Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Please. We are not having this conversation. You’ve forfeited your right to this conversation.”

“Okay.”

“You didn’t invent this thing,” he said.

“What?”

“You didn’t invent it. You didn’t have to do it this way. People do it differently. We could have done it differently.”

I wasn’t totally sure I knew what he was talking about, but I thought I probably did. And he was right. Other people do it differently, with prayer and alternative medicine and blessings counted and cataloged. My inability to do it that way stemmed from immaturity and ego and an impious reverence for functioning human brains. I wasn’t exactly proud of this. But I couldn’t go home to do it the other way — to lose myself from the best parts down, to be spoon-fed by a man who hadn’t even seen me cry.

“I really cared about you,” he said.

“Well,” I said, and I knew I was going to have to hang up right away. “I guess that was your first mistake.”

St. Petersburg had an entirely different feel than Moscow — it was all planned streets and arcing avenues and stylistically unified architecture. On Teatralnaya Ulitsa, the buildings appeared to dance. Long cords of icy sunlight seemed to obey intended routes, making crisp ninety-degree turns around corners. The smell, too, was different. Both cities, I noticed, smelled bad — unforgivably, devilishly, abusively bad — in places. There was a smell in one corner near my hostel in Moscow that seemed to make the air opaque; your knees wilted, your spirit flagged, when confronted with it. It seemed concocted, preordained. It didn’t seem like the kind of smell that could have emerged organically without supernatural intervention. If some people look at the complexity of the universe and see proof of God, I look at the dire complexity of that smell and see the suggestion of Satan. In St. Petersburg, there was the fine-dirt smell of eggplant; below it, a casually salty marine smell, like dirty aquarium; and just below that, something meatier and wilder, the smell of iceberg and whale. There was the smell of vodka and beer caked along alleyways, after a night of thaw and half a day of indirect sunlight, and this smell came to make cold tragic fingers against my rib cage whenever I smelled it, because it meant abandoned hopes, revised game plans, the instructive clashing of desire and reality. It meant an evening of fun had come and, inevitably, gone.

I went to St. Petersburg soon after Elizabeta gave me Nikolai’s information, crinkling into my bag my damp clothes and directions and taking a night train. I’d photocopied my passport twice and put one copy in my left shoe and one into a box of tampons. I’d found my own car, full of prissy antimacassars and the hearty stink of urine. Of course I’d vowed not to sleep, and of course I’d woken up halfway through the trip with a middle-aged man splayed out on the seat across the aisle from me, making half-snores and little sucking noises in his dreams. In the morning I felt awkward and too intimate, as though we were on the other end of a night of the worst kind of sexual mistakes. In St. Petersburg I’d found a hostel similar to the one in Moscow, with long drafty hallways and a vaguely hostile staff. And there I sat for a few days and waited for the nerve to look into finding Nikolai. I toured the city, admired its clean architecture and commemorative statues, spun my wheels, and spent my money. My Russian was improving marginally, though not as fast as I’d hoped. I was about ready to sit down and call this man, arrange a meeting, and subject myself to all its attendant futilities and absurdities and hazards. But as it turned out, Nikolai got to me before I got to him.

I’d taken to spending long afternoons seated in a tiny café next door to my hostel, poring over newspapers and shivering. The café was always ten degrees cooler than the outside, and the outside — even in July — could take on a dull-edged chill in the late afternoons. So I was wearing a few sweaters and a half-awake grimace when a large man plopped down across the table from me and asked me, in rough-hewn and fragmented English, if I was Irina Ellison from America.

I was startled. The man had a face that looked as if it had been scoured by steel wool; his head was the shape and size and durability of an American football helmet. I looked at his hands to see if they were holding a badge of some kind, and was relieved and then confused and then scared when I saw that they weren’t. I couldn’t tell if this was the kind of man it would be smart to lie to.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s my name. Who are you?”

“My name is Nikolai Sergeyevich,” said the man. “I hear you have been looking for me.” The lacy network of light scars across his face made him look almost comically sinister from afar. Up close, they appeared to be only the remnants of adult acne.

“I haven’t been looking for anybody yet,” I said. “I’ve only been thinking about it.”

Nikolai rubbed his hands together. When he turned his face to the side to signal the waiter for coffee, the light made his face look like a slice of marbleized ham. He was fat, and his was the kind of fat that really asserts itself, through heavy breathing and the noisy rolling of flesh.

“You are looking for Aleksandr Bezetov, I understand,” he said. “I want to help you find him.”

“Why?” The waiter brought a tiny black coffee, and Nikolai grunted a thank-you.

“We were great friends back in the day,” said Nikolai, taking a sip of his coffee and pulling his face into a grimace of disapproval. “We were basically children together.”

“In Okha?” It didn’t seem likely.

“Not children,” said Nikolai. “Youth, I should say. We were young men together during Soviet days.”

“Oh,” I said. A string of obvious questions ran through my head: How did you know I had your information? How did you know I was looking for Aleksandr Bezetov? How did you know my name? I thought briefly of the man at my hostel’s front desk and how noisy I’d been about my mission and my whereabouts. But I didn’t say anything. I’ve always been hesitant to question absurd premises — other people’s or my own. It seemed undiplomatic to ask him who the hell he was and what the hell he thought he was doing.

“You’re at the embassy, then?” said Nikolai. There was a standing hostility in his voice that seemed to be occasionally eclipsed by sheer effort, as though somebody had firmly admonished him ahead of time to be nice to me.

“No,” I said.

Nikolai looked confused. “Of course.” His lacerated face creased with worry, as if he thought he might have offended me. “Well, I think if we pool our information, we might just have the chance to track down Aleksandr Bezetov. My old buddy.”

“I don’t have any information.”

“Ah,” said Nikolai, sinking back into his chair with a fleshy smack. “How would you characterize your role at the embassy, then?”

This was baffling.

“I’m not at the embassy,” I said. “I’m just on vacation.”

Nikolai looked at me — my several sweaters, the gray tea in its cup bleeding onto the newspaper. “A vacation,” he said. “I see. I just want you to know you’re supposed to be registered if you’re working out of the embassy.”

“I’m not.”

“Because we couldn’t help but notice that you’re not registered.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” which, again, was true. “Who’s ‘we’?” And then, finally — because I didn’t like the way his face was looking at me, like the world’s most reproachful piece of poultry — I asked, “Who the hell are you?”