Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

Please forgive the oddity of the questions. Chalk it up to the sentimentality or the lunacy — or perhaps, charitably, the clarity — that comes from leaving too much, too soon.

With appreciation,

Prof. Frank Ellison

I read it over once more and sat down on the radiator for a long minute. It’s possible that I cried the slightest bit. And then I read it again. I was struck by the formality of the tone. The bit about “opening gestures” was my approximation of a phrase that was somewhat difficult to translate — literally, I think it was “the commencing gambit”—a reference to the early signs of my father’s illness, no question, but an odd phrase for him to use. And even post-translation, the whole letter was written in a different idiolect than I remembered as my father’s — though the vocabulary he used with me, I had to remind myself, was inevitably that which one uses with a child. My father had never spoken to me as an adult because he had never known me as an adult. So it’s wrong for me to say whether any particular tone, any particular language, was or wasn’t typical for my father. The truth is, I did not know.

Similarly, I did not know what this letter meant to my father, what kind of feature it was in the misty landscape of his life. Perhaps it was strange, or perhaps it was wholly singular, or perhaps his life had been full of letters of this kind — to chess champions, to squash players, to noted economists, to circus performers. Maybe this letter, this affinity, was one of many. Then I read it again and decided I didn’t think so.

He knew he was going, and maybe that gave him some particular insight — some inexplicable knowledge that this, this , was the proper way to exit, the proper narrative to follow. I am approaching my own end now and am still awaiting that particular bolt of understanding, but that’s not the point. If my father found it, then I’m happy for him.

I thought about his questions. Clearly, he must have been thinking a lot about fate when he wrote the letter, and he wanted Aleksandr Bezetov to offer some authoritative comment on the issue. My father was not a religious man — or if he was, he hid it very well — and I don’t think he saw fate as a preordained ending invented by some cruel, self-amused deity. When my father wrote about fate — which might as easily have been meant as destiny or even, perhaps, future — I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been. When one is afflicted with a genetic disaster that one has a 50 percent chance of escaping, this kind of thinking becomes prominent. One feels like a special kind of loser to lose at fifty-fifty odds.

I wondered if my father ever received an answer. The fact that the letter was photocopied suggested that he’d sent the original. But perhaps not — maybe he’d been overtaken by embarrassment, second-guessing, time, distraction, and finally, illness.

I rifled through the papers twice but found no response from Aleksandr. There was, however, a brief note from somebody else.

Dear Prof. Ellison,

Thank you for your letter. Unfortunately, Mr. Bezetov isn’t able to respond to your queries at this time. I wish you all the best with finding your answers.

Best,

Elizabeta Nazarovna

I read the note again. She was a secretary, most likely, though there was something a little wistful about the phrasing, as though she’d read my father’s letter in a capacity that went beyond purely official duties. I stared at the box for a long time, listening to the silence reverberate around the house and wondering. It was clear that my father never got his answers from Aleksandr Bezetov. And that seemed an unjust thing for a person who got so little else.

Maybe that was when I first thought of going. I was already looking for a graceful exit from Jonathan’s life, and — I’m not above admitting it — I was already looking for a last adventure. I did not want to put my mother through something she’d barely survived the first time. The thought of running to look for answers to my father’s questions had an alluring symmetry. Like a chess move, this move was an iteration of preexisting realities. Though it’s true that such a move was in no way inevitable, and finding answers — or, indeed, Bezetov himself — would be nothing short of miraculous.

But as Nabokov’s loathed Dostoyevsky pointed out, miracles never bother a realist.

Leningrad, 1980

Aleksandr kept going to the Saigon every week for the rest of the winter, and his visits there became the dull smudge of dawn against the bleak, interminable horizons of his days. It was not a warm dawn, rosy and flooded with sunshine and hope — Nikolai was rude, and Ivan was pompous, and Aleksandr quickly grew to understand that neither of them particularly liked him — but it was fundamentally better than nighttime. On Saturday mornings, when there were fewer police out, Ivan and Nikolai would take him downtown to the banned-book market, which moved every week. At night they’d sometimes go to see underground art shows at the culture club of the Kirov plant, or go to see Sankt-Peterburg play at the Saigon and then drunkenly debate the band’s purported monarchist leanings. Sundays Aleksandr spent holed up in his room, poring over sloppy translations of Kurt Vonnegut and Iris Murdoch, which interested him more than the jaunty stories about intrepid boys in challenging natural circumstances that he’d read at school in Okha. Weekdays he spent at the academy, or in the bright gymnasiums of universities, beating everybody, hitting the timers with his thumb. Passage of time seemed a product of Aleksandr’s own sheer will, as though he were exerting all his best strategy against the days, forcing them to relent and eventually disappear.

At first Aleksandr was universally dismissed — dismissed because he was so young, and eastern, and fierce-faced; dismissed, he finally decided, because people found themselves wanting to believe he was stupid, and this desire sometimes outlasted evidence to the contrary. But slowly, the world began to take notice — first within the academy, where his amassed collection of wins, and the startling ways he’d acquired them, began to elicit attention, then suspicion, then hatred — and then outside the academy, via a moderately sized profile in Literaturnaya Gazeta . It wouldn’t be long, he could only figure, before word of his greatness bled out completely onto the streets and became widely known. The profile was just the beginning. Once things really got going, he would have to learn to be self-abnegating and funny about it all. It was best to be modest when one’s life changed. And he loved to think about how his life would change. The steward might bring him tea and saiki in the mornings. She might brag about him to new tenants as though he were a selling point of the building, along with the location and the indoor plumbing. Some bitter night he might hear Elizabeta mention him to someone outside his door, her voice like the whisper of dried flower petals falling to the floor. “That’s where he lives,” she’d say. “Aleksandr. The chess prodigy.” He’d settle back into his dreams then, and in his head the cerulean sea would turn to black-and-white blocks that he’d skate across to the edge of the earth.

It was only a matter of time, he’d known, until he’d play Andronov. The certainty of this was something of a standing joke among the other boys. If he tried something new or bizarre, the boys would say, “Are you going to try that on Andronov?” If he made a mistake — rarely, rarely, though it did happen — the boys would shriek and yell that Andronov would not let him get away with that . But when Andronov grabbed him by the ear one day and pulled him into the back office, Aleksandr was surprised. “Am I in trouble?” he said. He’d been playing Oleg, a bright white boy who seemed to make a game of how little he could speak.