A Partial History of Lost Causes (38 page)

“Fine.” She sniffed. “You are an odd young woman.”

Something about this—the pronouncement of judgment issued by a quasi-hostile European—made me miss Lars so much that I almost started to cry. I rarely cry—finding it an activity I can consider and then reject engaging in, typically for lack of energy—but there are occasional seizures of emotion that grab me at strange moments: in parking lots, in supermarkets, elicited by old couples picking out fruit or little children grabbing at a mother’s dress. The woman looked alarmed.

“I know,” I said. “Thank you for your help.”

She sniffed and turned away, for which I was grateful, because the vista before me—the roiling crowds with their tiny flags and their indecipherable shouts and their enormous gall—was starting to smear, and I didn’t want anybody watching me as I tried to make my way through.

I took the long way home—across the embankment, past the cannon at the Peter and Paul Fortress, the sphinx’s humped crown a misshapen shadow in the distance, before heading across Dvortsovvy Proezd to my island. My mind streaked with war and revolution. I thought of the assault on Nicholas II—the murderous clawing at the palace doors, the shots sailing through the sternums of the men, the women crumpling and crying in their taffeta. I thought of Stalin’s purges—the shivering red-faced intellectuals, the ones who wept, the ones who spat at their
captors. I thought of the lines of Jews waiting for their exit visas in the eighties, turning around to look at the bleak landscape that once was their home; I thought of Yeltsin on a tank, screaming down a military coup; I thought of the school siege, the terrorism, the brinkmanship, the bluffs, of the last decade. And then I thought of Aleksandr’s rally, the way a thousand heads turned if he pointed and another thousand shouted if he spoke.

I went home, nodded to the icy-eyed night manager, and sat on my bed. I watched the chilly stars grow sharper as darkness fell. Over the weeks, I’d started to feel a certain sense of belonging in my room: my beach towel, decorated with fish whose lurid blues had faded into gray, had taken up a permanent residence in the communal bathroom; my salt-stained boots sat in the hallway outside my room like the relics from an atrocity. I’d stared so hard at the floor that I’d started to make an absurdist geography from the stains: near the bedside table was an Indian subcontinent; near the window was an entire Africa, complete with satellite Madagascar.

I thought of my father’s map, with its jaundiced Soviet Union; I thought of how I was now in its vast midst. It was as though I had climbed up on my father’s desk, kicking away his papers and disturbing his souvenirs, and crawled into the map. It was as though I’d been sucked through the television to the other side: a place where time held the world in unending potential energy, and the static broke the air into pieces, and everything was the color of a chessboard.

Aleksandr’s apartment was sunny and enormous, decorated with the slightly oblique tastefulness of a modern-art museum. There was a black and white sofa in the parlor, and the complicated chords of a sonata for piano—dissonant, in a minor key—floated faintly from somewhere above my head. Sharply dressed women and slightly frumpier men walked in and out of the main apartment with great purpose. When the door swung open, I could see a flat-screen TV turned on mute to a government news channel. I could hear the shriek of an espresso machine.

I was patted down by a brawny security guard who lingered indecorously on my inseam. Then, as Nina had promised, there was a wait.
Every time the door opened, I looked up expectantly and confronted suspicious looks from whoever was leaving—a goatish woman in thick glasses, a very young man with a clipboard, a few meaty gents with earpieces and grim expressions. Viktor did not appear. Nobody called for me. Nobody spoke to me. It reminded me of my doctors’ visits back in college, when I’d been given pamphlets on vitamins and management and “living with” Huntington’s and had waited for eons, epochs, watching the occasional nurse shoot me a sympathetic wince.

Finally, Nina emerged. I was half sleeping by that point, my head bobbing me savagely awake every thirty seconds. My hair, always unfortunate, had been done no favors by the time spent waiting. Nina frowned at me. Today she was wearing a beige blouse with an intricately scalloped neck and had her mouth done in orangey lipstick. She was paler than I remembered, and her hair was pulled back in an unforgiving bun. Her cheekbones jutted from her face like installation art.

“You’re still here?” she said.

“Apparently.”

“Very well, then. Come in.”

She led me into a high-ceilinged hallway. The walls were white, decorated with tiny prints of Moscow and St. Petersburg done in reds and blues. Above me, the Neva snarled in inky cobalt; St. Basil’s reared, strangely menacing, above a sanguine horizon.

“Nice apartment,” I said. I could feel her roll her eyes, even though she had her back to me.

“Mr. Bezetov has about fifteen minutes for you,” said Nina. “I told him I had a strange American waiting for him, and he seemed interested. I trust you’ll be able to explain yourself more thoroughly. He is very busy.”

“I understand,” I said, and then the hallway opened up into a room. It was epic and echoing; lacy cords of sunlight struck down from a snowy skylight in one corner, and a baby-grand piano squatted in another. In the center of a room, at a black desk, Aleksandr Bezetov sat typing furiously on a laptop.

“Aleksandr,” said Nina. “Your visitor.”

“One moment,” Aleksandr said in Russian. Nina was already
gone. He was dressed more casually than he’d been at the protest and was wearing wire-rimmed glasses that looked Western and a tad self-conscious. His face—which, on the stump, had been energized, animated, his thick eyebrows casting as though looking for political contraband—held a vaguely bored expression. His tongue probed thoughtfully at his lower lip. His sleeves were rolled up.

After a moment, he looked up at me. He raised one eyebrow. I took this as my cue.

“Hello,” I said in Russian, and Aleksandr made a face.

“Please,” he said in English. “I’ve been speaking Russian long enough that this hurts me.”

His English was flat and professional and very clear. It reminded me somehow of stones skipping on a river.

“So,” he said. “You probably wonder why I agreed to meet with you.”

“I suppose,” I said, although I hadn’t. I’d hoped he would meet with me; I appreciated that he’d decided to. But I hadn’t thought it could be anything more than a kindly indulgence, because today he had the time for it.

“Well,” he said. “I know you probably don’t realize this, but you’ve been causing trouble for me. You can sit, you know.” He gestured to the spindly chair across from his. He resumed his typing as I unwound my scarf and took a seat.

“I have?” I said.

He stopped typing. “Yes.”

I said nothing, waiting for clarification. I didn’t know how I’d managed to create trouble for Aleksandr Bezetov without even managing to create any trouble for myself.

“Have you possibly been approached by a Nikolai Sergeyevich?”

There was a dull ding in the back of my head. “Yes.”

“And perhaps he’s tried to convince you that the two of you have some interest in common? Perhaps he’s tried to suggest that he’s a friend of mine?”

The ding was resolving into a dissipated vibrato. I was already starting to feel like an idiot. “It’s been confusing,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it.”

This wasn’t how I’d imagined our meeting going. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but I suppose I thought Aleksandr would be kindly and gentle and maybe a tad professorial; that he’d patiently answer my questions and then inquire politely about my own interests and then blandly dismiss me with the most generic of best wishes for the future. In my most involved fantasies, he’d be able to answer some questions close to my still-functioning mind and heart—he’d be able to reveal some deep wisdom about proceeding with grace toward doom, and that wisdom might somehow illuminate my future or my past. Either way, I hadn’t expected to be cross-examined.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “All I did was approach an old friend of yours to see if I might get your contact information. I didn’t realize that would be troublesome.”

Aleksandr issued a weary sigh, as though he’d been asked to coach a high school chess club. “No, of course you didn’t. I’ll be quite clear. The Russian government suspects I am a pawn of American intelligence. They’ve always thought that. Now you’re here, looking for me, making a spectacle of yourself, and you attracted their attention. They think you’re running me, or trying to, or something. Do you understand?”

His breath was becoming thick with the strain of remaining civil. Sarcasm buckled to the surface of his voice, like the eruption of some long-suppressed subterranean substance. “As it is, in case you’re wondering, I am not run by your CIA. But if I were, they’d be a lot subtler about it than you are being.”

“So who is Nikolai?”

“He’s a well-regarded bureaucrat in our very legitimate government.”

“Oh.” I was getting it. “Okay.”

There was a pause in which Aleksandr resumed typing, and I wondered if our conversation had somehow come to a cryptic end. I tried to remember what I had been doing when Nikolai appeared at the café those weeks ago. Had I been doing something suspicious, something that denoted sinister and illegal activities? I didn’t see how I’d managed it without noticing. I could barely remember any moments of import in the last few weeks—and those that shuffled to the surface,
when I groped for them, were small and personal and oddly sentimental: watching a snow flurry blur out the stars through my hostel window, buying pastries from a woman who always gave me an extra bialy “for my children,” walking around the Neva until my skin was raw and my eyes were leaking and my head was filled with a symphony of Russian poetry.

“I don’t understand this,” I said. “I don’t see how I got anybody’s attention. I don’t do anything. All I do is sit around in cafés and read.”

“Yes,” he said. “They don’t quite know what to make of you. But they think you’re a representative of the American government, if an unwitting one.”

“An unwitting one?” I was insulted now.

Aleksandr eyed me, and I could see him registering my half-open coat, my ill-fitting sweater, the gauzy bits of hair that flew away from my head as if they were fleeing political persecution.

“Yes,” he said.

I fingered the seam of my coat and looked down. I felt very tired. There’d been a bone-deep fatigue of late, coming in dark waves that made my eyes feel as if they were orbiting my skull. I didn’t know how to interpret it or how hard I should try to. It wasn’t a physical harbinger of onset—I’d read enough accounts to know—but it seemed a psychological readying, and I was mostly grateful for it.

“All of this,” he said, “creates some further difficulties for me. And for you, I might add. More for you, I would suppose. I have many bigger difficulties already.”

“So do I,” I said, still looking down.

Aleksandr sniffed. “I’m sure you didn’t have any intention of causing trouble.”

“I had no idea.”

“I wholeheartedly believe you did not.” He stared at me. He seemed to be keeping his eyes self-consciously wide and still, which was as good as rolling them. “If not for trouble,” he said, “why are you here?”

A good question, this.

“Do you remember,” I said carefully, “a letter from an American academic in the early eighties?”

He sat back in his chair. “I’ve received a lot of letters in my life.”

“I’m sure,” I said quickly. “I understand that. But it was a pretty odd letter.”

“Odd how?”

“It wasn’t about chess, exactly. The letter was asking you how you proceed when you know you’re losing.”

“When I’m losing?”

“Yes.”

“Am I known primarily for losing?”

I hadn’t expected him to be arrogant. It shouldn’t have been surprising—he was the best chess player of all time. The best hamster trainer of all time probably has an ego, too. But a part of me had been hoping that, upon my request, he would sit up straighter, reach into his coat pocket, and produce a typed manifesto. Here, he might say. I’ve been waiting for you. There is so much here that you need to know.