God Lives in St. Petersburg (4 page)

Before anyone could answer, Graves had a seizure.

A few hours later, Donk was sitting outside the room in which Graves had been all but quarantined. He was petting a stray wolfish mongrel with filaments of silver hair threaded through its black coat, waiting for the village medicine man to emerge from Graves’s room. This man had claimed he was a doctor and offered up to Donk a large pouch of herbs as evidence. Donk did not have the heart to argue. The compound was quiet, except for some small animals fighting or playing along the eaves just above Donk’s head and the occasional overhead roar of a jet. Hassan, sitting a few feet away, watched Donk stroke the dog’s head in revulsion.

“Why,” he asked finally, “do you do that?”

Donk had always taken pity on Central Asian dogs, especially after learning that one could fend off a possible attack by miming the act of picking up a stone, at which the dogs usually turned and ran away. He lowered his lips to the creature’s head and planted upon it a chaste kiss. The dog smelled of oily musk. “Because it’s lonely,” Donk said.

“That is a filthy animal,” Hassan told him. “You should not touch such a filthy animal, Mister Donk.”

Donk chose not to point out that Hassan was, if anything, far dirtier. The boy had spent a night with Donk and Graves in Kunduz. His body odor had been so potent, so overwhelmingly cheesy, that Donk had not been able to sleep. Misplaced Muslim piety, he thought with uncharacteristic bitterness.

“You’re right,” Donk said at last. “The dog’s filthy. But so am I. So there we are.”

Hassan
hmph
ed.

During the seizure Donk had stuffed his bloody do-rag in Graves’s mouth to keep him from biting off his tongue, even though he knew convulsive people rarely, if ever, bit off their own tongues. It was one of those largely ceremonial things people did in emergencies. Donk had pushed Graves up on the table and held him down. Graves shuddered for a few moments, his eyes filled with awful awareness, his chest heaving like the gills of a suffocating fish. Then, mercifully, he went unconscious. Donk used the rest of his iodined water to try to rehydrate Graves, but he quickly vomited it up. At this General Mohammed had sent for his medicine man.

Donk knew there were at least two kinds of malaria. The less serious strain was stubborn and hard to kill— flulike symptoms could recur as long as five decades after the initial infection—but it was rarely lethal. The more serious strain quickly turned life-threatening if untreated. He was no longer wondering which strain Graves had contracted. Graves was conscious now—Donk could hear him attempting to reason with the village doctor—but his voice was haggard and dazed.

Donk looked around. Thirty or forty yards away a small group of General Mohammed’s soldiers watched him, their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. They looked beaten, bullied, violent. Hair-trigger men. Their faces were like shadows. And these were the
winners.
Donk found himself, suddenly, missing women. Seeing them, staring at them, smelling them. Afghanistan had mailed into Donk’s brain a series of crushingly similar mental postcards: men, men, desert, men, men, men, guns, men, guns, guns, desert, guns, men. One might think that life without women would lead to a simpler, less fraught existence. No worries about hair or odor. Saying whatever you wanted. But one’s eye tired of men as surely as one’s nerves tired of guns.

It was not just women, however. Donk missed sex even more. He needed, he admitted, an inordinate amount of sex. Heavy people needed things—hence their heaviness. Sex was a large part of the reason he had been reluctant to leave Chicago to come to Afghanistan. He was having a Guinness Book amount of it with Tina, who was maybe his girlfriend, his first in a long time. As luck would have it, Tina was menstruating the night before he left. They had had sex anyway, in her bathroom, and left bloody foot- and handprints all over the white tile. They Windexed away the blood together. It had not been freaky. It had almost been beautiful, and he loved her. But for him distance was permission, and newness arousal itself. Plane tickets and hotel rooms were like lingerie. He had already slept with an AP reporter in Tashkent. He did not regret it, exactly, because he had every intention of lying about it later. It occurred to him that he had also lied to Graves, about not being haunted. Strangely, he felt bad about that lie. It seemed like something Graves should have known. But Donk had not known where to begin.

A decade ago, Donk had worked as a staff photographer for a dozen family newspapers peppered throughout central Wisconsin, all somehow owned by the same unmarried Republican. His life then had been sitting through school-board meetings and upping the wattage of the smiles of local luminaries, drinking three-dollar pitchers of Bud after work, and suffering polite rejection from strangers he misjudged as unattractive enough to want to speak to him. This life began to end when the last of five sudden strokes stripped Donk’s father of his mind and sent him off into dementia. Donk was the only one of his siblings who lived within a thousand miles of Milwaukee, where his father was hospitalized; his mother had long refused to speak to the man. So, alone, Donk had set up camp beside his father’s deathbed.

Death was a peculiar thing. Some people endured unenviable amounts of firsthand death without its one clearest implication ever occurring to them. Donk had never much thought about his own death before. The prospect had always felt to him like a television show he knew was on channel 11 at eight o’clock but had never watched and never planned to. Donk stared at the monitors, listened to the hiss of his father’s bed’s mattress as the nurses pistoned it up and down, timed the steady beep whose provenance he did not care to isolate. It was all he could do to keep from thinking that everything was assembled to provide the man a few last deprived moments of life. Donk realized that even if he were beside his father at the moment his final journey began, the man would still die alone, as Donk would die alone, as we all die alone. Horribly, doubly alone, for just as no one went with us, no one greeted us when it was over.

Nurses found him weeping in the hospital’s cafeteria. When his father’s doctor brought some final forms for Donk to fill out, she slipped into his catatonic hand a small packet of diazepam. The nervous breakdown, Donk expected. The estrangement from his surviving family— who could not understand his “sudden obsession” with dying—he expected. Quitting his job and investing his small inheritance, he expected; becoming a freelance combat photographer, he did not. People who were not correspondents laughed when Donk told the story, which he often did. It sounded so unbelievable. But people are not born combat photographers any more than they are born lawyers. One day you were waiting tables; the next you were in law school. One day you were heartbroken and megalomaniacal; the next you were faxing visa requests to embassies using stolen letterhead. Only Tajikistan’s had answered him. If Tajikistan’s embassy wondered why the
Waukesha Freeman
felt it needed a photographer in Dushanbe, it did not share that curiosity with Donk. He was awarded his first visa to his first war, a genuine hot war, a civil war. He told everyone he met in Dushanbe that he was “stringing,” even though he was not sure what that word really entailed. In Tajikistan he saw his first gunshot wound, his first dead baby. He learned that combat photographers either spooked or did not. To his surprise, Donk did not. At least, he spooked no more than on the afternoon he watched his father burp, sigh, and stop breathing. The photo of the gunned-down old woman, taken after five months and $3,000 of squandered savings, led to Donk’s covering the reconciliation trials in Rwanda for one of India’s biggest dailies. There he learned that he no longer had much patience for American minorities’ claims of oppression. Rwanda led to Jerusalem, shortly after the intifada. There he learned of the subterranean connections world media outlets had expertly tunneled beneath continents of human misery, and how often you passed the same faces when traveling through them. Jerusalem led to Dagestan, where he spent a day with a Tatar Muslim warlord whose nom de guerre was Hitler and who made an awkward pass at Donk when they were alone. He learned that, of all the countries in the world, America was most hesitant to publish graphic “bang-bang” photos. He learned that arms and cocaine were the world’s second and third most profitable exports, after human sex slaves. He learned how to shop for a Kevlar vest. He learned how to take a good picture while running. He learned, when all else failed, to follow refugees. And he learned that the worse and more ugly the reality around him, and the more impervious to it and better he felt, the more he forgot his father. He learned that the only thing that truly frightened him was quiet, because he knew death was quiet—the longest quiet. He learned that the persona that came with this strange fearlessness was able to win, if only for a night, a certain kind of troubled heart belonging to a certain kind of woman more worldly than Donk had any previous right to expect, and he learned that he was the type of man to abuse this ability.

His brother and sister called him a fear addict, a desperate idiot on a danger bender; they claimed he had never “dealt” with their father’s death. Donk’s brother, Jason, was a first-team whiskey addict (three interventions and counting: “What, this again?” he had asked, after the most recent). His sister, Marie, lived in Anchorage, too far away to provide Donk with any idea of what, exactly, she was into. Judging from her insensate 3 a.m. phone calls, it was high-impact. Who were they to speak of fear, of “dealing with the natural process of death”? Death was actually the least natural thing Donk could imagine, involving, as it did, not living. Death’s stature as a physiological event did not mean it was natural. The trapped mink does not accept its own death; it chews off its leg. No, death was something else, uncategorized and dreadful, something to be fought off, defied, spat upon. Human Conflict, he thought. Death was the unappeasable aggressor. And he stroked the dog’s small head.

The medicine man stepped from Graves’s room. Without consulting him, Donk rushed inside. It was a little past ten in the morning now, the light in Graves’s room brighter than he expected. Graves was supine on a thick mass of blankets with another, thinner blanket mostly covering him. He seemed very still. His eyes were dry. Though he did not look at Donk, he raised his hand in brief acknowledgment. Donk crouched next to Graves’s makeshift bed and said nothing. Then, on an impulse, he took Graves’s hand and held it crossways in his own, as though hoping to offer him some mysterious transfer of strength.

“Did you once think,” Graves asked, “about how dirty dying is? I’m lying here in my own shit. You can smell it, can’t you? I should really do something about this.” He shifted positions and Donk did smell Graves’s shit, thin and sour and soupy. In response he squeezed Graves’s hand. “In England,” Graves went on, wincing briefly, “I think something like eighty percent of all deaths now take place in hospitals. I watched my mother and my father die in hospitals. They went quietly. It was lovely, in its way. But fifty years ago only forty percent of the English population died in hospitals. We sequester the dying, you see. Because it
is
ugly, it
is
dirty. I think we don’t want to know that. We want to keep that little truth hidden away. But think a moment about how most people have died, Duncan. They’ve died in places just like this. So if I’m going to die here I’m joining legions. For some reason this makes me happy.” Graves’s head rolled an inch on its pillow, and, for the first time, he looked at Donk.

Donk stared back at Graves, the connection allowing him to locate the voice, as faraway as a quasar, in his mind. “You’re not going to die.”

Graves smiled. “Old men have to die. The world grows moldy, otherwise.”

Graves, Donk knew, was forty. His sympathy left him in one brash gust. “What did the doctor say?”

“Oh, you mean St. John’s Wort, MD? Hell if I know. He all but sprinkled me with voodoo dust. Duncan, calm down. I’m either going to make it through this or I won’t. I’m not upset. I just have to wait.” He closed his eyes. “‘Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, / It seems to me most strange that men should fear; / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come.’ That Shakespeare. Preternatural, isn’t it? Any occasion one can think of, and there he is.”

Donk knew he could barely quote Shakespeare if he were spotted “To be” and “not to be.” In a low voice he said, “You
are
going to die, Graves, if you’ve already convinced yourself you’re going to die.”

“A puzzle.”

Donk let go of his hand. “It’s not a fucking puzzle.”

“Getting upset, Duncan, isn’t going to help me.”

“Then what
is
going to help you?”

“Medicine. Medicine they don’t have here.”

“Where?” Donk asked. “Where do I go?”

Graves looked at him again. Suddenly Donk saw the fear just below the flat blue composure of Graves’s eyes, a stern, dignified terror barricaded so completely inside of him it barely recognized itself. Graves’s lips were shaking. “Jesus, Duncan. I—you—you could rent that chap Ahktar’s jeep. You could—”

With that Donk rushed out, collared Hassan, and went to find General Mohammed and Ahktar. Seven hundred dollars was hidden beneath the insole of Donk’s boot. This would be enough, he hoped, for a safety deposit on the jeep. He would drive to Mazar with Hassan. He would walk into UNICEF’s office or Doctors Without Borders or find Lieutenant Marty and he would come back here. Graves was too sick to travel, and if they broke down again or were stopped—it was too complicated. That was the one truly upsetting thing about Human Conflict: It made everything far too complicated.

Donk found General Mohammed alone in his quarters. He was wearing glasses, surprisingly enough, sitting at a plain wooden desk, reading a book in Persian. His .45 was flat on the tabletop. Behind the general, on the wall, hung a green-and-black flag last used in Afghanistan during the reign of its deposed king, thirty years ago. Without knocking, Donk announced he was renting Ahktar’s jeep and going to Mazar. Without looking up, General Mohammed informed him that Ahktar had, only an hour before, left in his jeep to take care of a few more problems. He would be back sometime tomorrow, perhaps maybe. Donk stood silently by the general’s doorjamb, feeling himself growing smaller.
Perhaps maybe.
The national motto of Afghanistan.