God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  Hassan was shaking with terror; his voice broke register as he translated. “Mister Donk, he says he is injured and requests that we go back.”

  Donk nodded at Red Beard thoughtfully, his hands tucked away in his hooded sweatshirt’s front pockets to hide the fact that they were trembling. “Tell him, Hassan, that when we have the grass we can go back.”

  “He says he is injured very badly.”

  “Tell him this is his own stupid fucking fault.”

  “You tell him this!” Hassan cried.

  Black Beard, his Kalashnikov now slung over his shoulder, was pulling the pouches and Marlboro bags off the donkey. Donk was about to speak when he noticed Black Beard stand quickly and look off warily to the east, instinctively reaching around for his rifle but not unshouldering it. Before Donk had even turned his head he heard the hollow patter of an approaching horse, then a low snorty sound. Upon the horse was a soldier. He rode in slowly, stopping at the midpoint between Donk and Black Beard, whose hand was still frozen in midreach for his rifle. The soldier looked to Donk, then to the dead donkey. Finally he rode over and circled the donkey’s corpse, looking over at Black Beard only after he had made a complete orbit.

  “Salaam,” the soldier said, his horse’s ears smoothed back, clear evidence of its distress at the sight of its murdered cousin.

  “Salaam,” Black Beard returned, his hand lowering.

  The soldier was an American. His fatigues were lightly camouflaged, a few blobby splashes of faint green and wavy brown upon a dirty tan background. His backpack’s two olive-green straps ran vertically down his chest. Another, thicker strap corseted his waist, and two more cinched around his thigh, where a 9mm pistol was sheathed in a camouflaged holster. Affixed upon his shoulder was the bulky black control pad for his air-to-ground radio, its CB hooked to his waist. Somewhat ostentatiously, Donk felt, he was wearing a floppy Afghan pakul, and around his neck was the same make of white scarf Donk had bought in Kunduz. He galloped over to Donk, young and triumphantly blue-eyed, his nose snout-like and his chin weak. A southerner, Donk guessed. Obviously he was one of the commandos Donk had only heard about, Special Forces boys leading on horseback whole garrisons of guerrillas, shining lasers into the nasties’ mountain hidey-holes for the F/A-18s’ laser-guided bombs, and vacuuming up customs and language as they went. Some of these guys, it was rumored, had been here as early as September 14.

  It was against SF doctrine to travel alone, and Donk imagined that right about now he was zooming up in the digital viewfinder of the binoculars that belonged to this commando’s partner, who was no doubt watching from a hill or was perhaps even hidden in some impossibly nearby rocks.

  “Sir,” the commando said to Donk. “You’re an American?”

  Donk pulled his hands from his sweatshirt’s pockets and stood. “I am.”

  The commando, squinting, gazed down at Donk from his mount. He threw off the hard, unapproachable aura of sunlight on sheet metal. “Are you wounded?”

  “What?”

  The soldier tapped himself above the eye.

  “No,” Donk said, touching himself there and, with a flinch, regretting it. “It’s nothing. A car accident.”

  “Sir, I’ve been following you. And I have to ask what you’re doing out here, for one, and, for two, why are your men discharging their weapons in a hostile area?”

  “They executed our donkey,” Donk said. “I’m not sure why. And they’re not my men. They’re General Ismail Mohammed’s.”

  The horse footed back a few steps, its huge stone-smooth muscles sliding around one another beneath a dark-brown coat as shiny as chocolate pudding. The commando, with the steadiness of a centaur, had not taken his eyes off Donk. “That leaves what you’re doing out here.”

  “I’m a journalist. My friend is back in General Mohammed’s village, like I said. He’s very sick. I’m out here looking for grass.”

  The commando stared at him. “Pardon me, sir, but the stuff practically falls out of the trees here. There’s no need to be out this—”

  “Not marijuana. Grass. A special kind of grass.”

  “Ho-kay,” he said.

  “Look, forget that. Can you help me?”

  “Sir, I don’t really have any guidance.”

  “Any what?”

  “Guidance, sir. I can’t talk to the media.”

  Donk always admired military men, young military men in particular, for their peculiarly unsullied minds. “I’m not looking for an interview. My friend has malaria. He’s back in General Mohammed’s village. He’s dying.”

  “Sir, be advised that these mountains are not safe for civilians. They’re crawling with hostiles. And I don’t mean to sound like a hard-ass, but I’m not really authorized to use this radio for anything other than ordering air strikes. We’re doing pest control, sir, and I strongly recommend you get back to that village.”

  “Where’s your commanding officer?”

  “He’s in Mazar-i-Sharif, sir.”

  “Lieutenant Marty, right?”

  The commando paused. “I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”

  “Look, do you have any malaria medicine? Antibiotics? Anything you have. Believe me when I say it’s an emergency.”

  The commando pulled back on the reins. The horse turned with the finicky heaviness particular to its species, and the commando started off.

  Donk was not surprised. “This is all about reporters fucking you guys over in Vietnam, isn’t it?” he called after him. “Well, you should know I was about six when Saigon fell. Were you even born?”

  The commando stopped and turned back to him. “Leave this area, sir. Now.”

  Donk saluted the commando, who politely returned the salute and ya’d his horse to a full gallop. The cool thin dust swallowed them both just before they would have vanished over the nearest hill’s lip. Donk asked Hassan to inform Black Beard and Red Beard that his mission was now under the protection of the American military, owners of fearsome fighter planes, magical horseback summoners of aerial bombs, benevolent providers of PX-surplus camouflage. Neither Red Beard nor Black Beard had much of anything to say after that.

  Shortly after 4 p.m. they found the valley where the grass was supposed to grow, a large scooped-out gouge of grayish sand and brown rocky soil amid a ragged perimeter of half a dozen steep hills. A long twisty road wended through the valley and disappeared into an identically shady pass at each end. The hill they were now atop had provided them the least hospitable, most distinctly mountainous trek yet. Its top ridge was cold, windy, and dustless. As they stood in the sunlight looking down into the valley, Donk saw why the commando had wanted him to return to General Mohammed’s village. Along the valley’s road was a smudged line of charcoal-colored transport trucks and pickups. Black Beard withdrew from one of his satchels a pair of binoculars. After having a look he handed the binoculars without comment to Donk. They were, Donk saw, cheap enough to have been pulled from a cereal box. Nonetheless, they helped him discern that the smudges were blast marks; the dark charcoal color could be credited to the fact that each vehicle had been incinerated from the outside in. It took them another twenty minutes to climb down into the valley, and they walked along the road’s wreckage as warily and silently as animals. The bombing had not happened terribly recently. Not a single piece of hardware was smoking, and the truck husks had the brittle, crumbly look of a scorched old log one cleared from a well-trafficked campsite’s pit before building a new fire. The wreckage looked picked over, and the shrapnel was in careful little piles. Black Beard and Red Beard muttered to themselves.

  “What are they saying?” Donk asked Hassan.

  Hassan shook his head. “Their prayers for the dead.”

  “But these men were their enemies.”

  “Of course,” Hassan said, looking at Donk hatefully.

  Donk approached the bombed convoy’s lead vehicle. Its tires had melted and its doors were gone. The empty cab and bed were both largely intact, though th
ey had been parted from each other after sustaining what looked like a direct hit. There were no craters, Donk knew, because this campaign’s bombs were designed to explode a few feet above their targets. Donk walked farther down the blasted line. He did not see any bodies at all until the penultimate vehicle, a nearly vaporized Datsun pickup so skeletal it looked like a blackened blueprint of a Datsun pickup. The charred driver was barely distinguishable from the wreckage around him. He was just a crispy torso of shrunken unrealness. His face and hair had been burned off, his head a featureless black oval. Donk reached for the camera he did not have and stepped closer, discovering that the reason no one had moved his body was because it was melted to its seat. His stomach gurgled and turned. Something in him clenched. He did not have his camera. The image would never swim up at him from the bottom of a plastic platter filled with developing fluid. It would stay exactly this way. . . . Donk forced the thought away.

  “Mister Donk!” Hassan called.

  He turned, rubbing his beating heart through his chest. “Yes, Hassan. What is it?”

  He pointed at the Beards. “They say the grass is nearby.”

  Donk took in this information. He felt the same mild surprise he remembered experiencing when he had learned, thanks to a concert Tina had taken him to, that people were still writing symphonic music. Surprise that he would be so surprised. The grass actually existed. How unaccountable. “Where?”

  Hassan pointed across the valley. “They say over there.”

  Donk looked. At the far side of the valley stood a sparse stand of trees, the first trees he had seen all day. They made him feel better, somehow. Around the trees was a long squarish field of desiccated grass the color of wheat. The road this annihilated convoy had been traveling along would have taken them right past that field. They walked, Black Beard and Red Beard having now unshouldered their weapons. Walking across this valley felt to Donk like standing in the middle of an abandoned coliseum. Above, the sky was getting darker. The day was silent. Donk noticed, as they grew closer to the trees, that they had not yet completely shed their leaves, little pom-poms of bright orange and yellow still tipping their branches. The setting sun was pulling a long curtained shadow across this valley. He realized, then, that even if they pushed themselves they were not going to make it back to the village before nightfall. He hurried himself ahead, and Hassan and the Beards jogged to keep pace with him. He did not care to learn who or what ruled these hills at night.

  “Mister Donk,” Hassan said, “please slow!”

  “Fuck off,” he called back. Donk’s thoughts suddenly felt to him alien and disfigured, exalted by fear, disconnected from the internal key that transformed them into language. He veered off the road and sprinted toward the trees through grass abruptly growing all around him. His boots were scything up great cheerful swaths of the stuff. He did not know why he was not gathering up any of it. He was not certain what might make one kind of grass more restorative than another. He had a quiet, appalled thought at all the things he did not know. He then remembered to believe that the grass was not going to help Graves. Not at all.

  “Mister Donk!” Hassan called again. Donk turned to see Hassan following him across the field of grass in an unsteady, not-quite-running way. “They say we must be careful here! Mister Donk!” Black Beard, now shouting something himself, endured a moment of visible decision making, then left the road and followed after Hassan.

  Donk’s head swiveled forward. He was almost to the trees. The grass just under the trees looked especially boilable, thick and tussocky. Then, oddly, Donk seemed to be looking at the trees and the grass from much higher up. His horizon lifted, then turned over. Donk had heard nothing, but when he landed he smelled something like cooked meat, cordite, loam. He lay there in the grass, blinking. With his fingers he pulled up a thick handful of grass, then let it go. He looked over. Hassan was beside him, ten feet away, screaming, though still Donk could hear nothing. Hassan’s mouth was bloody and his cardigan sweater was gone but for some shreds, and what Donk initially believed to be large fat red leeches were crawling all over his stomach and chest. On the other side of him Black Beard was creeping away on all fours, shaking his head in a dazed way. After a few feet he stopped and lay down. Donk thought that he, Donk, was okay. But for some reason he could not sit up. His legs felt funny, as did his back. He did not panic and lifted his left leg to watch the tendons and veins and muscles fall away from it as though it were a piece of chicken that had been boiled too long. Then he was bleeding. The blood did not come out of him in a glug but in a steady silent gush. There was so much of it. He lowered his leg and from his prone position saw broken-ribbed Red Beard struggling down the road. Yes, he thought, that’s right. Go get help. Donk thought he was going to be all right. It did not hurt yet. Oh wait yes it did. Suddenly it hurt very, very much. Donk always believed that you learned a lot about a place by the first thing you heard said there. In Chechnya it was “It doesn’t work.” In Rwanda: “I don’t know.” In Afghanistan: “Why are you here?” He had not stepped on a mine. Slowly, he knew that. No reason to waste an expensive mine in such a remote place. He had stepped instead on a bomblet, a small and festively yellow cluster of ordnance that had not detonated above the eradicated convoy but rather bounced away free and clear and landed here in the grass. Hassan was no longer screaming but simply lying there and looking up at the sky. He, too, was mechanically blinking. Hassan needed help. Donk did not care if he stole his cameras. Donk could help him. Donk, suddenly, loved him. But first he had to rest. He could not think about all this until he had some fucking rest. Could he get some rest? He had to help Graves because if he did not Graves would die. He thought of his father, how he had looked in the end. God, Donk thought, I do not want to die. But he did not much care for old age either. A problem there. “Dad!” Donk yelled out suddenly. He did not know why; something in him unclenched. Or maybe he had not said anything at all. It was hard to tell, and it was getting dark. So: rest. Rest here one minute and off we go. Red Beard could use the company. Use the help. Ho-kay. He was all right. He just needed to figure this out.

  Aral

  Please,” he said to the American, blowing into his teacup with a delicacy that did not suit him, “you must eat more.”

  “No,” the American said in mild return. “Thank you.” She was exhausted. They’d been speaking for nearly three hours, and though she was famished—she hadn’t eaten all day—the notion of food or, more precisely, his food made her stomach knot. Self-righteousness, this was—stupidity—but she refused to let him spelunk his way into any of her weaknesses. He smiled at the American’s refusal; then, with both hands, he raised the teacup chin level and treated her to the theater of his blow-sip-blow method of tea intake.

  The American’s gaze slipped off him and again absorbed the room. It was resplendent, breathtaking: polychromatic tapestries on the wall, servile attendants stalking stiffly in and out, a low table scattered with more food, fruit, teapots, and silverware than seemed appropriate. They sat across from each other, on the floor, cross-legged, atop heavy blankets. She was unused to such long-term contortion and her feet had surpassed being merely asleep. They felt gone, disappeared, off in some other dimension. Part of the reason she no longer cared how long they sat here was that she had no idea how she would stand when they were finished.

  Suddenly the man spoke to the attendants standing guard near the door in his native tongue, Uzbek, something the American did not understand (to her he spoke Russian). In a blink the table was cleared and the attendants were gone. They were alone. The instant the table was empty she wished she’d eaten something. Hunger stumbled, heavy-footed, inside her stomach.

  “When will I get my passport?” the American asked, also in Russian, with a kind of graceless start-and-stop inflection.

  “I’m not sure,” the man said, deftly unfolding his legs and then refolding them.

  “When will I be able to leave?”

  “Of that too,” he said
, “I am unsure.”

  Her hands clenched. “All you have to do is call the United Nations. It’s so—it’s simple. Call them, ask them who I am.”

  The man said nothing for several moments, then tsked once, impassively. The American pulled herself together and saw that in the meantime he’d made a small pointed pile of bread crumbs on the tablecloth with his knife. “To be a woman,” he said with disinterest, tending to his pile, “and to travel alone—this is unwise in our nation.”

  It was interesting to her how little the man’s sexism bothered her now, how secondary such concerns had become. “I told you what happened. My colleagues are in Tashkent. They were ill. I speak the language; I was anxious; I didn’t feel like waiting for them, and—”

  “And off you went,” he said, smiling, “to our Aral Sea.” Her gaze collapsed when confronted with his smile. He was missing at least a dozen teeth, the replacements either gold or some shiny alchemic substitute, and his remaining teeth looked like a museum of cavities. Other than this distraction, he was not a bad-looking man. His hair was short, bristly, black, spangled by dandruff. His equally black mustache fell only a little short of achieving Fu Manchu proportions. His neck was too thin compared to the rest of his body; he reminded her of a saber or a long fish, a northern pike or a gar—something sharp, severe.