Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“You are a traitor to Russia and a traitor to chess,” he said, and Aleksandr would always remember it was the second insult that counted, a little.

“Shush,” bellowed Vlad.

“You are!” screamed the man. There was a webbing of saliva between his top and bottom lip; his eyes — which a moment ago had seemed promisingly idealistic, bursting with a longing for democracy and a free press and governmental transparency — now seemed mildly insane.

“Shut up,” said Vlad, elbowing the man in the gut.

“It’s okay,” said Aleksandr. “Let him shout.” Because, really, that was the whole point.

And so the man shouted hoarse admonitions as Vlad marched him out of the auditorium. And when he was out and the door was shut, all the remaining students took out their phones and started to text.

Later that night, Nina held a compress to Aleksandr’s head and made him a bowl of ice cream, even though she usually didn’t like him eating sweets.

“My mushroom,” she said. “You’re so brave.”

And he almost had to feel that it had been worth it for this moment, for the sympathy in Nina’s voice, for the feel of her cool fingers against his neck.

“Look,” Aleksandr said a few weeks later. “We need something different.”

Irina, Viktor, and Boris were sitting around the table. Boris was holding a remote control and flipping compulsively between Rossiya, NTV, and Channel One. Irina was staring vacantly, spinning a kopeck around and around. Lately, she’d seemed to fade some, her skin paling almost to translucence, her eyes hardening into a grim dullness that reminded him of sepia photos of Siberian mothers in shawls, surrounded by their half-dozen living children. Aleksandr didn’t know if this was a function of poor health, or loneliness, or the interminable stretch of a Russian winter — the unendurable combination of cold and dark and the omnipresent abuse of salt and sand.

“Just because you get hit on the head with a chessboard once,” said Viktor.

“It’s not about the chessboard,” said Aleksandr. “Boris, can you turn off the TV? Irina, can you stop spinning that?” She looked at him balefully and stopped. Recently, Aleksandr had become increasingly uncomfortable in Irina’s presence, and not only because her color and demeanor seemed to suggest the proximity of death, which he was already exhausted by thinking about. More so, he was uncomfortable with the extent to which he’d failed to answer her questions. He had looked through letters, diaries, notes from that time, and Irina’s father did not appear — he was a specter, haunting the pages of A Partial History of Lost Causes (now as frail as dried leaves) and Aleksandr’s silly, flummoxed poems about Elizabeta (as trite now as they had ever been). Aleksandr painfully wanted to give Irina something of her father — some omen, some benediction. But what could you say when you had nothing to say? The man had written a letter to him, apparently. This Irina had already known.

Then there was the broader question — the question of what one does, of how one plays, when one is facing certain doom. Irina might not have known, when she first came to St. Petersburg, how explicitly the totality of Aleksandr’s current existence would be an answer to that question. But it was not a satisfying answer, and Aleksandr could feel Irina’s disappointment, and it hurt him. What do you do in the face of certain doom? You try to make a little movie, you try to take sensible precautions, you try to enjoy your espresso and your frigid wife and your breakfast. Is this inspiration? Is it noble? You brush your goddamn teeth. This, he suspected, Irina also already knew.

Viktor smirked and cracked his knuckles. “It’s a little bit about the chessboard, I think, sir.”

Aleksandr felt the knob on his head. It was taking a surprisingly long time to disappear; when he thrashed his head against his pillow on these recent sleepless nights, it throbbed so much that he swore until Nina looked at him reproachfully and took her blanket into the living room.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it’s partly about the chessboard. But it’s indicative of a larger problem, yes?”

“You’ve been happy with the rallies, haven’t you? The turnout has been good, hasn’t it?” said Boris. “This was really just this one incident.”

“Yes, yes, the rallies,” said Aleksandr. He scratched his head again. It was true that the chessboard signing had been an anomaly, an aberration due to incompetent promoting. Typically, the turnout at the rallies was hearty but not astonishing; he knew that people would show up to see him, but interest had in no way reached a critical tipping point, the juncture from which everything would flow easily and exponentially forward. Still, they came. They came right after Putin had accused Aleksandr personally of being a puppet of the United States; they came and stood outside with placards reading WE ARE THE WEST’S FIFTH COLUMN. They came, often in the cold, which impressed Aleksandr, especially when he thought of the bitter implausibility of his first winter in St. Petersburg, before he’d been able to buy protection from the cold at almost all times. The presence of such cold was like the absence of oxygen — it quickly became the only relevant fact about reality — and Aleksandr knew that the people who came out and endured it were serious people. But still, he thought.

“The rallies are fine,” he said. “But I’m thinking it’s time to try something new. An infusion of new energy, right? At least give our supporters something new to support. At least give Putin something new to condemn.”

Boris clicked his pen open and shut his eyes.

“We want people to watch this film,” said Aleksandr. “I know everybody’s working hard on it, but nobody’s seeing us working, you know? So we need to keep generating interest in the movement in the meantime. We need to be engaging in guerrilla marketing.”

“Well,” said Boris. His voice sounded indulgent, like he was placating a child or a paranoiac. “There are always hunger strikes. If you can’t speak, you can go on a hunger strike to show that you’ve been silenced.”

“Khordokovsky did one in prison,” said Viktor. “He refused even water.”

“We could do that,” said Boris. “People pay attention to those.”

“A bit unoriginal, don’t you think?” said Aleksandr.

“You just like your dinner too much,” said Boris.

“Maybe Nina could go on a hunger strike on our behalf,” said Viktor. “I’m pretty sure she’s already got one under way.”

“Enough,” said Aleksandr, and Viktor stopped smiling. “Any other ideas?”

There was a pause. The clicking of Boris’s pen sounded like an insect placing its pincers delicately together. In the corner, Irina shook herself. “Well,” she said.

“Yes?” said Aleksandr. He was surprised she was talking. Her desolation hovered around her like an electron cloud.

“It’s going to sound silly.”

“I don’t doubt it at all,” said Boris.

“Try us,” said Aleksandr.

“Lately, I’ve been thinking about a funeral.”

For a moment Aleksandr did not know what she meant; and then, for another horrible moment he thought he did. “A funeral?” he said carefully.

“Yes,” she said. “A Funeral for Democracy.”

Aleksandr exhaled and realized he’d been holding his breath.

“A Funeral for Democracy?” said Viktor. “A bit bleak, isn’t it?”

Aleksandr leaned forward. “What do you mean, a Funeral for Democracy?”

“Well,” said Irina. “You could get a life-sized dummy representing democracy. You could have it lying there, dead — I don’t know, maybe under placards complaining about various things. And then you could march it through the street on the way to burial.”