In the light of day, I could give my room a more complete inspection. There were mysterious stains on the floor, and I soon found an apocalyptic toilet down the hall. In the shower, the smell of somebody’s gardenia shampoo floated just above the smell of wet dirt. I walked down the hall and passed the rockabilly poker player, who was shuffling his iPod with his thumb. There was a horrific smell outside the hostel’s entrance. I declined to investigate its source.
Downstairs I found a tabac selling tiny bear pins and bottled water. Candies of no discernible national origin sported nutrition information in fourteen tiny languages. Depressed-looking pornography was sold alongside gossip magazines, forbidding copies of Pravda, the international edition of Time. I bought some chocolate-covered banana jellies and sat on a park bench and thought, for the first time since landing, about what I was really doing here.
In the light of day, asking Bezetov to answer my father’s letter—a letter he’d never even read, most likely—seemed presumptuous and a few degrees beyond odd. When I tried to understand what I’d get out of it, I felt weirdly stupid, like a person trying to do a math problem in a dream. It was true that my father had wanted these answers, but it was also true that he’d managed to die without getting them. Surely I could do the same. I wasn’t sure how to approach Bezetov, even if I could find him. He was being constantly mauled by chess fans, I supposed, and maybe I could pretend that was what this was about. Maybe I could pretend that the whole undertaking was just the dying vanity project of a middle-class American—weren’t other, richer people with more mainstream interests always doing things like this? They hired professional chefs to teach them about soufflés. They learned obsolete languages. Having grown weary of perfecting the commoner abilities in life, they sought to acquire more exotic ones—windsurfing, herb growing, flower arranging. I could pretend that this was like that. I could pretend that I was vainly, fitfully meeting the demands of my own ego.
But the fact remained: Bezetov was whom my father had written to when the hourglass was running, its sand hissing with the force of an arterial hemorrhage. Maybe there was something my father knew that I didn’t yet. Maybe there was something he knew that I would need to know soon enough. I wasn’t sure that looking for it was a sensible way to spend one’s last twelve to twenty-four months. But it would have to be sufficient.
I took Elizabeta’s number out of my pocket and ran my finger across her name and address. I called her again, and explained who I was, and reminded her of my quest for Bezetov.
“Oh,” she said. “I remember you.”
“I’m sorry for the broken connection the other day.”
“I’ve been sitting here waiting by the phone ever since.”
“I think there was some problem with the international calling.”
There was silence that went on long enough to feel like skepticism.
“Are you a reporter?” she said finally.
“No,” I said, wondering if I should have been a reporter.
“He’ll talk to Western reporters. He loves to talk to Western reporters. But I don’t like to. Talking to reporters is a young man’s game, I find.”
“I’m not a reporter,” I said, sounding surer this time.
“Nobody’s ever a reporter,” she said cryptically. “What’s your interest in him, then? Are you a chess fan?” Her voice was becoming businesslike, crisp, and I was starting to hear the faint sheen of British English over the staccato of her Russian accent.
“Yes. Sort of. Not avidly. A casual fan, you might say.”
“Are you political?” I heard the faint click and hiss of a cigarette lighter, followed by light wheezing.
“Also casually.”
“Nobody’s political, either.”
There was a pause filled with some minor puffing. Then, horribly, she coughed. The cough sounded tubercular and wrenching, as though all the delicate things in her chest were coming painfully undone. When she was finished, she said, “Look,” which struck me as a strangely American thing to say. “You could try to talk to him yourself. But you have to be credentialed. You have to be from somewhere. You can’t come out of nowhere.”
I thought for a moment. “What about a university?”
“Maybe. Maybe a university would be okay,” she said, and her voice became coy and a bit sneering. “Why? Are you from a university?”
“Yes,” I said boldly, and told her the name of my school. My former school. “I’m doing research.” What were they going to do—fire me? Have me killed? “I have a letter from you. My father wrote to Aleksandr, and you wrote him back.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Could I come see you, do you think? I’ll bring it.”
“I don’t know about that.” Her voice was receding again, becoming brittle, like glass blown too thin. “Why are you here now to do your research? If you’re not political?”
Something about telling a lie makes it easier to tell a hard truth. The truth feels hidden in plain sight, and you start to forget which things are true and which things you wish were true and which things you conjured from nowhere just to make a story sound better. “I’m probably dying this year,” I told her.
“My dear,” said Elizabeta, and she coughed again. “That’s no great distinction.”
7
ALEKSANDR
Leningrad, 1980
And one night, at long last and against all odds, came a knock on the door. There was a glassy clinking and the breathy almost-sound of soft things shivering up against one another. And when Aleksandr pulled open the door, there was Elizabeta: summoned to his room at last by the magnetic draw of his imagining, over and over, this very moment.
He’d been doing his mending by candlelight, and on his bed were piles of torn trousers. He stood in the doorway with a needle in one hand, wearing his worst shirt. Elizabeta was in her usual complicated black, and her hair was flying everywhere and catching colors in the weak hall light. In her hand she held a sheaf of paper.
“I heard this was you,” she said, thrusting it into his hands.
It was the most recent issue of the journal, open to a smeared black-and-white photo of a pained-looking man with a beard.
“That’s not me,” said Aleksandr. “That’s Sharansky.”
Elizabeta laughed then, a complicated, multidimensional laugh filled with genuine appreciation for a bad joke, as well as mild derision toward its badness and a faint undertone of self-reproach for laughing. It was the kind of laugh you could write a university thesis about.
“Where did you get that?” said Aleksandr. When she pressed the journal into his hands, he thought, her thumb lingered against his palm.
“Nowhere,” she said. “It was passed on to me. It doesn’t matter. Listen.” Her hair was falling out of the clip; it seemed unlikely to Aleksandr that the clip was even trying to do its job. It was purely decorative—like her shirt, come to think of it, which seemed too thin to offer much protection against any kind of weather. He wanted to feel how thin her shirt was, to take its fabric between his fingers and gently pull. Just to see.
“Are you listening?” She’d wedged her shoulder against the door. “Can I come in?”
“Um,” said Aleksandr, because there were the clumps of clothes on his bed, which wasn’t made, and the candles had burned down, and his teacup was making a puddle on the table, but she was already in, running long fingers against the walls, brushing aside the clothes and sitting on the bed without asking.