A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois Page A

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 his 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, 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 warningagainst 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 gray 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.
    Aleksandr walked down Nevsky Prospekt, past the Museum of the History of Atheism and Religion. Leningrad was such a difference from the mangled wreck of Okha, a city that nobody had planned for or intended. Leningrad was all stately foresight and clean geometry, indisputable proof that Russians, too, could think more than one generation ahead. It was a beautiful city if you could open your eyes against the wind long enough to really see it. But Aleksandr didn’t look around much on his trip home after his first night out with Ivan and Nikolai. There was a new menace for him here, he thought, subtler and more nefarious than KGB in white Volgas. Back in Okha, he’d understood the nature of the game; he’d walked the parameters of his life over and over until he couldn’t even dream his way out of them. He’d known everyone there, and he’d known everyone’s grandparents and pockmarks and slimy vegetable gardens, and if there had been other-thinking people among them, he’d have known that, too.
    In Leningrad, he could tell, it was going to be different. He’d never thought to be scared before of old people pushing papers. He’d never been scared of the women who stood in the street and sold roses.

    When Aleksandr returned to his building, one of the night girls was standing in the corridor, the snow of her boots making turpentine-colored pools at her feet. She was knocking on the steward’s door vigorously, which Aleksandr had never seen anybody do. He stood and watched her and wondered what would happen.
    “What are you looking at?” said the girl. She was the darker-haired of the two girls, and Aleksandr knew her for her swearing in the hallways. The father of the family next door to him had complained about it one time, leaning over to spit into the sink next to Aleksandr. “I don’t like trying to raise a child next door to blyadi,” said the man. “It’s going to make him ask questions, and the fewer questions