God Lives in St. Petersburg Read Free Page A

to land, as faces differed. But the basic elements (ears, nose, mouth; aid workers, chaos, exhilaration) were always the same. It was the one thing that survived every era, every philosophy, the one legacy each civilization surrendered to the next. For Donk, Human Conflict was curiously life-affirming, based as it was on avoiding death—indeed, on inflicting death preemptively on others. He loved Human Conflict not as an ideal but as a milieu, a state of mind one absorbed but was not absorbed by, the crucial difference between combatants and non-. His love of Human Conflict was as unapologetic as it was without nuance. He simply
enjoyed
it. “Duncan,” a therapist had once asked him, “have you ever heard of the term
chronic habitual suicide
?” Donk never saw that therapist, or any other, again.
    He kicked from his path a billiard-ball-sized chunk of concrete. How was it that these people, the Afghans, could, for two hundred years, hold off or successfully evade several of the world’s most go-getting empires and not find it within themselves to pave a fucking road? And yet somehow Afghanistan was, at least for the time being, the world’s most significant place. Human Conflict had a way of doing that too. He remembered a press conference two weeks ago in the Presidential Palace in Tashkent, the capital of neighboring Uzbekistan, where the fragrant, rested-looking journalists who had arrived with the American secretary of state had surrounded him. Donk had taken his establishing shots of the secretary—looking determined and unusually Vulcan behind his press-conference podium—and quickly withdrawn. In one of the palace’s uninhabited corners he found a splendid globe as large as an underwater mine, all of its countries’ names in Cyrillic. Central Asia was turned out toward the room; North America faced the wall. Seeing the planet displayed from that strange side had seemed to Donk as mistaken as an upside-down letter. But it was not wrong. That globe was in fact perfectly accurate.
    Up ahead, Graves was walking more slowly now, almost shuffling. Donk was allowing Graves the lead largely because Graves needed the lead. He was one of those rare people one did not actually mind seeing take charge. But Graves, wrapped in his red blanket, looked little better than a confused pensioner. The sun momentarily withdrew behind one of the bigger bubbly cloud formations. The temperature dropped with shocking immediacy, the air suddenly as sharp as angel hair. Donk watched Graves’s bootlaces come slowly and then floppily untied. For some reason Donk was too embarrassed for Graves to say anything.
    “Mister Donk,” Hassan said quietly, drawing beside him. “Is Mister Graves all right?”
    Donk managed a weak, testy smile. “Mister Graves is fine.”
    Hassan nodded. “May I, Mister Donk, ask you questions?”
    “You may.”
    “Where were you born in America?”
    “Near the Sea of Tranquillity.”
    “I ask, what is your favorite food?”
    “Blueberry filling.”
    “American women are very beautiful, they say. They say too they have much love.”
    “That’s mostly true. You should only sleep with beautiful women, even though they have the least love. Write that down. With women it’s all confidence, Hassan. Write that down too. You might look at me and think, But this is a fat man! And it’s true. But I grow on people. You’re not writing.”
    “I hear that American women make many demands. Not like Afghan women.”
    “Did you steal my cameras?”
    “Mister Donk! No!”
    “That’s not nice, you know,” Graves said suddenly, glancing back. “Teasing the boy like that.”
    “I was wondering when I’d get your attention.”
    “Leave the boy alone, Duncan. He’s dealt with enough bad information to last his entire lifetime.”
    “I am not a boy,” Hassan said suddenly.
    “Don’t listen to him,” Graves said to Hassan. “War’s made Mister Duncan barmy.”
    “How are you feeling?” Donk asked