A Partial History of Lost Causes (58 page)

The embassy was notified. The American press liked the story of an American girl who ran away to find an adventure and a fate. Viktor got no mention on any television program, American or otherwise, although
Novaya Gazeta
wrote him a nice obituary. Aleksandr cried over it—partly because that poor young man was dead, and partly because there were so many things that the newspaper had discovered that he had never asked and thus never known.

Interest in Irina spiked and subsided in a week. The final Harry Potter book was released, and the world was momentarily awash with the kind of worldwide goodwill toward men that usually accompanies only the Olympics or international terrorism. A month after her death, her name had dropped back into obscurity, and anyone who remembered her could conjure up only the sketchiest of narratives—the story of some American girl who had run away to Russia and died there for reasons that nobody remembered or perhaps ever knew.

For Aleksandr, there were a few drawbacks to Irina’s brief posthumous notoriety. It raised certain suspicions in certain corners, suspicions that never fully went away. But for the most part, his stock rose modestly after the crash, both at home and abroad. Everybody knew who the intended target had been, and even people who hated Aleksandr admitted that he’d been lucky to escape. (On BBC, Misha, who was now a regular commentator, called Aleksandr “almost suspiciously lucky.”) Everybody liked the notion of the government trying to kill someone and failing, and some even seemed to regard the whole project with a degree of baffled amusement. Later, on CNN, a geriatric host would compare Aleksandr to a cartoon bird who perpetually outsmarts a malicious wild dog—and for the first time on live television, Aleksandr was utterly nonplussed and did not know what to say.

For weeks, Aleksandr thought constantly, unendurably of Irina and Viktor. Their names were in his ears, in his skull. They were in every synapse in his circuitry. He couldn’t shake them out no matter
what he tried. And Viktor and Irina were not the only people to whom Aleksandr owed his tenuous continued existence: they assumed their places alongside Ivan, and the three of them gazed at him with unswerving and disappointed reproach. It was too much: there was an entire aggrieved population in his head.

He sat and looked out the window for God knows how many nights in a row. He watched an escarpment of black descend upon the city, over and over and over again.

Boris came back almost immediately. He arrived on a sunny afternoon to find Aleksandr still in his pajamas, letting rings of cold coffee seep onto the stacks of newspapers that were piling up around the apartment. Boris eyed him up and down and said, “None of this looks very presidential.” Through raw eyes, Aleksandr stared at Boris and thought of the long life ahead of him—the long life of a survivor. It was his penance for being right, or his reward for being scared, depending on how you thought about it.

Then they sat in silence watching Channel One and counting the lies until the sun went down and the only light was coming from the television.

It was some days after the crash—maybe seven, maybe ten: Aleksandr would never remember precisely because his brain stopped forming new memories for a while—that he heard a knock at the door. Even though it was foolish to have done so, he’d put Vlad on paid leave, and he was living alone in the apartment, issuing statements to the sliver of free press whenever they called him, writing letters to all the editors in the West, living around the ghosts of the many people who had lately taken their leave. Vlad had told him how stupid this was, and he’d known it was true. But he couldn’t bear the thought of living with only his armed guard—he imagined Vlad manning the kitchen with a machine gun while he made spaghetti in his slippers. He couldn’t stand it. Not now, especially not now.

The knock came in the evening. Aleksandr had concluded his e-mails and teleconferences for the day and had settled into his new evening routine of reading his death threats and drinking a quarter
of a bottle of vodka and sometimes having a hand at the elite online chess forums, though this was no challenge nor, ultimately, much entertainment. It was Boris, he figured, when the knock came again—he’d probably left something, or had a piece of news that could not adequately be conveyed by telephone. Maybe there was something depressing on television that he didn’t want to watch alone. Or maybe he was only lonely, only aimless, only bereft and roaming the streets and finding himself back at Aleksandr’s—because where else, at this late hour, would he go? Aleksandr felt sorry for Boris, but even so, he did not want to see him. He’d already spent a non-negligible amount of time with the vodka, and he was experiencing a sensation of pleasant indifference: a sneaking suspicion that the pulsing lights of Petersburg out the window were the most important thing, and everything else was quite secondary. He liked this suspicion even if he didn’t entirely believe it, and he wanted to hang on to it as long as possible. So when he opened the door, it was probably with a bit of a scowl, and that was probably the first thing that Elizabeta saw when she looked up at him for the first time in twenty-seven years.

His mouth filled with ash; his bones turned fragile, ornithological. For a moment, or maybe longer, he wondered whether he’d lost his mind—whether solitude and sadness and the repeated imaginings of this exact event had ultimately pried apart his grip on reality. It was true that he hadn’t thought to imagine this moment for a good long while. There’d been too much intervening grief, and lately, even his subconscious hadn’t been indulgent enough to dip into this particular fantasy—there were, after all, so many other, more dangerous, more pressing ones.

“Aleksandr,” she said. “How are you?”

She sounded like there was nothing too terribly odd about her asking, as though she’d gone only a few days longer than normal without speaking to him, and she was curious as to how he’d been spending his time. His arm shot instinctively to the door frame. It was possible he was seeking its assistance in staying upright.

“What happened to the dinosaur?” he said. If he hadn’t been a touch drunk, he wouldn’t have said it, or he wouldn’t have said it precisely that way, or he wouldn’t have said it before he even said anything else.

“The dinosaur?”

There was a tsunami of oceanic noise in his ears, and he almost had to ask her to speak up. “The official,” he said.

She took a slight step backward. She must have known he would ask, but she probably expected to be invited in first. “Yes. Mitya. He’s dead now.”

“Isn’t everyone?” said Aleksandr. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not. I’m not really, either, though he wasn’t as bad a man as I expect you’re imagining.”

He looked at her and said nothing. His temperature was coming down, and he was starting to believe that what seemed to be happening actually was.

“Might I come in?” she said.

It was strange that he wanted to say no. He wanted to close the door and collapse against it in exhaustion; his apartment was already haunted enough, and if he let Elizabeta in, even for an hour, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep living there.

“I’m sorry about your employees,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I saw on the news.”

“Yes, you can come in.”

He stood aside and held the door open for her, and when she passed by, he was struck by the incredible strangeness of her proximity. There was his body, and then there was hers, and he could reach out and pull her to him if he wanted to, which he always had. But he couldn’t tell if this was better, or worse, or, depressingly, exactly the same. He gestured emptily to the chairs in the office. He then realized that they were covered in papers, and he went and swept them onto the floor.

“Do you want anything? Tea or”—he noticed her notice the vodka bottle melting onto the death threats, and he knew what an odd evening all
that
added up to—“or anything?”

“Tea,” she said. “Please.”

He stared at her helplessly, then went to make the tea. Nina had left her arsenal, and he selected something he hoped was especially bitter and unforgiving—something that tasted like missing a chance and realizing it far, far too late. Didn’t she know how relentlessly she’d
harassed him these past decades? Was her cruelty not satisfied? It occurred to him briefly that she might be here to kill him—she wouldn’t be the first person to try, and she had, after all, been married to a Party official for some time, and he’d probably been intimately linked to the current government in some way. Once a Chekist, always a Chekist, as Putin himself had said. There was also the small matter that Aleksandr had never really known this woman—not really, not at all—and he’d be a fool to be surprised by anything she might do. And it would be embarrassing, it would be mightily embarrassing, to have dodged a fairly expensive and technically involved plane crash only to be murdered a week later in his own apartment, while wearing slippers, while making tea.

He stayed in the kitchen until the kettle screamed, then brought her a cup on a tray.

“Thank you,” she said.

He wanted to be monosyllabic and coy, like she was being. He wanted desperately to make her wait excruciatingly for the accusations that she must have known were coming. But he couldn’t. The words were out of him before he’d given them a once-over. “I wouldn’t have let anybody else in the world into this apartment, you know,” he said. “Unaccompanied and without a meeting. Maybe my bodyguard. Maybe some of my staff. I don’t think there’s anybody else right now.”

She took a sip of the tea. If it hurt her, she didn’t let on. “You trust me?” she said.

“I don’t trust you. It’s not trust that got you in here.”

She looked out the window. “You don’t trust me. That’s funny.”

He scoffed. It was outrageous that she was here at all—after all the time, and after all he’d gone through on her account, although he supposed she couldn’t fairly be asked to know all that. But regardless, he was an important man now, and he’d run important risks, and there was no reason that he had to tolerate unwanted visits from anyone, let alone her. She’d known a different man in a different lifetime, and even that man, only very casually.

“You married an official.” He kept his voice flat, as though this were a neutral fact and he was helpfully reminding her. He hoped he was being cruel. He wanted to be cruel.

“I did.”

“You didn’t love him,” he said. He didn’t know this. She could have loved him. Sometimes, over the years, in his more generous moments, he had hoped that she did.

“I didn’t.”

“But you married him.” He was surprised that he had to keep pointing this out.

Her face became cloudy then, and he thought with terror that she was going to cry. It would be an incredible thing to see a woman like Elizabeta cry—like witnessing a freak meteor shower or the exhumation of a sea creature that was thought to be long extinct. Even though it would be a spectacle, he didn’t want to see it—he didn’t want to see it because he never wanted her to cry, ever, even now, even when he thought that maybe she deserved it.

All this was irrelevant, because she didn’t cry. She started to cough. It was a hopeless, wretched, horrible cough, and immediately he wished that she’d cried instead.

“Don’t feel bad,” she said when she emerged and saw him staring. “That would have happened even if you hadn’t brought up poor Mitya.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

She looked at him witheringly. “You mean—generally?”

“Your cough.”

She shrugged. “Cigarettes. Never start, Aleksandr. It’s a nasty habit.”

He didn’t remember her smoking in the kommunalka, and he immediately, quietly, decided to believe that this, too, was the fault of the dinosaur.

“You have a nice view up here,” she said. She was trying to move them past the coughing, past the dreadful thing that it seemed to suggest.

“Everyone says so.”

“You don’t agree?”

“No, it’s quite lovely. It’s a slightly different view when it’s all you’ve got, but yes, it’s lovely.”

She watched out the window, and he wished he could know what the view looked like to her.