Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

At the edge of the crowd, near the podium, stood a woman who was watching Aleksandr and looking bored. She was thin and light and her efficacious manner gave her the air of a business envelope. She looked too indifferent to be in charge but too efficient not to be involved. She had red hair. She was Nina. I crept in her direction — getting one toe smashed by a surprisingly heavy child, getting one breast groped by an old man who looked at the sky when I turned around. When I reached the woman, she looked at everything around me — the shearing sun, the hard-packed snow, the clumps of young men hooting and hurling chips of ice — before I could get her attention.

“Excuse me,” I said, waving my hand.

“Yes?” she said. She looked surprised, as though she actually hadn’t seen me standing there.

“My name is Irina Ellison,” I said. “I was wondering if I could get a meeting with Mr. Bezetov.”

She looked me up and down with unapologetic frankness, as if she were assessing me for physical fitness and finding me wanting. “And who are you, Irina Ellison?”

“Nobody,” I said eagerly. Nina’s gaze grew cloudy. “I’m an American lecturer,” I amended. “At a university.”

She remained silent. Tiny furrows appeared next to her mouth. She looked as if she was sucking very hard on something bitter. “Is that all?”

“That’s all.” I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I knew that — absolutely — was all. “Can I get a meeting, do you think?”

“Probably not. He’s very busy.”

Nina was turning away from me, her attention drawn by the backfiring of a motorcycle in the square. I should have proposed some research, I realized, some feigned academic pretext for this pursuit. Maybe there would have been some tolerance for that.

“Please,” I said. “My father and Mr. Bezetov were correspondents.”

“Then have your father arrange a meeting.”

“He’s dead now,” I said. “My father.” In English, I always say “passed away,” as a courtesy to whomever I’m talking with. It’s not because I believe that “passed away” is the right term — away to where? one wonders, passed to what? It’s because “dead” feels too confrontational, too vulgar. But in Russian I didn’t know any other word.

Nina cocked her head toward me, but I couldn’t tell where she was looking. “I’m sorry,” she said. If the edge in her voice was relenting, I couldn’t hear it. “But Aleksandr has corresponded with a lot of different people.”

She looked behind her at an enormous man with sunglasses who was standing a few feet away. He gave a slight nod. I had the feeling that I was on the verge of being escorted away.

“If you could just ask him,” I said. “I came a long way.”

She inclined her head once more, and abruptly I could see myself in her vision: red-nosed, with messy hair and a bewildered aspect, speaking the kind of American-accented Russian that is alternately viewed as comic, tragic, or an automatic indicator of stupidity.

“Who’s your customer?” she said finally.

“My customer?” This had been Nikolai’s question, too, and I wondered if some translational mismatch kept producing this problem.

The woman pressed her lips together as though dealing with the faked idiocy of an unwilling student. “Whom do you work for?”

“Nobody anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“I had a job at a university,” I said, although for a moment I couldn’t remember if that was true. “This was a while ago now.”

“I see,” she said, looking at me with an expression of incomprehension. “So you’re a tourist, then?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Yes.”

She stared at me hard, then shrugged. “Perhaps it is possible,” she said. “He has Wednesday off. He might have fifteen minutes for you. You will not be alone, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, although I couldn’t quite sort out in that moment what this meant.

“Come to this address Wednesday morning, and we will see. Okay? You’ll have to wait. I’m not promising anything.” She slipped me a business card, from which I promptly sustained a paper cut.

“Okay,” I said. “I can wait.” These days, that was my expert activity, my major accomplishment. I was a champion, grade-A, world-class waiter, unchallenged, unrivaled. I was confident in my waiting abilities.

“Fine.” She sniffed. “You are an odd young woman.”

Something about this — the pronouncement of judgment issued by a quasi-hostile European — made me miss Lars so much that I almost started to cry. I rarely cry — finding it an activity I can consider and then reject engaging in, typically for lack of energy — but there are occasional seizures of emotion that grab me at strange moments: in parking lots, in supermarkets, elicited by old couples picking out fruit or little children grabbing at a mother’s dress. The woman looked alarmed.

“I know,” I said. “Thank you for your help.”

She sniffed and turned away, for which I was grateful, because the vista before me — the roiling crowds with their tiny flags and their indecipherable shouts and their enormous gall — was starting to smear, and I didn’t want anybody watching me as I tried to make my way through.

I took the long way home — across the embankment, past the cannon at the Peter and Paul Fortress, the sphinx’s humped crown a misshapen shadow in the distance, before heading across Dvortsovvy Proezd to my island. My mind streaked with war and revolution. I thought of the assault on Nicholas II — the murderous clawing at the palace doors, the shots sailing through the sternums of the men, the women crumpling and crying in their taffeta. I thought of Stalin’s purges — the shivering red-faced intellectuals, the ones who wept, the ones who spat at their captors. I thought of the lines of Jews waiting for their exit visas in the eighties, turning around to look at the bleak landscape that once was their home; I thought of Yeltsin on a tank, screaming down a military coup; I thought of the school siege, the terrorism, the brinkmanship, the bluffs, of the last decade. And then I thought of Aleksandr’s rally, the way a thousand heads turned if he pointed and another thousand shouted if he spoke.

I went home, nodded to the icy-eyed night manager, and sat on my bed. I watched the chilly stars grow sharper as darkness fell. Over the weeks, I’d started to feel a certain sense of belonging in my room: my beach towel, decorated with fish whose lurid blues had faded into gray, had taken up a permanent residence in the communal bathroom; my salt-stained boots sat in the hallway outside my room like the relics from an atrocity. I’d stared so hard at the floor that I’d started to make an absurdist geography from the stains: near the bedside table was an Indian subcontinent; near the window was an entire Africa, complete with satellite Madagascar.

I thought of my father’s map, with its jaundiced Soviet Union; I thought of how I was now in its vast midst. It was as though I had climbed up on my father’s desk, kicking away his papers and disturbing his souvenirs, and crawled into the map. It was as though I’d been sucked through the television to the other side: a place where time held the world in unending potential energy, and the static broke the air into pieces, and everything was the color of a chessboard.

Aleksandr’s apartment was sunny and enormous, decorated with the slightly oblique tastefulness of a modern-art museum. There was a black and white sofa in the parlor, and the complicated chords of a sonata for piano — dissonant, in a minor key — floated faintly from somewhere above my head. Sharply dressed women and slightly frumpier men walked in and out of the main apartment with great purpose. When the door swung open, I could see a flat-screen TV turned on mute to a government news channel. I could hear the shriek of an espresso machine.