A Partial History of Lost Causes (2 page)

Aleksandr’s room contained a bed bolted to the floor, a chitinous desk, and an urn-shaped samovar, presumably left over from the previous tenant. Near the ceiling, the laths were showing through the plaster. Raggedy strips of light filtered through the tiny fortochka above the bed, and Aleksandr went to lie in them. The exposed mattress was vaguely moist against his skin. He stretched out his legs. In Okha, he’d shared a bed with his two kicking little sisters, and they’d thrashed all night like dying fish.

He stared at the crescent-shaped fungal smear on the wall; he gazed through the latticework of frost on the windowpane. He tried to sleep. At the end of the week on the train, he’d been so desperate for sleep that he’d tried briefly to sleep in the bathroom—balanced precariously above the hole that emptied onto the tracks—until someone had yelled at him to get the fuck out, idiot. But in bed, he found that he missed the oceanic rumble of the train. He found that he was restless with the energy of being somewhere new when, his whole life, he’d only ever been somewhere old. He found he didn’t feel like taking off his shoes yet.

He thought of the policemen down at the train station. He wondered
if, out in the city somewhere, anybody was dumb enough to be celebrating.

He wrestled his map from his pocket, picked up his rucksack, and headed down the stairs. In the kitchen, he passed a woman who was using a filthy spatula to scrape the remains of an egg off a pan. She looked at Aleksandr darkly and did not speak. Outside, the cold was settling into itself—announcing its scope, the way pain does after a moment or two—and the cold, along with the accumulated fatigue of six days on a train (two of them spent standing up), was making Aleksandr dizzy. All around him, buildings were painted blue only up to height level, and Aleksandr felt as though he were trapped in the mural of a child who had grown bored and wandered away. The wind kicked up.

Nevsky Prospekt was beautiful: the friezes and columns looked like ancient Rome, and the half-buried stores and bright orange signs and illuminated cinemas looked like the center of the very modern universe. Aleksandr recognized the rally by a beaming poster of Stalin, held high above the crowd like a grandfatherly, mustached god. The crowd was small—desultory and damp, ringed by nervous-looking police. As he approached, Aleksandr saw that the Stalins were everywhere: out of one photo, Stalin glowered menacingly; out of another, Stalin stared with an expression of stern benevolence. Into a microphone, a man droned dully about the Battle of Stalingrad. At the edge of the crowd lurked a small group of men with skunk-striped Mohawks and plaid shirts. Aleksandr leaned against a telephone pole and tried to listen. He was exhausted, he realized, and here—in this last pocket of stingy sun, with the wind breaking at the buildings behind him and the monotone buzz of military accomplishment in his ears—he thought he could probably fall asleep standing up. He pulled his cap tighter over his head. His gaze faltered. His head started to fall forward.

“Enjoying the show?” A man was talking to him. Aleksandr lifted his earflaps and looked. The man was tall and thin; when he moved, it looked like his joints were locking and unlocking and painfully rearranging themselves. He was holding a glass bottle of Pepsi and wearing no gloves. Next to him stood two other men. One was notably pale,
even for here, and had eyes the color of kopecks. The other was short, scarred, and writing furiously in a notebook. His mouth moved as if he was chewing something, even though Aleksandr somehow felt sure that he was not. All three of them were dressed in striped sailor shirts and quilted jackets and sodden flapped hats. The tall one wore a small silver medallion around his neck.

“Indeed,” said Aleksandr. “Quite a sight.”

“To think Koba would be one hundred,” said the tall man. His voice was flatter than irony. “What a pity he is not here to enjoy the party.”

“True,” said Aleksandr. “It’s evidently true.”

“His reforms were truly adequate to the task of modernization, am I right?”

“Very adequate. More than adequate.”

“And that mustache,” said the pale one. “That mustache was quite an achievement, yes? Koba had more hair in that mustache than some men have on their entire heads.”

Aleksandr turned to look at him. There was something about this one’s face that made Aleksandr not want to look at it straight: a haggardness underneath the eyes that raised uncomfortable questions about life in Leningrad. “Yes,” said Aleksandr, staring balefully at the ground. “An impressive feat.”

The tall man looked at Aleksandr with some amusement then. When he leaned in, his voice was lower. “Did you know he was five feet four?” he said. “He was. He was five feet four and had a bad arm. They never showed it in pictures. They never showed him standing next to anybody. He’s sitting in all the pictures with other dignitaries.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Aleksandr carefully. “I was given to believe that Comrade Stalin was a man of some stature.”

Aleksandr did not understand how things had gone so wrong so fast, so he turned to the short man, whose scars looked as if they might have just as easily been from fights as from some debilitating skin disease, and stuck out his hand. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Aleksandr Kimovich Bezetov. I just moved here.” He cast a bright smile, because in Okha, old women had always responded well to his smile. The men shot glances at one another and seemed to experience some collective facial twitching. It wasn’t eye-rolling, precisely, but Aleksandr was
seized by a frozen feeling that it meant something similar. He looked at the men and squinted. He tried to see in them signs of trouble, but they just looked like everyone else he’d seen on his way from the train station—underslept and vaguely hostile. The tall one was thin, but the other two looked simultaneously chubby and wanly malnourished, as though they’d had enough to eat of only one kind of food. The shortest one crouched down to the ground, revealing the haunches of a mustelid.

“I’m Ivan Dmietrivich Bobrikov,” said the thin one. “This is Nikolai Sergeyevich Chernov.”

“A pleasure,” said Nikolai from the ground.

“The sovok here is Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov,” said Ivan. “Where are you from?”

“Okha,” said Aleksandr. “In the east.”

“We know where Okha is,” said Nikolai. “We’re students of geography.”

“Geography?” said Aleksandr politely.

“Well, history,” said Ivan. He cracked his knuckles.

“Real history,” said Mikhail.

“Shut up, Misha,” said Ivan. He winked at Aleksandr as though they were adults looking over the head of a child. Aleksandr didn’t know what would be communicated by winking back, so he didn’t. “And why are you here, tovarish?” said Ivan.

In the center of the crowd, a man was offering a tender eulogy for Stalin. His voice buckled and his nose turned bright red with emotion.

“To play chess,” said Aleksandr. “I have a place at the academy. I’m working with Andronov.”

“Oh yes? And what is a boy from Okha doing at the academy with Andronov?”

Aleksandr scratched his nose. “I was in his correspondence course first.”

“I see,” said Ivan. “You have a favorite player, then? You like Spassky?”

“He’s all right. He let himself be psychologically outmaneuvered by Fischer, though, in ’72. All the nonsense with the money and the late arrival.”

“That match was rigged by the Americans, though, am I right? They were controlling Spassky via chemical and electronic devices, yes?”

Aleksandr stared at Ivan. He had no idea what he was supposed to say to this. “No,” he said slowly. “No, I don’t think so.”

“And Rusayev? You’re an admirer, surely, of Rusayev?”

“He’s a bore.”

“A bore!”

“He would’ve lost to Fischer, too, if Fischer hadn’t gone crazy.”

“The Americans should still have the World Championship, you’re saying?”

“Well, I don’t know about should. I’m just saying they would.”

“Hm,” said Ivan. “Interesting ideas you have. Is that all you brought with you?” He eyed Aleksandr’s bag. “Meager possessions. The sign of a strong commitment to the Party.”

Aleksandr didn’t like that Nikolai was still crouching; it made him look as if he was about to pounce.

“I have some other things in my building,” said Aleksandr. “But I’m committed to the Party.” It was nice to say a familiar phrase in a strange city.

“I’ll bet,” said Ivan, producing a piece of paper and a pen from somewhere inside his enormous black coat. He held the pen’s cap between his teeth and wrote something down. “Here.” He handed Aleksandr a piece of paper, and Aleksandr squinted at it. “Café Saigon,” said Ivan. “Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

“No,” said Aleksandr apologetically. He was forever having to confess to not having heard of things, not having known things, not having done things. It was tiresome.

“It’s on the corner of Nevsky and Vladimirsky. It’s the building that always looks like it’s under construction. We’re pretty much always there, since our flat really doesn’t have heat. Stop by sometime, if you like. Everyone else there is always talking about music, but we can talk geography.”

Aleksandr stared at him. “Isn’t geography sort of a settled field?”

“Less than you might think, turns out.”

“Well,” said Aleksandr. “All right.” He awkwardly held the paper
in one hand and his small backpack in the other. In the square, a tinny recording of the national anthem was starting to play. Aleksandr tried to turn to face it, but Ivan caught him by the shoulder.

“By the way,” said Ivan. “Are you any good? At chess, I mean.”

“Oh. Yes. I’m maybe starting to be.”

“You came to Leningrad to find out?” said Nikolai.

“Yes.” This was embarrassing: something about admitting out loud that he’d moved across the continent to determine his skill level at a game seemed outlandishly childish, as though he’d told them that he’d run away to find something he saw in a dream.

“Good,” Nikolai said. In the waning light, his spotted face looked like some sort of environmental catastrophe. “That’s good. Leningrad is where you find out what you are made of, yes? What you can stand.”

The men laughed. “Yes,” said Misha. “That’s true. Tell me, tovarish, what can you stand?”

Aleksandr twisted the paper in his hands. “I don’t know.” The anthem was reaching its bombastic conclusion now, and lyrics about scarlet banners and deathless ideals went sailing over Aleksandr’s head.

“Don’t worry,” Ivan said, putting his pen back in his pocket. “You’ll find out.”

And Aleksandr did find out. He could stand, it turned out, quite a lot: he wasn’t particularly bothered by the communal bathrooms, the thin walls, the lack of privacy. He had nothing to guard: no lovers, no secrets, no deviations from the politically acceptable. In Okha, he’d lived with a mother and little sisters who took no interest in him; here, he sometimes dreamed of having a dark, mysterious question at the center of his life. The kommunalki were designed to collapse families, flatten out intimacies, make everybody the keeper of each other’s secrets until those secrets became shallow and harmless. Soon Aleksandr knew far more about his neighbors than he cared to—if the door handle was turned down, the neighbor was out; if the slippers were gone, he was in for the night; if a man came back to his wife after an absence, it was expected that the neighbors would take the children. Everybody walked around half dressed—the women with their pale legs slipping in and out of their bathrobes, the men wearing stained undershirts as they
boiled potatoes. Everybody stole one another’s food—gelid and anonymous items left on the stove would be quickly, quietly consumed—and during the month without hot water, the women took to setting pots to boil in the kitchen and bathing right there without closing the door. Aleksandr heard even more than he saw—the crying of infants and drunks and lovers and widows—and sometimes he wanted to make some noise back: make people stop their screaming for a moment and wonder at what was going on in
there
. But his evenings were silent. He drank tea and read his chess books and chopped time into little tolerable increments until he thought he might be able to sleep.

Days were not much better. He registered at the chess academy and started work with Andronov, the instructor who’d heard of Aleksandr from his eastern scouts and summoned him across the continent, making the trip possible through contacts and bribes and veiled threats. In the months before his departure, Aleksandr and his family had taken to regarding Andronov as a terrible destroying angel who’d capriciously chosen Aleksandr for an awesome, elevating, all-consuming challenge. So it was nearly heretical to admit that Andronov was a disappointment: he was a short man with a thick neck, as it turned out, and he spat involuntarily when he spoke. At registration, Andronov took a perfunctory glance at Aleksandr, a slightly longer look at his papers, and said, “You may go. You will play number eleven.” Aleksandr took his damp papers and went where Andronov pointed. Number 11 was a surly, pimply-faced youth from Irkutsk. Number 11’s pimples encouraged Aleksandr to think that he might also need a friend, but that was a mistake. Aleksandr’s questions after their first match were met with withering thirty-second silences followed by monosyllabic answers. Aleksandr found he did not need friends so badly.