlin sneeringly reported that he had spoken English to the reporters there. “I spoke Russian, too,” he snarled at Radio Free Europe, even though his lip still hurt when he talked too quickly. “I speak Russian quite well, in fact, and I’d be more than happy to debate Vladimir Vladimirovich on national television so that we can see who speaks it better.”

  In December—after new, marginally promising poll num
bers came out—he was detained by police and thrown in jail for a week. He stared out the window into a pallid block of sky. The week was not pleasant, but it was also, he knew, not representative: he emerged well fed and unharmed, and overall, it was a media coup for his side (CNN rolled old interviews, the blogosphere ignited, there were text boxes in Newsweek and Time). The week afterward his crowd was bigger than ever, and he knew that they knew that the arrest had been a miscalculation, a blunder into blowback.

  It didn’t matter. In January they would not let him register—of the 2,067,211 signatures endorsing Aleksandr’s candidacy, 80,000 were deemed falsified by the authorities. Venues were canceled, permits revoked. Aleksandr withdrew, rather ceremonially, by delivering a blistering speech in blistering wind. And in March, Medvedev won with a staggeringly robust 70 percent of the vote, while Aleksandr watched the returns in a rented restaurant full of miserable people who eventually resorted to throwing things at the television, then shuffled out—depressed, drunk—into a black and snowy night.

  Aleksandr stayed at the restaurant, with Elizabeta making curlicues on his shoulders, until after the staff had finished cleaning up.

  Even Misha, whom he caught sneering on BBC a few days later, seemed distressed. “I’m no fan of Bezetov,” he said. “But the election was rigged. Obviously, it was rigged. There was no election here at all, so you can stop reporting on the results.”

  They pulled Nikolai out of the FSB and made him minister of the interior and gave him an enormous dacha in the woods outside Moscow. Aleksandr would see him sometimes when the television was covering some event in the Duma—in the background, he could catch Nikolai’s red-raw face, his portly nest of jowls. He’d been a loyal servant to the regime. He might have been prime minister one day if he hadn’t been so unforgivably ugly.

  At home, at least, there was Elizabeta—and whenever he lost his belief in the eventual arrival of unlikely events, she was there to remind him. He carried her around the apartment, and he reenacted every single inchoate gesture and emotion that had been choking him up for the past few decades. I always wanted to do this, he’d say. I always wanted to do this. They loved each other, and that was enough, although her coughing was dreadful, and there were nights when they didn’t touch each other at all and only watched old movies while Elizabeta sat sucking her oxygen through tubes. There were other nights when Aleksandr—who was not yet an old man but who would not be able to say that for long—thought about what it might have been like to have love for a youth, or for a decade, or for an entire lifetime.