God Lives in St. Petersburg (12 page)

“When you came in here. You were looking for someone.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He briefly looked into his lap. “Someone was going to meet me here. She said if she wasn’t around when I got here she wasn’t coming. I wasn’t really expecting to see her.” He bit the tip off a fry. “I’m leaving the country tomorrow.”

“Vacation?”

“No. For good. Forever.”

I didn’t say anything. Ryan didn’t either. Instead, he straightened the edges of what I now knew were his dismissal papers.

I looked at him. “Which organization are you with?”

He stared at the papers and didn’t answer me. I asked him again. He looked up, startled, and rubbed his eyes. “God, I’m sorry. I just . . . I can’t think. CARA. I’m with CARA.”

I nodded. CARA: the Central Asian Relief Agency. Missionaries were illegal anywhere in the country, and CARA was one of the first groups to figure out that since volunteers could be invited by the Capital as engineers and nurses and teachers, why not start a relief agency that sent
Christian
engineers, nurses, and teachers? So you can imagine what it was like for the locals: You sent your kids off to their English lesson, only to have them come back blabbing about King Solomon and John of Patmos. My dad got more official complaints about CARA than he did about any other American agency. The Capital wanted them gone.

“So you were a missionary,” I said.

To his credit, he immediately fessed up. “I guess so. I mean, I tried to be. It’s hard.”

This I believed. Though the country surrounding the Capital was nominally Muslim, everyone—including non-Russians—drank vodka, smoked cigarettes, and engaged in a good deal of the old rumpy pumpy. “Well,” I said to Ryan, “I’ll give you guys credit for having gargantuan balls.”

“For what?”

“For trying to convert a bunch of Muslims to Christianity when they’re not even interested in being Muslims.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks.” He sat there holding a half-eaten french fry, staring again at his dismissal papers. That was when I noticed the wedding ring—a simple dimmed gold band.

I looked him in the eye. “You married?”

He nodded, frowning.

“Is she here or back home?”

He cleared from his throat what sounded like a fistsized wad of phlegm. “Home,” he said, with difficulty.

“It’ll be good to see her again, I bet.”

He smiled a little, lifted his hand off the dismissal papers, delicately slid his ring from his finger, and dropped it into his glass of Fanta. With a soft
plunk
it struck the cup’s bottom, leaving a trail of chemically reactive bubbles popping at the soda’s orange surface.

I looked at the bubbles. “Your marriage could be better, I take that to mean.”

He ran a hand into his hair, plowing it back from his forehead and revealing a thinning window’s peak and a bright red sore at the hairline. “Yeah.”

Things began clicking into place. “This person you were meeting, this ‘she’—are you porking this girl?”

Some affirmative sound grunted out of him.

“And your wife found out.”

He shook his head back and forth.

I leaned back in my chair, having heard about CARA’s method of dealing with indiscreet adulteries, premarital dalliances, and other generally evil living: outright dismissal, no trial, no appeal. Just because I’d heard about this punishment didn’t mean I believed they actually enforced it. In a weird way I was impressed. From a pragmatic standpoint, though, enforcing rules like that was no way to run an overseas operation, since eventually everyone figures out that fucking is one of the only things that improves the farther you get from America. “CARA found out,” I said.

Hands still clenching his hair, he nodded.

“Well, Ryan, that’s a tough one.”

He looked up at me with sudden dry-eyed conviction. “I’m a sinner, and a fornicator. My forgiveness lies in the hands of God.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“It’s what they told me. I just left their office.”

“Who told you?”

“The director of CARA. Mr. Vandewiele.”

I burst out laughing. “Let me tell you something about your Mr. Vandewiele. First of all, he’s a major-league drinks-his-own-aftershave drunk. Second of all, the guy’s embezzled half of CARA’s dough into a private stateside account.” This was common knowledge around the embassy; it seemed weird everyone else wouldn’t know it too. “Man,” I said, shaking my head, “it’s one thing for them to boot you out, but I can’t believe they let that hypocritical old lizard call you a degenerate before they did it.”

Ryan folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “You think CARA’s staff knows what he’s doing?”

“Of course they do. The SNB”—that is, the KGB— “has their offices bugged. Our embassy gets all the transcripts hand-delivered. All in the New World Order’s spirit of cooperation.”

Ryan looked away.

“You don’t seem very surprised.”

“In the past nine months,” Ryan said, “I’ve repeatedly had to go to the bathroom in a hole. Horse has been a dietary staple. I’ve been stoned, mugged twice, and harassed by the SNB. I’d never tasted alcohol in my life before I came here, but I managed to spend an entire week drunk. I’ve been in three fistfights, two of them with children. I cheated on my wife twenty-seven times, nearly lost my faith in God, and in the meantime successfully managed to evangelize only ten people.”

“That’s not too bad. Only two less than Jesus.”

“So if you tell me that Mr. Vandewiele is a drunkard and an embezzler, then no, I’m not surprised. Not anymore. I am beyond surprise as an experience or an emotion.” He blinked, his eyes the veiny, cloudy red of boiled shrimp. “All I want now is to go home. That’s it.”

“Where’s home?”

“New Jersey. That’s where my wife and my divinity school are.”

“What possessed you to leave New Jersey for here?”

Ryan pushed away his boat of french fries. “I have no idea.” He looked at me, a fist up to his mouth. “How about you? Where are you from?”

I shrugged. “Nowhere, everywhere.”

“Where’d you go to college?”

“College of Life.”

He stared at me, puzzled, then nodded sharply and looked away. He chewed at his thumbnail, his right leg bouncing under the table. How he’d made it through nine months of life outside the Capital I had no idea.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, there. Cheer up. When’s your flight leave?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.” This said as if it were two thousand years away.

“Okay. Perfect. I’ve got it. Tonight we’re going to a restaurant that isn’t a certifiable shithole. Then we’re going to a dance club to watch Russian breasts bounce up and down. And then it’s back to the Hotel Ta-Ta for your first good night’s sleep in months. How does that sound?”

His eyes widened. “The Ta-Ta?”

I showed him the palms of my hands. “Relax. It’s my treat. All of it.”

“I don’t know . . .” he said, with a new, almost street-wise wariness about him.

“Yes, you do know. Where are you staying now?”

“The Hotel Chorsu.”

“The Chorsu!”

“Look, Alec,” he said, standing, “thanks for the offer, but I have to go and—”

I grabbed his rayon sleeve and eased him back down. “Listen to me. You’ve lived like a goddamn animal for— what,
months
, right? Don’t you deserve one night, one measly night of splendor? How much does CARA pay you guys, anyway?”

He told me.

“No, seriously,” I said. When he didn’t answer, I realized he wasn’t joking. I continued, delicately. “I think you
need
this, Ryan.”

He looked away, shaking his head. Suddenly he coughed out a disbelieving laugh. He turned to me. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I’m a hell of a good guy. Why do you think?”

He looked around the café. “It all sounds nice. It does. I just . . . I don’t think I could repay you.”

“Nonsense. I’ve got more money than ten popes.”

“I . . . I don’t know.” With a finger he fished his wedding ring from the cup of Fanta, wiped it off on his shirt, and pocketed it. He bit his lip, the pink draining to white where tooth met skin, and then he nodded hard to himself. “All right. What the hey. Let’s do it. Except for that club part. I don’t know if that’s my speed, exactly. Despite everything I just told you, Alec, I’m still, you know”—his nose scrunched up—“a
Christian.
”

I smiled and stirred the contents of a sugar packet into my last cup of coffee. “Golly, Ryan. You don’t say?”

We walked out of the café to see a violent struggle going on in the backseat of the Land Cruiser, but I realized it was only Sergei fooling around with the Tatar girl. My heart sank a little, seeing something my father often said once again proved true: every beautiful girl in the Capital was either for sale or willing to negotiate. Sergei was always dropping my name to get girls. It would be easy to get judgmental about Sergei, but the guy had had an awful life. His family was exiled to the Capital after Stalin killed his father, his grandfather, and three of his uncles. Now he was just a measly percentage point in the Capital’s shrinking Russian population. He could have used my name to get in the pants of every girl from the Capital to Islamabad, for all I cared.

“That’s my truck there,” I told Ryan as we approached the Toyota. “I’ll break this up and we can split.”

Before I could, though, the Tatar girl fell out of the Toyota with her shirt on inside out and backwards, wiping her chin. I figured for Ryan this would trigger a rectitudinous meltdown, so I turned to him and started to say something. Ryan just stared at the girl as she reached around and fixed her twisted bra strap. When she finished, he looked over at me and said, “Let’s go.”

I soon realized that Having Fun was a pretty dainty concept. It certainly wasn’t withstanding all the weight I was piling on it for Ryan’s sake. (There isn’t even a word for
fun
in Russian; how’s
that
for revealing?) As much as I tried, he wouldn’t cheer up. In his hotel room, Sergei and I were laughing and kicking roach corpses at each other while Ryan packed up his gear. In a lull we looked over to see Ryan sitting cross-legged on the floor, his face plunged into his hands. Sergei hoisted Ryan up, took him into his arms the way only a Russian male can, removed a flask of vodka from his breast pocket, and tenderly proffered it. The stuff Sergei drank belonged in a medicine cabinet, but Ryan tipped the flask and dumped it down his gullet. He nodded in thanks, took a bleary-eyed steadying sidestep, and returned it to Sergei, who peered into its shadowy opening in astonishment. I took advantage of the moment to cry out, “To the Ta-Ta!”

Now he and Sergei were drinking in the Ta-Ta’s restaurant as if they’d fought Napoleon together. We’d had our four-course dinner, half a dozen appetizers, drinks, everything. Inviting Sergei might have been a mistake. The guy had the alcoholic-intake capacity of ten men. Surprisingly, Ryan wasn’t faring too badly against him, getting down one drink to Sergei’s every three. The restaurant was large and spare, its decor severe, its “atmospheric” lighting like that of a fish tank. The tab we’d started at the beginning of the evening was creeping into territory so astronomical that waiters and cooks and waitresses were all huddling around the restaurant’s bar, peering at the tab and then, hands to breasts, looking over at us.

I was drinking Black Label. Ryan and Sergei were chasing tequila shots with bad Turkish beer. Between Sergei’s long Russian toasts I listened to Ryan dissect his troubled heart. He was young—my age—and had been married for two years. It seemed that Ryan’s wife (“a good woman,” he kept saying, “a good woman”) tended to interact with his pork sword as though it were made of poison ivy. The wife’s father was CARA’s stateside accountant, which made Vandewiele’s improprieties even more vexing. I asked why he was here alone, and he explained they were prepared to evangelize together until his wife failed her physical. “She’s a little overweight,” Ryan said quietly. But he still wanted to do it, and she wanted him to do it too.

“She sounds like a wacko,” I said.

Sergei took delighted, sleepy-faced note of this word.
“Vacko,”
he said, chuckling thickly.

“She’s not a wacko,” Ryan protested, softly shaking his head. He closed his eyes, his face dark with resignation. “You don’t understand.”

“Vacko,”
Sergei said again, nodding off.

Unbidden came Ryan’s tales of Christian persecution. Thrown rocks, SNB wiretaps, outright assaults. None of it was Saint Paul on the Appian Way or anything, but scarring enough for a divinity school grad from New Jersey, I’d imagine.

Finally we arrived at the shores of his unfaithfulness. By the standards I was familiar with, the story was tame. Moist things had developed between him and another CARA volunteer named Angela, Ryan flushing as he described how their trysts had become progressively more “wicked.” I pressed for details but, sadly, received none. Now he was afraid of who he’d become. He had desires now, cravings and doubts, and felt adrift on a sea of whims and decidedly un-Christian stimuli.

“Sounds like you’ve become a human being,” I said.

A hollow smile spread on Ryan’s face. “I belong to the world.”

This sounded promising to me. “Now you’re talking straight, Ryan. You’re goddamn right you do!”

“ ‘Because you do not belong to the world,’ ” Ryan said, “ ‘I have chosen you.’ ”

I frowned. “What the hell was that?”

“That,” Ryan said, “was Jesus talking to his disciples.”

“My opinion on Jesus,” I said, “is that he was probably a nice guy who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I raised my hand, ordering another round.

Ryan rubbed his face and said, “Wonderful. Can I go to my room and sleep now?”

I felt frustration spread its wings in my chest. I suddenly wanted to reach across the table and slap him, grab him by his boyish hair, and remind him that, unlike some of us, he had a life to go back to. I was within moments of throwing silverware when a skullful of soothing perfume wafted into my nostrils and I felt a hand fall lightly on my shoulder.

I turned to see a tall Russian woman in a short tight black dress standing next to me. She was one of those Capital women you saw only in places like the Ta-Ta or in pricey clubs. Her wrists were ringed with onyx bracelets; her earrings were stylish black hoops, her hair was an enormous black vortex, a spray-hardened shell. “Comrade Schiavo,” she said, smiling. Her lipstick was either black or a deep sooty red.