Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Should you — should we — go to the doctor?” I said, gesturing to the blood-flecked handkerchief.

“Not yet. They don’t do anything about the blood. I’ll go when I can’t breathe at all. It’s better now.” My face must have suggested some pale horror, because she said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

I’ve spent enough time in hospitals to know that this is generally never true, but I appreciated the sentiment.

“What were we on?” she said.

“Bezetov.”

“Ah. Bezetov. Right.” Her voice seemed to fully emerge from its cloud of coughing — wry, feathery, nearly unscathed. “Nice young man. As I recall. What’s your interest in him?”

“Well,” I said carefully. “I’m trying to get a meeting with him.” It seemed inappropriate to bring up now, I thought — it was like visiting your dear old grandmother for tea only to ask her probing questions about the will.

“Trust me, friend. If it were so easy to get a meeting with Aleksandr.” She stopped talking, and I tried to figure out if the midsentence halt was an issue of translation. “Why do you want this meeting, exactly?”

“My father admired him, and they’d had some kind of correspondence,” I said stupidly. “Actually, my father tried to have a correspondence. Bezetov didn’t write back. You did.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

I produced the letter and handed it to Elizabeta. She stared at it for a few moments.

“That’s you, right?” I said. “That’s your signature?”

“Yes. God, I had terrible handwriting. But I don’t remember writing it. Or reading it. Sorry.”

I looked down.

“What do you want him to say to you?” said Elizabeta, handing me back the letter.

“I have this — diagnosis, and I like chess,” I said. Elizabeta’s face registered no understanding. She blinked, rustled in her black layers, and waited for me to start making sense. “I couldn’t stay home,” I concluded.

“So you came to Russia to chase a dissident through the snow? You picked a weird vacation. He’s surrounded by security all the time. You understand the situation, don’t you?”

“Sort of,” I muttered. I felt violently foolish, an idiot American tearing a destructive path through a rain forest or a Graham Greene novel.

She squinted at me. “You know he’s running for president?”

“Oh yes, I know that,” I said. “Of course I know that. You must be pleased for him.” I’d been reading this in bits and pieces all year — usually in colorful text boxes at the bottom of the international sections of newsmagazines, headlined by self-satisfied wordplay. “State Strategy: A Chess Genius Turns His Mind to Politics,” they read, or “Check Your King: Former Chess Champion Takes on Putin.” It had occurred to me — somewhere between crumpling my life into plastic bags and getting my visa stamped, between leaving my lover and losing him — that this presidential campaign might create challenges for me, and that meeting a bewildered young woman, flailing in every sense of the word, might not be Aleksandr Bezetov’s absolute highest priority. But I’d chosen to mostly ignore this, like many of the more inconvenient facts of my life.

“Not so completely pleased, maybe,” said Elizabeta, her mouth becoming a curt little comma. “He can’t win, and it makes a lot of important people want to kill him. A lot of people who know how to do it with relative discretion. Poisons, you know, or plane crashes. Putin has basically put it on the government’s agenda for the year. Aleksandr never flies Aeroflot, even internally. Especially internally. Although the more famous he gets in the West, the more uncomfortable it gets for the FSB to try it. That’s part of why he likes to talk to you reporters all the time.”

“I’m not a reporter.”

“Okay. Whatever you’re calling it. But the problem is, like I said, people are always trying to kill him. Not often women, it’s true, and never Americans yet, but one never does know.”

“I’m not trying to kill him,” I said, mildly offended.

“Even if you weren’t, I can’t help you. He won’t remember me. I don’t have his information.” Her voice was starting to break apart again, like a single note opening up into a four-part chord. I thought she was about to start coughing, but she didn’t.

“Oh,” I said, and I felt that that perhaps could be that. This had been an elaborate scheme, psychologically costly and financially disastrous, and it was most definitely too embarrassing to go home with that as my excuse. People would say, “Oh, you’re still alive? Weren’t you supposed to die dramatically in some vast eastern expanse, and weren’t you supposed to learn or find or do something first? I suppose you can have your job and boyfriend back, if you want, but I’m sure you understand that this is extremely awkward.” Going back would be like going too late to a party thrown by people you hardly know, then getting stuck sitting there with them, with the lights up, drinking warm beer and talking about mutual acquaintances who already left. It would be like showing up at the chilly apartment of some half-dead Russian woman, then browbeating her for information about a forgotten friend, then choking up and staring at the ceiling for some length of time when she didn’t have it.

But what was the alternative? Roam the bridges of St. Petersburg until the time seemed right to jump into the Neva? Engage in full-throttle stalking of this chessman, throw stones at his window, leave little notes in his mailbox, get myself shot by his burly unmerciful companions? All of that, too, seemed anticlimactic.

The sharp edges of my silence must have been starting to make Elizabeta uncomfortable, because she gestured at the grim-faced woman in the portrait. “You know the story of Solominiya?” she said. Solomoniya glowered disapprovingly at me from underneath heavy brows.

“No. Who was she?” Tortured to death, no doubt, for some point of principle or virginity. Female saints always got that way by choosing death over sex. Maybe I could get myself canonized, I thought. That would at least keep me busy.

“She was the wife of Vasily the Third.”

“Ah, of course.”

“She couldn’t produce an heir — that’s always the way with powerful people, isn’t it? The wrong women produce the heirs, and then somebody has to get banished or killed. Anyway, Solomoniya was banished to a convent so Vasily could take another wife. But lo and behold, nine months later, she bears a son.”

I raised my eyebrows, trying to look scandalized, although I am basically incapable of being scandalized. Elizabeta tossed another chunk of biscuit to the bird.

“Solomoniya fears for the life of the child and promptly declares him dead. Nobody knows what became of him. And there the matter rests until the excavations of 1934, when they dig up Solomoniya — and next to her body lies a tiny dummy baby.”

“So the baby lived.”

“He lived, and his line technically would have produced the rightful heir to all of Russia — not that that’s much to claim, and not that any modern person believes that anybody’s the rightful heir to anything.”

“So why do you keep her up there?”

“She doesn’t look happy to be there, does she?” said Elizabeta. Solomoniya’s scorn seemed to rain down on us, her dark eyes communicating all the mute, immobile rage of people denied, confined, disappeared.

“She doesn’t.”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’ve always been interested in how things could have gone differently. Moments when things might have gone one way and instead went another.”

I thought of my father’s letter and his concern with the moment when one realizes that though there are many ways things might be, there is only one way that they are — and that no matter what, one will have to stand it.