by Tom Bissell
And then he is walking by himself, just as Jayne is, just as Viktor is. Three strangers on the steppe. Douglas feels the special bitter pleasure that comes with being angry and righteous and alone. She could leave him. He knows that. It is one of the many things he knows. He knows that he is a teacher because he enjoys the attention of children more than that of adults, and he knows there is something egotistical and sinister and frightened in this enjoyment. He knows that once, when he was haunting Lower Manhattan bookstores in the wake of his law-school washout, Jayne had found him irresistible and strange but now finds him something else but has not yet fully figured out what, he doesn’t think. He knows poetry, all about poetry—Frost, Auden, Stevens—and had— briefly!—tried to write it, but he knows he is no good, and this does not bother him, much. He knows nothing about IPOs and 401(k)s. He also knows he is in possession of no special gift, no appreciable talent, a peasant in the New Economy’s fiefdom, and that his parents, whose living disapproval had once made this condition acceptable, are dead. And he knows, too, that he is a coward.
Viktor and Jayne have stopped at a small hill twenty yards ahead. They are turned toward him and stand in rugged colored silhouette against scalloped mountains and an icy blue sky. Douglas looks up, toward the sun. The morning’s earlier cumulus ceiling has now fully dissipated, and thin lenticular saucer clouds float across the atmosphere. He trudges up the hill and, once he has joined them, hears a gush as thick as applause coming from its opposite side.
“A river,” Jayne says. For some reason, she smiles. He looks to Viktor and wonders what they were talking about but does not really wish to know.
“Oh,” Douglas says. “Okay.” He casts his eyes to the base of the hill and sees the river, a rush of silver topped with turbulent foam.
“Doesn’t look so bad,” Jayne offers mildly.
“Rivers,” Viktor intones. “Very dangerous. We cross!” He charges down the hill. Jayne watches Viktor with pallid awe. His movements have a thoughtless, animal anticipation, seemingly privy to the terrain’s every secret. Viktor transfers his weight from one foot to the other so smoothly that gravity seems to pull him forward rather than down. Although it is spring and the steppe is still cold, Viktor wears dirty canvas shorts. This allows Jayne to note his grenadelike calves and the long pythonic muscles on the backs of his thighs. Jayne remembers, abruptly, that Russian men are famed ballet dancers.
“Once more into the breach,” Douglas mutters, galloping down the hill himself. Jayne feels something uncomfortably close to disappointment that Douglas makes it to the bottom without stumbling. She ventures down the hill herself, slowly and sideways, like a crab.
After a moment of double-check reconnoitering, Viktor leads them along the river’s bank. It is edged with rocks and mucky soil and vaguely pubic gray-green vegetation and not a speck of evidence that human beings had ever before walked this path. Long white phalanges of snow lie in every shady furrow. “We must find widest part,” Viktor tells them.
Douglas shouts over the rage of the river, “Why don’t we just cross right now?”
Viktor turns to answer, but Jayne beats him to it. “Wherever the river is widest is also where the current is slowest.” She finds a stick marooned between two rocks at river’s edge and, to illustrate her point, heaves it into the water. The stick is caught and swept away more quickly than even she was expecting.
Douglas shakes his head, either angry he is wrong or angry she has made him so. He calls to Viktor, “You knew the river was here, though, right? Why didn’t you lead us . . . around it?”
“Once, river small,” he responds, without turning around. “Now river big.”
Douglas laughs, a cosmically empty laugh. “What does that mean?”
Viktor stops, head darkly tipped forward, then turns to confront him. His face has a clear unwrinkled menace. His mouth is open but he says nothing, his tongue dry and gray in its hollow. It is as though whole paragraphs of choice, partially translated reproaches are cycling through his Russian brain.
Suddenly Jayne is wedging herself between them. “The snow, you mean? The snow melted and ran down from the mountains?”
Viktor blinks. His mouth closes and stretches into a grin that doesn’t seem to end. He claps, once, joylessly, and sets off again, all marching-past-the-Kremlin energy.
“You two are certainly hitting it off,” Douglas tells her, when Viktor is out of earshot. The words do not hang between them for long before he feels a cold tremor of regret. Amazing, he thinks: He really could not have said anything worse. He tries to launder the statement with a joke, softly elbowing her and hating the falseness of the smile tearing his lips away from his teeth. “Should I worry about going back home alone?”
Jayne takes a long time to respond, a silence in which Douglas hears her die to him three, four, five times. “I wonder if you would worry about that.”
Douglas puts up a monitory hand. “Okay. Let’s stop now.” He walks for a while, kicking every bit of rock not bolted down by erosion into the river. “It would worry me. It would kill me. You know that.”
Jayne says nothing. Douglas listens to her breathe, inhales the thin unpleasant scent coming off her unwashed body. She did not use to smell like this, not even after spending a whole day in bed with him. He wonders at what age it is exactly that women exchange their scent of talc for that of faint decay. Just as he begins to hold this against her, Douglas winces, his ankle knocking like a pinched blood vessel. The only thing that keeps him from stopping to tighten his bootlaces is the certainty that Jayne will not wait for him if he does.
Viktor drops his pack and turns to them. “We cross,” he announces gravely.
“This doesn’t look any wider,” Douglas mutters to no one, bending down to redo his laces. When he is finished he looks at the river and sees that, actually, it is a bit wider here. On top of that, a dozen well-placed rocks make a broken span from one side of the river to the other. There is probably not a better place to cross a river in the entire former Soviet Union.
Viktor stands next to his huge torso-sized pack, contemplating the river. Jayne unloads her much smaller pack and sets it beside Viktor’s. Viktor’s pack is as gray and beaten as Almaty concrete; it appears better suited to haul potatoes than carry gear. Jayne’s pack, Douglas notes, is offensively new and colored in laboratory hues of yellow and red and orange. When Jayne squats beside Viktor, her thighs spreading like thick flanks of beef, Douglas turns away.
He walks over to the river’s edge and ponders the radioactivity that in all likelihood lurks along this riverbed’s freezing silt. He imagines all of Kazakhstan’s rivers as great glowing veins carrying their ghastly chemotherapy to the nation’s every corner. That there is something catastrophically wrong right before his eyes, something he can do nothing to alleviate or worsen, fills him with almost holy relief.
Jayne stares at her pack, condemned by its newness. She feels Viktor’s cold Russian eyes on her. “Please don’t look at me,” Jayne says softly, pulling the elastic cinch from the back of her head. Her ponytail comes apart, pungent oily hair falling into her downturned face. She blinks away the strands that catch in the barbed wire of her eyelashes.
Viktor nudges her pack with his boot, knocking his hands together in cryptic anticipation. She turns. His hands are eye-level, huge and chalky and cracked, his knuckles like rivets. “Steppe makes strong what is strong,” Viktor says. “Makes weak what is weak.”
She shakes her head. “Viktor, please. Spare me.” When she looks back at him he is gone, leaping across the river.
Douglas wanders over to Jayne, still squatting by her pack. “More boulders, huh?” Jayne’s eyebrows raise with crushing politeness. Douglas looks at Viktor and squints. “What’s he doing?”
“Making sure it’s safe?”
Douglas snorts and stares at a newfound rock. “Well, bully for him.”
“You’re having fun.” Jayne is still looking away, toward the river’s unimaginable headwat
ers. Fifty yards upstream is a miniature waterfall, the river pouring itself from one level to another in a clean glass-white arc that appears solid enough to walk upon.
He looks down at her. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say about this morning.”
Her expression does not change. “You don’t have to say anything, Doug.”
Quickly he squats beside her. “You know that if they did anything to you—”
She nods in hard, quick countermeasure, her eyes awash with unhappiness. “I know. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Douglas looks over to see Viktor returning. His above-the-knee shorts are fringed with a dark watermark and his leather hiking boots have the soaked, deep-brown look of living cowflesh. His legs glisten hairlessly. “ Tak,” he says, approaching them. “Very important. You keep pack loose when you cross, da?”
“Loose?” Jayne says.
Viktor lifts his pack with one hand, as though it were no heavier than a stole. He threads his arms through its straps and buckles his waist belt and sternum strap. Then, in moron-befitting slow motion, he unbuckles his waist belt and sternum strap and lets them dangle meaningfully from his body. “Understand? No straps. Very dangerous.”
“No straps,” Douglas says, struggling beneath his pack to rise.
“You fall in, you leave pack.”
“Right,” Douglas says. “I get it.”
“No straps.”
Douglas’s face fills with heat, as though he is leaning into a cleansing steam of dishwasher waft. “Drowning being what we’re avoiding here.”
Viktor regards Douglas with a vinegary expression, then shakes his head and stalks off toward the river.
“I’m not an idiot, you know,” Douglas calls after him.
Viktor slows but does not turn and then continues on.
Jayne is standing now, angrily working her way into her pack. Each word from her mouth seems to sizzle. “Is it a good idea to make an enemy of the one guy who can lead us out of here?”
Douglas looks at her, serenely undoing his straps. “The helicopter picks us up tomorrow. In fifteen hours we’ll never see him again.”
Viktor gazelles across the river in eight confident bounds. Viktor has that, Douglas thinks: perfect confidence. All thoroughly second-rate people had it. Only once, on the very first rock, was Viktor forced to break stride. Douglas had noted that hesitation and stands on that rock now. Four—possibly five—feet lie between it and the next rock. Douglas grinds his boot waffle against stone, aware that Jayne is waiting behind him, on the bank, as impassive as one of the sculptures in her studio. He is not afraid—the river does not look all that deep; the current does seem to let up here—but he knows he cannot fail. He cannot. To do so will allow Viktor to believe any number of things about Douglas, many of which Douglas would ordinarily concede as true. But he is more than the steppe. He is more than this morning. Moments mean nothing. Spume collects on Douglas’s face. Viktor now waits on the other side of the river. He sits Indian-style, gallingly oblivious, forearms draped across his knees, a cigarette dangling from his lip like an icicle. Bastard, Douglas thinks. Insolent bastard.
“Doug?” Jayne says.
He half turns. “I didn’t say anything while I was waiting for you on those fucking boulders.”
Douglas jumps before she can say anything else. His feet come down on rock, blessedly solid. The next few are as simple as walking, and he takes them with Christlike calm. He hops off the last rock, relishing the crunch of his boots in the pebbly ford, and saunters right up to where Viktor is sitting. In oppressive silence Douglas towers above Viktor, cloaking him with his shadow.
Viktor’s eyes flick irritably from Douglas to the river to Douglas and then Viktor is standing. He throws his cigarette aside like a dart. Douglas’s fists transform into mallets and he struggles free from his pack. But Viktor rushes past him, toward the river. Douglas turns. Splashing. Water in the air. Suddenly Viktor is standing next to Jayne, his hands cupping her small shoulders with unseemly intimacy. Jayne is sopping wet, every limb, every fiber, every part of her. Her waterlogged jacket looks so heavy it seems capable of foundering both of them. Her hair falls around her face in thick buds. She is crying, explaining something, pointing back toward the bank and then at the rock and now she is slapping at the water, which is deep, up to her waist at least, and it is fast. Viktor has braced himself against the river’s force, the water churning whitely at his thighs. Viktor lifts Jayne’s backpack from the river, water pouring from its innumerable pockets. Jayne’s teeth chatter as harshly as dice in a wooden box. She is still speaking when Viktor scoops her up and carries her toward the shore, her wet, frightened face pressed against his chest. Douglas stands at the bank, arms out, waiting for a delivery that never arrives, uselessly conscious of the play of a thousand rainbows on the water and in the air.
In monastic silence they set up camp on a hill a few kilometers from the river, unrolling the downy logs of their sleeping bags and pounding their tent pegs into the taiga. Jayne hangs her wool socks and pants and orange jacket around their glowing portable Daewoo stove, which, here on the treeless steppe, must serve as a campfire. She ducks into their tent and emerges wearing her black rain pants, Douglas’s Green Lantern T-shirt, and a yellow windbreaker. She sits down across from Douglas, expressionless. Viktor putters around the camp’s edges, as patient as a vulture, then unearths their dinner from his gear. They eat sardines and crackers and sip cognac. After a while they find themselves, still hungry, beneath a bright, freakishly starry sky. For close to an hour Douglas stares at them stare into the stove, then stands. His tent’s zipper howls like a moonstruck animal.
Some time later, Douglas hears low, furtive voices. In the vast darkness, the Daewoo throws off a surprising amount of light, and the tent’s walls are a molten orange. On one wall Viktor and Jayne’s huge golem shadows glower. Douglas is in his sleeping bag, a shiny silver sleeve pleated with cushiony squares. The sleeping bag is said to offer protection up to —40 degrees Fahrenheit. Barring intergalactic travel, he cannot imagine why such protection is necessary. Tomorrow is their last morning on the steppe, he thinks. Tomorrow they will awaken for the last time in the sub-Saharan humidity of this tent’s womb. Tomorrow they will rendezvous with the helicopter and for $300 an hour they will be ferried back to Almaty, board a plane, and fly home. Douglas thinks about tomorrow, his awareness crumbling, his eyes gliding shut. Outside, he hears Viktor and Jayne’s voices rise a little, his mind suspended in the sandy place between sleep and lucidity.
“What animal are you talking about?” Jayne asks.
“It is bird,” Viktor says. “Very . . . beautiful bird. I have seen pictures, photographs of such bird. So beautiful. Is American bird. Its feathers green, and . . . kak, oranzhivye?”
“Orange?”
“Da. O-range. Red. Yellow. Very beautiful. I want very badly to see this bird fly. I think about this bird much. In Russian we call this bird utka. I wonder what word in English must this bird be called. And then I learn that in America you call this bird duck. You laugh at me now.”
“No, no. I’m just—I’ve never thought of it that way, I guess. Your English is . . . very good, Viktor.”
“Nyet. My English is . . . uzhasny. Very bad. Idiot English.”
Douglas is closer to sleep now, brain waves prenatally flattened. He finds himself cast backward, to this morning, minutes after clearing their first boulder field. He is looking up at a gunmetal overcast sky, wondering if it will rain. Jayne is beside him, talking, though he is listening only enough to offer appropriate grunted interjections. Suddenly he feels Jayne’s fingers stab into his wrist, above his watch. His eyes drop.
Viktor is standing fifteen feet ahead of them, frozen. Three men are approaching. Two are not men at all but teenagers. The man is wearing a knockoff Adidas track-suit and carrying a small antiquated pistol, three of his fingers wrapped around the stock and the fourth extended, casually perpendicular to the breech. One of the b
oys carries a large curved knife. His face is dirty in the permanent way that suggests poverty, not circumstance. On his long-sleeved sweatshirt is a version of the Chicago Bulls logo so completely mistaken Douglas feels almost sorry for the boy. In Almaty’s bazaars he had seen similarly ludicrous permutations: New York Yankees T-shirts which somehow incorporated into their design the Empire State Building, Dallas Cowboy knit hats emblazoned with a single red star, sweatshirts for nonexistent clubs like the Las Vegas Braves and Illinois Champions. All stitched from careless memory and a deep, nameless want—the least cynical piracy he has ever seen. The man with the pistol lifts his empty hand, and the boys come to a militaristic halt several feet behind him. From the trio’s black hair and papyrus-colored skin and almond eyes Douglas knows they are Kazakh. They are smiling.
“What was it like,” Jayne asks Viktor outside Douglas’s tent, “when you got back?”
“I had to sell my sunglasses! This in Tashkent. Demobilizatsiya were sent there, after. No instructions. You understand. Our photos were destroyed. Our letters destroyed. We could not talk about Afghanistan. Illegal, tak?”
“Yes. Illegal.”
“I had to sell my sunglasses for ticket to Alma-Ata. Now Almaty, then Alma-Ata. I was private, only. Signal Corps. Brute with iron fist! That is what our sergeant say to us. If we do not yell back same loud enough, we are given hole training.”
“Hole training.”
“Da. This is very interesting. You yell into dirty toilet with sergeant behind you. If you don’t yell back same loud enough, he push in your face. I ask my mother in Alma-Ata soon to buy me small dog and name it Sergeant so I can strangle small dog when I get home. You laugh at me another time.”
“I’m sorry. That’s a little funny, though.”
“So I wait at train station in Tashkent, and I watch pretty girls in blouses and short skirts. I drink vodka so cold it is like cream. I think of Pavel, my friend, when he wakes up to see his leg cut off by doctors. His face like little girl’s, all pink and white. I think of donkeys in Kandahar, how they sit down during shelling, then rise and walk away when shelling stop. That is what I think of Afghanistan then and now. Here. More cognac. Drink.”