Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Are you there?” said Petr Pavlovich.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t be philosophical.”

Outside, the leaves on the trees turned pale side up. They looked as if they were admitting defeat.

“This is what you’ve been working for your whole life. You should be doing cartwheels in the streets. What has everything been for if not for this?”

Aleksandr did not believe that Petr Pavlovich meant this kindly. Still, there was nobody else to whom he could say this — this or anything.

“I don’t know,” he said. The window was cool against his forehead; it communicated a calming, pragmatic presence somehow. Aleksandr thought briefly of his mother. “I don’t know what it was for.”

Petr Pavlovich was silent. “Are you dressed? You need to come out for pictures.”

“What pictures?”

“With your trophy, of course.” Petr Pavlovich sniffed cruelly. “A family portrait.”

St. Petersburg, 2006

And so, entirely out of ideas, I put on my only revealing shirt and went to the Pravda bar. Inside, the place had an atmosphere of unrelenting grime; the air felt opaque with grit and an obdurate unwholesomeness that was, in a strange way, refreshing. I squirmed on a barstool, drinking white wine and mouthing my way through Kommersant and eyeing possible candidates for Viktor Davidenko as they entered. It felt decadent, profligate, pathological to be drinking before nightfall. I fluttered my fingers against the bar. This was what I’d come for, no? To sit in bars and await the arrival of strange men? It wasn’t what I’d come for, exactly.

After a few false alarms, the man who had to be Viktor Davidenko entered the bar. He was tallish, six-two or something, the kind of height that could seem epic or almost normal depending on one’s biases. He had a beard, but I somehow didn’t begrudge him that. I wondered if someone looking for me would have trouble figuring out who I was. Or was I the only possible candidate for myself in the entire bar? I didn’t like to think that; I liked to think that I could be anyone. But then I looked around — at the butcher lesbians, at the femmes fatales with their immense scaffoldings of eye makeup, hanging all over everywhere — and I had to level with myself. I was the only nervous-looking, polite-looking person in the whole establishment, and if anybody had been looking for me, he would have found me immediately.

I walked over to Viktor Davidenko’s table. I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them. Then I said hello.

“Yes?” His voice was a bit gravelly, a bit sullen — exactly the sort of voice you’d imagine. He had a heavy brow and, underneath it, fairly astonishing blue eyes. His hair was curly and, you could tell, barely subdued.

I introduced myself. He looked me up and down, as Misha had promised he would.

“You’re a journalist?” He’d switched to English. His accent — you could tell from even one word — was a complicated affair, incorporating multiple experiences and existences and institutions of higher learning.

“No.”

“Are you a blogger?”

“No.”

“Are you on social media?”

“Not really, no.”

He sighed. It was a profoundly aggrieved, hectored, performative sigh, and it made me immediately like him.

“Can I have a few minutes of your time anyway?” I was beginning to panic mildly. This was my first interaction with an ambassador of Bezetov’s actual team, and I feared I was wildly failing to say the thing I needed to say.

“I suppose.”

“When? Should I come to your office?”

“Office. Ah. No. How about right now?”

This seemed somehow slightly less than professional, though it’s true that my reasons for being here couldn’t be construed as entirely — or even marginally — professional. But in recent months I’d taken to regarding my quest for Aleksandr Bezetov as something like my job — I avoided it like a job, at any rate, and I approached it with stress and sporadic diligence and no small amount of resentment.

“Well,” I said. “Okay.”

He took my hand, and for a brief, absurd moment, I thought he might kiss it.

“Viktor Davidenko,” he said, dropping it. “Please sit down.”

I did. There was a courtliness to all of this that felt a little silly but also highly self-aware. I sat up straighter, so as to be ready for whatever pageantry was forthcoming. Viktor ordered three shots of vodka, which I found impressive and terrifying until he passed one over to me. I took a sip and coughed.

“Where did you learn English?” I said.

“Oxford, most recently.”

“What were you doing before that?”

“I was importing Japanese video recorders.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“And now you’re the media relations person?”

“I am that person. And you?” He looked amused.

“Where did I learn English?”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Of course. Would that be a diplomatic sort of nothing? A commercial sort of nothing?” His quasi-British accent made him sound like he was always on the brink of apology. His expression made him look like a person who had never apologized in his entire life.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Academic? Sheer awkwardness?”

“I really don’t.”

“Ah. Very good.”

I knew I was being assessed by some convoluted system of social metrics that I didn’t yet understand. I took another sip of my vodka and let the alcohol mince my mouth.

“So, what, then? What do you want?” He held his second shot, tracing the nimbus of moisture it had left on the table. “You want me to get a chessboard signed for you or something?”

I turned my face to the side. Something about this man made me not want to tell him everything all at once. “My father was a fan of Bezetov’s,” I said. “I just want to meet him.”

“Your father was a fan?”

I nodded. I knew how this sounded; I knew what particularly obnoxious fragilities in my psyche this guy was already starting to see, to think he saw. I wanted this part of the conversation to end as quickly as possible.

“Bezetov has a lot of fans,” said Viktor.

“Right.”

“Presumably, a lot of people have fathers who were fans.”

“I am sure.”

“And they don’t all come here looking for him.”

“Assuredly not.”

He leaned back in his chair and took a gulp, followed immediately by a fiercer gulp, of his drink. “This is kind of a sentimental project, isn’t it?”

I winced. I hate being accused of sentimentality. But I knew there was no way to assert that you weren’t sentimental; any attempt to do so was automatically suspect. “I guess so. I guess you could say that.” I took a moment to take another sip, flamboyantly. “He’s very busy, I’d imagine.”

“Well, not that busy.”

“Oh?” I waited for clarification long enough to understand that none was forthcoming. “How long have you been working for him?”

“Two years.”

“And how did you get hired?”

“I went to a rally.”

“And did what?”

“I approached him. I gave him my résumé.”

“I see. You showed up, you’re saying?”

“I mean I have a terrific résumé.”

“I don’t at all doubt it. Is that how he hires all the staff?”

“What staff?”

“Who works there?”

“There’s me. There’s Nina, Bezetov’s wife. A pure joy. There’s Vlad, the security guard, two-thirds retarded. There’s Boris, my assistant. He wouldn’t tell you he’s my assistant, but I assure you, he is.”

“What would he tell me he is?”

“He’d likely claim to be a peer of some kind. There’s not a whole lot of logic to the decisions Bezetov makes about people. If you met his wife, you’d see. Don’t mention I said that.”