God Lives in St. Petersburg

by Tom Bissell

  “My daughter loves America,” Irina Dupkova said, ignoring the knock, her voice soft and insistent.

  “Yes,” Timothy said, looking back at her.

  “I have no husband.”

  Timothy willed the response from his face. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “He was killed in Afghanistan.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “I live alone with my daughter, Timothy, in this nation in which Russians have no future.”

  Lord, please, Timothy thought, make her stop. “Irina Dupkova,” Timothy said softly, “there is nothing I can do about any of this. I am going home in three months. I cannot—I am not able to help you in that way.”

  “I have not come here for that,” she said. “Not for me. Again you do not understand me.” Irina Dupkova’s eyes closed with the faint, amused resignation of one who had been failed her whole life. “I have come here for Susanna. I want you to have her. I want you to take her back to America.”

  Struck dumb had always been a homely, opaque expression to Timothy, but he understood, at that moment, the deepest implications of its meaning. He had nothing to say, nothing, and the silence seemed hysterical.

  She stepped closer. “I want you to take my daughter, Timothy. To America. As your wife. I will give her to you.”

  Timothy stared her in the face, still too surprised for emotion. “Your daughter, Irina Dupkova,” he said, “is too young for such a thing. Much too young.” He made the mistake of looking down at Susanna. There was something in the girl Timothy had always mistaken for a cow-like dullness, but he could see now, in her pale eyes, savage determination. He suddenly understood that Susanna’s instigation lay behind Irina Dupkova’s offer.

  “She is fourteen,” Irina Dupkova said, moving her hand, over and over again, along the polished sheen of Susanna’s hair. “She will be fifteen in four months. This is not so young, I think.”

  “She is too young,” Timothy said, with a fresh anger. Again he looked down at Susanna. She had not removed her eyes from his.

  “She will do for you whatever you ask, Timothy,” Irina Dupkova was saying. “Whatever you ask. You understand.”

  Timothy nodded distantly, a nod that both understood but did not understand. In Susanna’s expression of inert and perpetual unfeeling, he could see that what Irina Dupkova said was right: She would do whatever he asked of her. And Timothy Silverstone felt the glisten of desire at this thought, felt the bright glint of a lechery buried deep in the shale of his mind. My God, he thought. I will not do this. He was startled to realize he had no idea how old Sasha was. Could that be? He was tall, and his scrotum dangled between his legs with the heft of postadolescence, but he was also lightly and delicately haired, and had never, as far as Timothy could tell, shaved or needed to shave. Sasha could have been twenty-two, three years younger than Timothy; he could have been sixteen. Timothy shook the idea from his head.

  “I have a brother,” Irina Dupkova was saying, “who can arrange for papers that will make Susanna older. Old enough for you, in your nation. It has already been discussed. Do you understand?”

  “Irina Dupkova,” Timothy said, stepping backward, both hands thrust up, palms on display, “I cannot marry your daughter.”

  Irina Dupkova nearly smiled. “You say you cannot. You do not say you do not want to.”

  “Irina Dupkova, I cannot do this for you.”

  Irina Dupkova sighed, chin lifting, head tilting backward. “I know why you are here. You understand. I know why you have come. You have come to give us your Christ. But he is useless.” Something flexed behind her Slavic face plate, her features suddenly sharpening. “This would help us. This would save.”

  Timothy spun around, swung open his classroom door, poked his head into the hallway, and scattered the knot of chattering children there with a hiss. He turned back toward Irina Dupkova, pulling the door shut behind him with a bang. They both stared at him, Irina Dupkova’s arm holding Susanna close to her thick and formless body. “You understand, Timothy,” she began, “how difficult it is for us to leave this nation. They do not allow it. And so you can escape, or you can marry.” She looked down at herself. “Look at me. This is what Susanna will become if she remains here. Old and ugly, a ruin.” In Irina Dupkova’s face was a desperation so needy and exposed Timothy could find quick solace only in God, and he tried to imagine the soul within Susanna, the soul being held out for him to take away from here, to sanctify and to save. That was God’s law, His imperative: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. Then God’s distant broadcast filled his mind, and with two fingers placed stethescopically to his forehead Timothy turned away from Irina Dupkova and Susanna and listened so hard a dull red ache spread behind his eyes. The sound disappeared.

  “Well,” Irina Dupkova said with a sigh, after it had become clear that Timothy was not going to speak, “you must begin your lesson now.” Susanna stepped away from her mother and like a ghost drifted over to her desk. Irina Dupkova walked past Timothy and stopped at his classroom door. “You will think about it,” she said, turning to him, her face in profile, her enormous back draped with a tattered white shawl. “You will consider it.” Timothy said nothing and she nodded, turned back to the door, and opened it.

  Students streamed into the room on both sides of Irina Dupkova like water coming to a delta. Their flow hemmed her in, and Irina Dupkova’s angry hands fluttered and slapped at the black-haired heads rushing past her. Only Rustam stepped aside to let her out, which was why he was the last student into the room. As Rustam closed the door after Irina Dupkova, Timothy quickly spun to his blackboard and stared at the piece of chalk in his hand. He thought of what to write. He thought of writing something from Paul, something sagacious and unproblematic like We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak. He felt Rustam standing behind him, but Timothy could not turn around. He wrote the date on the board, then watched chalk dust drift down into the long sulcated tray at the board’s base.

  “Meester Timothy?” Rustam said finally, his artificial American accent tuned to a tone of high contrition.

  Timothy turned. A bruise like a red-brown crescent lay along the ridge of Rustam’s cheekbone, the skin there taut and shiny. It was barely noticeable, really. It was nothing. It looked like the kind of thing any child was liable to get, anywhere, doing anything. Rustam was smiling at him, a bead of wet light fixed in each eye. “Good morning, Rustam,” Timothy said.

  Rustam reached into his book bag and then deposited into Timothy’s hand something Timothy remembered telling his class about months and months ago, back before he had come apart—something that, in America, he had said, students brought their favorite teachers. It got quite a laugh from these students, who knew of a different standard of extravagance needed to sway one’s teachers. Timothy stared at the object in his hand: an apple. Rustam had given him an apple. “For you,” Rustam said softly. He turned and sat down.

  Timothy looked up at his classroom to see five rows of smiles. Meester Timothy will be wonderful and American again, these smiles said. Meester Timothy will not hit us, not like our teachers hit us. Meester Timothy will always be good.

  Woolen gray clouds floated above the Registan’s minarets, the backlight of a high hidden sun outlining them in gold. Some glow leaked through, filling the sky with hazy beams of diffracted light. Timothy walked home, head down, into the small breeze coming out of the foothills to the east. It was the first day in weeks that the temperature had dipped below 38˚C, the first day in which walking two blocks did not soak his body in sweat.

  Sasha stood in the tall doorway of the teahouse, holding a bottle of orange Fanta in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Around his waist Sasha had knotted the arms of Timothy’s gray-and-garnet St. Thomas Seminary sweatshirt (Timothy didn’t recall allowing Sasha to borrow it), the rest trailing down behind him in a square maroon cape. He slouched in the doorway, one shoulder up against the frame, his eyes filled wit
h an alert, dancing slyness. He let the half-smoked cigarette drop from his fingers, and it hit the teahouse floor in a burst of sparks and gray ash. He was grinding it out with his cowboy-boot tip when Timothy’s eyes pounced upon his. “Nyet,” Timothy said, still walking, feeling on his face a light spatter of rain. “Ne sevodnya, Sasha.” Not today, Sasha. Timothy eddied through the molded white plastic chairs and tables of an empty outdoor café, reached the end of the block, and glanced behind him.

  Sasha stood there, his arms laced tight across his chest, his face a twist of sour incomprehension. Behind him, a herd of Pakistani tourists was rushing toward the Registan to snap pictures before the rain began.

  Timothy turned at the block’s corner even though he did not need to. In the sky a murmur of thunder heralded the arrival of a darker bank of clouds. Timothy looked up. A raindrop exploded on his eye.

  Timothy sat behind his work desk in his bedroom, a room so small and diorama-like it seemed frustrated with itself, before the single window that looked out on the over-planned Soviet chaos of the Third Microregion: flat roofs, gouged roads that wended industriously but went nowhere, a domino of faceless apartment buildings just like his own. The night was made impenetrable by thick curtains of rain, and lightning split the sky with electrified blue fissures. It was the first time in months it had rained long enough to create the conditions Timothy associated with rain: puddles on the streets, overflowing gutters, mist-cooled air. The letter he had started had sputtered out halfway into its first sentence, though a wet de facto period had formed after the last word he had written (here) from having left his felt-tip pen pressed against the paper too long. He had been trying to write about Susanna, about what had happened today. The letter was not intended for anyone in particular, and a broken chain of words lay scattered throughout his mind. Timothy knew that if only he could pick them up and put them in their proper order, God’s message might at last become clear to him. Perhaps, he thought, his letter was to God.

  Knuckles against his door. He turned away from his notebook and wrenched around in his chair, knowing it was Sasha from the lightness of the three knocks, illicit knocks that seemed composed equally of warning and temptation. Timothy snapped shut his notebook, pinning his letter between its flimsy boards, and winged it onto his bed. As he walked across his living room, desire came charging up in him like a stampede of fetlocked horses; just before his hand gripped the doorknob he felt himself through his Green Bay Packers sweatpants. A sleepy, squishy hardness there. He opened the door. Standing in the mildewy darkness of his hallway was not Sasha but Susanna, her small nose wrinkled and her soaked hair a tangle of spirals molded to her head. “I have come,” she said, “to ask if you have had enough time to consider.”

  Timothy could only stare down at her. It occurred to him that he had managed to let another day go by without eating. He closed his eyes. “Susanna, you must go home. Right now.”

  She nodded, then stepped past him into his open, empty living room. Surprise rooted Timothy to the floorboards. “Susanna—” he said, half reaching for her.

  After slipping by she twirled once in the room’s center, her eyes hard and appraising. This was a living room that seemed to invite a museum’s velvet rope and small engraved plaque: SOVIET LIFE, CIRCA 1955. There was nothing but the red sofa, a tall black lamp that stood beside nothing, and a worn red rug that did not occupy half the floor. Susanna seemed satisfied, though, and with both hands she grabbed a thick bundle of her hair and twisted it, water pattering onto the floor. “We can fuck,” she said in English, not looking at him, still twisting the water from her hair. She pronounced it Ve con fock. She took off her jacket and draped it over the couch. It was a cheap white plastic jacket, something Timothy saw hanging in the bazaars by the thousand. Beneath it she was still wearing the bubble gum dress, aflutter with useless ribbonry. Her face was wet and cold, her skin bloodless in the relentless wattage of the lightbulb glowing naked above her. She was shivering.

  Timothy heard no divine static to assist him with Susanna’s words, only the awful silent vacuum in which the laws of the world were cast and acted upon.

  “We can fuck,” Susanna said again.

  “Stop it,” Timothy said.

  “We can,” she said in Russian. “I will do this for you and we will go to America.”

  “No,” Timothy said, closing his eyes.

  She took a small step back and looked at the floor. “You do not want to do this with me?”

  Timothy opened his eyes and stared at the lamp that stood next to nothing. He thought that if he stared at it long enough, Susanna might disappear.

  “I have done this before with men.”

  “You have,” Timothy said—it was a statement—his throat feeling dry and paved.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes.” She looked away. “I know what you think. You think I am bad.”

  “I am very sad for you, Susanna, but I don’t think that.”

  “You will tell me this is wrong.”

  Now both of Timothy’s hands were on his face, and he pushed them against his cheeks and eyes as if he were applying a compress. “All of us do wrong, Susanna. All of us are bad. In the eyes of God,” he said with listless conviction, “we are all sinners.”

  A knowing sound tumbled out of Susanna. “My mother told me you would tell me these things, because you believe in Khristos.” She said nothing for a moment. “Will you tell me about this man?”

  Timothy split two of his fingers apart and peered at her. “Would you like me to?”

  She nodded, scratching at the back of her hand, her fingernails leaving a cross-hatching of chalky white lines. “It is very interesting to me,” Susanna said, “this story. That one man can die and save the whole world. My mother told me not to believe it. She told me this was something only an American would believe.”

  “That’s not true, Susanna. Many Russians also believe.”

  “God lives for Russians only in St. Petersburg. God does not live here. He has abandoned us.”

  “God lives everywhere. God never abandons you.”

  “My mother told me you would say that too.” From her tone, he knew she had no allegiance to her mother. She could leave this place so easily. If not with him, she would wait for someone else. She shook her head at him. “You have not thought about marrying me at all.”

  “Susanna, it would be impossible. I have a family in America, friends, my church . . . they would see you, and they would know. You are not old enough to trick anyone with papers.”

  “Then we will live somewhere else until I can.” She looked around, her wet hair whipping back and forth. “Where is your bed? We will fuck there.”

  “Susanna—”

  “Let me show you what a good wife I can be.” With a shoddy fabric hiss, her dress lifted over her head and she was naked. For all her fearlessness, Susanna could no longer meet Timothy’s eye. She hugged herself, each hand gripping an elbow, her xylophonic rib cage heaving, the concave swoop of her stomach breathing in and out like that of a panicked, wounded animal. She was smooth and hairless but for the blond puff at the junction of her tiny legs. She was a thin, shivering fourteen-year-old girl standing naked in the middle of Timothy’s living room. Lightning flashed outside—a stroboscope of white light— the room’s single bright lightbulb buzzing briefly, going dark, and glowing back to strength.

  His bedroom was not dark enough to keep him from seeing, with awful clarity, Susanna’s face tighten with pain as he floated above her. Nothing could ease the mistaken feeling of the small tight shape of her body against his. After it was over, he knew the part of himself he had lost with Sasha was not salvaged and never would be. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. He was longing for God to return to him when His faraway stirrings opened Timothy’s eyes. Susanna lay beside him, in fragile, uneasy sleep. He was drawn from bed, pulled toward the window. The beaded glass was cool against his palms. While Timothy waited—God felt very close now—he imagined himself wit
h Susanna, freed from the world and the tragedy of its limitations, stepping with her soul into the house of the True and Everlasting God, a mansion filled with rooms and rooms of a great and motionless light. Even when Susanna began to cry, Timothy could not turn around, afraid of missing what God would unveil for him, while outside, beyond the window, it began to rain again.

  Animals in Our Lives

  The English,” Franklin says, ostensibly to Elizabeth but mostly to himself. He twists the key and shifts into first, her Saturn’s engine whirring. “Maybe it’s all the fog and boarding school. Makes their brains soggy.” He backs out of their spot in the parking lot of Frodo’s, a popular Hobbit-themed pizza joint. It was the third time he had eaten at Frodo’s, and its lode of wonderment only deepened. He thinks of the braid-headed waitresses wearing poofy aprons and forbidding black blouses. The dark Middle Earth decor. The signed copy of The Fellowship of the Ring stored within a small glass coffin near the entrance. The antiquarian’s certificate of authentication that hangs above it, like an edict. The silence, neither hostile nor familiar, in which they picked at their oblong mushroom-and-cheese.

  Elizabeth looks over at him as he muscles into Grand River Avenue’s Sunday traffic. Her tennisy white T-shirt is soiled with a colon of tomato sauce along its V-neck. He’s only now noticed and hopes she will not. Quickly he looks away. One never quite knows when the end begins. Such a strange intuitive lapse for brains so attuned to the flutter of beginnings, their nauseating spiral of joy and terror. Somehow, the beginning of the end molts recognition’s casing, a phantom countdown lacking even the condolence of a synonym. After she falls asleep tonight, he will remove this shirt from the hamper, rub liquid detergent into the tiny orange stains, and let it soak overnight in the stoppered bathroom sink. He will not tell her. He will rise early, and by dawn the shirt will find itself back in the hamper. The sink will be discreetly drained. Kindness, once as uncomplicated as respiration, has a sick new venturesome quality. Anything they do for each other now is fuel for yet another misunderstanding.