God Lives in St. Petersburg (9 page)

“The Soviet war in Afghanistan.”

They both look at Viktor. He has stopped ten boulders up and waits for them with a lavishly dour face and his arms in a tight cross-chest plait. Jayne stares at him, her lips scarcely moving as she speaks. “And these Afghantsi all smoke the same awful cigarettes?”

“Looks that way.”

“Great,” she says, leaping to the next rock.

“Your coat,” Viktor asks Jayne. “How much you pay?”

They are walking across a greenish hillock, pingo mounds squishing beneath their boots. The boulder field is an hour’s walk behind them. The clouds have broken, and sunlight falls upon the steppe in huge warm rhomboids. The lower slopes of the Tien Shan Mountains are smoky with the vapor of spring-melted snow, and their white saw-toothed upper slopes and horns glitter like pyrite. Jayne walks beside Viktor, while Douglas has dropped back.

Jayne looks down at her orange jacket. It is a Patagonia Puffball jacket, space-agey and shiny, tricked out with Polarguard HV insulation, a ripstop nylon shell, and water-resistant coating. She purchased it and her Patagonia Capalene underwear, her Dana Design Glacier backpack, her Limmer hiking boots, her Helly Hansen rain pants, and her EMS Traverse sleeping bag at Paragon on Eighteenth and Broadway a few weeks after they booked their flight on Kazair. She can’t remember what the jacket had set her back specifically, but remembers quite well the $1,200 dent the excursion bashed into her checking account. She feigns recollection. “Fifty dollars?”

Viktor eyes her suspiciously, a Grand Inquisitor of sportswear. “I ask another American about her coat. Same color. Patagonia. She tells that she pay three hundred dollars.”

“It was on sale,” Jayne says quietly, then stops to wait for Douglas.

Viktor smirks as he fishes the half-smoked cigarette from his breast pocket. As he lights up the remnant, he remembers his schoolboy days as group leader of his Oktyabryata youth group, back when he wore his bright red Young Pioneer scarf nightly to bed, still glowing from the
A
he’d received in Scientific Communism for his critique of bourgeois individualism at School Number 3. This was before he knew of such things as Patagonia jackets. Before, as a private in the Signal Corps stationed near Kandahar, he went out on patrol as a demonstrably Soviet soldier and returned equipped with the battlefield tackle of half the planet’s nations. After scavenging the bodies of dead
mujahideen
, his platoon’s medics threw away their Soviet-made syringes, rendered magically sterile by a thin paper wrapping, and stocked up on Japanese disposable syringes whose plungers never clogged. Their Soviet plasma containers, half-liter glass bottles that shattered constantly, were exchanged for captured Italian-made polyethylene liter blood bags so rupture-resistant one could stomp on them in field boots to no effect. Their Soviet flak jackets were so heavy many soldiers could barely lift them. Upon seizing their first American flak jacket, Viktor’s mystified platoon found that this vestment, which lacked a single metal part, could not be penetrated at point-blank range with a Makarov pistol. He did not know, then, that when the war began the
muj
were armed only with cheap Maxim rifles you could not fire for long without scorching your guide hand. He did not know of the CIA and ISI airlifts and border sanctuaries the
muj
were then making use of. His schoolboy critique of bourgeois individualism did not foresee such contingencies any more than the Americans who would one day pay him to safeguard their leisure. But he feels little pleasure in having shamed the woman over her jacket. He lied to her about knowing its true price. He has several such jackets at home, which he wears only around the cafés of Almaty for the status their indiscreet labels supply.

“Hey,” Douglas says, as he falls in beside Jayne.

“Hey,” Jayne returns.

Douglas’s mouth goes tight, his mustache of sweat sparkling. “Are we there yet?”

She motions toward his foot. “How’s that ankle?”

“Okay. It just hurts. That’s good, though, right? When it stops hurting is when you’re in trouble.”

A small, toothless smile. “That’s frostbite.”

“Well. The good news then is that I don’t have frostbite.”

Jayne digs into her jacket’s marsupial pocket and removes a cling-wrapped piece of crumbly halvah. She holds it out to Douglas, who shakes his head. Jayne takes a bite, several hundred sesame seeds instantly installing themselves between her teeth. She looks across the steppe, a sweep of land so huge and empty she wonders if a place can be haunted by an
absence
of ghosts. She has never seen a sky so big. So big, in fact, it makes her own pathetic smallness somehow gigantic—as though to contemplate one’s place in the nothingness of the universe can only set free some stoned homunculus of monomania.

“Walking here,” she tells Douglas suddenly, “I can’t get something out of my mind. It just repeats itself over and over again. What’s weird is that it’s a poem.”

“That’s not weird.” His tone hovers just above annoyance.

She looks over at him, noting the new crease in his forehead. “Not if you’re an English teacher. Normal people don’t walk around with poems in their heads.”

“What’s the poem?” His tone is curt, satisfied, as though he has just prevailed in some internal argument of which he neglected to make her a part.

She ignores this, finding the loop in her mind and giving it voice: “ ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth.’ ”

“Frost?” he says. “That’s even less weird. He’s as catchy as a pop song.”

“I had to memorize it in fourth grade. If I’ve thought about it three times since then I’d be surprised.”

Douglas stares at his boots and says, almost meditatively, “‘Love and forgetting might have carried them / A little further up the mountainside / With night so near, but not much further up.’”

They walk silently for a while, strides synchronized. Jayne finishes her halvah and kisses the honey from her fingertips. “That’s . . . really lovely,” she says at last.

“Frost again,” Douglas says.

She walks out ahead of him, shaking her head in affected wonder. “I’ve hiked in a lot of places, but never anywhere so big.”

“Kazakhstan is five times the size of France.”

“That’s what I mean. And it’s so
empty.
”

Douglas nods. “During Stalin, Kazakhstan was repopulated with Ukrainians and Russians, so much so that they soon outnumbered the Kazakhs. Rather than see their livestock collectivized, the Kazakhs slaughtered something like twenty million sheep and goats, five million cattle, and three million horses.”

“Someone’s been reading his guidebook.”

“Kazakhstan also happened to be the Soviet Union’s atomic playground. From the fifties to the early nineties, fifteen atom bombs a year were exploded over and under Semipalatinsk, which is”—he stops, gets his dubious bearings, and points—“I think about six hundred miles that way. So. You do the math, and it turns out that this place endured over eight hundred nuclear blasts in all. Enough to destroy the entire planet several times over. We haven’t avoided a nuclear holocaust as much as localized it in one very unlucky place.”

“Which explains perfectly why you’re lecturing
me.
”

The bleakness of her tone stops him dead. “I’m—” He can’t get a word out; his throat is lined with thorns. He breathes until the pent sentence finally bursts free. “I’m
not
lecturing you. I can’t
believe
you think I’m lecturing you.” But now, of course, he is.

Jayne is walking fast now, as upright as a sea horse. “I’d like to thank you again for bringing me here,” Douglas hears her say.

And then he is walking by himself, just as Jayne is, just as Viktor is. Three strangers on the steppe. Douglas feels the special bitter pleasure that comes with being angry and righteous and alone. She could leave him. He knows that. It is one of the many things he knows. He knows that he is a teacher because he enjoys the attention of children more than that of adults, and he knows there is something egotistical and sinister and frightened in this enjoyment. He knows that once, when he was haunting Lower Manhattan bookstores in the wake of his law-school washout, Jayne had found him irresistible and strange but now finds him something else but has not yet fully figured out what, he doesn’t think. He knows poetry, all about poetry—Frost, Auden, Stevens—and had— briefly!—tried to write it, but he knows he is no good, and this does not bother him, much. He knows nothing about IPOs and 401(k)s. He also knows he is in possession of no special gift, no appreciable talent, a peasant in the New Economy’s fiefdom, and that his parents, whose living disapproval had once made this condition acceptable, are dead. And he knows, too, that he is a coward.

Viktor and Jayne have stopped at a small hill twenty yards ahead. They are turned toward him and stand in rugged colored silhouette against scalloped mountains and an icy blue sky. Douglas looks up, toward the sun. The morning’s earlier cumulus ceiling has now fully dissipated, and thin lenticular saucer clouds float across the atmosphere. He trudges up the hill and, once he has joined them, hears a gush as thick as applause coming from its opposite side.

“A river,” Jayne says. For some reason, she smiles. He looks to Viktor and wonders what they were talking about but does not really wish to know.

“Oh,” Douglas says. “Okay.” He casts his eyes to the base of the hill and sees the river, a rush of silver topped with turbulent foam.

“Doesn’t look so bad,” Jayne offers mildly.

“Rivers,” Viktor intones. “Very dangerous. We cross!” He charges down the hill. Jayne watches Viktor with pallid awe. His movements have a thoughtless, animal anticipation, seemingly privy to the terrain’s every secret. Viktor transfers his weight from one foot to the other so smoothly that gravity seems to pull him forward rather than down. Although it is spring and the steppe is still cold, Viktor wears dirty canvas shorts. This allows Jayne to note his grenadelike calves and the long pythonic muscles on the backs of his thighs. Jayne remembers, abruptly, that Russian men are famed ballet dancers.

“Once more into the breach,” Douglas mutters, galloping down the hill himself. Jayne feels something uncomfortably close to disappointment that Douglas makes it to the bottom without stumbling. She ventures down the hill herself, slowly and sideways, like a crab.

After a moment of double-check reconnoitering, Viktor leads them along the river’s bank. It is edged with rocks and mucky soil and vaguely pubic gray-green vegetation and not a speck of evidence that human beings had ever before walked this path. Long white phalanges of snow lie in every shady furrow. “We must find widest part,” Viktor tells them.

Douglas shouts over the rage of the river, “Why don’t we just cross right now?”

Viktor turns to answer, but Jayne beats him to it. “Wherever the river is widest is also where the current is slowest.” She finds a stick marooned between two rocks at river’s edge and, to illustrate her point, heaves it into the water. The stick is caught and swept away more quickly than even she was expecting.

Douglas shakes his head, either angry he is wrong or angry she has made him so. He calls to Viktor, “You knew the river was here, though, right? Why didn’t you lead us . . .
around
it?”

“Once, river small,” he responds, without turning around. “Now river big.”

Douglas laughs, a cosmically empty laugh. “What does
that
mean?”

Viktor stops, head darkly tipped forward, then turns to confront him. His face has a clear unwrinkled menace. His mouth is open but he says nothing, his tongue dry and gray in its hollow. It is as though whole paragraphs of choice, partially translated reproaches are cycling through his Russian brain.

Suddenly Jayne is wedging herself between them. “The snow, you mean? The snow melted and ran down from the mountains?”

Viktor blinks. His mouth closes and stretches into a grin that doesn’t seem to end. He claps, once, joylessly, and sets off again, all marching-past-the-Kremlin energy.

“You two are certainly hitting it off,” Douglas tells her, when Viktor is out of earshot. The words do not hang between them for long before he feels a cold tremor of regret. Amazing, he thinks: He really could not have said anything worse. He tries to launder the statement with a joke, softly elbowing her and hating the falseness of the smile tearing his lips away from his teeth. “Should I worry about going back home alone?”

Jayne takes a long time to respond, a silence in which Douglas hears her die to him three, four, five times. “I wonder if you
would
worry about that.”

Douglas puts up a monitory hand. “Okay. Let’s stop now.” He walks for a while, kicking every bit of rock not bolted down by erosion into the river. “It would worry me. It would kill me. You know that.”

Jayne says nothing. Douglas listens to her breathe, inhales the thin unpleasant scent coming off her unwashed body. She did not use to smell like this, not even after spending a whole day in bed with him. He wonders at what age it is exactly that women exchange their scent of talc for that of faint decay. Just as he begins to hold this against her, Douglas winces, his ankle knocking like a pinched blood vessel. The only thing that keeps him from stopping to tighten his bootlaces is the certainty that Jayne will not wait for him if he does.

Viktor drops his pack and turns to them. “We cross,” he announces gravely.

“This doesn’t look any wider,” Douglas mutters to no one, bending down to redo his laces. When he is finished he looks at the river and sees that, actually, it
is
a bit wider here. On top of that, a dozen well-placed rocks make a broken span from one side of the river to the other. There is probably not a better place to cross a river in the entire former Soviet Union.

Viktor stands next to his huge torso-sized pack, contemplating the river. Jayne unloads her much smaller pack and sets it beside Viktor’s. Viktor’s pack is as gray and beaten as Almaty concrete; it appears better suited to haul potatoes than carry gear. Jayne’s pack, Douglas notes, is offensively new and colored in laboratory hues of yellow and red and orange. When Jayne squats beside Viktor, her thighs spreading like thick flanks of beef, Douglas turns away.