Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“I used to sometimes. I played with my father when I was small.” I looked down. “And I had a friend I played with sometimes in Boston. I was never very good. I could never think more than a move ahead.”

“Count yourself lucky. Thinking more than a move ahead never got me anywhere in life. Only in chess. And even then it was sometimes a burden. I saw fifteen moves ahead once, in Norway, but there was a much easier path to victory, and I missed it. Looking into the future too hard, I’ve found, can be paralyzing.”

“I’ve found that, too.”

Aleksandr looked at me suspiciously. “Anyway,” he said, clapping me on the back. “I’ll let you get to work.”

I took the reams of paper — the press releases, the drafted e-mails, the artlessly phrased leaflets — and sat in a corner. Around me there was arguing and joking and the sound of words clacking fiercely onto pages. I started to skim the first e-mail, catching the first misspelling and the first inelegant turn of phrase. I felt more awake than usual. There was something satisfying about doing a small, good thing after all these weeks of living in a morass of uselessness. I thought about what Aleksandr had said about chess, about the paralyzing effects of imagination. I knew that to be true. Any time I let my mind wander more than three steps into the future, it reached the limits of comprehension and fell off the edge. But for now there were concrete concerns — small, surmountable problems: typos, grammatical irregularities. I could live with these. I bent my head over the pages, and I started to work.

St. Petersburg, December 2006

Aleksandr stood on top of a box in Gostiny Dvor and shouted into the crowd. It was a sizable turnout — maybe not the biggest group he’d seen since he began, but near it. He’d have to ask Nina about the head count. Today they were a bit more frenetic than usual: boys kicked bits of hail like footballs; the crowd clunked their feet against the unyielding snow like a group of ungulates getting ready to stampede. He should be thankful for the energy, he knew. But the wind angled itself through his clothes — it always managed to do this; no matter how many layers he wore, it laced its fingers together and then ran them up and down his pant leg and collar provocatively — and he was again struck by the thought that he was beginning (already!) to be tired of this. The crowds, the slogans, the shouting at the sky, as though it would count for something in the end. He was committed to it, he was, he was, and he would keep at it until they caught up with him somewhere — sneaked polonium into his imported sushi, dismantled the engine of his airplane, shot him dead in the stairwell of his own apartment building as they had done to Anna Politkovskaya in October. But there were times — like now, and now wasn’t a good time for it — when it all felt preordained. They weren’t the first crowd to clot and yell, to issue demands.

He took a gulp of icy air. “We are running to lose,” he shouted. This line always got the biggest shouts, which had to make him wonder. “And in the losing, we are running to be noticed. We are running to be blocked. We are running to be opposed. We are running to be assassinated.” He cast his eyes around the crowd. This line was his dare — or maybe his invitation — to the universe. It was coming, he knew it was coming, so it might as well look artfully stage-managed. But the flags fluttered in unison, and the crowd cheered. Today was not the day.

He looked at his notes. He tried to make his speeches different every time he delivered them — on this day, did you know, Pushkin completed Eugene Onegin , and Poland declared independence from Russia for the first time? — so that people could listen to him now and again and still expect to hear something new. He tracked his eyes back up to the crowd; he arranged his face into an expression of surprised interest so that he could convincingly sell the fun of knowing that today was the anniversary of the day that Khrushchev sent a dog to die in outer space. And as he did, he caught sight of a young woman standing kitty-corner from his box and taking notes. He delivered his line and looked back. He always noticed when people took notes at his rallies — it was a habit, he was sure, from Nikolai — although Nina often reminded him that note-taking wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: it could be a citizen journalist, or a European blogger, or the real Western press. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d say, tossing her long leg over his in their giant black and white bed. “Don’t you want people to be paying attention to you?” And he’d say he did, he did, although he knew that at least some of the people who were paying attention were doing so for very bad reasons. “You worry too much,” Nina would say, making her face into a monstrous mock pout (apparently what he looked like to her when he was worried, which he always was). And because it was insulting to try to make a woman worry for you when she was naturally disinclined to do so, he usually just shrugged and rolled over and fell asleep facing the wall.

But this woman — what was it about her that didn’t seem journalistic? She seemed so unassuming, so unsure of herself, that one wondered whether it might not be a pretense. She looked like she could be Russian — she had brown hair and a grim expression and skin the color of table salt — but he knew immediately that she was not. Something in her stance was half off; she stood too far apart from everybody else to seem comfortable but too close to seem actively hostile. She was not pretty — she was too monochromatic, too self-conscious, he thought, in the way she moved and glanced — but her eyes held a wry intelligence that made him look at her twice. She was approaching Nina. Nina would dismiss her quickly, he knew; Nina’s greatest strength in life was a capacity to dismiss, and Aleksandr relied on her to be rude on his behalf. Somebody needed to be, and Aleksandr was a little too polite even after all the decades and all the women. It was good for Nina to have something to do besides click around the apartment on high heels and dye her hair red and keep her body in such a state of hygienic starvation that Aleksandr sometimes wondered how she could have been a product of natural selection. Nina was talking, he saw, to the woman with the notepad.

He could see Nina shaking her head and turning around to look at Vlad — the head bodyguard, the best because he was the biggest — then turning back to the woman. There was a current of desperation in the woman’s eyes, he could see, not abject pathos, exactly, but the quiet suggestion that here was a person who had not gotten something that she’d wanted very much. Aleksandr pulled on his gloves. He found himself hoping that Nina could give her whatever she was asking for.

After the rally, in bed, Aleksandr ran his cold feet up and down Nina’s leg.

“Stop that,” she said. “You are a cruel man.”

“Did you think the rally went well?”

“As well as always,” said Nina, which was no answer at all. Aleksandr wished he could care a little less about what Nina thought of him; they were married, and he was rich, and she was beautiful, and that should be enough, but he often found himself restlessly worrying at the gaps between them, sticking his fingers into the fissures and prying them farther apart. Tonight he managed to say nothing.

“I wish you would cut that line about assassination,” said Nina.

“I thought you said I worry too much.”

“You do worry too much. That line is you worrying in front of the whole crowd. It’s not manly.”