God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  His brother and sister called him a fear addict, a desperate idiot on a danger bender; they claimed he had never “dealt” with their father’s death. Donk’s brother, Jason, was a first-team whiskey addict (three interventions and counting: “What, this again?” he had asked, after the most recent). His sister, Marie, lived in Anchorage, too far away to provide Donk with any idea of what, exactly, she was into. Judging from her insensate 3 a.m. phone calls, it was high-impact. Who were they to speak of fear, of “dealing with the natural process of death”? Death was actually the least natural thing Donk could imagine, involving, as it did, not living. Death’s stature as a physiological event did not mean it was natural. The trapped mink does not accept its own death; it chews off its leg. No, death was something else, uncategorized and dreadful, something to be fought off, defied, spat upon. Human Conflict, he thought. Death was the unappeasable aggressor. And he stroked the dog’s small head.

  The medicine man stepped from Graves’s room. Without consulting him, Donk rushed inside. It was a little past ten in the morning now, the light in Graves’s room brighter than he expected. Graves was supine on a thick mass of blankets with another, thinner blanket mostly covering him. He seemed very still. His eyes were dry. Though he did not look at Donk, he raised his hand in brief acknowledgment. Donk crouched next to Graves’s makeshift bed and said nothing. Then, on an impulse, he took Graves’s hand and held it crossways in his own, as though hoping to offer him some mysterious transfer of strength.

  “Did you once think,” Graves asked, “about how dirty dying is? I’m lying here in my own shit. You can smell it, can’t you? I should really do something about this.” He shifted positions and Donk did smell Graves’s shit, thin and sour and soupy. In response he squeezed Graves’s hand. “In England,” Graves went on, wincing briefly, “I think something like eighty percent of all deaths now take place in hospitals. I watched my mother and my father die in hospitals. They went quietly. It was lovely, in its way. But fifty years ago only forty percent of the English population died in hospitals. We sequester the dying, you see. Because it is ugly, it is dirty. I think we don’t want to know that. We want to keep that little truth hidden away. But think a moment about how most people have died, Duncan. They’ve died in places just like this. So if I’m going to die here I’m joining legions. For some reason this makes me happy.” Graves’s head rolled an inch on its pillow, and, for the first time, he looked at Donk.

  Donk stared back at Graves, the connection allowing him to locate the voice, as faraway as a quasar, in his mind. “You’re not going to die.”

  Graves smiled. “Old men have to die. The world grows moldy, otherwise.”

  Graves, Donk knew, was forty. His sympathy left him in one brash gust. “What did the doctor say?”

  “Oh, you mean St. John’s Wort, MD? Hell if I know. He all but sprinkled me with voodoo dust. Duncan, calm down. I’m either going to make it through this or I won’t. I’m not upset. I just have to wait.” He closed his eyes. “‘Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, / It seems to me most strange that men should fear; / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come.’ That Shakespeare. Preternatural, isn’t it? Any occasion one can think of, and there he is.”

  Donk knew he could barely quote Shakespeare if he were spotted “To be” and “not to be.” In a low voice he said, “You are going to die, Graves, if you’ve already convinced yourself you’re going to die.”

  “A puzzle.”

  Donk let go of his hand. “It’s not a fucking puzzle.”

  “Getting upset, Duncan, isn’t going to help me.”

  “Then what is going to help you?”

  “Medicine. Medicine they don’t have here.”

  “Where?” Donk asked. “Where do I go?”

  Graves looked at him again. Suddenly Donk saw the fear just below the flat blue composure of Graves’s eyes, a stern, dignified terror barricaded so completely inside of him it barely recognized itself. Graves’s lips were shaking. “Jesus, Duncan. I—you—you could rent that chap Ahktar’s jeep. You could—”

  With that Donk rushed out, collared Hassan, and went to find General Mohammed and Ahktar. Seven hundred dollars was hidden beneath the insole of Donk’s boot. This would be enough, he hoped, for a safety deposit on the jeep. He would drive to Mazar with Hassan. He would walk into UNICEF’s office or Doctors Without Borders or find Lieutenant Marty and he would come back here. Graves was too sick to travel, and if they broke down again or were stopped—it was too complicated. That was the one truly upsetting thing about Human Conflict: It made everything far too complicated.

  Donk found General Mohammed alone in his quarters. He was wearing glasses, surprisingly enough, sitting at a plain wooden desk, reading a book in Persian. His .45 was flat on the tabletop. Behind the general, on the wall, hung a green-and-black flag last used in Afghanistan during the reign of its deposed king, thirty years ago. Without knocking, Donk announced he was renting Ahktar’s jeep and going to Mazar. Without looking up, General Mohammed informed him that Ahktar had, only an hour before, left in his jeep to take care of a few more problems. He would be back sometime tomorrow, perhaps maybe. Donk stood silently by the general’s doorjamb, feeling himself growing smaller. Perhaps maybe. The national motto of Afghanistan.

  “He says,” Hassan translated for General Mohammed, “that Mister Graves is very sick. He says he has spoken to his doctor.”

  “Yes,” Donk said, looking at the general. “He’s going to die.”

  General Mohammed frowned and spoke again. The man’s face, Donk thought, was 70 percent nose. Hassan translated. “His doctor says there is one thing that can help him.”

  “What’s that?” Donk asked, the second word cracking as it left his mouth. He was still looking at the general.

  “There is a grass that grows in a valley in the mountains. A special grass. Medicine grass?”

  “Medicinal grass.”

  “Yes. This grass his doctor can boil for Mister Graves, he says. Then Mister Graves can drink the broth.” General Mohammed spoke again, nodded, and returned to his book. “He says Mister Graves will get better.” Hassan shrugged.

  “He has malaria,” Donk told Hassan numbly. “Grass won’t help malaria. He needs antibiotics.” Donk had not meant for Hassan to translate this, but he did.

  “Yes,” General Mohammed said, through Hassan. As the general went on Hassan began to shift and nod. “Okay, now he says once he suffered this himself. Six years ago, in the summer?” General Mohammed kept talking. “And many of his men as well. They were all very ill, he says, just like Mister Graves. He says they have seen much of Mister Graves’s sickness here. But they drank the boiled grass and a day later they were well.”

  “Do they have any of the grass here?”

  “No. He says it is in a valley in the mountains beyond the village.” Hassan listened. “He is saying now he can tell for you how to find the grass and give you two of his men. Together, he says, you can go get the grass. Then Mister Graves will be well.” Hassan smiled.

  “I need a vehicle,” Donk said. He did not intend to find the grass. He would simply drive to Mazar. If General Mohammed’s shadow-faced men did not care for this, they could shoot him. They could give Donk his own shadow face.

  The general was reading again. When Hassan translated Donk’s request, he breathed in deeply and turned a page. He spoke. Hassan: “It is not a far walk, he says. His men will show you.”

  “Tell him I need a vehicle.”

  General Mohammed peered at Donk over the top edge of his glasses and spoke, it was clear, for the last time. Hassan shook his head. “He says he is sorry, Mister Donk, but they have too many problems today to spare any vehicles to go to Mazar.”

  When Donk returned to Graves’s room he found him asleep, his white face and reddish-purple cheeks agleam with perspiration, his forehead creased and dented. He was holding his purple Nokia. NO SIGNAL, its LCD read. Again Donk sat next to Graves�
�s bed. Getting close to Graves was now like entering a force field of heat. He could smell Graves’s bad breath, which smelled like shit, and his shit, which smelled like bad breath. Donk did not now believe and never had much believed in God or in human goodness. He did not think that people had a “time” they “had to go,” or even that this special mountain grass would do fuck-all for Graves. He believed in and tried to think about very little. He believed in photography, which he loved, and death, which he hated. He thought about how he had been using one to deny the other. He thought about how clearly he felt death in Graves’s bright room, the same greedy cool-edged core of heat that a decade ago he had felt zeroing in on his father. He refused to abandon Graves to it. Of course, this was just more ceremony. Graves was dying as he looked at him. But death, too, was ceremony, the one sacrament that, in time, singed every tongue.

  Donk touched his own lips, absently. They were cold. No signal.

  Hassan disagreed that helping Donk find medicinal grass was an implied part of his duties. He had no wish to leave the relative safety of this village. He seemed surprised, in fact, that Donk even wanted him along. Donk began to wonder if robbing them was not Hassan’s polite if highly indirect way of attempting to end their association. The two soldiers General Mohammed lent Donk most clearly did not want to go find the grass either. The only person who wished less than they to go out and find this grass was Donk.

  General Mohammed assured them that leaving by 1 p.m. would afford them plenty of time to find the valley, fill a satchel with grass, and return by evening. Before they left, one of General Mohammed’s wives fed them all a pile of meatless pilau that they chased down with gallons of cherry compote.

  Just outside the village, Donk watched as the two loaner soldiers loaded a small donkey with canvas pouches and plastic bags emblazoned with the Marlboro logo.

  “Why,” Donk asked Hassan, “are they bringing a god-damned donkey? We’re only going to be gone for a few hours.”

  Hassan asked them, but the soldiers did not respond and kept loading the donkey with plastic bags. “I am thinking,” Hassan hazarded, “that this donkey belongs to one of them. Like pet? Maybe they want it to receive its exercise today.”

  That these were not General Mohammed’s ablest men was evident in several ways. They had been lucky enough to receive the American camouflage uniforms, but in place of the boots Donk saw on proud display among the general’s other soldiers these men were wearing what he realized only incrementally were tire treads held to their feet by twine.

  “I have a rule,” Donk told Hassan to tell the soldiers, neither of whose names he had any interest in learning. “I’m going to call it Rule One. Rule One is: No talking. Unless it’s an emergency, or unless they see the grass. Otherwise I don’t want to hear any talking. Okay?”

  Hassan looked troubled. “Mister Donk, why this rule?”

  “Because I’m sick of talking, I’m sick of languages I don’t understand, and I’m sick of words in general. I just want to walk.”

  “Can I talk if I talk English?”

  Donk looked at him. “Did you steal my cameras?”

  “Mister Donk! Why would I steal your cameras? Where would I put them?”

  “You can talk in English. A little. But ask me first.”

  Hassan shook his head, lamely mouthed Donk’s edict to the soldiers, then walked away a few feet and moped defeatedly. The soldiers had scarcely listened, their limited attention still fully commandeered by the donkey. The donkey was a youngish creature with a rust-and-toffee coat and teeth the size of shot glasses. Once it was loaded up, one of the soldiers smacked the donkey with proprietary cruelty on its bulbous muscular hindquarters. The donkey trundled forward a few steps, then stopped and shook its head, its long ears flapping. The first soldier, whose angular and almost handsome face was nearly hidden behind a bushy black beard that began growing just below his eyes, laughed. The second soldier, a smaller man whose beard was redder and less ambitious, walked over to the donkey and whipped it with a switch. This time the donkey walked and did not stop. Donk stared at the animal with dejected and secret confederacy, then followed after it.

  They hiked for an hour without talking, saw no one, and reached the range’s first serious hill just after two. They cleared it easily and, though another, steeper hill lay just ahead, Donk was pleased. These foothills were not very challenging. Even this range’s highest faraway peaks were snowless. In Tajikistan he had trekked over far more punishing country. The trails were well worn and dusty, and the wind was low. The sun was bright; beneath it Afghanistan looked like a blizzard of gray and brown. A nature hike, minus the nature.

  Donk thought back to the Porcupines in Upper Michigan, family trips his brother, Jason, now referred to as “hurt-feelings competitions.” But Donk did not remember them this way. Donk was always deputized to carry the party’s RV-sized tent, as well as anything that related to the inevitable screaming match that doubled as the tent’s assembly. Donk had been a shortish, overweight boy, a puffing congenital sweater. On one trip, Jason had likened his younger brother’s hunched appearance under thirty pounds of fatly wrapped weatherproofed nylon to that of a donkey. The word’s homophonic closeness to Duncan or, worse, Dunc, his family nickname, did not immediately occur to Jason, and for the remainder of the trip Duncan inured himself to being known as “Donkey Boy.” On their last night in the Porcupines—traditionally, the one time their father let the boys drink beer before they headed back to Milwaukee—Duncan had plunged his hand into their cooler’s watery lukewarm dregs in search of a can of Miller Lite. “Hey, Donk,” Jason called over, distracted with the fire. “Grab me one too?” Donk knew, even before Jason and his father had exchanged looks of revelation, that he had just been rechristened. The nickname spread as though it were a plot. His mother was the longest holdout, but after six months he was Donk even to her. He thought that nothing could have ever happened to him out there. That was what the trips now meant to him. They were pre-danger. Pre-death. Once, after he had had too much to drink during one of his infrequent visits back to the Midwest, Jason had unkindly disclosed that the trips’ whole purpose had been their father’s attempt to rid Donk of what the man always called “that goddamn baby fat.” This had hurt Donk, a little.

  “Mister Donk,” Hassan said, apprehensive to be violating Rule One, “you are well?”

  “Fine,” Donk said. “Some dirt in my eye.”

  Hassan almost smiled. “Both eyes?”

  Hassan was smarter than Donk realized. Everyone, Donk thought, was smarter than you realized. “Yes, Hassan. Both eyes.”

  Hassan fretted with the front flap of his shalwar khameez. “Mister Donk, I have maybe an emergency.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think perhaps General Mohammed’s soldiers are not pleased.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Hassan was quiet a moment, listening to the soldiers. They were ten feet back, softly chatting, their rifles’ thin black straps cutting across their chests and their tire-tread sandals slapping against the hard soil. Their language sounded to Donk, strangely, like yodeling. Hassan edged closer to Donk and whispered, “They are talking about leaving us.”

  “Fuck them, then. I have a compass. I can find our way back. We don’t need them.”

  “But what of the grass?”

  Donk had completely forgotten about the grass.

  “I am thinking,” Hassan said, looking straight ahead, “that these are bad men.”

  The second hill took longer to climb. It was steeper, the path more friable. The sun’s warmth had opened Donk’s eyebrow, and sweat soaked into the wound lividly. The donkey, especially, was having trouble, its hard little hoofs slipping in the thick gray gravel. Red Beard decided the best way to hasten the donkey’s ascent was to whip it across the face with his switch. The donkey hissed at him, its huge rotten teeth bared, its eyes rolling wildly in their sockets. Red Beard whipped it again, this time across the nose. Black Beard observ
ed all this with nodding satisfaction. Hassan shook his head wretchedly, turned away, and kept walking. As the beating went on, it gathered a terrible energy, as crying does, as pain does, and Donk took a seat on a pathside stone and watched. As bad as he felt for the animal he was not about to step between it and Red Beard, whose streak of ferruginous cruelty was certain to run deeper than Donk could even begin to imagine. Thus he was cheered when the donkey, rearing bronco-style on its hind legs, its huge testicles bouncing, cunningly maneuvered its position in such a way as to deliver into Red Beard’s chest a quick and astonishingly forceful doublebarreled kick. Red Beard managed, somehow, to stay on his feet. After a few moments of absorption, however, his expression loosened, opening to a hundred new possibilities of pain. He dropped his stick and—gently—sat down. He rolled onto his side and rocked back and forth in the dirt. Donk noticed, remotely, that Red Beard was barefoot. The donkey had kicked him right out of his tire-tread sandals. With equal remoteness, Donk watched Black Beard calmly level his Kalashnikov at the donkey and squeeze off three quick rounds into its hindquarters. The donkey kicked blindly a few more times and then galumphed down the path, back toward the village, screaming. That was, Donk thought, really the only word for the sound he was now hearing: screaming. It did not get far. With the Kalashnikov’s stock tucked snugly into his shoulder, Black Beard tracked the donkey and fired twice. The donkey’s head kicked up, the reports’ echoes saturating the afternoon air. The donkey staggered ahead for a few steps more, tried to turn around, then dropped onto its side. Its legs were still moving at different speeds and in different directions. In the meantime, Red Beard had struggled to his feet. With one arm wrapped around his cracked rib cage, he limped over to Donk and spoke.