God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell

Author:Tom Bissell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307426031
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

The Ambassador’s Son

I liked the Capital because you could always find something to do there. Booze, women, dancing—you name it. As for the rest of the country, the guidebook writers could have the place. They didn’t even have toilets outside the Capital. Please realize I require very little as a human being: bread, water, flush toilet. Something about living on the cusp of the millennium and still shitting over a hole calls into question the entire concept of historical progress.

I’ll tell you a little about the country. It was one of the old Soviet republics where you started drinking at ten, started really drinking at fifteen, and dropped dead of it around fifty. The kind of place that was so corrupt that you had to bribe yourself to get out of bed in the morning. This wasn’t one of the European former Soviet republics; this was one of the Central Asian republics you’ve never heard of. As for the culture, I’ll say this: its combo of Soviet paranoia and Muslim xenophobia made red wine and fish look like peanut butter and jelly in comparison.

You didn’t see a whole lot of tourists hanging out in the Capital, needless to say, but there were a few Americans around. (There are always a few Americans around.) First, you had the Professional Expatriates at the embassy. Their ranks were filled with a lot of uptight stuffed shirts, stuffed blouses, stuffed heads. Most of them couldn’t stray a block from embassy row without their cell phones, chauffeured cars, and International Herald Tribunes. Second, you had your Do-Gooders. These people, God bless them, needed a serious fucking clue. Each fall I’d see a new group of hatchlings turn up in the Capital, their first day in-country, snappily dressed, taking pictures with disposable cameras for Mom and Dad back home in Iowa and Nebraska and Michigan. Then they’d get shipped out to the villages. Three months later I’d see them back in the Capital shopping for Snickers bars and deodorant, crazed and dandruff-ridden. Finally, you had your Sharks, men and women whose in-country presence consisted solely of pocketing ducats. This wasn’t as evil as you might think, not even by folksinger standards. After all, the more money the Sharks made, the more the country made, and everyone was happy. Sometimes Sharks were Do-Gooders who’d stayed but gotten wise on how to live; sometimes they were Professional Expats who’d had their fill of embassy politics; and sometimes they were twenty-four-year-old ephebes with liberal arts degrees pulling down seventy-five grand a year as “consultants” for PriceWaterhouse or Boeing or British-American Tobacco. As for me, I had an in-country sinecure but didn’t consider myself one of the Sharks. Although I was around the embassy a lot no one would have mistaken me for a Professional Expat. A Do-Gooder, then? Hardly.

I was the ambassador’s son.

A dilemma: What do you do when you’re sunk to the hilt in the lovely, splayed vagina of bent-over Olga, who to your utter, surprised delight is

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