A Partial History of Lost Causes (49 page)

“Yes, but don’t you think it’s a little theatrical for us? A little histrionic?” said Boris. “I wouldn’t want our supporters to get the idea that we’re into stunts now.”

“Maybe a stunt is what is needed now. Maybe some political theater is in order. I, for one, have been getting bored of our usual tricks. Irina, I’d like you to write up a plan of action.”

“Me?” said Irina. Viktor and Boris exchanged dark, inscrutable looks, but Aleksandr didn’t care. Every time Irina had something useful to do, she seemed to brighten; her depression, as far as he could tell, seemed to be a pragmatic kind. This might be good for her—not that he knew what was or wasn’t good for a person in her position, whatever that was, exactly.

“You,” said Aleksandr. “Get out of here.”

That evening Aleksandr paced in his study and thought about the future. Against the sky, a tiny airplane flashed its cosmic green lights. He thought about what would happen when the film came out. When it came out, he figured, he’d be able to get the formal nomination from Alternative Russia. And that would make the Kremlin afraid of him, and he’d still be afraid of them, and they would hold each other in some nervous mutual regard. Like a two-way Zugzwang, in chess, when it was disadvantageous for either player to make a move.

Except that wasn’t quite right. Playing Putin was more like playing that awful computer—there was nothing you could think of that he hadn’t thought of first. The election was already decided, Putin’s successor already picked and groomed; the only questions were which of his lackeys it would be and when the decision would become publicly known. No Russian theaters would show the film, and Aleksandr had no delusions about getting it on television. But he did have some modest hopes for the Internet, for YouTube, for pirated DVDs, for word of mouth. For people passing contraband hand to hand in the streets. It had worked for him, almost, once before.

The airplane made its way to the center of the city’s sky. There was something lonely about the scene: the plane’s cold flashing colors, the snarl of buildings below, and all that tremendous sky in between.

That was it, he thought: there would be a week, maybe ten days,
when it would look like he had a chance. He wouldn’t, of course he wouldn’t, but maybe—for a week, for ten days—he’d trick enough people into thinking he would. Maybe they would get angry at long last, and maybe they would start causing some real trouble.

But maybe, he thought, not. Maybe the week would come and go, and the movie would be seen and dismissed, and his nomination would be ignored, and the handpicked successor to Putin—the man who would babysit the post for four or eight years before Putin came back for another round—would calmly, confidently sail to victory.

Out the window, the office lights were blinking like beacons, and the Neva was turning silver in the winter dusk. The small airplane was slipping out of Aleksandr’s line of vision—out of the edges of the city, out of the cast of the lights—and off into a different, deeper dark.

V
iktor and I began promotion for the Funeral for Democracy a full two months before it was scheduled. We used the Internet—Vkontakte, mostly—and that generated some interest among students. We made a video that went marginally viral. The essential part, though, was the posters. We thought it would be funny to make posters with sort of haphazard pictograms of dead democracy—democracy with a knife in its back, a bullet in its brain, X’s for eyes. We printed them out and passed them around cafés, student centers, dormitories. The posters were ironic-looking, and they actually generated a certain degree of cachet for Aleksandr. Soon enough, students started to tear them down for their dorm rooms, so that I had to run out to the same places I’d already been and issue replacements.

The Funeral for Democracy was the first element of the three-part plan that Aleksandr outlined for the summer. After the Funeral, Viktor and Boris and I would go to Perm to try to talk to the lieutenant whom Valentin Gogunov had spoken of. If the lieutenant admitted military cooperation in the thievery at Perm, the case prosecuting the
government for their involvement would be closed. The film would have made its point. And then—as a response to that anger, riding on a swelling wave of intense populist feeling—Aleksandr would win the formal nomination from Alternative Russia. There was no talk of winning the actual presidency.

What after that? What would we do once Aleksandr had the nomination? Once he’d positioned himself as an alternative candidate in a country with no real elections? Once he’d put himself firmly in the crosshairs of an enemy who had a monopoly on the ammunition?

We simply didn’t know. Which is another way of saying we thought we did know and were too polite to talk about it.

At the hostel, I remained an odd, slightly inconvenient reality of the building, like the drain that never drained properly and the coffee cups in the cupboard that always looked dirty. I don’t know what the managers made of me. They’d never had a guest stay longer; I’m sure they expected that I would never leave. In the time I’d been at the hostel, I’d watched hundreds of young people come and go. I’d watched people flirt and fight and get to know each other in a dozen different languages; they debated literature, and showed off about philosophy, and offered searing opinions about the political development of each other’s home countries. There was a Belorussian stripper (“I’m in club work,” she said. “You understand?”). There was an engaged couple who broke up loudly outside the hostel in the middle of a horrifically cold February night. There was an older Japanese woman who shared no language with anyone, and wore the same outfit every day, and slept curled around her backpack every night. There was a young woman who lost a baby she didn’t even know she was carrying. There was a tiny twenty-three-year-old, eyelinered, multilingual, forever awaiting her visa to go study at the Sorbonne. There was a pair of slick-haired Italian men who stared at me ceaselessly—keeping them from ever seeing my breasts was ultimately a losing battle. There was a young man who rocked himself against a wall and stole sugar packets from the communal tea-and-coffee station near the door. He’d been traveling, he claimed, for fourteen months.

Then they all left, and then new ones came. Once I overheard one of them asking the night manager about me. “The woman,” he said. “The older woman who’s been here the whole time. Who is she?”

I think he said “older woman.” He might have said “old woman.” And who could blame him? Who could say that I had not earned the title?

“Oh, her,” said the night manager. “We don’t know. She lives here.”

It was startling to hear, in a way, although of course I did live there—as much as I could be said to live anywhere, anymore.

At first, walking home from Aleksandr’s late at night had bothered me—rare was the night when I didn’t encounter a leering drunk or an aggressive panhandler or a person in clear need of hospitalization for one reason or another. I was a target for all kinds of harassment—I was visibly female, visibly foreign (especially at the beginning), and I walked around unaccompanied at all hours of the day and night. But at some point in the winter, the walk stopped alarming me. Maybe it was that something about me subtly changed—maybe something in my bearing started looking more comfortable, more aggressive, less afraid. Maybe it was that the cold made me believe, on any given night, that I was more at risk from the weather than from anything else. Or maybe it was that I started to feel—more acutely than I had felt before—that it didn’t matter what happened to me, and this indifference offered a quasi-ironic protection against any real trouble. Whatever the reason, on all my walks, on all the nights, nobody ever truly scared me until Nikolai found me again.

It was early evening in late March, the time of year when you feel absurdly grateful that the sky has started staying pallid into the late afternoon. It’s a time of counting the smallest of blessings, which is never something I’ve excelled at. But that day I was, perhaps, trying—I’d left Aleksandr’s apartment early and taken a long, lingering walk along the river, finally finding myself down by the Hermitage and, hours later, watching the night raising of the bridge. It wasn’t until late that I hopped on the metro, sailed underneath the Neva back to Vasilevsky Island, and picked my chilled way back to my neighborhood.
When a man emerged from the shadowy side of one of the buildings on my street, I was almost too tired to jump.

“Irina?”

I felt a twist against my wrist, like the slithering of a dessicated eel. In my throat, an entire life cycle of a scream ran its course.

“Who is it?” I hissed.

He moved, and the synthetic light from the nonstop market caught a snatch of red-raw skin. I remembered.

“Young lady,” said Nikolai. “I believe we have met before.”

“I know you,” I said. I remembered him from the day at the café last fall, before I had properly met Aleksandr. It occurred to me, horribly, that he couldn’t have followed me all the way home—through the labyrinthine metro, along the three million art pieces of the Hermitage—without being noticed. It was worse than that. He had waited for me here.

“That’s a bit presumptuous,” he said. I stared at him and tried to figure out what was going on with his face. It looked like the epidermis had been pulled off, carefully, precisely, perhaps as part of some medical experiment.

“You’re working for Aleksandr Bezetov now,” he said.

“I’m not answering that.”

“I’m not asking.”

I looked away. A hunched old woman passed by us, muttering to herself. I tried to lock eyes with her, but she didn’t look up.

“Look,” said Nikolai. “I don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe the Americans have taken to spying on Bezetov, and if that’s the case, then by all means, carry on.”

I said nothing.

“But lately, I’ve been suspecting otherwise. We’ve been suspecting otherwise. We think you’re just sort of—an independent agent, might be the charitable way to put it? Or a loose cannon? It seems as though you really are just here on your own, for your own inscrutable reasons, as implausible as that still sounds. As such, we have to wonder if we might persuade you to reconsider your approach.”