The morning of February 24. Prison isolation room. Concrete room, ten by ten feet.
Table, two chairs, a bare light overhead. Dzhumabayev sat across from Zulfiya. Between them: a report form, a pen, and a pack of Kazbek cigarettes.
Zulfiya was silent. Dzhumabayev asked questions. Calmly, without pressure.
He was a professional and knew shouting would get him nowhere with this woman. Zulfiya Akhmetova was not the kind of person who broke under noise. She was a wall.
A quiet, solid wall you couldn’t push through headfirst. “Citizen Akhmetova, did you prepare food yesterday for prison staff?” Silence.
“Did you cook pilaf?” Silence. “Three staff members are dead.
One is in critical condition. Do you understand that?” Zulfiya looked at the table.
Face still. Hands in her lap. She didn’t move.
Dzhumabayev didn’t rush. He questioned her by the book. Question, pause, next question.
No raised voice. No threats. He wrote in the report: “Refused to answer.”
The questioning lasted four hours. Zulfiya did not say a word. The second interrogation, February 25.
Same walls, same table, same chairs. Dzhumabayev came with the preliminary lab results. “Thallium was found in the leftover pilaf, in a concentration many times the fatal dose.
Alkaloids of plant origin were also found, believed to be aconitine.” Dzhumabayev set the lab report on the table. “Zulfiya Kadyrovna, the lab confirms that the food you prepared contained poison.
Three men are dead. This is Article 88, Part 2 of the criminal code of the Kazakh SSR: intentional murder of two or more persons. Penalty: ten to fifteen years, or death.
Do you understand that?” Zulfiya raised her head. For the first time in two days she looked the investigator in the eye.
Then she said quietly, evenly, without expression: “They had it coming.” Dzhumabayev did not move. Only the hand holding the pen paused for a second.
Then he wrote: “The suspect has begun to testify.” And Zulfiya started talking. She talked for three days, six or seven hours at a stretch, with breaks for food and sleep.
She spoke calmly, flatly, as if dictating a grocery inventory. No emotion, no dramatic pauses, no tears. Dzhumabayev wrote it all down.
Two notebooks over three days. Zulfiya told everything. From the beginning.
About Thursdays. About how women were taken from the barracks every Thursday. How Zhuravlev chose them.
How Galimov sat in the corner and watched. How Savchenko smiled and promised early release. About Natasha Belyaeva, 22.
Grocery clerk from Tselinograd. Three years for a shortage worth about $300. How they called her to headquarters two weeks after arrival.
How she came back before dawn. How she lay on her bunk without moving, eyes open. About the others.
Zulfiya named names, surnames, dates. Who, when, how many times. Over three years, dozens of women.
Zulfiya didn’t know every name, but the ones she knew, she gave. Raikhan Amarova helped. Quietly, from her corner of the barracks, prompting her.
“There was Sveta too. Morozova. They took her in ’77.
And Galina from Barracks Two, don’t remember the last name. And that redheaded one from Pavlodar, the one who was gone later. Hanged herself in the bathhouse.”
Just like that. As if discussing the weather. Zulfiya told him about Doctor Kovaleva.
About abortions. About medical notes listing household injuries and falls down stairs. About guard Zueva, who left every Thursday at nine sharp and knew nothing.
She told him about her daughter. About Aigul, who died of diphtheria while Zulfiya sat behind barbed wire. About the letter from her mother.
About the denied funeral request: “Not allowed.” And she told him how she prepared. Three months.
Herbs. Thallium. Kuzmin.
Pilaf. Dzhumabayev listened, wrote, smoked one cigarette after another. By the end of the third day the isolation room was blue with smoke.
When Zulfiya finally stopped, Dzhumabayev asked the same question reporter Somov would ask thirteen years later. “Do you regret it?”
Zulfiya looked at him. For a long moment. Then answered: “I regret that I only got three.
I should have fed the ones who looked away too.” Dzhumabayev wrote it down. Closed the notebook.
Stood up. Walked out of isolation. Lit a cigarette on the steps.
His hands were shaking. Not from the cold. He stood in the freezing air for ten minutes and smoked two cigarettes.
Then he went back into the dead warden’s office and sat down to write his report. Dzhumabayev’s report went to the regional prosecutor in Karaganda. From there—to Alma-Ata, to the republic prosecutor’s office…
