A Partial History of Lost Causes (39 page)

“No,” I said. “Of course not. It’s just that he knew that in your long career, there had certainly been … moments when you knew you must lose. And he wanted to know how you kept playing.”

“I can’t imagine I responded to such a letter,” he said. “If I got it.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he took off his glasses and pinched the skin between his eyes. “When did he die, your father?”

I looked at him.

“You wouldn’t be here if he weren’t dead, right?” It was a challenging thing to say, I suppose, but he managed to say it kindly.

“He died in February,” I said. “But he’d been sick for a very long time.”

Bezetov nodded. He put his glasses back on. I tried to make myself say something politely admiring about the modern art on the walls, but my gaze faltered on the dark-coated men hulking in the doorway. “I notice you have a lot of security,” I said.

“I do,” he said, waving his arm at them. “They cost me tens of thousands of dollars, and they will probably fail me in the end anyway. I can minimize my risk, but it’s an ultimate futility. It’s only a question of time.”

“I know something about that,” I said. The radiator started to kick up, making spitting sounds and giving the room an overcooked smell.
Aleksandr looked out that great picture window, even though there wasn’t much to see: in the late-afternoon dark, there was only the reflection of the gilded orbs of his lamps, the sharp glint of light on his computer, the frightful paleness of my own face.

“You mentioned you saw an old friend of mine,” said Aleksandr. “And which friend was that?”

“Elizabeta Nazarovna. Do you remember her? She lived in your building. She said you might not remember.”

He said nothing and kept looking out the window. I thought I noticed a minor tightening in his neck muscles. Out the window, a cascading wash of headlights filtered through the gloom.

“I remember something about her, I think.” He let the sentence sit, lightly buffered by silence. “And how is she doing now?”

I thought of the murderousness of her coughing, the way her hunched shoulders shook like trees in a cyclone. I thought, too, of the way her voice glinted; how listening to it was like looking down a hall of mirrors.

“She does not seem well.”

“I see.” He waited. I could feel him hoping for me to offer more, but I didn’t know what was expected. “She is alone?”

I thought of the clasp of her hand in mine, the nudity of her thin fingers. I thought of the size of the apartment, how the birdcage seemed to dominate the decor. I realized that there was no bedroom—just the cramped living room, the toy-sized kitchen. She must be sleeping on the couch.

“It seems so.” Then I understood, from the way Aleksandr clenched his jaw and the way he erased his eyes and the way his words seemed to shiver on a tightrope, that he had loved her. And I was struck by the unforgivable stupidity of refusing love. And I was further struck by the violence of my own mistake, and I felt lucky for the limited time I would have to live with it.

“You should see her,” I said. Then I felt presumptuous. “Maybe. If you want to.”

“Maybe. I’m very busy these days.”

“That I see,” I said. I realized that there was an approach I had not tried. “Maybe I could be of help to you?”

He stood, and I was struck again by the reality of his shortness. His authority came from his thick eyebrows and vigorous jaw, the muscled compactness of his shoulders, the tired intelligence of his eyes. He didn’t look like a man who’d spent a lifetime flitting toys across a board.

“You want a job,” he said brusquely.

I coughed. “Not a job. I just want to be of use.”

There was an impatient silence. I stood up, too, because it seemed the thing to do. He looked at me. “You are an academic at home, yes?” he said finally.

“Formerly.”

“You can write in English, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You will not be speaking any more with our friend Nikolai?”

“No.”

“Very well,” he said. “You can help us with the American press. You can send them e-mails. Okay? You can type things up. Okay? Not sexy, not glamorous.”

“I don’t need sexy.”

“Good, then,” he said. “Since they already think you’re causing trouble, you might as well, right? You can come in on Monday. How long will you be expecting to stay in the country?”

I thought about how to answer. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But probably not that long.”

“All right,” he said, orienting me toward the door. “We’ll use you while we can.” He opened the door for me, and I was confronted again with the smell of gourmet coffee and a beach of white carpeting stretching door-to-door. I held out my hand to Aleksandr. He took it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome. And Irina?” He was ushering me out. “When you know you’re losing, I am told it is sensible to resign.”

The next week dissolved in much the same way as the others had: in a dreamy, almost drunken suspended animation, impinged upon by the faintest fragments of memory and hallucination. Often I felt clinically numb, and I watched myself with the third-person detachment of a
person on heavy painkillers. Occasionally, I felt strangely exhilarated, my head filling with snatches of speech and irrelevant images. Out of nowhere, I remembered the cartoon skunk on the cover of a coloring book from the late seventies; one day at an apple orchard with a boy I loved in middle school; the yellow dog across the street from my childhood day care that had one day mysteriously disappeared. And I marveled over the mind’s ability to record so much information that it would never, ever need.

I wrote more to Jonathan, more unsendable, unreadable, unforgivable letters. I told him I knew these past months were months I’d lost with him. I told him I knew I’d missed dinners and walks and sex and laughter and showers and earnest, whispered discussions and the kind of fights you pick because you think it’s sexy when the other person is a little bit mad at you. But then I told him about the other thing I was missing, the other thing I was making him miss. The first jerk of an elbow or a hand. The spiraling loss of competencies. My brain’s grim retreat across a sealed border. I told him about his mounting resentment, and the way he’d feel guilty for it, and the way it would consume him. It would consume him, I told him, whether he ever believed me about this or not. The living always resent the claims of the dead, especially when the dead are still living. I told him I spoke with authority. I told him I knew I’d made the right decision, even if I would have to know it for the both of us.

Through my window in the mornings came pink light: if I woke up at a certain time, the whole room would be infused with the pink of the Sistine Chapel, the pink of a face brought back from the dead. I’d sit and wait to hear the plucking of harps, the stirring choir, and when I heard nothing, I would roll over and try again to sleep. I was always struck by how unafraid I was of sleep, even though it was the closest approximation.

Strange things were starting to happen with time. The moments started to bunch and buckle; whole hours could disappear into staring fits from which I’d emerge lost and unstrung. Then there would be an agonizing eon distilled into the stirring of a coffee, the turning of a page.

Nights became restless and feverish. I’d skim the edge of sleep,
hearing the echoes of sarcastic laughter and the clicking of keys. On the wall, shadows made filaments and lace. I’d wake up muttering, recovering from dreams that followed me around in the day. In them there were more mute memories: my mother and father leaning against a tree, surrounded by leaves, slow-falling and yellow. There were chessboards from Boston, melting into the chessboards of my childhood. I remembered the triumph of my father’s ever conquering queen. I remembered the crack of the skull of my father’s king against the board.

Then, too, I remembered the crack of my father’s arm against the stove, his head against the bathroom tile.

When I went back to Aleksandr’s apartment the following week, Viktor was there. He eyes flitted to me momentarily. Then he went back to shaking his head savagely at what a shorter man was writing in a notebook. “Nashi will kill that,” said Viktor. “They’ll surround us. You need a better layout.”

“Hush,” said the other.

“Look what they did at G8. You’re wasting your fancy pen.”

“Please hush.”

Viktor glanced at me, then nodded to the sitting man. “Assistant,” he mouthed.

I immediately retreated to the foyer and busied myself by looking at the prints. Though I’d been told to come by, I was aware of how lost I looked. I had a flash of myself at fourteen, my first day of ninth grade, wandering the halls in a hopeless quest for the geometry classroom. On the wall, I squinted into an amber-colored Nevsky Prospekt and tried to look engrossed.

A moment later, something changed in the air. Aleksandr was behind me. “You like those?” he said.

“I do,” I said, turning around.

“They were done by a friend of ours. A very rich man. He was in oil. He did printmaking to civilize himself.”

“Is he here?” I said.

“He’s in a penal colony in Siberia for eight years,” said Aleksandr. “He was funding us. But Putin has a sharp sense of how to prioritize. He’s not interested in stopping everybody. Only everybody who he
thinks might actually count. This friend of mine, the printmaker, he was very, very rich. He had billions. Do you know how rich you have to be to put a billionaire in jail?”

“Pretty rich,” I said.

“Yes,” said Aleksandr. “Pretty rich. Nobody ever talks about how indecently
rich
Putin is, but I like to bring it up a lot. Do you how many billionaires we have in Russia?”

“How many?”

“Sixty-one. Sixty-one billionaires, and Putin could put every last one of them in jail if they threatened his business interests. That’s what people don’t understand about him. He’s not an ideologue. He’s just pragmatic. He’s just greedy. He could be liberal or conservative—he doesn’t care. He supports Syria and Iran because tension brings up oil prices. And you let him get away with it.”

“Me?”

“The West. You’re easily impressed by staged democracy. We have something here we call an election, after all. But that doesn’t mean we’re not a police state. And there’s money here now. So the West lets our oligarchs export their questionable assets, and they grant Putin democratic credentials in order to do it. If the U.S. was serious about restraining Putin, they’d start denying visas. The oligarchy can’t afford a new Cold War.”

I looked at him. “What would you do about it as president?”

He waved his hand. “It’s not a campaign the way you’re thinking of it—like, oh, I’d support this and that legislation. I’m not winning. I want to coordinate a broad platform, not promote my own ambitions.”

“That’s a little vague, isn’t it?”

He raised his eyebrows at me, and I knew then, if I hadn’t before, that the way to get him to like me was to push back at him. “Since you asked, then. Extreme caution must be used when assessing the components of the existing mechanism that may still be used in establishing the new state. Otherwise, chaos would ensue.”

I took a breath and plunged forward. “Existing mechanism? That all sounds very prudent.”

“It is prudent.”

“Do your supporters know it’s prudent? Do they know it’s extremely cautious? They don’t seem like the most cautious of people, from an observer’s perspective.”

He looked at me, and I thought he might call security to frog-march me out the door. I would have, if I’d had a security apparatus at my disposal. But he didn’t. He smiled as if he’d discovered a chess opponent who was somewhat better than expected, though still fairly terrible.

“We must have a return to gubernatorial elections. We must draft a new constitution, since the current one is baldly authoritarian.”

“Isn’t single-handedly scrapping the constitution a tiny bit authoritarian?”

His eyes flared slightly. He was amused. “It will arise from a national consensus.”

“What percentage of Russians consider themselves fans of Stalin?” I said. “Is it forty-five percent?”