The Dog (4 page)

Omar ran the west end of the Ganjiakou market, which was known as Uyghurville. There the crowded market stopped abruptly at an invisible line on the road. Chinese there, Uyghurs here. From the Chinese side, it was possible to look into Uyghurville and see a few shirtless men tending pit ovens outside the mutton and noodle restaurants, old people moving slowly and without intent down the pockmarked road, expats looking to score hash. Bicycle tires and old shoes lay strewn across the roofs of the low buildings. Curtains of acrid steam poured from the paper plant at the neighborhood's edge. Farther west the poorest of the poor had slung tarps at the feet of massive hills of garbage. Uyghurville was unquestionably the worst place in the world, and it remained perched on the edge of oblivion by a mix of swindle and violent refusal to submit to the Chinese city surrounding it.

For years residents of Beijing would not go there for fear of being robbed or killed. There had been uprisings and bombings. The Public Security Bureau, a paramilitary force known for its enterprising use of torture as a public relations tool, regularly conducted sweeping acts of brutality in Uyghurville. Old men disappeared only to reappear months later with weeping stumps for legs. Women were destroyed with lead pipes. In some circles there was discussion of who had struck first, but no one involved in the fight cared one way or another.

The violence advanced and receded like floodwaters.

Then Omar struck a deal with the PSB officer in charge of minority control: in exchange for monthly “advisory fees,” the PSB would publicly declare the neighborhood rehabilitated and safe for commerce. Uyghurville hosted a ceremony with ethnic dancing and speeches touting a new era of progress. Chinese cadres, like lions at the kill, hunched over meals of spicy lamb. Later, Uyghur girls were brought in. Though the cadres' eyes lit up at the sight of that primitive flesh, only a few partook, and the rest thought them perverse for doing so.

For a while everything ran smoothly. PSB officers walked the beat and the neighborhood attracted the faddish attentions of Chinese bohemians, the children of high-ranking officials, the first wave of Chinese entrepreneurs. Expats hung around the noodle and mutton places smoking with the kitchen boys. The restaurants kept up their monthly payments and almost overnight the atmosphere of menace began to lift. But it wasn't long before the deal started to unravel. The cadres were swept up in a corruption scandal and replaced with a new band of bureaucrats who as their first order of business doubled the protection fees, reasoning that since they had been clever enough to survive the scandal, they were worth twice as much as the morons who'd been kicked out of office. This sort of Chinese logic made Omar want to shoot himself in the head.

On this point alone Omar and his grandson saw eye to eye. The Chinese were pigs. No amount of money could make up for the defilement they heaped on the Uyghurs. At one point, the government had welded the neighborhood's manhole covers in place and diverted the sewers when the PSB discovered that gangsters were using the tunnels as escape routes. Consequently, shit ran in the streets and Uyghur children died from diseases. Only Omar and a few others had proper homes. The Chinese robbed everyone blind, and no one could save enough to improve his lot. They lived like animals, sleeping in their noodle shops, atop laminate tables. At night, the floors belonged to the rats.

He ordered the restaurants to stop making payments. The Chinese were already bleeding them dry. Soon the PSB patrols thinned and the neighborhood began to decay. There were rumors the Chinese had marked Omar for death. People joked that it was better not to stand too close to Omar in case an inept Chinese sniper had been assigned to the case. With him out of the picture, the Chinese could bulldoze the neighborhood and put up skyscrapers. There was no question about that: the land was worth something, even if the people weren't.

It was with dark pleasure that Uyghurville's residents repeated the gossip about Omar. He wielded absolute power over the neighborhood, and for that they blessed him, feared him, and wished him dead all in the same breath. He was famously vengeful and he had a long memory. Once, a Kazakh had brushed against Omar's wife in the market. The man apologized profusely, prostrating himself, delivering gifts in the following days. It's nothing, Omar had said. He waited ten years to pour hot lead down the Kazakh's throat. In the meantime, he did business with the man, ate at the same table, shared the pipe. The Kazakh had come to feel that he could depend on Omar. This was how Omar operated. He took the long view.

By summertime, the rumors that had simmered for months were being served up as fact: Omar was as good as dead. He didn't pay them any mind. There was always something in the air.

Every night Omar took a walk, as much to assure the neighborhood that he was very much alive as to survey his domain. He wore large square sunglasses, a blindingly white skullcap, patent leather shoes. On this particular night, he was engulfed by a double-breasted suit that hung on him like a hospital gown. A small velvet bag filled with his enemies' gold teeth chattered in his pocket. His capos trailed behind him, and behind them, a few little boys, like gulls in the wake of a garbage scow, worrying the men for betel nuts.

The sun had dropped between the paper plant's stacks, tinting the sky the color of a bloody wound. A hot wind pressing down from above flooded the street with steam.

Despite the PSB pullout, the restaurants were packed on this hot summer night, the streets swarming with Chinese, Uyghurs, expats, shady-looking in-betweens. See, Omar thought, it's worked out fine. When he passed by, the wranglers who pulled in customers kept up their patter—“Come! Come!”—but maintained a respectful distance. Foreigners and Chinese stared openly at this slice of local flavor, the crowd parting to allow him passage.

Near a pile of trash at the edge of the neighborhood Omar passed by some off-duty PSB. They were young and stiff, swallowed by their green woolen uniforms, and absolutely terrified of this place, which lay between their station and the dormitory where they lived. Only through great restraint did they manage to keep from holding hands, as some officers would have done. Two had reached a compromise and walked with their arms locked at the elbows. It was obvious they were only kids, but Omar never let them out of his sight. Children always ran the revolutions, and in the old days these animals would have worked him over with their clubs. He knew they had a nose for his blood. Sure enough, as they passed by, one jumpy recruit thumped his stick against his woolen leg.

Omar was sick of it. He'd been dreaming of open skies and the steppes. The intimacy of emptiness. Endless rivers and the shallow arc of the horizon. It had been thirty years since he'd breathed air so clear a man could detect the hint of a cooking fire an entire valley away. He blamed these fantasies on his grandson, who had been threatening to go home to Ürümqi. The young man was spineless but hot-blooded, and these days they avoided each other except to argue.

After strolling the neighborhood for a while, Omar settled into a table at his usual haunt, where a bad thing happened. A kitchen boy who had no friends among the other boys, seized by a lunatic scheme to prove himself worthy of their respect, stuck his penis into a steaming bowl of noodles meant for Omar. The other boys made such a ruckus that Omar's guards stormed the kitchen. They hoisted the boy onto a table and pinned him there. Instantly the restaurant was empty as a windswept plain.

Slowly, perhaps with a hint of weariness, Omar rose from his chair. Standing over the boy, he opened a delicate knife shaped like a crescent moon and sliced open the boy's pants. He carved the air above the rubbery nub of flesh and stroked the boy's hairless abdomen with his hard fingers, but he felt he was doing it for the benefit of his men, who seemed pleased to have interrupted such an obvious act of disrespect.

“This sort of thing never used to happen,” Omar said.

“Please, Uncle,” squealed the boy.

Omar was distracted. He needed to eat. “What's to be gained by cutting you up?”

The boy whimpered for mercy.

“Everyone thinks I've gone soft in the head. This is bad for you, understand? It means that I might have to make an example of you.”

“Uncle, please.”

Omar looked around at his men, their faces those of expectant children. “Have you seen that new movie?” Omar said. “The one about those Yakuza? To punish disloyalty they split it from stem to stern.”

Urine spurted from the boy and darkened the table.

Omar was seized by a sudden and deep sadness, and he turned away in shame. His men made a huge fuss about the piss. This is only a boy, he thought. A boy.

“Change this one's diaper and send him back to the kitchen,” Omar said. Then, to the boy, he said, “Keep that thing in your pants or you'll lose it.” He stroked his cheek with the back of his hand. “Bring me another bowl,” he said.

As a younger man he would sooner have castrated the boy than spat on the floor. Maybe he was getting soft in his old age. But what was the point of thinking about it?

The boy, trembling, one hand clutching the waist of his pants, returned with a fresh bowl of noodles. Omar pressed a twenty-yuan note into his palm. He looked carefully at the boy's anguished face, into the black waters the boy didn't even know existed within him, and as if a tumbler had fallen in a lock, with a crisp, unbroken motion Omar cracked him on the side of his head with the knife's ash handle. The boy's lips parted; he wobbled, then dropped to the floor. The other kitchen boys pried the money from his fist and dragged him away, his pants around his ankles, his eyelashes fluttering. It was done and Omar would not think of it again.

After Omar returned home from dinner, he had one of his men fetch his grandson, who was sitting on a crate outside a restaurant down the street, watching the world go by. Anwher was twenty-five, uncomfortable in his own skin. His sharp cheekbones launched straight out from his deep eye sockets like a pair of cliffs, and, like most young men, he spent the bulk of his time cultivating an air of internal discord, which made him look superficially haunted.

“Boss wants you,” Omar's minion said.

“He can wait,” said Anwher.

The thick-necked goon stayed where he was, silently exuding thuggish authority.

“Fine,” Anwher said. Without a word, they started back toward the house. Anwher studied the man's gait with an almost scientific attention to the roll of his massive shoulders. No one stood in their way, and before long they were at Omar's house.

The man stopped at the door and stepped to the side. Anwher went in and sat on the floor by a low table.

Omar sat drinking his tea for a while, sizing up the boy.

“So?” Omar said.

“So what?” Anwher said.

“Busy out there tonight.”

Anwher nodded and took a cup of tea.

Omar sighed. He considered himself an able communicator, but the boy was impossible to talk to. He was lazy as a rug and responded to neither reason nor violence. What once had been a gap between them had become a canyon.

“It's hopping,” Anwher offered. “A human farm. Eat, shit, screw. All day, all night.”

“Perhaps if you did something besides sit on your ass all day, you'd have a different take on things,” Omar said.

Anwher set down his cup and made moves to leave, but Omar held up his hand.

“You have a point,” Omar said. “But you might show a little respect for your home.”

“Ürümqi is my home.”

“This again,” Omar said.

“Always. Don't act surprised,” Anwher said. “I'll go like a ghost in the night.”

“You should write that down,” Omar said. “Hand me the smoke.” He slowly brought an unlit pipe to his lips and blew through it, moving with the measured patience of a man who routinely found himself talking to people too stupid to come around to his point of view. Anwher dropped a leather pouch into his grandfather's palm.

“And what will happen to the business when you go?” Omar asked.

“Maybe this stomach ulcer will clear up, is what will happen. I can't believe I've lasted this long. If I had any sense I would have bugged out years ago.”

Anwher looked out the top of his head when he said this, gauging his grandfather's reaction as best he could without making eye contact. He was ready to run, but Omar said nothing. Then the old man motioned for a knife.

Anwher pulled one from his pocket, snapped it open, and with a flourish presented the handle.

“Where's yours?” Anwher asked.

“Left it at a restaurant,” Omar said. He gouged at the pipe with Anwher's knife, the blade rasping against the bowl. “This pipe is a piece of junk.”

“It's fine.”

“Really? Look at this. It's clogged solid. What am I supposed to do with this?” Omar paused to stab at it some more. “What to do? Cleaning it properly will destroy it. You see what I'm saying?”

“Yeah, I see.”

“Ürümqi's not the way you remember it,” Omar said.

“It's not the way you remember it, either.”

“No Uyghurs left there, you know,” Omar said. “It's slope city now. They turned all the Uyghurs into Chinese. You have to cut them open to see the difference.”

“You don't say.”

Omar stopped working on the pipe and looked at his grandson. “The Chinese have black blood. That's the truth.”

“Sure,” Anwher said.

“Go to Kashgar if you want to be a man. Go someplace you can behave like a noble human being.”

“We'll see. I'm overflowing with noble ideas.”

“You're overflowing with something.”

“You wouldn't joke if you knew how serious I am about this.”

“Really?” Omar roared, his voice thick with rage. “You're serious? Be on your way, then.”

“Don't tempt me,” Anwher shot back.