“I told you I was adopted,” she began. I nodded.
“Well, Albina didn’t choose you to be her pet. I wasn’t so lucky.”
“She adopted you?”
“That’s right.”
“But why? She was young, she could have had children of her own.”
“I don’t think Albina had the slightest interest in sex,” Saltanat said. “Oh, she knew how to use the promise of it as a weapon, sometimes it was all she needed to get what she wanted. But actually carrying out the deed, that would have made her vulnerable, and she couldn’t abide that.”
Saltanat stopped, turned away from me.
“You don’t have any cigarettes, do you?”
“No, I only smoke yours,” I said, hoping to make her smile. “And besides, they’re bad for your health.”
A grunt was Saltanat’s only answer.
“So Albina adopted you?”
“Yes, but not in the way you think. She didn’t want a child to love, but one she could train.”
I looked puzzled, and Saltanat began to explain.
“In my country, the authorities are very cautious, and they value loyalty very highly. What they don’t believe in is trust. Some families have always supplied the elite in the security services, because it’s a lot easier to guarantee loyalty if you have a hold over someone’s children, parents, grandparents. She’d been trained by her father to fight, spy, kill, just as he’d been trained by his father. That’s how it’s done.
“Albina married very young, a marriage of convenience to the son of one of the other families. He was killed during ‘an anti-Uzbek rising of disloyal citizens,’ leaving Albina a childless widow.”
“Is that why she came to my orphanage?” I asked.
Saltanat shook her head.
“I don’t think so. For a start, you’re Kyrgyz, not Uzbek, so you would never have been accepted, never trusted. Maybe then, she was looking for a son. But later, once the family put pressure on her, she toed the party line.”
“Then why pick you, why pick a girl?” I asked.
Saltanat stared at me for a moment, her black eyes impenetrable.
“Because my mother had been in the security services, trained by her father. She died in a car accident outside Samarkand, which is how I ended up in the orphanage.”
“Why didn’t her family look after you?” I asked, guessing the answer even as I asked the question.
“Because she wasn’t married to my father. She was their shame, and I was hers. So, off to the orphanage with Saltanat, and forget there was ever a little girl of that name.”
Now I understood the depth of bitterness within her, realized why she was so reticent about her past life. I knew no words could comfort her. Instead, I stared at our joint reflection in the ornate gilt mirror.
“How old were you when you left the orphanage?”
“Nine.”
“And Albina trained you?” I said.
“In her own image,” Saltanat said, a wry smile breaking through the mask of composure, “until the pupil outdid the master. To start, it was about getting me physically fit; you know what orphanage food is like.”
For me, the food in my orphanage had been better than the food I’d been given at home, but it didn’t seem tactful to mention that.
“Then it was about learning skills; swimming, running, climbing. All the things kids want to do anyway, but with Albina it was an obsession. Stopwatches, records, and punishment if you didn’t do better than the time before.”
“She was cruel to you?”
“Not cruel,” Saltanat said, “more that her interest in me was entirely practical, the way you might train a guard dog, or teach someone how to cook. I think she only became cruel later.”
I saw her face tighten with memories, wondered about holding her hand, sat still.
“After that, it was learning to shoot, rifles, pistols, arrows. Stationary targets at first, then moving ones. How to fight with a knife, unarmed, with anything that came to hand. How to defend yourself, how to track someone, disguise yourself, live off the land. All the skills that might one day come in handy.
“The only time we stopped was when Albina had to go away on a mission. I never knew in advance, just one day I’d wake up and she wouldn’t be there. But I’d practice anyway, in case she came back and caught me lazing around.”
“It sounds terrible,” I said.
“Not really,” she said. “We lived better than most people: good food, good housing, the best teachers. When it comes to defending the status quo, nothing’s too good for the top guys. And remember, it was what my family did. I’d have had the same training if my mother had lived.”
I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about her role as a trained killer, but it wasn’t as if I’d ever been under any illusions about Saltanat as a placid housewife.
“Every few months, Albina would go on road trips, not just Uzbekistan but Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, looking for potential recruits, children she could train up to be foot soldiers to the elite. It must have been on one of those trips that she visited your orphanage.”
I was silent, wondering how different my life would have been if I’d taken Albina’s hand, been led into a new way of living, perhaps of dying. And how I would have felt about Saltanat if we’d grown up together.
“So what made it go wrong?” I asked.
“I was fifteen when Albina went away, didn’t come back for five months. I never found out the details, but she’d been hurt working undercover, shot twice, thigh and shoulder. She healed, but she was never quite as supple, maybe a pace behind her best. I was better than she was, and she resented that.”
“What happened then?”
“We’d always pulled back in practice before then, held the knife a centimeter away, got the neck hold but didn’t snap the spine. No point in training an agent if you lose them before they go out into the field.
“One day, we were practicing with knives, close quarters. We used blunted knives so we might get the odd scratch or two, but nothing serious. But when we started, I saw Albina was using a real blade, razor-edged on both sides. And that’s how I got this.”
Saltanat ran her fingernail down the length of her scar.
“You know how much head wounds bleed,” she said. “It looked like I’d been slaughtered. I thought she was going to cut my throat.”
I remembered the sheep we’d sacrificed for Chinara’s forty-day toi, the ceremony commemorating her life, how the sheep had bleated as we dragged it toward the waiting knife.
“What stopped her?”
“One of the other trainers saw what had happened, stopped the fight. Of course, Albina swore she didn’t know the knife was for real. But I knew. And we never fought like that again. But that’s when she really started to hate me. For being stronger than her, for having seen her weakness.”
“She was shot here?” I asked. “In Kyrgyzstan?”
Saltanat gave me the “are-you-stupid?” look I’d grown to know so well.
“I don’t know,” she said. “And even if I did, you don’t expect me to tell you?”
I shrugged.
“It was a long time ago. And besides, she’s dead,” I said.
“Secrets stay secrets. In my country, anyway.”
I rolled over to look at her, at the raven’s wing of hair splayed out on the pillow, at the dark eyes whose depths I could never fathom.
“My country’s not as good at keeping secrets,” I said. “That’s why we have revolutions. And the news a foreign agent’s corpse has been found in the center of Bishkek, that’s going to be a secret for maybe twenty seconds.”