Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Do you want to see me do something manly?”

“I’d rather not tonight.” She kissed him dryly on the cheek and rolled over. “Sorry, grib.” He had never liked that she called him “mushroom”—first because he worried that he looked a little like a mushroom (dark, lumpy-faced, on the stout side now) and then because he worried that he behaved like a mushroom (brooding furtively in the dark when nobody was looking). But Nina always said that was nonsense — that she loved mushrooms and she loved him — and she kept calling him “mushroom” and he stopped asking her not to.

“Who was that woman with you at the rally?” said Aleksandr.

“I don’t know, exactly. A very odd American.”

Aleksandr turned over and propped his head with his hand. “A fan?”

“I guess so,” said Nina, wrinkling her nose. Here, too: she might show the faintest tremor of jealousy at the idea of a young American woman traveling internationally to get to meet him; she might reflect fleetingly on the fact that there were many, many women who would pay for that opportunity, who would be grateful to talk to him, who would not roll over in bed if they were next to him.

“Was she chess or political?” said Aleksandr.

“I couldn’t tell.” Nina’s voice was becoming creaky and reluctant, dislodging into sleep. “I scheduled you a meeting for Wednesday. Bring Vlad.”

“I always bring Vlad,” said Aleksandr. An American visitor was odd. His chess fans were usually Russian and almost exclusively male. Yet he’d have known her if she was a delegate from an NGO; she would have had a more professional approach and outfit and wouldn’t have scared his nice wife by shivering at her pitifully in the snow.

“She’s an American professor,” said Nina.

“Oh yes?” Aleksandr sat up. Something was snarling in the back of his head — some meaning taking shape, like tea leaves settling into symbol.

“What’s wrong?” said Nina, although he could hear in her voice the profound indifference of fatigue. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ll be back.”

He went to his study, flipped on the light, and started riffling through his notes. There had been something about an American professor at his security meeting the week before. Some years ago, Aleksandr had paid to turn a low-level FSB man — Grigorii, a baby-faced clown from Nizhny who’d sat shaking in his boots the first time and tried to demand a higher sum — who had been photocopying Aleksandr’s file ever since. For the most part, the endeavor had proved a stupendous waste of money. But at the most recent meeting, Grigorii had said something strange — it was obvious from the get-go that he’d had something beyond his usual predictable babble, because he’d looked a little more smug and obnoxious than usual — and he’d stuck out his feet and leaned back in his chair.

“They think you have a new boss,” he’d said, and smirked.

Aleksandr had kicked the leg of the table. “I don’t have a fucking boss,” he said. Vlad glared him into silence. Aleksandr had never gotten used to listening to lies about himself, and he usually insisted on correcting them, even though neither Vlad nor the turncoat seemed to care in the end what was true and what was not, as long as they were paid.

“They think the embassy has a new officer, a sort of awkward young woman, and that she’s on your case.”

“Please,” Aleksandr had said. “It’s embarrassing to even listen to this.”

The little shit had smiled, had scratched his beardless chin. “I’m just telling you what’s in your file.”

Where were his notes from that meeting? Aleksandr flipped through his papers — the facts for the speech, some statistics on the depopulation of Siberia, a few fragments on the film project — and then found the notes. The officer in question was supposedly an “awkward female American academic.” How many of them could there be, running around the same city? It was probably the same woman.

She wasn’t really CIA, he knew that much. Over the years, they’d approached him occasionally, and done him favors from time to time, and accepted some from him, but they understood, fundamentally, that he’d have no credibility with anyone if he let them own him. He wasn’t pressing their agenda, anyway. He wasn’t pressing anyone’s. As much as they liked him on CNN — because he was sarcastic and skeptical and liked to talk about civil liberties — he was a radical fiscal conservative. He wanted a flat tax. He wanted extreme deregulation. They wouldn’t like him at the American universities if he talked about that stuff, though mostly he was on about press freedom and democracy — and so they clamored for his autograph, these kids at Princeton with their Che Guevara T-shirts.

But the rumors mattered. They mattered because when he traveled the countryside, when he listened to the concerns of the people in Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod and Irkutsk, he needed them to trust him. The people wanted to talk to him and were inclined to like him; he had a common face and an uncommon energy, and he seemed to remind mothers of their most capable son. They liked to complain to him, and they liked how he eviscerated Putin — with an impression accomplished by sucking his cheeks into vicious little concavities and making his eyes go flat and dead — but they stopped trusting him when they heard rumors. I heard he works for the Americans. I heard he’s an agent of the American CIA . He couldn’t afford it — it was too damaging, it tore too savagely through the carefully wound threads of trust he’d established across this enormous, lonely country — and he had to make this woman, whoever she was, stop whatever she was doing.

He considered going back to bed — to hold the angular slashes of Nina’s shoulders, to run his fingers against the rocky cordon of her spine — but he decided against it. He was too awake. He flipped back to his notes on the bombing film. The first page of his notes was a photograph: a black-and-white snapshot of the first apartment-building bombing, its top twisted off, its living rooms and sofa beds and kitchen counters reduced to a collapsed pile of gray cinders. In the corner of the photograph, a small boy ran wide-mouthed across a smoldering alley.

The boy reminded him always of the girl — his girl, his handless girl and her soundless scream. And when he thought of her, he thought of the apartment buildings exploding in stars of fibrous orange, giving off little atomic clouds that made the city barely habitable. Then came the fear: the frantic desperation of a siege, the people stockpiling, placing bets, holding out. Then came the talk: terrorism, it was called; Chechens, no doubt, it was decided; all a part of this global Islamic jihad that had taken a swipe at America’s embassies a year earlier, although America, it was agreed, had at least halfway had it coming. Then there was Putin, fucking Putin, skipping to his victory: smug, assured, issuing commandments and condemnations. The people were glad to have someone in charge. It was only because they were so afraid — chafing against the iron grip of terror, choking on the metallic stink of death (though Misha, who’d thought he was dying more times than was typical, said that the smell of death was actually something closer to sassafras).

Aleksandr knew that fear. He’d known it back when he was a sniveling chess idiot, smiling big dumb smiles over chattering teeth at his chess chaperones and begging the God he didn’t believe in to make him less like Ivan (less brave, that is, and thus less dead). He knew that fear now, now that he was an adult and making an adult’s painful choices and taking an adult’s painful risks. It was a powerful thing.