Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Business or pleasure?” said the customs official, his head cocked to one side, his expression an unlikely blend of paranoid suspicion and boredom.

I thought about it for a moment. Pleasure seemed absurd as I looked past the man and into the airport — at the fraying upholstery on the walls and the truncated skeletons of what must have, at one point, been chairs. The air was bizarrely cold. Forlorn old women squatted by the windows. Women my age manned kiosks, their gum snapping like rubber bands against skin. A dog with the size and grace of a hyena stalked one corner, and nothing in his manner suggested that he was employed by the airport.

“Business or pleasure, please?” the man said again, his tone suggesting that he might be offering me firing squad or lethal injection.

“Business.” As soon as I said it, I knew it to be true.

The air outside was muggy and chilled at the same time. It was the kind of weird weather that creeps up on you, makes you sweat under your jacket and then makes your sweat turn to ice. A line of taxicabs lurked along the curb; the drivers had the fierce look of men who tamed wild things for a living. I hailed one and situated myself in its backseat. I produced from my pocket my hostel information and Elizabeta’s phone number and address. My eyes were dry and feeling slightly dislodged. This whole thing was already feeling like a suspect undertaking.

“Maly Zlatoustinskiy, please,” I said. We peeled out of the airport parking lot. Clouds were starting to clot along the horizon, and I watched bone-colored housing units begin to take shape beneath them. The outside of the city was as anonymous and dour as rural semi-civilization anywhere; when I rolled down the window and felt the dirty rain smack against my cheek, watched the bright yellow cellphone ads materialize, and smelled the exhaust, I felt as if I might have been in New Jersey. As we got closer to the city, though, I could feel foreignness start to accumulate like weather. Along the road were stands selling pastries, with hand-printed signs in Cyrillic, stark black lettering against cardboard. Small, scoured-looking trees squatted against the wind. The wind was different, too: it had an untrammeled quality, as though it had sailed without interruption across a country frighteningly vast. I thought of the map of my father’s above the chess sets in his study: the chicken-fat-yellow USSR, hunched above the world like a jaguar in a tree, waiting to pounce. Even now, even reduced by history and one-third of its landmass, I thought I could feel something of its size as I looked out the window. The plains crashed into the white sky like an ocean on a flat earth.

Moscow was upon us in bits, incrementally visible through the murk. The traffic was horrendous, the graffiti multilayered and emphatic. The men were light-skinned and square-jawed, with the kind of bland good looks that have always made me feel slightly menaced. In the women you could see the jostling of the centuries. The old women were Tolstoyan and nearly toothless, with gnomic features and fiercely wrapped kerchiefs. The young women were as elaborately assembled as the women of the Upper West Side, although some were elegant (swept hair and dark clothes, sparse and gleaming bits of jewelry) and some were tacky (bejeweled bosoms, tricked-out hair, the ruffled pelts of various unidentifiable Siberian weasels). They moved through the streets like the competing emissaries of various historical periods. In front of a department store, a man sat on a box with a chained and collared chimpanzee. I watched everything in a daze, retroactively registering the miracle of air travel. I’d snapped my fingers, rashly spent some money, and here I was — across the universe in a forbidding country where I knew no one, with only a scrawled and suspect address to guide me. Nobody had stopped me. Only a few people had even noticed.

The taxi let me out in front of my hostel. I got out and buzzed the doorbell. On one wall of the hostel, SLUT INFLUX was spray-painted in big block letters. A noise that sounded like the honk of a monster indicated that the door had been unlocked. I climbed the creaking stairs and found myself at the top of the stairway, at the end of a hall, standing in a yellow orb of light. A young man with weirdly rockabilly hair sat at the front desk, tapping his foot. The reflection of the computer screen was cast onto the glass cabinet behind him, and I could see a green expanse with miniature numbers and playing cards along the bottom.

“Wait,” he said in English without looking at me.

I waited. He clicked his mouse. I looked around the lobby. On the walls were fraying posters of various Russian landmarks — the Hermitage, St. Basil’s, Lake Baikal. There was an incomprehensible map of Moscow, the subway system color-coded like nerves and capillaries in a medical textbook. There was an advertisement for an art show that had concluded in 2002. On the glass, a fifth shimmering card was overturned. The boy kicked the desk.

“Blyad,” he said. He turned to me. “Name?”

“Irina Ellison,” I said, producing my passport. He took it and flipped to my picture, which was outdated and silly — taken in college, before I’d gotten my results, when I was affecting a smile that I’d not yet realized looked affected. My hair was short, and the skin around my mouth was flat, and my eyes sat in my skull properly, without being surrounded by semicircles the color of weak tea. I looked, I saw with a start, young. And it’s only when you see how young you once were that you become, in your own mind, old.

“Hm,” he said, and snapped closed the passport. He filed it away for safekeeping and collateral and handed me a pair of keys and a map with our building circled on it. “Here is Moscow boardinghouse.” He pointed with a marker. “Here is metro. Here is bar. You are thirteen.” He pointed down the hallway, which curved around menacingly. Smoke hung visibly in the air, making the light look greasy.

I took the map and the keys and wound my way down the hall, my luggage thumping behind me as though I were being followed by a deformed dog. I’d splurged on a private room, and I found it much as I’d imagined it — dim and dark and cold but serviceable. I dropped my luggage to the floor. I turned the key and locked myself in. I was here, strange as it was to realize. In my wallet, I carried the letter my father had drafted to Bezetov. Tomorrow I would start tracking down the answers to his questions. But tonight all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball, turn my back to the wall, and fall asleep in my clothes. I lay on the bed and closed my eyes.

I woke up fourteen hours later, although it took me a while to figure that out. I’d had restless, shivering dreams that disappeared immediately from memory but left me unhinged. I looked out my window and tried to discern the hour, but the outdoors looked oddly timeless. A fine film of rain was filling the air like ambient noise. The sky was white. On the street churned a sluggish river of people, moving too slowly for business and too dully for pleasure. I looked at my watch and tried to think. It was nearly two in the afternoon.

In the light of day, I could give my room a more complete inspection. There were mysterious stains on the floor, and I soon found an apocalyptic toilet down the hall. In the shower, the smell of somebody’s gardenia shampoo floated just above the smell of wet dirt. I walked down the hall and passed the rockabilly poker player, who was shuffling his iPod with his thumb. There was a horrific smell outside the hostel’s entrance. I declined to investigate its source.

Downstairs I found a tabac selling tiny bear pins and bottled water. Candies of no discernible national origin sported nutrition information in fourteen tiny languages. Depressed-looking pornography was sold alongside gossip magazines, forbidding copies of Pravda , the international edition of Time . I bought some chocolate-covered banana jellies and sat on a park bench and thought, for the first time since landing, about what I was really doing here.