Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“It’s not.”

“Fine, it’s about the Olympics, then. They boycotted Moscow. We can’t send you.”

“You’d send Rusayev.”

Pavlovich rolled his eyes. “Enough.”

“You would.”

“Enough. Rusayev’s different. You’re young. You can afford to wait three years.”

At this, Aleksandr dropped his plate. Sopping fragments of smoked fish and pickled vegetables dislodged themselves and went sliding surprising distances across the marble floor.

“You’re all so enthralled with Rusayev,” said Aleksandr. “You know he’s only world champion technically. He inherited the title by default from Fischer. But you all worship him. You bend over backward to preserve his title.”

“Arrogance doesn’t suit you,” said Petr Pavlovich, bending down to clean up the food with his handkerchief. “Neither does alcohol.”

“Can’t I afford to be arrogant?”

“You could be doing better.”

Aleksandr scoffed. “My rating has overtaken Rusayev’s this year.”

Petr Pavlovich stood up. “You could be doing better in other ways.”

Aleksandr looked down into his vodka. His ears buzzed. He thought of his sneering comments about Oleg Chazov, the FIDE president, uttered within earshot of a FIDE official. He thought about rolling his eyes at a slide show about the superiority of the Russian athlete. He thought about telling that stupid joke to that bulbous-lipped, unimpressed woman, and how it wasn’t even a good joke, and how she hadn’t even laughed.

“If you want to play Rusayev for world champion in the fall, you’ve got to start behaving yourself better. It’s not too late for you, Aleksandr. I advocate for you every day, I do. Every single day.”

In his vodka, Aleksandr could see part of the reflection of his own globular, inelegant nose. He didn’t like to think of Petr Pavlovich defending him to the Party — in that wheedling voice, that apologetic tone, asking for more time, more leniency. Aleksandr realized that he’d become a petty, irrelevant dictator himself. There were probably entire armies of thinkers and strategists who sat around figuring out how to get him to do exactly what they wanted. And they were probably always successful.

“Do you know that? You know that, don’t you?” said Petr Pavlovich. He sounded hurt. Aleksandr refused to respond to hypothetical questions. “You’re not going to Pasadena,” said Petr Pavlovich. “I’m sorry. You can still play Rusayev for world champion in the fall. But you need to help me out here.”

Aleksandr did not look at Petr Pavlovich; he knew there would be that distorted, forgiving tenderness in his face, and he did not want to see it.

“You need to behave yourself,” said Petr Pavlovich. “Please stop doing that with your face. Let’s get you another plate.”

And, through the blowsy spring and into the horrid summer, Aleksandr behaved himself. He listened politely. He feigned attention whenever it was required, he kept quiet whenever it was possible. He made no demands. He asked no follow-up questions. At parties, he stood quietly by picture windows and shoveled great masses of gourmet food into his mouth, and when anyone from the Party tried to talk to him, he pretended to always be chewing.

The World Championship match began in September. Moscow’s buildings groped the sky with a modern, monolithic insatiability; the kommunalki were epic, blanched white, cluttered in rows like crooked teeth in the maw of an animal. Leningrad was forced by sheer architecture to acknowledge its past, its old defeats and triumphs, its roots in rationality and Euclidean geometry. In Leningrad — in the long avenues, in the arcing canals — one could find the past’s hope for the future. In Moscow, the future had been captured, torn down, and bent to the will of the present. Enormous signs defaced the sides of buildings: HELP THE MOTHERLAND — BUILD COMMUNISM, THE IDEAS OF LENIN LIVE AND CONQUER. Marching down Gorky Ulitsa, Aleksandr saw how the street might evoke a jaunty sense of usefulness, if he were someone who was inclined to think that way.

On the day of the first match, an escort met Aleksandr and his second, Dmitry, who had been appointed by the Party. The escort walked them through the Hall of Columns, with its ornate light fixtures and richly patterned wallpaper, and waited while Aleksandr stopped by the gorgeous, gilded bathroom to vomit. Outside, Aleksandr could hear the rustling of five hundred journalists from twenty-seven countries. He wished nobody had quoted this statistic at him. He flushed the toilet and splashed his face. The escort banged on the door.

After climbing the steps to the main stage and tripping lightly, Aleksandr found himself sitting across from Rusayev. Rusayev was a solid man in any context, and he looked even heartier and more hostile on the other side of a chessboard. The crowd shifted and settled; they were expecting to be disappointed. Rusayev had won the USSR Chess Championship four years straight, and it was almost offensive, the crowd thought, to pair him against this obscenely young man — who was so dark-browed, so awkward and faltering in his movements. Aleksandr was a man who seemed to apologize for his own existence in every step he took. They were not a good match, the crowd thought, and the game would be an easy win. The crowd hated easy wins.

Aleksandr wanted to touch the board before they began, to gather himself into the game, but it was not allowed. The timer was set. Rusayev mustered a look approaching respect. Aleksandr had been assigned white by the tournament directors, and as he introduced his knight’s pawn, he let everything — the audience, the great hall, his own mind — disappear into the clean chromatics of the board. They began.

As chess journalists and students, social historians of Russia, and masters of trivia often remarked, it was Rusayev’s match almost from beginning to end. Aleksandr opened with too much sloppy aggression (the impetuousness of youth, it was whispered). He lost one game for every two draws, until he lost two games in a row. This had never happened to him, but there it was (proof that the young upstart was at least half as stupid as he looked, it was said). When the secretaries brought the transcribed score sheets back to the press room, the reporters from Sovietsky Sport stamped their feet in annoyance and pouted that the whole thing had been an unmitigated embarrassment. Nobody had been routed this squarely since Fischer’s leveling of Taimonov on his way to Spassky (and such mismatches in ability were, frankly, tedious, it was muttered). Even the board boys looked indifferent.

Then there were seventeen draws in a row. Most of the press left. The tournament was moved out of the magnificent Hall of Columns and into the fraying Hotel Sport. Aleksandr’s jaw clicked whenever he ate. He woke up at night to horrible leg cramps that sent him jumping up and down, half asleep, to the continued disapproval of Dmitry. He wandered Moscow during the days, staring at the gorgeous Oktyabrskaya Hotel across from the French embassy, counting the metallic muscles on the statue of Iron Dzerzhinsky outside KGB headquarters. In Red Square, he stared mournfully at the lovely lights of the State Department Store and then shuffled through a forty-minute line to admire waxen Lenin in his tomb.

Aleksandr had never felt farther from Okha than he did in the days wandering Moscow. He could feel the vastness of Russia prickling at the back of his neck. In the white dawn, he squinted out his hotel windows at the horizon and felt sure he could see the eastern plains tapering into nothing, could see the identical villages and hamlets that pocked the landscape like craters on the moon until they became fewer and fewer and finally disappeared into the stoic, flinty face of the continental shelf. He was at the edge of the world, and the terrible enormity of outer space was bearing down on him. It gave him vertigo — like walking too close to the edge of a steep drop, or looking up at the sky and pretending that you are not looking up at all but down, down into an endless sea of illuminated sea creatures, their star-bright organs burning out of an unfathomable abyss.