God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  “What? How do you know that?”

  “. . .”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We are the KGB. I know this as I knew you were coming here, as I knew whom you were to meet at the airport.”

  “Nuridinov—”

  “An easier man to bribe than I thought possible, even by our standards.”

  “Wait a minute. . . . Bribe?”

  “Certainly. How else would I guarantee his not joining you at the airport?”

  “You planned all this?”

  “I tried, Professor. Alas, everything has gone wrong. This, too, is common for our people. Now, come, we must stand.”

  “Why are—what are you talking about?”

  “We are going, Professor.”

  “Going where? I’m not going anywhere with you. Get the American embassy on the phone right now.”

  “Americans rely too much on this device, I think. You don’t need it. Professor Reese, I’m taking you to the very place you traveled seventeen thousand kilometers to see.”

  “Aral? It’s close?”

  “From my heart, Professor, the Aral Sea is never far.”

  A note had greeted them at the hotel check-in desk. Amanda handed it to Michael, who unshouldered his luggage onto the polished floor and murmured its text incredulously: “‘Forgive us, kind gentlemen, but we are forced to meet you in Nukus, tomorrow. Things have risen.’” Softly Michael repeated the last line over again— things have risen—then flipped the paper over as if searching for the elliptical message’s tail. “It’s not even signed,” he said. But stapled to the note were three plane tickets for tomorrow’s flight to Nukus, on the western side of the country.

  Ted was chewing on his pipestem, leaning against the check-in desk, buried to midthigh in sporty Day-Glo luggage. “Oh, hell, Michael,” he confided, giving him a manly swat on the back, “welcome to the former Soviet Union. Nothing ever works. Don’t sweat it. It used to take me a week in Murmansk just to place an overseas phone call.”

  Michael was simmering like a spanked child, staring at the plane tickets helplessly. When the words registered, he turned to Ted with an apoplectic slackness to his face. “Well, this isn’t Murmansk, Ted, in case you hadn’t noticed”—he was, incredibly, hissing—“and we’re not here to study brine in the North Atlantic; we’re here with the fucking United Nations and I’m sorry if it’s just too fucking much on my part to expect someone to be here!”

  While Ted quietly, indignantly, returned fire, Amanda interrupted the drowsing babushka behind the desk and booked two rooms.

  The hotel was a middle-range affair, the lobby done up in a marblish, neo–From Russia with Love motif a clever film student might have thought touching. It was not the nicest hotel in Tashkent, nor was it the worst. The service industry here was still in its australopithecine stage, and the nicest hotels thought nothing of charging three hundred dollars a night for Best Western–quality rooms, a price the UN was simply unwilling to pony up for such a nonevent. That each member of their team had been given the Aral Relief project entirely on nepotistic grounds was well known, making them markedly easier to abuse.

  Amanda had her own room, and as she double-checked the steadfastness of her small golden luggage locks she heard Ted and Michael next door, continuing their stilted lockjaw bickering. The narcotic fusion of jet lag and finally being alone knocked her out before she quite knew what was happening. She remembered only to set her alarm for the next morning.

  She dreamed of seas and of Andrew, of drifting Cyrillic letters and of Connery’s James Bond, and awoke at 5 a.m. to the sound of vomiting next door.

  “I’m dying,” Michael said, when he opened the door for her.

  Amanda stepped in, hearing through the bathroom door the muffled, gastric trauma of Ted’s stomach contents rapidly leaving his body, though from which exit she didn’t know. Instinctively, her hand shot up to lie flush on Michael’s forehead. It was hotter than a sauna rock. “Michael,” she said.

  They sat on the bed, Michael shivering as she put her arm around him. “The shashlik,” he said, and smiled. His gentle Korean eyes, though, were wreathed with fear. “I’m fairly sure it’s just food poisoning. You wait it out, you live through it, it goes away. I think I had something like this in Osaka once. We ported there while tracking whales, and I ate some sushi I shouldn’t have. Familiarity’s of slight consolation right now, I’m afraid.”

  Seeing him sick unhardened her heart toward him, and she was moved by this attempt at bravery. He was making up, she knew, for his slippage in the lobby earlier. Amanda’s forehead met his with a small suctionless thud. “Michael, I told you not to eat that thing.” She smiled and shook her head.

  Michael nodded, shivering more violently now. And suddenly the Carl Sagan of oceanography began to weep, sobbing and shuddering, though whether from pain, or hopelessness, or embarrassment, or fear of being sick in such a place, or the guilty futility one feels in countries less fortunate than America, she didn’t know. She pulled the sheet from his bed and draped it over his shoulders and held him until Ted emerged, whiter than an igloo, from the bathroom.

  “I’ve got the Dresden of diarrhea,” he announced, wearing only a flimsy towel and propping himself up against the peeling hotel-room wall. His face was half shaven, as if he’d been preparing for his day when struck down by the thirsty protozoan horde swirling through his GI tract. “This is the Mother of all Diarrhea, people.”

  “I’m calling the embassy,” Amanda said. Neither of them argued. The phone in their room did not work. The phone in her room did, but she was informed by the operator downstairs—an excitement blooming in her voice when she placed Amanda’s accent and learned of her call’s destination—that an outgoing call would be twentyfive American dollars, payable in advance at the front desk. “I’ve got to walk over there,” Amanda told them when she came back. “Calling out from here’s a pipe dream.”

  Both Ted and Michael were now in their slender single beds, their restless legs scissoring under the sheets and their hands plastered to their faces, as if trying to cool the burning brain pans behind their skulls. The room’s intestinal stench was eye-watering.

  “Amanda,” Michael said, “listen.” She looked at the empty travel bottles of Pepto-Bismol on the night table and at Ted, reaching over the edge of his bed and, without looking, digging in his carry-on. “We’re going to wait this out. We talked about it. We can wait this out.”

  She brushed hair from her face. “Michael, let me call them at least—”

  “We’re waiting it out, Amanda. You go to Nukus and meet Nuridinov, and we’ll be along in the next day or two. The flight leaves in two hours. If you want to catch it you’ve got to hurry.”

  “There’s no reason to involve the embassy in this, Mandy,” Ted said.

  “This isn’t a pissing contest, gentlemen. You’re both ill, and we have no idea how seriously. Jesus, think about it! This is a no-brainer. Doesn’t the embassy have a staff specifically for in-country nationals’ emergencies?”

  Ted spoke through his teeth. “I traveled through Commie Russia for six months, Amanda, and I never once so much as darkened the embassy’s door. I’ll be damned if I do it now.”

  Amanda, disgusted, merely stared at them, listening to the smooth fabric hiss of the beds’ cheap material as her teammates writhed against it. After a while she said, “You’re academics, you know, not superheroes.”

  Michael propped himself up to look at her. “If you don’t want to go alone, Amanda, we understand, but someone needs to call the ministry to tell them what’s happened.”

  “Oh, for . . . I’ve got no problems with going alone, Michael. I speak Russian better than either one of you.” She was about to explain that the only thing keeping her here was her concern for their well-being when a possibly delirious Ted stepped in:

  “Then what’s the fucking problem, you dumb cunt? Go.”

  She left.

  “What’s with the blind
fold?” the American asked.

  His response was two beats delayed; she’d interrupted him from something. “To make you sightless.”

  “Other than that,” she said darkly.

  “You will know soon. Do not be frightened.”

  “I’m too tired to be frightened,” the American said. They had left Nukus’s KGB building and were driven by her captor’s chauffeur—the man who at the airport assured her he was from the Ministry of Water—to the city of Moynaq, a drive of two hours. Moynaq, like most of Uzbekistan’s penumbral cities, was ornamented by nuclear-winter lassitude, but due to its closeness to Aral it was worse off than most. Driving through its devastated streets felt to the American like putting on dirty clothes. In the middle of Moynaq they entered a run-down warehouse strewn with broken concrete and automobile shells; there her hands were bound and she was blindfolded, then put into another car—something bouncy like a dune buggy—where she sat alone for forty minutes until joined by her captor and three others. One was the driver, she knew. The other two were a mystery. She heard only their endless maneuvering against the back-torturing plastic seats and their steady breathing.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, shouting over the insectoid drone of the engine. The dune buggy heaved and revved, the driver swearing heroically after more alarming bumps.

  “I told you,” the man said.

  After an unidentifiable length of time, the dune buggy came to an inglorious, wheezing stop. She heard the driver light a cigarette. The mysterious passengers sighed quietly. Somewhere far away tractors were plowing. The wind pushed at her, the dust weaved into its invisible fabric whistling. Her head came to rest against the roll bar.

  “Are you going to kill me?” the American asked, startled at how unmoved she was by this possibility.

  The man exhaled sharply and laughed a little. “No, Professor Reese.”

  The American swiveled her head around. “It’s bright.”

  “We are outside.”

  The American laughed herself now, then nodded. “You knew,” she began, “that I was coming on that flight to Nukus alone. Right at the airport you knew to grab me.”

  “We had no idea you would be alone, Professor,” he said. “Not at all. We thought all along professors Whitford and Nam would be with you.”

  “So the plan was to nab all of us.”

  “Nab is a sinister word, Professor. Escort you is perhaps more accurate.”

  “Why? Why is the government doing this when they’re the ones who invited us here?”

  He said nothing for a few moments and then cleared his throat. The two unknown passengers climbed out of the dune buggy and padded away on what sounded like gravel. When they were gone he told her, “My government, Professor, is unaware of what is happening here.” And with a polite, regal-sounding “Excuse me,” he left the vehicle as well.

  The American sat there alone under the murderous sun, salted by the wind. She dozed for what might have been ten minutes or two hours and was awakened by rough sausagy fingers undoing her binds. “Ket,” the driver said to her when she was free. “Khozer, tez-tez.”

  “Ya ne govoryu po-uzbekski,” the American told him. I don’t speak Uzbek.

  “Go,” he said to her in Russian, and as she stood he peeled off her blindfold.

  The sun nearly exploded her eyeballs. With a hopeful foot she tried to step out of the buggy and onto the running board but miscalculated. She smacked her lip against the roll bar as she tumbled out of the buggy and onto the ground. Her tongue probed the split lip. It had burst open like a ripe tomato. Cathedral bells gonged whole dirges in her head; salty, sulfurous dust filled her mouth. Dizzily she stood and looked around, her pupils mad, convulsing black pinpricks.

  “It is unenjoyable,” she heard behind her. She turned. There the man stood, a small well-dressed black-haired child on each side of him. His hands were on their backs and they stared at the space above the American’s head with the emotion of rag dolls. Behind them were a half-dozen grounded, rusted-out fishing boats—a naval graveyard. Above the boats the sun sizzled like a cancerous boil in the yellow sky. She knew she was standing on what used to be the Aral Sea’s silty floor. Once water had washed over the rocks beneath her feet, flickered against the ships’ crumbling hulls, carried on its wave crests the burden of every creature’s life for miles around her. It was a burden now lifted; she couldn’t see anything for miles other than the graveyard’s hulking tombstones and yellow-brown scree. She felt hotter right now than she imagined possible and fought back the urge to dry-heave, to faint.

  From her split lip a thread of blood unspooled, stopping on the swell of her chin. She mopped it away with her pocket handkerchief and said, “What’s unenjoyable?”

  “Blindness,” he said, and moved his hands from his children’s backs to the tops of their heads. “Blindness,” he said again, and looked away.

  After a moment of puzzlement, the American caught the milkiness to the children’s eyes, the unseeing patina coating their corneas. “Oh, Christ,” she said, sighing it, and looked away herself.

  “I thought the world would hear of this,” the man said, still looking away from her, “if I showed the Americans.” His smile became impish, then mischievous, so mischievous it took her a moment to recognize that he was weeping. The children, under their father’s hands, remained as still as the ship carcasses behind them.

  “Their mother—?” the American said.

  He shrugged, his mouth a lumpy, hardened bulge. “Cancer. Dead.” He turned away from her, into the poisonous, erosive wind. “I was going to leave you, the three of you, out here—strand you—for the night. Then return the next morning to ask how you felt about your proposals for us now.”

  The American said nothing.

  “I knew by doing that to you—I knew I would be punished, Professor Reese. This word punished means—this means something else to us, I’m afraid, than it does to you. But I felt it was important. Doing something more than—” He stopped himself and turned back to her, smiling again, and pointed at the dune buggy. The driver sat behind the wheel, his back to the wind, smoking. “That is my brother, Ilhomjon. He will care for my children. I leave them to him now.”

  The American said nothing.

  The man hooked his arms around the children and slowly led them away. He stopped, turned to the American, and hesitated before asking her, “It wouldn’t have mattered, would it? If I had showed the Americans.”

  “No,” she said.

  Now the man nodded. For a long time he nodded. Then he said, “I think I will strand you anyway, Professor,” and walked away.

  Expensive Trips Nowhere

  Jayne breaks the morning’s long silence: “I have a rock in my boot, I think.”

  Viktor and Douglas do not look at each other as Jayne hunkers into a lotus and with one pull dissolves an impressive knot of signal-orange laces. She removes her boot, turns it upside down, and gives it an irate ketchup-bottle shake. An incisor-shaped pebble plinks off her thigh.

  When they continue on, it seems to Douglas that the silence has an entirely new implication. It reminds him of the equally unanswerable silence he and Jayne once shared, walking side by side to Lenox Hill Hospital after he’d accidentally broken her arm playing touch football with friends in Central Park. To speak, then as now, struck him as absurd.

  A moraine-pocked valley sprawls before him beneath the cloudy dimmer of a huge gray sky. A powerless yellow blur is the only indication that the sun continues to exist. Jayne is ahead of him now, moving up the valley’s gentle slope, hopping from boulder to boulder, her little brown ponytail bouncing. Viktor is in the lead. Far in the lead. Too far, Douglas thinks, popping an herbal cough drop. The valley and surrounding mountains are so quiet that the accumulated jingle of their equipment has the startling tonality of a triangle tapped over and over again. When Douglas closes his eyes, his skull filling with peppermint, he thinks of the tink of silverware at wordless meals spent with his parents
and of childhood carriage rides through a powdery Central Park. But his lids lift and he is back on the steppe, moving across the world’s empty center.

  By leaping from rock to rock to rock in their quest to reach the valley’s other side, Douglas understands that he and Jayne and Viktor are engaged in what is known as bouldering, a term that strikes Douglas as one rich with effortful coinage. He has bouldered before; this is their second boulder field of the day. They came upon their first early this morning, long before their run-in with the bandits, passing through a talus-littered cleft to find themselves at the base of a forbidding muskeg pitted with rocky islets, the unrisen sun a pink smear along the horizon. Some boulders were Volkswagen-sized, others no bigger than an ottoman. They lay fixed in the valley’s spring-thawed soil and stretched for nearly a mile, forming by some glacial fluke a workable path. Viktor had been quick to provide navigational pointers.

  Keep your feet in center of any rock you step on. Otherwise you roll rock and turn your ankle. Step only on rocks with fur.

  Douglas and Jayne had exchanged glances. Lichens, you mean?

  Da, da. Lichens. Old rocks, he’d said. Most secure.

  When Viktor finished, his indifferent powder-blue eyes locked on Douglas’s. Ponimayete? he asked him. Understand? Douglas had nodded, irritated by Viktor’s insistence on addressing him in Russian before the clarifying English switch-over. There is something malevolent about this, Douglas decides now.

  Douglas watches Jayne maneuver along the rocks, wondering in a distracted way exactly what anatomical principle causes her rear end to double in size when she bends over. Jayne, it seems, has taken Viktor’s instruction to heart; any time her feet wander out to a boulder’s periphery, they spark immediately back to the center. Standing there, features scrunched, fussing with her backpack straps, her ponytail stilled, she spends the same amount of time settling on her next boulder as she does selecting fruit at the market. When she moves, though, she moves with beautiful simian grace, and only now can Douglas picture Jayne as the freckly, tree-climbing tomboy she claims to have once been. Some inner perversity moves Douglas to venture only to those boulders Jayne has dismissed. Once aboard a particularly chancy reject—a wobbly-looking anvil-shaped rock naked of any lichens whatsoever—Douglas, emboldened by transgression, pushes his waffled black boot sole right to the boulder’s edge.