God Lives in St. Petersburg (15 page)

Timothy could not—could never—answer him.

The next morning Timothy entered his classroom to find Susanna seated at her desk. Class was not for another twenty minutes, and Susanna was a student whose arrival, on most days, could be counted on to explore the temporal condition between late and absent. Timothy was about to wish her a surprised “Good morning” when he realized that she was not alone.

A woman sat perched on the edge of his chair, wagging her finger and admonishing Susanna in juicy, top-heavy Russian. Her accent was unknown to Timothy, filled with dropped
G
s and a strange diphthongal imprecision. Whole sentence fragments arced past him like softballs. Susanna merely sat there, her hands on her desktop in a small bundle. Timothy turned to leave but the woman looked over to see him caught in mid-pirouette in the doorway. She leaped up from his chair, a startled gasp rushing out of her.

They looked at each other, the woman breathing, her meaty shoulders bobbing up and down, her mouth pulled into a rictal grin.
“Zdravstvuite,”
she said stiffly.

“Zdravstvuite,”
Timothy said, stepping back into the room. He tried to smile, and the woman returned the attempt with a melancholy but respectful nod. She was like a lot of women Timothy saw here: bull-necked, jowled, of indeterminate age, as sexless as an oval. Atop her head was a lumpen yellow-white mass of hair spray and bobby pins, and her lips looked as sticky and red as the picnic tables Timothy remembered painting, with his Christian youth group, in the parks of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

“Timothy Silverstone,” she said.
Teemosee Seelverstun.
Her hands met below her breasts and locked.

“Yes,” Timothy said, glancing at Susanna. She wore a bright bubble gum–colored dress he had not seen before, some frilly ribboned thing. As if aware of Timothy’s eyes on her, Susanna bowed over in her chair even more, a path of spinal knobs surfacing along her back.

“I am Irina Dupkova,” the woman said. “Susanna told me what happened yesterday—how you reacted to her . . . problem.” Her joined hands lifted to her chin in gentle imploration. “I have come to ask you: This is true, yes?”

Her accent delayed the words from falling into their proper translated slots. When they did, a mental dead bolt unlocked, opening a door somewhere inside Timothy and allowing the memory of Rustam’s eye swelling shut to come tumbling out. A fist of guilt clenched in his belly.
He
had struck a child.
He had hit a boy as hard as he could, and there was no place he could hide this from himself, as he hid what he did with Sasha. Timothy felt faint and humidified, his face pinkening. “Yes, Irina Dupkova,” he said, “it is. And I want to tell you I’m sorry. I . . . I—” He searched for words, some delicate, spiraled idiom to communicative his remorse. He could think of nothing, entire vocabularies lifting away from him like startled birds. “I’m sorry. What happened made me . . . very unhappy.”

She shot Timothy a strange look, eyes squinched, her red lips kissed out in perplexion. “You do not understand me,” she said. This was not a question. Timothy glanced over at Susanna, who had not moved, perhaps not even breathed. When he looked back to Irina Dupkova she was smiling at him, her mouthful of gold teeth holding no gleam, no sparkle, only the metallic dullness of a handful of old pennies. She shook her head, clapping once in delight. “Oh, your Russian, Mister Timothy, I think it is not so good. You do not
vladeyete
Russian very well, yes?”

“Vladeyete,”
Timothy said. It was a word he was sure he knew.
“Vladeyete,”
he said again, casting mental nets. The word lay beyond his reach somewhere.

Irina Dupkova exhaled in mystification, then looked around the room. “You do not know this word,” she said in a hard tone, one that nudged the question mark off the end of the sentence.

“Possess,” Susanna said, before Timothy could lie. Both Timothy and Irina Dupkova looked over at her. Her back was still to them, but Timothy could see that she was consulting her CARA-supplied Russian-English dictionary.
“Vladeyete,”
she said again, her finger thrust onto the page. “Possess.”

Timothy blinked.
“Da,”
he said. “
Vladeyete.
Possess.” For the benefit of Irina Dupkova, he smacked himself on the forehead with the butt of his palm.

“Possess,” Irina Dupkova said, as if it had been equally obvious to her. She paused, her face regaining its bluntness. “Well, nevertheless, I have come here this morning to thank you.”

Timothy made a vague sound of dissent. “There is no need to thank me, Irina Dupkova.”

“You have made my daughter feel very good, Timothy. Protected. Special. You understand, yes?”

“Your daughter is a fine girl,” Timothy said. “A fine student.”

With that Irina Dupkova’s face darkened, and she stepped closer to him, putting her square back to the doorway. “These filthy people think they can spit on Russians now, you know. They think independence has made them a nation. They are animals, barbarians.” Her eyes were small and bright with anger.

Timothy Silverstone looked at his scuffed classroom floor. There was activity in the hallway—shuffling feet, children’s voices—and Timothy looked at his watch. His first class, Susanna’s class, began in ten minutes. He moved to the door and closed it.

Irina Dupkova responded to this by intensifying her tone, her hands moving in little emphatic circles. “You understand, Timothy, that Russians did not come here willingly, yes? I am here because my father was exiled after the Great Patriotic War Against Fascism. Like Solzhenitsyn, and his careless letters. A dark time, but this is where my family has made its home. You understand; we have no other place but this. But things are very bad for us now.” She flung her arm toward the windows and looked outside, her jaw set. “There is no future for Russians here, I think. No future. None.”

“I understand, Irina Dupkova,” Timothy said, “and I am sorry, but you must excuse me, I have my morning lessons now, and I—”

She seized Timothy’s wrist, the ball of her thumb pressing harshly between his radius and ulna. “And this little hooligan Uzbek thinks he can touch my Susanna. You understand that they are animals, Timothy, yes?
Animals.
Susanna,” Irina Dupkova said, her dark eyes not leaving Timothy’s, “come here now, please. Come let Mister Timothy see you.”

In one smooth movement Susanna rose from her desk and turned to them. Her hair was pulled back into a taut blond ponytail and lay tightly against her skull, as fine and grained as sandalwood. She walked over to them in small, noiseless steps, and Timothy, because of his shame for striking Rustam before her eyes, could not bear to look at her face. Instead he studied her shoes—black and shiny, like little hoofs—and the sapling legs that lay beneath the wonder of her white leggings. Irina Dupkova hooked Susanna close to her and kissed the top of her yellow head. Susanna looked up at Timothy, but he could not hold the girl’s gaze. He went back to the huge face of her mother, a battlefield of a face, white as paraffin.

“My daughter,” Irina Dupkova said, nose tilting downward into the loose wires of Susanna’s hair.

“Yes,” Timothy said.

Irina Dupkova looked over at him, smiling, eyebrows aloft. “She is very beautiful, yes?”

“She is a very pretty girl,” Timothy agreed.

Irina Dupkova bowed in what Timothy took to be grateful acknowledgment. “My daughter likes you very much,” she said, looking down. “You understand this. You are her favorite teacher. My daughter loves English.”

“Yes,” Timothy said. At some point Irina Dupkova had, unnervingly, begun to address him in the second-person familiar. Timothy flinched as a knock on the door sounded throughout the classroom, followed by a peal of girlish giggling.

“My daughter loves America,” Irina Dupkova said, ignoring the knock, her voice soft and insistent.

“Yes,” Timothy said, looking back at her.

“I have no husband.”

Timothy willed the response from his face. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“He was killed in Afghanistan.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“I live alone with my daughter, Timothy, in this nation in which Russians have no future.”

Lord, please
, Timothy thought,
make her stop.
“Irina Dupkova,” Timothy said softly, “there is nothing I can do about any of this. I am going home in three months. I cannot—I am not able to help you in that way.”

“I have not come here for that,” she said. “Not for me. Again you do not understand me.” Irina Dupkova’s eyes closed with the faint, amused resignation of one who had been failed her whole life. “I have come here for Susanna. I want you to have her. I want you to take her back to America.”

Struck dumb
had always been a homely, opaque expression to Timothy, but he understood, at that moment, the deepest implications of its meaning. He had nothing to say, nothing, and the silence seemed hysterical.

She stepped closer. “I want you to take my daughter, Timothy. To America. As your wife. I will give her to you.”

Timothy stared her in the face, still too surprised for emotion. “Your daughter, Irina Dupkova,” he said, “is too young for such a thing.
Much
too young.” He made the mistake of looking down at Susanna. There was something in the girl Timothy had always mistaken for a cow-like dullness, but he could see now, in her pale eyes, savage determination. He suddenly understood that Susanna’s instigation lay behind Irina Dupkova’s offer.

“She is fourteen,” Irina Dupkova said, moving her hand, over and over again, along the polished sheen of Susanna’s hair. “She will be fifteen in four months. This is not so young, I think.”

“She is too young,”
Timothy said, with a fresh anger. Again he looked down at Susanna. She had not removed her eyes from his.

“She will do for you whatever you ask, Timothy,” Irina Dupkova was saying. “Whatever you ask. You understand.”

Timothy nodded distantly, a nod that both understood but did not understand. In Susanna’s expression of inert and perpetual unfeeling, he could see that what Irina Dupkova said was right: She
would
do whatever he asked of her. And Timothy Silverstone felt the glisten of desire at this thought, felt the bright glint of a lechery buried deep in the shale of his mind.
My God
, he thought.
I will
not do this.
He was startled to realize he had no idea how old Sasha was. Could that be? He was tall, and his scrotum dangled between his legs with the heft of postadolescence, but he was also lightly and delicately haired, and had never, as far as Timothy could tell, shaved or needed to shave. Sasha could have been twenty-two, three years younger than Timothy; he could have been sixteen. Timothy shook the idea from his head.

“I have a brother,” Irina Dupkova was saying, “who can arrange for papers that will make Susanna older. Old enough for you, in your nation. It has already been discussed. Do you understand?”

“Irina Dupkova,” Timothy said, stepping backward, both hands thrust up, palms on display, “I cannot marry your daughter.”

Irina Dupkova nearly smiled. “You say you cannot. You do not say you do not want to.”

“Irina Dupkova,
I cannot do this for you.
”

Irina Dupkova sighed, chin lifting, head tilting backward. “I know why you are here. You understand. I know why you have come. You have come to give us your Christ. But he is useless.” Something flexed behind her Slavic face plate, her features suddenly sharpening.
“This
would help us.
This
would save.”

Timothy spun around, swung open his classroom door, poked his head into the hallway, and scattered the knot of chattering children there with a hiss. He turned back toward Irina Dupkova, pulling the door shut behind him with a bang. They both stared at him, Irina Dupkova’s arm holding Susanna close to her thick and formless body. “You understand, Timothy,” she began, “how difficult it is for us to leave this nation. They do not allow it. And so you can escape, or you can marry.” She looked down at herself. “Look at me. This is what Susanna will become if she remains here. Old and ugly, a ruin.” In Irina Dupkova’s face was a desperation so needy and exposed Timothy could find quick solace only in God, and he tried to imagine the soul within Susanna, the soul being held out for him to take away from here, to sanctify and to save. That was God’s law, His imperative:
Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations.
Then God’s distant broadcast filled his mind, and with two fingers placed stethescopically to his forehead Timothy turned away from Irina Dupkova and Susanna and listened so hard a dull red ache spread behind his eyes. The sound disappeared.

“Well,” Irina Dupkova said with a sigh, after it had become clear that Timothy was not going to speak, “you must begin your lesson now.” Susanna stepped away from her mother and like a ghost drifted over to her desk. Irina Dupkova walked past Timothy and stopped at his classroom door. “You will think about it,” she said, turning to him, her face in profile, her enormous back draped with a tattered white shawl. “You will consider it.” Timothy said nothing and she nodded, turned back to the door, and opened it.

Students streamed into the room on both sides of Irina Dupkova like water coming to a delta. Their flow hemmed her in, and Irina Dupkova’s angry hands fluttered and slapped at the black-haired heads rushing past her. Only Rustam stepped aside to let her out, which was why he was the last student into the room. As Rustam closed the door after Irina Dupkova, Timothy quickly spun to his blackboard and stared at the piece of chalk in his hand. He thought of what to write. He thought of writing something from Paul, something sagacious and unproblematic like
We who are strong ought to put up with
the failings of the weak.
He felt Rustam standing behind him, but Timothy could not turn around. He wrote the date on the board, then watched chalk dust drift down into the long sulcated tray at the board’s base.

“Meester Timothy?” Rustam said finally, his artificial American accent tuned to a tone of high contrition.