He looked at me, and I thought he might call security to frog-march me out the door. I would have, if I’d had a security apparatus at my disposal. But he didn’t. He smiled as if he’d discovered a chess opponent who was somewhat better than expected, though still fairly terrible.
“We must have a return to gubernatorial elections. We must draft a new constitution, since the current one is baldly authoritarian.”
“Isn’t single-handedly scrapping the constitution a tiny bit authoritarian?”
His eyes flared slightly. He was amused. “It will arise from a national consensus.”
“What percentage of Russians consider themselves fans of Stalin?” I said. “Is it forty-five percent?”
He smirked. “It’s fifty-five percent, actually. So you can see what I’m up against.”
“Yes,” I said. I leaned in toward the prints again. One, in rich greens, was of a little café at the end of a long street.
“That’s the Saigon,” said Aleksandr. “We used to hang around there. Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s a hotel now. I think its rooms go for something like six thousand rubles a night. So. You’re ready to start?”
“Yes.”
“You can copyedit these,” he said, handing me a stack of papers. “They’ve already been translated, but we need a native speaker to catch the subtler problems.”
I scanned the top page. Aleksandr Bezetov, in assistance of the Democratic Union, will spend public debate at the St.-Petersburg university, addressing to a question of to what degree the state should soften oil monopolies in modern economy.
“Okay,” I said. “I can fix this.”
“I used to do that kind of thing,” he said. “Mindless errands. My job was to run around the city and shove illegal newspapers into people’s hands.”
“Did you ever get caught?”
“We were always caught. We were caught before we even really knew what we were doing. But we thought we were being clever.”
“Were you being clever?”
“Not very,” he said. “I was a notable figure then. Less so than now, perhaps, but even so. I was on some list before I even knew my way around the city. They had us the whole way through. So this time”—he straightened up—“I know that much. I know that I am already caught. I am not hiding. Also, I am not flattering myself. No matter how you look at it, it’s a futile endeavor.”
“Why do it, then?”
“Nothing much else to do. Chess tires me now.”
“Do you still play?”
“Not so much. I needed a new hobby.” He put his hands in his pockets and frowned, as though an unhappy possibility had just occurred to him. “Do you play?”
“I used to sometimes. I played with my father when I was small.” I looked down. “And I had a friend I played with sometimes in Boston. I was never very good. I could never think more than a move ahead.”
“Count yourself lucky. Thinking more than a move ahead never got me anywhere in life. Only in chess. And even then it was sometimes a burden. I saw fifteen moves ahead once, in Norway, but there was a much easier path to victory, and I missed it. Looking into the future too hard, I’ve found, can be paralyzing.”
“I’ve found that, too.”
Aleksandr looked at me suspiciously. “Anyway,” he said, clapping me on the back. “I’ll let you get to work.”
I took the reams of paper—the press releases, the drafted e-mails, the artlessly phrased leaflets—and sat in a corner. Around me there was arguing and joking and the sound of words clacking fiercely onto pages. I started to skim the first e-mail, catching the first misspelling and the first inelegant turn of phrase. I felt more awake than usual. There was something satisfying about doing a small, good thing after all these weeks of living in a morass of uselessness. I thought about what Aleksandr had said about chess, about the paralyzing effects of imagination. I knew that to be true. Any time I let my mind wander more than three steps into the future, it reached the limits of comprehension and fell off the edge. But for now there were concrete concerns—small, surmountable problems: typos, grammatical irregularities. I could live with these. I bent my head over the pages, and I started to work.
15
ALEKSANDR
St. Petersburg, December 2006
Aleksandr stood on top of a box in Gostiny Dvor and shouted into the crowd. It was a sizable turnout—maybe not the biggest group he’d seen since he began, but near it. He’d have to ask Nina about the head count. Today they were a bit more frenetic than usuaclass="underline" boys kicked bits of hail like footballs; the crowd clunked their feet against the unyielding snow like a group of ungulates getting ready to stampede. He should be thankful for the energy, he knew. But the wind angled itself through his clothes—it always managed to do this; no matter how many layers he wore, it laced its fingers together and then ran them up and down his pant leg and collar provocatively—and he was again struck by the thought that he was beginning (already!) to be tired of this. The crowds, the slogans, the shouting at the sky, as though it would count for something in the end. He was committed to it, he was, he was, and he would keep at it until they caught up with him somewhere—sneaked polonium into his imported sushi, dismantled the engine of his airplane, shot him dead in the stairwell of his own apartment building as they had done to Anna Politkovskaya in October. But there were times—like now, and now wasn’t a good time for it—when it all felt preordained. They weren’t the first crowd to clot and yell, to issue demands.
He took a gulp of icy air. “We are running to lose,” he shouted. This line always got the biggest shouts, which had to make him wonder. “And in the losing, we are running to be noticed. We are running to be blocked. We are running to be opposed. We are running to be assassinated.” He cast his eyes around the crowd. This line was his dare—or maybe his invitation—to the universe. It was coming, he knew it was coming, so it might as well look artfully stage-managed. But the flags fluttered in unison, and the crowd cheered. Today was not the day.
He looked at his notes. He tried to make his speeches different every time he delivered them—on this day, did you know, Pushkin completed Eugene Onegin, and Poland declared independence from Russia for the first time?—so that people could listen to him now and again and still expect to hear something new. He tracked his eyes back up to the crowd; he arranged his face into an expression of surprised interest so that he could convincingly sell the fun of knowing that today was the anniversary of the day that Khrushchev sent a dog to die in outer space. And as he did, he caught sight of a young woman standing kitty-corner from his box and taking notes. He delivered his line and looked back. He always noticed when people took notes at his rallies—it was a habit, he was sure, from Nikolai—although Nina often reminded him that note-taking wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: it could be a citizen journalist, or a European blogger, or the real Western press. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d say, tossing her long leg over his in their giant black and white bed. “Don’t you want people to be paying attention to you?” And he’d say he did, he did, although he knew that at least some of the people who were paying attention were doing so for very bad reasons. “You worry too much,” Nina would say, making her face into a monstrous mock pout (apparently what he looked like to her when he was worried, which he always was). And because it was insulting to try to make a woman worry for you when she was naturally disinclined to do so, he usually just shrugged and rolled over and fell asleep facing the wall.