God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  The road narrowed. The houses grew tighter, bigger, and slightly taller. The smoky air thickened, and soon they were rolling through Ahktar’s village proper. He saw a few shops crammed with junk—ammunition and foodstuffs and Aladdin’s lamp for all he knew—their window displays tiered backward like auditorium seating. Black curly-haired goats hoofed at the dirt. Dogs slunk from doorway to doorway. Dark hawk-nosed men wearing shirts with huge floppy sleeves waved at Ahktar. Most looked Tajik, and Donk cursed his laziness for not learning at least how to count in Tajik during all the months he had spent in Tajikistan. Walking roadside were beehive-shaped figures whose bedspread-white and sky-blue garments managed to hide even the basest suggestion of human form. These were women. Around their facial areas Donk noted narrow, tightly latticed eye slots. Children ran happily beside the jeep, many holding pieces of taut string. “Kites,” Graves observed weakly. “They’re flying kites.”

  Ahktar’s face turned prideful. “Now we are free, you see.” He pointed at the sky. Donk turned his head sideways and peered up out the window. Floating above the low buildings of Ahktar’s village were, indeed, scores of kites. Some were boxes, others quadrangular; some swooped and weaved like osprey, others hung eerily suspended.

  Hassan looked up also. “We could not fly kites before,” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” Donk said. “I know. Let freedom ring.”

  “When they leave our village,” Ahktar—a bit of a present-tense addict, it seemed—went on, “we see many changes, such as shaving of the beards. The men used to grow big beards, of course very long, and they checked!”

  Donk smiled. “So you had a long beard?”

  “Of course I have. I show you my pictures. It was a very long beard! Now everybody is free to shave or grow as their own choice.”

  It seemed impious to point out that virtually every man momentarily centered within the frame of Donk’s murky plastic window had a griffin’s nest growing off his chin.

  “When did they leave?” Donk asked. “Was it recently?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ahktar said. “Very recently!” He cut the engine and rolled them down a rough dirt path through a part of the village that seemed a stone labyrinth. Sack-burdened peasants struggled past plain mud homes. Kunduz suddenly seemed a thriving desert metropolis in comparison. A high-walled compound guarded by two robed young men cradling Kalashnikovs stood where the path dwindled into a driveway. Inches before the compound’s metal gate the jeep rolled to a soft stop. Ahktar climbed out of the vehicle, and Donk followed.

  “What’s this?” Donk asked.

  “My father’s house. I think you are in trouble. If so, he is the man you are wanting to talk to now.”

  “We’re not in trouble,” Donk said. “My friend is sick. We just need to get him some medicine. We’re not in any trouble. Our car broke down.”

  Ahktar lifted his hands, as though to ease Donk. “Yes, yes.” He moved toward the compound’s gate. “Come. Follow.”

  “What about my friend?” But Donk turned to see that the guards were helping Graves from the jeep and leading him toward Ahktar’s father’s compound. Surprisingly, Graves did not spurn their assistance or call them bloody Hindoos, but simply nodded and allowed his arms to find their way around each guard’s neck. They dragged him along, Graves’s legs serving as occasional steadying kick-stands. Hassan followed behind them, again nervously eating the raisins he kept in his pocket.

  The large courtyard, its trees stripped naked by autumn, was patrolled by a dozen more men holding Kalashnikovs. They were decked out in the same crossbred battle dress as the soldiers Donk had seen loitering around Kunduz: camouflage pants so recently issued by the American military they still held their crease, shiny black boots, pakuls (the floppy national hat of Afghanistan), rather grandmotherly shawls, and shiny leather bandoliers. While most of the bandoliers were empty, a few of these irregulars had hung upon them three or four small bulblike grenades. They looked a little like explosive human Christmas trees.

  “Wait one moment, please,” Ahktar said, strolling across the courtyard and ducking into one of the many dark doorless portals at its northern edge. The guards deposited Graves at a wooden table, and a minute later he was brought a pot of tea. Donk and Hassan, exchanging glances, walked over to Graves’s table and sat down in the cold dark light. The soldiers on the compound’s periphery had yet to acknowledge them. They simply walked back and forth, back and forth, along the walls. Something about their manner, simultaneously alert and robotic, led Donk to guess that their weapons’ safeties were off—if Kalashnikovs even had safeties, which, come to think of it, he was fairly sure they did not.

  “Nothing quite like a safe, friendly village,” Graves said in a thin voice. He sipped his tea, holding the round handleless cup with both hands.

  “How do you feel, Mister Graves?” Hassan asked eagerly.

  “Hassan, I feel dreadful.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this, Mister Graves.”

  Graves set down the teacup and frowned. He looked at Hassan. “Be a lad and see if you can’t scare up some sugar for me, would you?”

  Hassan stared at him, empty-faced.

  Graves chuckled at the moment he seemed to recognize that the joke had not been funny. “I’m joking, Hassan.” He poured them both a cup of tea, and with a dramatic shiver quickly returned his arm to the warm protective folds of his blanket. “Bloody freezing, isn’t it?”

  “It’s actually a little warmer,” Donk said, turning from his untouched tea to see Ahktar and an older gentleman walking over to join them. Ahktar’s father was a towering man with a great napkin-shaped cinnamon beard. He wore long clean white-yellow robes and a leather belt as thick as a cummerbund. Stuffed into this belt was what looked to be a .45. He was almost certainly Tajik, and had large crazed eyes and a nose that looked as hard as a sharp growth of bark. But he was smiling—something he did not do well, possibly for lack of practice. When he was close he threw open his arms and proclaimed something with an air of highly impersonal sympathy.

  “My father says you are welcome,” Ahktar said. He did not much resemble his father, being smaller and darker-skinned. Doubtless Ahktar had a Pashtun mother around here somewhere. Donk could almost assemble her features. His father said something else, then nudged Ahktar to translate. “He says too that you are his great and protected guests.” His father spoke again, still with his effortful smile. “He says he is grateful for American soldiers and grateful for you American journalists, who care only of the truth.”

  “English,” Graves said quietly.

  “Whatever trouble you are in my father will help you. It is his delight.”

  “Ahktar.” Donk stepped in gently, “I told you. We’re not in any trouble. My friend here is very sick. Our car broke down. We were trying to go to Mazar. It’s very simple.”

  Ahktar said nothing.

  “Well,” Donk asked, “are you going to tell your father that?”

  “I tell him that already.”

  “Then can we go to Mazar from here?”

  The muscles of Ahktar’s face tightened with regret. “Unfortunately, that is problem. No one is going to Mazar today.” He seemed suddenly to wish that he were not standing beside his father, who of course asked what had just been said. Ahktar quietly back-translated for him, obviously hoping that his pea of an answer would be smothered beneath the mattress of translation.

  “Why can’t we go to Mazar?” Donk pressed.

  At this mention of Mazar his father spoke again, angrily now. Ahktar nodded obediently. “My father wishes you to know you are safe here. Mazar is maybe not so safe.”

  “But Mazar’s perfectly safe. It’s been safe for days. I have friends there.”

  “My father is friendly with American soldiers in Mazar. Very friendly. And now we are helping them with some problems they are having in this region. We have authority for this. Unfortunately, Mazar’s Uzbek commander and my father are not very friendly, and there my father has no
authority. Therefore it would be good for you to stay.”

  After a pause, Donk spoke. “Who, may I ask, is your father?”

  “My father is General Ismail Mohammed. He was very important part of United National Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which fought against—”

  “But Mazar’s commander was part of that same front.”

  “Yes,” Ahktar said sadly. “Here is problem.”

  Donk had met a suspiciously large number of generals during his time in Afghanistan, and was not sure how to judge General Mohammed’s significance. Warlord? Ally? Both? He let it drop. “Do you have medicine here?”

  Again Ahktar shrugged. “Some. But unfortunately it is with my father’s soldiers now. They are out taking care of some problems for Lieutenant Marty.”

  “Is Lieutenant Marty with them?”

  “Oh, no. Lieutenant Marty is in Mazar.”

  “Where we can’t go.”

  “Yes.”

  There really were, Donk had often thought, and thought again now, two kinds of people in the world: Chaos People and Order People. For Donk this was not a bit of cynical Kipling wisdom to be doled out among fellow journalists in barren Inter-Continental barrooms. It was not meant in a condescending way. No judgment; it was a purely empirical matter: Chaos People, Order People. Anyone who doubted this had never tried to wait in line, board a plane, or get off a bus among Chaos People. The next necessary division of the world’s people took place along the lines of whether they actually knew what they were. The Japanese were Order People and knew it. Americans and English were Chaos People who thought they were Order People. The French were the worst thing to be: Order People who thought they were Chaos People. But Afghans, like Africans and Russians and the Irish, were Chaos People who knew they were Chaos People, and while this lent them a good amount of charm, it made their countries berserk, insane. Countries did indeed go insane. Sometimes they went insane and stayed insane. Chaos People’s countries particularly tended to stay insane. Donk miserably pulled off his do-rag, the bloody glue that held the fabric to his skin tearing from his ruined eyebrow so painfully that he had to work to keep the tears from his eyes. “So tell me, Ahktar. What are we supposed to do here?”

  Before anyone could answer, Graves had a seizure.

  A few hours later, Donk was sitting outside the room in which Graves had been all but quarantined. He was petting a stray wolfish mongrel with filaments of silver hair threaded through its black coat, waiting for the village medicine man to emerge from Graves’s room. This man had claimed he was a doctor and offered up to Donk a large pouch of herbs as evidence. Donk did not have the heart to argue. The compound was quiet, except for some small animals fighting or playing along the eaves just above Donk’s head and the occasional overhead roar of a jet. Hassan, sitting a few feet away, watched Donk stroke the dog’s head in revulsion.

  “Why,” he asked finally, “do you do that?”

  Donk had always taken pity on Central Asian dogs, especially after learning that one could fend off a possible attack by miming the act of picking up a stone, at which the dogs usually turned and ran away. He lowered his lips to the creature’s head and planted upon it a chaste kiss. The dog smelled of oily musk. “Because it’s lonely,” Donk said.

  “That is a filthy animal,” Hassan told him. “You should not touch such a filthy animal, Mister Donk.”

  Donk chose not to point out that Hassan was, if anything, far dirtier. The boy had spent a night with Donk and Graves in Kunduz. His body odor had been so potent, so overwhelmingly cheesy, that Donk had not been able to sleep. Misplaced Muslim piety, he thought with uncharacteristic bitterness.

  “You’re right,” Donk said at last. “The dog’s filthy. But so am I. So there we are.”

  Hassan hmphed.

  During the seizure Donk had stuffed his bloody do-rag in Graves’s mouth to keep him from biting off his tongue, even though he knew convulsive people rarely, if ever, bit off their own tongues. It was one of those largely ceremonial things people did in emergencies. Donk had pushed Graves up on the table and held him down. Graves shuddered for a few moments, his eyes filled with awful awareness, his chest heaving like the gills of a suffocating fish. Then, mercifully, he went unconscious. Donk used the rest of his iodined water to try to rehydrate Graves, but he quickly vomited it up. At this General Mohammed had sent for his medicine man.

  Donk knew there were at least two kinds of malaria. The less serious strain was stubborn and hard to kill— flulike symptoms could recur as long as five decades after the initial infection—but it was rarely lethal. The more serious strain quickly turned life-threatening if untreated. He was no longer wondering which strain Graves had contracted. Graves was conscious now—Donk could hear him attempting to reason with the village doctor—but his voice was haggard and dazed.

  Donk looked around. Thirty or forty yards away a small group of General Mohammed’s soldiers watched him, their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. They looked beaten, bullied, violent. Hair-trigger men. Their faces were like shadows. And these were the winners. Donk found himself, suddenly, missing women. Seeing them, staring at them, smelling them. Afghanistan had mailed into Donk’s brain a series of crushingly similar mental postcards: men, men, desert, men, men, men, guns, men, guns, guns, desert, guns, men. One might think that life without women would lead to a simpler, less fraught existence. No worries about hair or odor. Saying whatever you wanted. But one’s eye tired of men as surely as one’s nerves tired of guns.

  It was not just women, however. Donk missed sex even more. He needed, he admitted, an inordinate amount of sex. Heavy people needed things—hence their heaviness. Sex was a large part of the reason he had been reluctant to leave Chicago to come to Afghanistan. He was having a Guinness Book amount of it with Tina, who was maybe his girlfriend, his first in a long time. As luck would have it, Tina was menstruating the night before he left. They had had sex anyway, in her bathroom, and left bloody foot- and handprints all over the white tile. They Windexed away the blood together. It had not been freaky. It had almost been beautiful, and he loved her. But for him distance was permission, and newness arousal itself. Plane tickets and hotel rooms were like lingerie. He had already slept with an AP reporter in Tashkent. He did not regret it, exactly, because he had every intention of lying about it later. It occurred to him that he had also lied to Graves, about not being haunted. Strangely, he felt bad about that lie. It seemed like something Graves should have known. But Donk had not known where to begin.

  A decade ago, Donk had worked as a staff photographer for a dozen family newspapers peppered throughout central Wisconsin, all somehow owned by the same unmarried Republican. His life then had been sitting through school-board meetings and upping the wattage of the smiles of local luminaries, drinking three-dollar pitchers of Bud after work, and suffering polite rejection from strangers he misjudged as unattractive enough to want to speak to him. This life began to end when the last of five sudden strokes stripped Donk’s father of his mind and sent him off into dementia. Donk was the only one of his siblings who lived within a thousand miles of Milwaukee, where his father was hospitalized; his mother had long refused to speak to the man. So, alone, Donk had set up camp beside his father’s deathbed.

  Death was a peculiar thing. Some people endured unenviable amounts of firsthand death without its one clearest implication ever occurring to them. Donk had never much thought about his own death before. The prospect had always felt to him like a television show he knew was on channel 11 at eight o’clock but had never watched and never planned to. Donk stared at the monitors, listened to the hiss of his father’s bed’s mattress as the nurses pistoned it up and down, timed the steady beep whose provenance he did not care to isolate. It was all he could do to keep from thinking that everything was assembled to provide the man a few last deprived moments of life. Donk realized that even if he were beside his father at the moment his final journey began, the man would still die alone, a
s Donk would die alone, as we all die alone. Horribly, doubly alone, for just as no one went with us, no one greeted us when it was over.

  Nurses found him weeping in the hospital’s cafeteria. When his father’s doctor brought some final forms for Donk to fill out, she slipped into his catatonic hand a small packet of diazepam. The nervous breakdown, Donk expected. The estrangement from his surviving family— who could not understand his “sudden obsession” with dying—he expected. Quitting his job and investing his small inheritance, he expected; becoming a freelance combat photographer, he did not. People who were not correspondents laughed when Donk told the story, which he often did. It sounded so unbelievable. But people are not born combat photographers any more than they are born lawyers. One day you were waiting tables; the next you were in law school. One day you were heartbroken and megalomaniacal; the next you were faxing visa requests to embassies using stolen letterhead. Only Tajikistan’s had answered him. If Tajikistan’s embassy wondered why the Waukesha Freeman felt it needed a photographer in Dushanbe, it did not share that curiosity with Donk. He was awarded his first visa to his first war, a genuine hot war, a civil war. He told everyone he met in Dushanbe that he was “stringing,” even though he was not sure what that word really entailed. In Tajikistan he saw his first gunshot wound, his first dead baby. He learned that combat photographers either spooked or did not. To his surprise, Donk did not. At least, he spooked no more than on the afternoon he watched his father burp, sigh, and stop breathing. The photo of the gunned-down old woman, taken after five months and $3,000 of squandered savings, led to Donk’s covering the reconciliation trials in Rwanda for one of India’s biggest dailies. There he learned that he no longer had much patience for American minorities’ claims of oppression. Rwanda led to Jerusalem, shortly after the intifada. There he learned of the subterranean connections world media outlets had expertly tunneled beneath continents of human misery, and how often you passed the same faces when traveling through them. Jerusalem led to Dagestan, where he spent a day with a Tatar Muslim warlord whose nom de guerre was Hitler and who made an awkward pass at Donk when they were alone. He learned that, of all the countries in the world, America was most hesitant to publish graphic “bang-bang” photos. He learned that arms and cocaine were the world’s second and third most profitable exports, after human sex slaves. He learned how to shop for a Kevlar vest. He learned how to take a good picture while running. He learned, when all else failed, to follow refugees. And he learned that the worse and more ugly the reality around him, and the more impervious to it and better he felt, the more he forgot his father. He learned that the only thing that truly frightened him was quiet, because he knew death was quiet—the longest quiet. He learned that the persona that came with this strange fearlessness was able to win, if only for a night, a certain kind of troubled heart belonging to a certain kind of woman more worldly than Donk had any previous right to expect, and he learned that he was the type of man to abuse this ability.