God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  When Douglas cries out, Viktor calmly takes a seat and smokes an Okhotnichny cigarette. Jayne, perhaps twenty meters away, squats on a large rock with one hand pressed across her mouth. Through a mesh of fingers she asks her husband if he is all right.

  The man pulls off his backpack and muddy, thickly sopping boot and sits down, rubbing his woolen foot. “Ankle,” he tells her, grimacing. Then, quickly, he calls to Viktor, “I’m all right,” and waves, once, as though forcefully wiping something from a blackboard. The idiot has turned his ankle. Of course. Viktor had decided long before the bandits that he does not much like this Douglas. He rarely respects his clients, though he often comes to tolerate them. For two hundred dollars a day, Viktor has found, most people can be tolerated quite easily. But not this Douglas. A large, soft, American oaf.

  “Doug, honey,” the woman says, shooting Viktor a quick look before turning back to her husband. It is the first conversation they have had, as far as Viktor knows, since the bandits. “Can you walk?”

  The man is now holding his ankle with two hands, as though strangling it. He looks up at her, his cheeks lit with a burgundy glow. Sweat plasters his clipped black bangs to his forehead. His eyes are watery blurs, as though he has eaten something tiny, red, and hot. He is in some pain, obviously. “I can walk. Just—just give me a second.”

  The woman nods and looks back at Viktor. She stands, hugging herself. Her head is small and egg-shaped, her brown eyebrows as dense as hedges. Her face has the taut, squinty intensity Viktor knows well: the look of a worried American woman trying very hard to appear that she has seen it all. Jayne is short and, Viktor thinks, disappointing. Hard stocky legs. Medium-length camel-brown hair. Small muscular arms, like a kishlak boy’s. Viktor can only imagine what taking such a tiny powerful thing might be like. Disappointing, he thinks. It is all very disappointing.

  “Do you think they’ll come back?” she asks Viktor.

  Viktor stubs out his cigarette and deposits its accordioned husk into the breast pocket of his khaki vest. He shrugs. “Is difficult to say.”

  “They’re not coming back,” Douglas says. He is no longer holding his ankle but simply sitting there, his long inert legs hanging off the boulder’s edge and his yellow marshmallowy Gore-Tex vest unzipped. Beneath his vest is a shadow-blue T-shirt affixed with a plain black Batman logo. (“The old Batman logo, from the forties,” Douglas had been careful to point out to Viktor, when Viktor asked about it, which feels to Viktor like a very long time ago.) Douglas’s head is tipped back to the sunless sky, his eyes are closed, and his temples pulse as he pulverizes another cough drop.

  Jayne looks back at her husband and sighs through her nose. Beneath her pack, her shoulders sag and her spinal column wishbones outward, as though respiration and posture had some complicated association. “Doug—”

  “They’re not.” The second word is as propulsive as a round. Jayne rocks back a little, so stunned she is nearly smiling. Instantly Douglas shakes his head, an apology he seems to recognize is too impersonal to mean anything.

  Jayne turns away, trolling her eyes across a motionless sea of rock. She has spent the last four days in such constant close contact with Douglas that intimacy’s pleasant burden now feels more like a millstone. The twenty-four-hour flight from JFK to Frankfurt to Almaty. The two days they’d spent sightseeing in Almaty, trying valiantly to pretend that Almaty had two days’ worth of sights to see. They’d bused from their hotel to the world’s largest ice rink at Medeo and skated beside ex–Soviet hockey stars. They’d traipsed through Panfilov Park and watched dozens of solemn old Kazakhs play chess in the murky sunshine. They’d scratched Zenkov Cathedral—which claimed to be the tallest wooden building in the world—from their pitiful itinerary. They drank fermented mare’s milk in a fast-food restaurant shaped like a yurt, ate blocky tomato sandwiches and apples as big as softballs at the Zelyony Bazaar, and wandered back to their room, killing time with the BBC as they waited for the Hotel Kazakhstan’s sixty minutes of hot-water service, which commenced at the supremely inconvenient hour of 5 p.m.

  They are here for no real reason. Two years ago, Jayne found herself with Douglas ducking her way inside something called Glowworm Cave in Waitomo, New Zealand. Last year she’d had her photograph taken beside Hadrian’s Arch in Jarash, Jordan. Both were what Douglas called Expensive Trips Nowhere, the rubric beneath which this current junket also falls. Douglas first conceived of the Expensive Trip Nowhere after his parents were blind-sided on the New Jersey Turnpike by an Atlantic City– bound tour bus whose driver had suffered a stroke at the wheel. Douglas and Jayne had been married a little shy of a year when it happened. Jayne had stabilized into a teeth-clenched toleration of Douglas’s parents, Park-and-Seventieth gentry who never understood why their son had settled for “some mousy midwestern girl.” This was the phrase Douglas had once quoted—his ill-advised attempt at honesty—in trying to provide Jayne with some understandable frame for his parents’ animosity.

  Douglas did not seem surprised that his parents had ceded their estate to a number of New York charitable organizations rather than to him. His parents had, however, arranged for a dispositive provision—thus began Jayne’s education in the phraseology of bequeathment— which ensured that a portion of their trust’s income and dividends would be paid out monthly to Douglas, a “sum certain” to the tune of $8,000. Beyond that not a cent belonged to him, except in cases of “extreme need,” and only then in “reasonable amounts,” along with other similar caveats that kept the world in suspended litigation.

  The monthly windfall was large enough to encourage carelessness yet modest enough to make frugality seem picayune. Months after the accident, in bed one night, at some namelessly late hour, neither of them sleeping, both of them knowing it, her back discreetly to him, Douglas proposed the Expensive Trip Nowhere, a journey to no place, for no reason, with no plan. Just to go. Just to leave. He spoke with such irreproachable sadness that Jayne rolled over to find his eyes pooled. She’d agreed, instantly. She knew that Douglas’s wealthy Manhattan upbringing had been far too serious a matter to allow for even the suggestion of a childhood; rather like a sexually timid girl turning incandescent atop a boy she finally trusts, the death of his parents now allowed Douglas the consort of some unfamiliar, someday self he’d always been denied.

  Three months ago, Douglas had burst into their apartment blabbing about Kazakhstan, from which one of his uniformly affluent students’ parents had just returned. Jayne, whose purse had been stolen in New Zealand and who had been extravagantly ill in Jordan (or, as she called it, Giardian), stood there in their kitchen, holding a stack of DoubleStuf Oreos that she had spent a good part of the day stevedoring into her mouth, staring at Douglas with a slipping, ugly expression she hated him for not heeding.

  The next day Douglas came home with a muddy fax from something called the Adventure Mountain Company in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. It offered two- or four-day package tours of hiking, rock climbing, rafting, and other communions with the natural world of which Douglas knew nothing. She read over the fax, numb. “Come on,” he’d wheedled. And suddenly he was Douglas again, her rescuer from Manhattan starving artistry. “You’re a Midwesterner, Jayney. Aren’t you supposed to like this stuff?”

  Douglas was never embarrassed to be an American, never hesitant to reveal his monolingual helplessness. Wherever he found himself, he pumped hands with street vendors and enjoyed an incorruptible digestive system. Travel scraped him away to reveal not some dulled surface but bright new layers of personality. But Jayne is thirty years old. She wishes to learn nothing new about the man she married. That time is gone. It has been months since she has even attempted a sculpture, a career that has earned her a reliable five-figure salary, provided that one counted past the decimal points. This was her joke for the cocktail-party circuit.

  Jayne now studies the plain, awful hurt on Douglas’s face. It is a large lumpy face above which a periwig would not seem at all improp
er. The bluish beginnings of a spotty, erratic beard gleam upon his cheeks and chin like an unfinished tattoo. His boot is beside him, encased in a cracked shell of mud. She catches herself thinking, Ruined. The boots I bought for him are ruined. And she knows that for one horrible moment she has forgotten that he is hurt, or does not care, which is the same thing. This is marriage, she thinks, with a whelm of heartsick apathy. This is what happens. Its intimacy is such that you—

  “God,” Jayne says suddenly, paddling her hands in front of her face. Some of Viktor’s cigarette smoke has, in the motionless air, drifted to her nostrils and given her lungs a toxic baptism. She looks over at Viktor. “What on earth are you smoking?”

  Viktor flashes a horselike smile. He has a pure Slavic face that allows Jayne to grasp what Caucasian really means. The arches of his cheeks look as hard as whet-stones. His hair is stalky and yellow, like wheat. It occurs to her that only Caucasian follicles pigment their yield with something other than humanity’s standard-issue black.

  “Death in swamp,” Viktor answers her. “Very strong. Very bad taste. Is what we call them.”

  Jayne obliges him. “We?”

  “Afghantsi,” he says.

  Jayne nods blithely and looks back to Douglas, who is staring at Viktor with huge confounded eyes.

  “Afghantsi?” Douglas says, his tone one of vague challenge.

  Viktor nods sharply, then stands. “Da. Come. Replace your boot. We walk again.”

  “What,” Jayne asks Douglas after Viktor has forged out ahead, “is an Afghantsi?”

  Douglas reaches out to Jayne and she pulls him onto her boulder, releasing his hand the moment he is balanced. Douglas’s ankle feels vulcanized, though he has tied his laces so tightly he cannot quite claim that it hurts. He shrugs at Jayne. “That means he’s a veteran.”

  Jayne stares into some middle distance, her chest heaved out. Stray coils of premature gray wisp around her small shell-like ears. “A veteran of what?”

  “The Soviet war in Afghanistan.”

  They both look at Viktor. He has stopped ten boulders up and waits for them with a lavishly dour face and his arms in a tight cross-chest plait. Jayne stares at him, her lips scarcely moving as she speaks. “And these Afghantsi all smoke the same awful cigarettes?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Great,” she says, leaping to the next rock.

  “Your coat,” Viktor asks Jayne. “How much you pay?”

  They are walking across a greenish hillock, pingo mounds squishing beneath their boots. The boulder field is an hour’s walk behind them. The clouds have broken, and sunlight falls upon the steppe in huge warm rhomboids. The lower slopes of the Tien Shan Mountains are smoky with the vapor of spring-melted snow, and their white saw-toothed upper slopes and horns glitter like pyrite. Jayne walks beside Viktor, while Douglas has dropped back.

  Jayne looks down at her orange jacket. It is a Patagonia Puffball jacket, space-agey and shiny, tricked out with Polarguard HV insulation, a ripstop nylon shell, and water-resistant coating. She purchased it and her Patagonia Capalene underwear, her Dana Design Glacier backpack, her Limmer hiking boots, her Helly Hansen rain pants, and her EMS Traverse sleeping bag at Paragon on Eighteenth and Broadway a few weeks after they booked their flight on Kazair. She can’t remember what the jacket had set her back specifically, but remembers quite well the $1,200 dent the excursion bashed into her checking account. She feigns recollection. “Fifty dollars?”

  Viktor eyes her suspiciously, a Grand Inquisitor of sportswear. “I ask another American about her coat. Same color. Patagonia. She tells that she pay three hundred dollars.”

  “It was on sale,” Jayne says quietly, then stops to wait for Douglas.

  Viktor smirks as he fishes the half-smoked cigarette from his breast pocket. As he lights up the remnant, he remembers his schoolboy days as group leader of his Oktyabryata youth group, back when he wore his bright red Young Pioneer scarf nightly to bed, still glowing from the A he’d received in Scientific Communism for his critique of bourgeois individualism at School Number 3. This was before he knew of such things as Patagonia jackets. Before, as a private in the Signal Corps stationed near Kandahar, he went out on patrol as a demonstrably Soviet soldier and returned equipped with the battlefield tackle of half the planet’s nations. After scavenging the bodies of dead mujahideen, his platoon’s medics threw away their Soviet-made syringes, rendered magically sterile by a thin paper wrapping, and stocked up on Japanese disposable syringes whose plungers never clogged. Their Soviet plasma containers, half-liter glass bottles that shattered constantly, were exchanged for captured Italian-made polyethylene liter blood bags so rupture-resistant one could stomp on them in field boots to no effect. Their Soviet flak jackets were so heavy many soldiers could barely lift them. Upon seizing their first American flak jacket, Viktor’s mystified platoon found that this vestment, which lacked a single metal part, could not be penetrated at point-blank range with a Makarov pistol. He did not know, then, that when the war began the muj were armed only with cheap Maxim rifles you could not fire for long without scorching your guide hand. He did not know of the CIA and ISI airlifts and border sanctuaries the muj were then making use of. His schoolboy critique of bourgeois individualism did not foresee such contingencies any more than the Americans who would one day pay him to safeguard their leisure. But he feels little pleasure in having shamed the woman over her jacket. He lied to her about knowing its true price. He has several such jackets at home, which he wears only around the cafés of Almaty for the status their indiscreet labels supply.

  “Hey,” Douglas says, as he falls in beside Jayne.

  “Hey,” Jayne returns.

  Douglas’s mouth goes tight, his mustache of sweat sparkling. “Are we there yet?”

  She motions toward his foot. “How’s that ankle?”

  “Okay. It just hurts. That’s good, though, right? When it stops hurting is when you’re in trouble.”

  A small, toothless smile. “That’s frostbite.”

  “Well. The good news then is that I don’t have frostbite.”

  Jayne digs into her jacket’s marsupial pocket and removes a cling-wrapped piece of crumbly halvah. She holds it out to Douglas, who shakes his head. Jayne takes a bite, several hundred sesame seeds instantly installing themselves between her teeth. She looks across the steppe, a sweep of land so huge and empty she wonders if a place can be haunted by an absence of ghosts. She has never seen a sky so big. So big, in fact, it makes her own pathetic smallness somehow gigantic—as though to contemplate one’s place in the nothingness of the universe can only set free some stoned homunculus of monomania.

  “Walking here,” she tells Douglas suddenly, “I can’t get something out of my mind. It just repeats itself over and over again. What’s weird is that it’s a poem.”

  “That’s not weird.” His tone hovers just above annoyance.

  She looks over at him, noting the new crease in his forehead. “Not if you’re an English teacher. Normal people don’t walk around with poems in their heads.”

  “What’s the poem?” His tone is curt, satisfied, as though he has just prevailed in some internal argument of which he neglected to make her a part.

  She ignores this, finding the loop in her mind and giving it voice: “ ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth.’ ”

  “Frost?” he says. “That’s even less weird. He’s as catchy as a pop song.”

  “I had to memorize it in fourth grade. If I’ve thought about it three times since then I’d be surprised.”

  Douglas stares at his boots and says, almost meditatively, “‘Love and forgetting might have carried them / A little further up the mountainside / With night so near, but not much further up.’”

  They walk silently for a while, strides synchronized. Jayne finishes her halvah and kisses the honey from
her fingertips. “That’s . . . really lovely,” she says at last.

  “Frost again,” Douglas says.

  She walks out ahead of him, shaking her head in affected wonder. “I’ve hiked in a lot of places, but never anywhere so big.”

  “Kazakhstan is five times the size of France.”

  “That’s what I mean. And it’s so empty.”

  Douglas nods. “During Stalin, Kazakhstan was repopulated with Ukrainians and Russians, so much so that they soon outnumbered the Kazakhs. Rather than see their livestock collectivized, the Kazakhs slaughtered something like twenty million sheep and goats, five million cattle, and three million horses.”

  “Someone’s been reading his guidebook.”

  “Kazakhstan also happened to be the Soviet Union’s atomic playground. From the fifties to the early nineties, fifteen atom bombs a year were exploded over and under Semipalatinsk, which is”—he stops, gets his dubious bearings, and points—“I think about six hundred miles that way. So. You do the math, and it turns out that this place endured over eight hundred nuclear blasts in all. Enough to destroy the entire planet several times over. We haven’t avoided a nuclear holocaust as much as localized it in one very unlucky place.”

  “Which explains perfectly why you’re lecturing me.”

  The bleakness of her tone stops him dead. “I’m—” He can’t get a word out; his throat is lined with thorns. He breathes until the pent sentence finally bursts free. “I’m not lecturing you. I can’t believe you think I’m lecturing you.” But now, of course, he is.

  Jayne is walking fast now, as upright as a sea horse. “I’d like to thank you again for bringing me here,” Douglas hears her say.