“But she had you.”
“I hadn’t seen her in four years. But we spoke.”
“But she still had you. In her thoughts.”
“I don’t know if I was any more real to her than her idea of a child. But even with the distance of time and place, she was very real to me. I …” His voice cracked and he stopped himself.
Their silence resumed. Cono’s mind became absorbed by each placement of his feet—on lichen-covered small boulders, between lumps of prickly scrub, on friable stones that might or might not crumble beneath his weight. He wondered if, on that night in Almaty when they tried to make love against the tree, Xiao Li had made an innocent slip in asking him to give her a baby. She hadn’t said another baby, she’d said a baby. But then again, how many hours had she been tormented in the rooms above the General? Could he, Cono, have kept his own mind straight through all that terror? He felt himself shriveling up in wrinkles of dread—dread that in disbelieving her, he had been just another one of the beasts in the salty garden of Xiao Li’s life. Maybe there was a son. Maybe it was his.
Cono felt the scree sliding beneath him again; he tried to jump to a firm piece of earth, but lost his balance and toppled over, sledding on his back until he careened into a boulder. Dimira came down to him, easily navigating the loose rocks, and helped him get to his feet.
They had almost reached the valley. A man on a horse surrounded by sheep was waving at them from below. He wore a white-and-black peaked felt hat, and even at this distance they could see that he was smiling.
“Better to come down that way,” he yelled in a Kyrgyz-Kazak dialect, pointing to their left. “It’s easier.”
The valley was in the mountains’ shadow as the Kyrgyz chaban, a herder, approached them on his stout horse, the sheep following without looking up from their meal of end-of-summer grasses. Cono searched the lush open valley. It spread out in front of them like a vast, undulating lawn, empty except for the whitish dome of a yurt perhaps a mile away, in the direction of the river that must lie at the bottom of the valley. The sky was still a brilliant, unblemished blue.
In a mixture of Kyrgyz, Kazak and Russian, the chaban asked if they were lost. “You don’t have packs,” he said. “No warm clothes. Don’t you know it’s cold up here at night? And why does your head look like a cracked melon?” His ruddy face was smiling all the while; he was intrigued and amused by the strange visitors to his borderless meadow, which he would abandon soon, taking his livestock down from the mountains before winter selfishly took back the Tian Shan until the next spring. The chaban invited them to his yurt to eat and spend the night. Dimira and Cono had been hiking for nearly twelve hours, and the chill of evening was already reddening their ears; the two of them exchanged glances and accepted his offer.
“He seems like a happy man,” Dimira said softly in English as they walked among the sheep, the herder weaving his horse back and forth at the rear of the flock.
“Yes, he has freedom in his face.”
The warmth was instant as they ducked their heads beneath the birchwood mantle of the yurt’s doorway. Human humidity mixed with the smoke of burning dung drifting up to the hole at the center of the domed felt roof. The chaban’s wife was seated on the floor next to a stack of saddles and harnesses, squeezing two fingers along lengths of sheep intestines until the semidigested green mush emerged and plopped into a small vat. She nodded, smiled, and said, “Welcome to this home.”
The herder, who called himself Nurbek, took off his hat and made them sit on the tiny red bench beneath ancestors’ photos at the far side of the circular walls. He proudly offered them vodka in tiny cups; he poured for his wife as well. They all took the drink in one gulp.
“How many children do you have?” Nurbek’s eyes were wide with curiosity.
Dimira and Cono passed glances at each other.
“Don’t worry, you look healthy. It will come. I have four. Three sons and a daughter. And if they eat well, maybe some grandchildren in the spring.” Nurbek’s cheeks were flushing red from the vodka. “So keep trying!” He poured again.
Two hours later, after a meal of mutton, rice, and knots of bread fried to the hardness of marbles, all eaten with their fingers, and more vodka, they were singing: old sobby Russian tunes; a hymn to Manas, the Kyrgyz warrior hero; the ballad of the mountain-god Khan Tengri; “Only Fools Rush In,” the way Elvis sang it. Cono followed as best he could, but Dimira knew all the songs by heart, and her voice was so enchanting to Nurbek that he grabbed her by the wrist to make her stand up for a duo performance of a song by Viktor Tsoi, a Russian rocker from the seventies. Nurbek swiveled Dimira by her hands as Mirgul, his wife, clapped to make a rhythm for their dance. Nurbek grabbed Cono’s hand, and he in turn pulled Mirgul up from the floor. Cono put on the happiest face he could muster as he thought of how boisterously Xiao Li would be singing along and dancing. The four twirled and twisted until Nurbek banged out the song’s climax with his throaty voice.
They were all laughing as Nurbek pulled away a tasseled and embroidered burgundy curtain revealing a bed less than a yard wide, snug against the wall of the yurt. “Here is where you two will sleep tonight,” he chuckled with delight. “It worked for my wife and me. And don’t worry—we won’t hear anything.”
The kerosene lanterns went out. Cono and Dimira adjusted their bodies to fit the cramped space as their hosts rustled the carpets and blankets that they would sleep on. Nurbek began humming a song, but was shushed by his wife. Cono had taken off his shirt and vest; otherwise he and Dimira were dressed except for their shoes. Two heavy wool blankets covered them. In the confines of the bed there was no choice but for Dimira to lie partly on Cono’s chest. Her breath passed over his neck. Outside the yurt, sheep and goats and horses stomped and bleated and snorted and farted. The rails of their temporary corrals creaked with their movements until they’d found their places for the night.
Dimira stroked Cono’s arm and put her mouth close to his ear. She slid her leg up to his thighs, passing over the rows of bruises from the bludgeons at the bank, but her movements elicited no pain. The pressure of her embrace and her smell and the closeness of her lips, her breath in his ear, her subtle rocking and intermittent light squeezes—Cono was dismayed that even in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, he was becoming aroused.
Their mouths searched for each other in the darkness. They kissed, lightly at first, as Dimira tried not to press on the most swollen parts of his lips. Their tongues played games until their kissing lost all restraint. Cono’s hardness became an ache. He reached for the small of Dimira’s waist. But as he touched her there, he saw Xiao Li’s body separating, stage by stage. He felt the pulsations in the hardness diminishing. He guided Dimira’s hand to the mound trapped in his pants. He wanted her to feel it, to know how much he desired her, before the images in his mind destroyed it.
He whispered, “Dimira. I want, but I can’t.”
Dimira said nothing. She nestled her lips next to his neck and stroked his hair for a long time, until her hand faltered and came to rest on his collarbone. Then she floated off into her dreams as Cono did into his.
Mama. Mama in her good dress. Mama crying. She cries more when the hand hits her again. Her face opens up. Pours red. No, no, no. I love you. The fist again. Grab Papa’s legs. Hold them tight. Hit them. Bite them. Make him stop. Lifted by the legs. Chairs falling. Puta, puta. Smack of the fist. Mama make him stop. Puta. No, no, I love you. Falling. Pressed between her knees and his knees. No air. Kicking from both sides. Mama. Papa. No more air. The pressure leaves. Crawling along her legs, to her waist, her breasts, her shoulders. Mama. The warmth of the liquid on his cheek and hers. Her open eyes. Her stillness. Mama! The loud noise. The ringing. The crushing of his back. The smell of his father’s armpit. Squirming. Squirming out of the heaviness. Papa! His father’s face. Broken open. Mama get up! The heaviness of Papa’s body. Pull it away. Let her breathe. Mama! The thing in Papa’s hand. The stare of Mama’s eyes, her beautiful eyes. Mam
a! The stillness of her eyes.
Cono awoke shouting: “No! I can’t breathe!” But his shouts were those of dreams, mumbled and barely audible. His eyes opened to the blackness and he felt a warm hand caressing his sweating cheek. The weight on top of him was Dimira. The steady breathing and the soothing hand were hers. Gradually his hyperventilating subsided. The sounds of agitated hooves against the earth outside slowly diminished as well. Cono wrapped his arms around Dimira’s reassuring solidity and fell back down the endless chute of sleep.
20
Morning came before dawn. Mirgul was stoking the tin hearth and Nurbek was outside releasing the sheep and goats for a day of grazing when Dimira and Cono knelt at the door and put on their shoes. Cono went outside to look at the last stars before they would be forced to surrender to the sun.
Soon Mirgul served breakfast—the same meal they’d had for dinner, except for the goat’s milk poured into the cups that had held vodka the night before.
“Thank you for the warmth of your home, and for your kindness,” Cono said as they finished eating.
“And for the dancing,” said Dimira, smiling at Mirgul and then at Nurbek.
Mirgul handed a dried horsemeat sausage wrapped in cloth to Dimira, along with a large, coarse shawl. Dimira thanked her again and held her leathery hands tightly. When all four were outside the yurt, Nurbek said, “You won’t have to walk today. My horses will get you down to Issyk-Kul a lot faster. But don’t let them stop to eat too much. Hunger keeps them going.”
“You are too kind,” Dimira protested. “Thank you, but we won’t be coming back this way.”
“Don’t worry,” Nurbek said as he cinched the saddle on one of the stocky mares. “Just leave them with my friend Kuban at Ornyok town on the edge of the lake. Not hard to find him—he has the only gas station in town. The horses are his competition. Friendly competition.” Nurbek grinned.
During the first hour of grinding against the saddles, Cono and Dimira wondered if they wouldn’t be better off hiking. But they both knew that with the horses they might be able to turn two days of nonstop marching, and one dangerously cold night, into a single long day of riding. Their gluteal muscles gradually became inured to the rhythmic pain. The alternating squeaks of stressed leather mesmerized Cono; it was a pleasing sound, a soothing pulse.
Just before the sun’s morning rays spilled into the valley, they forded the Chong-Kemin River at a wide bend that was shallow except for the last ten yards, where the water reached up to their stirrups. Dimira expertly dug her heels into her mount and forced a swift crossing. Cono’s horse veered with the flow of water, and only with vicious kicking and tugging was Cono able to reach the other side, well downstream.
“You’ve done this before,” he shouted.
“Growing up in Balkhash,” Dimira replied. “We had no bicycles, but there were plenty of horses.”
After five hours of steadily rising out of the valley, when the sun was just shy of its zenith, they reached the top of the last pass before the descent to the lake. Dimira and Cono halted the horses and stood side by side. Stretched out miles away, and a mile lower in altitude, was the mineral-blue surface of Lake Issyk-Kul, so deep and saline that it never froze under the lock of winter. To the east, at the end of the long axis of the lake, shielded by an army of progressively higher mountains, was the white pyramidal summit of Khan Tengri, King of the Sky, on whose shoulders the borders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and China met.
The placid lake was immense, beautiful, cradled by mountains all around. The last vacationers of summer were probably sunning themselves on the beaches of its north shore, Cono thought. But even here, near the roof of the world, beauty and tranquility had their secrets. At the far eastern rim of the lake, near a town called Koy-Sary, was a naval base that had been Moscow’s principal site for submarine research and testing of high-speed torpedoes. The military complex had been huge, a treasured research polygon on which the Soviet navy relied heavily during its Cold War underwater competition with the U.S.
As they sat in their saddles, enjoying the respite from constant movement, Cono privately recalled the details of the tontería that had acquainted him with Koy-Sary. The base had been winding down after the Soviet collapse. But even years later, many of the Russian engineers were still living there, tethered by families, many of them married to Kyrgyz women, all of them worried that their only future career was to drive a taxi in Novosibirsk or wait tables in Tomsk, if they could find even that work. They were brilliant Ph.D.’s educated in institutes of excellence that Cono could only imagine, reduced from party-coddled high status to a life of scratching for the survival of their children.
Cono’s task had been to recruit them to new career opportunities. He was new to this kind of career himself. He had sympathy for their plight, he was caring and convincing in his conversation, and even more convincing with the cash he handed over to the ones he selected—an advance from their future employer. When they asked who that employer might be, Cono gave them only a telephone number in Bishkek, the capital, as he had been instructed to do.
Cono didn’t know how many of the dozens of engineers and scientists he had discreetly met with had been successfully delivered to his client. He didn’t even know at the time who the ultimate client was—it had all been arranged through an intermediary, a talkatively unrevealing man from Pakistan who fiddled with his big ring as they spoke.
Although there were only a few entities—countries or corporations—that could fit the bill, a year passed before Cono acquired any certainty about who that entity was. The big-ringed Pakistani had called him, interested in his services for another tontería. He sounded like he’d been drinking.
“The Beijing boys and I are very happy with the caliber of your work.”
“Caliber?” The English word was new to Cono.
“The quaaality of what you deliver, the eeease of doing business with you.”
Working for Beijing; an eeeasy servant. A tool for guys like Zheng, giving them a kick-start for the Chinese navy, and anything else they wanted. Looking back on it now, he could see that the tontería was flagrant prostitution. But weren’t most of his missions just that? And yet some deep hunger kept him at it, kept him running, like the horses. Why? It was absurd, this addiction. As absurd as submarines in the Tian Shan.
But this time, Cono had failed. Xiao Li was dead, and he would be forever haunted by her. But at least on this mission he hadn’t been prostituting himself. That would end now, on this day. No more tonterías for the thrills they gave him, or the amusement, or the feelings of indispensability. He would have to be driven by his own purposes, by his own rules, not the whimsies of anonymous pimps or friends unworthy of trust.
Friends. Trust. Were they at all connected?
Dimira’s horse whinnied; it was eager to descend. To hold it back, she had to pull hard and wheel it around until she came to Cono’s side again. Cono pulled back tightly on the reins of his mare, too, which also saw the lake and wanted to get on with it and get fed.
“What was your dream last night about?” Dimira asked.
Cono was taken by surprise. He continued smiling, at all the absurdity and at the magnificent landscape before him, but his thoughts were diverted by her question.
“Tell me,” she said. “Was it about Xiao Li?”
The horses whinnied and snorted.
“Tell me.”
Dimira and Cono gripped their reins. Dimira’s mare rose up and tried to buck, until Dimira’s sure hands and soothing purr made it come back to all fours, quivering.
“My father killed my mother when I was a kid,” Cono said, facing not toward Dimira but toward the panorama before him. “He thought she was fucking a man to make money. I think she was. We were poor. I didn’t try hard enough to stop him. Then he shot himself. I dream about it often.”
A breeze from below, a warm and perfumed breeze born of the distant lake and carrying the scents of miles of trees and fallen summer flowers,
touched the nostrils of the horses. They reared up and scored the air with their hooves. Their riders looked into each other’s eyes and eased the reins, and the horses galloped back onto the trail.
The descent seemed endless. Cono leaned back in his saddle as his horse braced its front legs against the steepness. They passed inclined fields strewn with boulders, and splashed over streambeds of smooth, flat rocks. Three argali sheep with thick, helical horns eyed them shrewdly from a high outcropping; they clapped their hooves against the rock to gain a perch higher still, then stared down again at the invaders.
Dimira and Cono reached the tree line and were swallowed by the forest. After several hours in the shade of firs and tall pines, they emerged onto a ridge that exposed the lake to their view once again. From here they could see the road that followed the water’s edge, no more than an hour away. The sun was flirting with the lesser range of mountains to the west of Issyk-Kul, in the direction of Bishkek. They dismounted and plucked wild apples and bit into them with mashing sounds that revealed the fruit’s dryness. They fed two apples to each horse as well.
“When we get down to the lake, it’ll be safer for you to travel without me,” Cono said.
“I know that.”
“I’ll take the horses to Nurbek’s friend. So no one will see you with a foreigner. You can take a minibus to Bishkek and stay there for a while. With your Kazak ID, you’ll …”
“I know, I can cross back and forth freely.”
“You may have to stay a long time, to be safe. I’ll send you money. I have some cash on me now. You’ll be able to buy a new place. But your work?”
“I will ask for a medical leave,” Dimira said. “Some of the teachers will be happy I’m away. And without Asel, what do I have there anyway, in Almaty?”
Cono was uncomfortable with what seemed to be her nonchalance. “Dimira, I think you will be out of danger in a few months. Maybe you are even now, but I was wrong last time, very wrong. It’s hard to know. Maybe there’s another Zheng in the wings who will try to get some leverage from you. Or maybe no one was in control of Zheng, and the only men from their embassy who knew about you are the dead ones. Maybe Katerina, the Ukrainian, or the man she had follow me to your apartment will find some way to use you. Maybe the Bureau will have some way of knowing about you. I don’t know. Maybe it’s best if you go somewhere far away. I’ll get the visas for you. You won’t need to worry about money. Maybe …”
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