Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

Sometimes, though he wasn’t proud to admit it, he had to wonder how it would end for him. He hoped — when he hoped for anything — that it would be a shooting or a quick shove out a high window. He mightily feared a poisoning, although a high-end poison — polonium, for example, something that would be impossible to trace back concretely, something that would be impossible to treat (unlike thallium, which was cheaper but could be combated with a dose of Prussian Blue) — was expensive: two or three million dollars in cash for enough to kill a man. So he had economics on his side, at any rate.

Aleksandr was approaching the nation’s average life expectancy for a male, anyway, and sometimes he wondered if it weren’t a little presumptuous, a little elitist, to wish for more time. When he’d traveled across the country, he’d seen entire villages — the detritus of state-sponsored farm cooperatives — that were composed almost entirely of drunks, dying, disabled, the young people all gone to the cities, the barns left unpainted, the vegetables rotting in rows, the old people treating their heart attacks with swigs of fetid homemade hooch. Who was Aleksandr to live when other people lived like this?

When a finger grazed the side of Aleksandr’s shoulder, he just about leaped through the window.

“Don’t be so jumpy,” a voice said.

Aleksandr turned around. Misha’s head was cocked to one side, his shirttails falling out of the back of his suit. He was holding a tumbler of vodka between his fingers, and he was letting it tilt so far to the side that Aleksandr was sure it was going to fall from his hand and stain the carpet.

“Misha. How are you?” Aleksandr offered his hand, although he didn’t like touching Misha. The years had not been kind to him — there was still that persistent sickliness, the sense that the contours of his face refracted the light unnaturally, in defiance of physics.

“How am I?” Misha sneered. He did not take Aleksandr’s hand.

“Yes, Mikhail. It’s a polite question. It’s what polite people ask each other.” Aleksandr wasn’t sure how Misha had gotten invited. Nina must have been looking at an old list.

“Well, if that’s what the polite people are saying. Thank you for teaching the peasant your ways.”

Aleksandr stared at Misha. He’d had to train himself to look at Misha when was first back from the psikhushka — he’d had to force himself to hold Misha’s gaze and talk straight to his face. Misha had seemed so horrifying then; he’d been a monstrous anti-prophet, and his message was as terrifying as his face. Now he struck Aleksandr as merely reduced. He was no uglier or more paranoid than most people. “What do you want today?” said Aleksandr.

“Why do you assume I want something? Why can’t I just be saying hello to my old friend?”

“We were never friends.”

“I can’t argue with that, I suppose.” Misha ran his hand along Aleksandr’s desk. Trapeziums of artificial light sifted through the picture window and went wheeling across the carpet. In the distance, Aleksandr could hear the blare of premature noisemakers. “I do want something, come to think of it, Aleksandr. Now that you mention it.”

“Yes?”

“You’re doing a movie, I understand.”

“This is not a secret.”

“I want Right Russia included.”

“Included?” Aleksandr laughed a strategic, mirthless laugh. He wondered if anybody ever laughed like this involuntarily.

“Affiliated. I want us affiliated. I think this film sounds like a good idea.”

“I sure appreciate that, Misha.”

“So?”

“Do I have to point out that you’ve done nothing for us?”

“Not for lack of trying. You don’t ask us to participate in your rallies, your little conferences. I know you’re embarrassed of us.” He produced a cigarette from somewhere in his pants pocket and started to light it.

“Could you put that out?”

“You don’t smoke now?”

Aleksandr squirmed. “Nina doesn’t like it.”

“To think! The messiah of the Slavs doesn’t smoke because his scary wife tells him not to!”

“Honestly, Misha.”

Misha squinted at Aleksandr, then took a puff. “In all these years,” he said. “In all your panels, your assemblies, your full-page ads, you’ve offered us nothing. It’s time for some cooperation.”

“Cooperation? Misha, don’t be nonsensical. I need to have some credibility. Right Russia is — you’re not credible, let’s say. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“And you are?”

Aleksandr looked back out the window. All across the city, people were popping open bottles, edging closer to the person they wanted most to kiss at midnight. And here he was, standing with a jaundiced belligerent, slack-jawed and accusatory. Aleksandr closed his eyes. “Misha,” he said, gearing up to sound ludicrous. “It’s not you, you know, I don’t think this about you. But some of your guys are a little unhinged. ‘Russia is for Russians’ and all that?”

“It’s just a slogan.”

“It’s just a slogan? A quarter of the population thinks it’s fascist.”

Misha took another breath of cigarette, and Aleksandr could hear the halting effort of his lungs. “You want to make policies based on the polls? You know what kind of a country we’d have then?”

“It’s a criminally xenophobic philosophy. People get killed for it.”

“You’re accusing us of murder now?”

“Don’t be hysterical. I’m accusing you of stupidity. And bad marketing. I don’t want it near my film.”

Misha sucked at his cigarette contemplatively and arranged his face into an expression of overdone admiration. He looked down at the carpet. He gazed out the window. He offered a low whoosh of appreciation. “You have a lovely apartment. Have I told you that?”

Aleksandr said nothing. There was no right answer.

“Quite different from that old place you were in, right? Funny, isn’t it, Aleksandr? How far you’ve come?”

Aleksandr took a gulp of his champagne.

“Where is it you’re from again? Where your sister still is? Irkutsk, is it?”

“Okha. Sakhalin.”

“Right. That’s right. Sakhalin.” Misha was silent for a moment, tracing the tip of his shoe along the floor. Corpuscles of dirt fell off, and he ground them into the carpet. “I think,” he said finally, “that you owe me this much.”

“Owe you? Owe you what? Owe you how?”

Misha raised his eyebrows. “You will remember, I’m sure, that I know about what happened to Ivan.”

Aleksandr stared. “Know what about what happened to Ivan?”

“I’m surprised you’ve forgotten. I know that you let him die.”

Aleksandr thought of Ivan — his painful thinness, the way he bent against the snow when he walked, the way he believed in his own limitless capacity to outrun and outwit. Aleksandr could look back and see that Ivan had been fragile, although at the time he’d seemed invincible. He was the person who’d seemed able to see the symbols and know what they stood for; he’d seemed to have the capacity to intuit the reality that ran underneath the fictions like subterranean reservoirs beneath a city. But if Ivan had been fragile, Aleksandr had been barely standing upright — he could look back and see how naive, how outrageously vulnerable, he had been. He hadn’t let Ivan die. He’d spent half his life thinking about it, and he was sure. You could let something happen only if you knew it was coming; you could let something happen only if you had any idea how to stop it.

“I didn’t,” said Aleksandr.

“But you did. You must have. They came after him and not you? They left you alone all those years for no reason? It’s not like Nikolai didn’t know where you lived, even before you became their precious national chess baby and went to live in the woods. No, I don’t think so. I think you must have done them a favor. I think you must have made them a compromise. Even before you made all those other compromises. It took me a long time to figure this out, but now I have.” Misha smiled a weirdly good-natured smile. “And so now I think you owe me.”