At one time, I would have poured myself a couple of shots of the good stuff, oil to lubricate my thinking, push me in directions I wouldn’t consider when sober. But the last time I had a drink, it was to summon the courage to end my wife’s cancer with a cushion over her face. And ever since then, I knew vodka would only taste of bile and rot, a dead woman’s tongue thrust into my mouth.
I lay back on the hotel bed, its lumpy mattress digging springs into my shoulders, smoked, wondered if I’d finally reached the edge of my abilities, if all the deaths I’d paid witness to had soured and staled me beyond all redemption. The hesitant afternoon light dwindled to black, headlights crisscrossing the bedroom ceiling like prison searchlights.
The call came an hour before dawn, my cell phone summoning me from a dry-mouthed dream I couldn’t recall but which had left me apprehensive, as if something dreadful had happened while I dozed.
“Inspector, there’s a car downstairs waiting for you. To take you to Orlinoye.”
The voice was distant, mechanical, heartless.
Orlinoye. The village where my wife Chinara grew up, and where she now lay in the small graveyard on a bluff overlooking the valley.
“What’s this about?”
“There’s been a development. New information regarding the death of your wife. The courts have ordered an exhumation, and you are ordered to attend it.”
I shook my head, still fuddled with sleep, sure I’d misheard.
“Some mistake.”
“No mistake. It’s a direct order. Go now.”
An elderly Moskvitch with a taciturn uniformed ment at the wheel took me past the potato field where the children’s bodies had been found. White crime scene tape still fluttered from the three apple trees, a warning to the curious, flags indicating a surrender of sorts.
We didn’t slow down, but turned north, onto the road to Orlinoye, passing through a couple of small hamlets, clusters of worn farm buildings surrounded by bare fields, their backs toward the mountains that mark the border with Kazakhstan. The car’s worn suspension was no help against the potholed road: I swayed left and right to avoid the worst of the ruts, feeling the holster of my gun rub against my hip with each turn.
We drove for almost an hour until we reached Orlinoye’s one road that splits the village in two. With each kilometer we covered, the fear in my stomach grew more intense, a rat gnawing away at me. I was sure no one had seen me smother Chinara in her hospital bed, using the embroidered cushion that had been a wedding present from her grandmother. In those final hours of her life, I hadn’t been able to bear her pain, so with half a bottle of vodka inside me, I’d pushed her beyond any further suffering. I told myself it was a mercy killing, that she would have done the same for me. But that didn’t prevent her appearing in my dreams, her eyes hurt and accusing.
I’d taken the cushion home, put it away at the back of the wardrobe. Perhaps it had saliva traces, evidence that could convict me. Or maybe this was a setup; a grave already opened in the hours before dawn, room enough for one more body when I knelt down and felt a gun barrel cold against my neck.
Finally, we turned right down a muddy track past the village power station, and followed it until we reached the graveyard. My final destination? I almost hoped so.
We Kyrgyz believe in paying due respect to the dead, but we don’t believe in wasting good farming land either. The Orlinoye graveyard isn’t fertile land that would otherwise be put to good use; it clings to the sloping edge of a small cliff, a river winding through the valley below. There are some eighty graves here, each marked by a headstone and bordered by slender metal railings, most with the Islamic hilal—crescent moon—in each corner. A peaceful place, with birds of prey riding the thermals and a spectacular view toward the mountains.
We parked beside two more police cars, and I got out, the muscles across my shoulders tight with anxiety. Spring grass, still sprinkled with night frost and dew, crackled and whispered beneath my boots.
Three men stood by Chinara’s grave, one of them Usupov, the other two uniformed officers I didn’t recognize. Two others were stripped to the waist, despite the chill of the dawn air, scooping shovelfuls of dirt to one side, the mound of raw earth already partly excavated, three or four feet down.
The last time I visited Chinara’s grave, the mound had been stippled with tiny blue flowers, and a single long thorn with jagged blades. A careless beauty, together with a warning not to get too close.
Watching the desecration of my wife’s grave, each blow of the spades approaching her body, a sense of finality replaced the fear in my belly. My fingers brushed the cold metal of the gun on my hip, and I undid the leather clasp, making sure everyone saw me do it. I pulled my jacket clear of my gun and walked toward the grave. A thin wind gusted down from the Tien Shan, a whisper of condolence from the Celestial Mountains.
A good place to die, if this was where it was going to end.
Chapter 7
In the distance, high above us, indifferent to our presence, newly risen sunlight burned pale gold on the snow peaks of the mountains. In the crystal dawn air, my breath plumed and smoldered before vanishing. My eyes never left the men in front of me, watching for hands to make a sudden gesture, a turning away, a stepping apart.
Finally I stopped five meters away, and stared at Usupov. His face was expressionless, unreadable.
“Inspector—” he began, but I raised a hand to silence him.
“There must be a very good reason why you’re doing this, and I want to know it. And if I’m not satisfied…”
To finish my sentence, I let my fingertips brush the grips of my gun. I tried to keep anger out of my voice. Anger at the men in front of me, at myself for the failures and compromises that had brought me to this point, and shamefully, resentment at Chinara for dying and leaving me adrift, half submerged, like an abandoned rowboat on Lake Issyk-Kul.
“You understand, this is where I laid my wife to rest, on her side, facing Mecca. Where I said my farewells. Kissed her forehead and looked at her for the last time before I shrouded her face with a white cloth. Then wrapped her body in the frozen earth and snow.”
None of the men spoke. The diggers crouched down in Chinara’s open grave, watching, knowing they were trapped.
I wondered if the simplest solution to everything I carried inside me was to start shooting, and let them extinguish me in a dozen heartbeats, place me next to my life’s love.
I’d done my best to come to terms with the thought of Chinara’s decay. Cheeks collapsing to rest on teeth, eyes sinking back into their sockets, smooth belly distended by the gases of rot. Soft warm skin shrunk into rasping parchment stretched tight over bones before splitting. And slowly, over decades perhaps, turning back into the earth, with only her grave marker to show she’d ever lived and loved and made my heart bright.
I looked at the simple marble plaque in front of the grave. Chinara’s profile, copied from a paper silhouette done by a street artist in Red Square beside the Kremlin walls, during the one visit we’d made there. Followed by her name, her dates, and a line she would often quote by one of her favorite poets: LOVE WEATHERS ALL STORMS. When we argued, she could always defuse the occasion, simply by saying it, raising an eyebrow and winning my heart once more with her smile.