A Partial History of Lost Causes (55 page)

He nodded his head against her hair and smelled the foreign, expensive shampoos—willow or aloe vera, jojoba beads imported from Madagascar or God knows where.

“Maybe so,” he said. “I know you’re not the only one who thinks so.”

She looked at him mournfully, and he could see her realizing that he was a stranger and sillier man than she’d even suspected. He could see her studying his face, preparing herself to frame the scene in her memory. Then there was a softening and a fading—it was like watching a person let go of a ledge that she’s been clinging to for so long that there’s a relief in the defeat and an acceptance in the falling.

“The airport, Nina,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Okay, grib,” she said. “I’ll drive you.”

And so she drove him, dry-eyed now, through St. Petersburg. He slouched down in the passenger seat, wearing sunglasses, and she tied up her hair in a scarf, and they rode along the streets. Vlad sat in the back, glowering and muttering about the security risks and pleading with Aleksandr to call one of the drivers. The city was all deciduous trees this time of year, and networks of shadows skittered across the ground like spiders. Ancient air came up from the Neva and twisted into a welter of flower petals and newspaper broadsheets and brightly colored food wrappers. His wife had just left him, and his staff had just mutinied against him, and yet he felt oddly elated. He reached out and touched the glass, which the staff kept crystalline-clean. The street was choked with taxis, legal and illegal, and luxury cars the size of military tanks. In the car next to him, a woman poked her husband in the shoulder and pointed at Aleksandr.

“Sir,” Vlad said. “Sir, you are being very, very rash.”

“It’s broad daylight,” said Aleksandr. “It’s the middle of the street.”

“You’re being dumb. I don’t know what’s happening to you, but you’re being quite dumb.”

“I’m about to get even dumber.”

Nina accelerated the car. All around them, St. Petersburg thrummed with life—the street vendors, the clotting traffic, the trees going wild in the wind. Motorcycles backfired like gunshots and the canals quivered as if they were terrified. Aleksandr and Nina flew along the gray stretch of highway, Petersburg’s ancient skyline receding behind them, and then they turned onto Pilotov Ulitsa toward Pulkovo Airport. At departures, Nina slowed the car but didn’t fully stop. “Good luck, grib,” she said. Her voice wavered slightly but recovered.

With that, the car—her car now, Aleksandr supposed, although it didn’t matter much—was off, submerged into the honking assembly of taxis and limousines. Aleksandr looked at Vlad and told him to run for the ticket counter. They took off, disturbing an old woman with a long flea-bitten coat and a dog the size of a guinea pig, dodging a stern-looking man who waved his cane in consternation.

Somewhere in the sprint, Aleksandr had a moment to enjoy it—the exhilaration of being out in a public place without a route, a map, a
plan for any security eventuality, an entire army of helpers and minders. In this, there was a minor lifting—not as momentous as a liberation of serfs, or the sight of an army retreating from Moscow, or a free election in some future unimaginably far—but still, it was something: this small thing of pushing your own way through the messy world, stumbling without a spotter, running the risk of taking your own falls.

V
iktor and I had agreed that we would go. I’d called him that night—after he’d spent hours drinking with Boris, listening to him rant and rave and nodding miserably in agreement—and said, “We’re still going?” There had been a pause at the other end of the line, but I never felt unsure about how it would end. He said, “How about tomorrow?”

We’d jimmied into the apartment early, before Vlad was in for the day. Viktor had been given a key, it seemed, in those days when Aleksandr knew him well enough to know that he was a decent boy, though not well enough to imagine that he might ever use that decency against him. A network of dew sweated against the panes, and an overgenerous, fractured light came in through the windows. It was the kind of light that seemed to be throwing itself at your feet to beg for mercy. Or maybe the kind that falls down on its own knife in the name of honor.

Nina was strangely kind to me that last morning in St. Petersburg. We’d caught each other in simultaneous sneaking—she clearing out the luxury soaps from the cabinet, me sneaking a hastily written note into Aleksandr’s coat pocket.

“You are going, then?” she’d said, and though her mouth was drawn into a fussy, disapproving shape, there was a gruffness to her voice that made me want to trust her. It made me see her, fleetingly, as a different person: younger and rougher, the kind of person who might have had to scurry about to have enough to eat or think about. It made me understand how you might grow up to be someone who spent most of your time flopping around in an enormous silken bed, or fingering the delicate buds of overpriced earrings. Nothing makes a person materialistic like severe deprivation.

(Now, on the plane, that observation alone sends me into raptures of reflection; I parse the differing threads of my own loss, I savor the nuances of this particular disaster. How I will miss my own brand of clutching materialism, the treasured sensory joys of existence. Not only the transcendent, transporting vista or symphony or epic or orgasm, though there were those. There were also—just as much—the humble pleasures of getting enough sleep or eating a really good sandwich. Then, also, there was the possibility of observations such as the one I had made about Nina: the way that the world could tilt slightly sideways, even when you thought all of its potential positions were already known. Then, too, there was the joy of learning the destinies and back-stories of characters and countries, always stranger and more inevitable than the fates conjured by fiction. How I will miss all of this. But then I remind myself of the obvious point—realized again and again but never fully believed even now, on this plane, the country roiling cobalt black below us—that there will be no missing of anything, worthy or unworthy, at all.)

At any rate, Nina was our accomplice that last morning, creeping into the bedroom she would no longer share with Aleksandr and blasting the air-conditioning so that he wouldn’t hear us as we ruffled through papers, and nosed through notebooks, and packed up the camera equipment, and stole the credit card that Aleksandr used for film-related expenses. Whatever this film will mean, ultimately—and as a person who will never know for sure, I am increasingly interested in guessing—the country will owe its arrival, partly, to Nina.

Then we were careening through the early-morning city. There were still daubs of darkness on the farthest part of the sky, and the stars
were paling like the face of a person who is afraid but has decided to pretend not to be. I smiled at Viktor in the darkness, though he probably couldn’t see me.

Here on the plane, I add this to my catalog of gratitude, somewhere between the sandwich and the symphony: the feeling of getting up very early to do something of consequence.

The engine was starting to rumble already when we first glimpsed Aleksandr running across the tarmac. He was going at an improbable rate; from afar, he was portlier and slower—older—than he seemed up close, when he was throwing his hands about in impatience or engaging in various verbal gymnastics. He was stopped by an airport employee bedecked in neon orange, and turned sternly around. We could faintly see the angry arch of his neck, and we cringed to think of what he was saying. But the plane was pulling away, and he was smaller and smaller behind us. And we knew what we were going to do.

He could come the next day, on the next flight. Of course he could, and yes, we knew that. But I’d seen his stack of death threats, and I’d seen the way he looked at them. And I knew that by going this way, we were giving him the chance not to follow us.

On the plane, Viktor and I looked at each other and blinked. I suspect Viktor was wondering what he had gotten himself into—whether he would lose his job; whether in a wiser, more abstemious age, he would come back to look at this bad decision as the one where everything started to go disastrously wrong. I was beyond this kind of worrying. I didn’t know how the trip would go, or what it would mean, or whether it would be a mistake. But I did know that I wouldn’t look back on it with anything—pride or regret or misery or guilt or misty-eyed nostalgia—from some unimaginable vantage point. Who I was now was who I would always be. And what I did would have to be admired or despised or corrected by someone else.

The landscape below was quickly tapering off into countryside: dull stamps of beige and eggshell; clusters of villages; long patches of phlox and silver grass, sliced by the occasional vein of a creek. I’ve always loved flying, watching the earth resolve into its most basic elements: clean, subdued colors; starkly geometric designs. When you watch it all from an airplane, it’s difficult to take anything too seriously
or too hard. From above, the world and its teeming civilizations looked like nothing more complex than a series of cave drawings.

I thought of my flight into Moscow all those many months ago. The person I was before I touched down in Russia, the person who walked around Cambridge and fell in love and played chess with a strange Swede for whimsy—that person felt so thoroughly remote to me that it was as though she were a memory from a previous lifetime, or an identical twin with whom I had a troubled though persistent psychic connection. I could look back on her—and look back on that life—with something approaching indifference. I could recognize that there had been value there, and that there were memories that the other woman had clung to with the tragic self-importance with which we all cling to ourselves and our cherished little souvenirs. But that woman wasn’t me anymore. Or if she was, she wouldn’t be for long.

After a few minutes on the plane, Viktor twisted toward me and issued a frank and unnerving stare.

“Yes?” I said. “What? Having regrets? Too late now.”

He continued to stare at me, long enough that I started to wonder what Aleksandr had told him about me.

“Look, now that we’re in this mess together, I need to know some things,” he said.

“Okay,” I said carefully. I was thinking that I needed to know some things, too, but that didn’t mean I ever would.

“Who are you? Who are you really, I mean?” I looked at him. Maybe he’d always wanted to ask that. Maybe he’d been afraid that doing so would offend Aleksandr or antagonize Boris. Or maybe it’s simply the sort of question that you ask only once it’s too late for a proper answer.

“What can you possibly mean by that?”

“I mean.” He sighed and pressed his eyes shut. I could see him trying to frame his interrogation in some kind of civility. “I mean, why did you come here? What was this? Besides running away. Anyone can run away. Anyone can run away from anything, in fact. You don’t need to be dying to want to do this. I just mean, why here? Why this?”

All at once I was telling him—telling him things I’d never told anyone, telling him things I hadn’t even known I knew until I said
them, and they became unequivocally true in retrospect. I told him about my last chess game with my father, how that was simultaneously a benediction and bewilderment; it had announced the arrival of my adulthood as it had prophesied the onset of my father’s obsolescence. After my father had substantially disappeared from us but before he had died, I looked back and tried to find some of the clues to who he had been, to what had mattered to him, to how he had made sense of the world, to how he had addressed his own end. Sifting through the morass of information that was left to me was like pawing through a riverbed and trying to figure out which things are fossils and which things are just stones. But I’d pulled out the fragment that was Aleksandr, and I’d squinted at its flinty sheen, and I’d decided that there—there—was a treasured clue, or a missing link, or a splinter left to me by a divine prankster intent on testing my faith.