God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  “It is Susanna,” Rustam said, jerking his head toward the small blond girl who shared his desk.

  Most of Timothy’s students were black-haired, sloe-eyed Uzbeks like Rustam—the ethnic Russians able to do so had fled Central Asia as the first statues of Lenin toppled—and Susanna’s blond, round-eyed presence in the room was both a vague ethnic reassurance and, somehow, deeply startling.

  Rustam looked back at Timothy. “She is looking at my test and bringing me distraction. Meester Timothy, this girl cheats on me.” Rustam, Timothy knew, had branded onto his brain this concept of cheating and viewed his classmates with an ire typical of the freshly enlightened.

  Susanna’s glossy eyes were fixed upon the scarred wooden slab of her desktop. Timothy stared at this girl he did not know what to do with, who had become all the children he did not know what to do with. She was thirteen, fourteen, and sat there, pink and startled, while Rustam spoke his determined English. Susanna’s hair held a buttery yellow glow in the long plinths of sunlight shining in through the windows; her small smooth hands grabbed at each other in her lap. All around her, little heads bowed above the clean white rectangles on their desks, the classroom filled with the soft scratching of pencils.

  Timothy took a breath, looking back to Rustam, unable to concentrate on what he was saying because Timothy could not keep from looking up at the row of pictures along the back wall of his classroom, where Ernest Hemingway, John Reed, Paul Robeson, and Jack London stared out at him from plain wooden frames. An identical suite of portraits—the Soviet ideal of good Americans— was found in every English classroom from here to Tbilisi. Timothy knew that none of these men had found peace with God. He had wanted to give that peace to these children. When he had come to Central Asia, he felt peace with God as a great glowing cylinder inside of him, but the cylinder had grown dim. He could barely even feel God anymore, though he could still hear Him, floating and distant, broadcasting a surflike static. There was a message woven into this dense noise, Timothy was sure, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t decipher it. He looked again at Rustam, who had stopped talking now and was waiting for Timothy’s answer. Every student in the classroom had looked up from their tests, pinioning Timothy with their small impassive eyes.

  “Susanna’s fine, Rustam,” Timothy said finally, turning to erase the nothing on his blackboard. “She’s . . . okay. It’s okay.”

  Rustam’s forehead creased darkly, but he nodded and returned to his test. Timothy knew that, to Rustam, the world and his place in it would not properly compute if Americans were not always right, always good, always funny and smart and rich and beautiful. Never mind that Timothy had the mashed nose of a Roman pugilist and a pimply face; never mind that Timothy’s baggy, runneled clothing had not been washed for months; never mind that once, after Rustam had asked about the precise function of do in the sentence “I do not like to swim,” Timothy had stood at the head of the class for close to two minutes and silently fingered his chalk. Meester Timothy was right, even when he was wrong, because he came from America. The other students went back to their exams. Timothy imagined he could hear the wet click of their eyes moving from test to test, neighbor to neighbor, soaking up one another’s answers.

  Susanna, though, did not stir. Timothy walked over to her and placed his hand on her back. She was as warm to his touch as a radiator through a blanket, and she looked up at him with starved and searching panic in her eyes. Timothy smiled at her, uselessly. She swallowed, picked up her pencil, and, as if helpless not to, looked over at Rustam’s test, a fierce indentation between her yellow eyebrows. Rustam sat there, writing, pushing out through his nose hot gusts of air, until finally he whirled around in his seat and hissed something at Susanna in his native language, which he knew she did not understand. Again, Susanna froze. Rustam pulled her pencil from her hands—she did not resist—snapped it in half, and threw the pieces in her face. From somewhere in Susanna’s throat came a half-swallowed sound of grief, and she burst into tears.

  Suddenly Timothy was standing there, dazed, rubbing his hand. He recalled something mentally blindsiding him, some sort of brain flash, and thus could not yet understand why his palm was buzzing. Nor did he understand why every student had heads bowed even lower to their tests, why the sound of scratching pencils seemed suddenly, horribly frenzied and loud. But when Rustam— who merely sat in his chair looking up at Timothy, his long face devoid of expression—lifted his hand to his left cheek, Timothy noticed it reddening, tightening, his eye squashing shut, his skin lashing itself to his cheekbone. And Timothy Silverstone heard the sound of God recede even more, retreat back even farther, while Susanna, between sobs, gulped for breath.

  Naturally, Sasha was waiting for Timothy in the doorway of the teahouse across the street from the Registan, a suite of three madrasas whose sparkling minarets rose up into a haze of metallic blue-gray smog. Today was especially bad, a poison petroleum mist lurking along the streets and sidewalks and curbs. And then there was the heat, a belligerent heat. Moving through it felt like breathing hot tea.

  Timothy walked past the tall bullet-shaped teahouse doorway, Sasha falling in alongside him. They did not talk—they rarely talked—even though the walk to Timothy’s apartment in the Third Microregion took longer than twenty minutes. Sasha was Russian, tall and slender with hair the color of new mud. Each of Sasha’s ears was as large and ornate as a tankard handle, and his eyes were as blue as the dark margin of atmosphere where the sky became outer space. He walked next to Timothy with a lanky, boneless grace, in blue jeans and imitation-leather cowboy boots that clomped emptily on the sidewalk. Sasha’s mother was a history teacher from Timothy’s school.

  When his drab building came into sight, Timothy felt the headachy swell of God’s static rushing into his head. It was pure sound, shapeless and impalpable, and as always he sensed some egg of sense or insight held deep within it. Then it was gone, silent, and in that moment Timothy could feel his spirit split from his flesh. For I know, Timothy thought, these words of Paul’s to the Romans so bright in the glare of his memory they seemed almost indistinct from his own thoughts, that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.

  As they climbed the stairs to Timothy’s fifth-floor apartment, Sasha reached underneath Timothy’s crotch and cupped him. He squeezed and laughed, and Timothy felt a wet heat spread through him, animate him, flow to the hard, stony lump growing in his pants. Sasha squeezed again, absurdly tender. As Timothy fished for the keys to his apartment door, Sasha walked up close behind him, breathing on Timothy’s neck, his clothes smelling—as everyone’s clothes here did—as though they had been cured in sweat.

  They stumbled inside. Sasha closed the door as Timothy’s hands shot to his belt, which he tore off like a rip cord. He’d lost so much weight, his pants dropped with a sad puff around his feet. Sasha shook his head at this—he complained, sometimes, that Timothy was getting too skinny—and stepped out of his own pants. Into his palm Sasha spit a foamy coin of drool, stepped toward Timothy, and grabbed his penis. He pulled it toward him sexlessly, as if it were a grapple he was making sure was secure. Sasha laughed again and threw himself over the arm of Timothy’s plush red sofa. Sasha reached back and with medical indelicacy pulled himself apart. He looked over his shoulder at Timothy, waiting.

  The actual penetration was always beyond the bend of Timothy’s recollection. As if some part of himself refused to acknowledge it. One moment Sasha was hurling himself over the couch’s arm, the next Timothy was inside him. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. It began slowly, Sasha breathing through his mouth, Timothy pushing farther into him, eyes smashed shut. What he felt was not desire, not lust; it was worse than lust. It was worse than what drove a soulless animal. It was some hot tongue of fire inside Timothy that he could not douse— not by satisfying it, not by ignoring it. Sometimes it was barely more than a flicker, and then Timothy could live with it, nullify it as his we
akness, as his flaw. But without warning, in whatever dark, smoldering interior shrine, the flame would grow and flash outward, melting Timothy’s core—the part of himself he believed good and steadfast—into soft, pliable sin.

  Timothy’s body shook as if withstanding invisible blows, and Sasha began to moan with a carefree sinless joy Timothy could only despise, pity, and envy. It was always, oddly, this time, when perched on the edge of exploding into Sasha, that Timothy’s mind turned, again, with noble and dislocated grace, to Paul. Do not be deceived! he wrote. Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites . . . none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. It was a passage Timothy could only read and reflect upon, praying for the strength he knew he did not have. He prayed to be washed, to be sanctified in the name of Jesus, but now he had come apart and God was far from him. His light had been eclipsed, and in the cold darkness that followed, he wondered if his greatest sin was not that he was pushing himself into nonvaginal warmth but that his worship was now for man and not man’s maker. But such taxonomies were of little value. God’s world was one of cruel mathematics, of right and wrong. It was a world that those who had let God fall from their hearts condemned as repressive and awash in dogma—an accurate but vacant condemnation, Timothy knew, since God did not anywhere claim that His world was otherwise.

  A roiling spasm began in Timothy’s groin and burst throughout the rest of his body, and in that ecstatic flooded moment nothing was wrong, nothing, with anyone, and he emptied himself into Sasha without guilt, only with appreciation and happiness and bliss. But then it was over, and he had to pull himself from the boy and wonder, once again, if what he had done had ruined him forever, if he had driven himself so deeply into darkness that the darkness had become both affliction and reward. Quickly Timothy wiped himself with one of the throw pillows from his couch and sat on the floor, sick and dizzy with shame. Sasha, still bent over the couch, looked back at Timothy, smirking, a cloudy satiation frosting his eyes. “Shto?” he asked Timothy. What?

  Timothy could not—could never—answer him.

  The next morning Timothy entered his classroom to find Susanna seated at her desk. Class was not for another twenty minutes, and Susanna was a student whose arrival, on most days, could be counted on to explore the temporal condition between late and absent. Timothy was about to wish her a surprised “Good morning” when he realized that she was not alone.

  A woman sat perched on the edge of his chair, wagging her finger and admonishing Susanna in juicy, top-heavy Russian. Her accent was unknown to Timothy, filled with dropped Gs and a strange diphthongal imprecision. Whole sentence fragments arced past him like softballs. Susanna merely sat there, her hands on her desktop in a small bundle. Timothy turned to leave but the woman looked over to see him caught in mid-pirouette in the doorway. She leaped up from his chair, a startled gasp rushing out of her.

  They looked at each other, the woman breathing, her meaty shoulders bobbing up and down, her mouth pulled into a rictal grin. “Zdravstvuite,” she said stiffly.

  “Zdravstvuite,” Timothy said, stepping back into the room. He tried to smile, and the woman returned the attempt with a melancholy but respectful nod. She was like a lot of women Timothy saw here: bull-necked, jowled, of indeterminate age, as sexless as an oval. Atop her head was a lumpen yellow-white mass of hair spray and bobby pins, and her lips looked as sticky and red as the picnic tables Timothy remembered painting, with his Christian youth group, in the parks of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

  “Timothy Silverstone,” she said. Teemosee Seelverstun. Her hands met below her breasts and locked.

  “Yes,” Timothy said, glancing at Susanna. She wore a bright bubble gum–colored dress he had not seen before, some frilly ribboned thing. As if aware of Timothy’s eyes on her, Susanna bowed over in her chair even more, a path of spinal knobs surfacing along her back.

  “I am Irina Dupkova,” the woman said. “Susanna told me what happened yesterday—how you reacted to her . . . problem.” Her joined hands lifted to her chin in gentle imploration. “I have come to ask you: This is true, yes?”

  Her accent delayed the words from falling into their proper translated slots. When they did, a mental dead bolt unlocked, opening a door somewhere inside Timothy and allowing the memory of Rustam’s eye swelling shut to come tumbling out. A fist of guilt clenched in his belly. He had struck a child. He had hit a boy as hard as he could, and there was no place he could hide this from himself, as he hid what he did with Sasha. Timothy felt faint and humidified, his face pinkening. “Yes, Irina Dupkova,” he said, “it is. And I want to tell you I’m sorry. I . . . I—” He searched for words, some delicate, spiraled idiom to communicative his remorse. He could think of nothing, entire vocabularies lifting away from him like startled birds. “I’m sorry. What happened made me . . . very unhappy.”

  She shot Timothy a strange look, eyes squinched, her red lips kissed out in perplexion. “You do not understand me,” she said. This was not a question. Timothy glanced over at Susanna, who had not moved, perhaps not even breathed. When he looked back to Irina Dupkova she was smiling at him, her mouthful of gold teeth holding no gleam, no sparkle, only the metallic dullness of a handful of old pennies. She shook her head, clapping once in delight. “Oh, your Russian, Mister Timothy, I think it is not so good. You do not vladeyete Russian very well, yes?”

  “Vladeyete,” Timothy said. It was a word he was sure he knew. “Vladeyete,” he said again, casting mental nets. The word lay beyond his reach somewhere.

  Irina Dupkova exhaled in mystification, then looked around the room. “You do not know this word,” she said in a hard tone, one that nudged the question mark off the end of the sentence.

  “Possess,” Susanna said, before Timothy could lie. Both Timothy and Irina Dupkova looked over at her. Her back was still to them, but Timothy could see that she was consulting her CARA-supplied Russian-English dictionary. “Vladeyete,” she said again, her finger thrust onto the page. “Possess.”

  Timothy blinked. “Da,” he said. “Vladeyete. Possess.” For the benefit of Irina Dupkova, he smacked himself on the forehead with the butt of his palm.

  “Possess,” Irina Dupkova said, as if it had been equally obvious to her. She paused, her face regaining its bluntness. “Well, nevertheless, I have come here this morning to thank you.”

  Timothy made a vague sound of dissent. “There is no need to thank me, Irina Dupkova.”

  “You have made my daughter feel very good, Timothy. Protected. Special. You understand, yes?”

  “Your daughter is a fine girl,” Timothy said. “A fine student.”

  With that Irina Dupkova’s face darkened, and she stepped closer to him, putting her square back to the doorway. “These filthy people think they can spit on Russians now, you know. They think independence has made them a nation. They are animals, barbarians.” Her eyes were small and bright with anger.

  Timothy Silverstone looked at his scuffed classroom floor. There was activity in the hallway—shuffling feet, children’s voices—and Timothy looked at his watch. His first class, Susanna’s class, began in ten minutes. He moved to the door and closed it.

  Irina Dupkova responded to this by intensifying her tone, her hands moving in little emphatic circles. “You understand, Timothy, that Russians did not come here willingly, yes? I am here because my father was exiled after the Great Patriotic War Against Fascism. Like Solzhenitsyn, and his careless letters. A dark time, but this is where my family has made its home. You understand; we have no other place but this. But things are very bad for us now.” She flung her arm toward the windows and looked outside, her jaw set. “There is no future for Russians here, I think. No future. None.”

  “I understand, Irina Dupkova,” Timothy said, “and I am sorry, but you must excuse me, I have my morning lessons now, and I—”
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  She seized Timothy’s wrist, the ball of her thumb pressing harshly between his radius and ulna. “And this little hooligan Uzbek thinks he can touch my Susanna. You understand that they are animals, Timothy, yes? Animals. Susanna,” Irina Dupkova said, her dark eyes not leaving Timothy’s, “come here now, please. Come let Mister Timothy see you.”

  In one smooth movement Susanna rose from her desk and turned to them. Her hair was pulled back into a taut blond ponytail and lay tightly against her skull, as fine and grained as sandalwood. She walked over to them in small, noiseless steps, and Timothy, because of his shame for striking Rustam before her eyes, could not bear to look at her face. Instead he studied her shoes—black and shiny, like little hoofs—and the sapling legs that lay beneath the wonder of her white leggings. Irina Dupkova hooked Susanna close to her and kissed the top of her yellow head. Susanna looked up at Timothy, but he could not hold the girl’s gaze. He went back to the huge face of her mother, a battlefield of a face, white as paraffin.

  “My daughter,” Irina Dupkova said, nose tilting downward into the loose wires of Susanna’s hair.

  “Yes,” Timothy said.

  Irina Dupkova looked over at him, smiling, eyebrows aloft. “She is very beautiful, yes?”

  “She is a very pretty girl,” Timothy agreed.

  Irina Dupkova bowed in what Timothy took to be grateful acknowledgment. “My daughter likes you very much,” she said, looking down. “You understand this. You are her favorite teacher. My daughter loves English.”

  “Yes,” Timothy said. At some point Irina Dupkova had, unnervingly, begun to address him in the second-person familiar. Timothy flinched as a knock on the door sounded throughout the classroom, followed by a peal of girlish giggling.