Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

For the trip, Aleksandr loaned us a sleek black limousine the size of a boat. The seats were in a circle, so Viktor and Boris and I were forced to look at one another — or out the windows — the whole way. I opted mostly for the windows. We were meeting the soldier at a club, and Aleksandr had asked Nina to loan me a suitable garment for the excursion. What she’d given me was gauzy and orange and far too small; it stretched unbecomingly whenever I reached out my arms, so I kept them firmly at my sides. It was also too light for the weather, and I skimmed my thighs against the leather seats to keep them warm. Inside the car were bottles of high-end water, extracted from mysterious Siberian springs, and green bulbs of champagne. I felt alternately as though I were on my way to a wedding or a funeral. Viktor and Boris started to tell jokes somewhere around Novgorod Oblast.

“So Stalin comes to Putin in a dream,” said Viktor. “He says, ‘Putin, in order to maintain your power, you must do two things: paint the Kremlin green and kill all of your political enemies.’ Putin looks at him and says, ‘Why green?’ ”

“I’ve heard that one,” said Boris.

“You’ve heard them all, I suppose,” said Viktor.

“I think your mother told it to me in bed.”

The interviews that Viktor and Boris had collected so far had been wispy, insubstantial things — compelling for their human interest, but far from ironclad in their evidence. The interviewees told stories that had the haunting familiarity of myths, but in the end there was nothing terribly solid to be gained from them. We watched the interviews in the limousine’s DVD player as we drove. The first interview was with a skittish female university student who wore harsh glasses over her delicate features and kept pulling her skirt down over her knees. She had heard two men talking under her window on the night before the first bombing — a low, flat voice insisting that it be placed here , not there. There had been a sound of scraping, and at first she’d taken it for an animal of some kind, but then there was more talk, the congested sound of a heavy man breathing, the retch of a curse.

Was that all? Boris asked from behind the camera. You could hear the disappointment in his voice.

The young woman blinked and adjusted her glasses. Yes, she said. That was all.

In the explosion, she’d lost her mother and her little brother, and it wasn’t for a few weeks — until the ringing in her ears had dulled and the meat-colored burns on her thighs had started to heal — that she’d remembered the men and remembered that their accent had not been Chechen.

The next interview was with an enormously fat woman whose eldest son had overheard something at a bar on the night before the attack. “Going to be a big day tomorrow?” someone had said, and then somebody else had laughed a little too cruelly. The woman’s son had told her this while he was in bed, trying to recover from the crushing of his spinal column, which he never did. He’d been a gymnast. When he learned he’d be paraplegic for life, he’d wrestled himself into a homemade noose, in a final feat of athleticism, and hanged himself.

She stared down the camera as she talked about it. The camera zoomed in on her. Tears sprouted in the edges of her eyes, but they didn’t spill over onto her cheeks. It was an affecting moment, emotionally. But her story didn’t mean much once you’d thought about it for thirty seconds.

The final interview was with an older man who was spritely, almost elfin. When the camera zoomed in on him, he resembled nothing more than a half-starved arctic fox. He talked about something he’d seen during the attacks: in the melee, amid the running and screaming and the tearing off of smoldering clothes, he’d seen a man standing against a tree. He’d thought the man was in some kind of shock, and he’d started over to assist. But when he got closer, he’d seen that the man was smoking a cigarette and that his lips were twisted into an expression that could be interpreted as a smile. Our older man had turned away and gone to help a woman who lay flattened underneath a piece of cement window ledge.

Later, he told the camera, he’d thought about the man standing under the tree. He’d been there during the explosion, though it took the journalists thirty minutes to arrive, and it took the police nearly an hour. He’d worn a dark coat, and the most striking thing about him was his indifference.

The image of the man dissolved into blue, and Viktor turned off the DVD player. “It’s not very convincing, is it?” he said.

“It’s moving,” I said. “It’s heartrending, that’s for sure.”

“That’s not worth much. We don’t need to rend any more hearts.”

“It’s convincing if you’re looking to be convinced.”

“That’s the mark of a weak argument.”

We passed villages with damp-looking wooden houses, and I could almost feel the chill dripping from their ceilings, the drafts coming through the blocky walls. There were a few snatches of the romantic East, what you’d imagine if you were the kind to imagine this sort of thing: the spires of Orthodox churches spiking out of wintry mists, a sense of foreignness that stemmed not only from a dislocation of place but also, somehow, of time. There was a feeling of traveling not back or away but out — out on some kind of a Z axis, into a fairy-tale time that never, in fact, was real. My face must have reflected a certain dreaminess, because I caught Boris looking at me with an expression I recognized as contempt. “You think this is kind of romantic, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You do. I can tell. You think you are having a little adventure. Well, let me tell you something. This isn’t romantic, okay? And it’s not an adventure. This is severed heads in alleyways. I don’t know why you’re here, but this isn’t study abroad, okay?”

I nodded. I was surprised and a little numb — it was like the moment after a burn or a wounding, before your body has registered its pain. Maybe I would be a help, maybe I would not be, and I could understand why my presence was resented. But I knew I was not on study abroad. This trip, whatever it was for, was not for the photographs or the postcards. It was not for anecdotes to tell on first dates, for souvenirs to show at dinner parties a decade in the future, for wisdom to tell to adult children going off on their own adventures. It wasn’t a matrix or a road map or a source of knowledge that would ever inform my future, as I didn’t seem likely to have one.

But there was no way to say any of this, and no reason that it would be convincing. It might be emotionally affecting, but that’s not the mark of a good argument — on this we can all agree. So I said nothing, and pursed my lips, and turned away to look out the window.

And then we were smashing into the splendor of downtown Moscow at night. All around us there were beautiful women wearing almost nothing but lurid makeup and waiting in long lines outside of pulsing clubs. They looked absolutely terrifying, as well as freezing cold. I stared. The women tossed their hair. Their silver heels cast a spiky sort of light out into the street. Enormous IKEA billboards dominated the skyline. We passed the Pushkin Theater, glowing like an illuminated eggshell in the streetlights. We rolled by the Nord-Ost on Melnikov Street, and I thought of the siege there back in 2002: Spetsnaz blasting poison at the terrorists and hostages alike and everybody dying horribly in the snow. Then we were whirling past more clubs, more restaurants, more dripping, filigreed opulence. We passed the glittering Vagankovsky Cemetery, populated by victims of the eighteenth-century plague. We passed the gilded cupola of St. Isaac’s and the wide grinning arc of Kazan Cathedral. We passed a brightly lit café called Gifts of the Sea.