A Partial History of Lost Causes (10 page)

I thought of Jonathan—I thought him of pointing to my father, to his skittering hands and carved-out eyes. He asked if that would be me, and I’d said no, not if I could help it. Which reminded me of Lars’s saying, “But she never can, she never can.”

Jonathan came to the funeral, and he held my hand and bowed his head with the appropriate amount of sober reflection. Still, even then, I was starting to feel a chasm between us, crumbling into enormity. It’s true that we are all mortal, but maybe it’s also true that some of us are more mortal than others. The cemetery was almost lovely—full of the mild green of new buds and grass shyly beginning to assert itself, the cool wind blowing the trees’ shadows across the graves in a way that was a little beautiful and a little unnerving. And Jonathan regarded everything—the coffin, the grave, the green Astroturf laid out to conceal the exposed dirt—with the expression of a spectator.

I look back now, and I tell myself that in this, as in all things, there are advantages. So we don’t marry, have children, grow old together. This is what we miss. We also don’t stop sleeping together, divorce, come to see each other as strangers, look back in bewildered grief to these early days and try to unravel how it all went so wrong. Those days—that last spring in Boston—were the only days. There is something to be grateful for in this, I think.

But at the time, I wasn’t grateful yet. I looked at the sky; I looked at the ground. Everything was fragile and raw and acute. I looked at Jonathan. We are not the same, I thought. And you would not wish for us to be.

A few weeks after my father’s death, I went to clean out the house, and that was when I found the box. My mother had kept the house through my father’s illness—partly because she wanted a place to stay when she returned for semiannual visits, partly because it was the only asset that the state couldn’t claim after we relinquished my father and his savings to a publicly funded facility. After the death, my mother was free to sell the house, and she’d asked me to handle the posthumous categorizing and cataloging and investigating that comes with a completed life. I was given an afternoon to reduce my father to the elements we would most want to remember him by: the wittiest letters, the loveliest souvenirs, the most flattering photographs. Everything else would be thrown out.

The box was in my father’s study, shoved between a stack of withered postcards and his creaky, outdated globe. When I looked inside, I found a mess of snarled newspaper clippings, curling from age and multiple handlings, and I nearly stepped away, closed the box, and left the mystery alone.

Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t nearly close the box. I am not the kind of person who would close the box. I kept the box open, and I started to riffle. And inside the box I found pictures and clippings of Aleksandr Bezetov, the chess champion.

The first clipping was a 1980 article from
Literaturnaya Gazeta
, detailing an early success of Aleksandr’s at that unpronounceable Leningrad chess academy of his. In the picture, he’s heartrendingly young and nondescript—he never did look like a person who’d amount to much, even when he already had—and he appears slightly chagrined at being photographed. The clippings then follow him to regional and nationwide victories in Russia to international triumph at some tournament in Reykjavík. In the earlier pictures, he is gaunt and grumpy; his gestures are all hard angles; he has an expression of low-grade exasperation. The eighties begin. The reporting about him has a breathless quality; his youth is much remarked upon, as is his brilliance. He has a subversive manner of play, it is said. He has an attitude. There are reports on disputes with the FIDE. He stops meeting the camera’s eye when he’s photographed. He fills out some. He starts to look older.
He plays Rusayev interminably. The match is halted. The match is resumed. The last game is played. This was the game I had watched with my father, and the ferocity of Bezetov’s expression put me in mind of that night—the delirious rotating of shadow against wall, the slow-falling snow turning the color of dying fire. Bezetov wins. In the picture with his trophy, he appears clinically depressed. The clippings seem shakily cut now, as we move into the late eighties and the first stirring of my father’s Huntington’s. All documentation stops fairly soon after my father’s symptoms present, though not as soon as I might have imagined. After 1990, there’s nothing—nothing about Bezetov’s book, his much mourned loss to an IBM computer, his entry into post–Cold War politics. My father missed all that. My father missed a lot.

It was a strange thing, this chronicling of another man’s life. It isn’t what you expect to find in a secret reliquary hidden in your father’s study. In my narcissism, I’d imagined school pictures, honor roll announcements, pinecone Christmas ornaments; in my conspiracy-mindedness, I’d imagined love letters, mysterious sets of keys, government correspondence. Instead, what we had was the grim and thorough documentation of the career of a Soviet chess player—a man my father had never met and whose story he never got to finish. It was unexpected. But I can’t say it was terribly surprising, and not just because of my father’s love of chess and the Soviets, generally, and this Soviet chessman, specifically. I remembered the night of the snowstorm and my father’s glassy-eyed rapture over the unexpected turns in a faraway game. To my father, Aleksandr Bezetov wasn’t just a precocious young sportsman. He was the personification of order over anarchy. He was the embodiment of facing down near-certain doom with a degree of panache. Most important, perhaps, he was the representation of the possibility of unlikely events, which I’m sure my father was already starting to be interested in by the time he sat me on his lap and showed me some of the things one could do in a very short time.

In the bottom of the box was a letter. I let myself pretend for a self-congratulatory moment that I wouldn’t read it. And then I did.

The letter was photocopied, undated, and written entirely in Russian. Back then, before I came to St. Petersburg, my Russian was weaker than my father’s had been, even though mine had come from
my Ph.D., and his was primarily self-taught. It took me three reads to get the full scope of the letter, and even now that my Russian is fairly good, I wonder if there are elements I miss or misunderstand. Roughly, this is what it said:

I read it over once more and sat down on the radiator for a long minute. It’s possible that I cried the slightest bit. And then I read it
again. I was struck by the formality of the tone. The bit about “opening gestures” was my approximation of a phrase that was somewhat difficult to translate—literally, I think it was “the commencing gambit”—a reference to the early signs of my father’s illness, no question, but an odd phrase for him to use. And even post-translation, the whole letter was written in a different idiolect than I remembered as my father’s—though the vocabulary he used with me, I had to remind myself, was inevitably that which one uses with a child. My father had never spoken to me as an adult because he had never known me as an adult. So it’s wrong for me to say whether any particular tone, any particular language, was or wasn’t typical for my father. The truth is, I did not know.

Similarly, I did not know what this letter meant to my father, what kind of feature it was in the misty landscape of his life. Perhaps it was strange, or perhaps it was wholly singular, or perhaps his life had been full of letters of this kind—to chess champions, to squash players, to noted economists, to circus performers. Maybe this letter, this affinity, was one of many. Then I read it again and decided I didn’t think so.

He knew he was going, and maybe that gave him some particular insight—some inexplicable knowledge that this,
this
, was the proper way to exit, the proper narrative to follow. I am approaching my own end now and am still awaiting that particular bolt of understanding, but that’s not the point. If my father found it, then I’m happy for him.

I thought about his questions. Clearly, he must have been thinking a lot about fate when he wrote the letter, and he wanted Aleksandr Bezetov to offer some authoritative comment on the issue. My father was not a religious man—or if he was, he hid it very well—and I don’t think he saw fate as a preordained ending invented by some cruel, self-amused deity. When my father wrote about fate—which might as easily have been meant as destiny or even, perhaps, future—I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been. When one is afflicted with a genetic disaster that one has a 50 percent chance of escaping, this kind of thinking becomes prominent. One feels like a special kind of loser to lose at fifty-fifty odds.

I wondered if my father ever received an answer. The fact that
the letter was photocopied suggested that he’d sent the original. But perhaps not—maybe he’d been overtaken by embarrassment, second-guessing, time, distraction, and finally, illness.

I rifled through the papers twice but found no response from Aleksandr. There was, however, a brief note from somebody else.

I read the note again. She was a secretary, most likely, though there was something a little wistful about the phrasing, as though she’d read my father’s letter in a capacity that went beyond purely official duties. I stared at the box for a long time, listening to the silence reverberate around the house and wondering. It was clear that my father never got his answers from Aleksandr Bezetov. And that seemed an unjust thing for a person who got so little else.

Maybe that was when I first thought of going. I was already looking for a graceful exit from Jonathan’s life, and—I’m not above admitting it—I was already looking for a last adventure. I did not want to put my mother through something she’d barely survived the first time. The thought of running to look for answers to my father’s questions had an alluring symmetry. Like a chess move, this move was an iteration of preexisting realities. Though it’s true that such a move was in no way inevitable, and finding answers—or, indeed, Bezetov himself—would be nothing short of miraculous.

But as Nabokov’s loathed Dostoyevsky pointed out, miracles never bother a realist.