A Partial History of Lost Causes (50 page)

I said nothing. I couldn’t believe that people talked like this, and
I didn’t have any response—nobly indignant or otherwise—that wouldn’t sound canned.

“Not talking? All right,” said Nikolai. “You can buy most people, but I suppose it is true that you can’t buy everyone.”

I tried to move past him then, but he boxed me out with his sizable chest.

“Not yet,” he said. “We’re not done talking.”

That was when I got scared. It occurred to me that if Nikolai thought that what he wanted—whatever he wanted—wasn’t going to be gained through talking, he might try changing his tactics.

“You must think Aleksandr very brave, yes?” said Nikolai. “Living life in the rifle’s gaze? And all for his political ideals. Very poetic, yes? Very courageous? You admire him. And why he grants you this access, I don’t know. Maybe he’s fucking you, though I don’t know why he would. But for whatever reason, here you are. You respect this man. You find his moral judgment impeccable. You’d make sacrifices for him. Undoubtedly, you already have.”

I looked down. It wasn’t true, exactly. I hadn’t made sacrifices, at least not any that I hadn’t already been looking to make.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about Aleksandr. For example, his best friend from the seventies got himself hit by a bus. Did you know that? His best friend and colleague, the man who protected him, guided him through everything in his first days here. The man who got him interested in politics originally. The man who ran that journal originally. You knew that, right? You knew that Aleksandr was just a chess prodigy, right? He barely knew his left from right. He didn’t know what to do. All he did was shuffle these pieces around on a board and pine after this whore he knew from his building. It was pathetic by anyone’s standards. And then his best friend, Ivan, was killed by a night bus. Horrific accident. He was crossing the street carelessly, no doubt; terribly drunk, I shouldn’t wonder. The man was an incorrigible drunk.”

I stared at Nikolai.

“He never told you that, did he?” said Nikolai.

“What is your point.”

“Didn’t you ever find it odd that Aleksandr hasn’t had a similar accident yet? He’s been careless in his own way, nobody would argue.”

“You mean, do I wonder why you haven’t killed him yet? I imagine it’s not for lack of trying.”

Nikolai tsked and drew his cheeks together in a way that seemed oddly mannered and affected. “Please,” he said. “There’s no reason to be vulgar.”

I closed my eyes. I waited for him to go, but he did not. He leaned in closer to me. He stank of undercooked meat, of cheap alcohol, of the threat of violence. I thought I might faint from sheer character weakness.

“Look,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you. This is the truth, Irina: your friend Bezetov wants to have his little rallies, his little public fits or whatever, that is fine. That is okay with us. That is, frankly, good for us. He wants to sit up there in his barricaded castle, stroking his own ego? Okay. Your funeral thing that’s coming up? With the quirky little posters? Very cute. Fine, wonderful.”

He clenched and relaxed his fingers like an animal exercising a protractible claw. “But this film. It’s a bit much, don’t you think?”

“Much?” I was becoming—retroactively, impotently—terrified. My knees began to actually shake. My spine was wracked with a great seizure of fear.

“It’s pushing it. There has been tolerance.” He pulled me close to him, and his face caught the light again. I could see where he’d sliced himself shaving. I could see hairs between his eyebrows, looking like the legs of massacred beetles. “There has been tremendous tolerance and patience on the part of the Kremlin. The Kremlin has been magnanimous, has looked the other way and endured the slanders and silliness. But know this, Irina, and tell your boss: this generosity is not infinite. The film is much too much. And your Aleksandr may be famous. He may be well regarded. But even famous people can become careless in the roads. Even the famous can have accidents.”

I tried to back away, and this time he let me.

“I think you do understand. But Aleksandr seems to have forgotten. Remind him, wouldn’t you?”

I took a step, and then another, and then my knees bent, and I was running.

“You will,” called Nikolai. “I know your type. You will.”

The next day I was out before sunrise, making my way through the streets as the bakeries were turning on their lights. In the station, drunks sat shivering in the alcoves until police came and prodded them away. On the metro, dead-eyed young people were returning from long nights out, their pupils the size of thumbs.

I got to Aleksandr’s as the sky was turning a mottled gray. I waited outside the apartment until I saw the light go on, and then I waited fifteen minutes more. Vlad buzzed me in, and I knocked on Aleksandr’s door, and I heard a voice, and I went in.

Nina was holding a shoe in her hand, her jaw set in a furious determination. Maybe it was the way the light was catching her, but her red hair and the fury of her energy and the heaving of her chest conspired to make her unbeautiful. Anger, I’ve been told, can make some lovely women even lovelier, but with Nina, this was not the case. Rage deformed her face and made it somehow hers and yet not hers—there was the same elegant arrangement of the same objectively fine features, but now it all somehow amounted to ugliness. It was like stepping back from a painting and letting the clots of color take a horrible new meaning.

“You,” Nina said, “are a pitiful man.” She sounded like she meant it.

Aleksandr was sitting with his head down, his shoulders hunched over. I instinctively covered my eyes with my hands. I tried to back away, and in so doing, I knocked over an antique wooden bowl depicting an Orthodox cathedral.

Nina looked at me. Her faced changed almost imperceptibly—there was a brief bleed of contempt, followed by a speedy recovery. And on Aleksandr’s face: sheer humiliation. I should know what it looks like. Then Nina gave me a brief nod and quietly dematerialized in the doorway.

“Well,” said Aleksandr too carefully. “Good morning.”

“I’m sorry. I knocked. I thought I heard someone answer.”

He waved his hand at me as though batting away the implied question. “It’s okay. It happens.”

“You’re not happy,” I brilliantly observed.

I found myself thinking of Jonathan then. I thought again that there was some value in never seeing the bad things—the small, ugly facts you come to know about a person no matter how hard you try not to. The petty compromises, the self-promotions, the self-protections. The tiny tics of ego or of callousness. The eventual—inevitable—failure of comprehension.

“Happy? Oh, is that supposed to be the idea?” It was an oddly personal thing to hear, like listening to someone talk in his sleep. He tapped his pen against his papers and spun around joylessly in his chair. “Should we use this unexpected time to talk about Perm?”

“Aleksandr, I—”

“The guard will meet you at a café. You won’t go near the actual facility. As you know, I will not be going with you.”

“Aleksandr.”

“I’ll just be here, enjoying the joy of my domicile. Basking in the glow of my wedded bliss.”

“Please.”

“Please,” he repeated, waving his hand at me. “Please. We don’t need to discuss this. It’s a rather banal problem, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“There are more important things to talk about.”

“Yes,” I said emphatically.

Aleksandr raised his eyebrows at me.

“Nikolai stopped me on the street again. He told me to tell you.” I thought again of Nikolai’s face and how close to me it had been. “He smelled terrible,” I said.

Aleksandr took off his glasses. He squeezed the flesh above the bridge of his nose. He looked a little more beleaguered, a little more embattled, a little more tired than I normally thought of him.

“He was threatening me, or you, or something?”

“How does he always know where I am?”

Aleksandr squinted at me. “You have been at the same hostel for a year. You’re not exactly making it hard for him.” He pressed on his forehead with his index finger until a small weal appeared. “What does he say?”

“The film is going too far, he says.” Suddenly, I realized how terrified I was for Aleksandr. This was striking, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been terrified for a person who was not myself.

“I’ve gone too far before,” he said tiredly. “I’ve always been too far.”

It was true, I knew. He went too far, and he lived with what it meant. Not in the same way I did—his threats were external, and they would take his mind and his body at the same time. But in more ways than one, we were alike. Death stalked us; every day we caught glimpses of it out of the corner of our eyes, a grinning hyena through a thicket. We never knew when it was coming, and on good days, we could convince ourselves that it wasn’t coming at all. Aleksandr could talk himself into believing that no one would ever follow him home; that the things in the corners would stay shadows, and the loud noises would always be motorcycles backfiring, and the head injuries would remain minimal and vaguely comic. And I could believe that the tests were, perhaps, mistaken; that the cataracts on some printed-out sheet ten years ago had nothing to do with my actual mind, my actual memories; that the prophesy was misinterpreted or perhaps reversible. I could believe that if I had to be the type of person who was prone to statistical anomaly, then I could perhaps become the kind of person who could access statistical impossibility. I could cut out articles about the only known survivor of full-blown rabies (medically induced coma, steroids); I could cut out articles about the resurrection of the clinically dead. I didn’t believe in miracles, per se. But somehow, believing in your continued existence doesn’t feel like the miracle. It’s the alternative that defies logic, that beggars belief.

“They’re going to kill you,” I said.

“He wouldn’t say that.”

“He talked about ‘accidents’ with a rather unnerving emphasis.”

Aleksandr was nodding vacantly, as though I’d been going on about some petty grievance for hours already. He looked out the window. “You know, you’d think my wife would worry about me,” he said.

“She doesn’t?”

“It’s a funny thing, you know. She doesn’t. She really, really doesn’t.”

“Maybe she can’t stand to think about it. Maybe she has faith that you’ll be okay.” I knew how shallow a thought this was. I’d encountered
it myself—from friends of friends and aged aunts who clasped my hand in theirs and said, Irina, you’ll be okay, I know it, I just know it. What this means is: I haven’t properly thought about it—I haven’t subjected it to any kind of clean, brutal scrutiny—because it is unpleasant, and at the end of the day, I do not really care that much.

“Faith doesn’t enter into it with Nina. Neither does denial. She knows what we pay in insurance premiums. At any rate, I don’t expect that this business with Nikolai is anything more to be worried about than the kind of thing I’ve had to contend with already.”

“But that’s it,” I said. “He’s saying it is. He’s saying they’ve been letting you off the hook on purpose. He’s saying they’re going to stop doing that.”

“Is that so?” He raised his eyebrows mildly. “Think of that. Just think of all the freedom I might have had if I’d known. All the restaurant food I might have eaten. All the domestic holidays I might have taken. I’ve never seen Lake Baikal, you know.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“I’m taking it seriously. I’m taking it tremendously seriously. What else do you want me to do? How else do you want me to hide? Where else do you want me to
not
go? Am I going to Perm myself to do my own interviews? No. I’m sending a bunch of interns for me. I sit here on my laptop all day long. I leave the house to appear with an army of handlers wherever I go, and even then I get beaned with chessboards. I am taking it seriously. If I were taking it any more seriously, I’d lie down and die right this second just to get it over with.”

We were quiet. I looked at the table, where Nina’s delicate shoe was still crouched. It looked like it might, at any moment, get up and curtsy and take a twirl around the room.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked. “I just want you to be careful.” I did. I wanted him to be careful—Aleksandr, who could dodge his own fate through proper strategy, precaution, prediction. Aleksandr, who would have to live around his fear—deny it, repress it, outsmart it—for as long as he managed to live.

“I am careful,” he said. “I am. I am. I promise I am. Now. Can we talk about Perm?”