In her inspired debut, A Partial History of Lost Causes, out from Dial Press on March 19, Jennifer DuBois charts the journey of two disparate characters who share an unlikely journey of discovery: a world chess champion living in St. Petersburg, Russia, and an English lecturer in Cambridge, Mass., who discovers a connection between her late father and the Russian prodigy-turned-politician. In this excerpt, Aleksandr Bezetov is newly-arrived in Leningrad in 1979, and meeting with a pair of dissidents—Nikolai and Ivan—who will help shape his future.
Nikolai returned with a tray of Stoli, swirling and crystalline in the light. Aleksandr thanked him, and Nikolai said nothing. Ivan raised his glass and clinked it against Nikolai’s. “To Misha,” said Ivan.
Nikolai drank without toasting. Aleksandr picked up his vodka and examined it. In the glass, the light made chords of blue rainbows.
“What?” said Ivan. “Do you not have this in the East? It’s to drink.”
“I realize.” It tasted acerbic; Aleksandr pressed his lips together and swallowed some water. Ivan scoffed.
“What do you do with your time there?” said Nikolai.
“It’s not as cold there. There are other things to do.” Aleksandr gulped the rest of the shot to show them that he could, and Ivan handed him another.
“Our friend Misha,” said Ivan, “has unfortunately gotten himself into a little bit of trouble.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Aleksandr. The tendons in his neck were starting to unfurl slightly, and he wanted to look around the café some more. The ceiling was high and cavelike, strung with glowing lightbulbs the color of absinthe. Above the bar, bottles glinted with fish-belly silvers. The man in the wheelchair was still ranting to himself, puncturing the air with his cigarette tip.
“Who is that man?” said Aleksandr. “Who is he talking to?”
“You’re odd,” said Ivan. “Your priorities are odd.”
“Alcohol isn’t good for my game,” said Aleksandr. He was starting to be sorry he’d come. “It makes me fuzzy. It dulls my memory. Chess is all memory. Memory and imagination.”
“Memory and imagination are both technically illegal,” said Ivan. “Do you want us to order you a beer, then?”
“The beer is water,” said Nikolai. “Don’t insult the man. The beer’s not suitable for infants.”
They passed another shot glass to Aleksandr, and he rolled it between his fingers. The glass felt clean, and when it was full, it was just about the weight of a king in a good set. Nikolai produced a cigar from his pocket and lit it with a Saigon Café matchbook. The cigar made sweet swirls in the air. Aleksandr’s head felt like it was attached by a string connected to the ceiling and was dangling above his torso, moving in tandem with his gestures, manipulated by an unseen puppeteer.
“What happened to Misha?” said Aleksandr. It was hard to form words. He was coursing with a silly relaxation, a pleasant absence of energy that left only a few things thinkable: taking deep gulps of the cinnamon smell of the cigar, watching the green lights bob like buoys on a dark ocean.
“Well,” said Ivan. “Misha got stupid, Aleksandr Kimovich. And I’m going to tell you this so you don’t get stupid, too.”
“Okay,” said Aleksandr stupidly. His tongue was clumsy in his mouth.
“Because, to tell you the truth, you don’t seem like the sharpest individual,” said Ivan.
“No,” said Nikolai. “He doesn’t.”
“I know you’re a brilliant chess mind,” said Ivan. “This is what the newspapers tell me. And I believe what the newspapers tell me, always.”
“Always,” said Nikolai.
“But you can be good at one thing and not so good at other things,” said Ivan.
“Or you can be good at one thing and not so good at any other thing,” said Nikolai.
“Misha got stupid,” said Ivan. “He got stupid. He disseminated falsehood. He made statements that are not officially recognized as truth.”
“He circulated defamatory statements about the Soviet state and system,” said Nikolai.
“Oh?”
“He signed a petition,” said Ivan, “and he’s been thrown in a psikhushka. We don’t know when he’ll be back.” He rubbed his temples, his fingers fluttering against his dark hair.
“He’s an idiot,” said Nikolai. When he turned toward the light, his scars became aubergine thumbprints across his face.
“The point is,” said Ivan. “in seriousness, there is something of that in you, I think, and I hope you won’t mind me saying so. Don’t do what people ask you, unless they are from the competent organs. Don’t violate the traffic laws.”
“I don’t have a car,” said Aleksandr.
“Don’t grant favors. Don’t make assumptions. I trust you were in the Komsomol?”
Aleksandr shook his head. “You don’t really have to in Okha. It’s such a tiny town. Why, were you?”
“Everybody was,” said Ivan curtly. He raised his eyebrows at Aleksandr and pulled his mouth into a tight line. “All the decent students.”
“I see,” said Aleksandr. His head was starting to clear, and the green lamps were becoming dull orbs that pulsed against the inside of his eyelids. Nikolai and Ivan started talking about music, and then about women, and then about the invasion of Afghanistan and how many months it might take the Soviet army to subdue its dusty, uncultivated landscape and people. Aleksandr hadn’t been following the story much, although he’d glimpsed headlines as he flipped his way to the chess coverage—an “interventionist duty,” it was called, and “an invitation from the socialist brethren of Afghanistan”—and he bobbed in and out of listening. He was thinking about Misha, in psychiatric prison for having bad luck. He thought of the countless incomprehensible papers he’d encountered in his efforts to get to Leningrad, how many he’d signed without reading, without understanding. He went to find the bathroom.
Near the door, the man in the wheelchair was still talking to himself. “Motherfuckers,” he was saying, punching the air with his cigarette. His head was down against his chest, as though he were telling secrets to his breastbone. The man’s legs were shriveled and mostly missing, and his face had an odd flatness to it. When he lifted his head into the light, Aleksandr could see that he was missing teeth, too, which wasn’t unusual but which contributed to the man’s overall look of unnerving concavity. He looked like a person who’d been taken apart entirely and then put back together wrong. “Fucking motherfuckers,” the man said again, and looked straight at Aleksandr. “Don’t trust them.” The green café lights gave him a radioactive glow.
“Who are motherfuckers?” Aleksandr realized that he really wanted to know.
The man crooked a finger at Aleksandr and beckoned for him to come closer. Aleksandr did so, bringing his cheek down to the man’s, inhaling the man’s smell of rust and alcohol and something else that made Aleksandr sad, even though he didn’t understand why.
“Who?” Aleksandr said again. “Who are motherfuckers?”
“They all are,” whispered the man, and then laughed a choking, startling laugh. He gestured with his cigarette, ashing onto Aleksandr’s shoes, grandly implicating all the people in his field of vision. “Everyone.”
When Aleksandr stumbled out into the ice-wrecked streets several hours later, there was a shred of ash in the eastern sky. The light looked as though it had been filtered through dirty gauze; the clumps of snow were beginning to take on the fuzzy shape of mold. A tattered ad warning against the evils of Demon Vodka stuck under Aleksandr’s shoe, and he kicked it away. The air was sharp with the gasoline of idling Zhigulis. Leningrad was gearing up for another day, and the illegal street vendors were organizing themselves in dark corners: men in brown layers setting up carts of vegetables, the grey beets and cabbages turning to colors in the breaking sun. A woman stood shivering with her fish, their tongue-colored bellies slick in the light. Boys in wool caps crouched watching for the police, ready to alert their families and collapse the wood stalls and vanish. They could disappear as quickly as the cockroaches in the kommunalka could scatter from the cold light, as quickly as a person could evaporate into a car and never come back.
Excerpted from A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer DuBois. Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer DuBois. Excerpted by permission of The Dial Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
