A Partial History of Lost Causes (25 page)

He took the train up to Moscow alone, standing up sideways in the hallway, since all the cars were full, and watching the engineer
tap the wheels for metal fatigue before the train pulled away from the station. Aleksandr wore a coat with another coat underneath. Under the second coat, he held twenty-five copies of the final issue of
A Partial History of Lost Causes
.

The metro in Moscow was choked with security. Men sat with their hats off, looking blankly through the windows into the whirring underground darkness. Underneath the subterranean chandeliers and light-drenched alcoves, everybody was wearing black.

Two streets from Red Square, he could hear the brass horns, too jaunty and bombastic for the occasion. He knew he couldn’t get close. There would be scores of gray-coated, grim-faced soldiers, red flags slung over their shoulders, their knees snapping in time together. They would be thronging toward the Kremlin, Brezhnev’s coffin squatting darkly in the center. In the Kremlin there would be heads of state, Arab nationalistic leaders in keffiyehs, African dictators in traditional garb. They would all bend their heads together, assuming expressions of reflection and loss.

Outside the moving stand of soldiers, there were mourners: nearest the center were the ones who’d been recruited and paid; nearer the outside were coils of genuine grievers, and curious passersby, and people who’d brought their children to see history, and people who just didn’t want to go home yet. Some of them looked positively gleeful—a small vial of something alcoholic was passed from hand to hand, and an old man spat gray expectorate on the ground every time Brezhnev’s name was mentioned. One woman wept openly, her face unfolding, rubbing her brown sleeves across the delicate skin under her eyes until her cheeks became inflamed, and saying, “He was a good man. He was a good man. What will become of us now?”

When the crowds parted from time to time, Aleksandr could catch snatches of the ceremony as it progressed: the gray-and-red-clad soldiers, the brass band, the gold-limned black coffin, which, from a distance, looked like a transatlantic steamship on a pitching sea. There was something callous in its ostentation, its forbidding elegance. Something so palatial didn’t seem to want to mourn as much as parade.

Aleksandr could feel the sheets pressed to his chest, absorbing the shock of his rapid heartbeats. He wasn’t sure how he should proceed.
Ivan had never done something this stupid—he’d always operated with the utmost discretion, with careful and obsessively confirmed lists made of the initial recipients. He let the pamphlets thread out of their own accord after the initial copies were distributed; other people copied them in twos and fives and sevens and passed them on to trusted friends. It was a diffusion of risk that way, he’d always said. Still, risks didn’t always get you killed. And precautions couldn’t always keep you safe.

Aleksandr stepped back from the crowd, letting the people become a seething mass of dark-colored coats that shivered and peered as one. The wind began to pick up, its icy fingers drumming against his spine and taking liberties with his pants. Dead leaves, the color of rust and flint, whipped along the ground. In the street skittered programs commemorating Brezhnev, his gloomy face gazing sternly from underneath his single monstrous eyebrow. Delicate plumes of snow materialized from nowhere and cast themselves through the air.

Aleksandr took out the papers. He waited. He could still hear the tinny clanging of the band, the thick thudding of feet stamping in unison against the cobblestones. The wind seized upon him with the aggression of a vengeful arctic ghost, and he felt himself let the papers fly. They whirled outward in four directions, spinning through the air like weather. They were beautiful as they caught on the wind—they looked like white long-winged birds, maybe, or shivering bridal veils. He knew that soon they would come back to earth to be muddied and ripped, tramped underfoot by men in heavy boots. But maybe a few people would be curious enough to pick them up.

He turned quickly to go, his two coats billowing out behind him and his lungs overwhelmed by the influx of air. It was descending into the particular kind of cold that belongs to a Russian late afternoon: the kind of cold that threatens, that intimidates, because it is going to get so much worse. And, at some distance, leaning against a streetlamp, was Nikolai.

Bits of snow were catching on sideways drafts to make eddies in the air. They were turning Nikolai’s hair white, Aleksandr would always remember, as though he were witnessing some supernatural shock. He was looking at Aleksandr. Aleksandr was almost sure of it. He stood
looking until the watching people started to disperse, propelled by the harsh pings of the national anthem, and he was engulfed by the thickening snow and the gathering crowds.

Aleksandr didn’t find Nikolai again. But once he went looking, he started seeing him everywhere.

A
nd then the summer was over, and I did not know where it had gone. There were listless courses around the city, respectful and silent visits to the chilly long-abandoned houses of great writers, voracious reading of the chronically postponed Russian classics. I wrote scraps of pointless poems on the backs of napkins. I developed a taste for tea. I practiced making Russian statements about what had happened in the past, about what would happen in the future, about what might happen and what should happen. I learned to properly decline my nouns. Around me, the leaves paled and fell, leaving stark black branches that forked against the snow. It grew cold, a kind of cold that made me understand that I’d never understood cold before this—certainly not in those shallow Boston winters, mitigated by the churning Atlantic, uncomfortably brusque but leaving you with just enough composure to walk upright, to look around, to admire the way the seagulls seemed to shiver and how the tufts of snow on all the trees made the city beautiful and ornate.

The cold, that winter in Russia—it was striking in its absoluteness, its bracing singularity. It was an astronomical cold, otherworldly and
menacing, and it left me bent, submissive, muttering curses to I don’t know who. But there was something I liked about it, too. There was some wisdom, it seemed, in coming to terms with the fact that there could be something beyond what felt like nothing. That there were realities outside of imagination.

The Neva marbleized and turned still. Through the frost, the moon grew three haloes. Attempts at communication—from my mother, from Claire—slowed and then staggered, like a relenting hemorrhage from a severed limb. They kept at it periodically—my in-box, when I bothered to check it at the Internet café, was peppered with pleas, rants, the odd attempt at normalcy, as though I could be tricked by feigned casualness into responding—though I didn’t answer. It was cruel. I know I was being cruel. But I didn’t have the energy not to be.

I felt myself growing passive and immobilized. The cold pinned me down; I could feel in my bones a fatigue, an oncoming frailty. I felt lucky for the chance I’d had to disappear from everyone else. I started to wonder if I hadn’t disappeared from myself a little, too.

I began writing to Jonathan, long-winded and inarticulate letters that I knew I’d never send. I talked to him about the beginning, about how the days after seeing him were always a little like heroin withdrawal, about the shaky, wrung-out feeling of having all the serotonin in your body explode and disappear at one burst. I said that he was a wholly singular occurrence in my life. I said that I wasn’t asking him to understand anything else, but I needed him to understand that. I said that he was the most implausible plot point in the fairly implausible narrative of my life. I said that we do not know ourselves, so how could we ever really know each other? I talked about biology and pair-bonding and pheromones. I talked about Rilke’s idea of love as the bordering of two great solitudes. I talked about the subject-object problem. I talked about the arbitrary mythology of romance, the post-Arthurian nonsense we still cling to, nationally and culturally. I talked about divorce rates. I talked about my mother’s metastatic grief. I talked about my own cellular, atavistic, visceral fear. I talked about suicide and how many Huntington’s patients commit suicide—usually once they’ve lost some mobility but before they’ve lost their minds. They wrestle themselves
into their cars to breathe in carbon monoxide; they shoot themselves in the head if they live in a state where that is easy to do. Their hands shake, their arms jerk. Sometimes they need to ask for help in this, their final act of independence. I told him that I had always known I was not cut out for terminal illness. I told him that I had always known about him, that the first time I’d seen him I’d known about him, that this was not just the retroactive sentimentalization of an ordinary day, that I had known. I told him that this was not possible. I told him that he was the single most beautiful human I had ever seen. I told him that this was due to uncontrollable evolutionarily wired neuron firings in my brain, my still-functioning brain. I told him I was sorry for what I was doing. I told him there was no such thing as free will. I told him I loved him. I told him there was no such thing as love.

I wandered the city—through the epic emptiness of Palace Square, past the filigreed willow-colored Winter Palace, to the rotunda of St. Isaac’s, spiking up through the mist. I walked to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood and stared at the gorgeous schizophrenia of its spires. I traced the canals and counted the houses, all done up in cupcake pastels. I walked past Kazan Cathedral, turning the color of manganese in the November light. I watched adolescent daughters walking hand in hand with their mothers. I watched the passersby in the metro bend down and actually give money to the beggar women.

I began to research Bezetov. As far as I could tell, his coalition, Alternative Russia, served as an umbrella organization that included several subgroups, such as Pomerancovo and Right Russia. Pomerancovo was apparently the more conventionally liberal of the two—pro-West, pro-trade, pro–civil liberties, pro-democracy, anti-corruption, pro-reform. Right Russia was a bit more complicated—they were reactionary, contrarian, uneasy with the status quo but with vague, slightly alarming ideas about what should be happening instead. They’d harnessed resentment from all corners, played on xenophobia and nationalism, and were as willing to exploit frustration with Central Asian workers as they were to exploit frustration with the regime. It wasn’t entirely clear to me why Alternative Russia counted Right Russia as an ally, though I stumbled across a YouTube video of Bezetov answering that exact
question—muttering something about the virtues of a broad tent, the power of a diverse coalition. A man named Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov headed up Right Russia. Further research revealed that their offices were located on Konyushennaya Ulitsa, a block from the Moika, where I went every day to throw coins.

I thought about going to see him. I walked by, and I walked by again, and I approached and examined the doorbell, just to make sure they had one, I told myself. I meandered past the windows, slowed down, looked in—expecting to see what? I wondered. Aleksandr Bezetov himself, at the office for some kind of intergroup summit, staring idly out the window and just hoping to be accosted by an aimless American? I caught glimpses of dour young people and the luminous glow of computers. I didn’t see Aleksandr Bezetov. Neither did I see Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov.