A Partial History of Lost Causes (60 page)

Aleksandr stayed at the restaurant, with Elizabeta making curlicues on his shoulders, until after the staff had finished cleaning up.

Even Misha, whom he caught sneering on BBC a few days later, seemed distressed. “I’m no fan of Bezetov,” he said. “But the election was rigged. Obviously, it was rigged. There was no election here at all, so you can stop reporting on the results.”

They pulled Nikolai out of the FSB and made him minister of the interior and gave him an enormous dacha in the woods outside Moscow.
Aleksandr would see him sometimes when the television was covering some event in the Duma—in the background, he could catch Nikolai’s red-raw face, his portly nest of jowls. He’d been a loyal servant to the regime. He might have been prime minister one day if he hadn’t been so unforgivably ugly.

At home, at least, there was Elizabeta—and whenever he lost his belief in the eventual arrival of unlikely events, she was there to remind him. He carried her around the apartment, and he reenacted every single inchoate gesture and emotion that had been choking him up for the past few decades. I always wanted to do this, he’d say. I always wanted to do
this
. They loved each other, and that was enough, although her coughing was dreadful, and there were nights when they didn’t touch each other at all and only watched old movies while Elizabeta sat sucking her oxygen through tubes. There were other nights when Aleksandr—who was not yet an old man but who would not be able to say that for long—thought about what it might have been like to have love for a youth, or for a decade, or for an entire lifetime.

His first rally after the election was in Moscow, and he thought—although he didn’t have Nina to count for him—that it was a bigger crowd than ever. Nine thousand, he figured, maybe ten. Maybe they were angrier, and maybe they were remorseful, and maybe this time they meant business. They yelled slogans. They waved flags and held posters, and some of the posters were of Aleksandr’s own crumpled and two-dimensional face. He cleared his throat to calm them down. He looked out over them, these people, his people, Russians under duress, citizens with objections. It would always be hard to believe the polling data, it would always be hard to believe the electoral returns, when all of these people kept showing up and shouting.

He pulled the microphone toward him. They quieted down, friends shushing friends, so that they could all hear what he would say. He wanted to say something spectacular. He wanted to say something that would justify all the things that required justification—a countless number, that. He wanted to say something that would strike the perfect balance of rueful cynicism and quiet, enduring hope. He wanted to
say that there was no choice but to despair—and then, afterward, there was no choice but to stop despairing. He wanted to say that even if they didn’t see it in this lifetime, somebody would see it in some lifetime. He wanted to say that the historical sweep is a consolation, it has to be a consolation, we have to pretend it’s a consolation until it becomes one. He wanted to say that there is honor in being a small turn in a noble game, even if one doesn’t get to know the outcome. He wanted to say all this, but there was no way to say any of this, and there were notes to consult. He looked down. They were waiting. He looked up again.

“We have lost this round, my friends,” he said. “We have lost this game, to use a terrible chess metaphor. There was a time when I was a young man that I beat an old favorite just by letting myself imagine that I might.”

It was a weak comparison, he knew. It took more than imagination.

“Some of you might remember this,” he said, “although I expect that many of you are far too young. This was when chess was a more central pastime. This was before the Internet.”

There was light chuckling, though he’d made the joke before.

“That’s all I ask of you—it’s a modest request, after all, for an old man who has been through a lot. I don’t ask you to believe that we will win. I ask you to imagine that we might.”

And they were. He knew they were. He could feel them imagining—he could almost hear the collective crackling of their most personal wishes, and some of them were what you might expect: a girl wants her brother to return from Chechnya with his limbs and his sanity; a young man wants to vote in an election that doesn’t make him throw up afterward; an old woman wants to know what happened to her father during the Terror, and she wants a government that will tell her. Maybe some of them have more modest desires. Maybe some of them want to watch Putin handle a hostile press conference. Maybe some of them want to go abroad without being asked what their countrymen have been thinking for the past century or so. Maybe some of them want a satirical comedy program that skewers all of the politicians, makes a gleeful mockery of all of the institutions, every single night.

“Imagine that we might,” he said.

He closed his eyes for the briefest moment, and the crowd was quiet and reverential. Their flags caught the wind, and their posters fluttered away, but they didn’t stop them. In that moment, through their united imagining, he could almost see it. And who is to say they were not seeing it, too?

He spent hours, days, looking for some sign of his correspondence with Irina’s father. He wanted desperately to find it, now more than ever. At the same time, he wanted to prove to himself that he could not. He wanted to prove to himself that he wasn’t careless with a young woman’s last wish—that he wasn’t too absorbed with his own marriage and his own democracy to find the thing that counted. He wanted to know that the thing that counted was not really there. He went through countless stacks of the old pamphlets, the carbon copying bleeding into indecipherable bright blue rivulets. He went through his notes on strategy. He went through his old delivery routes and was surprised that he was ever fool enough to write them down. He found a diary entry about Elizabeta, but he could not give it to her now—not because he was embarrassed (although he was), but because confronting the shakiness of his writing, the exuberance of his love, made him want to weep.

He found nothing from Irina’s father. He sat for three days straight, scattering the apartment with paper that was as ancient and fragile as an old man’s skin. And then, finally, he told himself that he could stop looking. He told himself that Irina had already found whatever she came for.

It wasn’t until years later, when he was going through Elizabeta’s things, that Aleksandr would find the letter from Irina’s father. He remembered then Elizabeta’s attempted delivery of it in those weeks before her marriage to Mitya, and he remembered the way he’d rejected it while she stood in the doorway, young and alive and disappearing from him for the first time. He remembered the clawing grief at his chest during those days. He remembered how he’d thought that was the worst thing, and what a thin, marginal sadness it had been, comparatively.
And then he sat on the ground, among Elizabeta’s boxes and books, and cried a little and laughed a little and stared a little, bemusedly, at the ceiling. And then, for the first time, he read the letter.

In the aftermath of the election, the world briefly takes an interest. Aleksandr is flown out to the States to explain everything on television. (This happened every so often—whenever there was an event that demanded translation by an English-speaking capitalist who could talk about enormously complicated political upheaval in terms easily recognizable by any high school civics student.) He rides in a limousine through the frenetic city; he watches the hallucinatory lights of Times Square. The taxi drivers all ask him where he is from, and then he asks them where they are from. He can go whole days in New York that feel as though nobody is a native—the city is a spaceship, and everyone in it is a refugee from some dying planet (second world, third world, middle America). The hysteria of the lights, the flagrancy of the money, the stridency of the music—there is an energy that could remind him of Moscow. On MSNBC, he is asked what he thinks of the future of Russia. “We are not looking to win elections,” he says. “We are looking to have elections.” For a foreign policy blog, he is asked whether Russia is ready for democracy. Might not years of repression, might not the sheer size, might eons of the systematic subversion of civil society—might all that leave the country unprepared for a democratic system? Each time Aleksandr says no, he points to North Korea and South Korea, he points to East Germany and West Germany. People aren’t born with a template for government; there is not an indisposition for democracy encoded on a human being’s DNA; there’s not a love for authoritarian abuse entangled in a nation’s soul. There are only individuals, and then there are the governments that serve or disserve them. Democracy is the least bad form of government, he says. It maximizes the liberty of the individual, and in this world—in this uncertain, claustrophobic, ever shrinking world, but really, in any world—is that not the highest good? Is there anything more important than writing what you think, and saying what you think, and walking along a river at night unsupervised? Maybe he doesn’t say that last part. And one day in Russia, he says. One day in Russia, too.