A Partial History of Lost Causes (35 page)

A decade passed in slow motion, then faster and faster. When Aleksandr looked back, it returned in snatches, on repeat, hiccupping and distorted sometimes, like a scratched record. There were some good times, of this he was sure—some nice nights with Nina, especially at the beginning, though in memory it became difficult to ascertain how many of the nights were actually nice. Was it one night or two or a half dozen or a dozen? Or was it typical, was it usual, for them to slow-dance in front of that enormous picture window, with St. Petersburg cracked open before them, backlit by the moon, shining with all the grandeur of ancient Rome? What you imagine is what you remember, and what you remember is what you’re left with. So why not decide to imagine it a little differently? It is possible that it wasn’t all a horrendous mistake from the outset. It is possible that they were happier than he sometimes suspected.

But when he tried to remember the good, most of what emerged was the mundane: there’s Nina in 1993, combing her hair in front of
the mirror; there she is again in 1997, maybe, her hair slightly longer, her frown slightly deeper. He remembered her evolving sleepwear, the cyclical courses of her shoes—seasonal, astronomical, in their regularity. He remembered the things they acquired: the sound system that seemed to seethe in the dark, with an array of dials and knobs and buttons that looked to Aleksandr like the operational apparatus of a spaceship; the computers that began as looming presences, half the size of Aleksandr, and slowly shrank down to sleek nefarious objects, bafflingly unobtrusive. He remembered also the parade of Nina’s friends, wearing bright colors, talking conspiratorially. They came for lunch, they came for dinner, they came—eternally—for drinks. They were a rotating cast: he could never get their names straight and was always mixing one up with the other, and always being scolded, and always making a point to remember, and always, always, immediately forgetting again. The women often mocked one another for failings that Aleksandr couldn’t see or understand—anyone who missed the evening was considered fair game. No matter how thoroughly a particular woman had been eviscerated by the others in her absence, the next time she appeared, she would be greeted with the same breathless concern, the same false smiles, the same astonished arching of eyebrows at the same grim litanies of the outrageousness of children, the callousness of men. Then there was the same hearty agreement, the same clinking of glasses.

Aleksandr remembered also the halfhearted attempts at a baby. Over the years, Nina was on and then ambivalently off three different kinds of chemical birth control; in 1994 she went off again—this time earnestly, meaningfully—and they waited. Nothing happened. They waited longer. Still nothing happened. Aleksandr remembered the growing realization that it was taking longer than it should, then much longer than it should, and then the further realization—never articulated but shared, he was sure—that they were not as disappointed as they probably should have been. He watched Nina purse her lips at another negative test—the eleventh or twelfth—and he knew that she was nonplussed, slightly, but not distraught. The two of them with a baby: what the hell would they do with it? Nina was good at taking care of things—the stereo system, for example, and her ever growing
collection of fussy silken clothing—but things were still and quiet and could be fairly easily kept clean. A pregnancy, a birth, a wailing baby with an always open maw—the whole thing sounded as embarrassing as it would be exhausting. After a year or two, the birth control pills reappeared in the cabinet, and Aleksandr never complained.

They did not fight. They never fought. They went days without speaking sometimes, but even that wasn’t really a fight—he’d sometimes just forget to talk to her. Their sex life began to die quietly, uncomplainingly, with all the meek gravity of a religious martyr: first sex became conventional, then infrequent, then brittle and harassed and, he thought resentfully, resentful. And then it became a fluke, a comet glimpsed blearily through a thicket of stars—it happened sometimes when she’d been drinking, or he’d been cajoling, or they’d been laughing (rarely, rarely). Sometimes he’d engage in self-conscious rituals designed to bring them back to whatever they’d once been, but that was when he most realized that he wasn’t sure what that was. Still, he tried: he’d put awful early-nineties love songs on the stereo system, the kind that they’d heard in their nights out on the town, back in the early days. It was meant to be ironic, but like all irony, it was also slightly sentimental—and since Nina was possessed of neither irony nor sentimentality, she pursed her lips and stared at Aleksandr and failed to smile.

In lieu of sex, Aleksandr began watching TV. He watched Yeltsin hiccup his way through a presidency, red-faced and drunk and increasingly incompetent: it was hard to believe that he was the man who’d shouted down a coup, who’d kept Russia from teetering into a total police state. The nation’s life expectancy for males was down to fifty-eight, mostly due to alcoholism and suicide. Half of the economy was run by organized crime. At night Aleksandr would pace the floors and think about his country, which seemed to have outlived its own relevance. In this, he felt that they had something in common.

Aleksandr still followed chess; at night, while Nina was sleeping, he’d sneak onto the ever smaller computers and ruthlessly beat the best insomniac chess minds of the world. Excitement ruffled through online forums as they recognized him from a defense or an opening, and he felt an echoing twist when he remembered how he’d once been
at the promising opening gambit of his own career, and his own life. Now he’d fulfilled everyone’s highest hopes, and there was nothing left for him to do but haunt the communities of online enthusiasts. His chess successes seemed like the litany of accomplishments of some Soviet leader that he’d been made to learn about in school.

He rarely played in real life. Petr Pavlovich arranged a lackluster match in 1995 at the World Trade Center in New York. Aleksandr played an Indian champion and beat him handily. The win felt cheap, hollow, the afterthought of victory. Outside, the lemon-colored light sculpted the sky. The Twin Towers loomed with a fatal clarity through the crystalline windows.

After that, Aleksandr didn’t hear much from Petr Pavlovich. He had other people to manage, though fewer. The FIDE was less ensnared to the bureaucracy—no longer throttled by the corruption—and anyway, there was less at stake, less to prove, less hope that the Cold War could be won through cultural triumph, through withering superiority at the finest game in the world. It was a game of missiles in the end, and diplomacy, and national pride, yes, but mostly, it was a game about who had consistent access to toilet paper and cheap protein, and at this game, Russia had decidedly lost. They didn’t need a chess champion to be the standard-bearer; Aleksandr could no longer embarrass them the way he once could. They were already embarrassing themselves enough.

Occasionally, Nina and Aleksandr threw parties and Petr Pavlovich came, invariably resentful, usually alone. He stood in corners and grabbed at every single passing appetizer. Aleksandr’s feelings about Petr Pavlovich shifted depending on how he was feeling about his entire life that day. Sometimes he saw Petr Pavlovich as the necessary intermediary that had enabled Aleksandr’s own survival—their relationship was parasitic or symbiotic at best, and Aleksandr knew that he should feel grateful. Other days Aleksandr looked around his life—his huge apartment, his vacant heart, his shining trophy, dusted every other day by the maids—and he wondered if there was a more authentic life, a more authentic shadow self, that might have been possible. Though it was true that when he tried to envision such a life he came up blank—what else might he have done? Maybe they would have let
him give chess lessons for a time, though likely not in Leningrad. He might have gone back to Okha to teach whatever promising talent the town was yielding these days; and he might have had some status as the boy who had gone off and done well, though the child who returns can never have quite the same currency as the child who stays away. His family would have been proud of him, no question, though there probably would have been some sense that he’d given away too much, and for what? For some vague principle that was as inarticulate as it was remote. Life was full of untenables, of insurmountables, of absurdities; the question wasn’t whether you could hammer your life into some kind of purity (you couldn’t) but whether you could live around the roadblocks and whether you could run with the premises (your government system, your current coordinates in place and time, your mortality) and make something of yourself anyhow. Aleksandr had done that for a while, and wasn’t that adulthood, and wasn’t that life? Wasn’t retreating from it retreating from reality? You could passively resist, sure; you could protest, of course. But wasn’t it a little like refusing to get out of bed in the morning, since you knew one day you were going to die?

But still and all, of course, of course, they would have been glad to have him back.

Petr Pavlovich called Aleksandr in January 1997. Aleksandr saw his name pop up on the caller ID—a new acquisition of Nina’s, which she used to avoid answering the calls of those lady friends of hers who’d fallen into disfavor that week. Aleksandr cringed and considered ignoring it, but he was ultimately defeated by curiosity. It had been many months since he’d spoken to Petr Pavlovich for any length of time. He wondered if the nasal polyps had ever gotten take care of.

“Hi there, Petr Pavlovich,” said Aleksandr, and enjoyed the momentary disoriented silence that followed.

“Caller ID,” said Petr Pavlovich finally.

“Right.”

“Very up-to-date of you.”

“It’s all the wife.”

“How
is
the wife?

“A joy, as always.”

Aleksandr tried to remember if Petr Pavlovich had married. There’d been a woman at a party some years ago, of this he was sure—he remembered that she was delicate and chain-smoking and smiling and seemed to make Pavlovich very happy. Aleksandr wasn’t sure whether that had been a wife or a mistress or a girlfriend or a friend whom Petr Pavlovich was trying and failing to woo. He’d guess the latter.

“Are you married, Petr Pavlovich?”

“I was. Thanks for asking. She died three years ago. Esophageal cancer. Quick.”

Aleksandr cringed. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure the card’s in the mail.”

Aleksandr coughed his voice into something gentler and more supplicating. “Did you have children?”

“Why, we didn’t, Aleksandr Kimovich. This outpouring of interested generosity on your part is unprecedented. I hope you’re not on antidepressants. They’ll mess with your game.”

“I’m not on antidepressants.”

“That’s a relief to hear.”

Petr Pavlovich sniffed, and Aleksandr feared mightily—and momentarily—that he was crying.

“And you, Aleksandr? Any plans for children? You and that beautiful wife of yours, what’s her name?”

“Nina.”

“Nina. Of course. And so?”

“Ah, no.” Aleksandr shifted the phone to the other ear. “No immediate plans.”

“I see. You’re much too busy, I’d imagine.”

“What are you calling about?”

“Well.” Aleksandr could hear Petr Pavlovich gearing up to make his pitch, stripping his voice of its endemic weary sarcasm. “I know you’re very into technology. Very up on the latest developments. The caller ID and so on.”

“Mmm,” said Aleksandr. He eyed the stereo system nervously.

“As you’re probably aware, IBM has been building a program that plays chess.”

“I know,” said Aleksadr eagerly. This he actually did know.

“Big Blue, Deep Blue Sea, something like that. It’s very good now. Been in testing for years. It beats everyone who plays it. They program all possible responses to all possible moves into its—whatever—its brain, I guess, and then they program it to know which ones are most likely to be successful in every possible scenario. It’s what your brain must do, essentially. You’re programmed for exactly the same kind of responses.”

“Yeah, but I have to think about them.”