A Partial History of Lost Causes (20 page)

“Not so completely pleased, maybe,” said Elizabeta, her mouth becoming a curt little comma. “He can’t win, and it makes a lot of important people want to kill him. A lot of people who know how to do it with relative discretion. Poisons, you know, or plane crashes. Putin has basically put it on the government’s agenda for the year. Aleksandr never flies Aeroflot, even internally. Especially internally. Although the more famous he gets in the West, the more uncomfortable it gets for the FSB to try it. That’s part of why he likes to talk to you reporters all the time.”

“I’m not a reporter.”

“Okay. Whatever you’re calling it. But the problem is, like I said, people are always trying to kill him. Not often women, it’s true, and never Americans yet, but one never does know.”

“I’m not trying to kill him,” I said, mildly offended.

“Even if you weren’t, I can’t help you. He won’t remember me. I don’t have his information.” Her voice was starting to break apart again, like a single note opening up into a four-part chord. I thought she was about to start coughing, but she didn’t.

“Oh,” I said, and I felt that that perhaps could be that. This had
been an elaborate scheme, psychologically costly and financially disastrous, and it was most definitely too embarrassing to go home with
that
as my excuse. People would say, “Oh, you’re still alive? Weren’t you supposed to die dramatically in some vast eastern expanse, and weren’t you supposed to learn or find or do something first? I suppose you can have your job and boyfriend back, if you want, but I’m sure you understand that this is extremely awkward.” Going back would be like going too late to a party thrown by people you hardly know, then getting stuck sitting there with them, with the lights up, drinking warm beer and talking about mutual acquaintances who already left. It would be like showing up at the chilly apartment of some half-dead Russian woman, then browbeating her for information about a forgotten friend, then choking up and staring at the ceiling for some length of time when she didn’t have it.

But what was the alternative? Roam the bridges of St. Petersburg until the time seemed right to jump into the Neva? Engage in full-throttle stalking of this chessman, throw stones at his window, leave little notes in his mailbox, get myself shot by his burly unmerciful companions? All of that, too, seemed anticlimactic.

The sharp edges of my silence must have been starting to make Elizabeta uncomfortable, because she gestured at the grim-faced woman in the portrait. “You know the story of Solominiya?” she said. Solomoniya glowered disapprovingly at me from underneath heavy brows.

“No. Who was she?” Tortured to death, no doubt, for some point of principle or virginity. Female saints always got that way by choosing death over sex. Maybe I could get myself canonized, I thought. That would at least keep me busy.

“She was the wife of Vasily the Third.”

“Ah, of course.”

“She couldn’t produce an heir—that’s always the way with powerful people, isn’t it? The wrong women produce the heirs, and then somebody has to get banished or killed. Anyway, Solomoniya was banished to a convent so Vasily could take another wife. But lo and behold, nine months later, she bears a son.”

I raised my eyebrows, trying to look scandalized, although I am basically incapable of being scandalized. Elizabeta tossed another chunk of biscuit to the bird.

“Solomoniya fears for the life of the child and promptly declares him dead. Nobody knows what became of him. And there the matter rests until the excavations of 1934, when they dig up Solomoniya—and next to her body lies a tiny dummy baby.”

“So the baby lived.”

“He lived, and his line technically would have produced the rightful heir to all of Russia—not that that’s much to claim, and not that any modern person believes that anybody’s the rightful heir to anything.”

“So why do you keep her up there?”

“She doesn’t look happy to be there, does she?” said Elizabeta. Solomoniya’s scorn seemed to rain down on us, her dark eyes communicating all the mute, immobile rage of people denied, confined, disappeared.

“She doesn’t.”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’ve always been interested in how things could have gone differently. Moments when things might have gone one way and instead went another.”

I thought of my father’s letter and his concern with the moment when one realizes that though there are many ways things might be, there is only one way that they are—and that no matter what, one will have to stand it.

“Aren’t all moments like that, though?” I said.

“Some more than others, I have come to believe,” Elizabeta said lightly, before coughing again. When she came up for air this time, I let a respectful beat pass—a moment of mourning or solidarity—and then said, “What was Aleksandr like?”

“What was he like?”

“Well, you know. What did he do?”

“Oh, who knows? What does anybody do? He fiddled around with his game, I always supposed. He was into the samizdat thing. They published a journal that a handful of people read. Sometimes my friend and I—I lived with my girlfriend Sonya then—would sneak past his door and put our ears against it and listen. Sonya had all these theories
about him; thought he was a secret sex maniac or a sort of idiot, or a serial killer, or KGB.” Elizabeta turned to Fyodor and puckered her lips at him, and I could tell she was trying to keep her face from doing something involuntary and revealing. I’ve had too much experience with facial sleights and emotional misdirection not to notice this type of thing when I see it. It occurred to me, briefly and casually, that Elizabeta and Aleksandr had been lovers.

“And what did you think?”

“I guess I just thought he was a very nice boy. No, not nice. Sort of interesting and confusing. I liked him.” Elizabeta’s face turned a marginally different color, and she looked up at Solomoniya, who stared back bleakly. “But our acquaintance was short-lived.”

“What did you do in those days?”

“I was a secretary,” she said, and looked away, and I was struck flatly across the face with the uncomfortable reality that Elizabeta had probably worked for the Party. She was so irreverent that it hadn’t yet occurred to me. But everybody, more or less, had been implicated—the smart people and the cynical ones, the listless survivors and the true believers. So she’d typed stuff for men with misguided economic notions. What did it matter? What did I understand about it? I noticed that Elizabeta still wasn’t looking at me.

She took a sip of tea. “Our friendship was short-lived, and then it was too late.”

“Too late?”

“I mean by then he was famous. This was a different time, remember. Being a secretary involves a great deal of massaging of the male ego, even in the offices of our great social utopia. I couldn’t do it when I wasn’t being paid to.”

“That’s a principled stance,” I said. It came out worse than I’d meant.

There was a horrid pause. “You must need to get back to your hostel,” Elizabeta said, standing up. I stood up, too, so as not to be left idling with an angry Russian woman dressed in black—even a weak, miserably coughing one—hovering above me. Elizabeta was small, but she was the type of person whom you didn’t want looking at you in a certain way.

“I’m sorry if I upset you,” I said. This was a phrase I learned from college boyfriends.

Elizabeta laughed, and this time her laugh sounded like buckling ice on an undiscovered planet. “I am not so easily upset. But listen.”

She disappeared into the kitchen and then returned with a yellow index card. She handed it to me. “This is the information of a man in St. Petersburg.” She’d written the name in an underconfident, overly careful Latin alphabet.

“Is this a friend of Aleksandr’s?”

“This is a man who has been trying to get in touch with Aleksandr. A man in your line of work, I think. Calling, calling, calling. Maybe by now he has managed to do it.”

I didn’t know what she meant by my “line of work.” Was he a fugitive non-tenure-track professor? A person who stumbled blindly through foreign countries and degenerative diseases as a career? I looked at the name. Nikolai Sergeyev, 132 Vasilievsky Ostrov, St. Petersburg.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m sure this will be helpful.” Another person to cold-call, I thought. Fantastic. I was becoming a professional telemarketer, a sad-eyed celebrity in maudlin television ads for my own lost cause.

“You know your way back?” she said.

“I’ll get a taxi.”

Elizabeta looked at me evenly. “You know that some of the taxis aren’t really taxis.”

“What?”

“Some of them are really thieves.”

“How do you know which ones are which?”

She shrugged. “You find out the hard way, I guess.”

Suddenly I’d had enough of Elizabeta, with her faulty lungs and her sour-faced bird and her portrait of a woman who had somehow missed her own proper fate. I didn’t know why I so often found myself in contact with people who insisted on speaking cryptically, in little proverbs and hints. Lars was like this, too, and he didn’t even have the excuse of a childhood spent in a police state.

“Good luck,” said Elizabeta, and I thanked her and went out into
the dusky neighborhood. Oncoming car lights illuminated the trash cans. I walked in little circles for quite a while before I found a cab.

The next afternoon I wandered Moscow. I admired art nouveau arabesques and neoclassical sunset-colored facades on all the post-Communist buildings. I stared at the gargantuan statue of Peter the Great above the Moskva, with his grotesquely small head and creepily long fingers. I went to Gorky Park and watched parents pay a nominal fee to have little Petr or Ivanka photographed with a depressive, flea-bitten tiger. Peat-bog fires east of the city had driven up temperatures, and in the evening I sweated my way through the statue park and counted the pallid roses at the foot of Lenin. The next day I called Jonathan.

Navigating the phone card was a disaster, full of such stern admonitions from the operator that I felt pretty bad about myself before he even picked up the phone. When he did, I heard muffled subaquatic noises and felt sure for a sickening eternal moment that he had somebody over.

“Hello?” He sounded alarmed, and it occurred to me that it was four in the morning where he was.

“I’m sorry,” I said. There wasn’t an audible sound, but the phone line seemed to convey an attitude in its silence—derision or disbelief or an adult exhaustion with the self-absorbed hijinks of children.

“Are you coming back?” His voice was the tense crackle of a man on the edge of sleep—which, I realized, I’d never gotten familiar with.

I thought, but I didn’t really have to think. “I don’t know what to say.”

He was silent, but it didn’t feel like the kind of silence that would hang up on you. It felt like the kind of silence that would wait, breathe quietly, and hate you across the swirling dark ocean.

“Can’t we be friends?” I said, then almost hit myself over the head with the enormous Brezhnev-era telephone for saying it.

“What would that even mean at this point?”

“It would mean we’re okay with each other in the universe.” That was what I wanted for us, I realized as soon as I said it. I could stand it, I thought, if we were still friends, on balance—on whatever invisible
psychic ledger kept track of these things. I couldn’t have him over there in Boston hating me or forgetting me. I couldn’t have him revising who I was so that he could properly dismantle me, turn me into a pathological mistake or a lesson learned or a bullet dodged.

“This is insulting,” said Jonathan. “Seriously. What do you want me to say? Never mind. I don’t care what you want me to say.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, which is a phrase that only gets soggier if you say it over and over. We were quiet. Sometimes I wish I’d been the kind of person who could stand the ignorance, the excruciating optimism, of not finding out.

“How are things?” I said.

“Please. We are not having this conversation. You’ve forfeited your right to this conversation.”

“Okay.”

“You didn’t invent this thing,” he said.

“What?”

“You didn’t invent it. You didn’t have to do it this way. People do it differently. We could have done it differently.”

I wasn’t totally sure I knew what he was talking about, but I thought I probably did. And he was right. Other people do it differently, with prayer and alternative medicine and blessings counted and cataloged. My inability to do it that way stemmed from immaturity and ego and an impious reverence for functioning human brains. I wasn’t exactly proud of this. But I couldn’t go home to do it the other way—to lose myself from the best parts down, to be spoon-fed by a man who hadn’t even seen me cry.

“I really cared about you,” he said.

“Well,” I said, and I knew I was going to have to hang up right away. “I guess that was your first mistake.”