A Partial History of Lost Causes (59 page)

“So,” she said. “You don’t trust me because I married poor Mitya.”

“Essentially.”

“Why do you think I did that?” She was standing up and moving closer to him.

“Because it was easy.” He stood up, too, just in case there was going to be hand-to-hand combat. He didn’t want to die sitting down.

“Partly that,” she said.

“Because you were tired of what you did.” She was close, and the only thing to do was to stare straight into her face. It was an odd thing, this aging. It was there as a fading around the eyes and a severity around the chin. But the young person—the real person—was so present, so undoubtedly alive. It was as though the rest—the netting across the eyes and the pursing of the mouth—were a shoddy disguise, not meant to be taken seriously.

“Partly that, too,” she said.

“Because you were afraid.”

“No,” she said carefully. “No, not that.” She smelled like oatmeal and lilac—and yes, cigarettes, but they were the cigarettes of prewar Paris, the cigarettes of Ingrid Bergman, not the cigarettes of zeks in the gulag or common people anywhere.

“What else?”

She looked at him then with a look that was more complicated than some people’s entire hearts or lives. It was a look that was part resentment and part tenderness and part inarticulate fury. Behind that, maybe, there was something else—something he wasn’t sure he was in any position to see or to judge or to believe anymore.

“Aleksandr,” she said. “Did it ever occur to you to wonder why you weren’t killed along with your friend?”

She didn’t ask to stay, and he didn’t invite her, but somehow she was still there a week later, and she was showing no signs of leaving. They took cautious walks occasionally, along the Neva—Vlad trailing them at a prenegotiated distance—and they told each other their entire lives: the parts that had happened before the kommunalka, and the parts that had happened afterward, and the unseen parts that had happened
while they were living around each other. He told her that after he’d first met her, he’d gone and lay on his bed, delirious with a new, improbable, striking thing. She told him that after she talked to him in the hallway, she spent the afternoon asking the steward questions about him until she chased Elizabeta from the room and never dealt with the worms in the faucet. She also told him—never directly but obliquely, unbelievably—that maybe she had married to protect him. Not totally, not entirely, but maybe partly. In the days after the discovery of the pamphlet, she’d pleaded with the dinosaur man (who’d been slow, and not mean-spirited, and hopelessly in love with Elizabeta) and he’d agreed to protect Aleksandr, within reason, if Elizabeta would marry him. And so—because she didn’t want to be a prostitute forever, and she was poor, and it was a time when everybody, everybody, had done something of which they were now ashamed—she’d agreed.

They talked also, finally, about Irina—the nominal reason for Elizabeta’s visit to him in the first place. She told him how the girl had come to see her—funny, to hear Elizabeta call Irina a girl when Irina had been thirty-one and Elizabeta, even now, even when he squinted, could never be too much older than nineteen. Aleksandr saw now that Elizabeta might feel guilty, too—she’d sent Irina chasing Nikolai, which had gotten her summoned to Aleksandr, which had gotten her killed. He saw that Elizabeta might have thought him an unworthy steward of the young woman she had circuitously sent him. He saw, too, that this was something else they might share.

The bottom line was this: he loved her, he’d always loved her, and he couldn’t entirely forgive her, he could never entirely forgive her. She knew this, and they could live with it—live with the best years lost, and irretrievable, and unknowable now, always. Then again, maybe they’d traded those years for these—maybe her protection had bought him his whole life and whatever would one day come of it, if anything at all. He didn’t know, honestly, if it were a trade he would make again—but then it wasn’t his to make. And when she stayed, and kept staying, and he kept waking up to her, there were moments when he could only feel grateful. There were moments when he could almost believe she’d been there all along.

A few nights after Elizabeta’s return, Aleksandr finally looked at the material from Perm. The e-mail from Viktor had been sitting in his in-box, crouching sinisterly like a prank left by a poltergeist, and Aleksandr had been half afraid to open it—he feared that it might unleash a duo of swirling, self-righteous ghosts who would point at him with ghoulish fingers and ask him why he hadn’t done some things (maybe everything) differently. But when he opened it, it was only what it purported to be. The footage was as damning as anything Aleksandr could have hoped for; nothing short of an audio recording of Putin clapping his hands and giggling about the attacks could have been better for the film. It was the clincher. It was the closing argument. Along with the footage came an e-mail message from Viktor, now three weeks dead:

Aleksandr never deleted it. In later years, it moved farther and farther into the recesses of his in-box, but he never let it go. It was a signal, a semaphore. It was a beacon across an incomprehensible gulf, and as long as it was there, Aleksandr felt that somebody was still swinging the lantern.

The documentary came out in the middle of the summer. It was shown in indie movie houses in the United States, in Western Europe. In Russia, it was pirated and passed along on DVD, though it was viewed mostly by the usual people—the intelligentsia with their wire-rimmed glasses, showing the film to their dinner-party guests and clucking over the things that they were going to cluck about anyway. It was available in nine parts on YouTube, and nearly one hundred thousand people watched it. Aleksandr sent it to the Moscow Film Festival just to antagonize the close buddy of Putin’s who ran the thing.
Novaya Gazeta
gave it some coverage and wrote a review, giving particular attention to the findings from Perm. The film was never spoken of on television. At the end of August, the page editor responsible for the film review suffered a tragic fall down some faulty stairs. In October,
the editorial writer who’d offered a scathing analysis based on the investigation contracted an implausible, incurable disease and died in a state hospital, where his remains were confiscated by the authorities.

Aleksandr would never know (how could anyone know?) whether it was worth it—worth the death of those two, plus an entire airplane of people, not all of whom were dying of terminal illnesses. But there were times when he walked along the river and felt sure that it was not. There’d been twenty-three people on the flight—twenty-two if you discount Irina, who was already on her way out—and then the two newspapermen, and when Aleksandr fully rejoined the land of the living, he spent his first few trips counting twenty-four people from a crowd: a rubbery-faced old woman with a nose like a toe, a dark-eyed young beauty, two well-dressed young men giving each other a wide distance, a mother with a passel of small children of indeterminate genders who tumbled around her like puppies, an entire grade-school class out for a day. It was not worth it. In the world of painful trade-offs—in a life spent calculating risks—it was not a wise sacrifice; it was a rook for a pawn, a bishop for a rook, a queen for a far-off victory, admittedly improbable.

Aleksandr disappeared into work, and he took Boris with him. Through the rest of the smothering summer into the ruddy fall, they worked: they collected signatures, they gave interviews, they brought up the Moscow bombings whenever it was appropriate and, quite often, when it was not. Aleksandr wrote articles for
The Wall Street Journal
to be read only by people who already agreed with him. He spoke to crowds that were not smaller but also not discernibly larger. Putin unveiled his successor, Medvedev—a skittish-seeming man with no appreciable credentials—who immediately announced that he’d make Putin his prime minister if he were elected. The week of his coronation, he polled at 79 percent.

To the crowds, Aleksandr unveiled his best lines yet: here in Putin’s Russia, the government is reviving the idea of collective guilt for dissidence. Here in Putin’s Russia, we put people on trial in cages in the courtroom. Here in Putin’s Russia, commercial airlines are exploded
for politics. Do we want four more years, at least, of Putin’s Russia? Because with Medvedev, there is no doubting that is what we will get. And the crowds said no, they didn’t want that.

At the end of November, one of the rallies got ugly, and Aleksandr was beaten by a small mob. The Kremlin sneeringly reported that he had spoken English to the reporters there. “I spoke Russian, too,” he snarled at Radio Free Europe, even though his lip still hurt when he talked too quickly. “I speak Russian quite well, in fact, and I’d be more than happy to debate Vladimir Vladimirovich on national television so that we can see who speaks it better.”

In December—after new, marginally promising poll numbers came out—he was detained by police and thrown in jail for a week. He stared out the window into a pallid block of sky. The week was not pleasant, but it was also, he knew, not representative: he emerged well fed and unharmed, and overall, it was a media coup for his side (CNN rolled old interviews, the blogosphere ignited, there were text boxes in
Newsweek
and
Time
). The week afterward his crowd was bigger than ever, and he knew that they knew that the arrest had been a miscalculation, a blunder into blowback.

It didn’t matter. In January they would not let him register—of the 2,067,211 signatures endorsing Aleksandr’s candidacy, 80,000 were deemed falsified by the authorities. Venues were canceled, permits revoked. Aleksandr withdrew, rather ceremonially, by delivering a blistering speech in blistering wind. And in March, Medvedev won with a staggeringly robust 70 percent of the vote, while Aleksandr watched the returns in a rented restaurant full of miserable people who eventually resorted to throwing things at the television, then shuffled out—depressed, drunk—into a black and snowy night.