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

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