Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

“Sir,” Vlad said. “Sir, you are being very, very rash.”

“It’s broad daylight,” said Aleksandr. “It’s the middle of the street.”

“You’re being dumb. I don’t know what’s happening to you, but you’re being quite dumb.”

“I’m about to get even dumber.”

Nina accelerated the car. All around them, St. Petersburg thrummed with life — the street vendors, the clotting traffic, the trees going wild in the wind. Motorcycles backfired like gunshots and the canals quivered as if they were terrified. Aleksandr and Nina flew along the gray stretch of highway, Petersburg’s ancient skyline receding behind them, and then they turned onto Pilotov Ulitsa toward Pulkovo Airport. At departures, Nina slowed the car but didn’t fully stop. “Good luck, grib,” she said. Her voice wavered slightly but recovered.

With that, the car — her car now, Aleksandr supposed, although it didn’t matter much — was off, submerged into the honking assembly of taxis and limousines. Aleksandr looked at Vlad and told him to run for the ticket counter. They took off, disturbing an old woman with a long flea-bitten coat and a dog the size of a guinea pig, dodging a stern-looking man who waved his cane in consternation.

Somewhere in the sprint, Aleksandr had a moment to enjoy it — the exhilaration of being out in a public place without a route, a map, a plan for any security eventuality, an entire army of helpers and minders. In this, there was a minor lifting — not as momentous as a liberation of serfs, or the sight of an army retreating from Moscow, or a free election in some future unimaginably far — but still, it was something: this small thing of pushing your own way through the messy world, stumbling without a spotter, running the risk of taking your own falls.

Perm, June 2007

Viktor and I had agreed that we would go. I’d called him that night — after he’d spent hours drinking with Boris, listening to him rant and rave and nodding miserably in agreement — and said, “We’re still going?” There had been a pause at the other end of the line, but I never felt unsure about how it would end. He said, “How about tomorrow?”

We’d jimmied into the apartment early, before Vlad was in for the day. Viktor had been given a key, it seemed, in those days when Aleksandr knew him well enough to know that he was a decent boy, though not well enough to imagine that he might ever use that decency against him. A network of dew sweated against the panes, and an overgenerous, fractured light came in through the windows. It was the kind of light that seemed to be throwing itself at your feet to beg for mercy. Or maybe the kind that falls down on its own knife in the name of honor.

Nina was strangely kind to me that last morning in St. Petersburg. We’d caught each other in simultaneous sneaking — she clearing out the luxury soaps from the cabinet, me sneaking a hastily written note into Aleksandr’s coat pocket.

“You are going, then?” she’d said, and though her mouth was drawn into a fussy, disapproving shape, there was a gruffness to her voice that made me want to trust her. It made me see her, fleetingly, as a different person: younger and rougher, the kind of person who might have had to scurry about to have enough to eat or think about. It made me understand how you might grow up to be someone who spent most of your time flopping around in an enormous silken bed, or fingering the delicate buds of overpriced earrings. Nothing makes a person materialistic like severe deprivation.

(Now, on the plane, that observation alone sends me into raptures of reflection; I parse the differing threads of my own loss, I savor the nuances of this particular disaster. How I will miss my own brand of clutching materialism, the treasured sensory joys of existence. Not only the transcendent, transporting vista or symphony or epic or orgasm, though there were those. There were also — just as much — the humble pleasures of getting enough sleep or eating a really good sandwich. Then, also, there was the possibility of observations such as the one I had made about Nina: the way that the world could tilt slightly sideways, even when you thought all of its potential positions were already known. Then, too, there was the joy of learning the destinies and back-stories of characters and countries, always stranger and more inevitable than the fates conjured by fiction. How I will miss all of this. But then I remind myself of the obvious point — realized again and again but never fully believed even now, on this plane, the country roiling cobalt black below us — that there will be no missing of anything, worthy or unworthy, at all.)

At any rate, Nina was our accomplice that last morning, creeping into the bedroom she would no longer share with Aleksandr and blasting the air-conditioning so that he wouldn’t hear us as we ruffled through papers, and nosed through notebooks, and packed up the camera equipment, and stole the credit card that Aleksandr used for film-related expenses. Whatever this film will mean, ultimately — and as a person who will never know for sure, I am increasingly interested in guessing — the country will owe its arrival, partly, to Nina.

Then we were careening through the early-morning city. There were still daubs of darkness on the farthest part of the sky, and the stars were paling like the face of a person who is afraid but has decided to pretend not to be. I smiled at Viktor in the darkness, though he probably couldn’t see me.

Here on the plane, I add this to my catalog of gratitude, somewhere between the sandwich and the symphony: the feeling of getting up very early to do something of consequence.

The engine was starting to rumble already when we first glimpsed Aleksandr running across the tarmac. He was going at an improbable rate; from afar, he was portlier and slower — older — than he seemed up close, when he was throwing his hands about in impatience or engaging in various verbal gymnastics. He was stopped by an airport employee bedecked in neon orange, and turned sternly around. We could faintly see the angry arch of his neck, and we cringed to think of what he was saying. But the plane was pulling away, and he was smaller and smaller behind us. And we knew what we were going to do.

He could come the next day, on the next flight. Of course he could, and yes, we knew that. But I’d seen his stack of death threats, and I’d seen the way he looked at them. And I knew that by going this way, we were giving him the chance not to follow us.

On the plane, Viktor and I looked at each other and blinked. I suspect Viktor was wondering what he had gotten himself into — whether he would lose his job; whether in a wiser, more abstemious age, he would come back to look at this bad decision as the one where everything started to go disastrously wrong. I was beyond this kind of worrying. I didn’t know how the trip would go, or what it would mean, or whether it would be a mistake. But I did know that I wouldn’t look back on it with anything — pride or regret or misery or guilt or misty-eyed nostalgia — from some unimaginable vantage point. Who I was now was who I would always be. And what I did would have to be admired or despised or corrected by someone else.

The landscape below was quickly tapering off into countryside: dull stamps of beige and eggshell; clusters of villages; long patches of phlox and silver grass, sliced by the occasional vein of a creek. I’ve always loved flying, watching the earth resolve into its most basic elements: clean, subdued colors; starkly geometric designs. When you watch it all from an airplane, it’s difficult to take anything too seriously or too hard. From above, the world and its teeming civilizations looked like nothing more complex than a series of cave drawings.