Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Shut up,” said Aleksandr, but hearing her name made him stupidly happy. He sped through Vasilevsky Island that day in an uncommonly good mood and got back to the apartment before Ivan had even finished copying the next sheaf.

And then, as suddenly as Elizabeta had started coming, she stopped. Aleksandr didn’t see her in the hallways. He didn’t see her in the kitchen. He lingered outside the bathroom, sure that she’d eventually turn up there, until the steward chased him away. He didn’t knock on her door, though he did walk by it several times. Her slippers were always there, which meant she was always out.

It was possible that he should knock. But he wasn’t sure. He waited and agonized about the waiting. He hemmed. He weighed the competing considerations. She had started the whole thing, so it was gentlemanly to let her come back on her own. Better not to push it. As the days stretched to weeks, however, and as the weeks compressed into a series of unending moments in which he was not with Elizabeta, his rationale changed. She’d come to see him the first time, after all. She was probably waiting for him to come to her. It was only diplomatic, and chivalrous, to return a visit with a visit — or, in this case, many visits with one. He’d be rude not to, and he so hated to be rude. And after further philosophical revision and fretting — and an attempted oblique consultation with Nikolai and Ivan that ended in their laughter and Aleksandr’s deep embarrassment — he swallowed down his terror and approached her room.

Outside apartment nine was a man leaning against the door. His hair and eyelashes were almost ice-white; his eyes were such a beautiful blue that they seemed wasted on a man. His coloring could be Slavic, but his demeanor absolutely was not. There was too much relaxation in his pose, too much openness in the way he watched the people pass him in the halls, unafraid to meet their eyes. Clearly, he wasn’t concerned he’d be noticed. Clearly, he was from the West.

“Are you waiting for Elizabeta?” said Aleksandr. He tried to speak slowly; he knew that Russian could be one interminable word if one talked too quickly.

“Yes,” said the man. He was young, though his hair was cut with mild gray around the temples. Up close, the blueness of his eyes was irrepressible. Even from a single word, Aleksandr could note with a marginal thrill that the man’s accent was quite poor.

“Where are you from?”

“Brussels.” The man sneezed and looked wary. “Excuse me.”

“Why are you here?”

“That’s what everyone wants to know, isn’t it? Every time I’m stalled in traffic, somebody in a black raincoat approaches me and asks why I’m here, why I’m not in a tourist zone, why I’m not with a group. You people certainly know how to make a man feel welcome.”

Aleksandr took a step back. Outside of the Saigon, he hadn’t heard anybody complain so loudly about anything since he’d arrived in Leningrad. It was galling to realize that it made him nervous. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “I just play chess here.”

The Belgian nodded. “You waiting for the girl?”

“I guess so.”

“Then you don’t just play chess here, eh?” said the man. A look of self-amusement illuminated his eyes like the blue flash of a passing ambulance.

“I suppose.” The man was awfully nosy and tactlessly quick to issue his own opinions. Aleksandr was used to being treated with indifference; he was used to people avoiding each other like the wrong ends of magnets. It was a frightening way to live, but at least it wasn’t vulgar.

The Belgian blinked his eyes, the blueness of which was starting to feel intrusively Western: his eyes were becoming the blue of cornflowers and van Gogh paintings and United Nations helmets. “She’s a nice girl,” he said. “It really is too bad she’s getting married.”

“No. What? No.”

The Belgian shrugged and put his cigarette in his mouth to show that he didn’t care. His eyes were becoming the blue of oxygen deprivation. “She is. You didn’t know? To some Party official, I hear, who looks like a prehistoric beast. Large man. I’ve seen him. You’d think he walked out of a museum for dead things.” Aleksandr said nothing; the thought of saying anything about the subject — or maybe about anything else ever again — suddenly seemed monumentally taxing. The Belgian wore a bewildered expression, as though Aleksandr were just the latest of the Soviet Union’s mounting mysteries. “Sad, isn’t it?” he said. “I rather like her myself. But what can you do? The woman’s got to look out for her own interests.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Aleksandr, although he was already starting to believe it.

The man released a whoosh of smoke-free air from his mouth. He rolled his eyes. He kept talking around the cigarette. “Suit yourself. That’s kind of your thing, isn’t it? The Soviets?”

“What?” said Aleksandr miserably.

“Believing whatever you want to, regardless of the facts. Please don’t let me stop you. Please don’t let me get in the way of this. It’s your great national tradition, I understand.”

Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe the Belgian was mistaken, or maybe he’d meant the other girl, the roommate, and had gotten them confused. Elizabeta would never marry a Party official, for one thing, and — Aleksandr hoped savagely, then felt sorry for hoping it — a Party official would never marry her. It just could not be a good move professionally.

“Hey,” said the Belgian. “Where’d you go?” He waved his hand across Aleksandr’s face, snapped his fingers several times in quick succession. His eyes were the blue of fingers in winter on hands that nobody held. Elizabeta and a Party official. Maybe it was a good match after all. Maybe they’d have lots to talk about.

“You people,” the Belgian was saying. “You people are a weird bunch. Getting sentimental about your whores.”

Suddenly Aleksandr was seized with an overwhelming desire to hit this man, to pummel him with an aggression that was neither intellectual nor metaphorical. Games were pacified war, and no game was more overtly warlike than chess. But sometimes you needed violence to be real and losses to count. Sometimes you needed to defend something that really mattered, and not only because it symbolized something that mattered.

Also, the Belgian was smaller than Aleksandr.

Aleksandr’s fist clicked against the knob of bone below the man’s eye. The Belgian looked startled, then emotionally wounded, then resigned. He gave Aleksandr an almost fraternal slap across the chest. Aleksandr tried to yank some hair and only grazed the Belgian’s head. The Belgian tried to get a handle on Aleksandr’s rib cage with one hand while trying to tangle one of his legs around Aleksandr’s. Aleksandr tried to knee the Belgian in the balls and missed, and he was glad he’d missed. It was over in less than a minute, the two of them standing feet apart, relieved that no one had seen it.

“Sorry,” muttered Aleksandr.

The Belgian blinked, and his enormous light eyebrows seemed to waggle under the weight of his umbrage. He clicked his neck to one side and the other, rolled his shoulders back, inspected himself for damage. Aleksandr watched him. There was a soreness growing behind his kneecap, a stillness blooming in his heart. “Can I — Are you hurt?” said Aleksandr.

“Please. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I’ll go. If you could tell her I came by, maybe.” But he didn’t care, really, whether the Belgian did or not.

Aleksandr began to walk away. “Hey,” said the Belgian, but Aleksandr didn’t turn around. There was nothing to see behind him, he knew, nothing the Belgian could tell him that he wanted to know. “I wouldn’t want you to have to take my word for it,” the Belgian yelled, his accent flattening through his anger. Aleksandr walked faster, then started to run. The bruised soft side of his knee was pulsing and the neighbors were slamming their doors around him and the plaster molding was dropping white chips on his head and his run was opening up into a sprint. But he couldn’t get away fast enough to miss hearing the Belgian shout at him that the next time he saw her, motherfucker, he should look for the ring.