A Partial History of Lost Causes (13 page)

“How often is this?”

“Every three weeks or so.”

Aleksandr looked at Nikolai, who was staring out the window and gumming his shashlik meditatively. He wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps he was pretending not to pay attention. He was still wearing the leather jacket, and Aleksandr wondered about that, fleetingly. It looked well-made, which meant foreign-made—Italian, perhaps—though that was impossible.

“Can I see it?” said Aleksandr to Ivan.

Ivan opened a drawer fast enough that Aleksandr knew he had been waiting to be asked. “Of course,” he said, producing a pamphlet. “Here.” When he leaned close, Aleksandr could smell the kvass—somehow acrid and dusty both—on his breath. Ivan flushed as he handed Aleksandr the journal. It was strange to see Ivan want something,
and stranger still that the something should be Aleksandr’s approval.

The cover was dull, with oddly small black font. It didn’t look like the kind of journal a person would idly pick up; there was no promise that anything of interest lay within. In fact, the cover seemed to suggest that the contents might include an essay on metaphysics, or a survey of current breakthroughs in agricultural technology. Aleksandr opened it anyway. The first page was an anonymous introduction, clearly written by Ivan. (“Friends,” it read. “We convene in these pages, once more, to take stock of our situation and ourselves.…”) Then there was an oblique poem that Aleksandr read three times and still didn’t understand, though it seemed to be dwelling on the subject of “capitulation” at some length. There was an essay about rereading Bulgakov for modern times. And then a grim report of arrests, detentions, searches around Leningrad in the past month. This was the longest section of the journal—pages and pages of dates and names and abuses, without comment, in tiny lettering. The section was called “A Partial History of Lost Causes,” which was also the name of the journal.

“It’s incomplete,” said Ivan. “We don’t even try to get it complete. It’s just a sample, really. You get the general character of the month—what they were most interested in and what they got.”

Aleksandr stared at the account. Here there were arrests for misuse of state machines (he thought of the ill-gotten typewriter lurking in the living room), and here there was a detention for “disseminating falsehood” (he thought of how the very line that accounted that detention might be considered officially false), and here there was an imprisonment for “malicious parasitism” (this meant unemployment, which Aleksandr was, by any measure, afflicted with), and here there was a midnight search on the grounds of conspiracy (he looked around at the contracting tendons of Ivan’s neck as he swallowed hard, the inflamed stare of Nikolai as he looked at everything except Aleksandr, and wondered how much he trusted them). He put the pamphlet down. He leaned toward Ivan. “I got approached by an official tonight,” he said. “They offered me a dacha.”

Ivan nodded. “They want you to join.”

“Yes.”

“You have a file.”

“Of course.”

“And you said no to them?”

“Of
course
.”

“There must be something very compelling about that building of yours.”

“He told me not to hang around with you.”

“Very sound advice.”

“They know about this?”

“It’s not a secret. Nothing is a secret. Maybe exactly who we are, what we’re about, that might be a secret. Who our contributors are and who all of our subscribers are—those are secrets, too. The details are a secret. But the fact is not. We are not a secret. Your involvement, quickly, will not be a secret. KGB has asked you a question, and here you will be giving an answer.”

Aleksandr remembered the silken hands of Petr Pavlovich, he remembered the admonishment not to be foolish. Not bad advice, all things considered.

“Even though we’re not a secret,” said Ivan, “you need to behave always as though we are. Crucially, you need not to be followed, because we don’t want to let go of our details. You and me and Nikolai here, we’re worthless bachelors, and who could care what happens to us.” Aleksandr could not decide whether this level of indifference was something to admire or disdain or fear.

“But we have subscribers, we have contributors, with families,” said Ivan. “We need to minimize their chances of arrest. Thus, we need to be as discreet as possible, all the while remembering that we’re not kidding ourselves. Okay? Luckily, the KGB isn’t as artful as you might think. Sometimes there will literally be a white Volga driving slowly around the city, waiting for you at corners.” He took a swallow of kvass and grimaced slightly. “But sometimes it will be a bit subtler. The best you can do is zig and zag around the streets. Don’t take the same route habitually, and never start coming here on a routine. Find plausible reasons to be wherever you’re going—the culinary store, the
footwear store. And if you think you’re being followed, bore them to death.”

“Okay,” said Aleksandr slowly. He stared at his glass. Cloudy filaments drifted through the kvass like seaweed in a briny sea. “I’m pretty sure I can do that much.”

“The bottom line is that you will be known. You will be noticed. It will go in your file. At the same time, you can never, never be followed, because we need to protect the others. You can never have any information on your person. No lists. No addresses. No maps. But this is no challenge for a man of such formidable memory, yes?”

“I think I can manage.”

“You get called in for questioning, you’re gone, okay? You think someone’s followed you here, you go sit in the park for an hour, and then you get back on the metro and go home and never come back.”

“You never come back,” said Nikolai severely. “We won’t be offended.”

Aleksandr stared at Nikolai. “I like your jacket,” he said.

Nikolai took a gulp of kvass and looked down.

“Aleksandr,” said Ivan, twirling a tether of sausage on his bent fork, “you are blessed with a face and manner that nobody can recall. I’m too tall, and Nikolai’s too ugly—forgive me, Nikolai—to blend in a crowd. You are anonymous. Not to the authorities, of course. But to the people they ask to describe you. If they harass a subscriber and ask him who brought the journal, what’s he going to say? Oh, the man was not so tall, not so short, brown hair, plain face, two eyes, and a nose? It will make it difficult for them to figure out exactly what you are doing, exactly where you have been. And nobody around you will ever suspect you. You look too dumb to be up to anything.”

“Okay,” said Aleksandr. “Wonderful. It’s nice to be appreciated.”

“Indeed,” said Ivan, returning his sausage to the plate without eating it. “Welcome to distribution.”

Distribution meant waking up very early in the morning, following carefully memorized directions to obsessively confirmed addresses, and knocking. Aleksandr wore a heavy hat for this, which took on a rich animal smell in precipitation, and he tilted it forward so that
it cast dark shadows over his dark face. This was in case anyone recognized him—in case anyone looked up from his paper one morning and wondered what Aleksandr Bezetov, subject of a small feature article in
Literaturnaya Gazeta
, was doing riding public transportation. But, as he learned from walking around the city anonymously in the afternoons—after his route was over and his hat was off and he turned his face up toward the wilting sun—it was probably an unnecessary precaution.

He met interesting people this way—the subscriber list was small but diverse and full of people Aleksandr never would have expected. There were women, for one thing, and older people, and one or two people who’d been forced to make public self-denunciations that year. He’d been provided with detailed descriptions of their physical appearance. If anybody else answered the door, he asked directions to the metro in his best approximation of broken Russian until that door was slammed. The client list was always under twenty people. Occasionally, a new person who’d gained the trust of Ivan and Nikolai at the Saigon might be added to the list; occasionally, somebody got paranoid or got a promotion and frantically, rudely told Aleksandr to please never, never come back. And so he didn’t.

Some mornings he spent walking around the city, other mornings he spent taking the metro, and many mornings were a combination of both: riding the metro a few stops and then walking a mile only to reconnect with the metro again. This was Ivan’s idea, and it was the way Aleksandr came to feel he owned and understood the city: the constant early-morning romping that brought him down into the elegant bowels of the station, ornate and ostentatious and reinforced against nuclear attack; then up into the weak white of a Leningrad dawn, trudging into the mist while the city around him became a phantom and then a specter and then a silhouette; then back down to the metro, where the men hurried and jostled and the lights dripped like the chandeliers on the
Titanic
.

It was on a metro morning in what was allegedly spring that Aleksandr saw Elizabeta at work. She was standing on a subway platform at five
A.M.
, half hanging off the arm of an enormous man who looked like a dinosaur. She was at the very end of her night, Aleksandr figured.
Her black attire that moved as though it were its own system, with its own provocative ideas, looked undone somehow; her face, still almost beautiful, looked older. There were bluish pits of fatigue under her eyes, and her makeup seemed miscalculated. The man’s great forehead was like a shelf overhanging his face. He leaned close to Elizabeta and said something to her, and she laughed the same laugh she had used with the steward.

Aleksandr would tell himself later that he almost went to her. He thought about it. He really thought about it. He could go gather her up with him, bring him on his mission, pay the man back whatever he had spent on her, with interest, and then run laughing out into the street, leaving the man behind to shift his prehistoric mass in anger and confusion.

But there was work to do—for him and, he knew, for Elizabeta. And work, of course, was sacred. So he stopped watching and turned away and kept moving, up the enormous, unending staircase that led to the city and the day.

M
y flight landed at Sheremetyevo at night, but the line at customs was long. Angling over the landscape during our rickety descent, I’d watched the weak lights that Moscow cast up into the universe, and I was struck by how small they seemed in comparison to the rest of it: the enormity, the darkness. The flight had been long—the six hours over the churning Atlantic, the three hours chewing overpriced and mysterious British sandwiches at Heathrow, and the last restless, hiccuping leg of the journey to Russia. The flight attendants had been conspiratorial and hostile. I’d flipped through my Russian 3 book and tried to order a soda. They’d rolled their eyes and looked me up and down and asked me in English whether I might prefer a diet. I’d pressed my face against the cool window and looked out and asked myself: How? Why? For what?

What happened was Jonathan wanted me to move in with him. We were in love, I guess, and moving in together, in our culture, is part of the natural progression of that particular disease. I’d told him yes,
and then I’d told him maybe, and then I’d told him I was leaving the country forever.