A Partial History of Lost Causes (45 page)

For the trip, Aleksandr loaned us a sleek black limousine the size of a boat. The seats were in a circle, so Viktor and Boris and I were forced to look at one another—or out the windows—the whole way. I opted mostly for the windows. We were meeting the soldier at a club, and Aleksandr had asked Nina to loan me a suitable garment for the excursion. What she’d given me was gauzy and orange and far too small; it stretched unbecomingly whenever I reached out my arms, so I kept them firmly at my sides. It was also too light for the weather, and I skimmed my thighs against the leather seats to keep them warm. Inside the car were bottles of high-end water, extracted from mysterious Siberian springs, and green bulbs of champagne. I felt alternately as though I were on my way to a wedding or a funeral. Viktor and Boris started to tell jokes somewhere around Novgorod Oblast.

“So Stalin comes to Putin in a dream,” said Viktor. “He says, ‘Putin, in order to maintain your power, you must do two things: paint the Kremlin green and kill all of your political enemies.’ Putin looks at him and says, ‘Why green?’ ”

“I’ve heard that one,” said Boris.

“You’ve heard them all, I suppose,” said Viktor.

“I think your mother told it to me in bed.”

The interviews that Viktor and Boris had collected so far had been wispy, insubstantial things—compelling for their human interest, but far from ironclad in their evidence. The interviewees told stories that had the haunting familiarity of myths, but in the end there was nothing terribly solid to be gained from them. We watched the interviews in the limousine’s DVD player as we drove. The first interview was
with a skittish female university student who wore harsh glasses over her delicate features and kept pulling her skirt down over her knees. She had heard two men talking under her window on the night before the first bombing—a low, flat voice insisting that it be placed
here
, not there. There had been a sound of scraping, and at first she’d taken it for an animal of some kind, but then there was more talk, the congested sound of a heavy man breathing, the retch of a curse.

Was that all? Boris asked from behind the camera. You could hear the disappointment in his voice.

The young woman blinked and adjusted her glasses. Yes, she said. That was all.

In the explosion, she’d lost her mother and her little brother, and it wasn’t for a few weeks—until the ringing in her ears had dulled and the meat-colored burns on her thighs had started to heal—that she’d remembered the men and remembered that their accent had not been Chechen.

The next interview was with an enormously fat woman whose eldest son had overheard something at a bar on the night before the attack. “Going to be a big day tomorrow?” someone had said, and then somebody else had laughed a little too cruelly. The woman’s son had told her this while he was in bed, trying to recover from the crushing of his spinal column, which he never did. He’d been a gymnast. When he learned he’d be paraplegic for life, he’d wrestled himself into a homemade noose, in a final feat of athleticism, and hanged himself.

She stared down the camera as she talked about it. The camera zoomed in on her. Tears sprouted in the edges of her eyes, but they didn’t spill over onto her cheeks. It was an affecting moment, emotionally. But her story didn’t mean much once you’d thought about it for thirty seconds.

The final interview was with an older man who was spritely, almost elfin. When the camera zoomed in on him, he resembled nothing more than a half-starved arctic fox. He talked about something he’d seen during the attacks: in the melee, amid the running and screaming and the tearing off of smoldering clothes, he’d seen a man standing against a tree. He’d thought the man was in some kind of shock, and
he’d started over to assist. But when he got closer, he’d seen that the man was smoking a cigarette and that his lips were twisted into an expression that could be interpreted as a smile. Our older man had turned away and gone to help a woman who lay flattened underneath a piece of cement window ledge.

Later, he told the camera, he’d thought about the man standing under the tree. He’d been there during the explosion, though it took the journalists thirty minutes to arrive, and it took the police nearly an hour. He’d worn a dark coat, and the most striking thing about him was his indifference.

The image of the man dissolved into blue, and Viktor turned off the DVD player. “It’s not very convincing, is it?” he said.

“It’s moving,” I said. “It’s heartrending, that’s for sure.”

“That’s not worth much. We don’t need to rend any more hearts.”

“It’s convincing if you’re looking to be convinced.”

“That’s the mark of a weak argument.”

We passed villages with damp-looking wooden houses, and I could almost feel the chill dripping from their ceilings, the drafts coming through the blocky walls. There were a few snatches of the romantic East, what you’d imagine if you were the kind to imagine this sort of thing: the spires of Orthodox churches spiking out of wintry mists, a sense of foreignness that stemmed not only from a dislocation of place but also, somehow, of time. There was a feeling of traveling not back or away but out—out on some kind of a Z axis, into a fairy-tale time that never, in fact, was real. My face must have reflected a certain dreaminess, because I caught Boris looking at me with an expression I recognized as contempt. “You think this is kind of romantic, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You do. I can tell. You think you are having a little adventure. Well, let me tell you something. This isn’t romantic, okay? And it’s not an adventure. This is severed heads in alleyways. I don’t know why you’re here, but this isn’t study abroad, okay?”

I nodded. I was surprised and a little numb—it was like the moment after a burn or a wounding, before your body has registered its pain. Maybe I would be a help, maybe I would not be, and I could understand
why my presence was resented. But I knew I was not on study abroad. This trip, whatever it was for, was not for the photographs or the postcards. It was not for anecdotes to tell on first dates, for souvenirs to show at dinner parties a decade in the future, for wisdom to tell to adult children going off on their own adventures. It wasn’t a matrix or a road map or a source of knowledge that would ever inform my future, as I didn’t seem likely to have one.

But there was no way to say any of this, and no reason that it would be convincing. It might be emotionally affecting, but that’s not the mark of a good argument—on this we can all agree. So I said nothing, and pursed my lips, and turned away to look out the window.

And then we were smashing into the splendor of downtown Moscow at night. All around us there were beautiful women wearing almost nothing but lurid makeup and waiting in long lines outside of pulsing clubs. They looked absolutely terrifying, as well as freezing cold. I stared. The women tossed their hair. Their silver heels cast a spiky sort of light out into the street. Enormous IKEA billboards dominated the skyline. We passed the Pushkin Theater, glowing like an illuminated eggshell in the streetlights. We rolled by the Nord-Ost on Melnikov Street, and I thought of the siege there back in 2002: Spetsnaz blasting poison at the terrorists and hostages alike and everybody dying horribly in the snow. Then we were whirling past more clubs, more restaurants, more dripping, filigreed opulence. We passed the glittering Vagankovsky Cemetery, populated by victims of the eighteenth-century plague. We passed the gilded cupola of St. Isaac’s and the wide grinning arc of Kazan Cathedral. We passed a brightly lit café called Gifts of the Sea.

“For homosexuals,” said Viktor, leaning in close to me. “Boris, do you need to make a stop?”

The driver dropped us off in front of a club called Absinthe. In the upper windows, I could just make out a stack of pink cubes, a faint dusting of purple light. At the door, a gorgeous woman was turned away; in a rage, she threw her purse into a snowbank.

“How are we going to get Irina through face control?”

I stuck out my tongue.

“Nice,” said Boris. “That will definitely improve your odds.”

“Good thing we’re bribing our way in,” said Viktor. He pointed to the top windows. “They watch them from up there.”

“Who?”

“The rich men. They get private booths up there with one-way mirrors, and they watch the women dance. If they see one they like, they invite her up for a drink.”

We assembled in a line behind red velvet ropes. I stamped my heels against the snow and clamped my hands against each other, trying to keep myself warm. I was thinking that the inadequacy of women’s formal wear in the face of extreme weather was probably a patriarchal conspiracy.

“It is not really an invitation, I shouldn’t think,” said Viktor, rubbing his nose. His time at Oxford had left his English peppered with uniquely British affectations—arabesques on his speech that seemed funny when paired with his accent. “Our blatnoy is up there, I’d bet.”

“Why would he want to meet here?” I said through clenched teeth.

“I think it’s where he spends most of his evenings. We wouldn’t want to disrupt his schedule.”

We watched more. In that top corner, something was skewing the light coming through; a phosphorescent-green entity floated out to the window and then flicked away.

“Do they have—Is that an aquarium in there?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Viktor. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a three-ring circus in there.”

“They only serve sushi up there,” said Boris. “It’s why the world’s oceans are running out of fish.”

“Have you been to a club like that before?”

They laughed. “No,” they said. “But tonight’s the night.”

“And we’re going to make a habit of it someday,” said Viktor.

“What day is that?”

“When we’re rich,” said Viktor. “We’re men, so we don’t have to be pretty. Only rich.”

“Oh, yes?” I said. “And when are you planning on being rich?”

“In the new world order, I suppose,” said Boris.

“I thought we were already in that,” I said, because I was freezing, which was making me feel difficult.

“When Bezetov’s president, he’ll make us his most trusted advisers,” said Boris.

“Ha. When Bezetov’s president, he’ll probably start by cutting the salary for federal employees,” said Viktor.

I looked at them. “Do you guys really believe that?” I said.

They looked at me. “Which part?” said Viktor.

“You actually believe that Aleksandr will be president one day?”

“Sure,” said Boris. “Not this year, sure, we know that. But one day. Look at the Ukraine, you know? It’ll happen here eventually. And when it does, he’s the obvious choice, right?”

Viktor nodded. “He’s been the voice of reason, always. He’s Vaclav Havel. Except he’ll be the chessmaster president instead of the poet president. Uniquely Russian thing.”

“And he’s young still,” said Boris. “Youngish. He’s got a long career ahead of him if he can be careful enough. It’s a long life.”

I looked at them again. Listening to Aleksandr’s speech—as he extolled the virtues of futility, the courage of working against the current—one could believe that nobody thought he would ever succeed. One could believe that failure was, in a way, the point.

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose that for some people, it is.”

“What?” said Viktor. “You’ve got your money on someone else? You throwing your hat in the ring? Who else could it be?”

I squinted at him, and when I did, I could see snatches of a future—Aleksandr at the Kremlin, throwing open the windows, firing the security apparatus while the people cheered in the streets—that would happen, if it happened, without me there to watch it. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I guess I really don’t know.”

At the door, Viktor slipped the bouncer a wad of cash. We’d called ahead about this. The bouncer eyed my diaphanous costume bemusedly but took the money. He ushered us through the door. Inside, the music was loud enough to make small reverberations in my sternum. The aquarium, it turned out, was built in to the wall and part of the ceiling. It cast a wash of watery light over the dance floor, and when the fish
flicked close to the pane, the light mottled with the psychedelic colors of tropical marine life. The bouncer gestured at a staircase that coiled around the back of the club. “He’s up there,” he said, pointing up the stairs. “He’s always up there.”

The air was overrun with the competing claims of outlandish body sprays; I thought of ads featuring alpine vistas and wild rivers. The club’s floor was covered in a film of some unidentifiable substance that was the color of mercury and the consistency of silt. At the bar, Technicolor cocktails emerged from behind a smoke machine. The whole place had the feeling of modernity gone amok, as though it were the most elite club in outer space, although along the edges, it was a little more baroque: the sweep of the staircase, the heavy velvet tapestries along the back walls, made me feel that I might look up into the rafters and see horrified operagoers gazing at all the nudity through their lorgnettes. In the center of the room, women danced around in enormous translucent cubes. “SexyBack” was playing. The girls crept up to the sides of the cubes and licked the glass. They were wearing silver pasties and shimmery body paint and nothing, discernibly, else. Boris stared, but Viktor pulled him along.