Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

The apartment, never orderly, had exploded. The mattress had been overturned. The dresser bulged with open drawers and overflowing clothes. Papers were two inches deep on the floor, and they caught at Aleksandr’s ankles as he walked through the room. The poster of Brigitte Bardot was, ludicrously, gone.

Okay, thought Aleksandr. I see.

There were some drafts for the upcoming issue underneath the couch, and he wrestled them out from puffs of dust and loose coins and a smear of something sticky and indecipherable. On the coffee table, Ivan’s ancient Leica was decapitated, all its film exposed to the unforgiving light. Underneath Ivan’s best shirt, Aleksandr found some photographs — a woman, a little boy, an old couple — but he didn’t recognize anyone. He thought again of Ivan’s regrets and wondered if any of these people counted among them. He realized that he’d never heard Ivan speak of anything besides the next or last issue, the depravity of the government, the idiocy of Aleksandr and Nikolai, the torment of Misha, or the needs of the cat. Aleksandr wheeled back through his memories of Ivan, but there was nothing else — no childhood, no loves, no personal disasters. No explanation for living alone with a cat. No moment of revelation that led him to risk his life over and over, to antagonize a system that would, realistically, remain in power forever. And that was all it had been — antagonism. They’d been an irritant, perhaps, on a good day, like a monkey pestering an elephant that can, at any time, snap the monkey underfoot and crunch its head flat. For the elephant, it’s only a question of when. It’s only a question of summoning the energy.

It was entirely possible that Misha was right.

There wasn’t much left in Ivan’s apartment to find. The KGB had taken a lot, more than they could possibly find useful. They seemed to have taken dirty socks and irrelevant receipt paper. They’d taken bits of coinage. The typewriter with the carbon paper was, of course, gone. Most notably, they had taken the books.

The cat whimpered, and Aleksandr picked her up. He could feel the whirring of her little chest and wondered what mechanism it was that kept it running.

“I guess you’re mine now, huh?” said Aleksandr.

Natasha nipped him on the thumb.

He borrowed an ancient typewriter from one of the academic subscribers. He got more carbon paper. He spent four days typing, until his thumbs and elbows pulsed in protest. He was good at sitting still and engaging in slight repetitive motions; chess had prepared him for this, if nothing else. He stapled them all together in the oncoming white light of dawn, as his last candle was melting down into a waxy pool. He left Natasha with some desiccated mushrooms on the floor.

He took the train up to Moscow alone, standing up sideways in the hallway, since all the cars were full, and watching the engineer tap the wheels for metal fatigue before the train pulled away from the station. Aleksandr wore a coat with another coat underneath. Under the second coat, he held twenty-five copies of the final issue of A Partial History of Lost Causes .

The metro in Moscow was choked with security. Men sat with their hats off, looking blankly through the windows into the whirring underground darkness. Underneath the subterranean chandeliers and light-drenched alcoves, everybody was wearing black.

Two streets from Red Square, he could hear the brass horns, too jaunty and bombastic for the occasion. He knew he couldn’t get close. There would be scores of gray-coated, grim-faced soldiers, red flags slung over their shoulders, their knees snapping in time together. They would be thronging toward the Kremlin, Brezhnev’s coffin squatting darkly in the center. In the Kremlin there would be heads of state, Arab nationalistic leaders in keffiyehs, African dictators in traditional garb. They would all bend their heads together, assuming expressions of reflection and loss.

Outside the moving stand of soldiers, there were mourners: nearest the center were the ones who’d been recruited and paid; nearer the outside were coils of genuine grievers, and curious passersby, and people who’d brought their children to see history, and people who just didn’t want to go home yet. Some of them looked positively gleeful — a small vial of something alcoholic was passed from hand to hand, and an old man spat gray expectorate on the ground every time Brezhnev’s name was mentioned. One woman wept openly, her face unfolding, rubbing her brown sleeves across the delicate skin under her eyes until her cheeks became inflamed, and saying, “He was a good man. He was a good man. What will become of us now?”

When the crowds parted from time to time, Aleksandr could catch snatches of the ceremony as it progressed: the gray-and-red-clad soldiers, the brass band, the gold-limned black coffin, which, from a distance, looked like a transatlantic steamship on a pitching sea. There was something callous in its ostentation, its forbidding elegance. Something so palatial didn’t seem to want to mourn as much as parade.

Aleksandr could feel the sheets pressed to his chest, absorbing the shock of his rapid heartbeats. He wasn’t sure how he should proceed. Ivan had never done something this stupid — he’d always operated with the utmost discretion, with careful and obsessively confirmed lists made of the initial recipients. He let the pamphlets thread out of their own accord after the initial copies were distributed; other people copied them in twos and fives and sevens and passed them on to trusted friends. It was a diffusion of risk that way, he’d always said. Still, risks didn’t always get you killed. And precautions couldn’t always keep you safe.

Aleksandr stepped back from the crowd, letting the people become a seething mass of dark-colored coats that shivered and peered as one. The wind began to pick up, its icy fingers drumming against his spine and taking liberties with his pants. Dead leaves, the color of rust and flint, whipped along the ground. In the street skittered programs commemorating Brezhnev, his gloomy face gazing sternly from underneath his single monstrous eyebrow. Delicate plumes of snow materialized from nowhere and cast themselves through the air.

Aleksandr took out the papers. He waited. He could still hear the tinny clanging of the band, the thick thudding of feet stamping in unison against the cobblestones. The wind seized upon him with the aggression of a vengeful arctic ghost, and he felt himself let the papers fly. They whirled outward in four directions, spinning through the air like weather. They were beautiful as they caught on the wind — they looked like white long-winged birds, maybe, or shivering bridal veils. He knew that soon they would come back to earth to be muddied and ripped, tramped underfoot by men in heavy boots. But maybe a few people would be curious enough to pick them up.

He turned quickly to go, his two coats billowing out behind him and his lungs overwhelmed by the influx of air. It was descending into the particular kind of cold that belongs to a Russian late afternoon: the kind of cold that threatens, that intimidates, because it is going to get so much worse. And, at some distance, leaning against a streetlamp, was Nikolai.

Bits of snow were catching on sideways drafts to make eddies in the air. They were turning Nikolai’s hair white, Aleksandr would always remember, as though he were witnessing some supernatural shock. He was looking at Aleksandr. Aleksandr was almost sure of it. He stood looking until the watching people started to disperse, propelled by the harsh pings of the national anthem, and he was engulfed by the thickening snow and the gathering crowds.