A Partial History of Lost Causes (21 page)

St. Petersburg had an entirely different feel than Moscow—it was all planned streets and arcing avenues and stylistically unified architecture. On Teatralnaya Ulitsa, the buildings appeared to dance. Long cords of icy sunlight seemed to obey intended routes, making crisp ninety-degree turns around corners. The smell, too, was different. Both cities, I noticed, smelled bad—unforgivably, devilishly, abusively bad—in
places. There was a smell in one corner near my hostel in Moscow that seemed to make the air opaque; your knees wilted, your spirit flagged, when confronted with it. It seemed concocted, preordained. It didn’t seem like the kind of smell that could have emerged organically without supernatural intervention. If some people look at the complexity of the universe and see proof of God, I look at the dire complexity of that smell and see the suggestion of Satan. In St. Petersburg, there was the fine-dirt smell of eggplant; below it, a casually salty marine smell, like dirty aquarium; and just below that, something meatier and wilder, the smell of iceberg and whale. There was the smell of vodka and beer caked along alleyways, after a night of thaw and half a day of indirect sunlight, and this smell came to make cold tragic fingers against my rib cage whenever I smelled it, because it meant abandoned hopes, revised game plans, the instructive clashing of desire and reality. It meant an evening of fun had come and, inevitably, gone.

I went to St. Petersburg soon after Elizabeta gave me Nikolai’s information, crinkling into my bag my damp clothes and directions and taking a night train. I’d photocopied my passport twice and put one copy in my left shoe and one into a box of tampons. I’d found my own car, full of prissy antimacassars and the hearty stink of urine. Of course I’d vowed not to sleep, and of course I’d woken up halfway through the trip with a middle-aged man splayed out on the seat across the aisle from me, making half-snores and little sucking noises in his dreams. In the morning I felt awkward and too intimate, as though we were on the other end of a night of the worst kind of sexual mistakes. In St. Petersburg I’d found a hostel similar to the one in Moscow, with long drafty hallways and a vaguely hostile staff. And there I sat for a few days and waited for the nerve to look into finding Nikolai. I toured the city, admired its clean architecture and commemorative statues, spun my wheels, and spent my money. My Russian was improving marginally, though not as fast as I’d hoped. I was about ready to sit down and call this man, arrange a meeting, and subject myself to all its attendant futilities and absurdities and hazards. But as it turned out, Nikolai got to me before I got to him.

I’d taken to spending long afternoons seated in a tiny café next door to my hostel, poring over newspapers and shivering. The café was
always ten degrees cooler than the outside, and the outside—even in July—could take on a dull-edged chill in the late afternoons. So I was wearing a few sweaters and a half-awake grimace when a large man plopped down across the table from me and asked me, in rough-hewn and fragmented English, if I was Irina Ellison from America.

I was startled. The man had a face that looked as if it had been scoured by steel wool; his head was the shape and size and durability of an American football helmet. I looked at his hands to see if they were holding a badge of some kind, and was relieved and then confused and then scared when I saw that they weren’t. I couldn’t tell if this was the kind of man it would be smart to lie to.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s my name. Who are you?”

“My name is Nikolai Sergeyevich,” said the man. “I hear you have been looking for me.” The lacy network of light scars across his face made him look almost comically sinister from afar. Up close, they appeared to be only the remnants of adult acne.

“I haven’t been looking for anybody yet,” I said. “I’ve only been thinking about it.”

Nikolai rubbed his hands together. When he turned his face to the side to signal the waiter for coffee, the light made his face look like a slice of marbleized ham. He was fat, and his was the kind of fat that really asserts itself, through heavy breathing and the noisy rolling of flesh.

“You are looking for Aleksandr Bezetov, I understand,” he said. “I want to help you find him.”

“Why?” The waiter brought a tiny black coffee, and Nikolai grunted a thank-you.

“We were great friends back in the day,” said Nikolai, taking a sip of his coffee and pulling his face into a grimace of disapproval. “We were basically children together.”

“In Okha?” It didn’t seem likely.

“Not children,” said Nikolai. “Youth, I should say. We were young men together during Soviet days.”

“Oh,” I said. A string of obvious questions ran through my head: How did you know I had your information? How did you know I was looking for Aleksandr Bezetov? How did you know my name? I
thought briefly of the man at my hostel’s front desk and how noisy I’d been about my mission and my whereabouts. But I didn’t say anything. I’ve always been hesitant to question absurd premises—other people’s or my own. It seemed undiplomatic to ask him who the hell he was and what the hell he thought he was doing.

“You’re at the embassy, then?” said Nikolai. There was a standing hostility in his voice that seemed to be occasionally eclipsed by sheer effort, as though somebody had firmly admonished him ahead of time to be nice to me.

“No,” I said.

Nikolai looked confused. “Of course.” His lacerated face creased with worry, as if he thought he might have offended me. “Well, I think if we pool our information, we might just have the chance to track down Aleksandr Bezetov. My old buddy.”

“I don’t have any information.”

“Ah,” said Nikolai, sinking back into his chair with a fleshy smack. “How would you characterize your role at the embassy, then?”

This was baffling.

“I’m not at the embassy,” I said. “I’m just on vacation.”

Nikolai looked at me—my several sweaters, the gray tea in its cup bleeding onto the newspaper. “A vacation,” he said. “I see. I just want you to know you’re supposed to be registered if you’re working out of the embassy.”

“I’m not.”

“Because we couldn’t help but notice that you’re not registered.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” which, again, was true. “Who’s ‘we’?” And then, finally—because I didn’t like the way his face was looking at me, like the world’s most reproachful piece of poultry—I asked, “Who the hell are you?”

“Look,” he said, leaning close to me, and he smelled unexpectedly delicate, like expensive shampoos in lavender and men’s cologne in some scent that purports to be masculine. “We don’t need to decide anything today. I’ve already told you who I am. I am looking for my old friend.”

“You really haven’t told me who you are. Why are you looking for him?”

“And why are you?” he countered.

I was quiet for a moment. “Because my father knew him, almost,” I said. “Because I couldn’t stay home.” I was aware of how I sounded—simultaneously lame and wildly suspicious, an incompetent spy with a ridiculous cover.

“Okay,” said Nikolai. “Something about your father. Fine, sure.” He handed me his card, which suggested he had several addresses and an implausible number of mobile telephones. “Call me anytime, if you decide we could work together.”

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. Nikolai heaved his mass to standing. “Well. Perhaps we’ll be in touch. In the meantime,” and he slammed a few rubles down on the table to cover his coffee, “remind your customer that you’re supposed to be registered.”

He plodded out of the café, leaving his half-drunk coffee still steaming on the table. It was only after he’d left and walked out into the misting gray afternoon that I thought to wonder how he’d known where to find me.

After that, it got harder to sit still. The mosquitoes in my hostel kept me up; I spent long nights hitting myself in the ears and hissing profanities, but nothing worked. Welts rose on my knees and calves and feet. I looked maimed, leprotic. I thought of all this as St. Petersburg’s little way of telling me to go the fuck home, idiot. But I didn’t. The bites puckered and exploded and left scars the color of dust, but still I did not go home. And by midsummer I was inured to them—along with much else.

The air grew dense with littoral winds. The white nights came, and the skies stayed pearly and cloud-streaked until dawn. It was impossible to sleep. Down on the Neva, kids sat around smoking and tossing fire, and I found myself down there with them—walking along the banks, absorbed in that dazzling azure sky, staring at the upraised bridges that looked like the forked jaws of a felled beast. The Neva, so I read, would not flood this year. It flooded with some regularity, when low-pressure regions in the North Atlantic moved onshore and created seiche waves that brought the river up too high. It had flooded
catastrophically in 1824, in 1924, in 1998. I’d stare at the Neva—with its reflected floodlights and shimmering midnight sun—and try to believe that its beauty was just a cover. And I liked to imagine it for some reason: the tempestuous twisting of water into a seashell spiral, the creation of mammoth standing waves, the river rising to the bridge until it buckled and broke. There was something terrible about any disaster, of course. But maybe there was something worse about things you could see coming and could not stop: celestial flash of earthbound meteor, or terminal diagnosis in tiny font, or cyclonic lows on the Baltic Sea.

At nights in the hostel that summer, I’d lie on my bed and remember. I would think about my father, and my memories of him always unspooled backward, from most recent to most distant. First, his rasping shallow breaths right before we turned up the morphine; then the staggering ghostly men of his ward in the years of his institutionalization; then his juddering mouth and his carved-out eyes and his hands, which threaded endlessly forward as though obsessively stringing an invisible rosary. The way he’d sit at the piano and play nothing, then aimless trills, then flawed Mozart sonatas. And before that: indoor soccer when my mother wasn’t home, chess games after dinner, hugging trees well after it had gone out of vogue.

At the end of his life, I remember staring into my father’s eyes and trying to make them the eyes of the man who’d taught me world capitals and music. But I couldn’t. My imagination failed me. The man who died as my father was not the man who lived as my father. I don’t think he would disagree with me on this.

I would be thirty-one in the fall. That meant I would be entering the three-year time frame in which 70 percent of people with my CAG number start to exhibit symptoms. After onset, there can be variation in the progression of symptoms, in the length of time certain competencies are maintained, in life span. But I wasn’t interested in gambling on these details. A disease that takes away your cognitive abilities also takes away your capacity to value your cognitive abilities. You can decide ahead of time that you never want to be a zombie person, that once you can’t write a sentence or tell a joke you are gone, the part
of you that is unique and recognizable and human is gone, and that there is no value to life as a nonperson once you’ve experienced life as a person. But by the time you get to that point, you don’t think that way anymore, if you think at all. By the time you’re there, you’re interested only in being warm, in being well fed, in being pain-free. Your demands are modest.

So strategizing your own exit ahead of time is a challenge. You have to outsmart your future self; somehow ensure that the priorities of today inform the choices of tomorrow. And you have no partner to rely on in this, since nobody—nobody—will help you. Even your own mind will someday turn on you and sell you out.

So I lay on my bed, those early nights in St. Petersburg, after Nikolai first found me, and started thinking seriously about my options. I didn’t know what I’d see first—a lurch or a lunge or a throbbing jerk of my head—but whenever my body started driving without my steering, I’d know. And as the days grew longer and longer—my bank account emptying like a hemorrhaging organ, the nights growing luridly bright past midnight, the drinkers outside my window shouting into the dawns the hoarse joy of being young and alive—I’d start to imagine. And then my hands shook so hard that I’d wonder if they would ever stop before starting again.