Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“These are the offices of Right Russia?”

He cocked his head impatiently toward the sign.

“Is Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov available, please?”

He stood aside and gestured for me to enter. Inside, the office was dank, piled to the rafters with papers and paraphernalia. Two interns clacked desultorily at two oversize, outdated computers. The computers wheezed and whirred alarmingly; they seemed on the verge of giving up the ghost entirely. A phone rang forlornly, but nobody answered it.

The man who’d answered the door led me into a back room. He flicked on the light. A trash can was overturned, and the man stooped to right it. When he did, his shirt rode up to reveal a wedge of pale flesh spidered with black hair. I grimaced. He spun a chair around for me. “Sit,” he said. “Please.”

I sat. Closer, I could see that he had a silver sickle-shaped scar running from eye to jowl. It was an odd scar; one couldn’t quite decipher what might have produced it, though I thought briefly of small-arms combat. On the wall behind him, a tattered poster proclaimed that RUSSIA IS FOR RUSSIANS!

“Is this where I’ll wait for Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov?”

“I’m Mikhail Andreyevich Solovyov,” he said. “You can call me Misha.”

“You are?” I said. “Oh. You are.”

He stared at me, an unwavering, unnerving gaze. I shifted in my chair. I wondered again about the scar. Maybe he’d been a soldier, though this had not turned up in my Google searches.

“And this might be a good time to tell me who you are,” he said.

His pants were too short. When he leaned back, I saw a slab of hairy, bright white ankle. I decided to go with the short answer first.

“I’m Irina Ellison,” I said. “I’m trying to arrange a meeting with Aleksandr Bezetov. I met with an old friend of his in Moscow, and she suggested I might try to contact some of his colleagues.” I would have added something about hoping I wasn’t imposing, if it hadn’t been so evident that I was.

“You met with — who, exactly?”

“Elizabeta Nazarovna. She was his secretary, I think.”

Mikhail Andreyevich — I was having trouble thinking of him as Misha — snorted. “His secretary? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

I chose to ignore this. I stared at the poster above Mikhail’s head. “I understand you and Aleksandr Bezetov are colleagues?”

“We are.” He straightened up in his chair, and his sneer softened marginally. “We absolutely are.”

“You can get me a meeting, then?”

“A meeting. Well.” He coughed. “A meeting is difficult.”

“Just a short one.”

Mikhail Andreyevich sat back in his chair. He chewed his lip for several long moments while looking at me curiously — trying to decide, I guess, how much of his time I was worth. “Bezetov is a chickenshit,” he finally declared.

I had not been expecting this. “I thought you said he was your colleague.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not a chickenshit. I’ve never met someone with a more maudlin attachment to his own life.”

I blinked. “Is this why you can’t get me a meeting?”

He sneered again, making his scar zigzag. “He surrounds himself with this army of handlers. He’s in full-body armor every time he leaves the house.”

I pictured bulletproof vests. I pictured chain mail. “Well,” I said. “Doesn’t he need it?”

Mikhail Andreyevich snorted again. “Yeah, well, we all need a lot of things. Only a few of us get them.”

I was suddenly miserable. The conversation was twisting aggressively, wrongly; some odd torque was at work that I couldn’t quite fathom. I’d assumed that Bezetov was beloved by everyone, as he’d been beloved by my father. This was the essential premise, the only one. I shifted in my seat. “So Right Russia is — not affiliated with Alternative Russia?” I said.

“Affiliated, sure. We’re all very affiliated. But they don’t like us. We’re the embarrassing bastard stepchild. They keep their distance from us as much as possible. We’re not their type. They prefer Pomerancovo. You know. Fuzzy-headed, idealistic. Western-backed. Insane.”

I decided not to act surprised that he was bothering to tell me all this. “And your position is what, exactly?” I asked, though the posters had given me more than a few clues. “You have — policy differences?”

“We have aesthetic differences.”

“That’s kind of shallow, isn’t it?” All at once I felt absolutely sure that bullshitting my way through this conversation was the correct course of action.

“Spiritual differences, then.”

I scoffed, just to scoff. Mikhail Andreyevich sighed witheringly. “We think change needs to be authentic, permanent. We think it needs to come from within. We think it needs to be populist. Bezetov is a dreadful elitist.”

“Is he?” I brightened momentarily. I found I was more comfortable with elitism than abject cowardice.

“Absolutely. He doesn’t even like the Russian people. You couldn’t pay him to interact with them. He’s up there in his castle, typing up his press releases, and he doesn’t know anything about the nation he’s trying to run.”

“Isn’t he just trying to stay alive?”

“Whatever. Any idiot can stay alive. Any fucking amoeba can stay alive. That’s just evolution. It’s what you do once you’ve managed to stay alive that counts.”

I pondered this. He made it all sound so easy.

He leaned back in his chair with some decisiveness. “You know,” he said, “I’m not surprised you’re here.”

“You’re not — What?” I was surprised I was there.

“It’s what I’ve always suspected about him. The Americans are in charge of everything. He doesn’t have an original thought in his head.”

“What are you talking about?”

He waved his hand at me with exasperation. “I understand, I understand. The need for discretion and all that. Of course.”

“I don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”

“Right, right. Me, neither.” He stared at me with a creepy knowingness, then smiled a smile that was nearly kind. “You’re a fan, then? That’s the story?”

“Sort of.”

“Well,” he said grandly. “Of course. We’re all terrific fans of Bezetov’s. And you want to see him, particularly, why?”

I told him, or I tried to. I was learning how to say it better. He listened. His face, if possible, seemed to turn even yellower. “Really?” he finally said.

“Really.”

“Really?”

I glared. Mikhail Andreyevich squinted. “You sound like you’re looking for a therapist.”

I flinched. “No.”

“A priest, then.”

“Even worse.”

“He has symbolic value to you.”

“He has, uh, literal value to me, too.”

“You think he’s going to be able to tell you something you don’t already know?”

“Anybody could tell me something I don’t already know.”

“The right something, though?”

I was exhausted. I felt a dull cinder of pain behind my eye. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe not.” I coughed feebly into my shoulder for effect.

Mikhail Andreyevich chewed some more on his lip, which looked abused, macerated. This was unbecoming. “What do you know about him?”

“He’s — Well, he’s the chess champion.”

“Yes. Very good.”

“And he’s running for president.” I felt like a child.

“But you know his campaign is a stunt, right? You know he knows he will not win.”

This man, it was becoming obvious, was disgruntled — and so the strange, sharp-edged defensiveness that was emerging in me was, I told myself, obviously unwarranted. Bezetov’s moral credentials were impeccable. I tried to sound light, unguarded, as though I were arguing a point of politics or philosophy, nothing personal, nothing brutal. How much I’d loved to argue about those things once.