Amber (10 page)

I glanced down the street to where the young girl had been standing. She had gone. I wandered back, looking around warily. In the dust where she had been standing was the short length of gold ribbon. I bent down and picked it up. It felt soft and smooth between my fingers. I stroked it against the skin of my cheek. The fine cloth snagged on the coarse bristles that sprouted unevenly across my jaw.

‘Antanas, comrade,' a voice called. I looked up. From the truck Vassily was waving for me to join him. ‘Come on, my friend, let's go.'

As the afternoon gave way to evening and the light began to fade, I remained at my desk, staring blankly out through the dirty glass door into the street. Around me rose the spectral
kishlak
Ghazis. The village lay east of Jalalabad, towards the border with Pakistan. An old stone bridge spanned a lively river, which plummeted from the mountains through ash and juniper woods and into the walnut orchard in the low winding foothills around the village. The marketplace was crowded. It was hot and noisy.

‘It was in Ghazis,' Vassily had said, ‘in the Hindu Kush. You remember it?'

I remembered Ghazis. There are some places that sear themselves on to the skin of your being, that mark you so indelibly no amount of drugs or alcohol or work or love will wash their shadow away.

I stood up. In a cupboard beneath the sink there was a bottle of vodka. We kept it there for when we stayed late. Sometimes, when we had finished the day's work and settled at the desk, paperwork strewn between us, untouched, unread, bills unpaid, Vassily would begin one of his tales, a snippet of information he had learnt and was eager to share, which would develop into a story. On these occasions we would get out the bottle and a couple of glasses and drink and talk until the telephone rang and Daiva demanded to know whether I would be coming home that evening.

The bottle was three-quarters full. Setting it on the desk, I rinsed a glass under the tap by the lathe. Choking smoke burnt the back of my throat and the flames crackled in my ears as they rushed along the dry wood, shrivelling the grass. Ghazis. Unscrewing the top of the bottle, I poured a generous measure into the glass. I raised it to my lips. The smoke plumed from the hilltop, like a volcano. From nowhere, then, the pitiful cry of a child arrested me, catching all at once the hate, the raging anger from my heart. The glass hesitated against my lip. I stopped, the dust rising in swirls around me, the smoke, forced down by the wind, curling into the trees. I looked back up towards the barely visible village, the sun behind it dark and brooding. Lowering the glass to the table, I rolled up my shirtsleeve and examined the crinkled skin.

A soft knock at the door startled me. Pulling down my sleeve awkwardly, I twisted around, half expecting to see Kirov's face once more. But it was Tanya who stood in the doorway, the light of a street lamp illuminating her from behind. I unlocked the door and let her in.

‘You're all in darkness,' she said. ‘I didn't think you were here.'

I looked around. A buttery slab of light from the street fell through the glass in the door, faintly illuminating a patch of floor. The rest of the shop had dissolved into the evening gloom.

Tanya took off her coat and shook it, before hanging it over the back of a chair. She relit the paraffin heater and turned on my desk lamp.

‘Are you OK?' she asked, noticing the opened bottle, the glass on the table and my shirtsleeve, hanging loosely around my wrist.

‘Kirov was here,' I said.

‘Kirov?'

‘Vassily never spoke of him?'

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘Not that I can remember.'

‘We served together in Afghanistan. Vassily told me he was in prison.'

A look of concern crossed Tanya's face. ‘Did he hurt you?' she said. ‘What happened?'

‘No, he didn't hurt me,' I reassured her. ‘He wanted to know about the bracelet.'

Tanya pulled the two chairs close to the heater and drew me down next to her. I held my fingers up before the flames. They were, I noticed, shaking.

‘I can't stop them,' I said to Tanya, ruefully. ‘Every time I look at them, they're trembling like leaves on the trees.'

She took my hands in hers and held them tight, massaging them gently with the tips of her fingers.

‘Tell me about Kirov,' she said. ‘Tell me what he said.'

For a moment I weighed in my mind whether I should tell her of the veiled threat he had made against her. I decided not to.

‘He is under the impression,' I said, ‘that I am after this bracelet. He was warning me off, I think. He is after Kolya.'

Tanya shook her head, a bewildered frown creasing her forehead.

‘Kirov was taunting me,' I added. ‘He suggested Vassily was not the friend I thought he was, that he was not as honourable as I believed.'

‘Its not true, Antanas,' Tanya said. ‘You know Vassily has been a good friend to you.'

‘Of course, Tanya,' I reassured her. ‘He rescued me. He nursed me back to health. If it was not for him I would not have survived, I wouldn't have found the strength to carry on.'

Tanya stared into the flickering jets of flame for a few moments, silent. They were changing slowly from blue to orange as the heater warmed up.

‘Do you know where Kolya is?' she asked finally.

‘No.' I shrugged. ‘Not unless it said on the letter.'

‘Does this Kirov know where he is?'

I shrugged again. ‘I don't know what Kirov knows.'

‘Would he harm Kolya?'

If I paused before I answered, it was not because I had any doubts about whether Kirov would be prepared to kill to get what he wanted.

‘We were on a patrol, once, in the mountains,' I said to Tanya, ‘when we got cut off. Snipers had opened up on us from behind the walls of a ruined village, driving us farther up the mountain. Darkness fell, trapping us at the top of a ravine. The temperature dropped well below zero and we were hopelessly equipped. We sat huddled up in a crater, fearing that at any moment the muj would discover us and if they didn't the cold would kill us before the night was out.

‘There was an Uzbeki boy, Yuri. He decided he was going to make a break for it. If he had been seen or captured he would have drawn attention to the rest of us. We tried to stop him but he would not listen. As he climbed out of the crater, Kirov caught him. Covering the boy's mouth with one hand he slit his throat. He held the boy tight as he jerked about, blood squirting out across the rock, pooling at our feet. Not one of us said a word. Kirov held him until he was dead, then pushed him into the corner. We sat through the night with his body there, waiting until first light when some back-up finally arrived.'

Tanya shuddered.

‘Kirov will kill without compunction,' I said, realising, as I said the words, their significance.

‘What are we going to do?' Tanya said, after a while.

‘I told Vassily I was not interested in hearing about how he got the bracelet.'

‘But don't you want to know what Kolya has to say?'

‘I've spent eight years trying to forget about it all.'

‘Much good that has done you,' Tanya said. ‘Still you dream, you wake in the night trembling, shouting. Your drinking is pulling apart your relationship with Daiva. Perhaps it's time you faced up to things.'

I stood up and walked over to the door. The wind gusted, rattling the glass in the window. Sullen clouds darkened the sky, bearing night prematurely.

‘You think I should try to find him?' I said.

She got up and walked over to me. I felt her standing close behind me. She rested her head between my shoulder blades.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Vassily wanted you to. I think you should, for him. He made me promise to make you. It was important to him and it's important that you stop burying your experiences, it isn't helping you. And so what if Kolya just wants to sell the bracelet to buy drugs? What is that to you?'

Not answering, I stared out into the street.

‘You have no idea where to start looking for him?' Tanya asked.

‘No,' I said, ‘I haven't seen him. Not since Afghanistan.' I turned from the doorway. ‘The letter,' I said, ‘if only I had not thrown away the letter.' I had a sudden vision of it, snagged in the branches of the birch tree by the banks of the Vilnia.

‘What?' said Tanya, seeing me hesitate as I crossed the room.

‘The letter,' I said. ‘I was in the Uzupis Café. I screwed it into a ball and tossed it out towards the river. It caught – in the twigs. Do you think it's possible… it's still there?'

Tanya looked dubious. ‘I don't think there is much hope.'

Tanya's apartment was warm and inviting after the icy wind. It was less than a kilometre from the shop, but in the time it took us to walk that short distance we were chilled to the bone. Tanya's teeth chattered as I closed the door behind us.

‘I'm going to take a hot shower to warm up,' she said.

She disappeared into the bathroom. In the sitting room I turned on the standard lamp. The sofa was still made up as a bed. Clogging the surface of the low table were empty cups, sticky glasses and overflowing ashtrays. The air was thick with the smell of stale cigarette smoke and brandy. Clothes littered the floor.

Finding a clean glass, I poured myself a drink from the half-empty brandy bottle and drank it quickly. I poured a second and relaxed with that. Glancing at my watch, I noticed it was late. Instinctively I felt a spasm of guilt. I almost rose, before I remembered than Daiva had gone, that she would not be waiting for me. That the apartment would be empty. I sank back into the sagging armchair and drained the second glass. Remorsefully I considered how many times I had made her wait. How many times I had not been able to face going back to the apartment and had continued drinking with Vassily instead.

Hopelessly, and though I knew better, I got up and went over to the telephone. Dialling the number for our apartment, I listened as it rang.

After a minute I replaced the receiver and stood by the table, my mind skimming back across the last couple of years, recalling the number of times I had failed to come home to her, the number of times I had shamed her in front of her colleagues with my drunken sarcasm so that she had stopped inviting them to our apartment.

Hearing footsteps behind me, I turned. Tanya was dressed in a white cotton dressing gown; her hair was wet and dangled around her face in loose dark curls. She smiled hesitantly and my heart lurched. Zena, I thought, and trembled at how much she looked like that other beautiful young woman in that other world, that other time.

‘I'm sorry about the mess,' Tanya said, looking at the detritus of her life scattered untidily about the room. ‘I just can't seem to…'

Her explanation faded away when she saw how I was looking at her. When I reached out for her, she did not step away. I pulled her close. She rested her head against my chest. My lips grazed her hair, which was damp and smelt fresh and clean. I felt that if I reached down and touched her she would not stop me, that she needed closeness, the physical touch of another human, the comfort of skin against skin. I longed to, but didn't. In the bedroom, in the pale light that filtered through half-drawn curtains, I undressed quickly and slipped in between the clean sheets. We lay close; I could hear her breathing, could feel the heat from her hand by my own, could smell her soap-scented body. With every part of my body I could sense her.

‘Tanya,' I said, to remind myself who it was by my side.

She turned over and I felt her breath on my skin, could see her face milky cool in the light of the moon.

‘Yes?' she whispered.

I reached out and ran a finger gently across her cheek.

‘I feel confused,' I confessed. ‘Confused and afraid.'

Mistaking my meaning, she sighed and nodded. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘Me too.'

I withdrew my hand and we lay close but not touching. After some minutes she turned from me and later I heard the catch in her breath and a slow exhalation and knew she was sleeping. My mind spun. The image of a girl played across the ceiling above me. As much as I tried to banish it, she returned. Screaming. Her face distorted by fear. Screaming.

Leaving Tanya, I went back to the sitting room and poured myself another two drinks. When I went back to bed, I lay and watched the wind-tousled shadows of the trees dancing on the ceiling and thought of Daiva and Laura and where they were and wondered whether Laura had noticed my absence. I recalled the soft sound of her breathing as I lay in bed. The moments when, waking in the night, I would lift my ear from the pillow and hold my breath to listen for some sound of her, straining, unable to relax back into sleep before I heard the low sigh, or a faint rustling as she moved in the crib.

Spring had come suddenly, the year I met Daiva. Buttery yellow petals broke through the melting snow and the clouds flew higher, large billowing cumuli, which sparkled in the sunlight. Sharp showers sluiced away the last of the grey packs of ice, and children reappeared in the streets, shouting and laughing and running after a winter of incarceration.

In the early summer, Daiva and I had taken the trolley bus to the edge of the city and wandered in the forest, down to the river, where we lay in the deep grass at the edge of the water, watching the heron poking around the fields and the trout lolling lazily in the warm shallows.

I clung to our desire; found peace in the act of love. There no thought was required. I abandoned myself to the cool smoothness of her skin, the feel of her ribs, the arch of her belly, the sharp, hot exhalation of her breath.

As the months unfolded, the tightness of my chest loosened and the crushing weight lifted from me. I no longer jumped at the sudden crackle of static on the telephone line. I no longer woke in the night, with a scream on my lips, upright and soaked with fear. That other life – that life I slewed off, like a snake its skin, as Vassily put it – no longer haunted me with its dark emptiness.