Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

I was patted down by a brawny security guard who lingered indecorously on my inseam. Then, as Nina had promised, there was a wait. Every time the door opened, I looked up expectantly and confronted suspicious looks from whoever was leaving — a goatish woman in thick glasses, a very young man with a clipboard, a few meaty gents with earpieces and grim expressions. Viktor did not appear. Nobody called for me. Nobody spoke to me. It reminded me of my doctors’ visits back in college, when I’d been given pamphlets on vitamins and management and “living with” Huntington’s and had waited for eons, epochs, watching the occasional nurse shoot me a sympathetic wince.

Finally, Nina emerged. I was half sleeping by that point, my head bobbing me savagely awake every thirty seconds. My hair, always unfortunate, had been done no favors by the time spent waiting. Nina frowned at me. Today she was wearing a beige blouse with an intricately scalloped neck and had her mouth done in orangey lipstick. She was paler than I remembered, and her hair was pulled back in an unforgiving bun. Her cheekbones jutted from her face like installation art.

“You’re still here?” she said.

“Apparently.”

“Very well, then. Come in.”

She led me into a high-ceilinged hallway. The walls were white, decorated with tiny prints of Moscow and St. Petersburg done in reds and blues. Above me, the Neva snarled in inky cobalt; St. Basil’s reared, strangely menacing, above a sanguine horizon.

“Nice apartment,” I said. I could feel her roll her eyes, even though she had her back to me.

“Mr. Bezetov has about fifteen minutes for you,” said Nina. “I told him I had a strange American waiting for him, and he seemed interested. I trust you’ll be able to explain yourself more thoroughly. He is very busy.”

“I understand,” I said, and then the hallway opened up into a room. It was epic and echoing; lacy cords of sunlight struck down from a snowy skylight in one corner, and a baby-grand piano squatted in another. In the center of a room, at a black desk, Aleksandr Bezetov sat typing furiously on a laptop.

“Aleksandr,” said Nina. “Your visitor.”

“One moment,” Aleksandr said in Russian. Nina was already gone. He was dressed more casually than he’d been at the protest and was wearing wire-rimmed glasses that looked Western and a tad self-conscious. His face — which, on the stump, had been energized, animated, his thick eyebrows casting as though looking for political contraband — held a vaguely bored expression. His tongue probed thoughtfully at his lower lip. His sleeves were rolled up.

After a moment, he looked up at me. He raised one eyebrow. I took this as my cue.

“Hello,” I said in Russian, and Aleksandr made a face.

“Please,” he said in English. “I’ve been speaking Russian long enough that this hurts me.”

His English was flat and professional and very clear. It reminded me somehow of stones skipping on a river.

“So,” he said. “You probably wonder why I agreed to meet with you.”

“I suppose,” I said, although I hadn’t. I’d hoped he would meet with me; I appreciated that he’d decided to. But I hadn’t thought it could be anything more than a kindly indulgence, because today he had the time for it.

“Well,” he said. “I know you probably don’t realize this, but you’ve been causing trouble for me. You can sit, you know.” He gestured to the spindly chair across from his. He resumed his typing as I unwound my scarf and took a seat.

“I have?” I said.

He stopped typing. “Yes.”

I said nothing, waiting for clarification. I didn’t know how I’d managed to create trouble for Aleksandr Bezetov without even managing to create any trouble for myself.

“Have you possibly been approached by a Nikolai Sergeyevich?”

There was a dull ding in the back of my head. “Yes.”

“And perhaps he’s tried to convince you that the two of you have some interest in common? Perhaps he’s tried to suggest that he’s a friend of mine?”

The ding was resolving into a dissipated vibrato. I was already starting to feel like an idiot. “It’s been confusing,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it.”

This wasn’t how I’d imagined our meeting going. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but I suppose I thought Aleksandr would be kindly and gentle and maybe a tad professorial; that he’d patiently answer my questions and then inquire politely about my own interests and then blandly dismiss me with the most generic of best wishes for the future. In my most involved fantasies, he’d be able to answer some questions close to my still-functioning mind and heart — he’d be able to reveal some deep wisdom about proceeding with grace toward doom, and that wisdom might somehow illuminate my future or my past. Either way, I hadn’t expected to be cross-examined.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “All I did was approach an old friend of yours to see if I might get your contact information. I didn’t realize that would be troublesome.”

Aleksandr issued a weary sigh, as though he’d been asked to coach a high school chess club. “No, of course you didn’t. I’ll be quite clear. The Russian government suspects I am a pawn of American intelligence. They’ve always thought that. Now you’re here, looking for me, making a spectacle of yourself, and you attracted their attention. They think you’re running me, or trying to, or something. Do you understand?”

His breath was becoming thick with the strain of remaining civil. Sarcasm buckled to the surface of his voice, like the eruption of some long-suppressed subterranean substance. “As it is, in case you’re wondering, I am not run by your CIA. But if I were, they’d be a lot subtler about it than you are being.”

“So who is Nikolai?”

“He’s a well-regarded bureaucrat in our very legitimate government.”

“Oh.” I was getting it. “Okay.”

There was a pause in which Aleksandr resumed typing, and I wondered if our conversation had somehow come to a cryptic end. I tried to remember what I had been doing when Nikolai appeared at the café those weeks ago. Had I been doing something suspicious, something that denoted sinister and illegal activities? I didn’t see how I’d managed it without noticing. I could barely remember any moments of import in the last few weeks — and those that shuffled to the surface, when I groped for them, were small and personal and oddly sentimental: watching a snow flurry blur out the stars through my hostel window, buying pastries from a woman who always gave me an extra bialy “for my children,” walking around the Neva until my skin was raw and my eyes were leaking and my head was filled with a symphony of Russian poetry.

“I don’t understand this,” I said. “I don’t see how I got anybody’s attention. I don’t do anything. All I do is sit around in cafés and read.”

“Yes,” he said. “They don’t quite know what to make of you. But they think you’re a representative of the American government, if an unwitting one.”

“An unwitting one?” I was insulted now.

Aleksandr eyed me, and I could see him registering my half-open coat, my ill-fitting sweater, the gauzy bits of hair that flew away from my head as if they were fleeing political persecution.

“Yes,” he said.

I fingered the seam of my coat and looked down. I felt very tired. There’d been a bone-deep fatigue of late, coming in dark waves that made my eyes feel as if they were orbiting my skull. I didn’t know how to interpret it or how hard I should try to. It wasn’t a physical harbinger of onset — I’d read enough accounts to know — but it seemed a psychological readying, and I was mostly grateful for it.

“All of this,” he said, “creates some further difficulties for me. And for you, I might add. More for you, I would suppose. I have many bigger difficulties already.”