Along the Neva, I watched an older woman push her mentally disabled daughter in a wheelchair. The daughter was wearing eyeliner, and I thought of the care that had gone into making that a reality—the mother licking the pencil, bending her thumb against her daughter’s eyelashes.
If I’d defined my father’s failure in such stark terms—his unwillingness to part with the last feeble snatches of his existence, his greedy and small clinging to what little was left—if those were the terms by which I defined failure, I knew I had a hazier vision of what I meant by success. In part, I was trying to avoid causing my mother the exact brand of anguish that my father had caused us—the particular pain of wishing rabidly for the death of a person you once desperately loved. Though if I was honest with myself, I knew that I was doing something not dissimilar, not demonstrably better, by running away. Did I really think they’d forgotten me? Was my self-esteem actually so low? It was not. Jonathan would get over it one day—he’d find new love, he’d find new memories, those memories would pile on top of the memories of me, pushing me ever further to the bottom of his consciousness, time would elapse, great swaths of time, such time!, and the time he’d spent with me would become ever briefer, comparably, until one day it might feel incidental, anecdotal. But I knew that day had not yet come, and in the meantime, I’d done nothing less than traumatize him. And my mother. I did not think so little of her that I felt my departure was, fundamentally, any kind of favor. I didn’t believe that she’d be able to relax now, soak up the Arizona heat and the love of an inane man, enjoy life. I hoped there’d be some of that, but I could not pretend that all the great difficulties were truly over. To do so would be to invoke depths of grotesque faux self-martyrdom that not even I possessed. No, there was no way to romanticize it: this trip was essentially a temper tantrum. But then maybe insanity invites insanity; illogic invites illogic. There was simply no good answer. There was no right way to go, only countless wrong ways, each as unique as a snowflake.
I did not know what the humane thing was, but I knew I was not doing it.
I turned away from the Neva and started walking toward the bridge. The air was unbendingly cold, the city entombed in a darkness that was beginning to feel permanent.
I learned something once, I think, from my father’s illness. Mostly, I did not learn; mostly, I resented and resisted and made it elaborately clear how little fun I was having personally, to anyone who was paying attention, which nobody was. But once, maybe, my jaw aching with the tedium of it, in one of those awful, mostly unremembered years, there was a small revelation of a kind. Once, maybe, I looked into his stricken, blanking face and I knew something that I couldn’t stop knowing.
Behind me, the Neva was growing dim. The horizon was relinquishing its last monofilament of light.
Personality is continuity. Personality is the myth of continuity. And the person is lost when nothing can be old to him, when nothing can be familiar, when all parallels, all symbols, all analogs, are gone; when the world is perpetually stunning; when we are newborns again, at last.
PART TWO
13
ALEKSANDR
St. Petersburg, 1986–2006
The eighties melted into the nineties, and Aleksandr lost weight again. His currency among women strengthened, and there was something of a nationalistic uprising in his personal life. All of a sudden they were everywhere—thin-browed, thin-faced, pale, and long-limbed, pressing their warm asses against his thighs all through those long winters. They found his jokes hilarious, and his prominent nose distinguished, and his chess talk fascinating. When he started going on CNN, when he started being invited to speak at the elite American universities, it was an inundation: he nearly began to resent them for their beauty, for their unapologetic availability. He took to sleeping with women whose last names he did not know; then he took to sleeping with women whose first names he did not know. He didn’t ask, and he tried not to remember if they told him. Sex became tedious for a while; sometimes he longed for a woman to reject him just for a surprise.
He thought of how Elizabeta had left him back when he was deserving of love and it would not have been wasted on him. And now he was ruined for it, he knew, and did not warrant it.
In the other Leningrad—the one Aleksandr no longer lived in—the lines for toilet paper stretched around corners. On television, that smiling, simian American president kept making his demands. When the satellite countries broke away—with relative ease, as if the Soviet Union were a rotted thing that was more than ready to abandon its auxiliary elements—he sat up straight and allowed himself thirty seconds of optimism. He was an early supporter of Gorbachev; he waited in the cold until his ears were red, and he cried when he cast his vote for Yeltsin. The Museum of the History of Atheism and Religion turned back into Kazan Cathedral. The Communist Party was banned; the ruble became a convertible currency; confiscatory privatization overtook state-run concerns; inflation shot to 20 percent. The shelves at the markets filled back up, but no one could buy. Once prices tripled, people began to turn out their dogs, which roamed the streets like beggars, mangy and chagrined. The population was decreasing by six hundred thousand people a year. Shock therapy was hard on the common people, certainly, but it was the birth pangs of capitalism, the plinth upon which the towering new Russia would be built. And in the free-market economy, Aleksandr wrote a book on business and chess that made five million dollars. He intended to sink gratefully into the luxuriant wealth of the brand-new post-Communist oligarchy—hot tub, women, the kind of travel that comes with steaming face towels when you cross the international dateline.
He went to clubs. He never danced, he only watched. He encountered blondes. He encountered brunettes. He encountered Central Asians who turned out to have no pubic hair whatsoever. And one night when he was out late, five years after he’d become world champion, maybe, he encountered a redhead who was smiling a secret smile to herself.
“Hello,” he said. “What do you know that I don’t know?”
She shrugged, and at the time he believed that this meant there was something. Later, he knew that he should have taken her at face value.
“You’re the chess champion.”
“Yes.”
“But you already knew that.”
He ducked his head. “I suppose.”
She was drinking champagne. He wondered if she was celebrating something. She cocked her head to one side; her red hair was ineffably gorgeous in the light. No, he decided, she was not celebrating anything. She didn’t need to.
“And who are you?”
“Nina,” she said, extending a hand. Her wrist was impossibly delicate and feminine, tremendously well-made. She looked like a human to whom some attention had been given, whereas Aleksandr often remarked that God had made him (Aleksandr) in the dark, one hand tied behind His back, possibly drunk. Aleksandr didn’t really believe in God, of course, but he liked the joke, and told it often. He thought of telling it now but looked at the wrist again and decided against it.
She smiled at him then. “It was bold the way you made them resume play during the World Championships.”
“Bold?”
It had been a long time—too long—since someone had thought he was brave. No: maybe nobody ever had. Elizabeta might have once, for the paper, but that was ages ago, in another lifetime. Was this assessment from Nina undeserved? Maybe. The risk he’d taken with the FIDE had been more calculating, more clinically self-interested; after all, he wasn’t standing up to them because they were morally bankrupt—he was standing up to them because they’d wanted to screw him over, and he’d lost too much already to let them screw him over at that late date. So she admired him for an impulse that was as petty and shallow and reflexive as slapping someone’s hand away when he’s digging in your pocket.