Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Faith doesn’t enter into it with Nina. Neither does denial. She knows what we pay in insurance premiums. At any rate, I don’t expect that this business with Nikolai is anything more to be worried about than the kind of thing I’ve had to contend with already.”

“But that’s it,” I said. “He’s saying it is. He’s saying they’ve been letting you off the hook on purpose. He’s saying they’re going to stop doing that.”

“Is that so?” He raised his eyebrows mildly. “Think of that. Just think of all the freedom I might have had if I’d known. All the restaurant food I might have eaten. All the domestic holidays I might have taken. I’ve never seen Lake Baikal, you know.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“I’m taking it seriously. I’m taking it tremendously seriously. What else do you want me to do? How else do you want me to hide? Where else do you want me to not go? Am I going to Perm myself to do my own interviews? No. I’m sending a bunch of interns for me. I sit here on my laptop all day long. I leave the house to appear with an army of handlers wherever I go, and even then I get beaned with chessboards. I am taking it seriously. If I were taking it any more seriously, I’d lie down and die right this second just to get it over with.”

We were quiet. I looked at the table, where Nina’s delicate shoe was still crouched. It looked like it might, at any moment, get up and curtsy and take a twirl around the room.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked. “I just want you to be careful.” I did. I wanted him to be careful — Aleksandr, who could dodge his own fate through proper strategy, precaution, prediction. Aleksandr, who would have to live around his fear — deny it, repress it, outsmart it — for as long as he managed to live.

“I am careful,” he said. “I am. I am. I promise I am. Now. Can we talk about Perm?”

When I got back to the hostel that evening, the night manager spoke to me for the first time in recent memory.

“Miss,” he said, waving an envelope in front of my nose. “You appear to have a letter.”

“A letter?” This was new. Nobody from my past life had tried this. They’d tried e-mail before I canceled my account. I didn’t know how somebody would start to find me, at least not from afar, without showing up.

“So it would seem.” He sniffed and handed me the letter. I could feel something heavy and finger-shaped at the bottom of the envelope. Cursive Cyrillic in faint blue writing threaded across the top like varicose veins. Something about the writing made my heart fall and then flip before I could orient myself — it was like the nameless scent of your nursery school, the heart-destroying melody of your childhood music box.

The letter was from Lars.

I tore along the top of the envelope, and I pulled out the knobby thing from the bottom. It was a king. I squeezed it while I read the letter.

Dear Irina,

I hope this letter finds you well; indeed, I hope that this letter finds you at all. When I drove through Soviet Russia in the eighties, I remember the mail system as being quite incompetent. And, at any rate, I do not know if this letter is correctly addressed — I’ve been making inquiries to various hostels, and this one seems to house a woman of your advanced age and unremarkable description. I hope that you find the experience of staying in hostels in Leningrad more comfortable than I did when I was there! I had some, shall we say, interesting times there back in the day. Propriety prevents me from explaining further.

Harvard Square is just the same as always, and I am still at my chessboards. I have no shortage of opponents, as the undergraduates with the harsh glasses and the tight T-shirts have taken to playing me on the weekends. They are better players than you, most certainly, but I do not find them as amusing, and they are not so entertained by my stories as you were. Being men, they are more worldly and sophisticated and thus less easily impressed. But being college students, they seem to regard playing me as a sort of … ironic pastime. I rather preferred your earnest if inexplicable interest, even though you never did get any better.

I think you should know that your friend Jonathan has missed you very much. He came to see me quite a bit right after you left, and he asked me many times how he might go about finding you. I struggled with whether to tell him. But it seemed to me that it was your right to run away if you wanted to. I hope you were not waiting all this time to be found.

At any rate, I find it odd to be writing to a person who may or may not be reading, who may or may not be anywhere. It is a bit like talking to yourself, or talking to the dead, and I believe I have done enough of both in this life. So I will start to end.

I know that the thing that you were running away from will be catching you someday soon, if it hasn’t already. I would remind you that you have more words than you need — you always did — so you shouldn’t feel so sorry about losing some.

Your friend,

Lars Bergquist

P.S. I have enclosed my king. You would never have caught him by conventional measures, but now I would like him to have you. I would not like to think of him as having surrendered, however. Perhaps he is just taking a bit of a rest.

I stared at the letter until the paper turned into a smear and a full orchestra started in my head. Somewhere off in the distance behind me, I had the sense of leaves whirling, of the wind picking up, of a tornado contracting into a terrible spring.

I had not remembered that I was remembered still. I had not remembered that I would be remembered still — in fragments, half wrongly, half mockingly, yes. But remembered nonetheless.

“Young lady,” said the man at the desk. “I’ll ask you not to cry in the lobby.”

The Funeral for Democracy came in late May. The weather was finally relenting; there was a dangerous humidity to the air, and the clouds crouched low and heavy against the skyline. They looked like the sickening crests of lethal waves — the storming of some freak mid-Atlantic disaster, a cosmic cyclone observed only by the starfish and the cowering sharks. The air had a syrupy heaviness that was undercut by a dull edge of cold. It was the same suffocating chill that I’d noticed the first day I landed in Moscow, in some faraway lifetime. I had been here nearly a year.

Viktor stood on an egg crate with a pair of sunglasses and a bullhorn. I stood off to the side, selling posters at 150 rubles apiece. On the other side of the street, police paced like caged animals, tapping their batons against the ground. The permit for the protest had arrived only that morning. They might have been waiting for a pretext to make an arrest, or maybe they’d had orders to allow the protest to continue for some predesignated amount of time — just enough to make Putin look indulgent, liberal, all-merciful. I looked at them hard but didn’t see Nikolai.

The crowd was pleasingly huge. Some people were waving flags, and others were jumping up and down, and the multidimensional movement of their summer garb looked liked the parading flags of friendly nations at a sporting event. Some were wearing black; a few had taken the theme quite literally and were wearing shrouds and pretending to weep. Some threw flowers. Some held pictures — of Anna Politkovskaya, of Sakharov, of Aleksandr himself — and marched, solemn and stricken. Others were viewing the Funeral as a slightly more festive affair: taking nips of liquor, concealed in pockets and boots; twirling about in capes; shouting the slogans of loopier, goofier, more marginal causes than ours. Aleksandr stood at a podium, flanked by security guards. In the crowd were sharpshooters he’d hired for the occasion. I fixed my gaze at the clouds, their cumulus haunches stacked against the horizon like game on a wall.