A Partial History of Lost Causes (53 page)

“I understand.” There was sense to this, he thought. He could squint and tilt his head and see it the way she did. But as soon as he acutely felt her problem, he could immediately see the solution. He screwed his eyes tighter, making effulgent whorls across his eyelids. Leave, then, he thought. I dare you. He stayed still. He listened. Leave, he willed her. Leave. Eventually, she did—but she only went so far as the bedroom, where he could hear the whinny of the closet door closing, the submerged whisking of nightgown against sheet. There was a silence. And then came muffled crying so earnest that it sounded, to Aleksandr, like the sobbing of a stranger.

Aleksandr stayed in the study, barely asleep for the first half of the night, barely awake for the second. When the dawn insinuated itself over the horizon, red as a festering wound, Aleksandr gave up and tried to work. Irina and Boris came in quietly at nine and took their
papers into separate corners. At ten, Viktor walked in, his jaw stiff and his movements brittle. He was holding a copy of
Novaya Gazeta
. “Boss,” he said. “Did you see this?”

He handed the paper to Aleksandr. He’d brought copies for Irina and Boris, too. They opened their papers to the letters-to-the-editor section. In large font, the headline read,
ALEKSANDR BEZETOV: THE RIGHT OPPOSITION CANDIDATE FOR RUSSIA?
As Aleksandr read, he felt the arteries rioting and tangling in the back of his head. He recognized this as the physiology of rage.

Aleksandr read, and his shoulders felt rigid, as though his shirt had been pinned to a wall. He retreated to the couch, moving aside a pair of gardening shears to sit. In some part of his head, he wondered why Nina had gardening shears—they didn’t have a garden, after all, they didn’t have a front yard, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have had the leisurely security to work in it. She kept sprigs of basil along the windowsill sometimes, and maybe she’d hoped that by now they’d be summering in a beautiful, enormous dacha somewhere outside the city, with a litter of tiny children playing outside in the dirt. “Well,” he said. “That’s pretty bad.”

“Pretty bad? We’re dead,” said Boris.

“Not quite yet,” said Viktor.

“You know this just made our lives infinitely harder, right?” said Boris. “You know it made our chances of getting killed incalculably higher, right? If they think you’re actually traveling with us, we’re screwed. And that’s what Misha made them think—that you’re going to Perm. That you’ll have to go now, in order to save your candidacy.”

“I do,” said Aleksandr. “I do have to go now.”

“You can’t,” said Irina.

“I have to.”

“Are you trying to be funny?” said Boris.

“What’s funny about it? It’s my movement, right? It’s my idea, right? It’s my fucking
candidacy
, right?”

“You can’t. You won’t.”

“The idiot has a point, right?” said Aleksandr. “You’re all thinking it. You’re too afraid to mention it, but you’re all thinking it. What has he risked for this? you wonder. What grants him his authority when he’s too afraid to eat a sausage on the street, or fly an airplane to his home village, or walk around at night without his fucking security guard trailing him everywhere? This man is some sort of hero? No, you think. This man is a coward, a pampered coward, and he sends
out young people to do the dangerous things for him, and then he leans back and enjoys the applause.”

There was a pause, and what he’d said swirled around the silence in ever wider loops, until it filled up the whole room with its spiraling echo.

“No,” said Irina finally. “We don’t think that. You’ve had hundreds of death threats. You’ve had body parts come through your window. They would kill you the second they had you alone in a hallway.”

“Did you read this?” said Aleksandr. “Did you read it?” He was aware that he was pacing and possibly shouting. “This is going to be the line of defense. This is going to be the mantra. I have to go. He’s left me no choice.”

Boris was shaking his head furiously. “No, no, no,” he said. “I don’t think so, no. I’m done with this. I quit. I’m not going. You can’t ask me to do such a thing after this. After the way this set us up.”

“Put it in perspective,” said Viktor. “It’s a calculated risk, like all of them.”

“Bullshit,” said Boris. “You think they don’t read
Novaya Gazeta
? You think they won’t catch this? Please.”

“Calm down,” said Viktor.

“Jesus,” said Boris. “What the hell did you do to that guy to make him write something like that?”

Aleksandr winced. “I wouldn’t let him be affiliated with the film.”

“You wouldn’t let him be affiliated with the film.” Boris kicked the couch. “Because, what, he’s a little too right of center for you? A little too nationalistic? They’re not the fucking National Bolsheviks. You could have cut him a deal. If you were any kind of politician, you would have.”

“Boris,” said Viktor. “Stop it.”

“Stop it?” said Boris. “Oh, I’m stopping. I’m also not going. I could die for something, maybe, someday, but not for this kind of stupidity.”

“He’s right,” said Aleksandr. “He shouldn’t go. None of you should go, actually. You are all young. None of you should be incurring an old man’s risks. Exposing yourselves to an old man’s enemies. I’ll go. You can all take paid vacations.”

“It’s done, then,” said Boris, standing up. “I’m done.” He walked
out of the room. After a moment, Viktor followed him, casting a bleak glance back at Aleksandr and Irina.

Aleksandr put his head on his desk. He could feel Irina staring at him, her eyes boring twin craters into his back, and he didn’t like it. Ever since she’d returned from her unannounced vacation, she’d had a stricken, mournful, darkly knowing look that Aleksandr found unnerving but didn’t know how to address. You couldn’t ask a person to make her face stop doing something that seemed involuntary. There were other things, too—her face blanching at odd intervals, as though she were going through a process of remembering and forgetting and then inevitably re-remembering something terrible. She was shakier than she’d been. Her motor skills—never stellar—were worse, and she’d taken to standing far away from things that were fragile or expensive. She was also, for the first time since Aleksandr had known her, too thin. She’d always been shaped like a bean, but now her skeletal system seemed to be issuing a protest and taking its leave through her skin. Her clavicle jutted like a continental shelf.

“Stop,” he said. “Please stop looking at me like that.”

“What is this?” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just think that jaundiced schizophrenic has a point, much as it pains me to say so. I have to go to Perm. I’ve got no credibility otherwise.”

“This country can’t afford to lose you.”

“How do I know that? What do I have to show for all this nonsense? All I see are unreliable poll numbers, poorly conducted surveys.”

“You see the crowds. You see how they turn out for you. I don’t need to remind you. You know this. You are being intentionally difficult.”

“I’m not going to win.” He could hear himself being wretched—he could hear in his own voice the stomping about of a howling, unappeased toddler—but he couldn’t help it.

“You’re not going to win this year. You know that,” said Irina. “Maybe you won’t win any year. You know what Anna Politkovskaya said about you? You’re not Thomas Paine, you’re John the Baptist? You’re right, it might not be you. But whoever it is will owe it to you. You’ve made the thought conceivable. You make it more conceivable every day. And in order to keep doing that, you need to be alive.”

He said nothing. Alive, what was that? He’d never be alive again—feeling the exhilarating gusts of wind slamming into his lungs, reveling in the wild anonymity of being young and alone in an enormous city. It could end one of two ways, he guessed: he could wind up watching the country from the reinforced windows of the Kremlin, or he could wind up dead. He had a hazy image of himself trapped in some ornate grave, grumpily listening to the ongoing march of the city around and above him. They’d have his tomb secluded somewhere to protect it from vandalism. Nina would come once a month to sit in the rain and look at her nails.

But no, not really. Really, he’d wind up here, just here—growing older, watching out the window. People might forget that he was alive, when they thought of him at all. And there would probably come a day—when more relevant targets presented themselves, and vines grew over the memory of his campaign, and he became an old man on whom nobody would want to waste a bullet or a scheme—when it would be safe for him to go out again. Unfortunately, he would never know which day that was.

“You can’t afford to be like this,” said Irina. “Stop it right now.”

He stared out the window, where an understated sun was looming politely. He stared at the table, at the sheaf of papers before him. He stared at Irina’s hands, ten inches from his face. They were durable, inelegant hands; unmanicured, but with fingers that looked like they’d been raised fluttering along a piano or a typewriter. He was staring at the hands, he would always remember, because he couldn’t stand to look at Irina’s face. And then suddenly, one of the hands jumped—“jumped” was the only word for it, because it was obvious that it had not been moved. The hand took to the air and fell again, limply, heavily, like a frog casting itself into a pond. Irina turned the color of an onion and put her hands underneath the desk as if to hide them. Aleksandr stared at her.

“What was that?” he said, even though he knew, and the question was horrible to ask and more horrible to hear answered.

“It’s nothing,” she said in a voice that did not sound like her own.

He supposed he had known it already, but seeing it was surprising and gruesome and oddly more painful than he had thought it might
be. He’d thought that the inevitability of the event had inoculated him, somehow, against its potency. But then again, his whole life had been about trying—and failing—to come to grips with the inevitable. He shouldn’t be surprised that the inevitable was often the worst thing; worse, even, for the fact that it had been etched so long ago, that it was an ending that had predated its own characters.

“Irina,” he said. He tried to take her hand, but she wouldn’t let him. He could almost see the fluttering of her ravaged fist-sized heart. He could hear the raggedy slicing of her breath. “I saw it. I saw that. You didn’t mean to do that.”

She looked down. She looked out the window. Her breathing sounded like the beating of wings. Her face looked waxy and slightly unreal, as if she were an amateur artist’s rendering of a human being. The whole thing felt too terrible, too intimate, to see—this poor young woman’s unraveling. It was a kind of honor, a kind of liability.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” he said.

“It is,” she said. “That’s it. That is, I’m afraid, it.”

He shook his head instinctively, although he knew that in doing so, he looked like he was mourning something small and silly, something that might be best termed a “shame.” What was the appropriate gesture? What was the appropriate response? He adjusted his glasses in a way that he hoped made him look competent, professorial. “What does this mean, exactly?”

She looked at him grimly and didn’t answer. He sat up straighter in his chair. Somewhere, way back in the hidden chambers of his face—behind his cheekbones and eye sockets, in that central core from which he’d always felt that he was watching the events of his own life—he could feel the oncoming menace of tears. He coughed.