A Partial History of Lost Causes (36 page)

“This thing thinks, right? It just thinks faster. It’s what—algorithms, right? I don’t know, it’s not my area. Anyway, they want you to play it.”

“Should I?”

“Of course. Can’t you beat it?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a pile of tubes. You’re the greatest living chess player in the world. I’m sure these kids at MIT who made it are smart, but it’s going to be a game of Tetris for you, right?”

“Probably. How should I know?”

There was a pause. “When you were a younger man, you know, I don’t think you would have hesitated.”

Aleksandr went to the picture window. Outside, the St. Petersburg sky was ensconced in folds of blues and grays, masking all the new construction projects, the new billboards, the new fruits of what was fast becoming a new kleptocracy. It was the future. They wanted him to play a computer. Aleksandr would not have hesitated when he was a younger man, but he was no longer a younger man.

“It’ll be a disaster if I lose,” he said.

“It’ll be publicity if you lose. But you won’t lose.”

“I don’t know.”

“Aleksandr,” said Petr Pavlovich merrily. Aleksandr could almost hear him smiling. “You forget you’re the world champion. Have a little confidence.”

Aleksandr would remember the game much as he’d remember the entire decade, when he remembered it at all, which was rarely. It came
back distorted, in fragments—the puckered cheeks of the man who stood in for the computer, inflating and deflating with distraught little breaths; the silence of the crowd—still, then suspenseful, then stunned. Afterward, there was the astonished grimace of Petr Pavlovich—he’d often been surprised by Aleksandr, but never this way. Then there was the gleeful chattering of the MIT people, the Internet enthusiasts, the tech reporters—the triumphalism, everybody buzzing happily about this brand-new kind of apocalypse. Aleksandr knew—even as he was playing, even as he was losing, even as he was taking the limousine back to his apartment—that he’d have to approach this evening in the same way that he’d approached his marriage. He would try not to think about it. He would try not to remember its details, its sequences, its accumulated humiliations.

Nina had been following online, and when he got home, he caught her, feet curled up under her, silk nightgown shimmering in the moonlight (Nina owned so much silk that he wondered whether she had an entire silkworm army somewhere in the closet)—and he knew that she’d been poring over the results, the analysis, the obsessive online speculation. She might not understand the details, but the tone—the headline, the upshot—was inevitably clear.

“I’m sorry, Aleksandr.” She closed the computer quickly.

“Yes.” He beelined for the cabinet and poured whiskey into a water glass.

“I really am.”

Aleksandr considered ice, then rejected it. “I really am, too.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

He did not want to tell her about it. He did not want to tell anyone about it. He did not even want to tell himself about it in his own head. The people who had watched had understood. What was there to say about it? Nobody would ever beat that thing. Nobody would ever again do sums on an abacus. And could he be sorry? What kind of person could be sorry to watch history march forward, and progress be attained, and problems be solved? Yes, yes, there was some romance lost when they mapped the entire globe, but still. You couldn’t root against it; that was like wishing that all the tiny villages of the world would keep their untranslatable, useless languages and their horrific
hygiene practices just so we could all go and look and think that they were authentic and quaint. Aleksandr had an ego but not that kind of ego. He would not demand that the world know less so that he could know the most.

“You look awful,” said Nina.

He poured another whiskey. “I’m fine.”

“You look like you’re about to kill yourself.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Or me.”

“Never fear.”

Nina went to the couch and produced a nail file from somewhere on her person. Aleksandr poured a third glass. On the couch, Nina commenced vigorous filing, and he watched her for a few moments. He never understood how she managed not to start filing her actual fingers. Aleksandr sat down at the computer.

Nina looked up. “You don’t need to look at that stuff about the game.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You really don’t.”

“I really wasn’t.

“There’s some stuff on there you don’t want to see.”

“Christ, Nina,” Aleksandr roared. “I know.”

She looked at him, eyes brimming with emotion. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Nina look sorry for him. He knew he did not like it.

“Really, Alyosha,” she said. “It’s only a game.”

There was a détente then—there must have been. Some benumbed years, an admission of estrangement that resulted, oddly, in more kindness. Once he stopped trying to make Nina his wife, he could better appreciate her as a friend of a sort; a person to enjoy spending money on and with. There are as many ways for a marriage to work as there are ways for a marriage to fail, and theirs, he thinks now, was working. He knows because he is sure—absolutely sure—that on the day of the bombing, he was gazing at Nina with fondness.

It was the tail end of August 1999, and they were spending the weekend in Moscow with some friends of Nina’s. He’d been waiting
for Nina to finish trying on shoes at a store in Manezh. He was standing outside the shop and watching her through the window—he could see the slight sour curve of her frown as she pressed her porcelain heel into some punishing scrap of footwear—and he knows that things must have been going better for them because he remembers admiring her, thinking how beautiful she was, how proud he was to have an exacting wife who knew what she wanted in a shoe. Striated light came sieving through the big picture windows. Nearby, a little girl shrieked on a small plastic indoor ride—it was a blue bewhiskered walrus that moved slowly up and down—and Aleksandr felt that the world was well. They were headed out that night to a sushi dinner, followed by an evening at a club, and Aleksandr was already looking forward to his sashimi and his buzz. Inside the store, the light caught Nina’s red hair, and it glinted nearly gold. “Mama, Mama, Mama, it’s a walrus!” said the little girl on the ride.

And then somehow half the building was gone. The light was nuclear, the roar cyclonic—and all of it, all of it, seemed to come several moments after Aleksandr had shattered his clavicle on the ground. Nina staggered out of the store, still wearing her unpurchased shoe. Next to him, the little girl from the ride was missing most of her hand. Her mouth was open in what must have been a howl, and Aleksandr had crept halfway to her, his chest a crucible of pain, before he realized that he could not hear.

His hearing was restored within the day, and the little girl lived, and only one person died that day. They went back to St. Petersburg, and Aleksandr turned on the television to watch what would happen next.

Buynaksk was hit a week later, then Moscow once more, and Volgodonsk—malls, highways, apartment buildings. At the apartments, the timers went off at night to maximize civilian casualties. The government announced the Volgodonsk bombing two days before it happened, which Aleksandr found personally insulting: a government conspiracy, if indeed this was, should at least be executed with more care. “Are you watching this, Nina?” Aleksandr yelled from the couch, and winced. It still hurt to breathe. “Are you paying attention to this at all?”

“What is it, Aleksandr? Do you need more codeine?”

From the couch, Aleksandr’s collarbone healed, but he kept sitting, and he kept watching. He watched the blaming of the Chechens; he watched the commencement of the second Chechen war. He watched the pro-war party sail to the Duma, and Putin—Yeltsin’s invertebrate-smug prime minister, that mere lieutenant-colonel in the KGB—sail to the presidency. He watched the suspension of regional elections.

“Aleksandr.” Nina coughed. “Don’t you think you might like to get out for some exercise?”

Aleksandr hated Putin with a hatred that felt personal. When he remembered the others—Brezhnev and the decrepit, staggering parade of geriatrics thereafter—he didn’t remember a feeling so urgent as his hatred for Putin. Putin’s first act in office was to restore the Soviet national anthem. When Aleksandr heard the song again, after a nine-year gap, he saw Elizabeta walking down the aisle, applauded by bureaucrats, and he almost threw up.

“Aleksandr,” said Nina. “Do you think you’re taking all this a little too seriously?”

After the bombing—after seeing the little girl’s blue penguin shirt streaked with arterial blood, and after crawling to her across a ruined marble floor—he felt less tolerant of his own life. Nina cajoled him into returning to his old ways, but they didn’t take. The caviar stuck in his throat. The nights out seemed empty. He found himself thinking more and more about Ivan and how Ivan would have lived, if he’d lived. Ivan wouldn’t have spent a decade in strenuous appeasement of the regime. Ivan wouldn’t have spent the budding years of democracy slowly poaching in hot tubs, one indifferent young woman on each arm. Every morning Aleksandr arose and looked at himself in the mirror and tried to remember who he’d been when he’d been brave.

His friends—his rich friends, who still enjoyed their caviar—told him that if he was so bothered by it all, he should throw his weight behind the fledgling pro-reform movement. He was a national hero, after all, an icon of chess, which was purer than religion and more elegant than sport. He had money. If he had ideas, he might make himself a figure. Did he have ideas?

He did have ideas, though they were vague—he was pro-business, anti-corruption, pro-transparency, pro–civil liberties. He was a capitalist.
He was a realist. But at first he wanted to support an umbrella network of oppositional groups—believing that a robust opposition was the initial and most necessary step—and he started by contacting anyone who was willing to be publicly defiant, including earnest reformers, conspiracy theorists, quacks, and leftist loonies. At early meetings, he’d regularly see pictures of Trotsky fluttering alongside posters quoting Milton Friedman. They called it Alternative Russia.

“I don’t like them smoking in the house,” said Nina.

At first, all they did was talk. They agreed that the post-Communist kleptocracy was only marginally better, in some ways, than the teetering incompetence of late-stage Communism—and in other ways, it was perhaps worse. They agreed that the regime’s indifference was so callous that it could hardly be called indifference at all. As time passed, Putin gave them more to talk about. After the bombings came the sailors abandoned on the
Kursk
, a nuclear submarine that sank quietly in the Barents Sea during Putin’s first summer in office. Later, it was clear from the notes they wrote on their bodies that some of them had lived for days, while the Kremlin insisted that they were already dead, while the offers of help from the Brits and the Norwegians were ignored, while Putin continued his vacation on the beach.

Then there were the theatergoers in the fall of 2002, dead in a horrifically botched hostage rescue attempt. They’d crawled out gagging from state-issued morphine and died in the snow when the Kremlin didn’t think to call any ambulances. Aleksandr talked about this in Alternative Russia meetings. He also talked about it quite a bit outside them.

“Stop talking about this stuff all the time,” said Nina. “You’re being morbid.”

“I’m not morbid. Life is morbid. Reality is morbid. Our governmental system is morbid.”

“If I hear you refer to our ‘governmental system’ one more time, I’m going to die of boredom.”

“Please don’t let me stop you.”

In 2004 came the school siege at Beslan: the children held hostage for days, then killed when the government stormed the school with tanks and thermobaric weapons. A year later, the parents of the dead children went to Moscow to demand their own arrest—they’d voted
for Putin, they said, and thus were culpable for the murders of their children.

Though Aleksandr was keen at calculation—at weighing the consequences of rational self-interest—he could never quite understand any of it. What was in it for the state to watch hundreds vomit and die in the elegant Moscow streets, to let sailors write goodbyes on their bodies and choke to death on their own carbon dioxide? There was ineptitude, yes, but it was hard to believe that was all: it was a murderous apathy that amounted to sadism. It reminded Aleksandr of how, when the infant mortality rate had grown troubling under Communism, the Party had decided to simply subsidize more births.