God Lives in St. Petersburg Read Online Free PDF Page B

small animals fighting or playing along the eaves just above Donk’s head and the occasional overhead roar of a jet. Hassan, sitting a few feet away, watched Donk stroke the dog’s head in revulsion.
    “Why,” he asked finally, “do you do that?”
    Donk had always taken pity on Central Asian dogs, especially after learning that one could fend off a possible attack by miming the act of picking up a stone, at which the dogs usually turned and ran away. He lowered his lips to the creature’s head and planted upon it a chaste kiss. The dog smelled of oily musk. “Because it’s lonely,” Donk said.
    “That is a filthy animal,” Hassan told him. “You should not touch such a filthy animal, Mister Donk.”
    Donk chose not to point out that Hassan was, if anything, far dirtier. The boy had spent a night with Donk and Graves in Kunduz. His body odor had been so potent, so overwhelmingly cheesy, that Donk had not been able to sleep. Misplaced Muslim piety, he thought with uncharacteristic bitterness.
    “You’re right,” Donk said at last. “The dog’s filthy. But so am I. So there we are.”
    Hassan
hmph
ed.
    During the seizure Donk had stuffed his bloody do-rag in Graves’s mouth to keep him from biting off his tongue, even though he knew convulsive people rarely, if ever, bit off their own tongues. It was one of those largely ceremonial things people did in emergencies. Donk had pushed Graves up on the table and held him down. Graves shuddered for a few moments, his eyes filled with awful awareness, his chest heaving like the gills of a suffocating fish. Then, mercifully, he went unconscious. Donk used the rest of his iodined water to try to rehydrate Graves, but he quickly vomited it up. At this General Mohammed had sent for his medicine man.
    Donk knew there were at least two kinds of malaria. The less serious strain was stubborn and hard to kill— flulike symptoms could recur as long as five decades after the initial infection—but it was rarely lethal. The more serious strain quickly turned life-threatening if untreated. He was no longer wondering which strain Graves had contracted. Graves was conscious now—Donk could hear him attempting to reason with the village doctor—but his voice was haggard and dazed.
    Donk looked around. Thirty or forty yards away a small group of General Mohammed’s soldiers watched him, their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. They looked beaten, bullied, violent. Hair-trigger men. Their faces were like shadows. And these were the
winners.
Donk found himself, suddenly, missing women. Seeing them, staring at them, smelling them. Afghanistan had mailed into Donk’s brain a series of crushingly similar mental postcards: men, men, desert, men, men, men, guns, men, guns, guns, desert, guns, men. One might think that life without women would lead to a simpler, less fraught existence. No worries about hair or odor. Saying whatever you wanted. But one’s eye tired of men as surely as one’s nerves tired of guns.
    It was not just women, however. Donk missed sex even more. He needed, he admitted, an inordinate amount of sex. Heavy people needed things—hence their heaviness. Sex was a large part of the reason he had been reluctant to leave Chicago to come to Afghanistan. He was having a Guinness Book amount of it with Tina, who was maybe his girlfriend, his first in a long time. As luck would have it, Tina was menstruating the night before he left. They had had sex anyway, in her bathroom, and left bloody foot- and handprints all over the white tile. They Windexed away the blood together. It had not been freaky. It had almost been beautiful, and he loved her. But for him distance was permission, and newness arousal itself. Plane tickets and hotel rooms were like lingerie. He had already slept with an AP reporter in Tashkent. He did not regret it, exactly, because he had every intention of lying about it later. It occurred to him that he had also lied to Graves, about not being