God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  “I’ve told you,” she said. “I’m a biologist. I was sent by the UN to—”

  “I know who you are,” he cut in, with fresh displeasure, “and I know who sent you.”

  She was astonished. It was the first time he’d spoken to her as if he believed she was who she claimed to be. He sat there, pleased with her struck-dumbness, and she realized with something like complete certainty that he’d always believed she was who she said she was; he knew it. The dynamic of their relationship changed so swiftly the American imagined she felt a breeze slide over her.

  “You,” he said, “are Amanda Reese. You are an American. You work with the United Nations.” He found no consolation, she could tell, from telling her the truth. He gained no clearheaded frankness, no serendipitous nobility. “You are a biologist from the University of Indiana.”

  “Illinois,” she said quietly.

  He smirked. “Excuse me. Illinois.” He pronounced it Russian-style, E-lee-NOIS, though she had not. She felt oddly lifted by this, superior.

  “I think you know my next question,” she said. But the language tripped her up. Finding the words was getting more difficult as she grew more exhausted. She felt as if she were digging around in a darkened attic for something she knew only by sight, and she hoped he’d missed her grammatical mistake.

  He hadn’t. He held up a finger and repeated her sentence, gently correcting her Russian, something about the correct adjective ending. His raised finger did not retreat until she said it again, correctly.

  “High school was a long time ago,” she mumbled in excuse. But she’d also studied in college, after college, before coming; she’d studied more than she would have admitted to anyone. Still, despite the huge vocabulary that years of studying had harvested, she was terrible, stump-tongued, a syntax butcher. “No gift” was how her most patient tutor, Vova Petrovich, had once sadly appraised her. No geeft, Amanda, you hev no geeft.

  “I understand,” he said in English. His head tipped forward adroitly on his thin neck. “School was long ago for me too.” In Russian: “Your question, yes? When will you leave? Professor Reese,” he said, leaning back, “you may leave whenever you want. You are not imprisoned. On the contrary, you are my guest.”

  “I’m not leaving until I get my passport—and until I can tell the UN about my treatment here.”

  Now he laughed, his eyes doubling in size. “Your treatment !” This burst out of him. He looked around for someone to join this ebullience, found no one, and stopped laughing as suddenly as he had begun. “Yes, your treatment is something I’d like to discuss as well, Professor Reese. From the airport you were chauffeured here”— he motioned around him, underscoring the room’s bright opulence—“and offered lunch, which, I might add, you refused.” He smiled again. “Yes, let us tell the United Nations how you were treated, Professor Reese.”

  “I know who you are,” she said.

  He looked at her with distaste. “Of that,” he said, “I have my doubts.”

  “Kah Gay Bay,” she said quickly. KGB. He raised his eyebrows in polite acknowledgment, obviously pleased the initials carried such mythic tonnage in her mind’s canals. “That’s who you are. And I know what you do.”

  He ran his index fingers along the gutters under his eyes, clearing away the silt.

  “Get me my passport,” she said. “Right now, goddammit.”

  He said nothing, again treating her to his freighted, sullen silence. “I will not keep you any longer, Professor Reese,” he said at last. “But I would like to hear your UN’s thoughts about our problem before you go.”

  She regarded him coldly. “Our problem?”

  For once, this man seemed honest in his surprise. “Why, Professor Reese,” he said. “I speak of the Aral Sea, of course.”

  She was an environmental biologist, though she would have resented being pinned to merely one biological discipline, since like most biologists she had several realms of interest and thought herself bright about many things. Her specialty was irrigation: its almost incomprehensibly far-ranging effects both on the irrigated area and on the area whose irrigation was diverted. She was in fact held to be one of America’s most accurate prognosticators on the often unpredictable and occasionally ecocidal effects of the always ill-advised practice of monkeying with rivers, lakes, and seas. She was a recent and uncommonly young recipient of tenure, author of dozens of articles, coeditor of a cobbled-together collection of essays whose slant grew before her eyes to be so idiotically anti-industry its existence embarrassed her to this day. She was “famous in certain circles,” as she often heard her mother say to guests when she thought her daughter out of earshot, during those long July days she spent summering with her parents in Vermont. “Our little Rachel Carson.” But this dotage was embarrassing, and ridiculous besides: Who isn’t famous in “certain circles”? Although of course it was her desire to garner true, unqualified Rachel Carson fame that disqualified what most people would have accepted as God’s plenty.

  Initially, she studied biology to work in the sea (which she had yet to do); her pursuit of the stumbling, bearlike Russian language had its germ in a bizarre teenage infatuation with chess (indirectly) and Boris Spassky (directly); she had never married though had once been close, which is how she’d become involved with the United Nations’ Aral Sea Basin Relief Project one year ago. Getting a government job—a job with any government, she was confident—had less to do with personal excellence than did a professional wrestling match, and though Amanda was no hardened cynic she accepted this more or less uncritically, just as she had uncritically accepted the job with the Aral project that her former lover, Andrew, had more or less gift-wrapped for her.

  Once upon a time, the name Aral Sea was accurate. Since 1960, however—when Soviet engineers began to divert its twin tributaries to fertilize cotton fields in Turkistan—the Aral had gone from a sea of plenty to a sea of less plenty, to an unfortunate polluted lake, to a poison lake to a shrinking pestilent bog to a certified disaster. That was where it stood when Amanda was named part of a ten-scientist team acting as a stateside academic/scientific codicil to an Aral Sea Basin Relief Project—no longer the Aral Sea at all but the Aral Disaster.

  Of course, she had never actually expected to get to see the Aral Sea. Mostly she crunched numbers, calculating the average increase of temperature and decrease of airborne moisture and what that would mean, hypothetically, for the surrounding area’s agriculture. She ran computer simulations that posited what would happen with no Aral Sea at all. She e-mailed her findings to other biologists and tried to forget about the decades of pollution and insecticide and toxins in the Aral’s exposed and wind-blown seabed. She also tried to forget that the sanitized, bloodless, glowing-green numbers on her Hewlett-Packard’s screen told her seventeen thousand kids who in nearly any other part of the world would have been learning multiplication tables and team sports were going to be anemic.

  Her alpha-and-omega trip to the Soviet Union had been to Moscow, in 1987, as Andrew’s guest (he was then working for the ambassador), and she’d bathed in the springy feeling of glasnost. What she saw was not the nation of wicked Lenin, evil Stalin, warty Brezhnev, but Pepsi billboards and gleaming hotels and elegant, jaw-dropping cocktail parties. This was her week in Russia, and she had spoken the language twice (“Skazhite, pozhaluista, gde tualet?” and “Taksi!”).

  Of course, everything was different now. For one, Andrew was gone. Aral was worse. The Soviet Union was no more. Along with the tourist-perfect, industry-friendly teardrop-and-puddle nations that had sprouted along Russia’s western flank, a jigsaw of polysyllabic, hostile-sounding nations had metastasized to the south. Central Asia, this was, and the Aral Sea was its fountain of life.

  When Amanda learned that, thanks to her Russian skills, her days of computer simulations and guesswork were over—she was going there, as in next month, with two other members of the team to survey the Aral Sea basin personally—she called up her old tutor, Vova, and
asked him what was Central Asia’s story anyway? Vova said, “Theenk of Ziberia, Amanda, fleeped over.” Had he ever been there, seen it? “Amanda, Amanda,” he said, becoming serious, nearly bitter, his accent suddenly falling away. “The only Russians in Central Asia are the ones whose relatives were exiled there.” She sensed him shaking his head at the boundless naïveté Americans had for places that weren’t America. “Don’t you think they knew what they were doing when they decided to murder the place?”

  She learned more about Central Asia on the plane while gliding over the Ukraine from Ted Whitford, PhD, Marine Biology, UCLA. He too spoke some Russian (he’d spent time in Murmansk while studying the Barents Sea), and they practiced together until he realized she knew more than he did and put a stop to it right then and there. An asshole, Ted was. But he seemed to know a lot about the Aral Sea. (A disarmingly accurate generalization about assholes: They all know a lot, however brittle their knowledge becomes under intimacy’s whitest, hottest lights.) What he told her was specific, real-seeming—more information, at least, than the UN’s ossifyingly dull dossiers were willing to provide. Ted Whitford mentioned cities and local nationals he’d spoken to, supplying bleak sketches of how annihilated the Aral’s fishermen had been. He spoke with the world-weariness of one who simply knows too much. Had he been to Uzbekistan, the country that bore the brunt of Aral’s ailments? Amanda asked. Once, Ted explained, to Tashkent, the capital, which was still pretty Russian. More Russian than Russia, in fact. Ha-ha.

  On her own, Amanda had learned that the rest of the world had, by and large, dismissed Central Asia and its problems with Aral; that most of the solutions for the problem cost somewhere in the twelve-figure range; that the UN was trying to do everything it could, but until Central Asia’s nations began to cooperate on water allocation and set prices for water usage like the good little budding market-economy nations they claimed they wanted to be, there was little the UN could do. Add to this the fact that the Aral Sea was found in one of Uzbekistan’s biggest headaches, Karakalpakistan, a nominally sovereign republic with its own government, bureaucracy, and eddies of red tape apart from Uzbekistan’s, and you were left navigating waters too tricky even for the United Nations. The entire scenario had the fiendish unsolvability of a physics story problem, and Amanda felt both intimidated and relieved. She and her team couldn’t, even at their least effective, possibly make anything worse.

  “It’s damn sad,” Ted Whitford concluded with a sigh. “It rips me up. Damn sad.”

  “Sounds like it,” said Michael Nam, sitting across the aisle from Amanda and Ted, reading the Cadogan guide to Central Asia (Amanda had Lonely Planet). Amanda had sat next to Michael on the first leg of the trip, over the Atlantic. She leaned forward to wink at him, become an accomplice to his insult of Ted in some way, but he did not look over at her. Instead, he turned the page in his book and pushed his styleless, thick-lensed glasses farther up his bridge. Michael was Korean, from the University of Miami—the “Carl Sagan of oceanography,” as she’d once heard him described. From their earlier conversation, Amanda had concluded that he, too, was an asshole, but an abidable, even interesting asshole.

  “Righto,” Ted said to Michael and, alarmingly, touched Amanda on the knee.

  “How long before we reach Tashkent?” Amanda asked Michael, again leaning forward.

  “Two hours,” Michael said, closing his book and then his eyes.

  Amanda looked around the plane. Nearly everyone was asleep, one or two souls glowing like angels under their reading lights. As far as she could tell, she and her colleagues were the only Americans on board. Her around-the-world trip was in its twentieth hour, and she was wide awake. She closed her eyes anyway, but opened them when Ted once again began talking. She turned to him and saw he’d not been speaking to her. He was addressing a small handheld tape recorder, whispering intense Churchillian cadences into it: “I’d say we’re at thirty-five thousand feet,” he was saying. Amanda rolled her head as far away from him as physiology would permit. “Tashkent,” he said, milking it, “Tashkent is down there too.” A pause of several moments. “And so is Aral. It all makes Murmansk and Barents . . . Jesus! Kid stuff, Ted. It was kid stuff.”

  While they waited in the customs line, Amanda first began to grow nervous. She could see quite a bit of the airport behind the customs booth but no one was there, not a soul. She tapped Michael, who was still reading his travel guide, on the shoulder. “Hey. Who’s supposed to meet us here, anyway?”

  Michael frowned and dug into his breast pocket. “Some guy named Nuridinov, from the Ministry of Water, and two other gentlemen. I can’t seem to read this.” He frown-squinted. “Hm. My own damn handwriting, too.”

  “I don’t see anyone, Michael,” Amanda said. The customs line opposite hers was for nationals, and every dark-skinned, black-headed, heavy-lidded man in that line stood facing her, staring. She was, it dawned on her, the only woman in the entire terminal. She thought herself an attractive woman, though not anyone an American male would cross the street for. But in the present situation she might as well have been a movie star, despite her no-nonsense shoulder-length auburn hair and her breastless, mousy trimness. (She was trim in the absurd, magical way only women with large rear ends and thick thighs can be, these last two something not even five days of lap swimming a week could dragon-slay.) She found herself longing for the Slavic familiarity of Moscow and stared at the clipped black hairs on the back of Michael’s neck. Ted was behind her, still recording: “Our line is not moving. . . . Some locals appear to be staring at me. . . .”

  “Someone’s waiting,” Michael said, after looking up at the empty terminal himself. Amanda nodded uneasily.

  They got through customs, got their luggage, and planted themselves near the airport’s main entrance. No one was there. No one came. Three times Amanda had to explain to curious, walking-by militsiya who they were, why they were waiting. By 7 a.m. they were told to move along. Michael was in charge of this little field trip, but he’d never been given any phone numbers. It had been assumed they wouldn’t need any. Someone would meet them. Amanda and Michael were outside the airport in the pinkish, dirty light, discussing whether to call the American embassy or go to their hotel, when Ted appeared with what he optimistically called breakfast. It was some rancid-smelling meat wrapped up in a pitalike pocket and smothered with onions. Shashlik, Ted called it. “Here. I had it when I was here before. It’s delicious.”

  “No, thanks,” Amanda said. “I don’t eat anything off the street.”

  “It’s not off the street,” Ted said, and pointed. “It’s from him.” A small mustached man waved from behind the shashlik stand fifty yards away. They all waved back, idiotically.

  Michael took the shashlik from Ted and absently tore into it, tracing his finger across the map of Tashkent in his guidebook. “Look,” he said. “I say we get to the hotel. They’re probably waiting for us there anyway. Change of plans. Something.”

  Amanda stepped back; she’d let them decide. She was happy so far only to be here, to see what those numbers became when made flesh and blood. She’d see it for better or for worse and was prepared, she thought, for either. Tashkent was beginning to stir. Car horns sounded off far away; the morning was already growing hot, smog saturating the air. She sucked in sharply and with crossed eyes coughed out her intake. She’d taken hits off hash pipes less potent than Tashkent’s morning air.

  When she rejoined Ted and Michael, it appeared they’d settled on the hotel, no doubt deeming it too embarrassing to go running off to the embassy just yet for help. They accepted her back into the huddle with a nod and told her what they were doing, making no pretense that her vote even mattered. Honest, at least, she thought.

  “Standing up the United Nations,” Ted said, amused, polishing off his shashlik. “Now I’ve truly seen it all.”

  “Explain to me,” the American said, “how Aral can possibly be our problem when you people make it impossible for us to help you.�
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  “How quickly you boil us down to one homogeneous people, Professor Reese. I am one man. How do I make it impossible for you to help us?”

  “I’m speaking in generalities.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’ve read briefings. People here think nothing of letting their spigots run all day. That’s why our primary advice is that you start charging your citizens for water usage.”

  “The Aral Sea is dead, Professor. Charging families who cannot afford it will not bring it back to life. You scold us like we are children. Americans enjoy this, it seems.”

  “We just enjoy paranoid totalitarian regimes forced to tell the truth for once and admit their monstrosities, that’s all.”

  “Blind children, Professor, have no stake in any regime. Nor do anemic pensioners.”

  “It’s obvious we view this problem differently. But there are—”

  “The difference between us, Professor, is that we know what suffering is. I know more about you—the many soft American indulgences—than you can hope to know of yourself. I know of your businessmen who fuck our women like cheap whores, your corporations that take advantage of our workers while thinking we are too stupid to know the difference, your Peace Corps workers who castigate us as lazy and stinking. You have no tragedy and forget that such things exist, and if you know they do, you blame those whom the tragedy befalls. Americans are a people who’ve let their souls grow fat.”

  “Then why even bother doing anything, if you’re so proud of suffering? Let it and everyone die. So, we’ve talked. Now let me go. I don’t even know where I am, where my companions are.”

  “Mr. Whitford and Mr. Nam are at the American embassy, Professor Reese, presently searching for you. It is, in fact, something of a crisis.”