A Partial History of Lost Causes (29 page)

There were women at the parties sometimes, though Aleksandr rarely spoke to them. The Party wives were mostly older, matronly, forbidding, wearing high-necked secretary blouses and giving off the faint scent of dogma and aerosols. Most of the other women were there for the officials—they were women in Elizabeta’s profession, or something like it, their clothes immaculate, their faces overdone, wearing tight-fitting stretch dresses and laughing unlikely first-soprano laughs. They were off-limits, it was understood, and Aleksandr never went near them unless he had to pass by to get a refill. One night, however, he found himself talking to a woman whose origins were unclear to him—she was too young to be a token female Party member, but not attractive enough to be one of the escorts. Her face was flushed and her lips were too full, one degree beyond erotic and veering toward grotesque. She was drinking red wine, and it made her lips currant-colored and lurid.

“You’re Aleksandr Bezetov?” she said. “The chess prodigy?”

“A prodigy?” Aleksandr was already quite drunk by that point, feeling a buoyancy slicked with careening despair, counting the coastal tides inside his head. “Aren’t I getting a little too old to be a prodigy?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“That’s not so old.”

“And how old are you?”

She turned her face to the side. There was something irritated about her eyes that made her look constantly overwrought. Her skin was bad, though her hair was terrific. Aleksandr was getting to be a discerning critic of women. “A gentleman never asks,” she said.

“And who said I was a gentleman?” Her plate was overflowing with rhombuses of continental cheese. He leaned in and stole a cracker. “You’re older than I am, probably. Twenty-four, twenty-five. You’re probably too old to find a man here, if you’re looking. How did I know that? you ask. Am I a prodigy? No, I’m not a prodigy. And not a hero, either, no matter how much you might insist.”

“I’m not insisting.” She hadn’t been smiling, so she could not now let a smile meaningfully fade.

“I mean, someone has to defend chess from the international mafia.” He hiccupped.

“Oh? And who is doing that?”

He pointed to his head and nodded gravely. “I am. Through independent thought, you know? And my subversive style of play? I might be a credible threat to Rusayev one day, you might have heard.”

“I might have.”

“Rusayev is a dinosaur. An apparatchik dinosaur. Have you ever been to California?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m going, you know. In three weeks. To Pasadena. What do you think the women are like in Pasadena, California?” He didn’t recognize his own voice. He could barely hear it.

“I’m sure I can’t imagine.”

“Do you want to hear a joke?”

“Not really.”

He raised his glass. “Adam and Eve must have lived in the Soviet Union, because they were naked, had one apple between them, and thought they were living in paradise!”

A hand grabbed him by the lapel; from its preternatural smoothness, Aleksandr knew it to be Petr Pavlovich’s. Another hand reached in to grab his drink away. “I’m sorry,” said Petr Pavlovich. “But Mr. Bezetov is needed elsewhere. Excuse us.”

One week before Aleksandr was to go to Pasadena, Nikolai appeared at a party. Aleksandr had known this would happen eventually, but he was surprised at the surreal serenity that he felt when it finally did. Nikolai emerged from behind one of the faux potted plants that comprised the bulk of the decor at these events. Aleksandr had imagined a clean, surgical terror splitting a seam down his chest; instead, he appraised Nikolai dully, with the benumbed feeling of watching one of his own recurring nightmares. Like Aleksandr, Nikolai was fatter—he looked as if he’d been spooned into his shirt—but his face was less ugly. Or maybe it was only that he seemed to have grown into his ugliness.

“Hello, Aleksandr,” said Nikolai. “Fantastic showing in Kaliningrad.”

Aleksandr looked at his plate of cornichons and herring. So many times he’d imagined asking Nikolai if he’d been running Ivan all along. And he imagined Nikolai saying, “Running him all along? I hardly had to try.” The more he thought about it, the more Aleksandr knew that the real insult of Nikolai’s betrayal was how little he’d tried to hide it, how little he knew he’d have to. He’d taken notes right in front of them, for fuck’s sake—he hadn’t even had to pay attention—and Aleksandr had thought, really, what? That Nikolai was so devoted, so committed to the cause and the written word, that he was constantly recording new influxes of inspiration? He hadn’t thought that; he’d always thought Nikolai was a bit of a philistine as well as a bit of an asshole. But he’d been so blinded by his trust in Ivan—who would always be a twenty-one-year-old kid now, smart and well-intentioned and right about a lot of things but wrong about the one thing that mattered most—that he hadn’t tried to reconcile his vision of Nikolai with Ivan’s. Ivan knew more about it, that’s all; Ivan was the mastermind,
the visionary, the great brain. And now Ivan was dead and would never be able to revise his opinion—on Nikolai or on anything else. Aleksandr had accepted his own strengths and weaknesses, and he believed now in the practicality of doing one’s best at whatever it was one did best and leaving it at that, so he could recognize ungrudgingly that Nikolai was the only one of the three of them with any degree of competence whatsoever. And competence was the new prevailing value of Aleksandr’s life. Nikolai had outmaneuvered them, that was all; he’d won, and he’d deserved to win, and Aleksandr refused to be a bad sport about it all, personally.

“Just warming up for Pasadena,” said Aleksandr. He watched Nikolai masticate a tiny pickle for longer than seemed strictly required.

“Oh, you still think you’ll be playing there?” Nikolai said mildly. He swirled his pancake around in its sour cream.

Aleksandr bit down on nothing. “Yes,” he said. “I expect so.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“That’s not what I heard.”

Still, there it was: hatred, cramping in his mandible, amplified by the knowledge that it was wholly unwarranted. He didn’t deserve to hate Nikolai anymore. He’d forfeited the moral ground from which hatred was possible. They were colleagues, essentially. Confederates. Comrades. The differences between them were quantitative, not qualitative. If Nikolai was a few degrees more implicated than Aleksandr was, give it a year or two. And here was his comrade, Nikolai, giving him a piece of horrible but relevant information.

“What are you talking about?” said Aleksandr.

“There are political considerations, I hear.” Nikolai cringed as though sorry to be the one to say so, though Aleksandr was quite sure he was not sorry.

“What kind of political considerations?” said Aleksandr. He didn’t want to ask. If he had anything left in this life besides chess, he wouldn’t have asked. But then, if he’d had anything besides chess, he wouldn’t be here at all—he wouldn’t have been so predictably bought, and he wouldn’t have been so easily maintained, and he
wouldn’t be standing here, across from Nikolai Sergeyevich, while his cornichons grew flaccid on his plate.

Nikolai raised his eyebrows and smiled obnoxiously. “I’d ask Petr Pavlovich about it, if I were you.”

Aleksandr zigzagged across the room. Petr Pavlovich was in a corner, telling a boring anecdote to a small coven of bored listeners. Aleksandr pulled urgently at Petr Pavlovich’s elbow until he raised one finger at his listeners and smiled indulgently at Aleksandr as though he were a loved but manic child. They retreated to a corner, where Aleksandr immediately began hissing.

“I’m not playing in Pasadena? I’m really not playing in Pasadena?”

Pavlovich bobbed his head and spoke without moving his lips. “Hush. You’re making a scene.”

“How was this decided?”

“It’s, ah. A relatively recent development.”

“
Why
was it decided?”

“Please keep your voice down.
I
don’t mind, you know. I don’t mind if you go. But it’s not about my preferences.”

“You’re going to forfeit a player? For the first time ever? I don’t see how this is in the interests of Soviet chess.”

“Again, it’s not
me
forfeiting a player. It’s not
me
doing anything.”

“FIDE, then.”

“Stop doing that with your jaw. You could show a little appreciation. It’s strictly about your safety.”

“It’s not.”

“Fine, it’s about the Olympics, then. They boycotted Moscow. We can’t send you.”

“You’d send Rusayev.”

Pavlovich rolled his eyes. “Enough.”

“You would.”

“Enough. Rusayev’s different. You’re young. You can afford to wait three years.”

At this, Aleksandr dropped his plate. Sopping fragments of smoked fish and pickled vegetables dislodged themselves and went sliding surprising distances across the marble floor.

“You’re all so enthralled with Rusayev,” said Aleksandr. “You know he’s only world champion technically. He inherited the title by default from Fischer. But you all worship him. You bend over backward to preserve his title.”

“Arrogance doesn’t suit you,” said Petr Pavlovich, bending down to clean up the food with his handkerchief. “Neither does alcohol.”

“Can’t I afford to be arrogant?”

“You could be doing better.”

Aleksandr scoffed. “My rating has overtaken Rusayev’s this year.”

Petr Pavlovich stood up. “You could be doing better in other ways.”

Aleksandr looked down into his vodka. His ears buzzed. He thought of his sneering comments about Oleg Chazov, the FIDE president, uttered within earshot of a FIDE official. He thought about rolling his eyes at a slide show about the superiority of the Russian athlete. He thought about telling that stupid joke to that bulbous-lipped, unimpressed woman, and how it wasn’t even a good joke, and how she hadn’t even laughed.

“If you want to play Rusayev for world champion in the fall, you’ve got to start behaving yourself better. It’s not too late for you, Aleksandr. I advocate for you every day, I do. Every single day.”

In his vodka, Aleksandr could see part of the reflection of his own globular, inelegant nose. He didn’t like to think of Petr Pavlovich defending him to the Party—in that wheedling voice, that apologetic tone, asking for more time, more leniency. Aleksandr realized that he’d become a petty, irrelevant dictator himself. There were probably entire armies of thinkers and strategists who sat around figuring out how to get him to do exactly what they wanted. And they were probably always successful.

“Do you know that? You know that, don’t you?” said Petr Pavlovich. He sounded hurt. Aleksandr refused to respond to hypothetical questions. “You’re not going to Pasadena,” said Petr Pavlovich. “I’m sorry. You can still play Rusayev for world champion in the fall. But you need to help me out here.”

Aleksandr did not look at Petr Pavlovich; he knew there would be
that distorted, forgiving tenderness in his face, and he did not want to see it.

“You need to behave yourself,” said Petr Pavlovich. “Please stop doing that with your face. Let’s get you another plate.”

And, through the blowsy spring and into the horrid summer, Aleksandr behaved himself. He listened politely. He feigned attention whenever it was required, he kept quiet whenever it was possible. He made no demands. He asked no follow-up questions. At parties, he stood quietly by picture windows and shoveled great masses of gourmet food into his mouth, and when anyone from the Party tried to talk to him, he pretended to always be chewing.

The World Championship match began in September. Moscow’s buildings groped the sky with a modern, monolithic insatiability; the kommunalki were epic, blanched white, cluttered in rows like crooked teeth in the maw of an animal. Leningrad was forced by sheer architecture to acknowledge its past, its old defeats and triumphs, its roots in rationality and Euclidean geometry. In Leningrad—in the long avenues, in the arcing canals—one could find the past’s hope for the future. In Moscow, the future had been captured, torn down, and bent to the will of the present. Enormous signs defaced the sides of buildings:
HELP THE MOTHERLAND—BUILD COMMUNISM, THE IDEAS OF LENIN LIVE AND CONQUER
. Marching down Gorky Ulitsa, Aleksandr saw how the street might evoke a jaunty sense of usefulness, if he were someone who was inclined to think that way.