A Partial History of Lost Causes (14 page)

I knew that I could not move in with Jonathan. I knew—really, I knew—that we had been playacting. The sentiment was real enough, I suppose, but the rest was composed of gestures imitating the behavior of other people, people who had an entire future to love and fail each other. And there was something almost insulting in his asking—something patronizing at worst and willfully clueless at best. It was as though he had not been paying attention. I was thirty. I was in my last year or two of sound body and mind. I was not going to move in with Jonathan only to have him watch whatever things he’d improbably loved about me disappear. I don’t sentimentalize love so much that I think it can endure such assault. It’s one thing to love a person who is absent; it’s quite another to love a person who is reduced and deformed and endlessly, endlessly present. I had loved my father once. Did I love the person he was when he died? I don’t know. What person was that?

I was going to leave Jonathan. Once I’d decided that, it seemed only right to leave everything else.

The night after Jonathan asked me, I came home to my empty apartment alone. I took out the letter my father had sent to Aleksandr Bezetov, and the terse reply from Elizabeta Nazarovna. I thought again about my father having to live and die with all his best questions unanswered. I thought again about Aleksandr Bezetov. I couldn’t help but hate him a little. All that energy and intelligence and, crucially, all that time—that whole average life expectancy—and he couldn’t find it within himself to answer my poor dying father’s few questions, abstract and intrusive though they were. It seemed like such a pittance for a man who had so much. It seemed so stingy to delegate a response—a nonresponse at that—to your secretary or whatever.

I looked again at the letter from the secretary. There was that vaguely sorry, vaguely sheepish tone, as though she knew that this was not the proper way of things. Elizabeta Nazarovna. Quite a mouthful, that.

I went to the computer. I typed in “Elizabeta Nazarovna” and “St. Petersburg.” I squinted through the Cyrillic and sounded out
words. There was a birth announcement for a baby born in 1998. There was a reference to a dissident poet who had died in the purges. There were pictures of a very young woman from a social networking site. She had perfectly manicured hair and the long furry arms of an anorexic, and in every single photo she held a different swirly, improbably colored cocktail. There was a woman running a store selling vintage Communist paraphernalia. I clicked through an interminable number of Elizabetas: old, newborn, implicated, expatriated. And then, to my everlasting chagrin, I began calling them.

I made rules for myself: I called only people who lived in Moscow or St. Petersburg (nobody who’d ever lived in Leningrad would go back to the country, I figured, not if they could help it). I ruled out people who were too old or too young. I ruled out people who’d had professions in the seventies or early eighties. I got mostly wrong numbers and dial tones and a coldhearted, impossibly fast-speaking operator who furiously chastised me for a transgression beyond my understanding. I reached a child Elizabeta. I reached an uncomprehending Elizabeta. I reached the widower of a dead Elizabeta. Finally, I reached an Elizabeta with a faint, strangely fragile voice that said, “Da? Da?”

This wasn’t her, either, I didn’t think. She sounded like a particularly technophobic grandmother, somebody who talked at the phone as though the person she was addressing was actually inside it. What the hell, I thought, was I doing?

“Zdrastvuytye,” I said carefully. “Minya zavut Irina Ellison. Govorite po angielski?” Though I thought I could manage all of it in Russian, I figured it would be embarrassing enough in English. No need to make it worse, if that could be avoided.

There was a pause the length and temperature of the Cold War.

“Yes,” she said at last in English. “What do you want?” She sounded like she thought I was selling something, which was a reasonable conclusion. I’ve found that most people are selling something, even if they don’t always know what.

“This may sound odd,” I said. “But my father was a correspondent of Aleksandr Bezetov. Do you remember him?” I tried to keep my voice gentle and supplicating, a posture I’m not particularly good at
adopting. I waited. There was another glacial silence, and I worried that I’d offended her. She was probably old, probably forgetful, and who knew what her relationship to Bezetov had been, and here I was asking her to grope for Gorbachev-era memories. I started to imagine kind ways to disentangle myself from the conversation—confusion about inverted numbers, swapped identities. But through the haze of my discomfort, which was expanding rapidly, filling up the silence, came her voice again, stronger this time, more certain.

“Aleksandr Bezetov,” she said, and I could hear her thawing out. Her voice had changed to clinking glass; behind it, I could hear the glinting echoes of laughter. “Yes. I believe I remember a thing or two about him. That dumb kid.”

I’d never thought of the esteemed Aleksandr Bezetov as a kid, and I tried to think of the kind of woman who would. She’d have to be old, for one thing—older than I was ever going to be, anyway.

“You worked for him?” I said.

“Not exactly.”

“But you knew him?”

Another pause. This one was fuller somehow—rife with silent memories that seemed to register in the crackles of the telephone wire.

“Yes.”

I hung up the phone.

When you get ready to die, you look back over a lifetime and try to unravel its enduring questions. You retroactively assign meaning to chaos, you make coincidence into portent. You scan your past for moments that might have been road signs, and then you try to see which way they were pointing. It’s an unrelenting striving for tenuous links, a dazed hunting for patterns that may or may not exist. You are a child looking for a lost thing in the sand, racing against the tide and the approaching darkness, trying desperately to remember where you might have buried it.

When I scanned my life, I found an alarming lack of loose ends. Bezetov, in a way, felt like a loose end.

So I thought about Russia: cold and vast, criminal and corrupt and
possessed of an impossible language, hostile to foreigners and women traveling alone. Then I thought about trying to sort through what few mysteries remained to me.

I double-checked my savings account: large from a lifetime of modest pay but too responsible living. I double-checked my age: one year, four months until average age of onset. I double-checked Elizabeta Nazarovna’s name and address.

It was logistically easy—almost too easy. I wasn’t trying to disappear. I was just trying to wrap up. But the accumulated attachments and obligations of an entire abbreviated lifetime took, in the end, under a week to resolve. I found myself wishing to leave behind a somewhat messier life. I half hoped that something would come up—an unknown bastard child, or a court case, or a professional emergency—that would require my attention, that would grab at me with insistent hands and pull me back to Boston and my life. But nothing did. I’d lived a life of relative simplicity and organization. I’d lived a life with an eye to leaving it. And here I was, leaving it, just as tidily as a traveler who doesn’t bother to unpack at the hotel room because she knows the time there is limited.

I withdrew my stocks and my savings. I submitted my final grades for my final cast of students, and then I submitted my resignation. I left three months’ rent for my landlord. I spent some time on the Internet. I spent some time counting the number of whims indulged in a lifetime (none, discernibly, in my case). And then I spent some time saying goodbye—which, like everything, is easier if you’ve got a head start.

I told everybody—mother, doctor, college friends, co-workers—that I was going on a trip. It was going to be meandering, I said, and spontaneous and luxurious and self-indulgent and, most important, very long. I said that I wanted to see the world while I still could; I said that I wanted to have an adventure on my own while I could still do anything on my own. My co-workers were supportive. My mother, I am sure, was relieved. People who’d never spoken of my diagnosis, people who’d never asked about my father, were thrilled to have a concrete and explicable and ultimately positive way to obliquely reference it. They talked about what an important decision it was. They talked about what a self-actualizing trip it would be. If they secretly thought
I’d chosen an odd locale for my final vacation, they had the courtesy not to mention it.

I gave Jonathan the same line, more or less, though he understood me well enough to know that it probably was not true, that I was probably never coming back. He was disbelieving, of course, grief-stricken, angry, all that. He thought I was bluffing; he thought I was losing it. He wanted me to go to counseling.

I wasn’t bluffing, although I probably wasn’t at the most mentally stable moment of my entire life. But I wanted to say—and finally did during one of those last awful nights that I will spend the rest of my life trying not to remember—look: I am not the one who’s delusional. I am not the one with a distorted vision of reality.

Ultimately, what could he do? I am an adult woman and a United States citizen; financially independent; capable of affording an expedited visa. He couldn’t stop me, the way nobody can really stop anyone from leaving them, in the end.

A few days before I left, I went to play my last game with Lars. It was May, and the air was silky. It didn’t feel like a day to play chess, but I wanted someone to talk to. This, however, was not to be. Lars raised his eyebrows at me and said nothing. “Hello, old man,” I said when I sat down. “How’ve you been?” He shrugged and gestured beatifically to the chessboard.

“What?” I squinted. “Is something wrong with you?” Lars looked the same as usual—dishwater-gray hair, a sunburned nose, the personal presentation of a person who sleeps habitually under bridges—but his eyes shone with higher than usual spirits. He handed me a card.

“You got arrested? For singing?” Lars’s eyes flickered, and he pointed to the word “detention” in the note. “Detained? For
singing
?”

He nodded solemnly.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that’s about right.”

Then we sat quietly and began to play our usual game. My heart wasn’t in it, so he went easy on me, I realize—I came closer to beating him that day than I probably ever had. But I did not win. And now, I suppose, I never will.

“You are almost no fun at all without language,” I said halfway through the game. Lars stuck out his tongue, I guess to convey that he was at least a little bit fun without language.

“It’s too bad that you don’t want to talk,” I said. “Because I have news.”

He turned his face to the side and narrowed his eyes. Lars loves to gossip, and I knew it would bother him to have to abstain from gossiping, even in the service of his noble political objectives. He grabbed a pen and flipped his petition over.
What?
he wrote.

And so I began to talk. And talk. I rambled with uncharacteristic fluidity, unhinged and incoherent and even more self-absorbed than usual. What I was getting at, I guess, was that I was terrified, although I never would have come flat out and said so, to Lars or to anyone. Lars could tell, though—you don’t achieve his heights of success in life without an instinctive ability to read people—and he watched me swirl my coffee, ignore my muffin, and knock over my pawns with an expression of mounting disgust. I was midway through a monologue about the relative merits of a quiet departure from Jonathan’s life before he could see my brain break down, when Lars couldn’t take it anymore. He nearly spat out his coffee and his five weeks of silence along with it.

“Oh, please,” he said. “Don’t you know that you
like
to feel this way? You like to brood. It is, I am afraid, your limited charm.”