A Partial History of Lost Causes (57 page)

Simonov looked down. “Valentina,” he said finally.

“That’s a pretty name,” I said. Viktor gave me a look that told me I was pushing it. There was another long silence.

“I can’t talk to you,” said Simonov. “Though I can’t help it if you break in.”

Viktor raised an eyebrow and looked at me.

“I can’t help it if you break in,” said Simonov again. “But if you do, you need to make sure to really break the windows.”

We did it at night, when Simonov had told us he’d get the guards drunk. We could hear them carousing off in the corner of the facility, singing some vigorous military songs and slamming bottles heartily on tables. Next to the office building, rows of Gelandewagens crouched half buried in the muck. Snarled bits of equipment poked out of huge squares of blue tarp. We did break the windows, and then we climbed through—first me, then Viktor. I was bleeding from above my navel, a little. The office was small and organized, with short file cabinets squatting darkly against the walls. We didn’t switch on the lights, but we didn’t need to. Simonov had made it easy for us. On the desk, he’d set out the papers that dryly noted a request by the FSB for one metric ton of the explosive RDX, signed by himself, and dated September 3, 1999.

We grabbed the paper. We threw some other papers off the table, overturned a chair, tossed Simonov’s coat on the floor. We made the place look messy, but we didn’t do much damage. Then we folded ourselves back through the window—first me, then Viktor. I could feel a welt emerging on my back where I’d caught myself in the window. In the rec building, we could see the yellow party unfolding into ever deeper debauchery. We returned to the car shaking and triumphant, and we cut our lights, and we drove slowly, slowly, out of the facility.

Even then, even at that late hour, I wanted to know how all of it would play out. Even then, when I should have been dragging my feet to slow everything down, to savor each moment as a precious representative of the beloved totality of life. Curiosity persists, when the answer is already on its way—even, in fact, when the coming answer is the removal of the question via removal of the questioner. So even then, in the car, when looking forward to anything was a sort of suicidal impulse, I found myself wanting to know what would happen next.

Out the window, the moonlight was anemic. I leaned back and felt my blood, hot and temporary, run down my spine.

We get back on the plane at six-twenty in the morning. When we drive to the airport, the sky is only beginning to leak its light, which is coming through pinpricks in the clouds in streaming, outreaching arms. This world is stranger and more beautiful than could ever be imagined ahead of time. I am struck with enormous gratitude for having gotten to see some of it.

The night before, Viktor sat at the table in the hostel and videotaped the document. He held it reverentially, as though it were a love letter or a Dead Sea Scroll, and zoomed the camera in on every damning implication. Then he e-mailed the video to Aleksandr, along with what little footage of Lieutenant Andrei Simonov we managed to acquire. Then he scanned the document to Aleksandr for good measure. “And who knows?” Viktor said as he closed down his computer. “Perhaps we will bring him the original.”

Halfway to the airport, it looks to me as though we are accompanied by a follower. A white car, hulking as a beached whale, is loping along the lanes behind us, and it seems to be a playing a counterpoint to our movements—slowing and accelerating when we do. I raise my eyebrows at Viktor, but he’s several steps ahead of me. He slows down, he speeds up, he pulls over, he changes lanes. Twenty feet behind us, the big white car mirrors our every move.

“They’re following us,” I say.

He keeps his eyes on the road. “Well, they shouldn’t bother. We’re going to the airport, obviously. Where else would we be going?”

And this is the thing about being followed by a huge white car: you can only keep driving, even if you know it’s after you.

We check in. The sunlight is breaking across the enormous picture windows and skittering cracked and crumbling across the floor. We wait, but now we seem to be alone. On the television screen, Putin is talking about Aleksandr, saying that his candidacy is illegitimate and ridiculous and doomed and not worth talking about, next question, please.

We file onto the plane, and Viktor lets me have the window seat. The plane is almost empty, I’m grateful to notice. The engine heaves, and we are off—we pull up and out, and below me I can see the terrible blue of the Kama, coiling around the city. I look down at this strange,
partially discovered place and think of all the others that exist, half formed and lurking, in my mind: the sheets of light wheeling over the Andes; the snaking, sculpted sand dunes of Namibia; the ancient cities cluttered with a millennium’s worth of objects left lying around—when the volcano erupted, when the city was sacked, when the plague swept through the streets and crumpled half the population in a week. There are many things I have not seen. But there are a few things that I have. Maybe living in the world for a time is enough, even if you don’t get to see all of it. Maybe it is enough. At any rate, it will have to be.

I find myself looking forward to getting back to Petersburg—to the city that never truly felt foreign to me, though I certainly felt like a stranger there, as I did everywhere else. It’s not an original observation, and yet it’s coming at me all at once—the bitterness and beauty of looking forward to the simple thing of gulping down a different kind of air. And somewhere behind my heart there’s a fermata of feeling—a slight lifting, then a falling that somehow doesn’t feel like a resolution. I screw my eyes shut, and then I open them and look down at the ground—it gets exponentially farther away with each blink, with each heartbeat and breath. It was how I always felt about birthdays back when I was younger but after I knew the cost of a passing year. How did I let this happen? I’d think. How did I ever let this life get so far ahead of me?

I lean back in my seat, and I feel the hoisting of the plane, its resilience against the whirring cold, the forbidding blue. The pilot banks to the side, and we are casting an improbably detailed shadow on the countryside; we look like the approach of a mythical bird or an avenging god. Beneath us there must be the rifling of grass against soil, the frenzied roiling of pale-edged leaves. But we can’t see those things anymore.

I think, although I am not sure, that my hands are shaking more than usual, beginning to thread forward of their own account ever more audaciously. I watch. I put my hands on the pullout tray, and they tremble and jump.

But then again, maybe it’s not pathological. It could just be reverential. It could just be the beauty of the sky and the clouds—the miracle of morning, the heresy of aviation.

I
n the end, he would have to imagine it. He would never know, not exactly, what happened, or how, or what it was like for Irina and Viktor and the others, all twenty-one of them, their names and nationalities printed in tiny letters in the newspaper some weeks later, after the search was called off and the luggage was identified and the passenger list was confirmed. He doesn’t know, so he’ll have to imagine.

It was a bomb—a small one, manufactured by the efficient people at the FSB, a hissing coil of fiber and flame that could be attributed to technical malfunction. He doesn’t know, so he has to guess, that they were most of the way to Helsinki—just off the coast, maybe, the Gulf of Finland hissing and murky below them. They were about to turn back toward the city airport. (That, he imagines, was a mistake. If the bomb had detonated even a few moments too late—or if the flight had made better than anticipated time—there could have easily been a crash over the city, which would have caused a lot more trouble and probably raised a lot more questions).

They thought that Aleksandr was on it, because Misha had made them think he might be; they may have trailed Irina and Viktor in
Perm, and maybe they made a note of the fact that Aleksandr didn’t seem to be with them, but they may have thought that he was in hiding, or incognito, or in the trunk. There was reason enough to think he was on it, and so they believed he was on it, even though he never flew Russian airlines, ever, for this exact reason, and even though his name was not on the list. They may have thought he was using an alias. They may have decided to take their chances. And a month later, when Aleksandr got his credit card statement—with its hotel rooms and room service and alcohol, all purchased in Perm, all reflecting his presence there—he stared at it for a long time before calling to cancel the card.

In the end, it was a calculated risk. Failure, they must have figured, would be worth little. And success would be worth quite a lot.

On the plane, Aleksandr imagines, they fell ten thousand feet in ten seconds, and it was the usual scene: dropping oxygen masks and flight attendants shouting at everybody to get down, get
down
. The people clasped hands with strangers, social protocol made suddenly, aggressively irrelevant. They prayed in six languages. They shuddered, cried, threw up. Was Irina scared? Of course she was scared. But the thing was (he thinks, he hopes), she was used to it.

They angled over the water, and there was a horrible silence from the cockpit, and then the plane came undone—a great unraveling of pieces, bits of people’s lives coming unhinged along with it. The windows exploded, and magazines and gum wrappers, teddy bears and toothbrushes, eye makeup kits and rosaries and foreign affairs magazines were whipped out and into the water. The bags were drowned, and later, what emerged was absurd and mundane—tennis shoes, self-help books, bras. Nothing as poetic and tragic as a tiny baby shoe, or a wedding ring still in its case, or an unpublished novel. People died with their lives intact, in full swing, not yet ready to be reduced to symbols or eulogies.

And Irina? Did she die praying, or cursing, or cursing herself for praying? Did she hold the frail hand of the old woman sitting next to her, stroke the arm of the girl her own age? Did she go down flirting with a handsome stranger? Did she cry? Did she scream? Did she learn finally, abruptly, whatever it was she’d needed to learn?

We don’t know, and Aleksandr doesn’t care to imagine that part.

We do know the oceanic light came in gusts. It was sheer white before they hit the water. At the end, in a way—like some sad things, although not all sad things—he likes to imagine it was beautiful.