After we placed my father in the nursing home, my mother moved to Sedona, Arizona, to find out if there was anything left for her in this life. She took up jewelry-making. She found a profoundly tan boyfriend. She got some sleep. She thought of it as her brief entr’acte between tragedies, I suspect. I know she always planned to come back for me when the time came. I did not relish the thought of summoning her back from her barely begun new life to ask her for another two decades of spoon-feeding. The poor woman deserved better.
I didn’t have many friends. I could chalk it up to general orneriness, and surely it was partly that. But there was also this: it’s isolating when absolutely no one will discuss the thing at the very center of your life. My father went completely unmentioned for years by the people whom I considered my friends, and even his death, when it finally came, was substantially ignored. My own genetic status was assiduously avoided in conversation, as though it was a horrible facial deformity and everyone I knew was a stranger. People who haven’t lost anyone think that to speak of grief is to summon it. People who haven’t grappled with their own mortality think that to speak of death is to make it real. And in my teens and twenties, most of my friends had never buried anybody who wasn’t a grandparent or a dog. So nobody asked after my father. Nobody asked after me. And sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.
My father must have felt his share of isolation and resentment, too, in the years preceding his final declension. Maybe that was what made him come to view Aleksandr Bezetov as some kind of kindred spirit. Or maybe it was something else—the idea of youth trumping obsolescence or intellect trumping entropy. My father was a man who loved his own mind and knew that one day he would lose it. That’s what made Aleksandr his hero, perhaps—here was a person whose neurological circuitry was so luminescent that it shone through seven time zones and a Cold War. Here was a person who knew the value of his own intelligence, and the shortness of its reign.
One winter night when I was seven, I had a fever so high that the shadows became animals against the wall and the room spun slowly around me. It was snowing, and the snowflakes caught the streetlight and turned red, and I was filled with the vague generalized anxiety of being sick and a child. I went downstairs, and my father was sitting with a glass of bourbon. Through the television static, two dark, angry-looking men were playing chess at a table.
“Dad?” I said, shivering uncontrollably through my fever.
“Look at this,” he said. “Come here.”
I sat on his lap, sweating into his lapel with my fevered head. The men on the television were hard to make out through the snow—they were gray and amorphous, crackling with every move, the ghosted relics of another universe.
“Where are they?”
“Russia. That’s very far away. It’s a huge country east of Europe.”
“They look far away,” I said. “Is it cold there?” The room the men were in had a cold light to it. There was a silence between them that felt full and fierce, as though if you listened carefully enough, you might hear in the static silent taunts and dares and ruminations. The younger of the two men scratched his chin and sacrificed a bishop.
“Look at him,” my father said, putting his finger right on the television, in violation of a rule of my mother’s. “He’s twenty-two, you know.” The man he touched had a face that was gray and gaunt but also tautly intelligent. He touched the pieces with a furious energy that bordered on recklessness. His opponent handled his pieces carefully, nearly caressing the bishops before moving them, letting his fingers linger for a split second on the move he had just made. The young man scratched his head vigorously, moved his queen with an offhand impatience. “He’s going to be the youngest chess champion in the world,” my father said wonderingly.
The muted men stared at each other, and we stared at them. My father stroked my forehead and I felt tired, but I wanted to stay awake so I could remember whatever it was my father wanted me to remember. Time seemed to collapse. The only sound was the crackle of the static, and we watched for what must have become a very long time—until the final moves were made, the tipping point beyond which all was inevitable. I’ve since studied this game: how Aleksandr sacrificed his black rook, which was consumed almost greedily by Rusayev’s white knight, and then swung his other rook—which had been lurking idly on the other end of the board, huddled like a creature, forgotten by the audience and, presumably, the old man—down to the end of the board. At the time, all I knew was that my father was rapt. He leaned forward slightly. In the monochromatic Eastern light, Aleksandr cracked his knuckles. His opponent’s king lay sideways on the black tiling, dead. Maybe there was the faintest rustle of a gasp in the audience. Or maybe I’m imagining that part. But I know what my father said afterward, even though I still wonder whether he was telling me the truth.
“You see,” he said, turning off the television with a flash that made bright spots in my eyes. The red snowflakes kept coming, slower and slower. My father spoke so quietly that I wasn’t sure whether he was talking to himself or to me. “You see,” he said, and I shivered again. “You can do a lot before you are thirty.”
3
ALEKSANDR
Leningrad, 1980
The first time Aleksandr went to the café, Ivan and Nikolai didn’t recognize him. Aleksandr had grown thinner that winter, since his mother wasn’t around to make unpalatable food endurable, and he was paler. The relentless cold had given him a wild-eyed look of defeat. It made him move awkwardly, too—with all his limbs straight, his shoulders making tense bunches at his ears, every muscle trying to burrow farther into his body. He didn’t look like himself anymore, and he hadn’t looked like much to start with. So when he showed up at the Saigon on a snowy black night in January, Ivan and Nikolai stared at him with bald suspicion. They were sitting at a table in a corner with tiny clear shots of vodka before them and an enormous bricklike ashtray between them. The curtains around their table were a dark green that had been dulled by proximity to smoke and conspiracy. Ivan was cradling a cigarette between his two long fingers and talking; Nikolai was nodding vigorously and taking notes. Aleksandr stood over them, not wanting to interrupt.
“What do you want?” said Ivan. He was wearing a frayed Sex Pistols T-shirt and the same silver medallion he’d had at the centenary. Aleksandr pulled off his hat and let some snow fall onto the table.
“Goddammit,” said Nikolai. A clump of snow disturbed his vodka. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m sure he’s just about to tell us,” said Ivan.
Aleksandr looked around the smoky café. It was labyrinthine and dark, though slanting red light illuminated corners here and there—a man and a woman without rings talked with their faces very close together; several groups of young men spoke in rustles and spurts and eruptions of laughter; a man in a wheelchair sat alone, rocking back and forth, the edge of his cigarette a rotating satellite as he gestured. Aleksandr closed his eyes for a moment and let the voices make a mosaic around him. They were relaxed, he decided, in their joking or raving or romance. They sounded like people talking in a bedroom, not a public place. Later, he realized that what he was hearing was the sound of people not lying.
“Sir?” said Ivan sternly. “Have you lost your way?”
“I’m Aleksandr Kimovich,” said Aleksandr. “We met at the centenary. You were taking notes. I just moved here.”