Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Real men, you will find, can last longer than thirty seconds at their activities.”

Viktor kicked Boris’s chair leg and went back to drafting the itinerary for Moscow, where the two would be heading in a week. They’d already been to Volgodonsk and Buynaksk, and in Moscow they’d be interviewing an ex-soldier who was making money in ways that Aleksandr had agreed not to scrutinize on camera. The interviews were to compose the final and most important third of the film — following an analysis of Putin’s political gain from the attacks and a delineation of the discrepancies in the press reports — and Aleksandr badly envied their going. Aleksandr couldn’t go anywhere anymore.

Viktor and Boris went off to draft questions and follow-up questions, and the afternoon was swept quickly away. Vlad came in with a toothless death threat; one of the assistants came in with a speaking invitation at Yale University. At four o’clock sharp, just as Aleksandr was starting to lose energy, he was brought a perfect, tiny espresso that gave him the will to go on. Then the door opened and in walked Nina, a few steps ahead of the strange, startled-looking American. “Your visitor,” she said, and clicked out of the room.

“One moment,” said Aleksandr.

The American took off her hat, which made her hair stand straight up. “ Zdryastvuytye ,” she said poorly, which made Aleksandr wince.

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

Later, he wouldn’t be sure what had made him hire her, exactly. It wasn’t pity, although he couldn’t help but feel an inexplicable lurch of empathy for her; it wasn’t that she was smart (although she was) or that she was beautiful (because she wasn’t). It was, he finally decided, the way she’d asked about Elizabeta, and the way she seemed to stumble her way into understanding something profound about him while he sat there and watched. He rationalized that it was a good quality in an employee: an ability to infer, to piece together a narrative, to take imaginative leaps into the psychology of others. And he had no doubt that she could competently fix the press releases (although Viktor, who’d studied at Oxford, could do just as well). But really, deep down, he hadn’t hired her for her fluent English. He hadn’t hired her to type or proofread or copyedit. He’d hired her to sit around and keep him company in his only undiscovered secret.

In the evening — once the army of typers and talkers had left, and Aleksandr had eaten his dinner of vegetables and high-end fish, and the sky out the living-room window had turned the color of a mostly healed bruise — Nina clacked against the oak floors and started up some tea. Aleksandr often came across Nina’s array of multicolored teas in the cupboards — strange tinctures beyond the realm of his understanding, usually involving obscure Latin American tubers — and they were the only evidence in the kitchen, he often thought, that Nina was a carbon-based life-form, requiring consumption for survival.

She waved a malodorous tea bag at his face. “Do you want some of this?” she said, although he had never once accepted her offer.

“No, thank you,” said Aleksandr. “What’s this one do?”

“It’s for digestion.”

“What do you have to digest? You don’t eat.”

“I eat plenty,” said Nina tiredly. “How was your meeting with the strange American?”

“It was fine.”

“Oh?”

“I hired her.”

“You what?”

“I hired her,” he said. “I’m going to coopt her, you know? It makes sense.”

Nina’s water started to boil, and she poured it over her tea leaves. A bitter smell flushed up, acrid and assaulting, and Aleksandr stepped away. “You’re going to pay her?” said Nina.

“She says she doesn’t need money. I’ll give her something nominally.”

“That’s very odd.” Nina took a sip of her tea. “What if she’s spying on you?”

Aleksandr had considered this. But after thirty years of paranoia — of seeing spies in corners, and ghosts in shadows, and murder in public transportation, and conspiracy in terrorism — he felt sure that she was not.

“What if you’re spying on me?” he said, and tugged at Nina’s hair.

“Grib, stop,” she said. “I just blow-dried it.”

That night — again, and he hoped it didn’t suggest a trend — Aleksandr couldn’t sleep. In bed, with Nina silent beside him, he tried to keep his legs from thrashing. He took deep breaths, but they caught somewhere behind his uvula, stirring little tides of anxiety, eddying over deep pools of energy. He wanted to go to Moscow. He wanted to run a marathon. He wanted, he realized, to get out of the apartment.

For a time, even in recent years, Aleksandr still occasionally went walking. But like American heads of state who insist on taking exercise outside, he was always trailed by a small army of his black-suited security staff. It was tiresome for him, and boring for them, and nothing in the way of freedom or reflection could be achieved. So in the last few years he’d mostly stopped. His universe had become this apartment — tastefully decorated (that was all Nina) and carefully managed, his toast and tea ready for him at five-fifteen in the morning, his afternoon espresso steaming hot at four, his laptop blinking an aquatic blue in the dark, whirling him into contact with the universe. Living in this apartment was like living in a museum, he sometimes thought, everything so immaculately clean, the objects chosen and placed with the care of a curator. Each room had a different unobtrusively pleasant smell — lemon in the kitchen, lavender in the bedroom, some sort of oceanic wind that made him sneeze in the bathroom. He walked the apartment end to end some nights, and when he put his foot down in that forgiving white carpeting, he could smell the rawness of Sakhalin dirt. In his sublime, epic, multilayered bed, he could feel the lethal cold of his room in the kommunalka.

No wonder, then, that he sometimes woke up choking on something that felt like fear. Sometimes he couldn’t quite stand it — the subtle ostentation, the supernatural calm, the fucking order of it all, like a planned economy.

He sat up. He got out of bed and put on his coat over his pajamas, and he put on his running shoes — bought as a Christmas present by Nina, who had grinned and pinched at his hefty trunk — and he punched in the security code at the doorway, blinking a subterranean green, and he found himself outside on the sidewalk. He tried to remember the last time he’d been out alone. There were some early acts of rashness, before the ear came through the window, and there had been a few moments of defiance since then. He’d sneaked out early one forgotten anniversary, when he knew there was no time to order something, and he’d been proud of his romanticism — risking life and limb to get his wife a diamond bracelet. Had she worn it? He couldn’t remember.

The cool of the morning air, the squeak of the snow under his shoes — they were quickly soaked, and a gangrenous ache started climbing up his calves — reminded him of those painfully cold mornings back in the early eighties when he’d run about the city before dawn started melting across the sky, free in his shrinking anonymity. He could envy this strange American woman, almost, and whatever wound had made her leave her country alone and come here to work for him for free. Whatever it was, whatever it had broken in her, it had also broken the mechanism that was small, that huddled, that took tiny steps and looked behind shoulders.