God Lives in St. Petersburg (6 page)

It was against SF doctrine to travel alone, and Donk imagined that right about now he was zooming up in the digital viewfinder of the binoculars that belonged to this commando’s partner, who was no doubt watching from a hill or was perhaps even hidden in some impossibly nearby rocks.

“Sir,” the commando said to Donk. “You’re an American?”

Donk pulled his hands from his sweatshirt’s pockets and stood. “I am.”

The commando, squinting, gazed down at Donk from his mount. He threw off the hard, unapproachable aura of sunlight on sheet metal. “Are you wounded?”

“What?”

The soldier tapped himself above the eye.

“No,” Donk said, touching himself there and, with a flinch, regretting it. “It’s nothing. A car accident.”

“Sir, I’ve been following you. And I have to ask what you’re doing out here, for one, and, for two, why are your men discharging their weapons in a hostile area?”

“They executed our donkey,” Donk said. “I’m not sure why. And they’re not my men. They’re General Ismail Mohammed’s.”

The horse footed back a few steps, its huge stone-smooth muscles sliding around one another beneath a dark-brown coat as shiny as chocolate pudding. The commando, with the steadiness of a centaur, had not taken his eyes off Donk. “That leaves what you’re doing out here.”

“I’m a journalist. My friend is back in General Mohammed’s village, like I said. He’s very sick. I’m out here looking for grass.”

The commando stared at him. “Pardon me, sir, but the stuff practically falls out of the trees here. There’s no need to be out this—”

“Not marijuana. Grass. A special kind of grass.”

“Ho-kay,” he said.

“Look, forget that. Can you help me?”

“Sir, I don’t really have any guidance.”

“Any what?”

“Guidance, sir. I can’t talk to the media.”

Donk always admired military men, young military men in particular, for their peculiarly unsullied minds. “I’m not looking for an interview. My friend has malaria. He’s back in General Mohammed’s village. He’s dying.”

“Sir, be advised that these mountains are not safe for civilians. They’re crawling with hostiles. And I don’t mean to sound like a hard-ass, but I’m not really authorized to use this radio for anything other than ordering air strikes. We’re doing pest control, sir, and I strongly recommend you get back to that village.”

“Where’s your commanding officer?”

“He’s in Mazar-i-Sharif, sir.”

“Lieutenant Marty, right?”

The commando paused. “I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”

“Look, do you have any malaria medicine? Antibiotics? Anything you have. Believe me when I say it’s an emergency.”

The commando pulled back on the reins. The horse turned with the finicky heaviness particular to its species, and the commando started off.

Donk was not surprised. “This is all about reporters fucking you guys over in Vietnam, isn’t it?” he called after him. “Well, you should know I was about six when Saigon fell. Were you even born?”

The commando stopped and turned back to him. “Leave this area, sir. Now.”

Donk saluted the commando, who politely returned the salute and ya’d his horse to a full gallop. The cool thin dust swallowed them both just before they would have vanished over the nearest hill’s lip. Donk asked Hassan to inform Black Beard and Red Beard that his mission was now under the protection of the American military, owners of fearsome fighter planes, magical horseback summoners of aerial bombs, benevolent providers of PX-surplus camouflage. Neither Red Beard nor Black Beard had much of anything to say after that.

Shortly after 4 p.m. they found the valley where the grass was supposed to grow, a large scooped-out gouge of grayish sand and brown rocky soil amid a ragged perimeter of half a dozen steep hills. A long twisty road wended through the valley and disappeared into an identically shady pass at each end. The hill they were now atop had provided them the least hospitable, most distinctly mountainous trek yet. Its top ridge was cold, windy, and dustless. As they stood in the sunlight looking down into the valley, Donk saw why the commando had wanted him to return to General Mohammed’s village. Along the valley’s road was a smudged line of charcoal-colored transport trucks and pickups. Black Beard withdrew from one of his satchels a pair of binoculars. After having a look he handed the binoculars without comment to Donk. They were, Donk saw, cheap enough to have been pulled from a cereal box. Nonetheless, they helped him discern that the smudges were blast marks; the dark charcoal color could be credited to the fact that each vehicle had been incinerated from the outside in. It took them another twenty minutes to climb down into the valley, and they walked along the road’s wreckage as warily and silently as animals. The bombing had not happened terribly recently. Not a single piece of hardware was smoking, and the truck husks had the brittle, crumbly look of a scorched old log one cleared from a well-trafficked campsite’s pit before building a new fire. The wreckage looked picked over, and the shrapnel was in careful little piles. Black Beard and Red Beard muttered to themselves.

“What are they saying?” Donk asked Hassan.

Hassan shook his head. “Their prayers for the dead.”

“But these men were their enemies.”

“Of course,” Hassan said, looking at Donk hatefully.

Donk approached the bombed convoy’s lead vehicle. Its tires had melted and its doors were gone. The empty cab and bed were both largely intact, though they had been parted from each other after sustaining what looked like a direct hit. There were no craters, Donk knew, because this campaign’s bombs were designed to explode a few feet above their targets. Donk walked farther down the blasted line. He did not see any bodies at all until the penultimate vehicle, a nearly vaporized Datsun pickup so skeletal it looked like a blackened blueprint of a Datsun pickup. The charred driver was barely distinguishable from the wreckage around him. He was just a crispy torso of shrunken unrealness. His face and hair had been burned off, his head a featureless black oval. Donk reached for the camera he did not have and stepped closer, discovering that the reason no one had moved his body was because it was melted to its seat. His stomach gurgled and turned. Something in him clenched. He did not have his camera. The image would never swim up at him from the bottom of a plastic platter filled with developing fluid. It would stay exactly this way. . . . Donk forced the thought away.

“Mister Donk!” Hassan called.

He turned, rubbing his beating heart through his chest. “Yes, Hassan. What is it?”

He pointed at the Beards. “They say the grass is nearby.”

Donk took in this information. He felt the same mild surprise he remembered experiencing when he had learned, thanks to a concert Tina had taken him to, that people were still writing symphonic music. Surprise that he would be so surprised. The grass actually existed. How unaccountable. “Where?”

Hassan pointed across the valley. “They say over there.”

Donk looked. At the far side of the valley stood a sparse stand of trees, the first trees he had seen all day. They made him feel better, somehow. Around the trees was a long squarish field of desiccated grass the color of wheat. The road this annihilated convoy had been traveling along would have taken them right past that field. They walked, Black Beard and Red Beard having now unshouldered their weapons. Walking across this valley felt to Donk like standing in the middle of an abandoned coliseum. Above, the sky was getting darker. The day was silent. Donk noticed, as they grew closer to the trees, that they had not yet completely shed their leaves, little pom-poms of bright orange and yellow still tipping their branches. The setting sun was pulling a long curtained shadow across this valley. He realized, then, that even if they pushed themselves they were not going to make it back to the village before nightfall. He hurried himself ahead, and Hassan and the Beards jogged to keep pace with him. He did not care to learn who or what ruled these hills at night.

“Mister Donk,” Hassan said, “please slow!”

“Fuck off,” he called back. Donk’s thoughts suddenly felt to him alien and disfigured, exalted by fear, disconnected from the internal key that transformed them into language. He veered off the road and sprinted toward the trees through grass abruptly growing all around him. His boots were scything up great cheerful swaths of the stuff. He did not know why he was not gathering up any of it. He was not certain what might make one kind of grass more restorative than another. He had a quiet, appalled thought at all the things he did not know. He then remembered to believe that the grass was not going to help Graves. Not at all.

“Mister Donk!” Hassan called again. Donk turned to see Hassan following him across the field of grass in an unsteady, not-quite-running way. “They say we must be careful here! Mister
Donk
!” Black Beard, now shouting something himself, endured a moment of visible decision making, then left the road and followed after Hassan.

Donk’s head swiveled forward. He was almost to the trees. The grass just under the trees looked especially boilable, thick and tussocky. Then, oddly, Donk seemed to be looking at the trees and the grass from much higher up. His horizon lifted, then turned over. Donk had heard nothing, but when he landed he smelled something like cooked meat, cordite, loam. He lay there in the grass, blinking. With his fingers he pulled up a thick handful of grass, then let it go. He looked over. Hassan was beside him, ten feet away, screaming, though still Donk could hear nothing. Hassan’s mouth was bloody and his cardigan sweater was gone but for some shreds, and what Donk initially believed to be large fat red leeches were crawling all over his stomach and chest. On the other side of him Black Beard was creeping away on all fours, shaking his head in a dazed way. After a few feet he stopped and lay down. Donk thought that he, Donk, was okay. But for some reason he could not sit up. His legs felt funny, as did his back. He did not panic and lifted his left leg to watch the tendons and veins and muscles fall away from it as though it were a piece of chicken that had been boiled too long. Then he was bleeding. The blood did not come out of him in a glug but in a steady silent gush. There was so much of it. He lowered his leg and from his prone position saw broken-ribbed Red Beard struggling down the road. Yes, he thought, that’s right. Go get help. Donk thought he was going to be all right. It did not hurt yet. Oh wait yes it did. Suddenly it hurt very, very much. Donk always believed that you learned a lot about a place by the first thing you heard said there. In Chechnya it was “It doesn’t work.” In Rwanda: “I don’t know.” In Afghanistan: “Why are you here?” He had not stepped on a mine. Slowly, he knew that. No reason to waste an expensive mine in such a remote place. He had stepped instead on a bomblet, a small and festively yellow cluster of ordnance that had not detonated above the eradicated convoy but rather bounced away free and clear and landed here in the grass. Hassan was no longer screaming but simply lying there and looking up at the sky. He, too, was mechanically blinking. Hassan needed help. Donk did not care if he stole his cameras. Donk could help him. Donk, suddenly, loved him. But first he had to rest. He could not think about all this until he had some fucking rest. Could he get some rest? He had to help Graves because if he did not Graves would die. He thought of his father, how he had looked in the end. God, Donk thought, I do not want to die. But he did not much care for old age either. A problem there. “Dad!” Donk yelled out suddenly. He did not know why; something in him unclenched. Or maybe he had not said anything at all. It was hard to tell, and it was getting dark. So: rest. Rest here one minute and off we go. Red Beard could use the company. Use the help. Ho-kay. He was all right. He just needed to figure this out.

Aral

Please,” he said to the American, blowing into his teacup with a delicacy that did not suit him, “you must eat more.”

“No,” the American said in mild return. “Thank you.” She was exhausted. They’d been speaking for nearly three hours, and though she was famished—she hadn’t eaten all day—the notion of food or, more precisely,
his
food made her stomach knot. Self-righteousness, this was—stupidity—but she refused to let him spelunk his way into any of her weaknesses. He smiled at the American’s refusal; then, with both hands, he raised the teacup chin level and treated her to the theater of his blow-sip-blow method of tea intake.

The American’s gaze slipped off him and again absorbed the room. It was resplendent, breathtaking: polychromatic tapestries on the wall, servile attendants stalking stiffly in and out, a low table scattered with more food, fruit, teapots, and silverware than seemed appropriate. They sat across from each other, on the floor, cross-legged, atop heavy blankets. She was unused to such long-term contortion and her feet had surpassed being merely asleep. They felt gone, disappeared, off in some other dimension. Part of the reason she no longer cared how long they sat here was that she had no idea how she would stand when they were finished.

Suddenly the man spoke to the attendants standing guard near the door in his native tongue, Uzbek, something the American did not understand (to her he spoke Russian). In a blink the table was cleared and the attendants were gone. They were alone. The instant the table was empty she wished she’d eaten something. Hunger stumbled, heavy-footed, inside her stomach.

“When will I get my passport?” the American asked, also in Russian, with a kind of graceless start-and-stop inflection.

“I’m not sure,” the man said, deftly unfolding his legs and then refolding them.

“When will I be able to leave?”

“Of that too,” he said, “I am unsure.”

Her hands clenched. “All you have to do is call the United Nations. It’s so—it’s simple.
Call
them,
ask
them who I am.”

The man said nothing for several moments, then
tsk
ed once, impassively. The American pulled herself together and saw that in the meantime he’d made a small pointed pile of bread crumbs on the tablecloth with his knife. “To be a woman,” he said with disinterest, tending to his pile, “and to travel alone—this is unwise in our nation.”

It was interesting to her how little the man’s sexism bothered her now, how secondary such concerns had become. “I told you what happened. My colleagues are in Tashkent. They were ill. I speak the language; I was anxious; I didn’t feel like waiting for them, and—”

“And off you went,” he said, smiling, “to our Aral Sea.” Her gaze collapsed when confronted with his smile. He was missing at least a dozen teeth, the replacements either gold or some shiny alchemic substitute, and his remaining teeth looked like a museum of cavities. Other than this distraction, he was not a bad-looking man. His hair was short, bristly, black, spangled by dandruff. His equally black mustache fell only a little short of achieving Fu Manchu proportions. His neck was too thin compared to the rest of his body; he reminded her of a saber or a long fish, a northern pike or a gar—something sharp, severe.

“I’ve told you,” she said. “I’m a biologist. I was sent by the UN to—”

“I know who you are,” he cut in, with fresh displeasure, “and I know who sent you.”

She was astonished. It was the first time he’d spoken to her as if he believed she was who she claimed to be. He sat there, pleased with her struck-dumbness, and she realized with something like complete certainty that he’d always believed she was who she said she was; he
knew
it. The dynamic of their relationship changed so swiftly the American imagined she felt a breeze slide over her.

“You,” he said, “are Amanda Reese. You are an American. You work with the United Nations.” He found no consolation, she could tell, from telling her the truth. He gained no clearheaded frankness, no serendipitous nobility. “You are a biologist from the University of Indiana.”

“Illinois,” she said quietly.

He smirked. “Excuse me. Illinois.” He pronounced it Russian-style,
E-lee-NOIS
, though she had not. She felt oddly lifted by this, superior.

“I think you know my next question,” she said. But the language tripped her up. Finding the words was getting more difficult as she grew more exhausted. She felt as if she were digging around in a darkened attic for something she knew only by sight, and she hoped he’d missed her grammatical mistake.

He hadn’t. He held up a finger and repeated her sentence, gently correcting her Russian, something about the correct adjective ending. His raised finger did not retreat until she said it again, correctly.

“High school was a long time ago,” she mumbled in excuse. But she’d also studied in college, after college, before coming; she’d studied more than she would have admitted to anyone. Still, despite the huge vocabulary that years of studying had harvested, she was terrible, stump-tongued, a syntax butcher. “No gift” was how her most patient tutor, Vova Petrovich, had once sadly appraised her.
No geeft, Amanda, you hev no geeft.

“I understand,” he said in English. His head tipped forward adroitly on his thin neck. “School was long ago for me too.” In Russian: “Your question, yes? When will you leave? Professor Reese,” he said, leaning back, “you may leave whenever you want. You are not imprisoned. On the contrary, you are my guest.”

“I’m not leaving until I get my passport—and until I can tell the UN about my treatment here.”

Now he laughed, his eyes doubling in size. “Your
treatment
!” This burst out of him. He looked around for someone to join this ebullience, found no one, and stopped laughing as suddenly as he had begun. “Yes, your treatment is something I’d like to discuss as well, Professor Reese. From the airport you were chauffeured here”— he motioned around him, underscoring the room’s bright opulence—“and offered lunch, which, I might add, you refused.” He smiled again. “Yes, let us tell the United Nations how you were treated, Professor Reese.”

“I know who you are,” she said.

He looked at her with distaste. “Of that,” he said, “I have my doubts.”

“Kah Gay Bay,” she said quickly. KGB. He raised his eyebrows in polite acknowledgment, obviously pleased the initials carried such mythic tonnage in her mind’s canals. “That’s who you are. And I know what you do.”

He ran his index fingers along the gutters under his eyes, clearing away the silt.

“Get me my passport,” she said. “Right now, goddammit.”

He said nothing, again treating her to his freighted, sullen silence. “I will not keep you any longer, Professor Reese,” he said at last. “But I would like to hear your UN’s thoughts about our problem before you go.”

She regarded him coldly. “
Our
problem?”

For once, this man seemed honest in his surprise. “Why, Professor Reese,” he said. “I speak of the Aral Sea, of course.”

She was an environmental biologist, though she would have resented being pinned to merely one biological discipline, since like most biologists she had several realms of interest and thought herself bright about many things. Her specialty was irrigation: its almost incomprehensibly far-ranging effects both on the irrigated area and on the area whose irrigation was diverted. She was in fact held to be one of America’s most accurate prognosticators on the often unpredictable and occasionally ecocidal effects of the always ill-advised practice of monkeying with rivers, lakes, and seas. She was a recent and uncommonly young recipient of tenure, author of dozens of articles, coeditor of a cobbled-together collection of essays whose slant grew before her eyes to be so idiotically anti-industry its existence embarrassed her to this day. She was “famous in certain circles,” as she often heard her mother say to guests when she thought her daughter out of earshot, during those long July days she spent summering with her parents in Vermont. “Our little Rachel Carson.” But this dotage was embarrassing, and ridiculous besides: Who
isn’t
famous in “certain circles”? Although of course it was her desire to garner true, unqualified Rachel Carson fame that disqualified what most people would have accepted as God’s plenty.

Initially, she studied biology to work in the sea (which she had yet to do); her pursuit of the stumbling, bearlike Russian language had its germ in a bizarre teenage infatuation with chess (indirectly) and Boris Spassky (directly); she had never married though had once been close, which is how she’d become involved with the United Nations’ Aral Sea Basin Relief Project one year ago. Getting a government job—a job with any government, she was confident—had less to do with personal excellence than did a professional wrestling match, and though Amanda was no hardened cynic she accepted this more or less uncritically, just as she had uncritically accepted the job with the Aral project that her former lover, Andrew, had more or less gift-wrapped for her.

Once upon a time, the name
Aral Sea
was accurate. Since 1960, however—when Soviet engineers began to divert its twin tributaries to fertilize cotton fields in Turkistan—the Aral had gone from a sea of plenty to a sea of less plenty, to an unfortunate polluted lake, to a poison lake to a shrinking pestilent bog to a certified disaster. That was where it stood when Amanda was named part of a ten-scientist team acting as a stateside academic/scientific codicil to an Aral Sea Basin Relief Project—no longer the Aral Sea at all but the Aral Disaster.

Of course, she had never actually expected to get to
see
the Aral Sea. Mostly she crunched numbers, calculating the average increase of temperature and decrease of airborne moisture and what that would mean, hypothetically, for the surrounding area’s agriculture. She ran computer simulations that posited what would happen with no Aral Sea at all. She e-mailed her findings to other biologists and tried to forget about the decades of pollution and insecticide and toxins in the Aral’s exposed and wind-blown seabed. She also tried to forget that the sanitized, bloodless, glowing-green numbers on her Hewlett-Packard’s screen told her seventeen thousand kids who in nearly any other part of the world would have been learning multiplication tables and team sports were going to be anemic.

Her alpha-and-omega trip to the Soviet Union had been to Moscow, in 1987, as Andrew’s guest (he was then working for the ambassador), and she’d bathed in the springy feeling of glasnost. What she saw was not the nation of wicked Lenin, evil Stalin, warty Brezhnev, but Pepsi billboards and gleaming hotels and elegant, jaw-dropping cocktail parties. This was her week in Russia, and she had spoken the language twice (
“Skazhite, pozhaluista,
gde tualet?”
and
“Taksi!”
).

Of course, everything was different now. For one, Andrew was gone. Aral was worse. The Soviet Union was no more. Along with the tourist-perfect, industry-friendly teardrop-and-puddle nations that had sprouted along Russia’s western flank, a jigsaw of polysyllabic, hostile-sounding nations had metastasized to the south. Central Asia, this was, and the Aral Sea was its fountain of life.

When Amanda learned that, thanks to her Russian skills, her days of computer simulations and guesswork were over—she was
going
there, as in
next month,
with two other members of the team to survey the Aral Sea basin personally—she called up her old tutor, Vova, and asked him what was Central Asia’s story anyway? Vova said, “Theenk of Ziberia, Amanda, fleeped over.” Had he ever been there, seen it? “Amanda, Amanda,” he said, becoming serious, nearly bitter, his accent suddenly falling away. “The only Russians in Central Asia are the ones whose relatives were exiled there.” She sensed him shaking his head at the boundless naïveté Americans had for places that weren’t America. “Don’t you think they knew what they were doing when they decided to murder the place?”

She learned more about Central Asia on the plane while gliding over the Ukraine from Ted Whitford, PhD, Marine Biology, UCLA. He too spoke some Russian (he’d spent time in Murmansk while studying the Barents Sea), and they practiced together until he realized she knew more than he did and put a stop to it right then and there. An asshole, Ted was. But he seemed to know a lot about the Aral Sea. (A disarmingly accurate generalization about assholes: They all know a lot, however brittle their knowledge becomes under intimacy’s whitest, hottest lights.) What he told her was specific, real-seeming—more information, at least, than the UN’s ossifyingly dull dossiers were willing to provide. Ted Whitford mentioned cities and local nationals he’d spoken to, supplying bleak sketches of how annihilated the Aral’s fishermen had been. He spoke with the world-weariness of one who simply knows too much. Had he been to Uzbekistan, the country that bore the brunt of Aral’s ailments? Amanda asked. Once, Ted explained, to Tashkent, the capital, which was still pretty Russian. More Russian than Russia, in fact. Ha-ha.

On her own, Amanda had learned that the rest of the world had, by and large, dismissed Central Asia and its problems with Aral; that most of the solutions for the problem cost somewhere in the twelve-figure range; that the UN was trying to do everything it could, but until Central Asia’s nations began to cooperate on water allocation and set prices for water usage like the good little budding market-economy nations they claimed they wanted to be, there was little the UN could do. Add to this the fact that the Aral Sea was found in one of Uzbekistan’s biggest headaches, Karakalpakistan, a nominally sovereign republic with its own government, bureaucracy, and eddies of red tape apart from Uzbekistan’s, and you were left navigating waters too tricky even for the United Nations. The entire scenario had the fiendish unsolvability of a physics story problem, and Amanda felt both intimidated and relieved. She and her team couldn’t, even at their least effective, possibly make anything worse.

“It’s damn sad,” Ted Whitford concluded with a sigh. “It rips me up.
Damn
sad.”