A Partial History of Lost Causes (34 page)

I did not know what the humane thing was, but I knew I was not doing it.

I turned away from the Neva and started walking toward the bridge. The air was unbendingly cold, the city entombed in a darkness that was beginning to feel permanent.

I learned something once, I think, from my father’s illness. Mostly,
I did not learn; mostly, I resented and resisted and made it elaborately clear how little fun I was having personally, to anyone who was paying attention, which nobody was. But once, maybe, my jaw aching with the tedium of it, in one of those awful, mostly unremembered years, there was a small revelation of a kind. Once, maybe, I looked into his stricken, blanking face and I knew something that I couldn’t stop knowing.

Behind me, the Neva was growing dim. The horizon was relinquishing its last monofilament of light.

Personality is continuity. Personality is the myth of continuity. And the person is lost when nothing can be old to him, when nothing can be familiar, when all parallels, all symbols, all analogs, are gone; when the world is perpetually stunning; when we are newborns again, at last.

T
he eighties melted into the nineties, and Aleksandr lost weight again. His currency among women strengthened, and there was something of a nationalistic uprising in his personal life. All of a sudden they were everywhere—thin-browed, thin-faced, pale, and long-limbed, pressing their warm asses against his thighs all through those long winters. They found his jokes hilarious, and his prominent nose distinguished, and his chess talk
fascinating
. When he started going on CNN, when he started being invited to speak at the elite American universities, it was an inundation: he nearly began to resent them for their beauty, for their unapologetic availability. He took to sleeping with women whose last names he did not know; then he took to sleeping with women whose first names he did not know. He didn’t ask, and he tried not to remember if they told him. Sex became tedious for a while; sometimes he longed for a woman to reject him just for a surprise.

He thought of how Elizabeta had left him back when he was deserving of love and it would not have been wasted on him. And now he was ruined for it, he knew, and did not warrant it.

In the other Leningrad—the one Aleksandr no longer lived in—the lines for toilet paper stretched around corners. On television, that smiling, simian American president kept making his demands. When the satellite countries broke away—with relative ease, as if the Soviet Union were a rotted thing that was more than ready to abandon its auxiliary elements—he sat up straight and allowed himself thirty seconds of optimism. He was an early supporter of Gorbachev; he waited in the cold until his ears were red, and he cried when he cast his vote for Yeltsin. The Museum of the History of Atheism and Religion turned back into Kazan Cathedral. The Communist Party was banned; the ruble became a convertible currency; confiscatory privatization overtook state-run concerns; inflation shot to 20 percent. The shelves at the markets filled back up, but no one could buy. Once prices tripled, people began to turn out their dogs, which roamed the streets like beggars, mangy and chagrined. The population was decreasing by six hundred thousand people a year. Shock therapy was hard on the common people, certainly, but it was the birth pangs of capitalism, the plinth upon which the towering new Russia would be built. And in the free-market economy, Aleksandr wrote a book on business and chess that made five million dollars. He intended to sink gratefully into the luxuriant wealth of the brand-new post-Communist oligarchy—hot tub, women, the kind of travel that comes with steaming face towels when you cross the international dateline.

He went to clubs. He never danced, he only watched. He encountered blondes. He encountered brunettes. He encountered Central Asians who turned out to have no pubic hair whatsoever. And one night when he was out late, five years after he’d become world champion, maybe, he encountered a redhead who was smiling a secret smile to herself.

“Hello,” he said. “What do you know that I don’t know?”

She shrugged, and at the time he believed that this meant there was something. Later, he knew that he should have taken her at face value.

“You’re the chess champion.”

“Yes.”

“But you already knew that.”

He ducked his head. “I suppose.”

She was drinking champagne. He wondered if she was celebrating something. She cocked her head to one side; her red hair was ineffably gorgeous in the light. No, he decided, she was not celebrating anything. She didn’t need to.

“And who are you?”

“Nina,” she said, extending a hand. Her wrist was impossibly delicate and feminine, tremendously well-made. She looked like a human to whom some attention had been given, whereas Aleksandr often remarked that God had made him (Aleksandr) in the dark, one hand tied behind His back, possibly drunk. Aleksandr didn’t really believe in God, of course, but he liked the joke, and told it often. He thought of telling it now but looked at the wrist again and decided against it.

She smiled at him then. “It was bold the way you made them resume play during the World Championships.”

“Bold?”

It had been a long time—too long—since someone had thought he was brave. No: maybe nobody ever had. Elizabeta might have once, for the paper, but that was ages ago, in another lifetime. Was this assessment from Nina undeserved? Maybe. The risk he’d taken with the FIDE had been more calculating, more clinically self-interested; after all, he wasn’t standing up to them because they were morally bankrupt—he was standing up to them because they’d wanted to screw him over, and he’d lost too much already to let them screw him over at that late date. So she admired him for an impulse that was as petty and shallow and reflexive as slapping someone’s hand away when he’s digging in your pocket.

“Yes,” she said. She clasped his hand. “It was courageous. Not everyone would have done such a thing.”

“Well,” said Aleksandr. He felt the thrum of social tables turning; he knew that he could take his time answering and that she would wait for him. “It was self-interested, you know.”

She laughed a little. He could smell the champagne she was drinking, vaguely vinegary; cheap, he thought. He wanted to buy her something better. “Rationally self-interested,” she said. Later, he’d look back and realize how, at the beginning, Nina would often say a catchphrase or a snippet of some academic or intellectual jargon, sometimes out of
context and often obliquely; this kind of talk seemed to suggest deep understanding, vast knowledge. It soon proved that she’d internalized a certain number of terms that, when deployed alongside a knowing expression, could make men believe she had a brain, if they were already inclined to hope so.

“Yes,” he said. “Rationally self-interested. Don’t tell my handlers.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. That Rusayev. Tell me. Is he really as ugly up close as he looks on television?”

They laughed. He told her anecdotes, partially embellished, about Rusayev’s hygiene and habits and quirks and demands. He performed an extended impression of Rusayev’s tendency to learn forward and taunt you with the mad hope that he might be ready to make his move, then lean back again, then forward, then back, until you were beset with nervous exhaustion. He also tended to leave his finger on his piece for a comically long time, rolling his wrist, leaving one hand, then two fingers, then one finger, retreating more slowly than the Americans from Vietnam, he said, and Nina laughed. It was a lovely laugh—bell-like and clear. It wasn’t necessarily a laugh that seemed to reflect actual amusement, but that didn’t matter to Aleksandr just then.

At some point in the evening, he started looking at her harder. He realized she was someone whom he would need to remember meeting, and so he tried to make a mental note of what she was wearing, and how she looked, and what she’d first said to him. If this went somewhere, he’d want to remember those things.

At the end of the evening, he walked her to her door and gazed at her fondly but did not, for the moment, kiss her. He could have, he knew, he could have done anything he wanted; he did not fear rejection. But he wanted to be able to tell her later about how he’d wanted to kiss her and had been too shy. He wanted that to be part of the story they would tell each other.

The next night he did kiss her, and he took her home. And after that, they were a couple.

He took her to private clubs with private leashed-off balconies, with gleaming vats of vodka and fresh juices already waiting for them. He took her dancing. Her took her to the ballet. She wasn’t an intellectual, but neither was she a philistine—she loved visual art, she loved
singing. She didn’t know art history or music history, but it didn’t keep her from responding to art and music; she wasn’t a theorist, and how refreshing that was. For her, he suffered through opera—twice—and it was worth it, almost, to see Nina rapt: the beautiful blankness on her stricken face.

She became interested in biorhythms, in energy fields. She liked to watch Kashpirovsky’s mass-healing séances on TV. She did not care for politics. She found public displays embarrassing. They watched the coup together on television, agog, but she did not want to go outside once it was all over and Yeltsin had saved the country. He tried dragging her down to Moscow for the Yuri Shevchuk concert, when 120,000 people swayed in Palace Square, but she rolled her eyes. She’d sooner cry in public, she said, than get sentimental about a pop singer in public. And that ended the conversation, since Aleksandr had never—not once—seen Nina cry, though he’d suspected her of secretive offstage crying once or twice over the months.

It didn’t matter. It did not matter. Here was a woman who could love him for what he was, not what he had tried—ineptly!—and failed—miserably!—at being. If this woman wanted competence, he had that to spare. If she wanted ruthlessness, he was learning. Better to be loved—or whatever—for our own actual sorry selves and not for some distorted version of who we might have been. It was that discrepancy that led to disappointment, among other things.

And then there was this: he was thirty-two. It didn’t have to be Nina in particular, but for decency’s sake, it had to be someone. He was still decent when it came to family: he’d rescued his mother and two of his sisters from their backward hovel in Okha (the third had married a semi-toothless sturgeon fisherman and had refused to come).

Nina and Aleksandr might have been mismatched, but their dual mismatch provided a kind of symmetry: she was so much more beautiful than he, he was so much more talented and accomplished than she, and was this not the trade-off made by most powerful men? It was a tenuous understanding, an uneasy policy of mutually assured destruction—either of them could wound the other with all the ways in which he or she was not what was wanted once. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he could have pointed out that there were countless gorgeous
women in the world, and there was only one chess champion (currently: him). He could have pointed out that beauty was fleeting. But she could have pointed out that everything was fleeting—chess competency was only slightly more enduring than beauty; both, it turned out, were games that favored the young. Anyway, what was power on the chessboard vs. power in the bedroom? Chess was a metaphor for war, but sex wasn’t a metaphor for anything. So whose power was more real in the end?

They fell into a routine in which she was playfully critical of him, and he was eye-glazingly tolerant of her, and this seemed to flatten the unevenness of their relationship’s landscape. Aleksandr might be a chess champion, but he was also just a man and was thus deserving of the ambient scorn of beautiful, exacting women. He did not disagree; in fact, he felt he deserved more scorn than even Nina would be able to provide him, though for reasons he never discussed with her.

He bought them a gorgeous apartment overlooking Nevsky Prospekt (expensive). He bought them a high-maintenance little dog with a lazy eye (also expensive). After an appropriate interval, Nina and Aleksandr were married.