A Partial History of Lost Causes (26 page)

One day I did it. I hadn’t necessarily planned for that day to be the day; I walked by and peered, as usual, but then some sliver of self-disgust caught me, and I marched to the door. I rang the doorbell and skittered back quickly, as though my distance from the door would absolve me from any reprimands that might be forthcoming.

The door opened. A sallow man stared out at me. There was something wrong with his face, though I couldn’t quite figure out what—the angles or contours seemed off somehow, by some nearly imperceptible degree.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello.” The meat of his eyeballs was inflamed, blood-colored. I wondered why they let this guy answer the door.

“These are the offices of Right Russia?”

He cocked his head impatiently toward the sign.

“Is Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov available, please?”

He stood aside and gestured for me to enter. Inside, the office was dank, piled to the rafters with papers and paraphernalia. Two interns clacked desultorily at two oversize, outdated computers. The computers wheezed and whirred alarmingly; they seemed on the verge of giving up the ghost entirely. A phone rang forlornly, but nobody answered it.

The man who’d answered the door led me into a back room. He
flicked on the light. A trash can was overturned, and the man stooped to right it. When he did, his shirt rode up to reveal a wedge of pale flesh spidered with black hair. I grimaced. He spun a chair around for me. “Sit,” he said. “Please.”

I sat. Closer, I could see that he had a silver sickle-shaped scar running from eye to jowl. It was an odd scar; one couldn’t quite decipher what might have produced it, though I thought briefly of small-arms combat. On the wall behind him, a tattered poster proclaimed that
RUSSIA IS FOR RUSSIANS!

“Is this where I’ll wait for Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov?”

“I’m Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov,” he said. “You can call me Misha.”

“You are?” I said. “Oh. You are.”

He stared at me, an unwavering, unnerving gaze. I shifted in my chair. I wondered again about the scar. Maybe he’d been a soldier, though this had not turned up in my Google searches.

“And this might be a good time to tell me who you are,” he said.

His pants were too short. When he leaned back, I saw a slab of hairy, bright white ankle. I decided to go with the short answer first.

“I’m Irina Ellison,” I said. “I’m trying to arrange a meeting with Aleksandr Bezetov. I met with an old friend of his in Moscow, and she suggested I might try to contact some of his colleagues.” I would have added something about hoping I wasn’t imposing, if it hadn’t been so evident that I was.

“You met with—who, exactly?”

“Elizabeta Nazarovna. She was his secretary, I think.”

Mikhail Andreyevich—I was having trouble thinking of him as Misha—snorted. “His secretary? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

I chose to ignore this. I stared at the poster above Mikhail’s head. “I understand you and Aleksandr Bezetov are colleagues?”

“We are.” He straightened up in his chair, and his sneer softened marginally. “We absolutely are.”

“You can get me a meeting, then?”

“A meeting. Well.” He coughed. “A meeting is difficult.”

“Just a short one.”

Mikhail Andreyevich sat back in his chair. He chewed his lip for several long moments while looking at me curiously—trying to decide, I guess, how much of his time I was worth. “Bezetov is a chickenshit,” he finally declared.

I had not been expecting this. “I thought you said he was your colleague.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not a chickenshit. I’ve never met someone with a more maudlin attachment to his own life.”

I blinked. “Is this why you can’t get me a meeting?”

He sneered again, making his scar zigzag. “He surrounds himself with this army of handlers. He’s in full-body armor every time he leaves the house.”

I pictured bulletproof vests. I pictured chain mail. “Well,” I said. “Doesn’t he need it?”

Mikhail Andreyevich snorted again. “Yeah, well, we all need a lot of things. Only a few of us get them.”

I was suddenly miserable. The conversation was twisting aggressively, wrongly; some odd torque was at work that I couldn’t quite fathom. I’d assumed that Bezetov was beloved by everyone, as he’d been beloved by my father. This was the essential premise, the only one. I shifted in my seat. “So Right Russia is—not affiliated with Alternative Russia?” I said.

“Affiliated, sure. We’re all very affiliated. But they don’t like us. We’re the embarrassing bastard stepchild. They keep their distance from us as much as possible. We’re not their type. They prefer Pomerancovo. You know. Fuzzy-headed, idealistic. Western-backed. Insane.”

I decided not to act surprised that he was bothering to tell me all this. “And your position is what, exactly?” I asked, though the posters had given me more than a few clues. “You have—policy differences?”

“We have aesthetic differences.”

“That’s kind of shallow, isn’t it?” All at once I felt absolutely sure that bullshitting my way through this conversation was the correct course of action.

“Spiritual differences, then.”

I scoffed, just to scoff. Mikhail Andreyevich sighed witheringly.
“We think change needs to be authentic, permanent. We think it needs to come from within. We think it needs to be populist. Bezetov is a dreadful elitist.”

“Is he?” I brightened momentarily. I found I was more comfortable with elitism than abject cowardice.

“Absolutely. He doesn’t even like the Russian people. You couldn’t pay him to interact with them. He’s up there in his castle, typing up his press releases, and he doesn’t know anything about the nation he’s trying to run.”

“Isn’t he just trying to stay alive?”

“Whatever. Any idiot can stay alive. Any fucking amoeba can stay alive. That’s just evolution. It’s what you do once you’ve managed to stay alive that counts.”

I pondered this. He made it all sound so easy.

He leaned back in his chair with some decisiveness. “You know,” he said, “I’m not surprised you’re here.”

“You’re not—What?” I was surprised I was there.

“It’s what I’ve always suspected about him. The Americans are in charge of everything. He doesn’t have an original thought in his head.”

“What are you talking about?”

He waved his hand at me with exasperation. “I understand, I understand. The need for discretion and all that. Of course.”

“I don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”

“Right, right. Me, neither.” He stared at me with a creepy knowingness, then smiled a smile that was nearly kind. “You’re a fan, then? That’s the story?”

“Sort of.”

“Well,” he said grandly. “Of course. We’re all terrific fans of Bezetov’s. And you want to see him, particularly, why?”

I told him, or I tried to. I was learning how to say it better. He listened. His face, if possible, seemed to turn even yellower. “Really?” he finally said.

“Really.”

“Really?”

I glared. Mikhail Andreyevich squinted. “You sound like you’re looking for a therapist.”

I flinched. “No.”

“A priest, then.”

“Even worse.”

“He has symbolic value to you.”

“He has, uh, literal value to me, too.”

“You think he’s going to be able to tell you something you don’t already know?”

“Anybody could tell me something I don’t already know.”

“The right something, though?”

I was exhausted. I felt a dull cinder of pain behind my eye. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe not.” I coughed feebly into my shoulder for effect.

Mikhail Andreyevich chewed some more on his lip, which looked abused, macerated. This was unbecoming. “What do you know about him?”

“He’s—Well, he’s the chess champion.”

“Yes. Very good.”

“And he’s running for president.” I felt like a child.

“But you know his campaign is a stunt, right? You know he knows he will not win.”

This man, it was becoming obvious, was disgruntled—and so the strange, sharp-edged defensiveness that was emerging in me was, I told myself, obviously unwarranted. Bezetov’s moral credentials were impeccable. I tried to sound light, unguarded, as though I were arguing a point of politics or philosophy, nothing personal, nothing brutal. How much I’d loved to argue about those things once.

“Sure, he knows he won’t win,” I said, “but that’s what’s impressive about it. That’s what’s brave about it. That’s the point.”

“Is it? I don’t know about that.”

“What is the point, then?”

“The question isn’t whether you like your revolutions fast or slow—it’s whether you like them temporary or permanent. Bezetov absorbs the attention, the money, the support from more pragmatic people—people who might have an actual shot at election and who could reform moderately from within. Bezetov gets the limelight because of his fucking chess career, and everyone thinks, Oh, how spectacular!
How dazzling! Chess strategy at the state level, and all that makes for a compelling narrative. I will never understand that man’s public relations situation. It’s extraordinary. No matter what he does, he gives the entire Western world a boner. But what’s the best thing for Russia, really? Is it losing their chances again on some aging chess star’s vanity project? Or is it electing some serious people who will pull and tug and compromise their way to a more humane life? What’s the brave thing, really?”

My defensiveness was collapsing into something else, something miserable and small. Aleksandr Bezetov was a man whom my father had deemed important. I didn’t want to hear him slandered. My quest was absurd at its absolute best, this I knew. It was misdirected, it was odd—even if Aleksandr were a hero, even if he were a saint. I found I desperately did not want to hear about it if there was more to him than that: if his colleagues had complaints, or if they’d found him wanting in one way or another. His job was to deliver me the wisdom of a lifetime. If he couldn’t do that, I had no reason to be here. And I had no reason to be anywhere else. I was quiet, eyeing Mikhail Andreyevich’s posters.

“But, I mean—I’m looking at your posters and, forgive me, but I read your Wikipedia page, and—”

“And?”

“And you’re not exactly a moderate yourself, right?”

He laughed. “I’m not anything anymore.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I don’t really believe anything. I’m just trying to make the conversation more interesting.”

“Is that a worthy goal? Making the conversation more interesting?” I didn’t disagree. I was interrogating him reflexively because I’d decided not to like him.

“When you’ve had seventy years of no conversation, yes, I think it’s a very worthy goal.”

We were silent. I was cold, and I rubbed my hands together to kick up the circulation.

“You know about the film he’s making?” said Mikhail Andreyevich after a moment.

“Of course.” Then, “Remind me.”

“He’s trying to establish a link between the apartment bombings and the regime.”

That sounded familiar. I remembered something about the commencement of the second Chechen war: a series of odd coincidences that looked, on the surface, somewhat sinister. Still, my impression up to that point had been that this was the kind of paranoid silliness that led my shriller liberal comrades in Cambridge to make dark intimations about George W. Bush and September 11.

“The thought was that it was a political move?” I said.

“To usher Putin into power. He came in on a hard-line security platform.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“I’m not sure it’s true. I certainly hope it’s true. That might be egregious enough to make all the difference.”

“Make the conversation more interesting, you mean.”

“Right.”

He cupped his chin in his hand—it was an oddly dainty, feminine gesture, and maybe it made him feel confiding. “To be honest with you,” he said, “I’m pretty impressed with the film idea.”

“You are?”

“Yes. And I’m not impressed by everything Bezetov does.”

“I’ve gathered.”

“But this, I think, will raise some interesting questions.”

“What’s your involvement with the film?”

He coughed. “That’s, ah. At this point. Somewhat unclear.”

I sat back. “You’re not invited to be a part of it?”

“It’s not a question of invitation, you know? It’s a large organization with a lot of auxiliary elements, a lot of different functions, a lot of different roles. It’s a bureaucracy, really.”

“I see.”

“So maybe Right Russia isn’t involved, you know, directly, but we’re involved in the movement, you know, so in a broader sense, we’re involved in the making of the film?”

“Like in the same way that everybody’s involved with everything?”

“Don’t be difficult. Don’t be dense.”

“Would you like to be more involved in the film than you are?”

He smiled tightly. “Like I said, we’d all like things we don’t get.”

It was interesting to have stumbled into the knowledge of a rift within the camp, first thing—like walking into a field and stepping directly into a sinkhole. Of course I should have imagined pettiness and infighting, resentments and reactionaries. Of course I should have imagined schismatic nuances. I didn’t know what I had imagined, really, and the more I realized that, the more I realized that I hadn’t thought to spend a lot of time imagining anything at all.

So I leaned forward. I knew—I must have known—that this would annoy the man.

“Tell me what Aleksandr was like in the eighties,” I said. “He ran a samizdat journal, right?”

Mikhail snorted again. I was beginning to wonder if that was a trademark. “ ‘Ran’ is perhaps a strong word. He was involved. I’ll grant him that. He was involved.”

“He delivered it himself? Door-to-door?” This was well known—even in the limited research I’d done, it had come up. “That must have been dangerous.”

“Dangerous. Yes. Assuredly. The man might have been the target of an assassination attempt or something.”

There was a twist to his words, but I said, “Exactly.”

I could immediately tell I’d driven him to the edge of apoplexy. He slowed his breathing, I could see him counting to decet in his head. He leaned back. “Let me ask you a question. This is a good opportunity for me. To learn about how Bezetov is broadly perceived.”