Free A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois Page B

international triumph at some tournament in Reykjavík. In the earlier pictures, he is gaunt and grumpy; his gestures are all hard angles; he has an expression of low-grade exasperation. The eighties begin. The reporting about him has a breathless quality; his youth is much remarked upon, as is his brilliance. He has a subversive manner of play, it is said. He has an attitude. There are reports on disputes with the FIDE. He stops meeting the camera’s eye when he’s photographed. He fills out some. He starts to look older.He plays Rusayev interminably. The match is halted. The match is resumed. The last game is played. This was the game I had watched with my father, and the ferocity of Bezetov’s expression put me in mind of that night—the delirious rotating of shadow against wall, the slow-falling snow turning the color of dying fire. Bezetov wins. In the picture with his trophy, he appears clinically depressed. The clippings seem shakily cut now, as we move into the late eighties and the first stirring of my father’s Huntington’s. All documentation stops fairly soon after my father’s symptoms present, though not as soon as I might have imagined. After 1990, there’s nothing—nothing about Bezetov’s book, his much mourned loss to an IBM computer, his entry into post–Cold War politics. My father missed all that. My father missed a lot.
    It was a strange thing, this chronicling of another man’s life. It isn’t what you expect to find in a secret reliquary hidden in your father’s study. In my narcissism, I’d imagined school pictures, honor roll announcements, pinecone Christmas ornaments; in my conspiracy-mindedness, I’d imagined love letters, mysterious sets of keys, government correspondence. Instead, what we had was the grim and thorough documentation of the career of a Soviet chess player—a man my father had never met and whose story he never got to finish. It was unexpected. But I can’t say it was terribly surprising, and not just because of my father’s love of chess and the Soviets, generally, and this Soviet chessman, specifically. I remembered the night of the snowstorm and my father’s glassy-eyed rapture over the unexpected turns in a faraway game. To my father, Aleksandr Bezetov wasn’t just a precocious young sportsman. He was the personification of order over anarchy. He was the embodiment of facing down near-certain doom with a degree of panache. Most important, perhaps, he was the representation of the possibility of unlikely events, which I’m sure my father was already starting to be interested in by the time he sat me on his lap and showed me some of the things one could do in a very short time.
    In the bottom of the box was a letter. I let myself pretend for a self-congratulatory moment that I wouldn’t read it. And then I did.
    The letter was photocopied, undated, and written entirely in Russian. Back then, before I came to St. Petersburg, my Russian was weaker than my father’s had been, even though mine had come frommy Ph.D., and his was primarily self-taught. It took me three reads to get the full scope of the letter, and even now that my Russian is fairly good, I wonder if there are elements I miss or misunderstand. Roughly, this is what it said:
    Dear Mr. Bezetov,
    You may find it strange to receive a fan letter from an American. Then again, you might get many a day, for all I know. There’s a lot to admire about your career, generally—the originality and radicalism of your strategy, your perseverance in the face of almost certain defeat, your remarkable intelligence. All of this is especially captivating for a person who has spent many years paying close attention to the significance of opening gestures; one suspects that you will go far. I feel a certain affinity with you, I suppose, because I’m fighting my own complicated match these days—and am, I fear, nearing the bitterest of losses. And I’m wondering if there’s a question you might find time to