God Lives in St. Petersburg (16 page)

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 with 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 with 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.

“The English,” she echoes blankly.

The rinse of daylight on the windshield is blinding. He jerks back and forth in his seat. “Not
all
of them. Churchill. Orwell. Nice dry brains.”

She simply shakes her head, hands lifting from her smooshed thighs. A mystified entreaty to elaborate.

“Tolkien,” he says. That she doesn’t know what he’s talking about sticks him through the heart. She would have, he thinks, once. His tone sharpens. “
The Hobbit.
Frodo’s. Where you just bought us lunch.”

Elizabeth gazes out her window. “Tolkien was Scottish, I thought.” They are passing the zoned commercial clutter of a small midwestern university town. She is a medical student here, in the closing weeks of her second year, widely held to be the most punishing. Sometimes, late at night, he allows this to console him. She stares at the bagelries, the record and bike stores, the bars so close to one another he suspects they are in hidden, felonious league. On his side of the street is the northern flank of the university, endless greenery plunked with long flat structures terraced with rococo Modernism, gloomy campus-Gothic firetraps, stark administrative fortresses designed from the academic-industrial-complex blueprint popular in the mid-1970s.

“Tolkien was English,” he points out gently.

She shrugs. Her haircut is a day old, a perky forgery of a popular television heroine’s. The way her hair sweeps huggingly down her cheeks, its planed tips curling at her clavicle, creates a vague resemblance to the Greek letter omega. Her face is sere with too much studying, stress, him. “I always thought hobbits were Scottish,” she says, with growing conviction. She has never, as far as he knows, surveyed any of the material one would need to support this observation. Her certainty seems to puzzle even her. She gestures. “Like, you know . . . leprechauns.”

“Leprechauns are—”

“I
know
what leprechauns are.”

His mouth tamps shut, the following silence like fall-out. His fingers find the steering wheel’s reassuring ergonomic grooves. He remembers when she enjoyed listening to him, the look of milky wonder in her eyes as he clarified and elaborated and invented. It does not seem so long ago. Suddenly he thinks of Tolkien, of the flashlit nighttime hours he’d spent reading him as a boy. The only time one really
could
read Tolkien. Tolkien had built the bridge that had allowed Franklin to travel from
Spider-Man
to
Beowulf
to Yeats to Joyce. He’d read
The Lord of the
Rings
five times, which seems impossible to him now, his shelves sagging with worthy books he knows he will never read. He thinks of Tom Bombadil. Quickbeam the Ent. Gandalf Stormcrow. For three Halloweens in a row he’d dressed as Gandalf, until his cotton-ball beard went stringy and ridiculous. That does not seem so long ago either. He is twenty-five years old.
Nothing
seems so long ago.

“Tolkien was a don at Oxford,” he says, after a little while. “One day while grading papers he wrote
hobbit
in the margin of one of them. He didn’t even know why. The word just came to—”

“What the
hell
kind of a name is J. R. R. Tolkien, anyway?
Three
initials? Who uses three initials?” She fixes him with a demanding stare, her mouth dropped open.

“M. F. K. Fisher,” he says.

She looks at him, blinking. “I don’t know who that is. Is
he
Scottish?”

He reflects, then clears the word for takeoff: “She.” A mistake. No need to point that out. He has no idea why he’s said it. She is a stranger to him now, and consequently he is a stranger to himself. He cannot decide if he is a kind, decent person who sometimes behaves terribly or a terrible person given to outbreaks of decency.

On her face:
You are such an ass.
She looks away, pushes hair from her temple, and settles back into the bucket seat.

They are on the highway now, headed toward Trapper’s Cove Trail, an isolated apartment complex inhabited by what university housing refers to as “older students,” a euphemism he knows is meant to be heartening. Two months ago he’d abandoned his job as an English teacher in Kyrgyzstan to come back here. To “work it out.” He’d pulled up to Trapper’s Cove Trail in a mostly empty U-Haul to find Elizabeth sitting on the curb, eating peanut-butter-and-chocolate-chip sandwiches. Her eyes blurred with tears as he leaped from the truck and embraced her. They’d smiled at each other, each time they’d passed on the stairs to her walk-up, lugging the dead storage of his old college life into her unchanged college life, box by box. That
does
seem long ago. But he is not a student, and everything in this place reminds him of it.

A billboard floats past on their starboard side, too bright and cartoonish to disregard. He spies a camel, an elephant, a peacock. The camel and elephant are deeply familiar, defiant cribs from icons made famous by R. J. Reynolds and
Dumbo.
The peacock, having seized the foreground, shouts in a large white word balloon: COME SEE US AT POTTER’S PARK ZOO! NEXT EXIT! It makes weird sense to him that, of this bestiary, a peacock should serve as spokesanimal.

“Zoo,” he says quietly. He has no idea if she’s seen the billboard, if she will know what he’s talking about. Read my mind, he thinks. Reconnect. Tell me what I’m asking you, because I no longer know.

“Oh, Franklin,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “Anything. Anything but this.”

“Lock the doors,” she says getting out of the car, slipping the knot of sleeves at her midriff and punching her way into a lawn-green sweatshirt. It is emblazoned with her College of Human Medicine’s logo, a quasi-federal seal wreathed high-mindedly with Latin. As her hairdo passes through the sweatshirt’s cinched neck it suffers the devastating physics of static electricity. She looks at him, nervous and pie-eyed, attempting to smile. The sweatshirt hangs dented and formless from her shoulders’ unsettlingly visible knobs. Since he’s moved back they have dropped so much weight they seem in anorexic competition.

“Locked,” he announces, using the fat remote control tethered to her key chain to fire the bolts into place. Her eyes roll instantly skyward as he double-checks the driver-side door the old-fashioned way, with his hand. He knows that Elizabeth has always believed the remote control to be technology’s most benevolent gratuity. Her air conditioner has a remote control, as does her microwave. Franklin’s faith in the purely tactile is a philosophical divergence they once thought charming, an enduring non-argument stoked only as an excuse to kiss and make up. He tries to ignore her double-nostriled sigh as he moves around the car to check on the passenger-side door.

They wend through a parking lot of minivans and station wagons, their shoulders docking in small, accidental bumps. Franklin chatters hopelessly, noting blacktop splatterings of mustard and ketchup that indicate likely sites of savage parent-child struggle. She looks at him in an amused, disbelieving way, then chuckles and shakes her head. Heartened, he begins to devise long, inscrutably reasoned police reports based on the sunbaked condiments’ arc and angle. She shushes him suddenly, her eyes rimmed with wet light, then throws her arms around his shoulders and crushes her face against his breastbone, as though this is the Franklin she wants,
this
one, right here. And please don’t change if I let go.

They pull apart, shaken, and reach the long willowy esplanade leading to Potter’s Park’s ticket booth. It is a bright, zephyr-bathed day. Pink and lilac flamingos stand motionless in the shoal of an adjacent pond. Peacocks and Canada geese roam freely along the sidewalk’s grass borderland, close enough to startle away with a foot stomp. He has a mindless phobia of Canada geese: the reptilian atavism of their physiology, their mysterious ability to hiss, the tiny razors cunningly hidden within their beaks, their sharp and grotesquely purple tongues. Suddenly, his heart nose-dives: one goose, satanically privy to his fear, is prancing toward him. Suddenly he is awash in sweat, charging down the path with panicked composure. Somehow Elizabeth catches him and takes his hand. He doubles over, temples thrumming with blood, her palm moving in clockwise solace in the drenched small of his back. Her smell is a synthesis of tumble-dried clothes and baby powder, and he has a child’s sudden faith that nothing will ever happen to him as long as she’s here.

At the booth an older man with a lean arrowy face trades Franklin’s money for tickets. The man smiles at them in the poignant, not quite envious way of one who has accepted his aloneness. He proffers a single map, an assumption of their indivisibility. In the aftermath of this gesture, Elizabeth looks on the brink of tears, the air above filled with the faint roar of the nearby airport’s arrivals and departures. They push through the turnstile and find themselves on the gazebo overlooking Potter’s Park Zoo. Across its sun-dappled plaza float small groups of three and four and five, families all. No one here is alone, yet he is unable to link wives with husbands, children with parents. Everyone either knows everyone else or is pretending to, reticence burned off in the sunshine. He knows Elizabeth is looking at him. Put her in any proximity to children and she is helpless but to midwife their own child’s physiognomy in her mind. He cannot bear to look over at her. What was once a reverie is now bloodless skepticism.

Potter’s Park’s designers have single-mindedly eschewed cages, bars, grates, anything that suggests an overt mandate to detain rather than preserve. Four identical brick buildings with tinted glass doors angle around the zoo’s centerpiece, an exposed moated rock pile draped with half a dozen California sea lions. Elizabeth is drawn toward them, down the gazebo’s bleached concrete stairs, cooing. Franklin follows, transfixed by how the sunlight ignites the sea lions’ fur to a bright rust, how the water slickens their coats with a petroleum sheen. They are absurdly pleasing animals, their flippers as huge as tennis rackets, their leglessness somehow mistaken, whiskers spraying from their smooth, tiny skulls.

As he joins her at the tank’s polished silver rail she reads aloud from a nearby plaque.

“A male’s harem may have as many as ten
females. They bark to discourage other
males from intruding on their territory.”

She turns to him, delighted with the fresh imprint of information she can, for once in her med-student hell, treasure as completely useless.

“Barking,” he says. “Maybe I should have thought of that.”

She takes a moment to process before her eyes cloud over and her face screws up in disbelief. “Jesus Christ,” she spits, executing a turn of military precision and marching off.

As he lets her go he fills with mechanical calm. What can he tell her, this late in the game? His bouquets have been tendered, tossed back in his face, reassembled and tossed back again . . . he has nothing left with which to console her. Her beeline terminates at the nearest building, whose glass door she yanks open. She hesitates before vanishing behind its tint, frustrated that the door’s slow journey shut confounds her desire to slam it. He turns back to the sea lions’ tank, water slopping dreamily over its raised edge. A small, sleek black shape swims ecstatic laps, in the thrall of discovering that a circle’s joy is never having to turn a corner.

She had broken up with him by letter—what his fellow aid workers had called a “long-distance rupture.” He had wandered the hilly green streets of Bishkek with the letter stuffed in his back pocket, hoping its contents might change if he read it in a different light, beneath trees, next to a statue, at night, across town. She had offered no explanation other than “this” being “too hard.” He could not write back. He did not know how. He did not know what “this” referred to. He knew only her, and him. A few weeks later his letters to her were returned, ribboned together, with a short, graceful note. He wrote back this time. For months he heard nothing. Then, one night, across twelve time zones, she called. Her testimony came forth all at once, any of its bitter serrates smoothened by rehearsal. Aaron, the man she now explained she had left him for, was gone, though it was no fresh wound; it had happened weeks ago. It seemed Aaron was something of a big-game hunter, and after he’d stared long enough into the eyes of his latest mounted trophy, the itch of the stalk sent him reaching for his pith helmet. She spared Aaron any villainy. He was a vain, childish man whose pathogens she had freely allowed to infect her.