A Partial History of Lost Causes (42 page)

“One moment,” said Aleksandr.

The American took off her hat, which made her hair stand straight up. “
Zdryastvuytye
,” she said poorly, which made Aleksandr wince.

“Please,” said Aleksandr. “I’ve been speaking Russian long enough that this hurts me.”

Later, he wouldn’t be sure what had made him hire her, exactly. It wasn’t pity, although he couldn’t help but feel an inexplicable lurch of empathy for her; it wasn’t that she was smart (although she was) or that she was beautiful (because she wasn’t). It was, he finally decided, the way she’d asked about Elizabeta, and the way she seemed to stumble her way into understanding something profound about him while he sat there and watched. He rationalized that it was a good quality in an employee: an ability to infer, to piece together a narrative, to take imaginative leaps into the psychology of others. And he had no doubt that she could competently fix the press releases (although Viktor, who’d studied at Oxford, could do just as well). But really, deep
down, he hadn’t hired her for her fluent English. He hadn’t hired her to type or proofread or copyedit. He’d hired her to sit around and keep him company in his only undiscovered secret.

In the evening—once the army of typers and talkers had left, and Aleksandr had eaten his dinner of vegetables and high-end fish, and the sky out the living-room window had turned the color of a mostly healed bruise—Nina clacked against the oak floors and started up some tea. Aleksandr often came across Nina’s array of multicolored teas in the cupboards—strange tinctures beyond the realm of his understanding, usually involving obscure Latin American tubers—and they were the only evidence in the kitchen, he often thought, that Nina was a carbon-based life-form, requiring consumption for survival.

She waved a malodorous tea bag at his face. “Do you want some of this?” she said, although he had never once accepted her offer.

“No, thank you,” said Aleksandr. “What’s this one do?”

“It’s for digestion.”

“What do you have to digest? You don’t eat.”

“I eat plenty,” said Nina tiredly. “How was your meeting with the strange American?”

“It was fine.”

“Oh?”

“I hired her.”

“You what?”

“I hired her,” he said. “I’m going to coopt her, you know? It makes sense.”

Nina’s water started to boil, and she poured it over her tea leaves. A bitter smell flushed up, acrid and assaulting, and Aleksandr stepped away. “You’re going to pay her?” said Nina.

“She says she doesn’t need money. I’ll give her something nominally.”

“That’s very odd.” Nina took a sip of her tea. “What if she’s spying on you?”

Aleksandr had considered this. But after thirty years of paranoia—of seeing spies in corners, and ghosts in shadows, and murder in public
transportation, and conspiracy in terrorism—he felt sure that she was not.

“What if
you’re
spying on me?” he said, and tugged at Nina’s hair.

“Grib, stop,” she said. “I just blow-dried it.”

That night—again, and he hoped it didn’t suggest a trend—Aleksandr couldn’t sleep. In bed, with Nina silent beside him, he tried to keep his legs from thrashing. He took deep breaths, but they caught somewhere behind his uvula, stirring little tides of anxiety, eddying over deep pools of energy. He wanted to go to Moscow. He wanted to run a marathon. He wanted, he realized, to get out of the apartment.

For a time, even in recent years, Aleksandr still occasionally went walking. But like American heads of state who insist on taking exercise outside, he was always trailed by a small army of his black-suited security staff. It was tiresome for him, and boring for them, and nothing in the way of freedom or reflection could be achieved. So in the last few years he’d mostly stopped. His universe had become this apartment—tastefully decorated (that was all Nina) and carefully managed, his toast and tea ready for him at five-fifteen in the morning, his afternoon espresso steaming hot at four, his laptop blinking an aquatic blue in the dark, whirling him into contact with the universe. Living in this apartment was like living in a museum, he sometimes thought, everything so immaculately clean, the objects chosen and placed with the care of a curator. Each room had a different unobtrusively pleasant smell—lemon in the kitchen, lavender in the bedroom, some sort of oceanic wind that made him sneeze in the bathroom. He walked the apartment end to end some nights, and when he put his foot down in that forgiving white carpeting, he could smell the rawness of Sakhalin dirt. In his sublime, epic, multilayered bed, he could feel the lethal cold of his room in the kommunalka.

No wonder, then, that he sometimes woke up choking on something that felt like fear. Sometimes he couldn’t quite stand it—the subtle ostentation, the supernatural calm, the fucking
order
of it all, like a planned economy.

He sat up. He got out of bed and put on his coat over his pajamas,
and he put on his running shoes—bought as a Christmas present by Nina, who had grinned and pinched at his hefty trunk—and he punched in the security code at the doorway, blinking a subterranean green, and he found himself outside on the sidewalk. He tried to remember the last time he’d been out alone. There were some early acts of rashness, before the ear came through the window, and there had been a few moments of defiance since then. He’d sneaked out early one forgotten anniversary, when he knew there was no time to order something, and he’d been proud of his romanticism—risking life and limb to get his wife a diamond bracelet. Had she worn it? He couldn’t remember.

The cool of the morning air, the squeak of the snow under his shoes—they were quickly soaked, and a gangrenous ache started climbing up his calves—reminded him of those painfully cold mornings back in the early eighties when he’d run about the city before dawn started melting across the sky, free in his shrinking anonymity. He could envy this strange American woman, almost, and whatever wound had made her leave her country alone and come here to work for him for free. Whatever it was, whatever it had broken in her, it had also broken the mechanism that was small, that huddled, that took tiny steps and looked behind shoulders.

In the distance, Aleksandr could almost see the inky spines of the modern office buildings, the peeling gilt of the moldering palaces, the slate-colored twist of the Neva. No one knew he was out, and under his heavy hat he might walk around unrecognized for hours. He’d spent years risking everything for the major freedoms—the right of the people to vote, to buy and sell, to cruelly caricature their leaders. But there was the small thing, too, of walking unsupervised through the snowy streets. Aleksandr headed down Nevsky Prospekt. The bakeries were just starting to open, and light came bleeding through the windows of Kazan Cathedral. Aleksandr turned down Naberezhnaya reki Moiki. In the dour crepuscular light, the Moika looked like aluminum. Soon Nina would be waking up and climbing on the treadmill, and maybe she’d wonder where he was, and maybe soon she’d start to worry. Maybe she’d leave two messages on his cell phone, curt
and exasperated, and maybe the third would open up into something long and pleading and tender. Maybe she’d call Vlad, and maybe he’d take a car out and track Aleksandr’s muddy sneaker-prints across the city. But for now Aleksandr was safe from all of that. For now he was out in the world: alone, the wind carving up his lungs, his city a little closer with every step.

A
leksandr was brilliant, of course. Anybody could see that, and everybody did. But he wasn’t quite as I’d imagined him, or maybe it’s more accurate to say he wasn’t quite as I imagine my father had imagined him. When the maid set down his afternoon espresso, Aleksandr never thanked her—he rarely even looked up. When his colleagues disappointed him, he snapped at them; when he heard something he deemed stupid, he raised an eyebrow with such withering contempt that all talk in the room ground to a halt. The apartment was absurd: it was as decadent as Versailles, with an endless supply of dumb little contraptions intended to make life easier than it should be—an appliance that simultaneously toasted your English muffin and fried your eggs, bottles of perfume with wood stems for all-day fresh fragrance. And the marriage was exactly as Viktor had described it. It was the kind of marriage that embarrasses everybody by its transparency—all of its petty dynamics and long-standing resentments were obvious in the way that Nina handed Aleksandr his espresso and the way his eyes followed her out of a room. Aleksandr’s colleagues respected him—and more than a few of them were in awe
of him—but Nina’s departures were always followed by a tense, soggy moment when everybody looked down at their papers and tried not to show their pity. I didn’t spend a lot of time speculating about it. Marriages fall apart so often, and in so many different, excruciating ways, that trying to sort out the particularities of anybody’s is like trying to unspool the proximate cause of death of a person with no immune system. Though at times there was an edge of fatigue in Aleksandr’s eyes, or an ironic twist to his words, that made me think of Elizabeta and the way he’d looked when he heard her name.

But then it’s possible I was just projecting. Everybody likes a story about love long gone. When I thought of Jonathan—if I thought of Jonathan—he came back in flashes, on mute, through static. Our time together had taken on the surreal dimensions of a dream or a childhood.

I took to keeping longer and longer hours at Aleksandr’s, since there was nothing impelling me toward anything else. I got the sense that Viktor and Boris were similarly situated—they were the kind of young people who probably slept on half-deflated mattresses, who kept their books in a pile and their appliances unassembled. They seemed to be living the refugee life of students who haven’t yet learned that they’re supposed to find meaning in things, not just ideas.

But even though I started spending long days in Aleksandr’s apartment—twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours, stumbling ever later out into the bitter dark, ringing the door and being buzzed into the hostel, receiving looks from the man at the front desk that ranged from disapproval to indifference to knowing amusement—Aleksandr and I spoke no further about my father. Sometimes he’d walk toward me with a look of determination, and I’d be almost sure that he’d found something—my father’s original letter, perhaps, or some conclusive answer to my father’s questions, or some magic strength to live and to die. But he didn’t. He handed me no answers. What he handed me instead were press releases, drafted e-mails, rally posters. Gruesome numbers about the bombings: the 300 dead, the 108 buildings destroyed, the hundreds of Chechens detained, the seventeen who were ultimately found guilty. They were the kind of facts that make one self-conscious about the search for illumination. Which was a good thing, since none
was forthcoming. Weeks passed, in fact, before Aleksandr and I had another proper conversation.

It was late, and I was about to reluctantly leave for the day. I’d been retranslating an editorial for a British newspaper, and I waved it at Aleksandr. “There’s that,” I said. He was sitting at his laptop. On the picture window behind him, I could see the reflection of a game of online chess. On the table sat an actual set—expensive, probably, ancient-looking and beautiful. I wondered about that. I had never seen him play.