A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois Page B

but it gets respectably far that way.”
    “How often is this?”
    “Every three weeks or so.”
    Aleksandr looked at Nikolai, who was staring out the window and gumming his shashlik meditatively. He wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps he was pretending not to pay attention. He was still wearing the leather jacket, and Aleksandr wondered about that, fleetingly. It looked well-made, which meant foreign-made—Italian, perhaps—though that was impossible.
    “Can I see it?” said Aleksandr to Ivan.
    Ivan opened a drawer fast enough that Aleksandr knew he had been waiting to be asked. “Of course,” he said, producing a pamphlet. “Here.” When he leaned close, Aleksandr could smell the kvass—somehow acrid and dusty both—on his breath. Ivan flushed as he handed Aleksandr the journal. It was strange to see Ivan want something,and stranger still that the something should be Aleksandr’s approval.
    The cover was dull, with oddly small black font. It didn’t look like the kind of journal a person would idly pick up; there was no promise that anything of interest lay within. In fact, the cover seemed to suggest that the contents might include an essay on metaphysics, or a survey of current breakthroughs in agricultural technology. Aleksandr opened it anyway. The first page was an anonymous introduction, clearly written by Ivan. (“Friends,” it read. “We convene in these pages, once more, to take stock of our situation and ourselves.…”) Then there was an oblique poem that Aleksandr read three times and still didn’t understand, though it seemed to be dwelling on the subject of “capitulation” at some length. There was an essay about rereading Bulgakov for modern times. And then a grim report of arrests, detentions, searches around Leningrad in the past month. This was the longest section of the journal—pages and pages of dates and names and abuses, without comment, in tiny lettering. The section was called “A Partial History of Lost Causes,” which was also the name of the journal.
    “It’s incomplete,” said Ivan. “We don’t even try to get it complete. It’s just a sample, really. You get the general character of the month—what they were most interested in and what they got.”
    Aleksandr stared at the account. Here there were arrests for misuse of state machines (he thought of the ill-gotten typewriter lurking in the living room), and here there was a detention for “disseminating falsehood” (he thought of how the very line that accounted that detention might be considered officially false), and here there was an imprisonment for “malicious parasitism” (this meant unemployment, which Aleksandr was, by any measure, afflicted with), and here there was a midnight search on the grounds of conspiracy (he looked around at the contracting tendons of Ivan’s neck as he swallowed hard, the inflamed stare of Nikolai as he looked at everything except Aleksandr, and wondered how much he trusted them). He put the pamphlet down. He leaned toward Ivan. “I got approached by an official tonight,” he said. “They offered me a dacha.”
    Ivan nodded. “They want you to join.”
    “Yes.”
    “You have a file.”
    “Of course.”
    “And you said no to them?”
    “Of
course
.”
    “There must be something very compelling about that building of yours.”
    “He told me not to hang around with you.”
    “Very sound advice.”
    “They know about this?”
    “It’s not a secret. Nothing is a secret. Maybe exactly who we are, what we’re about, that might be a secret. Who our contributors are and who all of our subscribers are—those are secrets, too. The details are a secret. But the fact is not. We are not a secret. Your involvement, quickly, will not be a secret. KGB has asked you a question, and here you will be giving an answer.”
    Aleksandr remembered the silken hands of Petr Pavlovich, he remembered the admonishment not to be foolish. Not bad advice, all things considered.
    “Even