Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“I wouldn’t go back up there if I were you.”

Aleksandr turned. “No?”

“They’re not quite through.”

Aleksandr thought of them rifling through pants and chess sets, books and letters (of these there were few): the paltry accretions of a lonely life. He wondered what else they might sense, standing there, looking for samizdat; he wondered if they might grimly assess and photograph and stow the accumulated mass of solitude and longing and explosive frustration that had been his one true possession in this life.

“There’s nothing up there.”

“No? Maybe not.” A thick gurgling issued from the back of Petr Pavlovich’s throat. “Excuse me. Nasal polyps. A great hassle.”

The gurgling made Aleksandr bold. “How long has Nikolai been with you?”

“Don’t be crass. You’re never going to have the career you deserve if you keep talking like that.”

“How long had you been planning to kill Ivan?”

“That was an accident.”

“Right.”

“It was an accident. And that’s not my purview, anyway. I hope you understand that. I stick to sport and propaganda, strictly.”

Aleksandr said nothing and stared numbly at the expanse of the yard — the gunmetal flank of the building, the frozen and brittle clothing on the line. Above them, the light was bleeding out of the sky.

“I have to admit,” said Petr Pavlovich, “I’m impressed by your willingness to live in this shithole. We all are. I didn’t think it was a palace you had here, but when you were so adamant about staying, I imagined something a little more tolerable.”

Aleksandr studied his window. He could still see the men, backlit by the marginal light of the failing lightbulbs. He could not tell what they were doing.

“But this.” Petr Pavlovich waved at the building. “This is horrendous. You must have been really serious about your little project in order to live in a place like this. Who knows what kind of people you probably lived with? Whores at the very least, I should imagine.” Aleksandr realized with a sock to the solar plexus that Elizabeta, too, had been in his file. “You must have really believed in this nonsense.”

“I did.”

Petr Pavlovich looked at Aleksandr with an expression that bordered on tenderness, and that, Aleksandr thought, was not going to be tolerable. Petr Pavlovich sniffed triumphantly. “Well, I’m sure you’ve changed many minds.”

The men came down then, two of them: one with the musculature of a wolverine, the other with a face that looked boiled for hygiene purposes. Neither of them looked at Aleksandr. They carried their meager harvest from his room, and Aleksandr recognized some of his things — a shirt, a passel of letters, a book, a dirty sheet. He winced. He should have changed that sheet. Then again, he hadn’t been expecting company.

Petr Pavlovich turned to Aleksandr and began speaking briskly. “So. You have a city tournament coming up in Moscow, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“I imagine you would still like to go.”

“Yes.”

“Of course you would. Smart boy. You’re a chess prodigy, after all. You’re not a political genius. I think we can agree on this much. The Kremlin is very generous, and very impressed with your chess ability, and willing — despite it all — to overlook your past indiscretions, assuming we can reach an understanding here. It is possible that we can forge some relationship.”

Petr Pavlovich looked at Aleksandr with the paternalistic searching expression of a doctor who is hopeful, in a vague way, that you’ll decide to take some unpleasant but lifesaving medicine.

“These city tournaments you’re doing, they’re small potatoes, don’t you agree? For a mind like yours? You should be playing at the national level. You should be playing, quite frankly, abroad. You want to continue to play for the Soviet Union. We want you to continue to play for the Soviet Union.”

It occurred to Aleksandr that Pavlovich was talking about supply and demand.

“But it’s all up to you. If you can improve your attitude. If you can amend your ideology.”

And maybe Aleksandr would. Maybe he would. The person he loved most in the world had seen fit to marry a Party official; the person he admired most for opposition was dead; the only other two people he’d thought he could trust were treacherous and insane, respectively. Models for alternative options were diminishing. Who could judge him for this? Who was left to judge him for this?

“Otherwise?” said Aleksandr. It’s possible he knew even then that he was being theatrical.

“Otherwise, you’re done playing. For one thing. Maybe you’ll be done with other things, too. Who can say? But the chess, we know for sure, you’re done. There’s been tolerance here. There’s been patience. We don’t need to talk about otherwise, I don’t think. I think we know what you’re going to do.”

Maybe Petr Pavlovich was right. Maybe Aleksandr would go up to his room in a moment and sit on his bed and stare at the liver-colored spots on the floor and consider it. He’d tried to live honorably for a few years in Leningrad. By anyone’s standards, he had failed. Out the window, the snow would ignite in the streetlights. On the bed, the KGB officers would have left his chess set. They’d have known that he was going to take it with him; they’d have known that it was all he was going to take with him; they’d have known where he was going. On his way out, he’d walk past apartment number seven, but he’d make a point not to look at it.

“You can go up now,” said Petr Pavlovich brightly. “You’ll want to be packing, I’d imagine.”

The new apartment had flawless indoor plumbing, a brocaded mirror, and two different bedrooms (“for guests,” Petr Pavlovich had said as he gestured majestically). There was a living room with a fireplace and built-in bookshelves filled with unreadable, politically acceptable books. The refrigerator was stocked with fresh meat and imported wine. A bowl on the counter overflowed with an entire jungle of fresh produce, including a banana the shape and color of a crescent moon. Aleksandr had never eaten a banana, though he’d had an orange once, as a child in Okha, when a freight train carrying fruit to the Party elite had overturned. Outside his window that spring bloomed bell-shaped fritillarias and the exploding radiant hearts of euphorbia.

He’d never known how dirty he’d always been until he finally stood for thirty minutes in a scalding shower with limitless soap. He thought of the grains of dirt, abrasive against his skin, that had always populated his bed in the kommunalka, and he recognized guiltily that they had fallen off his person. He drank Armenian cognac. He smoked Cuban cigars even without an occasion. Losing Elizabeta and Ivan had made him vengeful, and he knew it. He felt he deserved whatever he could find. He flopped around in his new sheets, some different genus entirely from the kind he’d had before. He never knew that bedding could be so silken and unobtrusive. The rosettes of eczema that had bloomed along his ass for his entire life finally cleared up.

He signed on to the CPSU. He joined the Komsomol officially, finally. On his new internal passport, his smile was like a sneer. In his new living room, he did a joyless cartwheel just because he had the space.

He was assigned a new trainer, a man who inexplicably wore what Aleksandr took to be a woman’s scarf around his neck at all times — except during tournaments, for which occasions he unveiled a meaty, tendony neck. He was an unimaginative chess mind, and his tendons contorted acrobatically whenever Aleksandr made a move that he didn’t like or didn’t understand. And ubiquitously, intrusively, there was Petr Pavlovich, who stationed himself at the very center of Aleksandr’s life, who followed Aleksandr nervously to hotels and restaurants, and shot him warning glances if he got too mouthy, which he rarely did anymore.