God Lives in St. Petersburg Read online

  Hassan seemed puzzled. “I ask-ed him. Why?”

  “Because, Hassan, information is only as reliable as the question that creates it.”

  “Mister Graves, I am not understanding you.”

  “He’s saying,” Donk said, “that our wheat-stealing friend may be telling us to go somewhere we shouldn’t.”

  Hassan looked at them both in horror. “My friends, no. This is not possible. He is good man. And we are gracious, hospitable people here. We would never—”

  Graves, cruelly, was ignoring this. “How’s the car?”

  Donk shook his head. “Wheel won’t turn, engine won’t start. Back wheels are buried in sand. And there’s the windshield issue. Other than that, it’s ready to go.”

  Graves walked out into the middle of the highway, drawing the blanket up over his head. Each end of the road streaked off into a troubling desert nothingness and appeared to tunnel into the horizon itself. It was hours before noon in northern Afghanistan, and the country felt as empty and skull-white as a moon. Not our familiar moon but another, harder, stranger moon. Above, the clouds were like little white bubbles of soap that had been incompletely sponged off the hard slate of the blue morning sky. Donk was compelled to wonder if nothingness and trouble were not, in fact, indistinguishable. Graves marched back over to the Corolla and savagely yanked his duffel from the front seat. “We walk to this village, then.”

  When it became apparent to the driver that they were leaving, he spoke up, clearly agitated. Hassan translated. “He says he won’t leave his car.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Graves said, and peeled off three twenties to pay the man.

  After leaving the main highway, they walked along a scarred, inattentively paved road toward the village Hassan had promised was only six or seven or was it eleven kilometers away. Human Conflict, Donk thought, rather abstractly. It was one of his lively but undisciplined mind’s fascinations. It differed from land to land, as faces differed. But the basic elements (ears, nose, mouth; aid workers, chaos, exhilaration) were always the same. It was the one thing that survived every era, every philosophy, the one legacy each civilization surrendered to the next. For Donk, Human Conflict was curiously life-affirming, based as it was on avoiding death—indeed, on inflicting death preemptively on others. He loved Human Conflict not as an ideal but as a milieu, a state of mind one absorbed but was not absorbed by, the crucial difference between combatants and non-. His love of Human Conflict was as unapologetic as it was without nuance. He simply enjoyed it. “Duncan,” a therapist had once asked him, “have you ever heard of the term chronic habitual suicide?” Donk never saw that therapist, or any other, again.

  He kicked from his path a billiard-ball-sized chunk of concrete. How was it that these people, the Afghans, could, for two hundred years, hold off or successfully evade several of the world’s most go-getting empires and not find it within themselves to pave a fucking road? And yet somehow Afghanistan was, at least for the time being, the world’s most significant place. Human Conflict had a way of doing that too. He remembered a press conference two weeks ago in the Presidential Palace in Tashkent, the capital of neighboring Uzbekistan, where the fragrant, rested-looking journalists who had arrived with the American secretary of state had surrounded him. Donk had taken his establishing shots of the secretary—looking determined and unusually Vulcan behind his press-conference podium—and quickly withdrawn. In one of the palace’s uninhabited corners he found a splendid globe as large as an underwater mine, all of its countries’ names in Cyrillic. Central Asia was turned out toward the room; North America faced the wall. Seeing the planet displayed from that strange side had seemed to Donk as mistaken as an upside-down letter. But it was not wrong. That globe was in fact perfectly accurate.

  Up ahead, Graves was walking more slowly now, almost shuffling. Donk was allowing Graves the lead largely because Graves needed the lead. He was one of those rare people one did not actually mind seeing take charge. But Graves, wrapped in his red blanket, looked little better than a confused pensioner. The sun momentarily withdrew behind one of the bigger bubbly cloud formations. The temperature dropped with shocking immediacy, the air suddenly as sharp as angel hair. Donk watched Graves’s bootlaces come slowly and then floppily untied. For some reason Donk was too embarrassed for Graves to say anything.

  “Mister Donk,” Hassan said quietly, drawing beside him. “Is Mister Graves all right?”

  Donk managed a weak, testy smile. “Mister Graves is fine.”

  Hassan nodded. “May I, Mister Donk, ask you questions?”

  “You may.”

  “Where were you born in America?”

  “Near the Sea of Tranquillity.”

  “I ask, what is your favorite food?”

  “Blueberry filling.”

  “American women are very beautiful, they say. They say too they have much love.”

  “That’s mostly true. You should only sleep with beautiful women, even though they have the least love. Write that down. With women it’s all confidence, Hassan. Write that down too. You might look at me and think, But this is a fat man! And it’s true. But I grow on people. You’re not writing.”

  “I hear that American women make many demands. Not like Afghan women.”

  “Did you steal my cameras?”

  “Mister Donk! No!”

  “That’s not nice, you know,” Graves said suddenly, glancing back. “Teasing the boy like that.”

  “I was wondering when I’d get your attention.”

  “Leave the boy alone, Duncan. He’s dealt with enough bad information to last his entire lifetime.”

  “I am not a boy,” Hassan said suddenly.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Graves said to Hassan. “War’s made Mister Duncan barmy.”

  “How are you feeling?” Donk asked Graves. “Any better?”

  Graves dropped his eyes to his open palm. “I was just checking my cell phone again. Nothing.” Some enigma of telecommunications had prevented his Nokia from functioning the moment they crossed into Afghanistan. He tried absently to put away the phone but missed his pocket. Graves stopped and stared at the Nokia, a plastic purple amethyst half buried in the sand. Donk scooped it up and handed it back to Graves, who nodded distantly. Suddenly the sky filled with a deep, nearly divine roar. Their three heads simultaneously tipped back. Nothing. American F/A-18s and F-14s were somewhere cutting through that high blue, releasing satellite- and laser-guided bombs or returning from dropping bombs or looking for new places to drop bombs. Graves shook his head, quick and hard, as though struggling to believe that these jets really existed. Only after the roar faded did they push on, all of them now walking Wizard-of-Oz abreast. Graves still seemed angry.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder if all the oil companies and the American military purposefully create these fucking crises to justify launching all those pretty missiles and dropping all these dreadful, expensive bombs. Air Force. Error Farce is more like it.”

  “Coalition troops,” Donk reminded him. “Those could be British jets.”

  “Somehow, Duncan, I doubt that.”

  Donk swigged from his canteen and wiped his mouth with his forearm. Talking politics with Graves was like being handed an armful of eels and then being asked to pretend that they were bunnies. He did not typically mind arguing, certainly not with a European, especially about the relative merits of the Land of the Red, White, and Blue. But Graves did not seem up to it. Donk settled on what he hoped was a slightly less divisive topic. “I wonder if they caught him yet.”

  “They’re not going to catch him. The first private from Iowa to find him is going to push him up against a cave wall and blow a hole in his skull.” Graves seemed unable to take his eyes off his feet.

  “Well,” Donk said, “let’s hope so.”

  Graves looked over at him with lucid, gaunt-faced disappointment. He snorted and returned his gaze to his All-Stars, their red fabric so dusty they now appeared pink. “I can’t
believe someone as educated as you would think that’s appropriate.”

  “I’m not that educated.” Donk noted that Graves was practically panting, his mouth open and his tongue peeking over the fence post of his lower front teeth. Donk touched him on the shoulder. “Graves, hey. You really look like you need to rest again.”

  Graves’s reaction was to nod, stop, and collapse into a rough squat, his legs folding beneath him at an ugly, painful-looking angle. Donk handed Graves his canteen while Hassan, standing nearby, mashed some raisins into his mouth. Graves watched a chewing Hassan watch him for a while, then closed his eyes. “My head,” he said. “Suddenly it’s splitting.”

  “Malaria,” Donk said, kneeling next to him. “The symptoms are cyclical. Headaches. Fever. Chills. The sweats.”

  “Yes,” Graves said heavily. “I know. Until the little buggers have clogged my blood vessels. Goodbye, vital organs.”

  “Malaria isn’t fatal,” Donk said.

  Graves shook his head. It occurred to Donk that Graves’s face, which tapered slightly at his temples and swelled again at his jawline, was shaped rather like a foot. “Untreated malaria is often fatal.”

  Donk looked at him evenly. Graves’s thermal underwear top had soaked through. The sharp curlicues of grayish hair that swirled in the hollow of Graves’s throat sparkled with sweat. His skin was shinier than his eyes by quite a lot.

  “Tell me something,” Graves said suddenly. “Why were you so nervous-seeming in Pyanj?”

  Donk sighed. “Because nothing was happening. When nothing is happening I get jumpy.”

  Graves nodded quickly. “I heard that about you.”

  “You did?”

  “That was a splendid shot, you know. The dead Tajik woman in Dushanbe. Brains still leaking from her head. You were there—what—three minutes after she was shot? I wonder, though. Do you see her when you sleep, Duncan?”

  It was probably Donk’s most famous photo, and his first real one. The woman had been gunned down by Russian soldiers in the Tajik capital during an early ugly paroxysm of street fighting. The Russians were in Tajikistan as peacekeepers after the Soviet collapse. Her death had been an accident, cross fire. She had known people were fighting on that street, but she walked down it anyway. You saw a lot of that in urban warfare. Chronic habitual suicide. In the photo her groceries were scattered beside her. One of her shoes was missing. A bit of her brain in the snow—just a bit, as though it were some glistening red fruit that had been spooned onto a bed of sugar—the rest shining wetly in a dark black gash just above her ear. Her mouth was open. The photo had run on the wires all over the world and, from what he had heard, infuriated the Russian authorities, which explained the difficulty he always had getting into Russia. “I guess I’m not a very haunted person,” Donk said finally.

  Graves was still smiling in a manner Donk recognized for its casual hopelessness. It was a war-zone look. He had seen it on aid workers’ faces and correspondents’ faces but most often on soldiers’ faces. He had witnessed it, too, on the bearded faces of the POWs in Kunduz’s granary. Hassan had stopped eating his raisins and now watched the two men. He saw the look too—perhaps because, Donk thought, it was his own default expression.

  “But you love death, though, Duncan, yes?” Graves asked. “You have to. We all do. That’s why we do this, isn’t it?”

  Donk began to pat himself down in search of something. He did not know what. He disliked such emotional nudism. He stopped pawing himself then, and, feeling not a little caught out, traced his finger around in the sand. He made a peace sign, an easy shape to make. “Graves, I have learned not to generalize much about people in our line of work. The best combat photographer I ever knew was the mother of two children.”

  “Russian?”

  “Israeli.”

  Graves leaned forward slightly. “Do you know what Montaigne says?”

  Donk neither moved nor breathed nor blinked. He heard Montaigne as Montane. “Can we walk again now?”

  “Montaigne believed that death was easiest for those who thought about it the most. That way it was possible for a man to die resigned. ‘The utility of living consists not in the length of days’—Montaigne said this—‘but in the use of time.’ ” Graves smiled again.

  Donk decided to switch tacks. “Your Royal Illness,” he said cheerfully, getting to his feet, “I bid you, rise and walk.”

  Graves merely sat there, shivering. His khaki vest looked two sizes too large for him, his hair no longer so thick-looking now that it was soaked to his skull, his snowy scalp showing through. Graves seemed reduced, as unsightly as a wet rodent. “Isn’t it strange,” he asked, “that in the midst of all this a man can die from a mosquito bite?”

  Donk’s voice hardened. “A, Graves, give me a break. B, You’re not going to die.”

  He laughed, lightly. “Today, no. Probably not.”

  Donk had a thought. Deborah. Turn the toaster. This Deborah had to be Graves’s girlfriend or common-law wife. The man did not seem traditional husband material, somehow. “Graves, you need to walk. For Deborah.”

  Graves’s puzzled face lifted up, and for a moment he looked his imperious self again. “Who the devil is Deborah?”

  “Mister Donk—” Hassan said urgently, all but pulling on Donk’s sleeve.

  “Graves,” Donk said, “I need you to get up.”

  Graves lay back, alone in his pain, his skull finding the pillow of his duffel bag. “It’s my head, Duncan. I can’t bloody think. ”

  “Mister Donk!” Hassan said, but it was too late. The jeep was approaching in a cloud of dust.

  The owner of the jeep was a thirtyish man named Ahktar. He wore blue jeans and a thin gray windbreaker and, as it happened, was only lightly armed, outwardly friendly, and claimed to live in the village they were headed toward. It was his “delight,” he said, to give them a ride. He spoke a little English. “My father,” he explained, once they were moving along, “is chief of my village. I go to school in Mazar city, where I learn English at the English Club.”

  “You’re a student now?” Donk asked, surprised. He found he could not stop looking at Ahktar’s thick mustache and toupee-shaped hair, both as impossibly black as photocopier ink.

  He laughed. “No. Many years ago.”

  Hassan and Donk bounced around on the jeep’s stiff backseat as Ahktar took them momentarily off-road, avoiding a dune that had drifted out into the highway. Jumper cables and needle-nose pliers jangled around at Donk’s feet. Graves was seat-belted in the shotgun position next to Ahktar, jostling in the inert manner of a crash-test dummy. Donk had yet to find the proper moment to ask why in Afghanistan the steering wheels were found on the right side of the car when everyone drove on the right side of the road. He thought he had found that moment now but, before he could ask, Ahktar hit a bump and Donk bashed his head against the vehicle’s metal roof. “Your jeep,” Donk said, rubbing his head through his terrorist-style do-rag.

  “Good jeep!” Ahktar said.

  “It’s a little . . . military-seeming.”

  Ahktar looked at him in the rearview and shook his head. He had not heard him.

  Donk leaned forward. “Military!” he shouted over the jeep’s gruff lawn-mowerish engine. “It looks like you got it from the military!”

  “Yes, yes,” Ahktar said, clearly humoring Donk. “I do!”

  Donk leaned back. “This is a military jeep, isn’t it?” he asked Hassan.

  “His father maybe is warlord,” Hassan offered. “A good warlord!”

  “Where are you from?” Ahktar asked Donk. “America?”

  “That’s right,” Donk said.

  “You know Lieutenant Marty?” Ahktar asked.

  “Lieutenant Marty? No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  Ahktar seemed disappointed. “Captain Herb?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  Ahktar reached into the side pocket of his gray coat and handed back to Donk a slip of paper with the names Captain H
erb and Lieutenant Marty written on it, above what looked to be a pi-length satellite phone number. “Who are they?” Donk asked, handing the paper back.

  “American soldiers,” he said happily. “We are friends now because I help them with some problems.”

  “Is there a phone in your village? We could call them.”

  “Sorry, no,” Ahktar apologized. “We have radios in my village but nearest phone is Kunduz. I think today I will not go to Kunduz. They are having problems there.” He motioned toward Graves, who seemed to be napping. “From where in America is your friend?”

  “I’m not an American,” Graves muttered, with as much force as Donk had heard him manage all day. “I’m English.”

  “What?” Ahktar asked, leaning toward him.

  Graves’s eyes cracked open, dim and sticky like a newborn’s. “I’m English. From England. The people your countrymen butchered by the thousand a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Yes,” Ahktar said soberly, downshifting as they came to a hill. Something in the jeep’s heater was rattling like a playing card in bicycle spokes. The waves of air surging from its vents went from warm, to hot, to freezing, to hot again. Ahktar drew up in his seat. “Here is village.”

  As they plunged down the highway, hazy purple mountains materialized along the horizon. From the road’s rise, Ahktar’s village appeared as an oblong smear of homes and buildings located just before a flattened area where the mountain range’s foothills began. Now came a new low-ground terrain covered with scrabbly, drought-ruined grass. Along the road were dozens of wireless and long-knocked-over telephone poles. The jeep rolled through the village’s outer checkpoint. Set back off the highway, every fifty yards, were some small stone bubble-domed homes, their chimneys smoking. They looked to Donk like prehistoric arboretums. None of it was like anything Donk had ever before seen in Central Asia. The virus of Soviet architecture—with its ballpark right angles, frail plaster, and monstrous frescoes—had not spread here. In the remoter villages of Tajikistan he had seen poverty to rival northern Afghanistan’s, but there the Soviet center had always held. In these never-mastered lands south of the former Soviet border, everything appeared old and shot up and grievously unattended. These discrepancies reminded Donk of what borders really meant and what, for better or worse, they protected.