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

harvested, she was terrible, stump-tongued, a syntax butcher. “No gift” was how her most patient tutor, Vova Petrovich, had once sadly appraised her.
No geeft, Amanda, you hev no geeft.
    “I understand,” he said in English. His head tipped forward adroitly on his thin neck. “School was long ago for me too.” In Russian: “Your question, yes? When will you leave? Professor Reese,” he said, leaning back, “you may leave whenever you want. You are not imprisoned. On the contrary, you are my guest.”
    “I’m not leaving until I get my passport—and until I can tell the UN about my treatment here.”
    Now he laughed, his eyes doubling in size. “Your
treatment
!” This burst out of him. He looked around for someone to join this ebullience, found no one, and stopped laughing as suddenly as he had begun. “Yes, your treatment is something I’d like to discuss as well, Professor Reese. From the airport you were chauffeured here”— he motioned around him, underscoring the room’s bright opulence—“and offered lunch, which, I might add, you refused.” He smiled again. “Yes, let us tell the United Nations how you were treated, Professor Reese.”
    “I know who you are,” she said.
    He looked at her with distaste. “Of that,” he said, “I have my doubts.”
    “Kah Gay Bay,” she said quickly. KGB. He raised his eyebrows in polite acknowledgment, obviously pleased the initials carried such mythic tonnage in her mind’s canals. “That’s who you are. And I know what you do.”
    He ran his index fingers along the gutters under his eyes, clearing away the silt.
    “Get me my passport,” she said. “Right now, goddammit.”
    He said nothing, again treating her to his freighted, sullen silence. “I will not keep you any longer, Professor Reese,” he said at last. “But I would like to hear your UN’s thoughts about our problem before you go.”
    She regarded him coldly. “
Our
problem?”
    For once, this man seemed honest in his surprise. “Why, Professor Reese,” he said. “I speak of the Aral Sea, of course.”
    She was an environmental biologist, though she would have resented being pinned to merely one biological discipline, since like most biologists she had several realms of interest and thought herself bright about many things. Her specialty was irrigation: its almost incomprehensibly far-ranging effects both on the irrigated area and on the area whose irrigation was diverted. She was in fact held to be one of America’s most accurate prognosticators on the often unpredictable and occasionally ecocidal effects of the always ill-advised practice of monkeying with rivers, lakes, and seas. She was a recent and uncommonly young recipient of tenure, author of dozens of articles, coeditor of a cobbled-together collection of essays whose slant grew before her eyes to be so idiotically anti-industry its existence embarrassed her to this day. She was “famous in certain circles,” as she often heard her mother say to guests when she thought her daughter out of earshot, during those long July days she spent summering with her parents in Vermont. “Our little Rachel Carson.” But this dotage was embarrassing, and ridiculous besides: Who
isn’t
famous in “certain circles”? Although of course it was her desire to garner true, unqualified Rachel Carson fame that disqualified what most people would have accepted as God’s plenty.
    Initially, she studied biology to work in the sea (which she had yet to do); her pursuit of the stumbling, bearlike Russian language had its germ in a bizarre teenage infatuation with chess (indirectly) and Boris Spassky (directly); she had never married though had once been close, which is how she’d become involved with the United Nations’ Aral Sea Basin Relief Project one year ago. Getting a government job—a job with any government, she was confident—had less to do with personal excellence than did a professional wrestling match, and though Amanda was