Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

It was a week, maybe, although it’s hard to know for sure. Then I got up, and climbed into the shower, and ate four sandwiches in a row from the nonstop market.

I thought of why I had come to St. Petersburg. I thought of my father’s questions — of my questions — about how one proceeds in the face of catastrophe, how one gracefully executes the closing moves of a doomed game. I thought about Aleksandr’s death threats, and Nikolai’s wintry breath on my face, and the movie that would get made one way or another. Aleksandr’s life was a kind of answer to the questions, a kind of model for how to proceed. I knew that mine would have to be as well.

I decided I could still go to Perm. It was my responsibility. It was also my deadline. What could I say for my short life if I was honest with myself? I’d taught a few students the correct use of semicolons. I’d made a few people I loved tremendously unhappy. If I went to Perm, and if we found something important, then at least there would be that. There would be an excuse for this trip. There would be an excuse for this lifetime. There would be a story worthy of a fine eulogy, if anybody was inclined to deliver one.

Long ago there were times — in dreams, in feverish nightmares, in fantasies (fearful and fretful, vengeful, petty, suicidally depressed, curious, guardedly optimistic) — when I wondered whether there might not be some relief when it happened. I had thought about it every day, every single day, for ten years. I had woken up forgetting, in the early days, and then having to remember. I had cried. I had cut off relationships. I had jumped at my own shadow. I had run away. At the end, I had wondered, might it not at last be freeing? Might it not at long last bring me a kind of peace?

It was not, and it did not. It was horrible. It was unimaginably horrible. It was as unimaginably horrible as unimagined beauty is beautiful. It was a reinvention, an inversion, a revelation.

I went back to Aleksandr’s, and I remembered how to type, and speak normally, and get up in the mornings, and do what I was asked. But it was a different world, that day and every day after — garbled, mistranslated, wrong. The world became so different that I almost didn’t recognize it anymore. We had no common ground, it seemed, and we sat for long hours in silence. Eventually, I gave up trying to engage it. And I remarked to myself, as I walked away from it, that it seemed to be fast becoming a stranger.

St. Petersburg, June 2007

The summer floated lightly down onto St. Petersburg, as if trying to enter a room unnoticed. Green ash and Siberian birch blossomed along the streets; the canals shivered in ever lighter winds. Against the horizon, the clouds clumped and cleaved and drew apart in a lazy miosis. Aleksandr watched out the window.

Sometimes he could assess the weather from the way that Nina smelled when she came in from a day of shopping with her friends, jangling bags in tow — he could smell the sun and mild air and longer days all tangled up in her hair, even though she wiggled away quickly whenever he went to her. Sometimes near the door Aleksandr would find vaguely sun-smelling leaves or sticks or flower petals, the remnants of a life lived out in the world, and sometimes he’d take a petal between his thumb and his forefinger to feel its oil, to let its edges bruise. And sometimes Aleksandr would sit up nights and crank open the window and take deep breaths of the air that came in gusts alternately lovely and rank. There were the smells of hydrangea and bittersweet nightshade and lily of the valley, and the smells of all the things that had fallen into the snow and frozen through the winter and then thawed out into black, stringy fossils, unrecognizable as their former selves: lost shoes and bras and love letters, outraged newspapers with stern fonts, bright pink gossip magazines.

He remembered delivering the pamphlets back when the city was still Leningrad, back when he was allowed out. Under the rule of a rotten regime, he’d managed a sort of ill-advised freedom. Then, at least, he could pad outside in the early mornings or the frosted nights. He could stand in the brittle light of the fingernail-shaped moon; he could wander past the enormous monuments that stood epic and monstrous, straining against the current of history. Then he’d had allies and the exuberance of youth. And a woman to love from afar, which had at least given him something to think about during his long walks around the city. Elizabeta had dislodged something in him that he could spend a lifetime trying to reclaim; and there had been a bittersweet joy, too, in that particular lost cause.

He shook himself and cracked his neck. It was embarrassing enough to love the same woman for so long. It was worse to look back on Communism with misplaced nostalgia. He found that sentiment often in the angry letters he received from older cranks, for whom Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko were the backdrop of first loves and marriages and infant children. The letter writers remembered that time as tinged with a sweetness, an innocence, an optimism that — while misguided, perhaps — was preferable to its alternative. Aleksandr would write back, Dear sir, Dear madam. Thank you for your letter. I understand your feelings. But I believe it is not the regime that you miss; it is your own youth .

He could stand to take his own advice.

He slapped himself on the cheek lightly. He was making a list of safe lodging places and eateries for Irina, Viktor, and Boris’s trip to Perm. He assumed Irina was still going, though she’d recently disappeared for a week, and he’d never gotten a straight answer about why. He’d sent Viktor out to her hostel on Vasilevsky, and Viktor had reported back that it was a silly place, a home for wayward Westerners who wanted to suffer shallowly and temporarily in order to have stories to tell. It was no place for a person to live, as Irina seemed to be doing. But the bottom line — as Viktor pointed out — was that they weren’t paying Irina and couldn’t make any claims about employing her, and so it wasn’t any of their business. Maybe she’d gone back home. Maybe she’d moved on. And Aleksandr was struck by the realization that he didn’t know where Irina might go — where “back” was, what “on” meant.

Eventually, she’d returned, looking pale and panicky and casting fatal looks at everybody who asked where she’d been. Aleksandr had been chasing her around the apartment for a week, trying to get a moment alone to ask how she was, but she’d avoided him assiduously. He’d mentioned it to Nina once, and she’d said, “That girl? She’s still around? Did you ever start to pay her?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t very well demand that she show up here, can you? That’s capitalism, grib. That’s kind of the whole idea.”

“It’s not that. I’m worried about her.”

Nina had looked at him disinterestedly and asked him point-blank if he was in love with the American. Aleksandr had told her no, truthfully, and turned over to look at his own wall, disappointed by Nina’s failure of imagination.

Now he bit his lip and bent over his notes for Perm. He had no idea how they were going to get the lieutenant there to talk. Follow-up communications with Valentin Gogunov had revealed a wealth of information that might be used as blackmail, but Aleksandr was squeamish about such a tactic, and Gogunov had intimated that it wasn’t going to work anyway. The current plan was that they’d pose as film students, but he hated sending them off with so little to go on. He’d written them a list of possible questions and angles and ideas, but it was difficult not knowing the inflections and the wordings, having no way to coach them into asking spur-of-the-moment follow-up questions or detecting bullshit. Sending them was like sending a probe to Mars — he thought of its insect legs folding up into a squat, its motorized head casting this way and that. You could program it to do what you wanted, but it was no replacement for going there yourself and flinging your fingers into the red sand.