Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

In the distance, Aleksandr could almost see the inky spines of the modern office buildings, the peeling gilt of the moldering palaces, the slate-colored twist of the Neva. No one knew he was out, and under his heavy hat he might walk around unrecognized for hours. He’d spent years risking everything for the major freedoms — the right of the people to vote, to buy and sell, to cruelly caricature their leaders. But there was the small thing, too, of walking unsupervised through the snowy streets. Aleksandr headed down Nevsky Prospekt. The bakeries were just starting to open, and light came bleeding through the windows of Kazan Cathedral. Aleksandr turned down Naberezhnaya reki Moiki. In the dour crepuscular light, the Moika looked like aluminum. Soon Nina would be waking up and climbing on the treadmill, and maybe she’d wonder where he was, and maybe soon she’d start to worry. Maybe she’d leave two messages on his cell phone, curt and exasperated, and maybe the third would open up into something long and pleading and tender. Maybe she’d call Vlad, and maybe he’d take a car out and track Aleksandr’s muddy sneaker-prints across the city. But for now Aleksandr was safe from all of that. For now he was out in the world: alone, the wind carving up his lungs, his city a little closer with every step.

St. Petersburg, 2006

Aleksandr was brilliant, of course. Anybody could see that, and everybody did. But he wasn’t quite as I’d imagined him, or maybe it’s more accurate to say he wasn’t quite as I imagine my father had imagined him. When the maid set down his afternoon espresso, Aleksandr never thanked her — he rarely even looked up. When his colleagues disappointed him, he snapped at them; when he heard something he deemed stupid, he raised an eyebrow with such withering contempt that all talk in the room ground to a halt. The apartment was absurd: it was as decadent as Versailles, with an endless supply of dumb little contraptions intended to make life easier than it should be — an appliance that simultaneously toasted your English muffin and fried your eggs, bottles of perfume with wood stems for all-day fresh fragrance. And the marriage was exactly as Viktor had described it. It was the kind of marriage that embarrasses everybody by its transparency — all of its petty dynamics and long-standing resentments were obvious in the way that Nina handed Aleksandr his espresso and the way his eyes followed her out of a room. Aleksandr’s colleagues respected him — and more than a few of them were in awe of him — but Nina’s departures were always followed by a tense, soggy moment when everybody looked down at their papers and tried not to show their pity. I didn’t spend a lot of time speculating about it. Marriages fall apart so often, and in so many different, excruciating ways, that trying to sort out the particularities of anybody’s is like trying to unspool the proximate cause of death of a person with no immune system. Though at times there was an edge of fatigue in Aleksandr’s eyes, or an ironic twist to his words, that made me think of Elizabeta and the way he’d looked when he heard her name.

But then it’s possible I was just projecting. Everybody likes a story about love long gone. When I thought of Jonathan — if I thought of Jonathan — he came back in flashes, on mute, through static. Our time together had taken on the surreal dimensions of a dream or a childhood.

I took to keeping longer and longer hours at Aleksandr’s, since there was nothing impelling me toward anything else. I got the sense that Viktor and Boris were similarly situated — they were the kind of young people who probably slept on half-deflated mattresses, who kept their books in a pile and their appliances unassembled. They seemed to be living the refugee life of students who haven’t yet learned that they’re supposed to find meaning in things, not just ideas.

But even though I started spending long days in Aleksandr’s apartment — twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours, stumbling ever later out into the bitter dark, ringing the door and being buzzed into the hostel, receiving looks from the man at the front desk that ranged from disapproval to indifference to knowing amusement — Aleksandr and I spoke no further about my father. Sometimes he’d walk toward me with a look of determination, and I’d be almost sure that he’d found something — my father’s original letter, perhaps, or some conclusive answer to my father’s questions, or some magic strength to live and to die. But he didn’t. He handed me no answers. What he handed me instead were press releases, drafted e-mails, rally posters. Gruesome numbers about the bombings: the 300 dead, the 108 buildings destroyed, the hundreds of Chechens detained, the seventeen who were ultimately found guilty. They were the kind of facts that make one self-conscious about the search for illumination. Which was a good thing, since none was forthcoming. Weeks passed, in fact, before Aleksandr and I had another proper conversation.

It was late, and I was about to reluctantly leave for the day. I’d been retranslating an editorial for a British newspaper, and I waved it at Aleksandr. “There’s that,” I said. He was sitting at his laptop. On the picture window behind him, I could see the reflection of a game of online chess. On the table sat an actual set — expensive, probably, ancient-looking and beautiful. I wondered about that. I had never seen him play.

“Thank you,” he said, waving me away.

I couldn’t look away from the set. “Are you playing?” I said.

“Chess.”

“Yes, I see that.”

He dragged a bishop into the center of the screen, then made the corresponding move on the set. “You played at home, right?” he said. His voice was hoarse, as though he’d recently talked quite a lot or hadn’t spoken in several days. It would have to be the first, I decided.

“Not too much. With one of the chessmen in Harvard Square. And with my father, some, as I said.” I waited for him to comment. He did not.

“You know the Fool’s Mate?”

“No.”

“It’s the shortest possible route to checkmate. It’s this.” He reset the game on his chessboard. “Two staggered pawns and a bishop in the right place. That’s it.”

“Does that ever happen in real life?”

“No, never. It’s just theoretical, really. It’s a scrupulously theoretical game.” He sounded, I thought, slightly bitter.

I stared at his set. The manes of the knights twisted out behind them as if moved by some mythical battlefield wind; the kings were bent, gnarled, stately. They were magnificent, more like statues on a medieval bridge than what I had to remind myself they were — essentially toys. The look of the kings made me bold.

“How did you learn to play?” I asked.

Aleksandr scratched his nose. “I saw a problem in the newspaper and I solved it.”

“Yes, but how did you learn?”

“That’s how I learned. I was four.” With his thumb, he tapped over the fool’s king. It landed on the board with a click. “Then my mother found me a trainer. Then I enrolled in a correspondence course. Then I came here. The end.”

“Oh,” I said, and I didn’t know what else to say.

“Did you know that in Saudi Arabia they play without bishops or queens?”

“I guess that sort of makes sense.”

“It really is a subversive, militantly feminist game, when you think about it.”

“Who was your last match?”

He looked at me, as if trying to ascertain whether I was being cruel. “A computer,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Oh.” I lowered my eyes. I remembered this now, vaguely — the amused headlines, the newspapers tripping blithely sardonic over the revelation that man had invented his own match. The best chess mind in the world was defeated by a machine; what, then, was the use of chess minds, or minds in general? I was almost glad that my father hadn’t kept his own mind long enough to see it. “I remember something about that, I think,” I said.