A Partial History of Lost Causes (8 page)

Aleksandr walked down Nevsky Prospekt, past the Museum of the History of Atheism and Religion. Leningrad was such a difference from the mangled wreck of Okha, a city that nobody had planned for or intended. Leningrad was all stately foresight and clean geometry, indisputable proof that Russians, too, could think more than one generation ahead. It was a beautiful city if you could open your eyes against the wind long enough to really see it. But Aleksandr didn’t look around much on his trip home after his first night out with Ivan and Nikolai. There was a new menace for him here, he thought, subtler and more nefarious than KGB in white Volgas. Back in Okha, he’d understood the nature of the game; he’d walked the parameters of his life over and over until he couldn’t even dream his way out of them. He’d known everyone there, and he’d known everyone’s grandparents and pockmarks and slimy vegetable gardens, and if there had been other-thinking people among them, he’d have known that, too.

In Leningrad, he could tell, it was going to be different. He’d never thought to be scared before of old people pushing papers. He’d never been scared of the women who stood in the street and sold roses.

When Aleksandr returned to his building, one of the night girls was standing in the corridor, the snow of her boots making turpentine-colored pools at her feet. She was knocking on the steward’s door vigorously, which Aleksandr had never seen anybody do. He stood and watched her and wondered what would happen.

“What are you looking at?” said the girl. She was the darker-haired of the two girls, and Aleksandr knew her for her swearing in the hallways. The father of the family next door to him had complained about it one time, leaning over to spit into the sink next to Aleksandr. “I don’t like trying to raise a child next door to blyadi,” said the man. “It’s going to make him ask questions, and the fewer questions he asks, the better for him.”

The girl snapped her fingers in front of Aleksandr’s face. “What?” she said. “Do you talk, by the way?”

“I talk.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed. “I had a bet.”

“What are you doing?” he said. “I don’t think the old woman comes to her door in the mornings.”

“She’ll come this morning. I don’t care how bad her hangover is. Worms came out of the faucet. This is a problem.”

“What kind of worms?”

“What kind of worms? What the fuck does it matter what kind? I go to turn on the hot water. I’m used to no hot water. No hot water does not surprise me. I know we don’t know each other very well, tovarish, but
little
surprises me. But worms seem, you know, excessive, I think.” Her brown hair was flying all around her face, and she swiped it from her eyes so hard that Aleksandr wanted to reach out and gently protect her from herself.

“Yes,” he said. “Certainly excessive.”

“So, I don’t know, I thought I might ask the old woman about this.” She resumed pounding, making her knocks sharp and arrhythmic for maximum annoyance. “It’s just that I’m coming back from a long night, you know? I work nights.”

“I know.”

“You know,” she said, then knocked again, harder. “Yes, I suppose you do know. Just like I know that you are the chess prodigy from Siberia—”

“Sakhalin.”

“Yes,” she said.

Aleksandr was struck, still, by her careening indignation. Her knocking was the knocking of a person who had been terribly
wronged. It was pretty bad, the worms in the faucet. But it could not possibly have been the worst thing.

“Which one are you?” he said.

“What?” She turned to face him, and when she moved, he heard clicks and clinks, the unidentifiable feminine shifting of heels and various bits of jewelry. She was dressed in black, although he thought there might be multiple components to her outfit—a shirt, and a short jacket, and a skirt, maybe? Her face was pretty, but maybe not pretty enough to sustain the attention that came from wearing only black. The outfit was like a drum roll.

“Are you Sonya, or are you the other one?” said Aleksandr. He couldn’t remember the other one’s name, and he couldn’t remember, either, which of the things he thought he knew about them were true and which he’d made up himself. They really were prostitutes, he thought. He wasn’t sure about the parakeet.

“I’m the other one. Elizabeta Nazarovna.” She rested her head forlornly on the door. “I think she’s not home.”

“I’m Aleksandr Kimovich Bezetov.”

“Okay,” she said, not taking his hand. She lowered her voice and started muttering cruelties at the door. “You tramp. You ape. You dirty, double-crossing, overcharging, collaborative bitch.” She stopped, and Aleksandr wondered if she was out of insults.

“Do you think maybe you should try not to make her mad at you?” he said. She could kick Elizabeta out, probably, or throw all her things out the front door, like she’d done with the university lecturer. He thought of Elizabeta’s things scattered across the bare front yard: books and perfume bottles; black indistinguishable garments; flecks of silver jewelry.

“Please. She sells winter things out of the basement every year. I know because all my mittens are from her. She’s like a spider. She’s more afraid of us than we are of her.” She turned again to the door. “And like a spider,” she hissed, “you lurk in the dark even in the daytime, you are unpleasant to look at, and you are universally reviled. Hey.” She turned back to Aleksandr. “Do you smoke?”

“Cigarettes?”

“Yes.” Now he would have to start.

She nodded. “Well, pretty much all Sonya and I do is smoke and tell lies. So if you ever want to come over for that, feel free. I know you don’t really do anything.”

“I do things. I’m busy. I go to the academy, you know. I have a trainer,” he said. He’d never tried to impress anybody with his game, and he was aware of how very poor he was at bragging, even when he wanted to. He cleared his throat and gazed at a spot above Elizabeta’s head and tried to look intellectual and preoccupied and haunted. “Chess absorbs most of my time.”

“Yes, well,” she said. “If you get a moment, then.” There was a rustling sound from within the apartment, vague cross murmuring and shuffling. Hideous bright light bled underneath the door and through its cracks. The old woman had stirred.

“Finally, you wretched she-beast,” muttered Elizabeta, and then in a high false voice, she said, “Babushka? Puzhalsta? Please, dear grandmother, it’s your tenant Elizabeta here with a question for you. I might find a few rubles for you if you answer the door.”

At this, the steward appeared, her graying whiskered face looking pinched and poisonous. Her hair was wrapped up in a dirty maroon scarf, and she gave off a faint smell of cheap tea and restless sleeping.

“What?” she said, looking at Aleksandr, who moved away from Elizabeta. “In God’s name, what?”

“Worms in the faucet, babushka,” said Elizabeta. “Please forgive me for bothering you. I know you’re very busy.” She winked at Aleksandr.

“Honestly,” said the old woman, who retreated into her apartment again, presumably to retrieve the tools necessary for handling worms.

Elizabeta smiled and shrugged. “Remember,” she whispered to Aleksandr. “Apartment nine, if you want some smokes and general hilarity. Thank you so much, babushka,” she called. “I so appreciate your help.”

“Okay,” said Aleksandr, and left her calling out bright lies to the steward, marveling at how expertly she could pretend to feel something she didn’t.

After a cold shower—avoiding even attempting the hot water faucet—and a day of dry, peeling fatigue and clumsy mistakes at the academy, Aleksandr came back and lay in bed. It was only five
P.M.
, although dark again, as always, and his bed felt colder than usual from having lain unmade and unoccupied for so many hours. He thought briefly about Elizabeta in apartment nine, getting ready for her night of work, and he wondered if he should stop by to say hello and borrow a cigarette and see whether the worm situation had sorted itself out. Maybe he’d sit on Elizabeta’s bed, which would be unmade, like his, and they’d split a cigarette. Prostitutes, like chess students, probably needed to economize. Maybe her roommate, Sonya, would be there, too, and he’d tell them stories about his night out. “Café Saigon?” he’d say casually. “Ever heard of it?” And if they had, terrific, and if they hadn’t, all the better. “How do you stay so brilliant with no sleep?” they’d ask him, concerned. And he would smile and take a long puff from his cigarette, and he would not cough, and he would wink and say, “Practice.”

His bed was growing a little warmer, and he pulled his hands into his sleeves and rubbed them together. On second thought, maybe he wouldn’t go over there. He thought about Misha, wincing in the cold rooms of a psikhushka because he’d done something for a stranger. He thought about the legless man and about his assertion that everyone,
everyone
, was a motherfucker. He thought he could believe it. Aleksandr rolled over and rubbed his feet together and tried to remember everything he could about his mother’s house in Okha. He thought of his little sisters, who looked like him and swung between scorn and laughter with the suddenness of heat lightning. He thought of his mother, who sat up long nights thinking unknowable thoughts and singing sad songs. It was just as well that he wouldn’t go to apartment nine. It was remembering that he was good at, remembering and imagining. And whether or not these were useful skills for Soviet life, they were things you could do quietly, upstairs in a boardinghouse, alone.

I
was playing chess with Lars one day in early spring when the man who turned out to be Jonathan stopped by to watch us. I don’t really know why; his later claims about what drew him over were not ones that I could quite bring myself to believe. Lars and I made an odd pair, I suppose—an impish old man and an unnervingly pale young woman, grimacing at each other over an unimaginative position—and at first I thought that the man had a bet with himself about the outcome of the game. I skimmed my bishop along the board until it was eyeball to plastic eyeball with one of Lars’s knights. The knight was defended, and this move was not really going to get me anywhere. But for some reason, I wanted the man to see me do something dramatic.

“There’s a man watching us,” Lars said loudly.

The man coughed. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Fine,” said Lars. “But you better not cough again.”

That first moment has taken on some mythic contours for me now, I suppose. I’m both impious and clinically self-absorbed, so it makes sense that I look hardest for meaning in my own memories. The man kept standing there. At the time, it was probably vaguely
uncomfortable—this man watching us, his scarf whipping out behind him in the wind, his eyes growing stung and watery in the cold. He was passably attractive but not arrestingly beautiful. Still, I wonder if I felt a sense of particularity, of unique rightness, in his face even then—in the curl of his hair and the slight crag of his chin and the pencil shavings of stubble across his cheek, in the way his eyes were tired and snappishly intelligent at the same time. It’s possible that his face felt familiar to me, but it’s also possible that this is a quality conferred only in retrospect. I tried not to look at him.