Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

He met interesting people this way — the subscriber list was small but diverse and full of people Aleksandr never would have expected. There were women, for one thing, and older people, and one or two people who’d been forced to make public self-denunciations that year. He’d been provided with detailed descriptions of their physical appearance. If anybody else answered the door, he asked directions to the metro in his best approximation of broken Russian until that door was slammed. The client list was always under twenty people. Occasionally, a new person who’d gained the trust of Ivan and Nikolai at the Saigon might be added to the list; occasionally, somebody got paranoid or got a promotion and frantically, rudely told Aleksandr to please never, never come back. And so he didn’t.

Some mornings he spent walking around the city, other mornings he spent taking the metro, and many mornings were a combination of both: riding the metro a few stops and then walking a mile only to reconnect with the metro again. This was Ivan’s idea, and it was the way Aleksandr came to feel he owned and understood the city: the constant early-morning romping that brought him down into the elegant bowels of the station, ornate and ostentatious and reinforced against nuclear attack; then up into the weak white of a Leningrad dawn, trudging into the mist while the city around him became a phantom and then a specter and then a silhouette; then back down to the metro, where the men hurried and jostled and the lights dripped like the chandeliers on the Titanic .

It was on a metro morning in what was allegedly spring that Aleksandr saw Elizabeta at work. She was standing on a subway platform at five A.M., half hanging off the arm of an enormous man who looked like a dinosaur. She was at the very end of her night, Aleksandr figured. Her black attire that moved as though it were its own system, with its own provocative ideas, looked undone somehow; her face, still almost beautiful, looked older. There were bluish pits of fatigue under her eyes, and her makeup seemed miscalculated. The man’s great forehead was like a shelf overhanging his face. He leaned close to Elizabeta and said something to her, and she laughed the same laugh she had used with the steward.

Aleksandr would tell himself later that he almost went to her. He thought about it. He really thought about it. He could go gather her up with him, bring him on his mission, pay the man back whatever he had spent on her, with interest, and then run laughing out into the street, leaving the man behind to shift his prehistoric mass in anger and confusion.

But there was work to do — for him and, he knew, for Elizabeta. And work, of course, was sacred. So he stopped watching and turned away and kept moving, up the enormous, unending staircase that led to the city and the day.

Moscow, 2006

My flight landed at Sheremetyevo at night, but the line at customs was long. Angling over the landscape during our rickety descent, I’d watched the weak lights that Moscow cast up into the universe, and I was struck by how small they seemed in comparison to the rest of it: the enormity, the darkness. The flight had been long — the six hours over the churning Atlantic, the three hours chewing overpriced and mysterious British sandwiches at Heathrow, and the last restless, hiccuping leg of the journey to Russia. The flight attendants had been conspiratorial and hostile. I’d flipped through my Russian 3 book and tried to order a soda. They’d rolled their eyes and looked me up and down and asked me in English whether I might prefer a diet. I’d pressed my face against the cool window and looked out and asked myself: How? Why? For what?

What happened was Jonathan wanted me to move in with him. We were in love, I guess, and moving in together, in our culture, is part of the natural progression of that particular disease. I’d told him yes, and then I’d told him maybe, and then I’d told him I was leaving the country forever.

I knew that I could not move in with Jonathan. I knew — really, I knew — that we had been playacting. The sentiment was real enough, I suppose, but the rest was composed of gestures imitating the behavior of other people, people who had an entire future to love and fail each other. And there was something almost insulting in his asking — something patronizing at worst and willfully clueless at best. It was as though he had not been paying attention. I was thirty. I was in my last year or two of sound body and mind. I was not going to move in with Jonathan only to have him watch whatever things he’d improbably loved about me disappear. I don’t sentimentalize love so much that I think it can endure such assault. It’s one thing to love a person who is absent; it’s quite another to love a person who is reduced and deformed and endlessly, endlessly present. I had loved my father once. Did I love the person he was when he died? I don’t know. What person was that?

I was going to leave Jonathan. Once I’d decided that, it seemed only right to leave everything else.

The night after Jonathan asked me, I came home to my empty apartment alone. I took out the letter my father had sent to Aleksandr Bezetov, and the terse reply from Elizabeta Nazarovna. I thought again about my father having to live and die with all his best questions unanswered. I thought again about Aleksandr Bezetov. I couldn’t help but hate him a little. All that energy and intelligence and, crucially, all that time — that whole average life expectancy — and he couldn’t find it within himself to answer my poor dying father’s few questions, abstract and intrusive though they were. It seemed like such a pittance for a man who had so much. It seemed so stingy to delegate a response — a nonresponse at that — to your secretary or whatever.

I looked again at the letter from the secretary. There was that vaguely sorry, vaguely sheepish tone, as though she knew that this was not the proper way of things. Elizabeta Nazarovna. Quite a mouthful, that.

I went to the computer. I typed in “Elizabeta Nazarovna” and “St. Petersburg.” I squinted through the Cyrillic and sounded out words. There was a birth announcement for a baby born in 1998. There was a reference to a dissident poet who had died in the purges. There were pictures of a very young woman from a social networking site. She had perfectly manicured hair and the long furry arms of an anorexic, and in every single photo she held a different swirly, improbably colored cocktail. There was a woman running a store selling vintage Communist paraphernalia. I clicked through an interminable number of Elizabetas: old, newborn, implicated, expatriated. And then, to my everlasting chagrin, I began calling them.

I made rules for myself: I called only people who lived in Moscow or St. Petersburg (nobody who’d ever lived in Leningrad would go back to the country, I figured, not if they could help it). I ruled out people who were too old or too young. I ruled out people who’d had professions in the seventies or early eighties. I got mostly wrong numbers and dial tones and a coldhearted, impossibly fast-speaking operator who furiously chastised me for a transgression beyond my understanding. I reached a child Elizabeta. I reached an uncomprehending Elizabeta. I reached the widower of a dead Elizabeta. Finally, I reached an Elizabeta with a faint, strangely fragile voice that said, “Da? Da?”

This wasn’t her, either, I didn’t think. She sounded like a particularly technophobic grandmother, somebody who talked at the phone as though the person she was addressing was actually inside it. What the hell, I thought, was I doing?

“Zdrastvuytye,” I said carefully. “Minya zavut Irina Ellison. Govorite po angielski?” Though I thought I could manage all of it in Russian, I figured it would be embarrassing enough in English. No need to make it worse, if that could be avoided.