Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

I thought of Jonathan — I thought him of pointing to my father, to his skittering hands and carved-out eyes. He asked if that would be me, and I’d said no, not if I could help it. Which reminded me of Lars’s saying, “But she never can, she never can.”

Jonathan came to the funeral, and he held my hand and bowed his head with the appropriate amount of sober reflection. Still, even then, I was starting to feel a chasm between us, crumbling into enormity. It’s true that we are all mortal, but maybe it’s also true that some of us are more mortal than others. The cemetery was almost lovely — full of the mild green of new buds and grass shyly beginning to assert itself, the cool wind blowing the trees’ shadows across the graves in a way that was a little beautiful and a little unnerving. And Jonathan regarded everything — the coffin, the grave, the green Astroturf laid out to conceal the exposed dirt — with the expression of a spectator.

I look back now, and I tell myself that in this, as in all things, there are advantages. So we don’t marry, have children, grow old together. This is what we miss. We also don’t stop sleeping together, divorce, come to see each other as strangers, look back in bewildered grief to these early days and try to unravel how it all went so wrong. Those days — that last spring in Boston — were the only days. There is something to be grateful for in this, I think.

But at the time, I wasn’t grateful yet. I looked at the sky; I looked at the ground. Everything was fragile and raw and acute. I looked at Jonathan. We are not the same, I thought. And you would not wish for us to be.

A few weeks after my father’s death, I went to clean out the house, and that was when I found the box. My mother had kept the house through my father’s illness — partly because she wanted a place to stay when she returned for semiannual visits, partly because it was the only asset that the state couldn’t claim after we relinquished my father and his savings to a publicly funded facility. After the death, my mother was free to sell the house, and she’d asked me to handle the posthumous categorizing and cataloging and investigating that comes with a completed life. I was given an afternoon to reduce my father to the elements we would most want to remember him by: the wittiest letters, the loveliest souvenirs, the most flattering photographs. Everything else would be thrown out.

The box was in my father’s study, shoved between a stack of withered postcards and his creaky, outdated globe. When I looked inside, I found a mess of snarled newspaper clippings, curling from age and multiple handlings, and I nearly stepped away, closed the box, and left the mystery alone.

Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t nearly close the box. I am not the kind of person who would close the box. I kept the box open, and I started to riffle. And inside the box I found pictures and clippings of Aleksandr Bezetov, the chess champion.

The first clipping was a 1980 article from Literaturnaya Gazeta , detailing an early success of Aleksandr’s at that unpronounceable Leningrad chess academy of his. In the picture, he’s heartrendingly young and nondescript — he never did look like a person who’d amount to much, even when he already had — and he appears slightly chagrined at being photographed. The clippings then follow him to regional and nationwide victories in Russia to international triumph at some tournament in Reykjavík. In the earlier pictures, he is gaunt and grumpy; his gestures are all hard angles; he has an expression of low-grade exasperation. The eighties begin. The reporting about him has a breathless quality; his youth is much remarked upon, as is his brilliance. He has a subversive manner of play, it is said. He has an attitude. There are reports on disputes with the FIDE. He stops meeting the camera’s eye when he’s photographed. He fills out some. He starts to look older. He plays Rusayev interminably. The match is halted. The match is resumed. The last game is played. This was the game I had watched with my father, and the ferocity of Bezetov’s expression put me in mind of that night — the delirious rotating of shadow against wall, the slow-falling snow turning the color of dying fire. Bezetov wins. In the picture with his trophy, he appears clinically depressed. The clippings seem shakily cut now, as we move into the late eighties and the first stirring of my father’s Huntington’s. All documentation stops fairly soon after my father’s symptoms present, though not as soon as I might have imagined. After 1990, there’s nothing — nothing about Bezetov’s book, his much mourned loss to an IBM computer, his entry into post — Cold War politics. My father missed all that. My father missed a lot.

It was a strange thing, this chronicling of another man’s life. It isn’t what you expect to find in a secret reliquary hidden in your father’s study. In my narcissism, I’d imagined school pictures, honor roll announcements, pinecone Christmas ornaments; in my conspiracy-mindedness, I’d imagined love letters, mysterious sets of keys, government correspondence. Instead, what we had was the grim and thorough documentation of the career of a Soviet chess player — a man my father had never met and whose story he never got to finish. It was unexpected. But I can’t say it was terribly surprising, and not just because of my father’s love of chess and the Soviets, generally, and this Soviet chessman, specifically. I remembered the night of the snowstorm and my father’s glassy-eyed rapture over the unexpected turns in a faraway game. To my father, Aleksandr Bezetov wasn’t just a precocious young sportsman. He was the personification of order over anarchy. He was the embodiment of facing down near-certain doom with a degree of panache. Most important, perhaps, he was the representation of the possibility of unlikely events, which I’m sure my father was already starting to be interested in by the time he sat me on his lap and showed me some of the things one could do in a very short time.

In the bottom of the box was a letter. I let myself pretend for a self-congratulatory moment that I wouldn’t read it. And then I did.

The letter was photocopied, undated, and written entirely in Russian. Back then, before I came to St. Petersburg, my Russian was weaker than my father’s had been, even though mine had come from my Ph.D., and his was primarily self-taught. It took me three reads to get the full scope of the letter, and even now that my Russian is fairly good, I wonder if there are elements I miss or misunderstand. Roughly, this is what it said:

Dear Mr. Bezetov,

You may find it strange to receive a fan letter from an American. Then again, you might get many a day, for all I know. There’s a lot to admire about your career, generally — the originality and radicalism of your strategy, your perseverance in the face of almost certain defeat, your remarkable intelligence. All of this is especially captivating for a person who has spent many years paying close attention to the significance of opening gestures; one suspects that you will go far. I feel a certain affinity with you, I suppose, because I’m fighting my own complicated match these days — and am, I fear, nearing the bitterest of losses. And I’m wondering if there’s a question you might find time to answer for me.

You wouldn’t be where you are if you weren’t mostly a winner — a winner, that is, at those matches that have counted the most. And yet there have been games, matches, tournaments that you’ve lost. And among these, surely, are games, matches, tournaments that you’ve known all along you were losing. Surely there are those that have been lost from the start, those in which your intellect proved itself to be the limited and temporary and mortal intellect that it does not always seem to be. When you find yourself playing such a game or match or tournament, what is the proper way to proceed? What story do you tell yourself when that enormous certainty is upon you and you scrape up against the edges of your own self?