A Partial History of Lost Causes (23 page)

Ivan seemed to tolerate Aleksandr’s visits with an attitude ranging from bemused indifference to near-fondness. Although Ivan lived alone, too, something about his apartment didn’t seem to register or reflect loneliness. Maybe it was the cat, or the books, or the constant copying and researching and typing, or the ongoing hostile conversation with the radio, or the phenomenal number of journals that Ivan somehow acquired—
Sovest’
, the pro-Communist Leningrad newspaper;
America
, the U.S. government’s propaganda organ;
Woman and Russia
, the first and, as far as Aleksandr knew, only feminist samizdat. However he did it, Ivan seemed to live in the very center of his own life—not around the margins, at an awkward distance, never quite knowing where to look.

When Aleksandr reached Ivan on the last night, he was sitting in front of his tiny television, jotting notes for the next issue while watching a miniseries. The syncopated antics of the actors were a little frantic, a little desperate. Still, Ivan slapped his bony knee and smiled and
offered Aleksandr a swig of vodka. The cat vibrated as loudly as the typewriter. On the television, through the static, came broad misunderstandings and wild stereotypes and unfortunate physical mishaps. It was an almost homey feeling, like some of Aleksandr’s better nights in Okha, before his father died, when he was very small. Aleksandr caught himself thinking such thoughts and straightened up, cracked his neck, and swigged his vodka. Sometimes he felt as though Ivan could hear him thinking, and he didn’t want Ivan to hear him thinking that.

“Are we going to include the Lithuanian, then?” said Aleksandr.

Ivan shrugged. “We probably will. Despite the objections of our dear friend Nikolai Sergeyevich.”

On the television, a grim-faced man was falling-down drunk. His frantic, coarse-faced wife made hapless efforts to conceal it as she served dinner to a well-dressed man and his wife.

“Why doesn’t Nikolai want to use the Lithuanian?” asked Aleksandr.

“Kolya is a continued mystery to me.” Ivan barked a brief laugh at the television. “He is a man of many strong, inarticulate opinions.”

On the television, the drunk man looked queasy and doubled over in the direction of the well-dressed man’s shoes. The wife screamed. Ivan laughed.

“He thinks it’s too provocative,” said Ivan. “Don’t involve the Baltics, that’s what he’s always said. He thinks it’s one step too far. But what does he know? He’s not exactly running the show, is he? Not exactly a creative driving force, huh?” He stood up and started to pace, running his fingers along the stacks of books and papers. “He keeps the records, he incurs the risks. But he doesn’t really care. Nikolai Sergeyevich is my friend, but I’ll tell you this: he’d get caught up in whatever it was that surrounded him. He’s a radical in search of a cause. We’re only lucky it’s ours.”

Aleksandr thought about this. Outside, the snow was making feathery white fingers against the window. Pieces flew away into the orbit of the streetlight, spinning slowly and turning the color of embers.

“So,” said Ivan after a moment. “I hear your girl got married?”

“Yes.” Something about looking out the window at the snow made him not mind as much; it was like being able to control the pain of some gruesome internal injury by keeping impossibly, inhumanly still.

“Better to him than to you, though.”

Aleksandr dragged his gaze away from the snow. “What do you mean?”

“With a girl like that, it’s better to stay one of her regrets. Better to stay on that side of the ledger, you know? You don’t want to be the man standing between her and her ghosts. You want to be one of the ghosts.”

“Maybe,” said Aleksandr, and he thought he could like that formulation. Right now, maybe, he was standing in the back of Elizabeta’s head, etched in black and white, flickering like a hologram, muted and waving. Right now, maybe, at this very moment, they were haunting each other.

Ivan sat down, jostling the sofa and scattering his papers. “You haven’t lived in a place unless you have at least one major regret there,” he said. Aleksandr experienced a charge in the air, a flash of prekinetic energy, and wondered if Ivan would say something about it. The moment passed, and Ivan sat back and pounded Aleksandr on the shoulder. “So welcome to Leningrad officially, tovarish.”

Aleksandr was about to sarcastically thank him when the comedy program cut out, the television hissing to a black-and-white buzz before crackling back to life. When the image rematerialized, the comic actors were gone, replaced by a somber and dark-clad newscaster who unleashed a spattering of language like rubber bullets on an unruly mob.

“Why are they doing that?” said Aleksandr.

“Shh.” Ivan clicked up the volume and stood close to the television.

“What is it?” The newscaster was introducing a program about Stalin’s strategic genius during World War II.

“Shh.” Ivan’s eyeball was almost against the screen. “Be quiet.” Together they listened, but the newscaster was only expounding on the glories of the Russian nation.

“That’s very strange,” said Aleksandr.

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Brezhnev’s dead.”

“Did they say that?” Aleksandr wondered if maybe he’d missed something. He listened harder.

“No,” said Ivan. “But look at how he’s dressed. Look at his expression. Why are they cutting in to a comedy program with this pseudo-historical shit?”

There was a sheen of panic to the newscaster’s expression, Aleksandr noticed. Something dark and knowing seemed to bob to the surface of his face from time to time before being forced down again.

“He’s dead,” said Ivan. “I would bet on it.” He stood up and started pacing the room, swinging his head slightly, like an annoyed horse. He clasped his hands behind his back. “Well.” He stopped walking, swore in victory, and started walking again. “Well. This is going to be interesting.”

“Are we covering it? Before it’s announced?”

“We’ll start, anyway. It won’t stay unannounced forever. A week, tops, I’d say. But they’ll want to get succession sorted out in quiet.”

Aleksandr nodded and looked out the window again. The snow was coming in quicker currents, crystalline spirals that swirled tighter and tighter until he felt almost dizzy. He wondered what would be coming next.

“The funeral is going to be something,” Ivan was saying. “They’ll really do it up right. It will be the greatest show they’ve put on for a while. The security will be very, very tight.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

Ivan looked almost dreamy. His eyes were becoming iron-colored in the low light; his expression was stricken and oracular, as though he were seeing through Aleksandr and all the way into the forbidding future.

“Alyosha,” he said. “We’re going to paper the city.”

Walking back from Ivan’s, Aleksandr did a minor dance in the street. When the news was announced, public celebration would be unthinkable. But now, before the news was out, he could whirl around in the snow without worry—he could cheer, and hoot, and throw fistfuls of snow that came back down at him in sparks and made him
shiver. There was nothing to celebrate, really, he knew that. There was another Brezhnev after Brezhnev, and another Brezhnev after that. But for the moment there was no Brezhnev, and Aleksandr was one of the only ones who knew. He careened and skidded, stamped muffled boot-prints into the snow. The stars looked sharper in the wintertime. The darkness, which was so complete and came so early, made the salt stains of light in the sky more luminous.

Aleksandr considered what Ivan had said about regrets—how they tied us to a place, made us belong there. Aleksandr wondered what Ivan’s one major regret was. He’d meant to ask him, but the television had cut in so quickly, and the moment had passed.

He pressed his bare hands into the snow until his forearms ached. He did flamboyant kicks in the air. Drivers of white Volgas, if any were passing, remarked without interest that there was a very drunk man on the sidewalk.

The knock came a few nights later. It was the middle of the night, and for a half-dreamed moment Aleksandr thought it was Elizabeta again—until he remembered that she’d moved out and that she didn’t knock like that, anyway, with meaty, demanding knuckles scraping against the door. The next moment he thought he’d been evicted—maybe the steward had learned of his involvement with
A Partial History of Lost Causes
and had decided that the risks were too high, there were children in the building, idiot, didn’t he know anything? She’d come to run him out of the building in the night, giving him a head start in the damp darkness, in case anybody was already after him. Maybe she’d throw his things out after him, socks and suitcase making a haphazard chessboard against the white snow.

But the knocking grew louder and more frantic and then he knew: he was fucked. It was KGB at the door, and they were coming to kill or bribe or break him, and any of the three would be easy to do.

But it wasn’t. It was Nikolai, hunched in the darkness like a creature.

“Let me in,” he choked. “For fuck’s sake, let me in.”

Aleksandr did, and Nikolai half fell into the room. He was shivering, though he was generally not the shivering type. Aleksandr backed
away, and Nikolai staggered toward the bed, where he sat—crunching Aleksandr’s sheets underneath him, smearing dirty snow on the bed—and spent a moment breathing loudly. Aleksandr realized how much he did not want to ask Nikolai what was wrong.

“Well,” said Nikolai. “You might as well know that Ivan Dmietrivich is dead.”

“What?” Aleksandr found he couldn’t hear himself. “What?”

“He was hit by a bus.” Nikolai was still breathing far too loudly, with great desperate wheezes that seemed to arise from some horrible oxygen deprivation—as though he’d been held underneath the Neva far too long, or been cast out of his spaceship without a helmet and had banged on the window, clutched at the door, and turned pale and stricken as his lungs collapsed, his ears rang, his body understood. “Honestly,” he said. “Can’t you offer a man a drink?”

“What are you talking about? A bus? What are you saying?”

“A bus. You know? The large public transportation vehicles? Are you familiar? Misha is in the hospital.”

“They were both hit by a bus? The same bus?”

“They were drunk. It was late. You know how much they drink.”

“This just happened?”

“Yes, it just happened.” Nikolai’s breathing was becoming more hysterical than seemed appropriate for his heft. “I don’t usually come visit you in the middle of the night, do I? I don’t usually find myself unable to sleep without a good-night from you, do I? Why would I come here now if it hadn’t just happened?”

“A bus? At night?”

Nikolai glared at Aleksandr. “It was a night bus.”

“What happened to the driver?”

“What?”

“Was he arrested? Where he is now? How did he manage to hit two people with his fucking bus?”

Nikolai blinked at Aleksandr. “It was late. They were very drunk, as I said. It wasn’t really a discussion.”

He was quiet, and then asked Aleksandr for water so wearily and pleadingly that Aleksandr found himself walking down the hall with one of his cleaner chipped cups, filling it with the water that always
tasted vaguely of blood and metal and sardines, and walking back and offering it to Nikolai. They sat on Aleksandr’s bed, on the sheets that would never get warm again tonight after being turned out so long in the midnight chill. Then Nikolai began to talk.

They were coming out of the Saigon, Nikolai said, when it happened. Misha had been thrown twenty feet and was deposited on a dead bush, its frozen branches breaking underneath him and splintering his face. Ivan had been killed almost instantly, his legs and most of his internal organs cut underneath the front wheels of the bus. Aleksandr’s imagination hovered over the word “almost.” He couldn’t stand it. It made his own internal organs rebel and collapse, shrink away from the light, when he thought of it.

Misha would live. Nothing could kill Misha, Nikolai said, and attempted a laugh that sounded like a cough. Aleksandr didn’t laugh. He stared at a tea stain on the floor. Some remote part of his head wondered where it had come from. Had it been there always? Had Elizabeta noticed it? Had he done it himself one of these recent nights, after he’d come back from Ivan’s half drunk and half blind in the dark, too lonely to notice or care where his teacups landed when he scattered them? Next to him, Nikolai seemed to fade. He slumped down. His breathing became slow and shallow. Aleksandr thought he might be falling asleep.

He could almost see it. The two of them stepping into the street, the biting gray slush kicking up into their ankles, the bus a dull yellow ambush. There was something too terrible about dying in a busy street with snow that was unclean and overused. Ivan deserved to die in great shoals of clean white snow, drifted and ridged like salt from an evaporated sea. He deserved better than to die in the exhaust from inefficient vehicles, in an alley between stalls that sold bloodied fish and rotten potatoes during the day. But that was how it had been, Nikolai said, and Aleksandr’s imagination had never been such a liability as it was the night after Ivan died: he could see him, jaw unhinged, his face a melting mask, his expression otherworldly and, for the first time in Aleksandr’s imagination, afraid.