A Partial History of Lost Causes (7 page)

“You see,” he said, turning off the television with a flash that made bright spots in my eyes. The red snowflakes kept coming, slower and slower. My father spoke so quietly that I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to himself or to me. “You see,” he said, and I shivered again. “You can do a lot before you are thirty.”

T
he first time Aleksandr went to the café, Ivan and Nikolai didn’t recognize him. Aleksandr had grown thinner that winter, since his mother wasn’t around to make unpalatable food endurable, and he was paler. The relentless cold had given him a wild-eyed look of defeat. It made him move awkwardly, too—with all his limbs straight, his shoulders making tense bunches at his ears, every muscle trying to burrow farther into his body. He didn’t look like himself anymore, and he hadn’t looked like much to start with. So when he showed up at the Saigon on a snowy black night in January, Ivan and Nikolai stared at him with bald suspicion. They were sitting at a table in a corner with tiny clear shots of vodka before them and an enormous bricklike ashtray between them. The curtains around their table were a dark green that had been dulled by proximity to smoke and conspiracy. Ivan was cradling a cigarette between his two long fingers and talking; Nikolai was nodding vigorously and taking notes. Aleksandr stood over them, not wanting to interrupt.

“What do you want?” said Ivan. He was wearing a frayed Sex Pistols
T-shirt and the same silver medallion he’d had at the centenary. Aleksandr pulled off his hat and let some snow fall onto the table.

“Goddammit,” said Nikolai. A clump of snow disturbed his vodka. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m sure he’s just about to tell us,” said Ivan.

Aleksandr looked around the smoky café. It was labyrinthine and dark, though slanting red light illuminated corners here and there—a man and a woman without rings talked with their faces very close together; several groups of young men spoke in rustles and spurts and eruptions of laughter; a man in a wheelchair sat alone, rocking back and forth, the edge of his cigarette a rotating satellite as he gestured. Aleksandr closed his eyes for a moment and let the voices make a mosaic around him. They were relaxed, he decided, in their joking or raving or romance. They sounded like people talking in a bedroom, not a public place. Later, he realized that what he was hearing was the sound of people not lying.

“Sir?” said Ivan sternly. “Have you lost your way?”

“I’m Aleksandr Kimovich,” said Aleksandr. “We met at the centenary. You were taking notes. I just moved here.”

“What?” said Nikolai. His disastrously splotched face was carved into a parody of concern; he looked like a social realist painting, thought Aleksandr—
The Insolence of the Youthful Alarm and Worry!

“You gave me this address,” said Aleksandr, feeling immediately stupid. “You wrote it down for me and said to stop by.”

“When was this?” said Nikolai. The snow in his vodka was starting to melt. Aleksandr had a sinking feeling and remembered a time in grade school when he’d been passed a note to meet one of the girls under the pine tree at noon, and he went and waited and didn’t understand.

“I remember,” said Ivan. He flecked ash into the tray. “You’re the chess prodigy, right?”

Aleksandr turned his face to the side. “I’m just at the academy.”

“I read about you some,” Ivan said. “You’ve been doing well.”

“Thank you,” said Aleksandr, then didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t want it to seem as though he had come only to be congratulated on his success.

“Please, please, sit down,” said Ivan. “Join us. Nikolai Sergeyevich,
would you be so kind as to order the young man some vodka?” Nikolai gave Aleksandr a long, appraising look and disappeared into the smoky hallway, leering mildly at a few young women at the next table on his way out. “So. Aleksandr Kimovich. You’re liking the city so far?” Ivan smiled as though he were a Soviet ambassador trying to win over the dictator of a third-world socialist state.

“It’s very nice,” said Aleksandr.

At this, Ivan laughed. When he sucked his cigarette, his face turned to glinting angles and sharp edges. He raised his eyebrow. “Your apartment gives you no trouble?”

“No,” said Aleksandr, although he sometimes wished it did. He sometimes wished that the steward or one of the other tenants would burst into his damp room, with its flickering and tenuous light, to see what he was doing. The winter had been so lonely that the encroachment of anybody, for any reason, would have been welcome.

“Where’s the other one?” said Aleksandr. He remembered the third in Ivan’s trio, the one who looked the scruffiest, who’d said that they liked to study real history.

“Misha.” Ivan stopped and ticked his long fingers against his chin. “You have a very good memory to remember poor Misha.”

“Thank you,” said Aleksandr. He did have a very good memory, though, as Andronov always told him, his greatest strength in chess was in forgetting what he’d remembered and doing something else altogether.

Nikolai returned with a tray of Stoli, swirling and crystalline in the light. Aleksandr thanked him, and Nikolai said nothing. Ivan raised his glass and clinked it against Nikolai’s. “To Misha,” said Ivan.

Nikolai drank without toasting. Aleksandr picked up his vodka and examined it. In the glass, the light made chords of blue rainbows.

“What?” said Ivan. “Do you not have this in the east? It’s to drink.”

“I realize.” It tasted acerbic; Aleksandr pressed his lips together and swallowed some water. Ivan scoffed.

“What do you do with your time there?” said Nikolai.

“It’s not as cold there. There are other things to do.” Aleksandr gulped the rest of the shot to show them that he could, and Ivan handed him another.

“Our friend Misha,” said Ivan, “has unfortunately gotten himself into a little bit of trouble.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Aleksandr. The tendons in his neck were starting to unfurl slightly, and he wanted to look around the café some more. The ceiling was high and cavelike, strung with glowing lightbulbs the color of absinthe. Above the bar, bottles glinted with fish-belly silvers. The man in the wheelchair was still ranting to himself, puncturing the air with his cigarette tip.

“Who is that man?” said Aleksandr. “Who is he talking to?”

“You’re odd,” said Ivan. “Your priorities are odd.”

“Alcohol isn’t good for my game,” said Aleksandr. He was starting to be sorry he’d come. “It makes me fuzzy. It dulls my memory. Chess is all memory. Memory and imagination.”

“Memory and imagination are both technically illegal,” said Ivan. “Do you want us to order you a beer, then?”

“The beer is water,” said Nikolai. “Don’t insult the man. The beer’s not suitable for infants.”

They passed another shot glass to Aleksandr, and he rolled it between his fingers. The glass felt clean, and when it was full, it was just about the weight of a king in a good set. Nikolai produced a cigar from his pocket and lit it with a Saigon Café matchbook. The cigar made sweet swirls in the air. Aleksandr’s head felt as if it were attached by a string connected to the ceiling and was dangling above his torso, moving in tandem with his gestures, manipulated by an unseen puppeteer.

“What happened to Misha?” said Aleksandr. It was hard to form words. He was coursing with a silly relaxation, a pleasant absence of energy that left only a few things thinkable: taking deep gulps of the cinnamon smell of the cigar, watching the green lights bob like buoys on a dark ocean.

“Well,” said Ivan. “Misha got stupid, Aleksandr Kimovich. And I’m going to tell you this so you don’t get stupid, too.”

“Okay,” said Aleksandr stupidly. His tongue was clumsy in his mouth.

“Because, to tell you the truth, you don’t seem like the sharpest individual,” said Ivan.

“No,” said Nikolai. “He doesn’t.”

“I know you’re a brilliant chess mind,” said Ivan. “This is what the newspapers tell me. And I believe what the newspapers tell me, always.”

“Always,” said Nikolai.

“But you can be good at one thing and not so good at other things,” said Ivan.

“Or you can be good at one thing and not so good at any other thing,” said Nikolai.

“Misha got stupid,” said Ivan. “He got stupid. He disseminated falsehood. He made statements that are not officially recognized as truth.”

“He circulated defamatory statements about the Soviet state and system,” said Nikolai.

“Oh?”

“He signed a petition,” said Ivan, “and he’s been thrown in a psikhushka. We don’t know when he’ll be back.” He rubbed his temples, his fingers fluttering against his dark hair.

“He’s an idiot,” said Nikolai. When he turned toward the light, his scars became aubergine thumbprints across his face.

“The point is,” said Ivan, “in seriousness, there is something of that in you, I think, and I hope you won’t mind me saying so. Don’t do what people ask you, unless they are from the competent organs. Don’t violate the traffic laws.”

“I don’t have a car,” said Aleksandr.

“Don’t grant favors. Don’t make assumptions. I trust you were in the Komsomol?”

Aleksandr shook his head. “You don’t really have to in Okha. It’s such a tiny town. Why, were you?”

“Everybody was,” said Ivan curtly. He raised his eyebrows at Aleksandr and pulled his mouth into a tight line. “All the decent students.”

“I see,” said Aleksandr. His head was starting to clear, and the green lamps were becoming dull orbs that pulsed against the inside of his eyelids. Nikolai and Ivan started talking about music, and then about women, and then about the invasion of Afghanistan and how many months it might take the Soviet army to subdue its dusty, uncultivated landscape and people. Aleksandr hadn’t been following
the story much, although he’d glimpsed headlines as he flipped his way to the chess coverage—an “interventionist duty,” it was called, and “an invitation from the socialist brethren of Afghanistan”—and he bobbed in and out of listening. He was thinking about Misha, in psychiatric prison for having bad luck. He thought of the countless incomprehensible papers he’d encountered in his efforts to get to Leningrad, how many he’d signed without reading, without understanding. He went to find the bathroom.

Near the door, the man in the wheelchair was still talking to himself. “Motherfuckers,” he was saying, punching the air with his cigarette. His head was down against his chest, as though he were telling secrets to his breastbone. The man’s legs were shriveled and mostly missing, and his face had an odd flatness to it. When he lifted his head into the light, Aleksandr could see that he was missing teeth, too, which wasn’t unusual but which contributed to the man’s overall look of unnerving concavity. He looked like a person who’d been taken apart entirely and then put back together wrong. “Fucking motherfuckers,” the man said again, and looked straight at Aleksandr. “Don’t trust them.” The green café lights gave him a radioactive glow.

“Who are motherfuckers?” Aleksandr realized that he really wanted to know.

The man crooked a finger at Aleksandr and beckoned for him to come closer. Aleksandr did so, bringing his cheek down to the man’s, inhaling his smell of rust and alcohol and something else that made Aleksandr sad, even though he didn’t understand why.

“Who?” Aleksandr said again. “Who are motherfuckers?”

“They all are,” whispered the man, then laughed a choking, startling laugh. He gestured with his cigarette, ashing onto Aleksandr’s shoes, grandly implicating all the people in his field of vision. “Everyone.”

When Aleksandr stumbled out into the ice-wrecked streets several hours later, there was a shred of ash in the eastern sky. The light looked as though it had been filtered through dirty gauze; the clumps of snow were beginning to take on the fuzzy shape of mold. A tattered ad warning
against the evils of Demon Vodka stuck under Aleksandr’s shoe, and he kicked it away. The air was sharp with the gasoline of idling Zhigulis. Leningrad was gearing up for another day, and the illegal street vendors were organizing themselves in dark corners: men in brown layers setting up carts of vegetables, the gray beets and cabbages turning to colors in the breaking sun. A woman stood shivering with her fish, their tongue-colored bellies slick in the light. Boys in wool caps crouched watching for the police, ready to alert their families and collapse the wood stalls and vanish. They could disappear as quickly as the cockroaches in the kommunalka could scatter from the cold light, as quickly as a person could evaporate into a car and never come back.