The Armory
The key was on a ring with two others: the boiler room, and a padlock on the yard gate that nobody had locked since the Americans left. It was a long key, old, brass, Soviet, with a square bit and the number 4 stamped into the bow. It opened a steel door in the basement of the municipal building on Manas Avenue, and behind the steel door there was a room with racks, and on the racks there were two hundred and twelve rifles, nine light machine guns and enough ammunition, the inventory said, to hold the government district for eleven days.
Sergeant Tolon Asanaliev had signed the inventory on the first of May. He had signed for the key too. It was in the left breast pocket of his uniform, buttoned down, and at a quarter past five on the morning of the fourth of June he could feel it there, against his chest, like a second heart that beat slower than his own.
He heard them before he saw them, like everybody that morning.
He was on the roof of the municipal building with Corporal Nazarov and a radio that did not work. The sky over the Alatau was going grey. The city below was dark, because the power station had stopped on the second, and quiet, because there was nothing left to make a noise with. And from the east, from the direction of the Old City and the Kara-Oi road, there came a sound that he felt in the soles of his feet before he heard it: a deep, uneven drumming that grew and grew and did not stop.
“What is that?” said Nazarov. He was from Nurzhan. He had never lived anywhere with horses.
Tolon had grown up in Kara-Bulak, in the Talas valley, where the Kenkol road comes down. His grandfather had kept horses. He knew the sound. It was the sound of the bayge at the end of the summer, all the riders coming at once down the long field. But it was a hundred times bigger, and it was coming down Manas Avenue.
“Horses,” he said.
By six the riders were in the Old City. By half past six they were at the Bazar-i Kalan, and the police in the bazaar station had come out with their hands up and been told to go home, and had gone. By seven the radio, which suddenly worked, was full of voices: police stations surrendering, ministers missing, somebody shouting the same call sign over and over and getting no answer.
The major came up onto the roof at five past seven.
Tolon had served under him for two years. He was a quiet man, from the north of the valley, with a mother who was Tanıp and a father who was nobody in particular. He had been in the siege of 1992 as a boy of twenty-one, and he did not talk about it. He did not drink with the men. He was the only officer in the battalion whom Tolon had never heard raise his voice.
He did not raise it now.
“Sergeant,” he said. “Get the men off the walls. All of them. Into the courtyard. No one fires.”
Tolon looked at him.
“Sir, the government district—”
“There is no government district,” said the major. “The Prime Minister is at his residence. Ministers are not at their ministries. There is nobody in Legislative Hall except the cleaners. I have spoken to the commander of the column coming down Manas Avenue. I have known him for fifteen years. He has given me his word. We stand down, nobody fires, nobody is hurt.” He paused. “Get the men off the walls.”
Tolon went down and got the men off the walls.
They stood in the courtyard of the municipal building, forty-one gendarmes in a ragged square, with their rifles slung, while the sound of the horses got louder. Some of the men were from Talas and looked at the gate with something that was not fear. Some of the men were from Nurzhan and from the Chu and looked at the gate with something that was. Nazarov stood next to Tolon, and his face had gone the colour of the courtyard concrete.
The major came down the steps. He stood in front of them and spoke briefly. He said what he had said on the roof. He said that this was a city, not a fortress. He said that the men coming down the street were Iradis, and so were they. He said that any man who wished to leave could leave now, by the back gate, with his rifle, and go home, and no one would stop him or write down his name. Six men left. Nazarov did not. Tolon did not.
Then the major turned to him.
“Sergeant Asanaliev. You have the key to number four.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Give it to me.”
Afterwards, a long time afterwards, there were two stories.
In the first story, which is told in the valleys and sung sometimes at weddings by bards who have never been to Talas, the major opened the armory himself, with his own hands, and stood aside, and the Front’s riders came down the basement stairs and took the rifles, and with those rifles the government district fell by noon without a shot, and the major rode out of the city with the Front that summer and has lived in the mountains ever since, and is a hero.
In the second story, which is the one in the ISEZ history textbook for the ninth class, an officer of the Republican Gendarmerie deserted his post in the face of armed insurgents and handed over state weapons to them, in violation of his oath, and there is a warrant out for his arrest.
In neither story is there a sergeant.
What happened was this. Tolon stood in the courtyard with the key against his chest, and the major held out his hand, and the sound of the horses was at the end of the street now, so loud that the windows of the municipal building were humming in their frames.
Tolon did not move.
He was not thinking about the government, or the Front, or the Bill of Sale, or the Prime Minister at his residence, or any of the things that the newspapers wrote about for years afterwards. He was thinking about the inventory. He had signed it. Two hundred and twelve rifles, nine light machine guns. His name was on the bottom of the page, in blue ink, with the date. Whatever happened to those rifles, from now until the end of the world, his name was on the bottom of the page.
“Sergeant,” said the major, quietly.
“Sir,” said Tolon. “I signed for them.”
The major looked at him. Then something happened to his face that Tolon had not seen before and never saw again: a kind of tiredness that came all at once and went straight through him, as if he had been carrying something heavy up a long staircase and had only just noticed.
“I know,” said the major. “So did I. Everybody signed for something.” He did not lower his hand. “Give me the key, or open the door yourself. Those are the choices. There isn’t a third one this morning.”
The gate of the courtyard opened. The first riders came in.
Tolon unbuttoned his pocket. He took out the key ring, with the boiler room and the yard gate and the long brass key with the 4 on it.
He did not give it to the major.
He walked across the courtyard, past the riders, who were mostly very young and very dusty and sitting their horses as if they had been born on them, which most of them had. Then down the steps to the basement, along the corridor, past the boiler room, to the steel door with the number 4 painted on it in white. The major followed him. So did two of the riders, on foot now, with their rifles in their hands.
He put the key in the lock.
He stood like that for what he thinks now was a very long time, and what the major, if anyone ever asked him, would probably say was three or four seconds. He had his hand on the key. The lock was old and stiff and turned either way. One way it locked twice, a deadbolt, and the key could be snapped off in it, and no one would get that door open without a cutting torch, and there was no cutting torch in Talas with any fuel in it. The other way it opened.
He turned the key.
Tolon Asanaliev still lives in Talas. He left the gendarmerie in the autumn of 2007, before the new administration got round to the question of who had been where on the fourth of June. He drives a minibus on the number 9 route, from the Bazar-i Kalan to the airport road. His son is nineteen and is studying engineering at the Polytechnic in Nurzhan, and the son has read both stories, the one from the valleys and the one from the ninth-class textbook, and has asked his father more than once which way he turned the key.
Tolon tells him to ask the major.
The major is in the mountains, and there is a warrant out for him, and nobody can ask him anything. And the brass key with the 4 on it, which should have been handed in and was not, is in a tin box on the top shelf of the wardrobe in Tolon’s flat, with his discharge papers and his father’s medals, where his son has seen it many times and has never once picked it up.