A Shadow Intelligence

by Oliver Harris

  I watched the grandmother and imagined her surviving the decades, passing through famines and ideologies. Her speech was inflected with something neither Russian nor Kazakh, almost Chinese. Aliya joined us, declined her father’s offer of vodka.

  ‘Where’s your grandmother from?’ I asked.

  ‘Karakol, even further south than Almaty.’

  That made sense. I was hearing traces of Dungan; she was a descendant of refugees from Northwestern China, Hui traders who knew the routes west. A rare linguistic treat. Aliya turned to her parents. ‘She is worse.’

  ‘Today it is bad,’ her father said. He asked me about England, how much flights and houses cost; if I was anti-European. He had read on Russian sites that Britain and America were not friends any more. Asked whether I shared concerns about immigration, and what I thought of Kazakhstan.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ I said. ‘The landscape.’

  ‘Have you been to the national park at Burabay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are here at an interesting time.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You say honeymoon? The honeymoon is over. Many of my fellow Russians returned to the motherland after independence. Others enjoyed the oil boom. But now, without the oil prices, no one knows what will happen. But don’t believe this is the next Afghanistan. These are good Muslims. Not like the ones you have wars with. People like my wife.’ He smiled at her. ‘I am more Muslim than her.’

  When we had eaten, the parents cleared plates away. Aliya and I were alone.

  ‘Let me email you the details about the magazine,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  I emailed them, the links directing to malware instead. ‘Have a look. I’ve been having difficulty with sending documents.’

  ‘It opens but the link doesn’t work.’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll try again.’

  ‘Okay. This one works fine.’

  ‘Great.’

  The bathroom was upstairs. So were the bedrooms. I took the opportunity to explore. The parents’ room had bare plastered walls, a bed and single dresser. A framed wedding photograph stood on the dresser. I listened to the voices downstairs, questioning Aliya: where she met me, what my work was.

  I opened the dresser – costume jewellery, bills going back years. Beneath them was a display box with a clasp. I opened it. On one side was a black and white photograph of an unsmiling man in the fatigues of a Soviet Tank Division commander. Her father. I recognised the Darul Aman Palace behind him, still intact, and felt a momentary shiver, as if overhearing a stranger discussing your own dream. Kabul, maybe 1979 or 1980. He could have been no more than twenty-one years old. Pinned opposite it was a Soviet Valour Medal with a red, white and blue ribbon.

  Sent to farm, sent to fight. Lives picked up and dropped down. I put the box back, returned to the hallway. The plasterwork here was peeling. All the furniture was old. Military pensions never stretched far. I thought about the medical treatment for her grandmother, and imagined the life of a bright daughter, a lucrative daughter. Responsibility like that could corrupt more effectively than anything else.

  Her room was at the end of the corridor. Single bed, clothes draped over a single chair. No PC, but a laptop on the desk. On her shelves: old Russian translations of the English and American writers considered revolutionary enough to be published under the Soviet Union, a canon about which I’d always been curious – Shaw, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Ford Madox Ford. Then newer editions: Orwell, Fielding, Proust. A collection of Shevchenko’s poems, the revolutionary currently sprayed across Astana’s walls. I took that down, leafed through to ‘My Testament’, the poem in question, in case it was marked in any way. It wasn’t. I put it back, read the other spines: Rewriting the Nation: Elites and Narratives, Modernising the Kazakh Alphabet. On the desk were more current affairs: The New Imperialism, The Globalisation of NATO. On the wall above the desk was a list of time zones and public holidays in different countries. A key had been left in the top desk drawer. I was approaching when I heard her steps on the stairs. I took a book from the shelf.

  ‘Auezov,’ Aliya said, when she arrived beside me. She was smiling. ‘He is a good playwright.’

  ‘When I was in Almaty I saw a procession of men and women all dressed in white,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t imagine what was going on. They didn’t look like any particular religion. So I followed them all the way to the central cemetery. Do you know it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They went to Auezov’s monument and took turns kissing the statue. Then they sat down nearby and read from his works.’

  ‘It is a tradition, on the anniversary of his death.’

  ‘I thought it was beautiful. And the cemetery itself was so overgrown. I loved all the headstones together: crescents, orthodox crosses, Stars of David, Red Stars. They all seemed very equal and comfortable together. But only one had worshippers that day.’ I put the book back. ‘I should go.’

  She nodded but didn’t move except to tilt her head. I kissed her. She took hold of my wrists and kissed me back with raw, clumsy enthusiasm. When we drew apart she glanced at the stairs. The grandmother could be heard, complaining that I had not eaten. Aliya rolled her eyes. She moved closer so that I was against the wall and kissed me again, her fists against my stomach.

  ‘I’m trapped,’ I said.

  ‘You are not the one who is trapped,’ she said.

  The family protested when I tried to leave. The father gripped my shoulder with his good hand. The mother gave me some shelpek to take home. At the door, Aliya said, ‘Thank you for the lift.’

  ‘No, thank you. For everything. It was an honour to meet your family. I hope to see you very soon.’

  ‘Send me a message.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You are a kind man.’

  ‘Not really.’

  She smiled. ‘You don’t like it?’

  ‘This is nothing. Really.’

  ‘No, it is something.’ She glanced behind her, then came out to kiss me once more in the snow. ‘You are kind, whether you like it or not, Toby.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  I stopped at a workers’ café on the way back, heated by an oven in the centre of the room, the lighting mostly supplied by headlights coming and going in the car park. More lagman, Silk Road comfort food. You could measure where you were in Central Asia by the noodles, which thinned as you approached the Altai mountains and China. The clientele looked and sounded like rural migrants, kolkhozniki, on their way to night work at the construction sites.

  Lights swept the room as a lorry pulled up outside. The driver came in: a fat man with a swaggering, loudmouth look on his face. He knew most of the people, saw I was out of place. I could feel him watching me, waiting for the opportunity to stir some entertainment out of a turgid night. In the end I turned and nodded. ‘Come far?’

  ‘You are Russian?’

  ‘English.’

  He said a name. It took me a moment to realise he was saying Oliver Cromwell: ‘Oliver Cromwell, he was a man of the people.’ The revolutionary Cromwell loomed large in Soviet accounts of British history.

  ‘Some of the people,’ I said.

  ‘How much does a lorry driver earn in England?’ he asked.

  ‘Lots. You’re a driver?’

  ‘Thirty years.’

  ‘Where have you come from tonight?’

  ‘Balkhash.’

  ‘Via Karaganda?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are things there?’

  ‘There’s people out, you know—’ He mimed the waving of placards. ‘Angry.’

  ‘A lot of them?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Checkpoints?’

  ‘North and south, yes.’

  ‘What about Balkhash?’

  ‘Quiet. But always too quiet. No women.’ He laughed, turned to the other men and they laughed too.

  A country in transition. I thought of Aliya’s declaration: soon things must change. Kazakhstan was a
beacon of hope. But states live miracle to miracle, utopias need cash. You have to keep the faith in progress going or the bad dreams start.

  I thought of her grandmother’s dialect. Not many Dungan speakers remained. My old supervisor at Cambridge would have been fascinated. I saw myself flying Astana to Heathrow; the train to Cambridge. It’s chilly but bright, Hertfordshire passing by, a winter day that looks like spring. Straight to the college library. The security guard remembers me, nods. I find Victoria Fell’s Literatures of Central Asia on the shelf. My bookmark is still there. I sit down.

  In fantasies we can be still. Yet that library was a place I had scavenged for means of escape. Linguistically, I had moved outwards from the European tongues into the disorientation of Russian and Arabic, then south, to the strange ones in between. In my second year I won a prize to be spent on travelling, so I hiked down to Tehran. That was in 2002, two months after Iran joined the Axis of Evil. It didn’t seem particularly evil. A man who ran a pub near where I grew up had told me that in the 1970s they used to drive double-decker buses from London to Afghanistan and on to India, searching for pot, opium, mysticism. That was before 1979: before the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had faded photos of himself in tie-dye, the bus painted orange. It felt like learning of an old land route between continents that had become submerged.

  But, with the low profile of a solo traveller, I re-created much of the route. The mid-Nineties were tranquil compared with now. With every step away from home I felt lighter. My mother was on her third partner since my father’s death, but any anger I had carried from my childhood was becoming counterbalanced by a sense of guilty relief; I could escape.

  After Iran, the closest I could imagine to a future was some kind of fieldwork that kept me travelling, so I proposed a thesis on Persianate culture in the time of the Mongols. The violently expanding empires of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had thrown scholars and poets together, some seeking refuge, others collected by the emperors themselves: trophies and treasuries of knowledge. I was interested in the illiterate Khan, collecting scrolls as he conquered, haunted by the knowledge they promised. Hunting truth like the enemy, my supervisor had said. Here, I thought, was a corner of history obscure enough to hide in.

  My supervisor was a brilliant woman. She’d spent time in Sudan and Yemen and had written the definitive book on Arabic poetry. Her husband had been a ‘diplomat’, as she described it. In retrospect, of course, it was all quite obvious. She was waiting for people like me. The whole place was a honeytrap.

  When she first suggested work for the government, I was still recovering from an exercise with the 4th Battalion, Parachute Regiment. My feet were swollen and blistered to the extent that I was forced to wear flip-flops. I remembered sitting in her office like that, my PhD proposal in her hands, wondering why she seemed uninterested in it.

  ‘This is all fine and I think you would do it well. I wondered if you’d thought about other options.’ She put the sheets down as if they’d left her unsatisfied and would do the same to me. ‘You volunteer in the reserves,’ she said.

  Even while I sat there with bare feet and a bruised cheekbone, it surprised me that she knew this.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you enjoy that?’

  I had joined as a gesture against the comfort of the college, the equation of learning with physical ease. And because it seemed an entirely unlikely thing to do. The training felt like the shedding of skin, which reminded me of learning a language. I had spent my first months at the university impersonating those around me, fascinated by their ready-formed personas, their postures and ensconced positions in networks that appeared to have arisen spontaneously. I had practised stretching my vowels, relaxing them as if I too was relaxed, letting my voice sink back in my jaw. I borrowed the grandeur of the college itself like a costume.

  But, to my surprise, it was the army reserves where I excelled. The Brecon Beacons, where most of the training took place, was beautiful and desolate. Ten-kilometre runs became 20 with packs, became 50-kilometre marches with strapless carbines, two hours’ sleep in a damp bivouac then 50 more. It became clear that they were not interested in your strength so much as your weakness. To know someone well enough to stake your life on them, you needed to know where and when they’d break. But you could only break if you were whole to start with. The art was to divide yourself in advance – from pain, primarily, your own and others’, and then from fear. The training, which had seen two men die in the previous five years, was both a border in your life that you were challenged to cross, and an ineradicable partition within you once you had done so.

  I enjoyed map work, and even weapons training, which I approached as you’d approach a class on Japanese wood carving – an intriguing skill you would never actually need. I remembered the meditative way in which a visiting commander with sunburnt cheekbones and sun-bleached hair unrolled a black and white keffiyeh which held an MP5 rifle, and arranged the pieces on the scarf, cleaning them, slotting them back together. When he had finished there was the faintest scatter of sand on the Cambridgeshire floor. I looked up. He was watching me looking at the sand. He winked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to my supervisor. ‘I enjoy it.’

  A delicate first interview overlooking St James’s Park two weeks later, training at Fort Monckton eight weeks after that. All spies have these stories: being chosen, steered. No one wants to believe they sought this profession out.

  The car’s interior still smelled of Aliya’s perfume. I sat in the back seat, opened my laptop, brought up a control board that replicated the home screen of her phone. I opened contacts and address book, recent messages, check-ins. I went in to her emails, deleted the first one from me with the infected link, then closed the laptop and drove back into town.

  I was in a shop attached to a petrol station, buying soap and a new toothbrush, when I heard a sound like popcorn. It came from the phone held by a man beside me. He stared at the screen. The crackling sound was semi-automatic gunfire. The man looked around, put the phone away, embarrassed.

  Someone moved past, at the end of the aisle, talking on a mobile, an urgency in their voice. I walked back to my car.

  Footage had been uploaded to YouTube showing protesters in the central square. It was hard to tell what was going on. The crowd became ragged, individuals running, turning; some people had fallen. There were voices close to the camera, a man and a woman. Where are they? Get out of here … Where is she? Go up Baiseitov Street. Then a ripple of tinny gunfire joined, after a second, by three sharp cracks from a rifle. Then a woman wailing some distance from the camera: hoarse, repeated cries of ‘No’.

  The woman close to the camera spoke again: Oh my God, look. Look. They shot him. Oh my God.

  There was no way anyone could bury this. It was going to be a question of how it was used.

  He’s hit – they shot him.

  The clearest footage came from a window overlooking Semey’s floodlit square. The voices were in the room where it was being filmed. They shot. They’re shooting. The camera phone remained steady. Two or three hundred protesters were trapped in the square. They began running away, found themselves blocked. More shots.

  Eventually most scattered, leaving the human debris: the dead and the injured, dark forms against the snow, then those trying to move them. The person filming focused on one man, shot in the leg, dragging himself across the ground. You could see he was young – just the exertion suggested he was young, wearing glasses and a black baseball cap. Then he shook as if electrocuted as someone fired another round into his body.

  It didn’t sound like the standard AK-74s. A more modern assault rifle. At least three individuals firing, one from a height. You could see the crowd running right to left of the screen, then a louder report, closer to the camera, and they moved in collective panic towards the back.

  I felt their shock. You think you’re protected because something special is happening. And there are hundreds of y
ou, standing side by side: people who’ve never fucked with power before and can’t imagine that it’s as desperate as they are.

  It was online for around ten minutes, then disappeared. I had three missed calls from Piper.

  ‘Nine, ten dead,’ she said, when I eventually got through. ‘Confirmed. A lot critical.’

  ‘Who opened fire? Police? Military?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Where was the President?’

  ‘We think he was stuck on the runway. Maybe weather. Maybe sabotaged.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘It’s localised. It’s a local dispute that got out of hand. That’s how we’re framing it.’

  ‘You can go further. Make it about elements in the Kazakh government close to Russia. Connect it to Zhaparov.’

  Piper sighed.

  ‘Say there’s stuff under the surface; people investigating him. The President’s an experienced dictator; he hates mess. This is an opportunity to move Zhaparov out of power once and for all.’

  ‘We can’t afford to inflame things.’

  ‘It’s not going to blow over.’

  ‘If you’ve got ideas of what we might get out there, send them my way.’

  I drove into the centre. Khan Shatyr was open. I headed past Tiffany and Hugo Boss up to the food court, the Kyoto Bar, where I ordered an overpriced Japanese whisky. Screens in the café showed sport. It looked like Semey had gone blackout. The staff were watching their phones. I found a number for a couple of businesses there, hotels and restaurants, dialled them and the line didn’t connect.

  Joanna had talked me through the principles of psyops: the essential ingredients of a political scandal are that it should be shocking and not immediately refutable. The best lies are built on truth. All you had to do was make people look; things came apart by themselves.

  I had a platform. Piper’s team had been hard at work. Raiymbek now existed – complete with a picture of himself on horseback with spear and helmet. He worked Twitter hard, posting almost hourly in Kazakh, Russian and English. The content was eclectic, ranging from footage of Russians abusing a Kazakh prostitute, to repeated links to a blog called Kazakh Independence, which had been up three hours and already boasted 800 subscribers. Its first post, on the Bolshevik invasion of Kazakhstan and its atrocities, had been shared more than 120 times.