God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  Viktor greets the Kazakhs in a friendly voice. Douglas looks over at Jayne. Her face is impassive, though her fingers have taloned even deeper into Douglas’s wrist. Douglas does not believe Viktor is speaking Russian to them—these harsh, gargly syllables sound nothing like Russian—and this seems to Douglas a cunning tactic indeed. Yes. That’s good, isn’t it? Engage them on their home court. He notices that Viktor keeps stepping between them and the man with the pistol. He does this casually, artfully, and the man seems simultaneously disinterested and utterly intent on getting a look at them.

  One of the teenagers steps away from his comrades, to his left, a large comical cartoonlike step, and peeks around Viktor’s shoulder at Douglas. Half a decade logged in classrooms triggers the Pavlovian workings of Douglas’s face: he smiles. The boy instantly breaks into Viktor and the man’s conversation, chattering and pointing at Douglas. Douglas’s chin lifts, his chest expands. He will not give them the comfort of terror, even as his stomach distends with what feels like ice cream and razor blades. But no. The boy is not pointing at Douglas, he realizes. He is pointing at Jayne.

  “When bullet hits man,” Viktor tells Jayne, “you hear it. Very strange sound. Like slap. You fall down in sand and you look over at your friend and you see the cigarette you gave him three minute ago is still in his teeth.”

  “I can’t imagine that. I can’t imagine any of this.”

  “What I remember most is little boy, little muj, running at our APC with Molotov cocktail. With our guns we turn him into nothing. Nothing.”

  “That’s—how did that make you feel?”

  “I never had problem. Dying is hard. Killing much easier, even for three rubles a month. Tell me why as twenty-year-old I can kill and now I cannot? Children have no pity. That is reason why. Think of their fairy tales. Many death in fairy tales. Baba Yaga cooks little girls in her oven, and children never frightened. They don’t cry.”

  “Fairy tales used to scare me to death. I cried. I cried all the time.”

  “After little muj, my friend buys urine from medics. Urine with . . . hepatitis, tak? He drinks urine, he get sick, he go home. Back to Georgia. Very smart friend. War make good men better, and I think make bad men much worse.”

  Zhoq, Viktor tells them, as the boy points at Jayne and the man with the pistol nods and nods. Zhoq, zhoq. Douglas suspects that in Kazakh this means No and hopes deeply that he is correct. For the first time, Viktor sounds angry. The man sneers and taps his pistol against his tracksuited leg. Viktor steps close to the man and says something, something hard and final, then looks at the ground. This is a ploy, and Douglas knows it: Viktor’s mind throws off a sudden telepathic thunder. They are silent, all of them, for half a minute. Viktor then sighs and digs into his vest pocket for his cigarettes. He offers the man one. The man takes it. Oddly, the man does not light up but gives the cigarette to one of the boys, who pockets it.

  Douglas has no conception of what is being said, for what reason, to what end. A black geyser of frustration pushes its way out of him. Before he can stop himself, Douglas calls out to Viktor: What do they want? Jayne’s other hand whips around, and now both are clamped around Douglas’s wrist.

  Viktor turns to Douglas, his face the astonished white of a lanced blister. Shut up, he says softly. It sounds to Douglas like shtup. At this, the man with the pistol points at himself, furiously, then thrusts his arms out at Douglas. Douglas finds himself studying the flailing pistol. It is fixed on him, now the sky, now the ground, him again. Then the rant is finished. The pistol drops. The man spits at Viktor’s feet. The boys laugh. Douglas finds himself thinking of music, of poetry, of themes and motifs building to sensible effect. But life is not like that. Life is chaos. People are horrifyingly alive and unknowable. As if personally escorting this realization from the stable of Douglas’s mind, the man walks over to Douglas, shrugging off Viktor’s feeble attempt to get in his way. Douglas’s knees fill with gelatin. As the man advances, he raises his pistol with almost threatless firing-range composure and points it at Douglas again. The man stops, his wet lips pushed out in curiosity. The pistol’s tiny black aperture is twenty inches from Douglas’s forehead, and without thought or intention Douglas takes hold of Jayne’s shoulders and pushes her in front of him.

  Jayne gasps, her face buried in her jacket’s shoulder. Douglas lets go of her instantly and steps forward, halving the distance between his forehead and the pistol. His eyes squeeze shut. He does not know where Jayne is. The boys are laughing again. When Douglas opens his eyes he sees that Viktor has materialized next to the man, and he whispers indulgently into his ear. The boy with the knife polishes its curved blade along his thigh.

  “Is never the same, after. Never. Many Afghantsi go on killing. Gangsters. Criminals. Hooligans who beat up rock-and-rollers at concerts. I throw my medals into Balkhash after war.”

  “Do you ever talk to anyone about it?”

  “Sometimes I see Afghantsi in Gorky Park. No legs, no arms, and I know them. I say nothing. Soviet Army Day, twenty-three February, they carry flowers and wear their medals and walk through Alma-Ata. That day, only that day, I go to cemetery. We are not buried in military cemetery because we did not fight in war. We fulfilled our international duty. That is what every red tombstone say: DIED IN EXECUTION OF HIS INTERNATIONAL DUTY. But beneath that are other messages, from Mama and Papa and sweet-hearts. ‘Sun and moon extinguished without you, dearest son.’ That is on tombstone of my friend Alek Ladutko. Nineteen years old. And on tombstone of Boris Zilfigarov, my friend shot with my cigarette, his sweetheart writes, ‘The earth is a desert without you.’ I drink to him now.”

  Viktor has calmed the man. He lowers his pistol, then scratches his temple with its long needlelike barrel. He rubs his chin. He enjoys a series of frowns. At what seems to Douglas precisely the right moment, Viktor’s arm finds its way around the man’s shoulder and, gently, he guides him away from Douglas and Jayne. When their backs are to them, Douglas does not look at Jayne, nor she at him.

  The Kazakhs leave. Agreeably. Suddenly. Saluting Viktor, Viktor saluting back. The three of them trudge off in the direction from which they appeared, and Viktor turns to Jayne and Douglas, one eye squinted shut in the sun.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Jayne asks Viktor now. “Stop looking at me like that.”

  “You are very beautiful,” Viktor tells her. “I do not have beautiful things in my life.”

  “I’m not beautiful. I’m awful.”

  “You say that because your husband is in his tent, listening to us. If he not there, you would not be awful. You would only be beautiful.”

  “You’re awful. You’re being awful to me right now. I don’t even know if anything you’ve told me is true.”

  “The earth is a desert without you. . . .”

  “Stop it.”

  “You sleep with me in my tent tonight. Your oaf is asleep. He will not know. He fails you. Over and over today he fails you. He does not deserve—”

  “Have you ever thought, Viktor, that whatever a man says to you, no matter what it is, at some level whatever he’s saying to you is just so fucking . . . poisonous?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. I’ve had too much to drink. Oh, I don’t want to sleep. I’ve had too—”

  “I go to tent now. You can join me. Your choose. I could make you. I could kill your oaf now, in his bed. I think maybe he would not mind so much. But I won’t do this. Where you sleep is your choose.”

  Who were they? Jayne had asked.

  Bandits, Viktor said, shrugging. On the steppe, such things happen. What could one do? Bad men.

  What did they want? Douglas had asked, again.

  Viktor had looked at him, not unkindly. I think you no want to know.

  Douglas’s eyes flicker open, his mind half conscious of the sudden, growing silence outside his tent. No, he thinks. No, I don’t want to know. Not this, not that. Nothing. Nothing and not
anything not ever again.

  The Ambassador’s Son

  I liked the Capital because you could always find something to do there. Booze, women, dancing—you name it. As for the rest of the country, the guidebook writers could have the place. They didn’t even have toilets outside the Capital. Please realize I require very little as a human being: bread, water, flush toilet. Something about living on the cusp of the millennium and still shitting over a hole calls into question the entire concept of historical progress.

  I’ll tell you a little about the country. It was one of the old Soviet republics where you started drinking at ten, started really drinking at fifteen, and dropped dead of it around fifty. The kind of place that was so corrupt that you had to bribe yourself to get out of bed in the morning. This wasn’t one of the European former Soviet republics; this was one of the Central Asian republics you’ve never heard of. As for the culture, I’ll say this: its combo of Soviet paranoia and Muslim xenophobia made red wine and fish look like peanut butter and jelly in comparison.

  You didn’t see a whole lot of tourists hanging out in the Capital, needless to say, but there were a few Americans around. (There are always a few Americans around.) First, you had the Professional Expatriates at the embassy. Their ranks were filled with a lot of uptight stuffed shirts, stuffed blouses, stuffed heads. Most of them couldn’t stray a block from embassy row without their cell phones, chauffeured cars, and International Herald Tribunes. Second, you had your Do-Gooders. These people, God bless them, needed a serious fucking clue. Each fall I’d see a new group of hatchlings turn up in the Capital, their first day in-country, snappily dressed, taking pictures with disposable cameras for Mom and Dad back home in Iowa and Nebraska and Michigan. Then they’d get shipped out to the villages. Three months later I’d see them back in the Capital shopping for Snickers bars and deodorant, crazed and dandruff-ridden. Finally, you had your Sharks, men and women whose in-country presence consisted solely of pocketing ducats. This wasn’t as evil as you might think, not even by folksinger standards. After all, the more money the Sharks made, the more the country made, and everyone was happy. Sometimes Sharks were Do-Gooders who’d stayed but gotten wise on how to live; sometimes they were Professional Expats who’d had their fill of embassy politics; and sometimes they were twenty-four-year-old ephebes with liberal arts degrees pulling down seventy-five grand a year as “consultants” for PriceWaterhouse or Boeing or British-American Tobacco. As for me, I had an in-country sinecure but didn’t consider myself one of the Sharks. Although I was around the embassy a lot no one would have mistaken me for a Professional Expat. A Do-Gooder, then? Hardly.

  I was the ambassador’s son.

  A dilemma: What do you do when you’re sunk to the hilt in the lovely, splayed vagina of bent-over Olga, who to your utter, surprised delight is finger-diddling the lipsticky and raven-haired Svetlana, when suddenly you hear your mother coming down the stairs? Did I mention that these stairs and the darkened basement they lead to are found in a home belonging to the United States embassy? Did I mention you live in this palace, which supplies a chauffeur named Sergei and an idiotically generous stipend? Finally, and most significantly, did I mention you’re two caterpillar lengths’ away from an orgasm of Vesuvian proportions?

  When the lights came on two things struck me. The first was that Olga had an American flag tattooed on her porky left rump cheek. The other was the difficulty of the choice I suddenly faced. The light switch was found halfway down the staircase, so I knew I had a second or two to pull on my pants and do at least a modicum of damage control. But Svetlana was spread-eagled on a large purple leather couch, bent-over Olga was before her on her knees, and I was screwing Olga from behind; this is not an easy situation from which to extricate oneself. In all honesty, I was too close to destroying Pompeii even to have considered stopping. I suppose it would be fairly easy to second-guess my judgment, but I’d never screwed two girls at once. My only defense is that you do not ask Columbus to turn around when the guy in the basket starts screaming “Land ho!”

  How long my mother watched before I heard her outraged gasp I’m unsure. I should point out that I love my mother. She’d stuck with my dad through his long, often dreary embassy-to-embassy career. (“A diplomat lives the life of a dog,” Jefferson said, and he was in fucking Paris.) First, until it blew up, he was in Beirut, where Dad was a staffer; then he spent a tense decade in the Soviet Union, where Dad was an ambassador’s aide; then to Dad’s biggest gig as a press envoy in the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan, which was about as much fun as you’d think; and then to his reward, the Capital. My mother was a woman who made an effort to learn the language of every country she traveled to. She shopped in the bazaars shoulder to shoulder with the locals. She cared. And this is what she had to see: an orgasmic Sveta hooting “Da, da!” and slapping the couch cushions with her hands, Olga’s finger rubbing her blood-swollen clit with the blurry speed of a hummingbird, and me, her son, ejaculating with enough torque to cross my eyes. When I was done—this process took a bit longer than I would have liked—I had no choice but to turn to her.

  Mom was no shrinking violet. She’d been in bullet-peppered cars in Beirut and had a rotten cabbage pitched in her face in Kabul, and by the time we locked pupils she’d composed herself. She wore a fuzzy white bathrobe with the American embassy insignia embossed smartly into the breast. Her hair was flattened and color-drained to the shade of gray found only in black-and-white movies. Her eyes were dry and unforgiving. “Oh,” she said, except it was more of a sigh. “Oh, Alec.”

  By now, Olga and Sveta knew the score. They were huddled naked against each other, whispering in Russian. I draped a nearby blanket along the three of us, and we sat there, the girls looking at the floor and me looking at the girls while my mother shook her head. I didn’t care about Olga and Sveta, really. They were Russian strumpets I’d picked up in a nightclub. They didn’t care about me, either. All they wanted was a chance at the Alec Schiavo Visa Application Program.

  “Mom,” I said, vaguely remembering my mother’s oath—after my urine had shown simultaneous traces of cocaine, marijuana, and opium—that it would be the Last Time she’d forgive me. She’d made that quite clear—it would be the Last Time, as opposed to the last time. You still have seven or eight “last times” left once you get that first one, but once you’re given a Last Time, it’s serious. (The drug test was at the request of the embassy’s regional security officer, a doughy guy called—not to his face—Genghis Ron, who did not care for me or, as he once put it, my “whole program,” one bit.)

  “Alec,” she said again, closing her eyes, her face hardening.

  I figured I had one chance to fix all this, to say the right thing. (Before I tell you what fell out of my mouth I feel it’s germane to point out that I’d spent the better part of the evening smoking Afghan poppy seeds that Sveta had seemed really surprised to find in her purse.) I put my arms around the girls, hugged them to me, and said, “Two chicks at once, Mom.”

  In a flash of fuzzy, hazy white, my mother vanished from the staircase. The next thing I knew my ear was twisting between her sharp fingers. She pulled me to my feet, my pants still around my ankles, and dragged me trippingly across the room. At the stairs I turned and saw Olga and Sveta on the floor, on their backs, kicking into their pirated American blue jeans.

  The Hotel Ta-Ta was a nice place. Built by Indian investors—anything built by Soviet architects had a tendency to fall apart—it relieved you of three hundred dollars a night for the privilege of stepping into its marble lobby and sleeping on its crisp, laundered sheets. I could afford it; I could have afforded twice that much.

  The next morning, ten steps past the hotel fountain, I saw Sergei, my chauffeur, sitting on the hood of a gleaming, freshly washed white Toyota Land Cruiser, reading the Capital’s Russian-language newspaper. The night before he’d helped me haul all my shit into the suite.

  “Sergei,” I called, waving. “Zdravstvuite! Kak dela?”
>
  “Ah, prekrasno, Alec,” he said, just about extinguishing our shared vocabulary. (I knew roughly enough Russian to fill the backs of two postcards.) Sergei folded his newspaper into a small square and held it pinned under his arm as he opened my door for me.

  I fell into the embassy-supplied Land Cruiser’s backseat and rubbed my hangover-tenderized temples. Seconds later Sergei was weaving through the traffic on Rashidov Avenue like an out-of-control darning needle.

  “Sergei,” I said. “Café, pozhaluista.”

  In the rearview mirror his vodka-reddened eyes flicked onto mine. “Amerikanskoe café, da?”

  “Da,” I said, leaning forward. “Sergei. My father. Moi . . . um, otets?”

  “Da,” Sergei said, with a solitary nod.

  “Where is he? Uh, gde moi otets? Do you know?” I knew Ambassador Schiavo had gone to Kiev to a human-rights conference sponsored by all the former Soviet republics. That morning on BBC, though, I’d seen that a bomb threat had ended the conference three days ahead of time. Was he home, did he call, had my mother debriefed him?

  “I no know,” Sergei said, with the typical shrug that followed all his heroic efforts at English. “My father, I no know where is he.” He looked at me again in the mirror. “Khorosho, Alec?”

  Still, after several months, I was pleased to see the fruits of Sergei’s and my daily five-minute English lessons. “Khorosho, Sergei. Great. To the café. Me want coffee now chop-chop.”

  “Chop-chop,” Sergei said, shifting, and I sat back and watched the Capital’s weird, oppressive architecture fill the spotless square of my window and then, after a moment, slide soundlessly away. I dozed off for a few blocks and woke to the sound of Sergei beeping his horn at a big-bottomed Tatar girl wearing black stretch pants and a tight white T-shirt. She was standing on the corner of the trendiest street in town, the street where one found the New World Café. Sergei turned around, grinning, showing me his mouthful of substitute gold teeth. “Alec,” he said, grinning. “Beeg tits, nice ahs, ah?”