A Spring Betrayal

Chapter 3

I was twelve, the first time I stood in this room. It was just a few months after we declared independence while the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, a brutal time for everyone in Kyrgyzstan. My father had gone to Moscow two years earlier to look for work, so my mother and I left Bishkek to live with my grandfather and his second wife in his small farm north of Karakol.

The two women loathed each other with the endless simmering resentment that comes from bad food, cheap clothes, and recognizing something of themselves in each other’s failures. Long silences would settle over the three-room farmhouse the way rainclouds brooded over the mountain peaks to the north, then burst like thunder into a tirade of faults and grievances. Finally, my grandfather declared himself sick of the skirmishes, and my mother packed our cheap plastic suitcase with the split handle and set off to find work in Siberia. I didn’t see or hear from her for almost three years.

However, my mother’s departure didn’t calm her rival; instead she transferred the battle to me. And after the potato harvest, when I’d outlived my usefulness, she bundled me into the back of my grandfather’s ancient Moskvitch. Through the scratched rear window, I watched my grandfather shut the gate behind us, unable to meet my bewildered stare. That was the first time I realized just how quickly men will surrender almost anything for a quiet life.

During the twelve-mile drive into Karakol, I wondered if my mother had sent for me, and whether I would recognize her, or she me. Even then, I didn’t have much trust in memories.

I spent just over two years in the orphanage, during which I ran away three times. Very few of the children were there because their parents had died. We were known as “social orphans”; in the chaos of independence, our families had split up, gone off to Russia to look for a job, or simply disappeared. So what little remained of the state authorities got the task of caring for us. And because we couldn’t complain, didn’t have anywhere else to go, and were only children, they took as little care as they needed.

“Pashol na khui.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been sworn at; it wasn’t even as if none of my superiors had ever said it to me. But I’d never had a one-armed man hug me, then tell me to fuck off.

I glanced around the orphanage director’s office. There had been some changes: the scuffmarks of children’s shoulders against the wall had darkened, and a different president scowled down from an ornate gilt frame. And there was a different man behind the desk from the last time I’d stood in front of it, waiting to be punished.

However, Gurminj Shokhumorov wasn’t your typical official. For a start, he was Tajik, a rarity in our government’s ethnic mix, and if you saw him in the street, you’d think he was a farmer, maybe a builder, who’d lost his right arm to an accident or a car crash.

It was shrapnel from an RPG fired by a mujahideen warrior in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul that smashed Gurminj’s shoulder and arm into fragments and ended his career in the Red Army. To Gurminj, it was a massive joke that the Panjshir is where the majority of Tajiks in Afghanistan live. As he always used to say, back in the days when we’d opened the second bottle of vodka and crushed the cap underfoot, “If you’re going to lose an arm, you want it to be a relative that fucks you up.”

It had been over a year since we’d last met; he was one of the mourners who stood by me as we buried my wife, and he had been with me the following day, when the women came down to the grave and scattered bread and milk on the hard earth.

“Do you honestly think I’ve got the time to track down some ancient identity bands?” he asked, lifting up the evidence bags Usupov had dropped off the day before.

“You know the right places to go, the right people to ask. Right now, I’m as welcome in Bishkek as a dose of clap half an hour after the town’s only pharmacy has closed down. No one will risk their neck to give me the whisper.”

“And if it’s me that does the asking, it shouldn’t set off any alarm bells; is that what you mean?”

“That too,” I admitted. “But someone has to do it. Those children didn’t get a chance at life; they deserve better than being left to rot by some stinking canal.”

“You know how many people I have to kneel in front of, just to keep this place warm, and stew and bread on the table?” Gurminj asked, throwing his one arm wide. “I’ll tell you, a fuck of a lot.” He smiled, his teeth dazzling white in a thick black beard.

I nodded. My memories of the orphanage weren’t great, but I knew Gurminj was a good man. He’d told me once, in the days when I was still drinking, that there was no such thing as a child that couldn’t be helped, sometimes even saved. I was drunk in the way I used to get then, with enough anger and despair bubbling under to turn the world into a fleapit hotel with blood on the carpet and screams soaked into the wallpaper. But I wasn’t drunk enough to tell him that I’d seen some of the children he cared for grow up to be robbed or raped or murdered. Or to do those things themselves.

He already knew.

Gurminj pushed the evidence bags back toward me, distaste evident on his face.

“Not the nicest present I’ve ever had.”

“Try being given one when you’re twelve,” I said.

He stared back at me, perhaps unsure if I was insulting him.

“I missed my mama, my grandfather, even the sour-faced bitch he married. I wasn’t a country boy, I didn’t know anyone, and they all laughed at my city accent. So I told them they were all myrki, stupid peasants. I lost the first few fights, but then I learned it was easier to just get along with what they said. Or to punch first when I had to.”

“No one ever said living in an orphanage is easy,” Gurminj said, “but sometimes it has to be better than what went before. You remember the silent ones?”

I nodded. The children who didn’t speak, the ones who never caught your eye or smiled or joined in playtime games. The ones who did their best in the showers to hide the scars and burn marks on their arms and backs. And then there were the ones whose scars were all on the inside, who’d given up trying to understand why the world was treating them with such cruelty.

I picked up the envelopes with the identity bands, all that we had to give names, faces to the bodies.

“Seven more silent ones,” I said, memories vivid behind my eyes.

“There’s one thing you need to know, Inspector,” Gurminj said, pointing at the bags.

“You’ve traced the children already?” I asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said, producing a sheet of paper from a pile on his desk. “As you know, I’ve got contacts in other orphanages. Mainly, we keep each other posted on the latest nomenklatura bullshit from Bishkek. But you know, Akyl, there’s a market for the children we look after.”

I could sense the anger coming off Gurminj; no one cared more for the orphans under his care, no one was more aware of the need for vigilance against the predators that circle the pack.

“I don’t really approve of foreign adoptions,” he said. “I know all the arguments about finding a better life in America, in Europe. And God knows, anyone that can love a child that isn’t their own is a good person. But why should Kyrgyzstan become a baby farm for rich foreigners? What if you lose that sense of who you are, what it means to be Kyrgyz?”

I nodded, although I’ve often wondered if being Kyrgyz simply means being chained to an endless supply of misfortune.

“We watch out for the traffickers, the illegal adoptions. We’ve all heard about children being harvested for their organs, or for medicine. Does it happen? Maybe a myth, but who knows? There’s no end to the ways in which scum exploit the helpless, so they can have a fancy car, expensive vodka, a bleach-blond Russian whore with silicone tits. So I keep in touch with some of the security people in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and we watch.”

Gurminj gave a mirthless smile that bared his teeth, held up the paper in his hand. God help anyone who abused a child under his care.

“The identity bands are genuine, no doubt about that. And the different colors show that they come from different orphanages as well as this one, as far away as Naryn and Osh. But that’s where the problem begins.”

He paused, and I stared across the desk at him, wondering at his silence.

“The numbers and the orphanages all tally. For once, Central Records didn’t screw it all up. But the children who wore them? Your problem is, they’re all still alive. And they all left their orphanages at least ten years ago.”