God Lives in St. Petersburg (8 page)

“There’s no reason to involve the embassy in this, Mandy,” Ted said.

“This isn’t a pissing contest, gentlemen. You’re both ill, and we have no idea how seriously. Jesus, think about it! This is a no-brainer. Doesn’t the embassy have a staff specifically for in-country nationals’ emergencies?”

Ted spoke through his teeth. “I traveled through Commie Russia for six months, Amanda, and I never once so much as darkened the embassy’s door. I’ll be damned if I do it now.”

Amanda, disgusted, merely stared at them, listening to the smooth fabric hiss of the beds’ cheap material as her teammates writhed against it. After a while she said, “You’re academics, you know, not superheroes.”

Michael propped himself up to look at her. “If you don’t want to go alone, Amanda, we understand, but someone needs to call the ministry to tell them what’s happened.”

“Oh, for . . . I’ve got
no
problems with going alone, Michael. I speak Russian better than either one of you.” She was about to explain that the only thing keeping her here was her concern for their well-being when a possibly delirious Ted stepped in:

“Then what’s the fucking problem, you dumb cunt? Go.”

She left.

“What’s with the blindfold?” the American asked.

His response was two beats delayed; she’d interrupted him from something. “To make you sightless.”

“
Other
than that,” she said darkly.

“You will know soon. Do not be frightened.”

“I’m too tired to be frightened,” the American said. They had left Nukus’s KGB building and were driven by her captor’s chauffeur—the man who at the airport assured her he was from the Ministry of Water—to the city of Moynaq, a drive of two hours. Moynaq, like most of Uzbekistan’s penumbral cities, was ornamented by nuclear-winter lassitude, but due to its closeness to Aral it was worse off than most. Driving through its devastated streets felt to the American like putting on dirty clothes. In the middle of Moynaq they entered a run-down warehouse strewn with broken concrete and automobile shells; there her hands were bound and she was blindfolded, then put into another car—something bouncy like a dune buggy—where she sat alone for forty minutes until joined by her captor and three others. One was the driver, she knew. The other two were a mystery. She heard only their endless maneuvering against the back-torturing plastic seats and their steady breathing.

“Where are we going?” she asked, shouting over the insectoid drone of the engine. The dune buggy heaved and revved, the driver swearing heroically after more alarming bumps.

“I told you,” the man said.

After an unidentifiable length of time, the dune buggy came to an inglorious, wheezing stop. She heard the driver light a cigarette. The mysterious passengers sighed quietly. Somewhere far away tractors were plowing. The wind pushed at her, the dust weaved into its invisible fabric whistling. Her head came to rest against the roll bar.

“Are you going to kill me?” the American asked, startled at how unmoved she was by this possibility.

The man exhaled sharply and laughed a little. “No, Professor Reese.”

The American swiveled her head around. “It’s bright.”

“We are outside.”

The American laughed herself now, then nodded. “You knew,” she began, “that I was coming on that flight to Nukus alone. Right at the airport you knew to grab me.”

“We had no idea you would be alone, Professor,” he said. “Not at all. We thought all along professors Whitford and Nam would be with you.”

“So the plan was to nab all of us.”

“
Nab
is a sinister word, Professor.
Escort you
is perhaps more accurate.”

“Why? Why is the government doing this when they’re the ones who invited us here?”

He said nothing for a few moments and then cleared his throat. The two unknown passengers climbed out of the dune buggy and padded away on what sounded like gravel. When they were gone he told her, “My government, Professor, is unaware of what is happening here.” And with a polite, regal-sounding “Excuse me,” he left the vehicle as well.

The American sat there alone under the murderous sun, salted by the wind. She dozed for what might have been ten minutes or two hours and was awakened by rough sausagy fingers undoing her binds.
“Ket,”
the driver said to her when she was free.
“Khozer, tez-tez.”

“
Ya ne govoryu po-uzbekski,
” the American told him. I don’t speak Uzbek.

“Go,” he said to her in Russian, and as she stood he peeled off her blindfold.

The sun nearly exploded her eyeballs. With a hopeful foot she tried to step out of the buggy and onto the running board but miscalculated. She smacked her lip against the roll bar as she tumbled out of the buggy and onto the ground. Her tongue probed the split lip. It had burst open like a ripe tomato. Cathedral bells gonged whole dirges in her head; salty, sulfurous dust filled her mouth. Dizzily she stood and looked around, her pupils mad, convulsing black pinpricks.

“It is unenjoyable,” she heard behind her. She turned. There the man stood, a small well-dressed black-haired child on each side of him. His hands were on their backs and they stared at the space above the American’s head with the emotion of rag dolls. Behind them were a half-dozen grounded, rusted-out fishing boats—a naval graveyard. Above the boats the sun sizzled like a cancerous boil in the yellow sky. She knew she was standing on what used to be the Aral Sea’s silty floor. Once water had washed over the rocks beneath her feet, flickered against the ships’ crumbling hulls, carried on its wave crests the burden of every creature’s life for miles around her. It was a burden now lifted; she couldn’t see anything for miles other than the graveyard’s hulking tombstones and yellow-brown scree. She felt hotter right now than she imagined possible and fought back the urge to dry-heave, to faint.

From her split lip a thread of blood unspooled, stopping on the swell of her chin. She mopped it away with her pocket handkerchief and said, “What’s unenjoyable?”

“Blindness,” he said, and moved his hands from his children’s backs to the tops of their heads. “Blindness,” he said again, and looked away.

After a moment of puzzlement, the American caught the milkiness to the children’s eyes, the unseeing patina coating their corneas. “Oh, Christ,” she said, sighing it, and looked away herself.

“I thought the world would hear of this,” the man said, still looking away from her, “if I showed the Americans.” His smile became impish, then mischievous, so mischievous it took her a moment to recognize that he was weeping. The children, under their father’s hands, remained as still as the ship carcasses behind them.

“Their mother—?” the American said.

He shrugged, his mouth a lumpy, hardened bulge. “Cancer. Dead.” He turned away from her, into the poisonous, erosive wind. “I was going to leave you, the three of you, out here—
strand
you—for the night. Then return the next morning to ask how you felt about your proposals for us now.”

The American said nothing.

“I knew by doing that to you—I knew I would be punished, Professor Reese. This word
punished
means—this means something else to us, I’m afraid, than it does to you. But I felt it was important. Doing something more than—” He stopped himself and turned back to her, smiling again, and pointed at the dune buggy. The driver sat behind the wheel, his back to the wind, smoking. “That is my brother, Ilhomjon. He will care for my children. I leave them to him now.”

The American said nothing.

The man hooked his arms around the children and slowly led them away. He stopped, turned to the American, and hesitated before asking her, “It wouldn’t have mattered, would it? If I had showed the Americans.”

“No,” she said.

Now the man nodded. For a long time he nodded. Then he said, “I think I will strand you anyway, Professor,” and walked away.

Expensive Trips Nowhere

Jayne breaks the morning’s long silence: “I have a rock in my boot, I think.”

Viktor and Douglas do not look at each other as Jayne hunkers into a lotus and with one pull dissolves an impressive knot of signal-orange laces. She removes her boot, turns it upside down, and gives it an irate ketchup-bottle shake. An incisor-shaped pebble plinks off her thigh.

When they continue on, it seems to Douglas that the silence has an entirely new implication. It reminds him of the equally unanswerable silence he and Jayne once shared, walking side by side to Lenox Hill Hospital after he’d accidentally broken her arm playing touch football with friends in Central Park. To speak, then as now, struck him as absurd.

A moraine-pocked valley sprawls before him beneath the cloudy dimmer of a huge gray sky. A powerless yellow blur is the only indication that the sun continues to exist. Jayne is ahead of him now, moving up the valley’s gentle slope, hopping from boulder to boulder, her little brown ponytail bouncing. Viktor is in the lead. Far in the lead. Too far, Douglas thinks, popping an herbal cough drop. The valley and surrounding mountains are so quiet that the accumulated jingle of their equipment has the startling tonality of a triangle tapped over and over again. When Douglas closes his eyes, his skull filling with peppermint, he thinks of the
tink
of silverware at wordless meals spent with his parents and of childhood carriage rides through a powdery Central Park. But his lids lift and he is back on the steppe, moving across the world’s empty center.

By leaping from rock to rock to rock in their quest to reach the valley’s other side, Douglas understands that he and Jayne and Viktor are engaged in what is known as
bouldering,
a term that strikes Douglas as one rich with effortful coinage. He has bouldered before; this is their second boulder field of the day. They came upon their first early this morning, long before their run-in with the bandits, passing through a talus-littered cleft to find themselves at the base of a forbidding muskeg pitted with rocky islets, the unrisen sun a pink smear along the horizon. Some boulders were Volkswagen-sized, others no bigger than an ottoman. They lay fixed in the valley’s spring-thawed soil and stretched for nearly a mile, forming by some glacial fluke a workable path. Viktor had been quick to provide navigational pointers.

Keep your feet in center of any rock you step on. Otherwise you roll rock and turn your ankle. Step only on rocks
with fur.

Douglas and Jayne had exchanged glances.
Lichens,
you mean?

Da, da. Lichens. Old rocks
, he’d said.
Most secure.

When Viktor finished, his indifferent powder-blue eyes locked on Douglas’s.
Ponimayete?
he asked him. Understand? Douglas had nodded, irritated by Viktor’s insistence on addressing him in Russian before the clarifying English switch-over. There is something malevolent about this, Douglas decides now.

Douglas watches Jayne maneuver along the rocks, wondering in a distracted way exactly what anatomical principle causes her rear end to double in size when she bends over. Jayne, it seems, has taken Viktor’s instruction to heart; any time her feet wander out to a boulder’s periphery, they spark immediately back to the center. Standing there, features scrunched, fussing with her backpack straps, her ponytail stilled, she spends the same amount of time settling on her next boulder as she does selecting fruit at the market. When she moves, though, she moves with beautiful simian grace, and only now can Douglas picture Jayne as the freckly, tree-climbing tomboy she claims to have once been. Some inner perversity moves Douglas to venture only to those boulders Jayne has dismissed. Once aboard a particularly chancy reject—a wobbly-looking anvil-shaped rock naked of any lichens whatsoever—Douglas, emboldened by transgression, pushes his waffled black boot sole right to the boulder’s edge.

When Douglas cries out, Viktor calmly takes a seat and smokes an Okhotnichny cigarette. Jayne, perhaps twenty meters away, squats on a large rock with one hand pressed across her mouth. Through a mesh of fingers she asks her husband if he is all right.

The man pulls off his backpack and muddy, thickly sopping boot and sits down, rubbing his woolen foot. “Ankle,” he tells her, grimacing. Then, quickly, he calls to Viktor, “I’m all right,” and waves, once, as though forcefully wiping something from a blackboard. The idiot has turned his ankle. Of course. Viktor had decided long before the bandits that he does not much like this Douglas. He rarely respects his clients, though he often comes to tolerate them. For two hundred dollars a day, Viktor has found, most people can be tolerated quite easily. But not this Douglas. A large, soft, American oaf.

“Doug, honey,” the woman says, shooting Viktor a quick look before turning back to her husband. It is the first conversation they have had, as far as Viktor knows, since the bandits. “Can you walk?”

The man is now holding his ankle with two hands, as though strangling it. He looks up at her, his cheeks lit with a burgundy glow. Sweat plasters his clipped black bangs to his forehead. His eyes are watery blurs, as though he has eaten something tiny, red, and hot. He is in some pain, obviously. “I can walk. Just—just give me a second.”

The woman nods and looks back at Viktor. She stands, hugging herself. Her head is small and egg-shaped, her brown eyebrows as dense as hedges. Her face has the taut, squinty intensity Viktor knows well: the look of a worried American woman trying very hard to appear that she has seen it all. Jayne is short and, Viktor thinks, disappointing. Hard stocky legs. Medium-length camel-brown hair. Small muscular arms, like a
kishlak
boy’s. Viktor can only imagine what taking such a tiny powerful thing might be like. Disappointing, he thinks. It is all very disappointing.

“Do you think they’ll come back?” she asks Viktor.

Viktor stubs out his cigarette and deposits its accordioned husk into the breast pocket of his khaki vest. He shrugs. “Is difficult to say.”

“They’re not coming back,” Douglas says. He is no longer holding his ankle but simply sitting there, his long inert legs hanging off the boulder’s edge and his yellow marshmallowy Gore-Tex vest unzipped. Beneath his vest is a shadow-blue T-shirt affixed with a plain black Batman logo. (“The
old
Batman logo, from the forties,” Douglas had been careful to point out to Viktor, when Viktor asked about it, which feels to Viktor like a very long time ago.) Douglas’s head is tipped back to the sunless sky, his eyes are closed, and his temples pulse as he pulverizes another cough drop.

Jayne looks back at her husband and sighs through her nose. Beneath her pack, her shoulders sag and her spinal column wishbones outward, as though respiration and posture had some complicated association. “Doug—”

“They’re
not
.” The second word is as propulsive as a round. Jayne rocks back a little, so stunned she is nearly smiling. Instantly Douglas shakes his head, an apology he seems to recognize is too impersonal to mean anything.

Jayne turns away, trolling her eyes across a motionless sea of rock. She has spent the last four days in such constant close contact with Douglas that intimacy’s pleasant burden now feels more like a millstone. The twenty-four-hour flight from JFK to Frankfurt to Almaty. The two days they’d spent sightseeing in Almaty, trying valiantly to pretend that Almaty had two days’ worth of sights to see. They’d bused from their hotel to the world’s largest ice rink at Medeo and skated beside ex–Soviet hockey stars. They’d traipsed through Panfilov Park and watched dozens of solemn old Kazakhs play chess in the murky sunshine. They’d scratched Zenkov Cathedral—which claimed to be the tallest wooden building in the world—from their pitiful itinerary. They drank fermented mare’s milk in a fast-food restaurant shaped like a yurt, ate blocky tomato sandwiches and apples as big as softballs at the Zelyony Bazaar, and wandered back to their room, killing time with the BBC as they waited for the Hotel Kazakhstan’s sixty minutes of hot-water service, which commenced at the supremely inconvenient hour of 5 p.m.

They are here for no real reason. Two years ago, Jayne found herself with Douglas ducking her way inside something called Glowworm Cave in Waitomo, New Zealand. Last year she’d had her photograph taken beside Hadrian’s Arch in Jarash, Jordan. Both were what Douglas called Expensive Trips Nowhere, the rubric beneath which this current junket also falls. Douglas first conceived of the Expensive Trip Nowhere after his parents were blind-sided on the New Jersey Turnpike by an Atlantic City– bound tour bus whose driver had suffered a stroke at the wheel. Douglas and Jayne had been married a little shy of a year when it happened. Jayne had stabilized into a teeth-clenched toleration of Douglas’s parents, Park-and-Seventieth gentry who never understood why their son had settled for “some mousy midwestern girl.” This was the phrase Douglas had once quoted—his ill-advised attempt at honesty—in trying to provide Jayne with some understandable frame for his parents’ animosity.

Douglas did not seem surprised that his parents had ceded their estate to a number of New York charitable organizations rather than to him. His parents had, however, arranged for a
dispositive provision
—thus began Jayne’s education in the phraseology of bequeathment— which ensured that a portion of their trust’s income and dividends would be paid out monthly to Douglas, a “sum certain” to the tune of $8,000. Beyond that not a cent belonged to him, except in cases of “extreme need,” and only then in “reasonable amounts,” along with other similar caveats that kept the world in suspended litigation.

The monthly windfall was large enough to encourage carelessness yet modest enough to make frugality seem picayune. Months after the accident, in bed one night, at some namelessly late hour, neither of them sleeping, both of them knowing it, her back discreetly to him, Douglas proposed the Expensive Trip Nowhere, a journey to no place, for no reason, with no plan. Just to go. Just to leave. He spoke with such irreproachable sadness that Jayne rolled over to find his eyes pooled. She’d agreed, instantly. She knew that Douglas’s wealthy Manhattan upbringing had been far too serious a matter to allow for even the suggestion of a childhood; rather like a sexually timid girl turning incandescent atop a boy she finally trusts, the death of his parents now allowed Douglas the consort of some unfamiliar, someday self he’d always been denied.

Three months ago, Douglas had burst into their apartment blabbing about Kazakhstan, from which one of his uniformly affluent students’ parents had just returned. Jayne, whose purse had been stolen in New Zealand and who had been extravagantly ill in Jordan (or, as she called it,
Giardian
), stood there in their kitchen, holding a stack of DoubleStuf Oreos that she had spent a good part of the day stevedoring into her mouth, staring at Douglas with a slipping, ugly expression she hated him for not heeding.

The next day Douglas came home with a muddy fax from something called the Adventure Mountain Company in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. It offered two- or four-day package tours of hiking, rock climbing, rafting, and other communions with the natural world of which Douglas knew nothing. She read over the fax, numb. “Come on,” he’d wheedled. And suddenly he was Douglas again, her rescuer from Manhattan starving artistry. “You’re a Midwesterner, Jayney. Aren’t you supposed to
like
this stuff?”

Douglas was never embarrassed to be an American, never hesitant to reveal his monolingual helplessness. Wherever he found himself, he pumped hands with street vendors and enjoyed an incorruptible digestive system. Travel scraped him away to reveal not some dulled surface but bright new layers of personality. But Jayne is thirty years old. She wishes to learn nothing new about the man she married. That time is gone. It has been months since she has even attempted a sculpture, a career that has earned her a reliable five-figure salary, provided that one counted past the decimal points. This was her joke for the cocktail-party circuit.

Jayne now studies the plain, awful hurt on Douglas’s face. It is a large lumpy face above which a periwig would not seem at all improper. The bluish beginnings of a spotty, erratic beard gleam upon his cheeks and chin like an unfinished tattoo. His boot is beside him, encased in a cracked shell of mud. She catches herself thinking,
Ruined
. The boots I bought for him are ruined. And she knows that for one horrible moment she has forgotten that he is hurt, or does not care, which is the same thing. This is marriage, she thinks, with a whelm of heartsick apathy. This is what happens. Its intimacy is such that you—

“God,” Jayne says suddenly, paddling her hands in front of her face. Some of Viktor’s cigarette smoke has, in the motionless air, drifted to her nostrils and given her lungs a toxic baptism. She looks over at Viktor. “What on
earth
are you smoking?”

Viktor flashes a horselike smile. He has a pure Slavic face that allows Jayne to grasp what
Caucasian
really means. The arches of his cheeks look as hard as whet-stones. His hair is stalky and yellow, like wheat. It occurs to her that only Caucasian follicles pigment their yield with something other than humanity’s standard-issue black.

“Death in swamp,” Viktor answers her. “Very strong. Very bad taste. Is what we call them.”

Jayne obliges him. “We?”

“Afghantsi,” he says.

Jayne nods blithely and looks back to Douglas, who is staring at Viktor with huge confounded eyes.

“Afghantsi?” Douglas says, his tone one of vague challenge.

Viktor nods sharply, then stands. “
Da
. Come. Replace your boot. We walk again.”

“What,” Jayne asks Douglas after Viktor has forged out ahead, “is an Afghantsi?”

Douglas reaches out to Jayne and she pulls him onto her boulder, releasing his hand the moment he is balanced. Douglas’s ankle feels vulcanized, though he has tied his laces so tightly he cannot quite claim that it hurts. He shrugs at Jayne. “That means he’s a veteran.”

Jayne stares into some middle distance, her chest heaved out. Stray coils of premature gray wisp around her small shell-like ears. “A veteran of what?”