A Partial History of Lost Causes (32 page)

The next morning Aleksandr woke, as he often did, to a ringing phone. “Get it, Dmitry,” Aleksandr groaned, until he remembered Dmitry was gone; he’d left the night before, pink-eared and elated to be finally done with his job and returning to his silly fiancée—Galina, was that her name? Aleksandr realized he’d never asked. He stood up. On the floor, Dmitry had left some scattered belongings, the accrued bits and pieces of his half a year as a glorified refugee butler. There were pens and coat hangers and mysterious scraps of paper—receipts of purchase that Aleksandr did not recall being present for, though they’d been side by side the whole time. Who was Dmitry? Where was he now? Why wasn’t he answering the phone?

For a short, buoyant moment, Aleksandr thought of who might be calling to congratulate him—his mother, most plausibly, though she usually waited for him to call her these days. It was unlikely to be anyone from the chess academy; their undisguised resentment had bothered him back when he felt he deserved better. Now it seemed appropriate. He did not wonder whether it might be Elizabeta, because he never thought of her anymore.

The phone kept ringing. He knew—and really, he’d always known—that there was only one person it could possibly be.

Petr Pavlovich sniffed happily into the phone. “Congratulations, friend,” he said.

“No thanks to you.”

“Quite a lot of thanks to me, if you think about it.”

“I don’t.”

“How does it feel?”

Aleksandr went to the window and looked out at the graying morning. The day already looked like a dirge. There was a horrible taste in the back of his throat. “Like nothing. It feels like nothing.”

“Oh, come. Don’t be bitter.”

“It feels the same.”

“It surely does not.”

Petr Pavlovich was right. It did not feel the same. Now that he’d
gotten what he wanted, he had justified his entire life—every isolated and selfish and odd childhood habit, his lack of friends, his lack of romance. His decision to stop the journal, his decision to hang around these people for the past four years and eat every imported delicacy they fed him. It had all paid off; it had all been warranted. He’d chased his own ego across an enormous country, and here, in Moscow, in Hotel Sport, he’d finally caught it. He was the best chess player in the world for now—though every moment he crept closer to the day when this would no longer be the case, and who was to say (even now, even right this second) that there wasn’t somebody out in the vast world who could beat him? Some wild-eyed prophetic prodigy in a cave somewhere, perhaps, or some nobler version of himself in some alternate universe who hadn’t had the stomach to make the compromises he’d made. The victory, such as it was, was bitter—that was to be expected. How odd that it also felt elusive. He watched the second hand flinch its way across the face of the clock, and in each moment, he wondered. Was he world champion now, really? Was he world champion
now
? You couldn’t ever be sure. Funny that he’d never thought of that when he was deciding whether to cash in the entire rest of his life for a chance at this. He’d never be able to be sure of his success. Even if he were world champion, truly, the man who would someday beat him (and of course it would be a man) had already been born, no doubt—he was already making puzzles in the sand, or tearing chess games out of the newspaper, or staring silently at the wall for hours on end. He was already lonely. He was already worrying his parents. They were already seeing in him the radiant seeds of greatness or lunacy or both; they saw their child driving a wedge into the world and opening up a new rift where he would someday sit, anointed, applauded, when Aleksandr was old and forgotten.

“Are you there?” said Petr Pavlovich.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t be philosophical.”

Outside, the leaves on the trees turned pale side up. They looked as if they were admitting defeat.

“This is what you’ve been working for your whole life. You should
be doing cartwheels in the streets. What has everything been for if not for this?”

Aleksandr did not believe that Petr Pavlovich meant this kindly. Still, there was nobody else to whom he could say this—this or anything.

“I don’t know,” he said. The window was cool against his forehead; it communicated a calming, pragmatic presence somehow. Aleksandr thought briefly of his mother. “I don’t know what it was for.”

Petr Pavlovich was silent. “Are you dressed? You need to come out for pictures.”

“What pictures?”

“With your trophy, of course.” Petr Pavlovich sniffed cruelly. “A family portrait.”

A
nd so, entirely out of ideas, I put on my only revealing shirt and went to the Pravda bar. Inside, the place had an atmosphere of unrelenting grime; the air felt opaque with grit and an obdurate unwholesomeness that was, in a strange way, refreshing. I squirmed on a barstool, drinking white wine and mouthing my way through
Kommersant
and eyeing possible candidates for Viktor Davidenko as they entered. It felt decadent, profligate, pathological to be drinking before nightfall. I fluttered my fingers against the bar. This was what I’d come for, no? To sit in bars and await the arrival of strange men? It wasn’t what I’d come for, exactly.

After a few false alarms, the man who had to be Viktor Davidenko entered the bar. He was tallish, six-two or something, the kind of height that could seem epic or almost normal depending on one’s biases. He had a beard, but I somehow didn’t begrudge him that. I wondered if someone looking for me would have trouble figuring out who I was. Or was I the only possible candidate for myself in the entire bar? I didn’t like to think that; I liked to think that I could be anyone. But then I looked around—at the butcher lesbians, at the femmes fatales
with their immense scaffoldings of eye makeup, hanging all over everywhere—and I had to level with myself. I was the only nervous-looking, polite-looking person in the whole establishment, and if anybody had been looking for me, he would have found me immediately.

I walked over to Viktor Davidenko’s table. I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them. Then I said hello.

“Yes?” His voice was a bit gravelly, a bit sullen—exactly the sort of voice you’d imagine. He had a heavy brow and, underneath it, fairly astonishing blue eyes. His hair was curly and, you could tell, barely subdued.

I introduced myself. He looked me up and down, as Misha had promised he would.

“You’re a journalist?” He’d switched to English. His accent—you could tell from even one word—was a complicated affair, incorporating multiple experiences and existences and institutions of higher learning.

“No.”

“Are you a blogger?”

“No.”

“Are you on social media?”

“Not really, no.”

He sighed. It was a profoundly aggrieved, hectored, performative sigh, and it made me immediately like him.

“Can I have a few minutes of your time anyway?” I was beginning to panic mildly. This was my first interaction with an ambassador of Bezetov’s actual team, and I feared I was wildly failing to say the thing I needed to say.

“I suppose.”

“When? Should I come to your office?”

“Office. Ah. No. How about right now?”

This seemed somehow slightly less than professional, though it’s true that my reasons for being here couldn’t be construed as entirely—or even marginally—professional. But in recent months I’d taken to regarding my quest for Aleksandr Bezetov as something like my job—I avoided it like a job, at any rate, and I approached it with stress and sporadic diligence and no small amount of resentment.

“Well,” I said. “Okay.”

He took my hand, and for a brief, absurd moment, I thought he might kiss it.

“Viktor Davidenko,” he said, dropping it. “Please sit down.”

I did. There was a courtliness to all of this that felt a little silly but also highly self-aware. I sat up straighter, so as to be ready for whatever pageantry was forthcoming. Viktor ordered three shots of vodka, which I found impressive and terrifying until he passed one over to me. I took a sip and coughed.

“Where did you learn English?” I said.

“Oxford, most recently.”

“What were you doing before that?”

“I was importing Japanese video recorders.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“And now you’re the media relations person?”

“I am that person. And you?” He looked amused.

“Where did I learn English?”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Of course. Would that be a diplomatic sort of nothing? A commercial sort of nothing?” His quasi-British accent made him sound like he was always on the brink of apology. His expression made him look like a person who had never apologized in his entire life.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Academic? Sheer awkwardness?”

“I really don’t.”

“Ah. Very good.”

I knew I was being assessed by some convoluted system of social metrics that I didn’t yet understand. I took another sip of my vodka and let the alcohol mince my mouth.

“So, what, then? What do you want?” He held his second shot, tracing the nimbus of moisture it had left on the table. “You want me to get a chessboard signed for you or something?”

I turned my face to the side. Something about this man made me
not want to tell him everything all at once. “My father was a fan of Bezetov’s,” I said. “I just want to meet him.”

“Your father was a fan?”

I nodded. I knew how this sounded; I knew what particularly obnoxious fragilities in my psyche this guy was already starting to see, to think he saw. I wanted this part of the conversation to end as quickly as possible.

“Bezetov has a lot of fans,” said Viktor.

“Right.”

“Presumably, a lot of people have fathers who were fans.”

“I am sure.”

“And they don’t all come here looking for him.”

“Assuredly not.”

He leaned back in his chair and took a gulp, followed immediately by a fiercer gulp, of his drink. “This is kind of a sentimental project, isn’t it?”

I winced. I hate being accused of sentimentality. But I knew there was no way to assert that you weren’t sentimental; any attempt to do so was automatically suspect. “I guess so. I guess you could say that.” I took a moment to take another sip, flamboyantly. “He’s very busy, I’d imagine.”

“Well, not that busy.”

“Oh?” I waited for clarification long enough to understand that none was forthcoming. “How long have you been working for him?”

“Two years.”

“And how did you get hired?”

“I went to a rally.”

“And did what?”

“I approached him. I gave him my résumé.”

“I see. You showed up, you’re saying?”

“I mean I have a terrific résumé.”

“I don’t at all doubt it. Is that how he hires all the staff?”

“What staff?”

“Who works there?”

“There’s me. There’s Nina, Bezetov’s wife. A pure joy. There’s
Vlad, the security guard, two-thirds retarded. There’s Boris, my assistant. He wouldn’t tell you he’s my assistant, but I assure you, he is.”

“What would he tell me he is?”

“He’d likely claim to be a peer of some kind. There’s not a whole lot of logic to the decisions Bezetov makes about people. If you met his wife, you’d see. Don’t mention I said that.”

“Of course not.”

With a flick of his finger, Viktor ordered us another round. He sat back and looked at me for a long moment. “So that’s it? Your father was a fan and you want to meet him?”

“Yes.” I didn’t know why I was lying to him. It could only bolster my case to tell him the truth—maybe Bezetov had some kind of Make-A-Wish Foundation for terminally ill American adults. But Viktor Davidenko was attractive, I guess, and there was an unusual clarity to his gaze, and I did not want to see what his face would do if we had to have that particular conversation. “Yes,” I said again. “I suppose that’s it.”

He looked skeptical. “We are inscrutable even to ourselves, I suppose.”

“More often than not, I find.”

“But really? That’s it? You’re not here to interview him or something? Tell him how to do things differently? Offer your expert policy opinions?” All this was delivered rapid-fire, without discernible irony.

“What? I—What? No. No.”

“Oh.” He picked up the menu and began to study it. I waited for him to say something else and noticed, in a detached way, the wave of anxiety that was cresting in my sternum. It’s an interesting thing, to watch the discrete components of a face resolve into beauty. If there was something unusual about this man’s face, it was that its overall sternness was cut by the sweetness of his eyes. I badly wanted to steer us back into the realm of answerable questions. I said the only thing I had to say.

“I just met with Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov.”

He put the menu down and eyed me with an expression that could only be described as world-weary. “Misha. I see. And how was that?”

“He’s got a vendetta, it would seem.”

Viktor widened his eyes into an expression of mock hurt. “Does he?”