Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

He would go to Perm. He’d get on the first flight tomorrow. He had to. That was all there was to it.

“Nina,” he whispered, “I’m going away tomorrow.” She didn’t answer. Maybe she really was asleep. Or maybe she just wasn’t listening anymore.

He woke up to thuds from the spare bedroom. When he walked in, Nina was organizing her clothes — there was a polychrome sartorial fan across the bedspread, shiny shirts and skirts with ruffles and mysterious items for which Aleksandr had no name; a spray of tops of every possible color gradation; dresses of intricately complicated and impossibly hideous prints. She did this sometimes: spent hours folding and assessing, holding the pieces up close for inspection, frowning at them as though the clothes — like everything else — were not quite as nice as she remembered them.

“You’re up,” said Nina. “Would you mind grabbing me that suitcase?”

“What are you doing?” He hoisted the suitcase from the back of the closet. “I need this for Perm, you know.”

“They left without you,” she said. “Viktor and the American. I understand they changed their flight. They went in the night. One of them left a note about it. I don’t know.”

“What?”

She shrugged. “It sounds like you left them no choice.”

“What?” He could feel a panicked, disgusted feeling growing behind his heart — the dawning understanding of a terrible mistake, the sickening sense of having slept through a lifetime.

Nina started throwing her clothes in the suitcase. “They didn’t want you going, of course. They wanted to protect you, of course. That’s what this whole operation hinges on, right? That’s kind of the entire point of the whole game?” She drew her knuckles savagely across her eyes, which were inflamed with salt and resentment. “It was sort of a forced move, I suppose, in your former terminology.”

“I have to get there.”

“You have to get there? Your wife is leaving you, have you noticed? That’s what all this means.” She pointed to the bags. They crouched along the doorway, looking like the alligators they once had been. “Typically, when you see this, you’re supposed to try to stop me.”

Nina was backlit by the sun coming in through the shafts in the doorway. Her red hair had never been lovelier, and he could remember the way she’d looked to him when he’d first met her — unbearably beautiful, unbearably delicate, the kind of woman you could spend a lifetime trying to satisfy and understand. He wondered why that had once seemed like an appealing project. Maybe it was a holdover need from Elizabeta. To have loved with such ardor at such a distance, to have the air charged always with a blue static electricity, to know the silhouette of the space between two people as the most palpable shape of one’s life — after that, the idea of engagement, however small and petty, however quotidian and demanding, had seemed like the only answer.

“Typically,” said Nina. “This is where you should plead with me and ask me if there’s anything, anything, you could do to get me to stay.”

“Nina,” he said. “Can we talk about this later?”

Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it was that the lifelong endeavor of reform in Russia was something so abstract and impossible to achieve that the smaller thing — of making a difficult woman happy — had seemed like an attainable goal. Except it hadn’t been. Democracy would sweep the streets, a free press would open up into a chorus of snarky disapproval, a transparent and functional rule of law would bind the government, before Nina was made happy. It simply wasn’t something that Aleksandr would see in this lifetime.

“I’m going to the airport, Nina,” he said.

“Fine,” she said. “By the time you get back, I’ll be gone.”

“I know.”

He went to her then, and grazed his fingers along her cheek, and for the first time in a long while, she let him. He had to admire her for this, in a way. He’d been unhappy, but Nina was the sole constant in this isolated life. She could leave, but it wouldn’t make him independent; she could leave, and it wouldn’t let him find someone new; she could leave, and it wouldn’t mean he could do what he wanted. His one personal happiness came from the tepid satisfactions — such as they were — of a well-organized domestic life; he’d told himself that the greater, more important consolation was still ahead. For her part, he knew she was unhappy, but he had thought she liked the apartment too much to ever leave it. It made him like her a little better — marginally, retroactively — to know that this was not the case.

“It’s no way to live,” she said, “and there’s no end in sight. The end for me is as a widow. That’s the only way this thing ends for me.”

He saw it then, and in the way of all things that are finally made clear, he could not believe he had ever missed it. He saw how she had longed for it, in her way: the house empty of its strangers and chatter and incessant typing; the city glittering through the windows, all of its potential available for purchase via money or beauty. “Is that why you were never afraid for me?” he said.

“Maybe it is. Maybe if we’re really honest, it is.”

“Well,” said Aleksandr carefully. “That explains a lot.”

She was crying then, silently, her hands wound into furious fists, her hair streaming down her back. “It’s just that I thought that you were someone else. I thought all this”—and here she flapped her arm helplessly at the vista of the apartment, the stacks of papers crowding out the fine Oriental carpeting; the antique typewriters and laptops and cords and cable connections spilling out from under the teak tables and snaking their way around the French windows—“it’s just that I thought all this would be something else.”

“I know,” said Aleksandr. “I’m sure at some point I did, too.”

He took her to him, and through her thin cashmere, he could feel the pitiless landscape of her scapula. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held her without the characteristic stiffening of the spine. Without feeling as if he were crossing some kind of armed border.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I don’t care about it the way you do. I can’t care about it the way you do. I think democracy will be the death of this country, if you want to know the truth. If you’d ever asked me about it, you’d know that by now.”

He nodded his head against her hair and smelled the foreign, expensive shampoos — willow or aloe vera, jojoba beads imported from Madagascar or God knows where.

“Maybe so,” he said. “I know you’re not the only one who thinks so.”

She looked at him mournfully, and he could see her realizing that he was a stranger and sillier man than she’d even suspected. He could see her studying his face, preparing herself to frame the scene in her memory. Then there was a softening and a fading — it was like watching a person let go of a ledge that she’s been clinging to for so long that there’s a relief in the defeat and an acceptance in the falling.

“The airport, Nina,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Okay, grib,” she said. “I’ll drive you.”

And so she drove him, dry-eyed now, through St. Petersburg. He slouched down in the passenger seat, wearing sunglasses, and she tied up her hair in a scarf, and they rode along the streets. Vlad sat in the back, glowering and muttering about the security risks and pleading with Aleksandr to call one of the drivers. The city was all deciduous trees this time of year, and networks of shadows skittered across the ground like spiders. Ancient air came up from the Neva and twisted into a welter of flower petals and newspaper broadsheets and brightly colored food wrappers. His wife had just left him, and his staff had just mutinied against him, and yet he felt oddly elated. He reached out and touched the glass, which the staff kept crystalline-clean. The street was choked with taxis, legal and illegal, and luxury cars the size of military tanks. In the car next to him, a woman poked her husband in the shoulder and pointed at Aleksandr.