Read Online God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell - Free Book Online

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