Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Aren’t all moments like that, though?” I said.

“Some more than others, I have come to believe,” Elizabeta said lightly, before coughing again. When she came up for air this time, I let a respectful beat pass — a moment of mourning or solidarity — and then said, “What was Aleksandr like?”

“What was he like?”

“Well, you know. What did he do?”

“Oh, who knows? What does anybody do? He fiddled around with his game, I always supposed. He was into the samizdat thing. They published a journal that a handful of people read. Sometimes my friend and I–I lived with my girlfriend Sonya then — would sneak past his door and put our ears against it and listen. Sonya had all these theories about him; thought he was a secret sex maniac or a sort of idiot, or a serial killer, or KGB.” Elizabeta turned to Fyodor and puckered her lips at him, and I could tell she was trying to keep her face from doing something involuntary and revealing. I’ve had too much experience with facial sleights and emotional misdirection not to notice this type of thing when I see it. It occurred to me, briefly and casually, that Elizabeta and Aleksandr had been lovers.

“And what did you think?”

“I guess I just thought he was a very nice boy. No, not nice. Sort of interesting and confusing. I liked him.” Elizabeta’s face turned a marginally different color, and she looked up at Solomoniya, who stared back bleakly. “But our acquaintance was short-lived.”

“What did you do in those days?”

“I was a secretary,” she said, and looked away, and I was struck flatly across the face with the uncomfortable reality that Elizabeta had probably worked for the Party. She was so irreverent that it hadn’t yet occurred to me. But everybody, more or less, had been implicated — the smart people and the cynical ones, the listless survivors and the true believers. So she’d typed stuff for men with misguided economic notions. What did it matter? What did I understand about it? I noticed that Elizabeta still wasn’t looking at me.

She took a sip of tea. “Our friendship was short-lived, and then it was too late.”

“Too late?”

“I mean by then he was famous. This was a different time, remember. Being a secretary involves a great deal of massaging of the male ego, even in the offices of our great social utopia. I couldn’t do it when I wasn’t being paid to.”

“That’s a principled stance,” I said. It came out worse than I’d meant.

There was a horrid pause. “You must need to get back to your hostel,” Elizabeta said, standing up. I stood up, too, so as not to be left idling with an angry Russian woman dressed in black — even a weak, miserably coughing one — hovering above me. Elizabeta was small, but she was the type of person whom you didn’t want looking at you in a certain way.

“I’m sorry if I upset you,” I said. This was a phrase I learned from college boyfriends.

Elizabeta laughed, and this time her laugh sounded like buckling ice on an undiscovered planet. “I am not so easily upset. But listen.”

She disappeared into the kitchen and then returned with a yellow index card. She handed it to me. “This is the information of a man in St. Petersburg.” She’d written the name in an underconfident, overly careful Latin alphabet.

“Is this a friend of Aleksandr’s?”

“This is a man who has been trying to get in touch with Aleksandr. A man in your line of work, I think. Calling, calling, calling. Maybe by now he has managed to do it.”

I didn’t know what she meant by my “line of work.” Was he a fugitive non-tenure-track professor? A person who stumbled blindly through foreign countries and degenerative diseases as a career? I looked at the name. Nikolai Sergeyev, 132 Vasilievsky Ostrov, St. Petersburg.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m sure this will be helpful.” Another person to cold-call, I thought. Fantastic. I was becoming a professional telemarketer, a sad-eyed celebrity in maudlin television ads for my own lost cause.

“You know your way back?” she said.

“I’ll get a taxi.”

Elizabeta looked at me evenly. “You know that some of the taxis aren’t really taxis.”

“What?”

“Some of them are really thieves.”

“How do you know which ones are which?”

She shrugged. “You find out the hard way, I guess.”

Suddenly I’d had enough of Elizabeta, with her faulty lungs and her sour-faced bird and her portrait of a woman who had somehow missed her own proper fate. I didn’t know why I so often found myself in contact with people who insisted on speaking cryptically, in little proverbs and hints. Lars was like this, too, and he didn’t even have the excuse of a childhood spent in a police state.

“Good luck,” said Elizabeta, and I thanked her and went out into the dusky neighborhood. Oncoming car lights illuminated the trash cans. I walked in little circles for quite a while before I found a cab.

The next afternoon I wandered Moscow. I admired art nouveau arabesques and neoclassical sunset-colored facades on all the post-Communist buildings. I stared at the gargantuan statue of Peter the Great above the Moskva, with his grotesquely small head and creepily long fingers. I went to Gorky Park and watched parents pay a nominal fee to have little Petr or Ivanka photographed with a depressive, flea-bitten tiger. Peat-bog fires east of the city had driven up temperatures, and in the evening I sweated my way through the statue park and counted the pallid roses at the foot of Lenin. The next day I called Jonathan.

Navigating the phone card was a disaster, full of such stern admonitions from the operator that I felt pretty bad about myself before he even picked up the phone. When he did, I heard muffled subaquatic noises and felt sure for a sickening eternal moment that he had somebody over.

“Hello?” He sounded alarmed, and it occurred to me that it was four in the morning where he was.

“I’m sorry,” I said. There wasn’t an audible sound, but the phone line seemed to convey an attitude in its silence — derision or disbelief or an adult exhaustion with the self-absorbed hijinks of children.

“Are you coming back?” His voice was the tense crackle of a man on the edge of sleep — which, I realized, I’d never gotten familiar with.

I thought, but I didn’t really have to think. “I don’t know what to say.”

He was silent, but it didn’t feel like the kind of silence that would hang up on you. It felt like the kind of silence that would wait, breathe quietly, and hate you across the swirling dark ocean.

“Can’t we be friends?” I said, then almost hit myself over the head with the enormous Brezhnev-era telephone for saying it.

“What would that even mean at this point?”

“It would mean we’re okay with each other in the universe.” That was what I wanted for us, I realized as soon as I said it. I could stand it, I thought, if we were still friends, on balance — on whatever invisible psychic ledger kept track of these things. I couldn’t have him over there in Boston hating me or forgetting me. I couldn’t have him revising who I was so that he could properly dismantle me, turn me into a pathological mistake or a lesson learned or a bullet dodged.

“This is insulting,” said Jonathan. “Seriously. What do you want me to say? Never mind. I don’t care what you want me to say.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, which is a phrase that only gets soggier if you say it over and over. We were quiet. Sometimes I wish I’d been the kind of person who could stand the ignorance, the excruciating optimism, of not finding out.

“How are things?” I said.