A Partial History of Lost Causes (16 page)

I woke up fourteen hours later, although it took me a while to figure that out. I’d had restless, shivering dreams that disappeared immediately from memory but left me unhinged. I looked out my window and tried to discern the hour, but the outdoors looked oddly timeless. A fine film of rain was filling the air like ambient noise. The sky was white. On the street churned a sluggish river of people, moving too slowly for business and too dully for pleasure. I looked at my watch and tried to think. It was nearly two in the afternoon.

In the light of day, I could give my room a more complete inspection. There were mysterious stains on the floor, and I soon found an apocalyptic toilet down the hall. In the shower, the smell of somebody’s gardenia shampoo floated just above the smell of wet dirt. I walked down the hall and passed the rockabilly poker player, who was shuffling his iPod with his thumb. There was a horrific smell outside the hostel’s entrance. I declined to investigate its source.

Downstairs I found a tabac selling tiny bear pins and bottled water. Candies of no discernible national origin sported nutrition information in fourteen tiny languages. Depressed-looking pornography was sold alongside gossip magazines, forbidding copies of
Pravda
, the international edition of
Time
. I bought some chocolate-covered banana jellies and sat on a park bench and thought, for the first time since landing, about what I was really doing here.

In the light of day, asking Bezetov to answer my father’s letter—a letter he’d never even read, most likely—seemed presumptuous and a few degrees beyond odd. When I tried to understand what I’d get out of it, I felt weirdly stupid, like a person trying to do a math problem in a dream. It was true that my father had wanted these answers, but it was also true that he’d managed to die without getting them. Surely I could do the same. I wasn’t sure how to approach Bezetov, even if I could find him. He was being constantly mauled by chess fans, I supposed, and maybe I could pretend that was what this was about. Maybe I could pretend that the whole undertaking was just the dying vanity project of a middle-class American—weren’t other, richer people with
more mainstream interests always doing things like this? They hired professional chefs to teach them about soufflés. They learned obsolete languages. Having grown weary of perfecting the commoner abilities in life, they sought to acquire more exotic ones—windsurfing, herb growing, flower arranging. I could pretend that this was like that. I could pretend that I was vainly, fitfully meeting the demands of my own ego.

But the fact remained: Bezetov was whom my father had written to when the hourglass was running, its sand hissing with the force of an arterial hemorrhage. Maybe there was something my father knew that I didn’t yet. Maybe there was something he knew that I would need to know soon enough. I wasn’t sure that looking for it was a sensible way to spend one’s last twelve to twenty-four months. But it would have to be sufficient.

I took Elizabeta’s number out of my pocket and ran my finger across her name and address. I called her again, and explained who I was, and reminded her of my quest for Bezetov.

“Oh,” she said. “I remember you.”

“I’m sorry for the broken connection the other day.”

“I’ve been sitting here waiting by the phone ever since.”

“I think there was some problem with the international calling.”

There was silence that went on long enough to feel like skepticism.

“Are you a reporter?” she said finally.

“No,” I said, wondering if I should have been a reporter.

“He’ll talk to Western reporters. He loves to talk to Western reporters. But I don’t like to. Talking to reporters is a young man’s game, I find.”

“I’m not a reporter,” I said, sounding surer this time.

“Nobody’s ever a reporter,” she said cryptically. “What’s your interest in him, then? Are you a chess fan?” Her voice was becoming businesslike, crisp, and I was starting to hear the faint sheen of British English over the staccato of her Russian accent.

“Yes. Sort of. Not avidly. A casual fan, you might say.”

“Are you political?” I heard the faint click and hiss of a cigarette lighter, followed by light wheezing.

“Also casually.”

“Nobody’s political, either.”

There was a pause filled with some minor puffing. Then, horribly, she coughed. The cough sounded tubercular and wrenching, as though all the delicate things in her chest were coming painfully undone. When she was finished, she said, “Look,” which struck me as a strangely American thing to say. “You could try to talk to him yourself. But you have to be credentialed. You have to be from somewhere. You can’t come out of nowhere.”

I thought for a moment. “What about a university?”

“Maybe. Maybe a university would be okay,” she said, and her voice became coy and a bit sneering. “Why? Are you from a university?”

“Yes,” I said boldly, and told her the name of my school. My former school. “I’m doing research.” What were they going to do—fire me? Have me killed? “I have a letter from you. My father wrote to Aleksandr, and you wrote him back.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Could I come see you, do you think? I’ll bring it.”

“I don’t know about that.” Her voice was receding again, becoming brittle, like glass blown too thin. “Why are you here now to do your research? If you’re not political?”

Something about telling a lie makes it easier to tell a hard truth. The truth feels hidden in plain sight, and you start to forget which things are true and which things you wish were true and which things you conjured from nowhere just to make a story sound better. “I’m probably dying this year,” I told her.

“My dear,” said Elizabeta, and she coughed again. “That’s no great distinction.”

A
nd one night, at long last and against all odds, came a knock on the door. There was a glassy clinking and the breathy almost-sound of soft things shivering up against one another. And when Aleksandr pulled open the door, there was Elizabeta: summoned to his room at last by the magnetic draw of his imagining, over and over, this very moment.

He’d been doing his mending by candlelight, and on his bed were piles of torn trousers. He stood in the doorway with a needle in one hand, wearing his worst shirt. Elizabeta was in her usual complicated black, and her hair was flying everywhere and catching colors in the weak hall light. In her hand she held a sheaf of paper.

“I heard this was you,” she said, thrusting it into his hands.

It was the most recent issue of the journal, open to a smeared black-and-white photo of a pained-looking man with a beard.

“That’s not me,” said Aleksandr. “That’s Sharansky.”

Elizabeta laughed then, a complicated, multidimensional laugh filled with genuine appreciation for a bad joke, as well as mild derision
toward its badness and a faint undertone of self-reproach for laughing. It was the kind of laugh you could write a university thesis about.

“Where did you get that?” said Aleksandr. When she pressed the journal into his hands, he thought, her thumb lingered against his palm.

“Nowhere,” she said. “It was passed on to me. It doesn’t matter. Listen.” Her hair was falling out of the clip; it seemed unlikely to Aleksandr that the clip was even trying to do its job. It was purely decorative—like her shirt, come to think of it, which seemed too thin to offer much protection against any kind of weather. He wanted to feel how thin her shirt was, to take its fabric between his fingers and gently pull. Just to see.

“Are you listening?” She’d wedged her shoulder against the door. “Can I come in?”

“Um,” said Aleksandr, because there were the clumps of clothes on his bed, which wasn’t made, and the candles had burned down, and his teacup was making a puddle on the table, but she was already in, running long fingers against the walls, brushing aside the clothes and sitting on the bed without asking.

“This is crazy,” she said, pointing to the journal.

“Have you read it?”

“I did. It’s very good. It’s very smart. But what I’m wondering is, are you suicidal?”

“Not suicidal,” said Aleksandr. “Just showing off.”

And then, just like that, her mouth was on his, although he wasn’t sure how. One moment he’d been speaking, and another moment the space between their mouths had disappeared. He drew one hand to her face, brought the other to feel the small instrument of her rib cage. Then she was drawing back, with each beat of his heart she was disappearing from his arms, and it seemed to him that he would always remember this: a sequence of snapshots of a woman, laughing with her eyes down, in each image a little farther away.

“Sorry,” she said. “That was just in case you’re going to be assassinated by KGB sometime soon.”

“Oh,” he said, and then he stopped because he couldn’t think of
anything smart to say. The back of his neck was running cold with the memory of Elizabeta’s fingers there, and he felt his brain frozen into an idiocy he feared would be permanent. “Who told you this was me?”

“Nobody. I saw the chess essay, and I’ve been noticing your weird hours lately, and I just—But listen, Aleksandr, don’t get stupid, okay? People have seen this. Party people have seen this.”

“How have Party people seen this?”

Elizabeta shook her head. “I mean, they know everything.”

“How do you
know
Party people have seen this?”

“Aleksandr,” and now Elizabeta was twisting up her hair, cracking her neck so hard it made Aleksandr wince, and standing up. “You know I know a lot of different kinds of people. Anyway. I should go.” She was in the doorway, and her eyes were looking somewhere beyond Aleksandr’s. “I’m sorry I bothered you.” But she spent another moment not leaving, biting her lip and looking oddly mournful.

“You didn’t bother me,” said Aleksandr, although he realized he felt bothered. He put his hand on her shoulder—self-consciously, fraternally. She plucked his hand with hers and started pulling his fingers, slowly and tenderly, until the knuckles cracked.

For a moment the only sounds in the room were shallow breathing, the popping of Aleksandr’s joints, the hiss of candles burning down to the ceramic and then quietly, without a fuss, going out.

“Watch out, Aleksandr,” said Elizabeta as she turned to leave. “That’s all I really came to say.”

It went like that for a little while, then. When Aleksandr looked back and counted, it added up to only six weeks, though somehow it felt like somewhere between a day and a half and his entire lonely life. She came in the evenings. At first there were pretexts—some new item she’d seen, some new warning she had—but soon enough she abandoned them. Soon enough she stopped knocking.

He’d slept with only one woman before Elizabeta—the daughter of the owner of Okha’s sole petrol station, who was mostly silent and smelled of wool—and with Elizabeta it was a different thing: the inversion or recapitulation of what had before been a rather stern affair. With Elizabeta, it was all exuberant gymnastics and sudden right
turns. They’d lie end to end for a long time, and he’d get lost somewhere there—the room seemed to rotate, and time didn’t seem quite like itself. They bit each other’s skinny shoulders. He tongued the fingerprint-sized indentation above her navel. They fell off the bed and laughed.