Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

I stared at the name. “Don’t you have anything else? I mean, this is the person everyone goes through, right?”

“And you’re not everyone?”

“No, I just thought—” I stopped. I stood up. I didn’t know what I’d thought.

“Listen. You can do this one of two ways. You can call him, arrange a meeting, see if he’ll talk to you, which he most likely will not. Or.” He eyed me. “You could put on some eye makeup and comb your hair and swing by the Pravda Bar around five-thirty any afternoon and see if he’ll talk to you then . He’s always there. I’d suggest the latter option. If you can remember to comb your hair. But it’s up to you.”

Mikhail Andreyevich was marching me to the door, past the interns, who looked up, alarmed, and then returned to their clacking. The door opened onto ludicrous cold, the falling of an implausibly early dusk. Mikhail peered at me. “And if you do manage to reach Bezetov,” he said, “tell him to call me, okay? I have some things I need to discuss with him.”

I walked down Nevsky Prospekt, away from the river. The encounter with Mikhail Andreyevich had left me feeling sour, uncertain. And then, strangely, angry — I was full of the narcissism of needing the world to bend to you, and the petty outrage you feel when it does not. I felt a frantic energy, the odd sense that I could run all night or put my hand through glass or strip down naked in the cold and survive. I knew that whether Aleksandr was who I thought he was, or who my father thought he was, was not the question. He needed to be good for Russia, for the people to whom he belonged, and not on behalf of a senile music professor now six months dead. It was a gross sense of entitlement — and yes, of course, a grossly American kind of entitlement — to feel otherwise, to try to lay claim to this person somehow.

And yet. When I thought of my life, it seemed contoured primarily by the vast number of things I had wanted and not gotten. My demands had been relatively modest; I had not wanted an extraordinary life. I’d wanted an ordinary life with an ordinary life span and ordinary consolations and an ordinary love that would, inevitably, degrade in ordinary time. These were not outrageous requests. Perhaps I’d thought that my one outrageous request — to meet this man, to absorb his wisdom, to go to my grave with one interesting stolen secret — would be granted in lieu of all the others. Though it’s true that when I caught myself thinking this, I realized I was essentially supplicating an entity that kept track of such things — requests granted, requests denied — and that this was a kind of stealth religious belief. So I told myself to quit it.

Still, one had to wonder. I’d doubted my mission; I’d questioned my motives, and reconsidered my hopes, and examined my unexamined privilege until my eyes glazed over. But I hadn’t entertained the idea that perhaps Bezetov was an unworthy target of all this angst, all these hopes. I was an unworthy supplicant, perhaps, silly, misguided, arrogant, undeserving. But Bezetov was assuredly unassailable. If he could not offer wisdom, there simply was no wisdom to be found.

Humiliatingly, I found myself walking toward Kazan Cathedral, though not for any reason beyond the aesthetic (the Implicit Attitude Test had revealed me to be consistent in my indifference to all major world religions). I walked inside. The crown of the cathedral was nearly as grand as St. Peter’s. Crenellated light streamed through the cupola. A black and white cat lolled, insensate, on a box in a corner. In another corner, richly colored saints gazed out from gilded frames, trapped forever in two dimensions.

Typically, blasphemously, I thought of Jonathan. It’s not the great tragedy of life to wind up without another human being. Half of marriages end in divorce — what a boring, obsessively repeated statistic this is — and I don’t flatter myself that we would have been any different. Dodging that particular bullet leaves me with something to feel good about, anyway: one major life failure avoided, if nothing else. One can become so sentimental about a person’s absence, but it’s impossible to be consistently sentimental in his presence — when you’re confronted with the quotidian selfishness and silence that, I’m given to understand, comprise most of a life. But we were just so new. We were at that ruthless, lovely edge, all the indignities as yet unimagined and unseen. We didn’t know yet what would have ever made us stop loving each other.

At first I’d tried to see the devastation of leaving him as possibly salutary; I’d hoped the pressure of it would make me stronger, better, like a diamond compressed from coal, a pearl emerged from the constant nick of sand on sand. But in the end — especially now, especially after talking to Mikhail Andreyevich — I found it exhausting.

I sat in the church for a while. I stared at the candles in their red glowing holders, burning on behalf of hopes or prayers or lost causes. And I remembered walking along a different river — carved up by a different kind of tenderness, a different kind of terror.

St. Petersburg, 1982–1986

When Aleksandr finally made it back to St. Petersburg from Moscow, there was a man waiting for him in front of his building. Aleksandr had spent a paranoid, insomniac night on the train, Nikolai’s face leering into his dreams every time he dozed, and he froze when he saw the figure standing underneath an emaciated tree branch, a few meters from the building’s collapsing doorstep. But it was not Nikolai. It was Petr Pavlovich Nikitin, hunching into the wind.

Petr Pavlovich stared at Aleksandr. He tossed his cigarette on the ground and watched it hiss and curl against the snow. But he did not come over. Aleksandr understood that Petr Pavlovich was waiting for Aleksandr to come to him.

Aleksandr considered turning around. He considered getting back on the train and going — to where? To what? Back to Moscow to hide? Back to the Saigon to drink?

And then he didn’t. He walked toward Pavlovich, terror snarling in his teeth. “What do you want?” said Aleksandr.

“Take a guess.”

Aleksandr looked up. In his fortochka, he could see the distorted silhouette of a man — arm and back and misshapen head — engaged in a methodical activity that looked a lot like searching. Aleksandr could only imagine the steward twisting her hands and biting her lip and trying to remember anything, anything, that she could say against him. He’d kept odd hours, she might say. He’d run with a strange crowd. He’d been fucking a prostitute and hadn’t even been discreet. Aleksandr knew the steward would be sorry she hadn’t thrown him out earlier.

“That was a nice little performance in Moscow there,” said Petr Pavlovich. In the austere light, he was sallow-cheeked, vaguely jaundiced; his nose ran unbecomingly. Overall, he did not look like a man with the power to ruin a life.

Aleksandr craned his neck and looked around.

“What, expecting someone else?” said Petr Pavlovich.

“Where’s Nikolai?”

“How should I know? I’m not his nanny.” Pavlovich sniffed vigorously. “I was sorry to hear about your friends.”

“I’m sure.”

“It was regrettable. Young men. Most regrettable.”

“Regrettable by whom? To whom? I mean, who regrets it?”

Pavlovich pinched himself on the nose and looked at Aleksandr magnanimously. Bits of snow blew onto his eyebrows; they looked like the furry legs of an albino tarantula. “It is to be regretted, surely,” he said. “By anybody.”

At this, Aleksandr turned from Petr Pavlovich and began marching through the snow toward the building. The ice made an empty sound under his feet.