Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Irina,” he said. He tried to take her hand, but she wouldn’t let him. He could almost see the fluttering of her ravaged fist-sized heart. He could hear the raggedy slicing of her breath. “I saw it. I saw that. You didn’t mean to do that.”

She looked down. She looked out the window. Her breathing sounded like the beating of wings. Her face looked waxy and slightly unreal, as if she were an amateur artist’s rendering of a human being. The whole thing felt too terrible, too intimate, to see — this poor young woman’s unraveling. It was a kind of honor, a kind of liability.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” he said.

“It is,” she said. “That’s it. That is, I’m afraid, it.”

He shook his head instinctively, although he knew that in doing so, he looked like he was mourning something small and silly, something that might be best termed a “shame.” What was the appropriate gesture? What was the appropriate response? He adjusted his glasses in a way that he hoped made him look competent, professorial. “What does this mean, exactly?”

She looked at him grimly and didn’t answer. He sat up straighter in his chair. Somewhere, way back in the hidden chambers of his face — behind his cheekbones and eye sockets, in that central core from which he’d always felt that he was watching the events of his own life — he could feel the oncoming menace of tears. He coughed.

“Well,” he said brusquely. “You can’t stay here, obviously. The state hospitals are horrific. We’d pay for a private one, but even so, you’d be better off in America. We’ll get you a plane ticket home.”

“I’m not going home.”

“Irina, you must. You have to.” He was relieved to be having this conversation — it was so enormously preferable to be debating something about which he might have a concrete opinion, to be issuing some kind of commandment with some kind of confidence. It gave him a matrix of a response. He was overjoyed that Irina didn’t want to go home, because now he could focus on the project of convincing her to go.

“No,” she said. “I can’t. You don’t understand.”

Although she was right — he did not understand — he found himself pressing on blindly.

“But don’t you have people somewhere?” he said. He knew she did, and he knew that this tack was futile. He knew that bringing it up was indulging in the kind of careless cruelty that people employ when they are so outmatched by their circumstances that they would rather say something terrible than say nothing at all.

“No,” she said. “Well, yes, I do, but I don’t want to go to them. That’s the whole thing. That’s been the point the whole time.”

He’d known she’d come here to get away — he’d known that this experience was meant partly to discharge the frustrated energy of a truncated lifetime. In addition to all the lofty questions about grace and catastrophe, there’d been also, he suspected, the small thing of having an adventure — an adventure that might marginally distinguish this particular short life from all the others out there that were substantially like it. But he’d also thought — when he thought of it, which was as rarely as compassion allowed — that it had been, on some level, a bluff. That when this disease caught up with her — whirring over the North Pole, hopscotching the Aleutian Islands, taking a rumbling old train through the Caucasus, or flying first-class over all the twinkling continental first-world capitals — that when it caught her, she would let it take her home. To do otherwise was insanity. And he couldn’t help but think that it was a kind of selfishness: why should he have to witness a tragedy he never summoned? Why should he be responsible for its care and management?

“Irina,” he said fretfully. “Please be reasonable.”

She said nothing. She stood up and walked to the window: outside, a wind was riffling through the treetops. Aleksandr could hear the wheeze of their bending.

“Why did you trust me?” she said, facing the window.

“Trust you?”

“At the beginning. When I showed up here. Didn’t you think I could have been a double agent or something? Didn’t you think I could have been spying on you?”

“Not for the Americans, probably. If they have a question for me, all they have to do is ask.”

She turned around. “No, for Putin. Or for, I don’t know, anyone. Or I could have been a random assassin, or a crazy person, or, I don’t know, a stalker with a ton of pictures of you printed out from the Internet.”

“I wouldn’t flatter myself.”

“I just mean you’re so careful. You’re so cautious. You won’t eat pastries from the street vendors. You won’t even go out at all.”

He sat back in his chair. “I go out sometimes.”

“You know what I mean. You’re careful. That’s — that’s the right thing. You should be careful. So why did you let me into your work here? How did you know I wasn’t out to get you somehow?”

“I don’t know.” He twirled his fingers against his temples. “Maybe I hoped you were.”

“What can that possibly mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it would have been a relief.”

Irina smiled strangely. “You think that, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t have been.”

He pulled her to him then. He felt the fragility of her bony back, and he thought of the daughter she’d once been to a father, and he thought of the daughter he might have had if life had gone otherwise. He found that he believed her, even though he didn’t think he could say it. So he decided not to say anything at all.

That night Aleksandr lay in bed, thinking about Irina and listening to Nina’s shallow breathing. Somehow, Nina never seemed fully unconscious — her breath always sounded slightly wakeful, as if she were feigning sleep or playing dead. She was sleeping on top of the sheet, and he could see the severe concavity of her pelvis, the unforgiving cut of her rib cage. One denuded leg was flung over the other; they looked like a pair of pirouetting bones. In the moonlight, Nina was almost translucent — she reminded him, appallingly, of a deep-sea creature, transformed by dark and pressure and evolution into a skeletal, bioluminescent alien.

“Nina,” he said. “The American girl is dying.”

That wasn’t his only problem. Misha’s outburst in Novaya Gazeta had been deeply problematic; he’d checkmated Aleksandr, it seemed, and now all moves were suicide — though it was true that one of the suicides was probably literal and one was probably political. Misha’s move had quite been clever, although Aleksandr had always known that he was a clever man. He knew, too, why Misha’s antics had cut him so deeply. When he saw Misha, he heard the hissing accusation that the better man had died back in the seventies, and that this was Russia’s loss. The dead or dying were always so much more virtuous than the living — even if, in life, they had been petty or callous or small-minded or vain, even if they’d been rash, even if they’d been terrified. Misha seemed to think, and Aleksandr could certainly believe, that it would be a different story if Ivan had lived. Ivan would have been out in the streets, out motivating the troops, with or without a security apparatus. Ivan would have gone to Perm. Ivan might have won by now. In the end, what could Aleksandr show for the campaign? What had it accomplished? He’d filled up a few squares for a few afternoons. He’d given a terminal case some inexplicable satisfaction. And he’d offered a few hours of entertaining programming for internationally inclined television viewers who regarded the whole thing as diverting as a game of chess. He’d be lucky if Putin had suffered an anxious night or a bout of indigestion over it all.