Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

Aleksandr took a breath. “I don’t know, Misha,” he said. “I do not know. I’ve thought about it a lot. I don’t know why they went for Ivan and not me. Probably because I wasn’t important enough to bother with. I was only distribution. They probably tried, and missed, and figured that the point had been sufficiently made.”

Misha looked at him strangely. “No. I am sure they did not try and miss.”

“Or maybe I was too important,” said Aleksandr. He was starting to hear the pleading tone in his voice. “Maybe my relative fame afforded me some protection. And my game made me a credit to Russia. Everyone said so. Maybe they didn’t want to lose me because of that. Maybe they knew even then they were going to sponsor me. And yes, you’re right, maybe they knew even then that I’d let them. There was no explicit compromise, Misha. There wasn’t. But maybe they thought my death would be noticed.”

“Noticed? Aleksandr, since when do they care what people notice? Maybe now this is your protection — your fame, such as it is. Maybe now they don’t want to try anything too obvious, anything that will cause a stir at Western universities. But then? No, friend. I don’t think that was it, either.”

Aleksandr thought back to the night when Nikolai came barging into his apartment, his eyes carved out and terrified, his hands shaking as if recoiling from the blowback of a gunshot. Aleksandr should have known then. Of course he should have known.

“I don’t know,” said Aleksandr. “I don’t know. I don’t know. It probably should have been me.”

“There we can agree, then.”

They were quiet for a moment. On his darker nights, it was true, Aleksandr had trouble believing that there was anything he’d done — anything — that Ivan wouldn’t have done, and done better, if he’d lived. No matter how famous or powerful or applauded he was, no matter how much the Western press fawned over him, no matter how ugly and crazed Misha got, and no matter how stigmatized his group became, there would always be the fact that Misha knew something that nobody else did. He knew that when they’d come for Ivan, they’d come for the better man.

“In any case,” said Aleksandr, “this doesn’t change that you can’t be affiliated with the film. I’m sorry, Misha.”

“Yes,” said Misha. He grinned boyishly. “Yes, I imagine you will be.”

Misha left, and when he opened the door, Aleksandr could hear the tidal rise and fall of voices in flirtation, in playful argument. He caught a glimpse of Nina, skeins of her red hair tumbling down her back. Her arm was on the arm of a rebel economist, her head tilted backward in amusement. Misha closed the door behind him.

In the dark, Aleksandr went back to the window and rested his forehead against the cool of the frosted glass. Through the door, he could hear the counting down, the shouts, the pop and fizz of champagne opened and poured. He raised his glass and toasted 2007.

At the end of January, Aleksandr was invited to a book-and-chessboard signing at a university library. “A little small, don’t you think?” Aleksandr had said when he looked at a description of the venue. Nina had raised her eyebrows at him and asked if he wanted to squander an opportunity to lecture to a group of sympathetic young people because the venue was too small. Then she’d rolled her eyes and tapped her fingers on the table, slowly, and he could almost hear her wondering who he thought he was these days, although he had no idea when she’d become the defender of the masses. So he’d gone, and stood at the podium, and watched as security checked IDs at the door and patted everyone down for weaponry. Vlad and the rest of the security stood near the exits, sturdy and still as Greek columns. Once a sluggish line of students had shuffled in — and once Aleksandr felt sure that even though the hall was only half full, no one else was coming — he pulled on his glasses and took out his notes and started to speak.

From the podium, he could see the neon flashing of text messages. In the back, two shaggy-haired men swapped a crossword; in the front, a young man and a young woman whispered madly, audibly.

Aleksandr tried anyway. He wanted to impress upon them the virtues of democracy, the dangers of apathy. “In this nation,” he said, “the profits are privatized, the losses are nationalized.”

Across the room, he could see eyes glass over; he could hear knuckles crack. One man in the front row looked up with shining and irrepressible eyes. He leaned forward. He appeared to be taking notes. Aleksandr decided to direct the rest of his speech to this young man.

“Putin,” boomed Aleksandr, “is motivated by nothing as pure as a wrongheaded philosophy. He’s motivated by money, by self-protection, by indifference — which can be quite as dangerous as ideology.”

Across the audience went muffled yawns. In the front row, the young man’s eyes shone. Aleksandr looked down at his notes. Usually, he paused for cheering; now the whole speech was going more quickly than it should, more quickly than had been advertised.

“He is the most humorless leader we’ve had in quite some time,” continued Aleksandr. “You will remember that Kukly , our former beloved puppet-comedy television program, was allowed to skewer even Brezhnev. But when they came out with a Putin puppet, they were promptly canceled. When our freedom to mock has been curtailed to such a degree, how can we pretend that we’ve made real progress since Communist times?”

In the back row, a woman spat out her gum, rolled it up in a tissue, and put it in her purse.

“But if Putin is a tyrant, we are perhaps complicit in his tyranny. Fifty-eight percent of the population, when polled, said that if they made a decent salary, they would immediately emigrate. This alarming statistic no doubt contributes to the sense of apathy among our nation’s young people when confronted with abuse after abuse.”

The audience looked down; they looked away. The young man grinned with fervor, with seriousness of purpose.

“And so,” Aleksandr concluded, “we have become a nation of people who are happy to sit on our backsides in our warm kitchens. We will be happy to do so until they take our kitchens away. Thank you.”

The audience applauded in staccato hiccups. In the back row, somebody sneezed.

Afterward, a desultory line of students waited for Aleksandr to sign their books or their chessboards. A long-haired woman asked for Aleksandr’s autograph “for her friend”; a stout young man asked for one “for his teacher.” Finally, the young man from the front row approached, clutching a chessboard under his elbow and looking nervous.

“Hello,” he said gravely.

“Young man,” said Aleksandr. “It’s good to see you. I think you were the only person awake out there.”

The young man smiled. “Mr. Bezetov,” he said. “You are my favorite chess player of all time. Would you do me the honor of signing my board?”

“Of course.”

Aleksandr smiled, reached for his pen, and felt a blunt wedge slam against the side of his head. A wash of red came over his eyes; there was a moment of numbness and then pain with a surprising edge. Aleksandr clutched his head and turned back to the young man just in time to see him holding the unsigned chessboard and gearing up for another swing.

“I admired you when you were a chess player,” he snarled. “Now you’re just a dirty politician.”

A woman shouted, and Vlad lunged at the young man, scissoring him into submission. The young man was shaking with rage, still clutching the chessboard in one trembling hand, the bony finger of the other pointing at Aleksandr.