Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

Moscow, 2006

Elizabeta lived a few miles north of my hostel, out in a gray neighborhood with rows of identical flats that expanded outward like the units of a self-replicating virus. The streets became narrower and more finicky the farther north we got, and after a while I relieved my indifferent taxi driver of his duties and struck out on foot. I took several wrong turns as I hunted for Elizabeta’s apartment, searching through sixteen-letter street names that often differed by only one vowel. I looked down alleyways at fluttering clotheslines, schools of androgynous blond children, large dark dogs that seemed to answer to no one. Above me, apartments were stacked on and over each other like cliff dwellings.

I had just about stopped looking when I found Elizabeta’s store, above which she claimed to live. It was hidden in plain sight amid houses with Russian flags snapping from the windows, pools of standing water congealing in front yards, men with cigarettes sitting wordlessly on front stoops. At the end of the street, a coterie of young men were jumping their bikes off a low concrete ledge, and their periodic shouts made the whole neighborhood seem like the innocent bystander to some sort of crime.

Elizabeta’s door, once I found it, was implausibly skinny. I knocked, and in the lengthy silence that followed, I wondered whether I would have to endure the indignity of walking in sideways. Muffled sighs began to issue from behind the door. Getting up seemed to require an enormous effort from Elizabeta, and I once again felt a crashing suspicion that this meeting was, on the whole, not a good idea. I heard a fierce cough that sounded as if she was trying to expel something that her body was not willing to part with. But instead of a withered babushka, with a worried face and a mouth collapsing where teeth used to be, the woman who opened the door looked healthy enough. She was pretty in a matter-of-fact way, with bright eyes and good bone structure — she had the kind of beauty that endures reasonably well, since it’s not overdoing it — and she wore makeup that was subtle but that you weren’t supposed to miss. She was dressed all in black, though her expression wasn’t mournful. There was something mocking right around her mouth, I noticed, a squiggly near-eruption of smiling. I recognized it because my own face does the same thing sometimes — mangles itself most unattractively when I’m most trying to look serious, if something strikes me as funny or strange or stupid.

“Ah,” she said. “You are Irina. The girl who is not a journalist.”

“Yes.” I couldn’t remember the last time somebody had called me a girl — anyone who was inclined to do so in the States was probably too afraid of getting sued. Even Lars, who you’d think would be a likely candidate, never called me a girl — convinced, as he was, of my unseemly old age and overly chaste dealings with men.

“Come in, then,” she said. “If you keep standing out there looking so hopelessly American, you’re liable to get sexually assaulted.”

She led me through the store. It was cramped and dusty and papered almost wall-to-wall with Soviet-era propaganda; in a poster above the cash register, athletic farmers in a bright green field worked underneath a banner proclaiming YOU ARE THE MASTERS OF THE NEW LIFE! I followed Elizabeta up a claustrophobic back staircase to her apartment. Inside, the living room was clean and almost bare, with a few black-framed photographs on the walls and shelves neatly arranged with books organized according to color. The greens swept along one corner, the blues faded to blacks along another. A rickety rocking chair sat at the center of the room, moving just enough to look inhabited by a particularly undernourished ghost. A birdcage was hanging in the back corner of the room with a small jewel-colored bird looking out through its ribs.

“Are you going to want tea or something?” she said, looking me up and down with some suspicion.

I nodded. I was relieved by the extent of her English; the ability to communicate scorn should be the true test of fluency in any language.

She swung the door of the living room open into a yellow kitchen, where I could just glimpse a hissing gas stove, purple bouquets on ragged wallpaper, a few dull photographs taped to a small nonmagnetic refrigerator. I waited. The living room smelled like dust and artificial cinnamon — the kind that comes from candles, not from cooking. The little green bird ruffled its feathers huffily, and I got up to look at it. Its eye was stern and mottled like igneous rock.

“That’s Fyodor,” said Elizabeta, coming back into the living room with a tray.

Fyodor blinked at me. “He’s very nice.”

“Not really,” she said. “And he sure is taking his time to die. He’s outlived many of my better human companions.”

She put down tea and some dusty-looking biscuits and then sat down in the creaking rocking chair. I sat on the sofa, which was threadbare and swirled with garishly ugly fabric roses. On the wall across from me was tacked a dark-toned portrait of a solemn, well-dressed woman.

“Do you have a pet?” said Elizabeta, her chair making silvery clacks against the wood floor. I knew then that I must seem more pitiful than I’d realized, to have elicited a level of small talk this tragic so early in our acquaintance. “They are quite a commitment.”

“I don’t really do commitments,” I said, sounding childish even to myself. I took a bite of biscuit to avoid saying anything else. It exploded in my mouth like a sandstorm. I put the biscuit back down and folded my napkin over the edge of my plate.

“Sorry,” she said, looking at my neglected pastry and not sounding too terribly broken up. “I am not domestic, you’ll notice.”

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” I said, sipping my tea.

Elizabeta shrugged. “Like you, I do not really have commitments. Just the damn bird.” She dunked a cube of biscuit into her tea, then flung it at Fyodor, who gobbled it greedily. “At least he likes my cooking.” The bird bobbed its head mildly, as if in half-ironic agreement.

“So,” I said, suddenly feeling the awkward absurdity of flying across the world to sit and make small talk in a Russian living room with an old woman and her pugilistic pet bird. “You said you didn’t work for Aleksandr Bezetov, exactly.”

She gave me a wry look. “Not exactly, no.”

“So how do you know him?”

“I don’t, really. We lived in the same building, back in the day.” Her voice, which had been relatively strong throughout the conversation, was starting to sound tangled by vines. “Excuse me,” she said, and disappeared into a fit of coughing so long and intense that I looked away. Her thin shoulders shuddered brutally. Evil tearing noises issued from her chest. Her coughing became wild and inconsolable, a howl of some permanent, universal grief. When she recovered slightly, there were small clots of blood in her handkerchief.

“Are you okay?” I said, even though she was clearly not okay. I’m intimately familiar with the irrelevancies generated by extreme distress — the platitudes of consolation, the clichés of kindness. I was annoyed at myself for having nothing better to say.

“Fine,” she croaked.

“Is it — are you — I mean,” I said, deploying in one go my whole personal arsenal of halting idiocies. I experienced a flash of sympathy for Jonathan, for my mother, for the doctors, for everyone who had tried with me, and failed, and endured the exacting judgment of my disappointed, dying gaze.

“It’s not tuberculosis,” she said. There was a dewy thread of blood hanging from her mouth, but I didn’t know her well enough to say so. “It’s not contagious. It’s emphysema. Damn cigarettes.”