An Autumn Hunting

Chapter 57

I spent the early part of the morning at the lock-up I keep on the city outskirts, away from prying eyes, people who might disapprove of a serving police officer having a stash of fake passports, unauthorised weaponry, dollars, euros and roubles. Nothing unusual; I’d be surprised if most of my colleagues didn’t have a similar arrangement. Governments change or are overthrown, politicians rise and fall, and it’s always best to be prepared for a sudden change in your circumstances.

I filled a black plastic carry-all, the sort gym freaks like to be seen with, locked up, looked around for a car to borrow. Technically, I was going to steal it, but since I had no intention of joyriding it to destruction or torching it for kicks, I preferred to think of it as a temporary loan.

I wanted an older model, something unmemorable and reliable. Newer cars are much harder to hot-wire, expensive cars get noticed. After several blocks I found it, a four-door Lada 1200 sedan that looked as if it had been driven three times around the world. The doors were locked, of course – no one in Kyrgyzstan is stupid enough to leave anything unlocked unless it’s been nailed down – but it wasn’t hard to smash the quarter light. Two minutes later, I was on my way, looking in the rear-view mirror to make sure I hadn’t been spotted.

In the summer, driving up to Chong-Tash is very pleasant once you’re out of the city. Fresh air drifting down from the mountains, passing through villages where excited dogs chase after your car and the local babushki sell buckets of plums, apples and cherries by the roadside. But that’s in the summer.

By autumn, the mist clings to the hillsides and haunts the fields, the day darkens earlier, and the mountains take on a menacing look. The villages are empty with only an occasional light shining through net curtains to show the place is inhabited. We’re Kyrgyz; we know winter is creeping up on us, stalking us as if we were its prey. Perhaps we are.

Ata-Beyit, Grave of our Fathers in Kyrgyz, is a memorial ground thirty kilometres south of Bishkek, near Chong-Tash. Every few months I go there, listen to the wind blowing from across nearby fields, watch tree branches shiver and their leaves tremble.

In the 1930s, almost a hundred and forty political figures and intellectuals were ‘purged’ by the Soviet NKVD as ‘enemies of the people’, shot at night, bodies dumped in a brick kiln. Shamefully, the massacre only came to light when the USSR collapsed and the bodies were moved to a mass grave by Chingiz Aitmatov, our most famous author and diplomat. His father was amongst the victims.

If that was all, Ata-Beyit would still be a melancholy place. But in 2010, during our second revolution since independence, waves of protests and demonstrations against corruption and nepotism flooded the country. Over forty protesters, mainly young men, were shot dead by government forces in Ala-Too Square.

It’s a day I would love to forget but cannot. Bullets tearing into flesh, blood from the dead a scarlet flood spilt on the road, the screams of the wounded, smoke from burning cars throwing a black pall over everything. Seeing the bodies stacked in the morgue like so much firewood as their families wept and begged for news was the worst day of my career, the day I realised the dead must always be avenged.

Many of those who died on that day are buried at Ata-Beyit, a reminder of the price we’ve paid for democracy. They lie in a separate graveyard, two rows of identical black marble stones, each one showing a name, dates and sometimes an engraved likeness of a face.

In April each year, the relatives of the young men killed in 2010 visit and clean around the graves, maybe bring a bouquet or a jar filled with flowers. Otherwise, the place is usually deserted, apart from the woman who works in the small yurt-shaped museum, a guard at the turn-off from the main road, an occasional tourist ticking the site off his list of things to see.

Older tragedies are also commemorated. It was only in 2016 that a monument was built to remember the Urkun, the Exodus, when men, women and children fled during an uprising against the Russian Tsarist forces. Perhaps a hundred thousand people and their animals perished trying to escape over the Tien Shan mountains as winter set in and the mountain passes became snowbound killing grounds.

Even now, a century later, at the Bedel Pass, four thousand metres above sea level near the Chinese border, you can wade through icy spring snowmelt and pick up human and animal bones, gleaming white where the water has brought them down and scrubbed them clean.

Not many people visit Ata-Beyit. It’s a reminder, after all, of suffering, murder, lives lost. And people are busy, of course, with the day-to-day stuff that fills our lives: fields to plough, livestock to tend, getting the children off to school. Visiting the dead isn’t a priority.

It was in this most sombre of places I’d decided to face Aliyev once and for all.