When they told him at work that he’d be accompanying a group of American tourists, Nikolay wasn’t particularly excited. This coming Saturday happened to be his only chance to take his car in for servicing. Sergey, his mechanic, had Sundays off, and it was high time somebody changed the oil.
Maybe I’ll manage to find time during the week, Nikolay figured, get off work early and change it. Come to think of it, how can one ever find the time for work, day-to-day routine, and on top of it all, self-improvement? And time isn’t the only thing in short supply—what about money for Mark’s private school? And diamond earrings for the wife on our fifteenth anniversary? And I need it all right now, not sometime in the future when the time or money happens to turn up. Damned if I know. One thing is clear—you’ve got to balance it all, stay on top of things all the time. Or life will kick you downhill all the way.
Nikolay was a manager at Vostok tour operator. He was his own boss, true, but recently there had been a lot of work. Tourists came in droves, wanting to visit the famous cities of Uzbekistan: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva. And, of course, Tashkent—the capital, where Nikolay’s company was located. Nikolay’s primary responsibility was to coordinate logistics: pickups and drop-offs at the airports, booking hotels, buses, attractions, and restaurants, coordinating local guides and tour directors, and designing tour itineraries. Sometimes he had to accompany tour groups himself, especially when they needed someone who spoke English.
Saturday would be just that kind of day. At twenty to nine in the morning, he drove up to the Hilton Tashkent City hotel, parked his car, and walked around the building to the spot where tour buses collected and dropped off their cargos of tourists.
The bus his company had chartered for the trip was already parked there. Kudrat, the bus driver, saw Nikolay, got out of the bus, and shook hands with him. They had worked together a few times before and were on good terms. Kudrat was a good guy and a pro. He was the head of a large, traditional Uzbek family, and tips—especially in US dollars—were a serious boon to the family’s financial well-being.
It looked like the whole group was there, and Nikolay began distributing name tags. Yes, everything checked out; no one was missing. Nikolay always appreciated the American habit of punctuality.
Today’s destination was the famous mountain beauty spot Lake Urunghach. This was the penultimate day of the group’s two-week visit to Uzbekistan. The plan for the next day was a farewell excursion around Tashkent, and on Monday, they would fly back home. Before such a long, taxing flight, it would be a good idea to have some R&R outdoors. The tour director assigned to that group, who had been with them for the whole itinerary, had called in sick, so Nikolay was asked to take them to the lake. There, he would organize a barbecue for them and then take them back into town in the evening. That would give the tourists a whole day off, with no obligatory sightseeing.
Or very little.
Their first stop was Tepar, a village in the mountains, about an hour and a half outside the city.
The bus stopped at the end of a gravel road on an empty, unpaved patch of ground. The twenty-first century seemed to have bypassed Tepar altogether. There were no traffic signs or lights on its narrow, winding streets. Not that there was much need for them—most of the traffic consisted of dogs, sheep, and goats, which would have been oblivious to them anyway. A lone rooster ran out onto the road, chased by a boy, who deftly grabbed it by the tail then took it away—probably home—leaving just a few feathers to drift to the ground.
The houses here were made of adobe bricks. Quite unprepossessing on the outside and fairly basic inside, these houses provided shelter for the village’s three hundred or so inhabitants. Tepar was famous for its delicious mountain honey and incomparable apples, but lately, the livelihood of the villagers had come to depend more and
