A Partial History of Lost Causes (17 page)

Then they’d lie together and tell each other things that made Aleksandr blush to think about—not because they were obscene but because they were not. It seemed humiliating in later years to have shared so much so quickly and for so little. The fucking was one thing—this was something he later got good at, and there were many other women, many other playful romps and beleaguered beds and high-end hairstyles ruined. But all that talking. All those confidences. He shuddered to think about it. At the time, though, he didn’t know any better, and he was filled with the gleeful lurching and teeth-chattering panic of early and undiagnosed love. Elizabeta told him about her childhood in Khabarovsk—about her father, drunken and stinking and apoplectic, and her mother, drunken and silent and besieged—and how she did not like her life in Leningrad but, truth be told, she’d liked her life in Khabarovsk quite a bit less. And Aleksandr told her about arguing with his grandfather about Communism, and listening to Radio Free Europe, and playing correspondence chess with the students at Andronov’s academy until he’d finally been summoned into his own future. And he told her how chess was the only escape from loneliness, and how epic his loneliness had been here, all these months before she’d knocked on his door.

She’d bring her slippers inside his room so that the neighbors didn’t notice her pair outside his door—though like most secrets in the building, it was no secret for long. The walls were thin. Aleksandr could hear the neighbors sneeze and toss creakily on their beds. He tried not to think about what they might have heard of him and Elizabeta, though it was hard not to wonder when the steward glowered smugly at Aleksandr in the hallway, when the man who didn’t like living near prostitutes clapped him manfully on the back. “Hope she’s giving you a discount, tovarish,” the man said.

Aleksandr winced but didn’t answer. He was too happy.

It was remarkable, truly startling, the way that he could be thinking
about Elizabeta absolutely all the time. Other thoughts came and went, skimming along the surface of the vast reservoir of consciousness that was devoted always to her. He was surprised at his capacity to think of other things—of many other things—with some degree of intelligence and depth without ever ceasing to think about her. She’d set up a full-blown military occupation of his brain. This energized him, made him wittier and livelier around Ivan and Nikolai, made him try harder at everything, made him fix his buttons and comb his hair and pull on his pants with more attention than he ever had before. Ivan even remarked that Aleksandr seemed to have snapped out of it. By this he seemed to mean that Aleksandr had snapped out of his entire personality, which certainly felt true.

There was a physical sensation in his chest, an internal compression that felt pathological; he felt constantly on the verge of tears or mad laughter or cardiac arrest.

He’d never believed in any of it before, but there it was.

It was a few weeks later that Misha made his return to the Saigon. It was a rainy night in early April—the sky was unleashed, and all the effluvia of winter were running through the gutters and out into the Baltic—and when Aleksandr, Ivan, and Nikolai reached their usual table, they were surprised to find a man waiting for them. He was a man you had to get used to looking at. His face looked as though it had been turned inside out: red sores shone through his thin hair and linked down the sides of his face like sideburns; the lights of the café made small yellow pools in the shallows of his face. The skin below his eyes seemed to conceal permanent low-grade internal bleeding. “Shit, Misha,” said Nikolai. “What the fuck happened to you?”

They’d been planning to talk about the next issue, but when they saw Misha at the table, Nikolai and Ivan fell to silence.

Aleksandr had met Misha only the once, so he wasn’t entirely sure what the man usually looked like. He was sure, however, that nobody could usually look like this. The veins against his temples were an alarming blue; his eyes seemed to float a millimeter or more beyond his skull. He was thin enough to provide his own anatomy lessons. He
sneered, which did further violence to his face. “Care to join me, fellows?” he said.

“Of course,” said Nikolai, pulling out a chair with a murderous scrape and jostling the table by sitting down too quickly. Aleksandr followed suit. Ivan leaned toward Misha, deep inlets forming between his eyebrows.

Misha sat and said nothing for a long while. He looked profoundly weary and too undone by life to ever voluntarily engage it again. Ivan and Nikolai stayed quiet, and their silence started to seem like reverence—as though Misha were a deposed king coming home to reclaim his land, or a wronged god returning to survey his wrecked world.

“Well,” said Misha after they’d all stared at him slightly longer than was decent. “How have you been occupying yourselves? In my absence?”

“Please,” said Ivan. “What can we get you? Do you need something to eat? A drink, maybe?”

“Nothing to drink.” Misha issued a cough that was thick and wounding. “The doctors tell me my internal organs are like tissue paper. A stiff drink could kill me here and now. Unless that’s the idea?”

“Let me get you some bread, at any rate,” said Nikolai. “You look like shit.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing, then? Drinking? Eating bread? Having a merry old time?” Misha turned toward Aleksandr, who felt an electric bolt judder his spine. It was the way he felt when he looked at the half-formed man in the wheelchair, or when the white Volgas passed him on the street. “Who’s this?” said Misha. “This is your new friend?” He extended his withered hand, and Aleksandr saw no choice but to take it. It felt dusty and shriveled, like an organic object buried for millennia in a desert.

“I’m Misha,” said Misha, and stared. It was amazing how a man so weak and shrunken could diminish everyone around him just by staring.

“We’ve met.” Aleksandr felt Misha’s chicken-bone fingers curl in his palm.

“Have we? You’ll forgive me. My memory is shot, I’m afraid. That’s the funny thing about being involuntarily committed to an insane asylum when you’re mentally sound. By the time you come out, you’re not quite yourself anymore.” Misha looked at Ivan, the whites of his eyes glinting like the abdomens of fish. Ivan, not historically a person who was easily lost for words, said nothing.

“So,” said Misha brightly. “You’re not going to tell me, then? What’s new? Don’t tell me you’ve all been sitting on your asses all year while your old pal Misha is suffering in a psychiatric prison?”

“We’re doing a journal,” said Aleksandr. Misha’s tone was making him feel oddly defensive of Ivan and Nikolai. They’d spent months carbon-printing the journal until their fingers turned blue; they’d risked their lives and sanity delivering it around the city. There was no way to know for sure, but Ivan said they might have a few hundred readers now. This counted for something, and Aleksandr didn’t know why Ivan and Nikolai sat with their heads slung low, twisting their napkins and ignoring their vodka and looking afraid.

“A journal?” Misha looked amused. “What kind of journal?” Ivan and Nikolai said nothing, so Aleksandr shrugged and opened his satchel. He fumbled with the zipper under Misha’s wolfish half-smile, which was becoming more ironic by the moment, but he managed to produce a copy. He pushed the sheaves of paper across the table, drawing his hand back quickly in case Misha reached out.

“It’s political opinion, mostly,” said Aleksandr. “Also philosophy. Chess articles. Poetry. Some visual art.”

Misha started thumbing through the tract, the little smile frozen on his face as if he were faking it for a photograph.
“A Partial History of Lost Causes?”
he said. He continued to flip, issuing small exhalations like a man having a nightmare. The flipping became faster and faster, and Ivan and Nikolai grew rigid, and finally, Misha reached the back cover of the journal and threw it back at Aleksandr with a force that was surprising, considering his arms seemed to be missing their tendons. “Partial, indeed. Do you have a cigarette, at least?”

Nikolai passed him a light. When Misha took a pull, his cheeks seemed to disappear entirely. Aleksandr could nearly hear Ivan and Nikolai thinking, and he was sure that if he looked up he’d see jet
trails of reproach and recrimination passing between them over his head.

“You’re doing this all wrong, you know,” Misha said authoritatively at long last. He blew white smoke and issued another consumptive cough. “It’s shit. You think—you really think—your drawings here are going to make a difference?”

Aleksandr looked down at his hands and absorbed himself in his peeling cuticles, the calloused edges of his fingertips. Ivan said quietly, “Maybe.”

Misha leaned forward, and Aleksandr instinctively leaned back. Up close, Misha smelled of poison disguised as medicine. When he spoke around the cigarette, his voice sounded strangled and high, like a violin played wrong.

“I wonder if you know what they did to me there,” said Misha. Ivan spread his long fingers out on the table one by one and turned up a palm. He shook his head. “They’d scrape the rust off of old needles and use them over and over. They gave me sulfur injections. They put electric cables on my temples.”

Aleksandr winced. Misha’s veins ran so close to the surface of his skin that his face looked like a map of underground rivers.

“They’d wrap me in sheets, then dunk me in a bathtub full of ice, then toss me near the radiator. When the sheets dried, they’d tear off my skin.” Misha took another puff of his cigarette and blew out his smoke coolly, methodically, in the general direction of Ivan’s face. Ivan coughed and turned aside and said nothing.

“They made me sleep in the same bed as a man who called me Stalin. At first I thought he was trying to insult me, but then I realized he actually thought I
was
Stalin. He screamed at night and wrote vulgarities in his own shit on the walls. And they made me sleep in a bed with him. Every night for do you know how many nights? How many nights, Nikolai, would you guess? How many nights was I gone?”

Nikolai shifted in his chair. “One hundred? Maybe you were gone one hundred nights?”

“Ah, Nikolai,” said Misha. “You’re starting to make me think you don’t care. I thought maybe you’d been marking the days on a calendar. I thought maybe you’d been writing every day.”

Nikolai grimaced.

“It was one hundred and fifty-seven nights, actually, in bed with that monster. Can you blame me if I’m as crazy as he is?” Misha slapped his hands down on the table, and against the dark wood they looked like the sun-bleached skeletons of two turtles. “You think your fucking doodles stop this? You think somebody says, ‘Oh, an unconventional painting! Communism is fucked, never mind!’ ”

“Please, Misha, keep your voice down,” said Ivan flatly. “Even here, some discretion. Please.”

“Discretion? Fuck your discretion. Did you know that I spent most of my nights gagged at the beginning, before I learned not to talk? Did you know that they keep half-people in cages there? Most of the people in there really are crazy. It’s not all intellectuals and dissidents. We didn’t all sit around and have erudite political discussions. And these people in the cages, a lot of them would scream. This was a very harrowing sound, especially in the beginning. Then it got less harrowing, but that’s probably part of the point of the whole thing. At the beginning, though, this sound was not human to me. It was very troubling, let’s say, to listen to it.”

Nikolai bit his lip and held his tumbler so tightly that his fingers turned nearly purple. Ivan swirled his vodka absentmindedly with his finger, drawing his hand to his mouth every so often to chew on an alcoholic fingernail.

“At first,” said Misha, “I tried to explain that there was a mistake. At the very beginning, especially, when they were cutting off my buttons. I thought if I was very good and reasonable and intelligent and calm, everybody would see that a mistake had been made.” He issued a great cloud of smoke that nearly obscured his face, and when you couldn’t see him, it was almost possible to believe that he was some unnerving prophet come to tell the present about the future. “But this was not the case. Everything I said—everything—was treated as nonsense. Some of the nurses were kind and gave me pieces of candy, and some nurses were cruel and slapped me across the face with the hard side of their hands while I was tied down or when nobody was looking. Most were indifferent and gave me pills—these enormous brown pills that choked me on their way down and that made the room around
me shimmer and disappear. But what they all had in common was that they treated me as though I were absolutely mad. And you know the funny thing, Ivan?” He leaned forward, and Aleksandr could again detect the yellow smell of fatigue, shallow breaths, and narcotics.

“No,” said Ivan, resigned to answering rhetorical questions. “What was the funny thing?”

“The funny thing, Ivan, is that I finally started to wonder if I actually was mad. You’d think I’d have a pretty good handle on my own sanity, but not so. Having everybody treat you as though you’re crazy is an interesting psychological experiment. Everyone should try it sometime. And wondering whether I was crazy made me crazy. I started to get obsessed with my own language, with forming words perfectly. I rehearsed what I’d say to the nurses in my head all day, writing it down, getting it right. I pored over sentence construction and grammar. I had it in my head, see, that this problem of mine—this failure to communicate—was just a sort of mechanical malfunction.”