She turned to Mark, looking frustrated. And tired. “Any way you can finish the paloo?”
“Yeah, sure.” Paloo was what the Kyrgyz called meat and rice mixed together in a big pot. Mark figured he could handle it.
“And drop it off?”
“No worries. I got it covered. What’s up?”
Daria had already left the kitchen and was putting on her coat. “Problem in Balykchy with one of the kids.”
“What problem?” asked Mark, but Daria was already on her way out the door.
2
The road to Balykchy, a town of forty thousand people about one hundred miles east of Bishkek, shot straight through a fertile valley that was one of the few flat places in all of Kyrgyzstan. Mountains rose up from the northern and southern edges of the valley.
As Daria pushed the limits of her Volkswagen Jetta, trying to make good time before she hit the part of the highway the Chinese hadn’t fixed yet, her thoughts turned to Mark. And to the fact that her period was a week late. Was it possible?
Yes. Unlikely, but possible.
Neither of their efforts to prevent conception had been heroic. Birth control pills made her feel bloated, and besides, she didn’t trust the quality of the locally available brands. So instead they’d relied on the rhythm method and the occasional condom. She’d known the risks, and had accepted — maybe even welcomed — the possible consequences. But could the same be said for Mark?
She exhaled and gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, wondering what his reaction would be if this wasn’t just a scare; she hoped the news would bring them closer, but worried he would pull away from her.
Truth be told, though they’d been living together in Bishkek for more than seven months now — ever since Mark had gotten kicked out of Azerbaijan — she still sometimes felt as though she didn’t understand him. She certainly didn’t understand the rationale behind what he was currently doing with his life.
During their first month living together in Kyrgyzstan, she’d sympathized with him wanting to take it easy for a while. He was more than ten years older than she was. He’d already seen, and done, plenty with his life. Running away from home at seventeen, putting himself through college, joining the CIA and rising quickly through its ranks… It had been nice to see him just relax in a way that, she suspected, he’d never done before.
Maybe the fact that he’d gotten kicked out of Azerbaijan had been a blessing in disguise, she’d thought. She’d continued to feel the same way during the second month. He just needed time to unwind.
By the third month, she’d started wondering just how long this unwinding business was going to last. In Azerbaijan, after leaving the CIA, he’d taught international relations at a university in Baku. She’d figured he’d try to land a similar teaching position here in Bishkek. It wouldn’t have been hard, given his credentials.
Instead he played narde. Every day. And worked halfheartedly for that spies-for-hire outfit. She couldn’t understand how someone as bright and capable as Mark was could be satisfied with that kind of life.
Balykchy was a wretched place.
During the Soviet era, the town had been a thriving factory center, a rail hub where wheat, corn, tobacco, cotton, beef, and wool had been consolidated and then shipped out across the Soviet Union. Situated on the far western end of Lake Issyk Kul — the tenth largest lake in the world — it had also been a big fishing port. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, Balykchy collapsed with it. The factories had closed. The trains had stopped. The orders for trout and whitefish had dried up. And most of the Russians had gone home, taking most of the jobs with them.
Twenty years later, what was left was a scarred and abandoned relic, a place that had sunk low and was still sinking.
Daria turned onto a rutted road that cut through the center of town. Along the roadside, women wearing tightly wrapped headscarves sold ten-kilo sacks of flour and round — to represent the sun, said the locals — loaves of lepeshka bread. Men in wool sweaters sat on their haunches in front of collections of used hardware equipment, or beside piles of salt- and mineral-rich boulders that would be used as cattle licks.
It was getting cold out — snow was visible on some of the distant peaks. She shivered, turned up the heat, and took a left off the main road. As she headed down toward the lake, she passed a few abandoned factories and horses grazing in marshy fields.
The local orphanage was in a converted one-story home that had been enlarged to serve its current purpose. It sat behind fencing made of corrugated-metal roofing panels, and the building’s exterior white-stucco walls had been repeatedly patched with gray mortar. A telephone pole leaned against the roof. The bright-blue wooden shutters on the front windows had been closed tight.
As Daria pulled up to the entrance gate, a gray Volkswagen police car, its red, white, and blue lights flashing, pulled up behind her.
“Shit,” she said. The police car could only mean one thing. She was too late.
3
Mark had grown to love the Shanghai, a Chinese restaurant in Bishkek.
The wine-red carpets were stained, half the plexiglass lids on the buffet-station dishes were cracked, and the ceiling had cobwebs in the corners. The fancy coffee shop next door — which offered free Wi-Fi and pricey double espressos to diplomats and government types — only made the Shanghai appear all the more shabby by comparison. But the Shanghai had both cold beer and an owner who tolerated daily narde games, and that was more than enough to make up for its faults.
At the moment, two narde boards were in play, both of which were set up on a long, cigarette-scarred laminate table in the back of the restaurant. Two players sat across from each other at each board. A Kyrgyz with a round brown face and perpetually flushed cheeks was up against a bald and bearded Uzbek. Mark sat across from a heavily jowled Kyrgyz-born Russian. All the men, save Mark, were in their seventies.
Each man’s face registered total concentration. Four open half-liter bottles of Arpa, a local beer, sat on the table. The loud smacks of narde pieces hitting the wooden playing boards created a steady staccato din that could be heard all around the room.
Mark rolled the dice, came up with a four and a six, and then slapped down his pieces in a way that set him up to start bearing them off in a turn or two. That was the ultimate object of the game — start off with all your pieces in one corner, circle them around the board, and then bear them off the board entirely. The first person to remove all his pieces won. Though luck played a role, it was also a game of strategy and skill.
At the adjacent board, the Uzbek looked as though he was about to roll his dice. But instead he leaned in toward Mark and, as if sharing a confidence, said in Kyrgyz, “Always so lazy.”
Mark got a whiff of sour old-man beer breath. He turned away.
The Uzbek lifted his eyes slightly from the board and briefly made eye contact with his Kyrgyz opponent. “He worships his pieces like his relations worship their sheep. Ha!”
The loser of the round-robin tournament had to pay for the beer, and the second-to-last player had to cover the gratuity — an easy burden to bear, especially if you were the Uzbek, though the Russian and Kyrgyz were not known for their big tips either.