God Lives in St. Petersburg (14 page)

God Lives in St. Petersburg

God, in time, takes everything from everyone. Timothy Silverstone believed that those whose love for God was a vast, borderless frontier were expected to surrender everything to Him, gladly and without question, and that those who did so would live to see everything and more returned to them. After college he had shed America like a husk and journeyed to the far side of the planet, all to spread God’s word. Now he was coming apart. Anyone with love for God knows that when you give up everything for Him, He has no choice but to destroy you. God destroyed Moses; destroyed the heart of Abraham by revealing the deep, lunatic fathom at which his faith ran; took everything from Job, saw it did not destroy him, and then returned it, which did. Timothy reconciled God’s need to destroy with God’s opulent love by deciding that, when He destroyed you, it was done out of the truest love, the deepest, most divine respect. God could not allow perfection; it was simply too close to Him. His love for the sad, the fallen, and the sinful was an easy uncomplicated love, but those who lived along the argent brink of perfection had to be watched and tested and tried.

Timothy Silverstone was a missionary, though on the orders of his organization, the Central Asian Relief Agency, he was not allowed to admit this. Instead, when asked (which he was, often and by everyone), he was to say he was an English teacher. This was to be the pry he would use to widen the sorrowful, light-starved breach that, according to CARA, lay flush across the heart of every last person in the world, especially those Central Asians who had been cocooned within the suffocating atheism of Soviet theology. “The gears of history have turned,” the opening pages of Timothy’s CARA handbook read. “The hearts of 120 million people have been pushed from night into day, and all of them are calling out for the love of Jesus Christ.”

As his students cheated on their exams
,
Timothy drifted through the empty canals between their desks. His classroom was as plain as a monk’s sleeping quarters; its wood floors groaned with each of his steps. Since he had begun to come apart, he had stopped caring whether his students cheated. He had accepted that they did not understand what cheating was and never would, for just as there is no Russian word that connotes the full meaning of
privacy,
there is no unambiguously pejorative word for
cheat.
Timothy had also stopped trying to teach them about Jesus because, to his shock, they already knew of a thoroughly discredited man who in Russian was called Khristos.

Timothy’s attempts to create in their minds the person he knew as Jesus did nothing but trigger nervous, uncomfortable laughter he simply could not bear to hear. Timothy could teach them about Jesus and His works and His love, but Khristos grayed and tired his heart. He felt nothing for this impostor, not even outrage. Lately, in order to keep from coming apart, he had decided to try to teach his students English instead.

“Meester Timothy,” cried Rustam, an Uzbek boy with a long thin face. His trembling arm was held up, his mouth a lipless dash.

“Yes, Rustam, what is it?” he answered in Russian. Skull-clutching hours of memorizing vocabulary words was another broadsword Timothy used to beat back coming apart. He was proud of his progress with the language because it was so difficult. This was counterbalanced by his Russian acquaintances, who asked him why his Russian was not better, seeing that it was so simple.

After Timothy spoke, Rustam went slack with disappointment. Nine months ago, moments after Timothy had first stepped into this classroom, Rustam had approached him and demanded (actually using the verb
demand
) that Timothy address him in nothing but English. Since then his memorized command of English had deepened, and he had become by spans and cubits Timothy’s best student. Timothy complied, asking Rustam, “What is it?” again, in English.

“It is Susanna,” Rustam said, jerking his head toward the small blond girl who shared his desk.

Most of Timothy’s students were black-haired, sloe-eyed Uzbeks like Rustam—the ethnic Russians able to do so had fled Central Asia as the first statues of Lenin toppled—and Susanna’s blond, round-eyed presence in the room was both a vague ethnic reassurance and, somehow, deeply startling.

Rustam looked back at Timothy. “She is looking at my test and bringing me distraction. Meester Timothy, this girl cheats on me.” Rustam, Timothy knew, had branded onto his brain this concept of cheating and viewed his classmates with an ire typical of the freshly enlightened.

Susanna’s glossy eyes were fixed upon the scarred wooden slab of her desktop. Timothy stared at this girl he did not know what to do with, who had become all the children he did not know what to do with. She was thirteen, fourteen, and sat there, pink and startled, while Rustam spoke his determined English. Susanna’s hair held a buttery yellow glow in the long plinths of sunlight shining in through the windows; her small smooth hands grabbed at each other in her lap. All around her, little heads bowed above the clean white rectangles on their desks, the classroom filled with the soft scratching of pencils.

Timothy took a breath, looking back to Rustam, unable to concentrate on what he was saying because Timothy could not keep from looking up at the row of pictures along the back wall of his classroom, where Ernest Hemingway, John Reed, Paul Robeson, and Jack London stared out at him from plain wooden frames. An identical suite of portraits—the Soviet ideal of good Americans— was found in every English classroom from here to Tbilisi. Timothy knew that none of these men had found peace with God. He had wanted to give that peace to these children. When he had come to Central Asia, he felt peace with God as a great glowing cylinder inside of him, but the cylinder had grown dim. He could barely even feel God anymore, though he could still hear Him, floating and distant, broadcasting a surflike static. There was a message woven into this dense noise, Timothy was sure, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t decipher it. He looked again at Rustam, who had stopped talking now and was waiting for Timothy’s answer. Every student in the classroom had looked up from their tests, pinioning Timothy with their small impassive eyes.

“Susanna’s fine, Rustam,” Timothy said finally, turning to erase the nothing on his blackboard. “She’s . . . okay. It’s okay.”

Rustam’s forehead creased darkly, but he nodded and returned to his test. Timothy knew that, to Rustam, the world and his place in it would not properly compute if Americans were not always right, always good, always funny and smart and rich and beautiful. Never mind that Timothy had the mashed nose of a Roman pugilist and a pimply face; never mind that Timothy’s baggy, runneled clothing had not been washed for months; never mind that once, after Rustam had asked about the precise function of
do
in the sentence “I do not like to swim,” Timothy had stood at the head of the class for close to two minutes and silently fingered his chalk. Meester Timothy was right, even when he was wrong, because he came from America. The other students went back to their exams. Timothy imagined he could hear the wet click of their eyes moving from test to test, neighbor to neighbor, soaking up one another’s answers.

Susanna, though, did not stir. Timothy walked over to her and placed his hand on her back. She was as warm to his touch as a radiator through a blanket, and she looked up at him with starved and searching panic in her eyes. Timothy smiled at her, uselessly. She swallowed, picked up her pencil, and, as if helpless not to, looked over at Rustam’s test, a fierce indentation between her yellow eyebrows. Rustam sat there, writing, pushing out through his nose hot gusts of air, until finally he whirled around in his seat and hissed something at Susanna in his native language, which he knew she did not understand. Again, Susanna froze. Rustam pulled her pencil from her hands—she did not resist—snapped it in half, and threw the pieces in her face. From somewhere in Susanna’s throat came a half-swallowed sound of grief, and she burst into tears.

Suddenly Timothy was standing there, dazed, rubbing his hand. He recalled something mentally blindsiding him, some sort of brain flash, and thus could not yet understand why his palm was buzzing. Nor did he understand why every student had heads bowed even lower to their tests, why the sound of scratching pencils seemed suddenly, horribly frenzied and loud. But when Rustam— who merely sat in his chair looking up at Timothy, his long face devoid of expression—lifted his hand to his left cheek, Timothy noticed it reddening, tightening, his eye squashing shut, his skin lashing itself to his cheekbone. And Timothy Silverstone heard the sound of God recede even more, retreat back even farther, while Susanna, between sobs, gulped for breath.

Naturally, Sasha was waiting for Timothy in the doorway of the teahouse across the street from the Registan, a suite of three madrasas whose sparkling minarets rose up into a haze of metallic blue-gray smog. Today was especially bad, a poison petroleum mist lurking along the streets and sidewalks and curbs. And then there was the heat, a belligerent heat. Moving through it felt like breathing hot tea.

Timothy walked past the tall bullet-shaped teahouse doorway, Sasha falling in alongside him. They did not talk—they rarely talked—even though the walk to Timothy’s apartment in the Third Microregion took longer than twenty minutes. Sasha was Russian, tall and slender with hair the color of new mud. Each of Sasha’s ears was as large and ornate as a tankard handle, and his eyes were as blue as the dark margin of atmosphere where the sky became outer space. He walked next to Timothy with a lanky, boneless grace, in blue jeans and imitation-leather cowboy boots that clomped emptily on the sidewalk. Sasha’s mother was a history teacher from Timothy’s school.

When his drab building came into sight, Timothy felt the headachy swell of God’s static rushing into his head. It was pure sound, shapeless and impalpable, and as always he sensed some egg of sense or insight held deep within it. Then it was gone, silent, and in that moment Timothy could feel his spirit split from his flesh.
For I
know,
Timothy thought, these words of Paul’s to the Romans so bright in the glare of his memory they seemed almost indistinct from his own thoughts,
that nothing good
dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is
right, but I cannot do it.

As they climbed the stairs to Timothy’s fifth-floor apartment, Sasha reached underneath Timothy’s crotch and cupped him. He squeezed and laughed, and Timothy felt a wet heat spread through him, animate him, flow to the hard, stony lump growing in his pants. Sasha squeezed again, absurdly tender. As Timothy fished for the keys to his apartment door, Sasha walked up close behind him, breathing on Timothy’s neck, his clothes smelling—as everyone’s clothes here did—as though they had been cured in sweat.

They stumbled inside. Sasha closed the door as Timothy’s hands shot to his belt, which he tore off like a rip cord. He’d lost so much weight, his pants dropped with a sad puff around his feet. Sasha shook his head at this—he complained, sometimes, that Timothy was getting too skinny—and stepped out of his own pants. Into his palm Sasha spit a foamy coin of drool, stepped toward Timothy, and grabbed his penis. He pulled it toward him sexlessly, as if it were a grapple he was making sure was secure. Sasha laughed again and threw himself over the arm of Timothy’s plush red sofa. Sasha reached back and with medical indelicacy pulled himself apart. He looked over his shoulder at Timothy, waiting.

The actual penetration was always beyond the bend of Timothy’s recollection. As if some part of himself refused to acknowledge it. One moment Sasha was hurling himself over the couch’s arm, the next Timothy was inside him.
I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
It began slowly, Sasha breathing through his mouth, Timothy pushing farther into him, eyes smashed shut. What he felt was not desire, not lust; it was worse than lust. It was worse than what drove a soulless animal. It was some hot tongue of fire inside Timothy that he could not douse— not by satisfying it, not by ignoring it. Sometimes it was barely more than a flicker, and then Timothy could live with it, nullify it as his weakness, as his flaw. But without warning, in whatever dark, smoldering interior shrine, the flame would grow and flash outward, melting Timothy’s core—the part of himself he believed good and steadfast—into soft, pliable sin.

Timothy’s body shook as if withstanding invisible blows, and Sasha began to moan with a carefree sinless joy Timothy could only despise, pity, and envy. It was always, oddly, this time, when perched on the edge of exploding into Sasha, that Timothy’s mind turned, again, with noble and dislocated grace, to Paul.
Do not be deceived!
he wrote.
Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes,
sodomites . . . none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.
And this is what some of you used to be. But you were
washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the
name of Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
It was a passage Timothy could only read and reflect upon, praying for the strength he knew he did not have. He prayed to be washed, to be sanctified in the name of Jesus, but now he had come apart and God was far from him. His light had been eclipsed, and in the cold darkness that followed, he wondered if his greatest sin was not that he was pushing himself into nonvaginal warmth but that his worship was now for man and not man’s maker. But such taxonomies were of little value. God’s world was one of cruel mathematics, of right and wrong. It was a world that those who had let God fall from their hearts condemned as repressive and awash in dogma—an accurate but vacant condemnation, Timothy knew, since God did not anywhere claim that His world was otherwise.

A roiling spasm began in Timothy’s groin and burst throughout the rest of his body, and in that ecstatic flooded moment nothing was wrong, nothing, with anyone, and he emptied himself into Sasha without guilt, only with appreciation and happiness and bliss. But then it was over, and he had to pull himself from the boy and wonder, once again, if what he had done had ruined him forever, if he had driven himself so deeply into darkness that the darkness had become both affliction and reward. Quickly Timothy wiped himself with one of the throw pillows from his couch and sat on the floor, sick and dizzy with shame. Sasha, still bent over the couch, looked back at Timothy, smirking, a cloudy satiation frosting his eyes.
“Shto?”
he asked Timothy.
What?