Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

The last evening Aleksandr spent with Ivan was snowy. It was the second week of November, and snowflakes careened madly around like drunken doves. After Elizabeta’s wedding, Aleksandr had found staying in his apartment during the evenings nearly unbearable. He could stand his apartment only if he came home terribly late, terribly inebriated, or both. He’d taken to buying Volzhokoe wine out of the red vending machines, since wine from the markets was usually raw alcohol, apple juice, and petrochemicals. He’d developed an approximately four-minute tolerance for his apartment at night with the lights on — enough time to throw his chess books off the bed and onto the floor, to run down the hall and splash his face with cold water, and to wrestle himself out of most of his clothes before collapsing. Any more time made him anxious and sick and sad; the look of the candlelight on his bed made the room look darker than no light at all. So he’d taken to going over to Ivan’s during the evenings to drink shot after shot of vodka and listen to jazz on Voice of America or watch terrible state television. That fall Traders of Souls was on Channel One, over and over and over, and sometimes they’d watch and laugh at the lurid anti-Semitism, and other times they’d just get quiet and drunk.

Ivan seemed to tolerate Aleksandr’s visits with an attitude ranging from bemused indifference to near-fondness. Although Ivan lived alone, too, something about his apartment didn’t seem to register or reflect loneliness. Maybe it was the cat, or the books, or the constant copying and researching and typing, or the ongoing hostile conversation with the radio, or the phenomenal number of journals that Ivan somehow acquired— Sovest’ , the pro-Communist Leningrad newspaper; America , the U.S. government’s propaganda organ; Woman and Russia , the first and, as far as Aleksandr knew, only feminist samizdat. However he did it, Ivan seemed to live in the very center of his own life — not around the margins, at an awkward distance, never quite knowing where to look.

When Aleksandr reached Ivan on the last night, he was sitting in front of his tiny television, jotting notes for the next issue while watching a miniseries. The syncopated antics of the actors were a little frantic, a little desperate. Still, Ivan slapped his bony knee and smiled and offered Aleksandr a swig of vodka. The cat vibrated as loudly as the typewriter. On the television, through the static, came broad misunderstandings and wild stereotypes and unfortunate physical mishaps. It was an almost homey feeling, like some of Aleksandr’s better nights in Okha, before his father died, when he was very small. Aleksandr caught himself thinking such thoughts and straightened up, cracked his neck, and swigged his vodka. Sometimes he felt as though Ivan could hear him thinking, and he didn’t want Ivan to hear him thinking that.

“Are we going to include the Lithuanian, then?” said Aleksandr.

Ivan shrugged. “We probably will. Despite the objections of our dear friend Nikolai Sergeyevich.”

On the television, a grim-faced man was falling-down drunk. His frantic, coarse-faced wife made hapless efforts to conceal it as she served dinner to a well-dressed man and his wife.

“Why doesn’t Nikolai want to use the Lithuanian?” asked Aleksandr.

“Kolya is a continued mystery to me.” Ivan barked a brief laugh at the television. “He is a man of many strong, inarticulate opinions.”

On the television, the drunk man looked queasy and doubled over in the direction of the well-dressed man’s shoes. The wife screamed. Ivan laughed.

“He thinks it’s too provocative,” said Ivan. “Don’t involve the Baltics, that’s what he’s always said. He thinks it’s one step too far. But what does he know? He’s not exactly running the show, is he? Not exactly a creative driving force, huh?” He stood up and started to pace, running his fingers along the stacks of books and papers. “He keeps the records, he incurs the risks. But he doesn’t really care. Nikolai Sergeyevich is my friend, but I’ll tell you this: he’d get caught up in whatever it was that surrounded him. He’s a radical in search of a cause. We’re only lucky it’s ours.”

Aleksandr thought about this. Outside, the snow was making feathery white fingers against the window. Pieces flew away into the orbit of the streetlight, spinning slowly and turning the color of embers.

“So,” said Ivan after a moment. “I hear your girl got married?”

“Yes.” Something about looking out the window at the snow made him not mind as much; it was like being able to control the pain of some gruesome internal injury by keeping impossibly, inhumanly still.

“Better to him than to you, though.”

Aleksandr dragged his gaze away from the snow. “What do you mean?”

“With a girl like that, it’s better to stay one of her regrets. Better to stay on that side of the ledger, you know? You don’t want to be the man standing between her and her ghosts. You want to be one of the ghosts.”

“Maybe,” said Aleksandr, and he thought he could like that formulation. Right now, maybe, he was standing in the back of Elizabeta’s head, etched in black and white, flickering like a hologram, muted and waving. Right now, maybe, at this very moment, they were haunting each other.

Ivan sat down, jostling the sofa and scattering his papers. “You haven’t lived in a place unless you have at least one major regret there,” he said. Aleksandr experienced a charge in the air, a flash of prekinetic energy, and wondered if Ivan would say something about it. The moment passed, and Ivan sat back and pounded Aleksandr on the shoulder. “So welcome to Leningrad officially, tovarish.”

Aleksandr was about to sarcastically thank him when the comedy program cut out, the television hissing to a black-and-white buzz before crackling back to life. When the image rematerialized, the comic actors were gone, replaced by a somber and dark-clad newscaster who unleashed a spattering of language like rubber bullets on an unruly mob.

“Why are they doing that?” said Aleksandr.

“Shh.” Ivan clicked up the volume and stood close to the television.

“What is it?” The newscaster was introducing a program about Stalin’s strategic genius during World War II.

“Shh.” Ivan’s eyeball was almost against the screen. “Be quiet.” Together they listened, but the newscaster was only expounding on the glories of the Russian nation.

“That’s very strange,” said Aleksandr.

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Brezhnev’s dead.”

“Did they say that?” Aleksandr wondered if maybe he’d missed something. He listened harder.

“No,” said Ivan. “But look at how he’s dressed. Look at his expression. Why are they cutting in to a comedy program with this pseudo-historical shit?”

There was a sheen of panic to the newscaster’s expression, Aleksandr noticed. Something dark and knowing seemed to bob to the surface of his face from time to time before being forced down again.

“He’s dead,” said Ivan. “I would bet on it.” He stood up and started pacing the room, swinging his head slightly, like an annoyed horse. He clasped his hands behind his back. “Well.” He stopped walking, swore in victory, and started walking again. “Well. This is going to be interesting.”

“Are we covering it? Before it’s announced?”

“We’ll start, anyway. It won’t stay unannounced forever. A week, tops, I’d say. But they’ll want to get succession sorted out in quiet.”

Aleksandr nodded and looked out the window again. The snow was coming in quicker currents, crystalline spirals that swirled tighter and tighter until he felt almost dizzy. He wondered what would be coming next.