Performance Anomalies (32 page)

“He was sending me an invitation to come out of the building.” Cono put his hand on Dimira’s shoulder again and looked into her eyes. “You have suffered because of me. And your road will be rough, because of me. I am sorry.”

Dimira’s hollowed brown eyes filled with tears again. “Xiao Li … she was so strong. I think …” Dimira swallowed. “I think if I hadn’t shot the gun …”

“No!” Cono shook her. “He was going to kill us all. You had no choice. Look at me. You had no choice.”

A distant whomping halted their conversation. The sound grew louder and was joined by two harsh, continuous whistles. Dimira scrambled beneath a thick juniper tree, with Cono on her heels. They huddled against the trunk and looked up. Two military-green helicopters passed over them, so low that the prop wash shook all the trees around them. Cono motioned for Dimira to give him the pistol that had been glued to her hand during the climb.

“Just in case,” he yelled over the deafening noise.

The whistles of the engines shifted to a lower tone as the copters rose up the mountainside. Only a few minutes passed before the popping of blades against the air again destroyed the trickling sound of the nearby stream. The copters were higher this time, and their noise receded quickly as they veered down the mountain.

The search seemed half-hearted. Maybe Zheng’s embassy had pressured a reluctant Kazak military to find the murderers of their diplomatic personnel. Cono imagined Bulat saying: “We are most fortunate that Beijing does not have its own helicopters in my city. Yet.”

Or maybe the Bureau had localized the cell phone calls made from the quarry and found their leader’s corpse on top of a dead woman, and then followed up with a perfunctory reconnaissance.

Or perhaps Katerina had fled back to the Americans and claimed credit for the foiling of the jihadis and the destruction of the high-U, which duly provoked the Americans to pressure the Kazak military to make a sweep for any jihadis who might have escaped.

Cono wondered what options Katerina had left. She probably had another card yet to be played, a new role, perhaps with the Russians. Such a superb actor. For all her worries about her family back home in Ukraine, she could have left the drama behind long ago. But she liked the stage. “Addicted,” she had written. Cono tried to hate her, to form feelings of what people called revenge, but they didn’t come. The only time he’d had a fully formed thought of revenge was when he’d wanted to kill his father. But he never got the chance.

“They’ve been gone awhile,” Dimira said. “I don’t think they’re coming back. We can go on.”

Sitting out the copters’ search had opened the floodgates of Cono’s fatigue, and Dimira’s words seemed dreamlike.

“Dimira, I need to rest.” He saw her worried eyes only hazily. “It will be cold. We’ll make the leaves into a pile.” Cono was having trouble even forming words.

They crawled away from the juniper to a stand of ash and pushed the crackling leaves into a mound. Although it was still daylight, they were already in the shadow of the mountain spur. They crawled into the pile, sweeping more leaves over themselves. They lay with their arms wrapped around each other. Dimira winced at a pain in her chest; she guessed she had broken a rib in the fall at the quarry, but she’d said nothing to Cono about it. She moved slightly, to a more comfortable position, with Cono’s face next to hers. She kissed Cono’s lips, but he had already passed into a sleep that not even dreams could enter.

19

Cono slept until the morning sun had breached the spine of the mountains to the east. From the angle of the light filtering through the branches above him, he guessed he’d been out for fourteen hours.

“Your friend Bulat was right. You needed sleep.” Dimira was washing mushrooms and wolfberries and wild walnuts in the stream and placing them on a slab of slate.

“Yes, he was right about many things.” Cono picked a piece of leaf from his eyelid and observed Dimira. “Looks like you know the fruits of the forest.”

“This is the way I lived with my baby, for almost a year, before I found work.”

“I also lived like this, in the wild, for a long time when I was little,” Cono said. “I miss it. I miss being wild.”

They ate, washed their faces and moved on, up the mountain. There was much ground to cover on this day.

The climb was painful for Cono at first, but gradually the pumping of his legs became pleasurable and made him want to climb faster. Dimira, too, seemed rejuvenated, only occasionally pressing her hand against her ribs and suggesting a stop to admire the view and catch their breath. They followed the ascending avenue of trees hugging the stream until it met a cascade falling over a cliff. Bathed by the spray, they pulled themselves up, searching for grips and footholds that could bear their weight.

At the top of the cliff an immense bowl of meadow spread before them, and the whiteness of the far peaks flashed in the sunlight. Two startled marmots raced away, their fur rippling with gold and amber. Dimira and Cono walked quickly across the meadow, accelerating their pace with each step. When Dimira broke into a halting run, her arms outstretched as if she wanted to hug the entire landscape, Cono ran after her.

They stopped to drink from one of the strands of a stream weaving through the far side of the meadow, and splashed the cold water at each other until they were shivering.

The trail rising out of the meadow became steep. The thinner air begged more of their lungs. The larch and pine and fir became sparse and eventually disappeared. In a few more hours they reached the pass that would carry them over the snow-topped Zailiysky Alatau range and send them down toward the valley of Chong-Kemin, one more mountain range away from Lake Issyk-Kul. They were nearly in Kyrgyzstan now, but any notion of boundaries here, with summits in every direction, was absurd.

Once they were over the pass, the trail downward became a steep path of scree that shifted beneath their feet. In the air in front of them a long-legged buzzard glided slowly from one current to another.

“Cono, I think Xiao Li loved you.” Dimira was walking in the lead, so Cono barely heard what she’d said.

“We had much in common,” he replied. “And I admired her. I respected her.”

“What do you have in common? She was Chinese. You are … something else.”

“She grew up without rules. She had to make her own rules, mold her own life, carve her own dignity, out of nothing.”

“Like you?”

“Like me. But she was better.”

“She told me she had a son in China. Your son.”

The scree beneath Cono’s feet gave way. He rode the sliding rocks as if he were surfing, nearly bumping Dimira as he passed her, coasting to a stop several yards down the slope.

Cono turned his head back toward Dimira. “Maybe the idea of a child kept her going, gave her something solid. Without that idea, she was all alone.”

“But she had you.”

“I hadn’t seen her in four years. But we spoke.”

“But she still had you. In her thoughts.”

“I don’t know if I was any more real to her than her idea of a child. But even with the distance of time and place, she was very real to me. I …” His voice cracked and he stopped himself.

Their silence resumed. Cono’s mind became absorbed by each placement of his feet—on lichen-covered small boulders, between lumps of prickly scrub, on friable stones that might or might not crumble beneath his weight. He wondered if, on that night in Almaty when they tried to make love against the tree, Xiao Li had made an innocent slip in asking him to give her a baby. She hadn’t said
another
baby, she’d said
a
baby. But then again, how many hours had she been tormented in the rooms above the General? Could he, Cono, have kept his own mind straight through all that terror? He felt himself shriveling up in wrinkles of dread—dread that in disbelieving her, he had been just another one of the beasts in the salty garden of Xiao Li’s life. Maybe there was a son. Maybe it was his.

Cono felt the scree sliding beneath him again; he tried to jump to a firm piece of earth, but lost his balance and toppled over, sledding on his back until he careened into a boulder. Dimira came down to him, easily navigating the loose rocks, and helped him get to his feet.

They had almost reached the valley. A man on a horse surrounded by sheep was waving at them from below. He wore a white-and-black peaked felt hat, and even at this distance they could see that he was smiling.

“Better to come down that way,” he yelled in a Kyrgyz-Kazak dialect, pointing to their left. “It’s easier.”

The valley was in the mountains’ shadow as the Kyrgyz
chaban
, a herder, approached them on his stout horse, the sheep following without looking up from their meal of end-of-summer grasses. Cono searched the lush open valley. It spread out in front of them like a vast, undulating lawn, empty except for the whitish dome of a yurt perhaps a mile away, in the direction of the river that must lie at the bottom of the valley. The sky was still a brilliant, unblemished blue.

In a mixture of Kyrgyz, Kazak and Russian, the chaban asked if they were lost. “You don’t have packs,” he said. “No warm clothes. Don’t you know it’s cold up here at night? And why does your head look like a cracked melon?” His ruddy face was smiling all the while; he was intrigued and amused by the strange visitors to his borderless meadow, which he would abandon soon, taking his livestock down from the mountains before winter selfishly took back the Tian Shan until the next spring. The chaban invited them to his yurt to eat and spend the night. Dimira and Cono had been hiking for nearly twelve hours, and the chill of evening was already reddening their ears; the two of them exchanged glances and accepted his offer.

“He seems like a happy man,” Dimira said softly in English as they walked among the sheep, the herder weaving his horse back and forth at the rear of the flock.

“Yes, he has freedom in his face.”

The warmth was instant as they ducked their heads beneath the birchwood mantle of the yurt’s doorway. Human humidity mixed with the smoke of burning dung drifting up to the hole at the center of the domed felt roof. The chaban’s wife was seated on the floor next to a stack of saddles and harnesses, squeezing two fingers along lengths of sheep intestines until the semidigested green mush emerged and plopped into a small vat. She nodded, smiled, and said, “Welcome to this home.”

The herder, who called himself Nurbek, took off his hat and made them sit on the tiny red bench beneath ancestors’ photos at the far side of the circular walls. He proudly offered them vodka in tiny cups; he poured for his wife as well. They all took the drink in one gulp.

“How many children do you have?” Nurbek’s eyes were wide with curiosity.

Dimira and Cono passed glances at each other.

“Don’t worry, you look healthy. It will come. I have four. Three sons and a daughter. And if they eat well, maybe some grandchildren in the spring.” Nurbek’s cheeks were flushing red from the vodka. “So keep trying!” He poured again.

Two hours later, after a meal of mutton, rice, and knots of bread fried to the hardness of marbles, all eaten with their fingers, and more vodka, they were singing: old sobby Russian tunes; a hymn to Manas, the Kyrgyz warrior hero; the ballad of the mountain-god Khan Tengri; “Only Fools Rush In,” the way Elvis sang it. Cono followed as best he could, but Dimira knew all the songs by heart, and her voice was so enchanting to Nurbek that he grabbed her by the wrist to make her stand up for a duo performance of a song by Viktor Tsoi, a Russian rocker from the seventies. Nurbek swiveled Dimira by her hands as Mirgul, his wife, clapped to make a rhythm for their dance. Nurbek grabbed Cono’s hand, and he in turn pulled Mirgul up from the floor. Cono put on the happiest face he could muster as he thought of how boisterously Xiao Li would be singing along and dancing. The four twirled and twisted until Nurbek banged out the song’s climax with his throaty voice.

They were all laughing as Nurbek pulled away a tasseled and embroidered burgundy curtain revealing a bed less than a yard wide, snug against the wall of the yurt. “Here is where you two will sleep tonight,” he chuckled with delight. “It worked for my wife and me. And don’t worry—we won’t hear anything.”