God Lives in St. Petersburg Read Free

he sighed. “I hope you’re not worried, Duncan.”
    Donk decided not to remind Graves, for what would have been the fortieth time, that he preferred to be called Donk. The nickname—a diminutive form of
donkey
— dated to one of the boyhood camping trips he and his father and older brother Jason used to take every year in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. If he had never especially liked the name, he had come to understand himself through its drab prism. DONK ST. PIERRE was stamped in raised black type upon his ivory business card; it was the name above which his photographs were published. People often mistook his work for that of some Flemish eccentric. When colleagues first met him, something Donk called The Moment inescapably came to pass. Faced not with a tall, spectral, chain-smoking European but a short, overweight Midwesterner with frizzy black hair and childlishly small hands, their smiles faded, their eyes crumpled, and a discreet little sound died just past their glottis.
    “I’m not worried,” Donk said. “I’ll be even less worried when we figure out where we’re going.”
    Graves stared at Donk as though weighing him in some crucial balance. “You seemed rather jittery in Pyanj. Wasn’t sure you’d be up to this.”
    When Donk said nothing Graves stood, listing momentarily before he steadied himself against the Corolla with one hand. Hassan loped back over to them, grinning beneath the pressure of one of his patented “discoveries,” always uncanny in their relative uselessness. “My friends, I have discovered that nearby there is village. Good village, the driver says. Safe, friendly village. We will be welcome there. He told for me the way. Seven, eight kilometers.”
    Although this was much better information than Hassan was usually able to manage, Graves’s expression was sour. Sweat dripped off his nose, and he was breathing hard. Merely standing had wiped him out. “Did he tell you that, or did you ask him?”
    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