Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Nobody. I saw the chess essay, and I’ve been noticing your weird hours lately, and I just — But listen, Aleksandr, don’t get stupid, okay? People have seen this. Party people have seen this.”

“How have Party people seen this?”

Elizabeta shook her head. “I mean, they know everything.”

“How do you know Party people have seen this?”

“Aleksandr,” and now Elizabeta was twisting up her hair, cracking her neck so hard it made Aleksandr wince, and standing up. “You know I know a lot of different kinds of people. Anyway. I should go.” She was in the doorway, and her eyes were looking somewhere beyond Aleksandr’s. “I’m sorry I bothered you.” But she spent another moment not leaving, biting her lip and looking oddly mournful.

“You didn’t bother me,” said Aleksandr, although he realized he felt bothered. He put his hand on her shoulder — self-consciously, fraternally. She plucked his hand with hers and started pulling his fingers, slowly and tenderly, until the knuckles cracked.

For a moment the only sounds in the room were shallow breathing, the popping of Aleksandr’s joints, the hiss of candles burning down to the ceramic and then quietly, without a fuss, going out.

“Watch out, Aleksandr,” said Elizabeta as she turned to leave. “That’s all I really came to say.”

It went like that for a little while, then. When Aleksandr looked back and counted, it added up to only six weeks, though somehow it felt like somewhere between a day and a half and his entire lonely life. She came in the evenings. At first there were pretexts — some new item she’d seen, some new warning she had — but soon enough she abandoned them. Soon enough she stopped knocking.

He’d slept with only one woman before Elizabeta — the daughter of the owner of Okha’s sole petrol station, who was mostly silent and smelled of wool — and with Elizabeta it was a different thing: the inversion or recapitulation of what had before been a rather stern affair. With Elizabeta, it was all exuberant gymnastics and sudden right turns. They’d lie end to end for a long time, and he’d get lost somewhere there — the room seemed to rotate, and time didn’t seem quite like itself. They bit each other’s skinny shoulders. He tongued the fingerprint-sized indentation above her navel. They fell off the bed and laughed.

Then they’d lie together and tell each other things that made Aleksandr blush to think about — not because they were obscene but because they were not. It seemed humiliating in later years to have shared so much so quickly and for so little. The fucking was one thing — this was something he later got good at, and there were many other women, many other playful romps and beleaguered beds and high-end hairstyles ruined. But all that talking. All those confidences. He shuddered to think about it. At the time, though, he didn’t know any better, and he was filled with the gleeful lurching and teeth-chattering panic of early and undiagnosed love. Elizabeta told him about her childhood in Khabarovsk — about her father, drunken and stinking and apoplectic, and her mother, drunken and silent and besieged — and how she did not like her life in Leningrad but, truth be told, she’d liked her life in Khabarovsk quite a bit less. And Aleksandr told her about arguing with his grandfather about Communism, and listening to Radio Free Europe, and playing correspondence chess with the students at Andronov’s academy until he’d finally been summoned into his own future. And he told her how chess was the only escape from loneliness, and how epic his loneliness had been here, all these months before she’d knocked on his door.

She’d bring her slippers inside his room so that the neighbors didn’t notice her pair outside his door — though like most secrets in the building, it was no secret for long. The walls were thin. Aleksandr could hear the neighbors sneeze and toss creakily on their beds. He tried not to think about what they might have heard of him and Elizabeta, though it was hard not to wonder when the steward glowered smugly at Aleksandr in the hallway, when the man who didn’t like living near prostitutes clapped him manfully on the back. “Hope she’s giving you a discount, tovarish,” the man said.

Aleksandr winced but didn’t answer. He was too happy.

It was remarkable, truly startling, the way that he could be thinking about Elizabeta absolutely all the time. Other thoughts came and went, skimming along the surface of the vast reservoir of consciousness that was devoted always to her. He was surprised at his capacity to think of other things — of many other things — with some degree of intelligence and depth without ever ceasing to think about her. She’d set up a full-blown military occupation of his brain. This energized him, made him wittier and livelier around Ivan and Nikolai, made him try harder at everything, made him fix his buttons and comb his hair and pull on his pants with more attention than he ever had before. Ivan even remarked that Aleksandr seemed to have snapped out of it. By this he seemed to mean that Aleksandr had snapped out of his entire personality, which certainly felt true.

There was a physical sensation in his chest, an internal compression that felt pathological; he felt constantly on the verge of tears or mad laughter or cardiac arrest.

He’d never believed in any of it before, but there it was.

It was a few weeks later that Misha made his return to the Saigon. It was a rainy night in early April — the sky was unleashed, and all the effluvia of winter were running through the gutters and out into the Baltic — and when Aleksandr, Ivan, and Nikolai reached their usual table, they were surprised to find a man waiting for them. He was a man you had to get used to looking at. His face looked as though it had been turned inside out: red sores shone through his thin hair and linked down the sides of his face like sideburns; the lights of the café made small yellow pools in the shallows of his face. The skin below his eyes seemed to conceal permanent low-grade internal bleeding. “Shit, Misha,” said Nikolai. “What the fuck happened to you?”

They’d been planning to talk about the next issue, but when they saw Misha at the table, Nikolai and Ivan fell to silence.

Aleksandr had met Misha only the once, so he wasn’t entirely sure what the man usually looked like. He was sure, however, that nobody could usually look like this. The veins against his temples were an alarming blue; his eyes seemed to float a millimeter or more beyond his skull. He was thin enough to provide his own anatomy lessons. He sneered, which did further violence to his face. “Care to join me, fellows?” he said.

“Of course,” said Nikolai, pulling out a chair with a murderous scrape and jostling the table by sitting down too quickly. Aleksandr followed suit. Ivan leaned toward Misha, deep inlets forming between his eyebrows.

Misha sat and said nothing for a long while. He looked profoundly weary and too undone by life to ever voluntarily engage it again. Ivan and Nikolai stayed quiet, and their silence started to seem like reverence — as though Misha were a deposed king coming home to reclaim his land, or a wronged god returning to survey his wrecked world.

“Well,” said Misha after they’d all stared at him slightly longer than was decent. “How have you been occupying yourselves? In my absence?”

“Please,” said Ivan. “What can we get you? Do you need something to eat? A drink, maybe?”

“Nothing to drink.” Misha issued a cough that was thick and wounding. “The doctors tell me my internal organs are like tissue paper. A stiff drink could kill me here and now. Unless that’s the idea?”