God Lives in St. Petersburg (7 page)

“Sounds like it,” said Michael Nam, sitting across the aisle from Amanda and Ted, reading the Cadogan guide to Central Asia (Amanda had
Lonely Planet
). Amanda had sat next to Michael on the first leg of the trip, over the Atlantic. She leaned forward to wink at him, become an accomplice to his insult of Ted in some way, but he did not look over at her. Instead, he turned the page in his book and pushed his styleless, thick-lensed glasses farther up his bridge. Michael was Korean, from the University of Miami—the “Carl Sagan of oceanography,” as she’d once heard him described. From their earlier conversation, Amanda had concluded that he, too, was an asshole, but an abidable, even interesting asshole.

“Righto,” Ted said to Michael and, alarmingly, touched Amanda on the knee.

“How long before we reach Tashkent?” Amanda asked Michael, again leaning forward.

“Two hours,” Michael said, closing his book and then his eyes.

Amanda looked around the plane. Nearly everyone was asleep, one or two souls glowing like angels under their reading lights. As far as she could tell, she and her colleagues were the only Americans on board. Her around-the-world trip was in its twentieth hour, and she was wide awake. She closed her eyes anyway, but opened them when Ted once again began talking. She turned to him and saw he’d not been speaking to her. He was addressing a small handheld tape recorder, whispering intense Churchillian cadences into it: “I’d say we’re at thirty-five thousand feet,” he was saying. Amanda rolled her head as far away from him as physiology would permit. “Tashkent,” he said, milking it, “Tash
kent
is down there too.” A pause of several moments. “And so is Aral. It all makes Murmansk and Barents . . .
Jesus!
Kid stuff, Ted. It was kid stuff.”

While they waited in the customs line, Amanda first began to grow nervous. She could see quite a bit of the airport behind the customs booth but no one was there, not a soul. She tapped Michael, who was still reading his travel guide, on the shoulder. “Hey. Who’s supposed to meet us here, anyway?”

Michael frowned and dug into his breast pocket. “Some guy named Nuridinov, from the Ministry of Water, and two other gentlemen. I can’t seem to read this.” He frown-squinted. “Hm. My own damn handwriting, too.”

“I don’t see
anyone,
Michael,” Amanda said. The customs line opposite hers was for nationals, and every dark-skinned, black-headed, heavy-lidded man in that line stood facing her, staring. She was, it dawned on her, the only woman in the entire terminal. She thought herself an attractive woman, though not anyone an American male would cross the street for. But in the present situation she might as well have been a movie star, despite her no-nonsense shoulder-length auburn hair and her breastless, mousy trimness. (She was trim in the absurd, magical way only women with large rear ends and thick thighs can be, these last two something not even five days of lap swimming a week could dragon-slay.) She found herself longing for the Slavic familiarity of Moscow and stared at the clipped black hairs on the back of Michael’s neck. Ted was behind her, still recording: “Our line is not moving. . . . Some locals appear to be staring at me. . . .”

“Someone’s waiting,” Michael said, after looking up at the empty terminal himself. Amanda nodded uneasily.

They got through customs, got their luggage, and planted themselves near the airport’s main entrance. No one was there. No one came. Three times Amanda had to explain to curious, walking-by
militsiya
who they were, why they were waiting. By 7 a.m. they were told to move along. Michael was in charge of this little field trip, but he’d never been given any phone numbers. It had been assumed they wouldn’t need any. Someone would meet them. Amanda and Michael were outside the airport in the pinkish, dirty light, discussing whether to call the American embassy or go to their hotel, when Ted appeared with what he optimistically called breakfast. It was some rancid-smelling meat wrapped up in a pitalike pocket and smothered with onions. Shashlik, Ted called it. “Here. I had it when I was here before. It’s delicious.”

“No, thanks,” Amanda said. “I don’t eat anything off the street.”

“It’s not off the street,” Ted said, and pointed. “It’s from him.” A small mustached man waved from behind the shashlik stand fifty yards away. They all waved back, idiotically.

Michael took the shashlik from Ted and absently tore into it, tracing his finger across the map of Tashkent in his guidebook. “Look,” he said. “I say we get to the hotel. They’re probably waiting for us there anyway. Change of plans. Something.”

Amanda stepped back; she’d let them decide. She was happy so far only to be here, to see what those numbers became when made flesh and blood. She’d see it for better or for worse and was prepared, she thought, for either. Tashkent was beginning to stir. Car horns sounded off far away; the morning was already growing hot, smog saturating the air. She sucked in sharply and with crossed eyes coughed out her intake. She’d taken hits off hash pipes less potent than Tashkent’s morning air.

When she rejoined Ted and Michael, it appeared they’d settled on the hotel, no doubt deeming it too embarrassing to go running off to the embassy just yet for help. They accepted her back into the huddle with a nod and told her what they were doing, making no pretense that her vote even mattered.
Honest, at least
, she thought.

“Standing up the United Nations,” Ted said, amused, polishing off his shashlik. “Now I’ve truly seen it all.”

“Explain to me,” the American said, “how Aral can possibly be
our
problem when you people make it impossible for us to help you.”

“How quickly you boil us down to one homogeneous people, Professor Reese. I am one man. How do I make it impossible for you to help us?”

“I’m speaking in generalities.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve read briefings. People here think nothing of letting their spigots run all day. That’s why our primary advice is that you start charging your citizens for water usage.”

“The Aral Sea is dead, Professor. Charging families who cannot afford it will not bring it back to life. You scold us like we are children. Americans enjoy this, it seems.”

“We just enjoy paranoid totalitarian regimes forced to tell the truth for once and admit their monstrosities, that’s all.”

“Blind children, Professor, have no stake in any regime. Nor do anemic pensioners.”

“It’s obvious we view this problem differently. But there are—”

“The difference between us, Professor, is that we know what suffering is. I know more about you—the many soft American indulgences—than you can hope to know of yourself. I know of your businessmen who fuck our women like cheap whores, your corporations that take advantage of our workers while thinking we are too stupid to know the difference, your Peace Corps workers who castigate us as lazy and stinking. You have no tragedy and forget that such things exist, and if you know they do, you blame those whom the tragedy befalls. Americans are a people who’ve let their souls grow fat.”

“Then why even bother doing anything, if you’re so proud of suffering? Let it and everyone die. So, we’ve talked. Now let me go. I don’t even know where I am, where my companions are.”

“Mr. Whitford and Mr. Nam are at the American embassy, Professor Reese, presently searching for you. It is, in fact, something of a crisis.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“. . .”

“How
do you know that?”

“We are the KGB. I know this as I knew you were coming here, as I knew whom you were to meet at the airport.”

“Nuridinov—”

“An easier man to bribe than I thought possible, even by our standards.”

“Wait a minute. . . .
Bribe?
”

“Certainly. How else would I guarantee his not joining you at the airport?”

“You
planned
all this?”

“I tried, Professor. Alas, everything has gone wrong. This, too, is common for our people. Now, come, we must stand.”

“Why are—what are you talking about?”

“We are going, Professor.”

“Going where? I’m not going anywhere with you. Get the American embassy on the phone right now.”

“Americans rely too much on this device, I think. You don’t need it. Professor Reese, I’m taking you to the very place you traveled seventeen thousand kilometers to see.”

“Aral? It’s close?”

“From my heart, Professor, the Aral Sea is never far.”

A note had greeted them at the hotel check-in desk. Amanda handed it to Michael, who unshouldered his luggage onto the polished floor and murmured its text incredulously: “‘Forgive us, kind gentlemen, but we are forced to meet you in Nukus, tomorrow. Things have risen.’” Softly Michael repeated the last line over again—
things have risen
—then flipped the paper over as if searching for the elliptical message’s tail. “It’s not even signed,” he said. But stapled to the note were three plane tickets for tomorrow’s flight to Nukus, on the western side of the country.

Ted was chewing on his pipestem, leaning against the check-in desk, buried to midthigh in sporty Day-Glo luggage. “Oh, hell, Michael,” he confided, giving him a manly swat on the back, “welcome to the former Soviet Union. Nothing ever works. Don’t sweat it. It used to take me a week in Murmansk just to place an overseas phone call.”

Michael was simmering like a spanked child, staring at the plane tickets helplessly. When the words registered, he turned to Ted with an apoplectic slackness to his face. “Well, this
isn’t
Murmansk, Ted, in case you
hadn’t
noticed”—he was, incredibly, hissing—“and we’re
not
here to study
brine
in the North
Atlantic
; we’re
here
with the fucking United
Nations
and I’m
sorry
if it’s just too fucking
much
on my part to
expect
someone to
be
here!”

While Ted quietly, indignantly, returned fire, Amanda interrupted the drowsing babushka behind the desk and booked two rooms.

The hotel was a middle-range affair, the lobby done up in a marblish, neo–
From Russia with Love
motif a clever film student might have thought touching. It was not the nicest hotel in Tashkent, nor was it the worst. The service industry here was still in its australopithecine stage, and the nicest hotels thought nothing of charging three hundred dollars a night for Best Western–quality rooms, a price the UN was simply unwilling to pony up for such a nonevent. That each member of their team had been given the Aral Relief project entirely on nepotistic grounds was well known, making them markedly easier to abuse.

Amanda had her own room, and as she double-checked the steadfastness of her small golden luggage locks she heard Ted and Michael next door, continuing their stilted lockjaw bickering. The narcotic fusion of jet lag and finally being alone knocked her out before she quite knew what was happening. She remembered only to set her alarm for the next morning.

She dreamed of seas and of Andrew, of drifting Cyrillic letters and of Connery’s James Bond, and awoke at 5 a.m. to the sound of vomiting next door.

“I’m dying,” Michael said, when he opened the door for her.

Amanda stepped in, hearing through the bathroom door the muffled, gastric trauma of Ted’s stomach contents rapidly leaving his body, though from which exit she didn’t know. Instinctively, her hand shot up to lie flush on Michael’s forehead. It was hotter than a sauna rock. “Michael,” she said.

They sat on the bed, Michael shivering as she put her arm around him. “The shashlik,” he said, and smiled. His gentle Korean eyes, though, were wreathed with fear. “I’m fairly sure it’s just food poisoning. You wait it out, you live through it, it goes away. I think I had something like this in Osaka once. We ported there while tracking whales, and I ate some sushi I shouldn’t have. Familiarity’s of slight consolation right now, I’m afraid.”

Seeing him sick unhardened her heart toward him, and she was moved by this attempt at bravery. He was making up, she knew, for his slippage in the lobby earlier. Amanda’s forehead met his with a small suctionless thud. “Michael, I told you not to eat that thing.” She smiled and shook her head.

Michael nodded, shivering more violently now. And suddenly the Carl Sagan of oceanography began to weep, sobbing and shuddering, though whether from pain, or hopelessness, or embarrassment, or fear of being sick in such a place, or the guilty futility one feels in countries less fortunate than America, she didn’t know. She pulled the sheet from his bed and draped it over his shoulders and held him until Ted emerged, whiter than an igloo, from the bathroom.

“I’ve got the Dresden of diarrhea,” he announced, wearing only a flimsy towel and propping himself up against the peeling hotel-room wall. His face was half shaven, as if he’d been preparing for his day when struck down by the thirsty protozoan horde swirling through his GI tract. “This is the Mother of all Diarrhea, people.”

“I’m calling the embassy,” Amanda said. Neither of them argued. The phone in their room did not work. The phone in her room did, but she was informed by the operator downstairs—an excitement blooming in her voice when she placed Amanda’s accent and learned of her call’s destination—that an outgoing call would be twentyfive American dollars, payable in advance at the front desk. “I’ve got to walk over there,” Amanda told them when she came back. “Calling out from here’s a pipe dream.”

Both Ted and Michael were now in their slender single beds, their restless legs scissoring under the sheets and their hands plastered to their faces, as if trying to cool the burning brain pans behind their skulls. The room’s intestinal stench was eye-watering.

“Amanda,” Michael said, “listen.” She looked at the empty travel bottles of Pepto-Bismol on the night table and at Ted, reaching over the edge of his bed and, without looking, digging in his carry-on. “We’re going to wait this out. We talked about it. We can wait this out.”

She brushed hair from her face. “Michael, let me call them at least—”

“We’re waiting it out, Amanda. You go to Nukus and meet Nuridinov, and we’ll be along in the next day or two. The flight leaves in two hours. If you want to catch it you’ve got to hurry.”