Amber (33 page)

‘You bastard,' I muttered, feeling my cheek throb. Feeling the cool smoothness of the parquet floor by the door, the smell of wax filling my nostrils.

*

Leaving Tanya's apartment, I went straight to Daiva's mother's. When I knocked, it was Daiva who answered. For some moments we stood in silence. She leant against the door frame. She looked tired and unhappy.

‘You'd better come in,' she said.

She kissed me awkwardly on the cheek. In the kitchen Laura was sitting at the table, strapped into a child's chair. I paced quickly across the tiled floor and scooped her up, pulling her clumsily from the straps. I held her close to me, burrowed my head into her clothes, inhaled her smell. Tears welled in my eyes and I felt a sharp pain in my heart. Laura cried in my arms.

‘You're holding her too tight,' Daiva said softly, extracting Laura from my grasp.

‘I'm sorry,' I said.

I took a seat at the table and Daiva sat on the other side of our daughter.

‘I've called the apartment a few times, but you weren't there,' she said. ‘I got a little worried.'

‘I've been away.'

Daiva spooned porridge into Laura's mouth, and when she became restless took her into her arms. She muttered and struggled in her mother's embrace.

‘I've had some time to think,' Daiva said.

‘Don't,' I said, holding up my hands. ‘Don't tell me you've made a decision, don't tell me your mind is made up.'

She leant back, her arms folded around Laura, drawing her to her breast tightly.

‘Why not?'

‘I've messed things up, Daiva, I know that. Things have been hard and I haven't coped. I know I don't really have the right to ask you to wait before you make any decisions. I know we have talked about my problems many times already, but please let's wait a while. Let's wait a little while before we make any decisions about what we are going to do.'

‘Are you suggesting you are about to change something? I mean, something significant?'

I stood up and walked around behind her. I put my hands on her shoulders and rested my forehead against the back of her head.

‘I don't know what I am capable of changing,' I said. ‘I want to be honest. But I feel as if I have lost so many things, I don't want to keep losing those things that are so precious to me.'

‘There are things that have happened, Antanas…' she said quietly. ‘There are things I can't… won't live with. I don't know if I can believe you are capable of changing now, after all this time.'

I turned her head and held her face between the palms of my hands. Her pale blue eyes gazed into mine. I saw the fear hidden in the tiny creases beginning to web her skin.

‘I'm sorry, Daiva,' I said. ‘I'm so sorry.'

When I returned to my apartment, I called Tanya at work. We met in a bar on Jewish Street.

‘How are you doing?' she asked.

‘More lost than ever,' I confessed. ‘We did so many things there, Tanya. Things we never spoke about. When I first went to Afghanistan I really believed we were doing some good. I believed all the propaganda and lies. But the political instruction we were given and the ideals they pumped us full of just bore no relation to the situation. The longer we were there, the worse things got.'

‘It was war.'

‘Is that an excuse? Does that alter anything?'

She shrugged. ‘It's not about excuses. We can't change the past; we can hide from it, we can accept it or we can let it chew us up. There are only so many choices open to us, only so many things we can do.'

‘Is it that simple? Does that answer the wrongs we did? There are wider implications.'

‘There are? What, like the fact that Russian boys are doing the same in Chechnya now, having the same done to them? That in all wars everywhere people do things they could never have conceived they were capable of doing? That afterwards they could never conceive of how they did them?'

‘Do you want, now, to start paying for the things you did? Are you going to demand too that those who did things to you pay also?'

‘It's not just about the war,' I said, sighing. I buried my head in my hands. ‘Why did Vassily want me to hear this story? What good did he think it would do? In the end it was only Zena who kept me sane, there was nothing else for me to cling to. How could Vassily have done what he did, Tanya? Is it possible? I loved him. Was Kirov telling the truth?'

‘Look,' she said, ‘it's like this.' She reached over and took my hand. ‘If Kirov was right, what then? Will you hate Vassily, your friend, who did so much for you? And if Kirov was lying, will those years once more seem to have been good ones?'

She squeezed my hand. Her eyes burnt intensely. She shook me gently.

‘It is in nobody else's power, Antanas, to say whether Vassily betrayed you or not. Not Kirov nor I nor Kolya can do that. We cannot validate or invalidate the years you shared with him. That is something you need to decide for yourself.'

‘But how can I do that if I don't know the truth?'

‘I don't see what the truth has to do with it,' Tanya said. ‘Either you loved him or you didn't. What does truth have to do with that?'

She paused and we lapsed into silence. A young man was sitting in the corner of the café, near the window. As I watched him, a woman came in and he got up to greet her. I felt a little pang of envy at their easy, careless affection. Ten years younger than I and they had been born into a different world.

‘Have you been to see Daiva?' Tanya asked, following my gaze.

I nodded. ‘I remember something Vassily said to me once,' I said. ‘When we had been drinking too much, moaning to each other. “We have had the surface seared from our souls,” he said. “We are naked and everything hurts us, but we feel more too. Every feeling we have is sharper. Richer.”'

Tanya smiled. But then her lips twisted and tears sprang to her eyes. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and squeezed it tightly to her face. Her whole body shuddered and she cried quietly. I got up, went round to her and embraced her.

‘God,' she said after a while, wiping away her tears. ‘God, how I miss him.'

The workshop was cold, and I could smell the dampness and mould in the air. I lit the paraffin heater and sat down at my desk. For some time I remained slumped there in silence, gazing around – at the lathe, the bulging hessian sacks, the tubs of worked amber, Vassily's desk. In ancient times, in Lithuania, I had read in the writings of the philosopher Vydunas, it was the custom to inscribe upon a piece of amber a thought, a sentiment, that would accompany the dead on their journey to the other world.

Switching on the lamp above my work table, I pulled forwards a large bowl full of amber. Digging my hand into the beads, I felt their warm weight, the pull they exerted. Sifting through them, I found a large piece, clear as water, the colour of the sun at the end of summer, at its softest.

Clipping it carefully into the small vice at the edge of the desk, I began to engrave it.
A threefold cord is not quickly broken
. I smoothed the fine dust from its surface, rubbed it clean with a rag. Held it up to the light and watched its heart explode with fire behind the words.

On Friday morning the cemetery was busy. The gravel and dirt paths around the graves were carefully raked; there were flowers and a throng of candles glittering in the low yellow light. The temperature had plummeted suddenly in the night, and we woke in the morning to find that the rain had hardened to frost on the leaves, and the paths were slippery and hazardous. Halfway through the service it began to snow – light, dry flakes that danced in the air and blew like paper confetti around the graves. A young boy looked up, joyfully. He pulled his mother's sleeve and pointed into the sky. When she brushed his arm away, he opened his mouth and wandered off, head held back, trying to catch a flake on his tongue.

I took Laura in my arms and held her tight. She had fallen asleep. I watched the boy as he wandered between the graves, arms high, chasing the flurries of snow. When I kissed Laura's cheek, she opened her eyes for a moment. Looking up at me grumpily, she murmured something and then her eyes closed once more and she slept on.

When the service was over I handed Laura back to Daiva. The mourners picked their way carefully towards the gates of the cemetery, through the gravestones, the cold marble slabs, the trees whose leaves had still not been fully shed, the metal railings.

Standing at the foot of the grave, I looked at the picture of Vassily etched upon the gravestone. I squatted down. The earth was cold and damp beneath my knees. In my palm I pressed the amber, felt its smooth warmth against my skin, and, with the tip of my thumb, the sharp edge of the words I had engraved.

I dropped it on to the top of the coffin. It bounced on the lid and settled against a knot in the wood, above his heart. The snow had begun to fall harder, and already a thin white sheet had spread itself across the grave. A flake fell on the amber, but dissolved immediately. As I watched, a pale cold sheet formed, but the amber, warm from my palm, melted its own small space.

The workmen began shovelling earth into the grave. For some moments I gazed down silently, listening to the soft, rhythmic thud as it scattered heavily across the wooden coffin. The thwack of shovels biting into the wet soil, the grunts of the workmen, their knuckles blue with cold – the sounds followed me as I walked slowly back along the path to the gates.

Daiva was waiting with Laura in her arms. When I reached her, she slipped an arm around me. I pulled her close and we stood for some moments as the snow fell thickly around us. When I took Daiva's face in my hands and drew her to me, her eyes opened a fraction wider and a small smile parted her lips. In her eyes I saw a kind of light.

For advice, support and encouragement, thanks to Almantas Marcinkus, Petras Marcinkus, Arunas Slionys, Dalia Slioniene, Arunas Stumbra, Loreta Stumbriene, Kristina, Gabriele and, of course, Lukas.

I smoked the cigarette down to the very nub, until it almost scorched my lips. Through the blue veins of smoke I glimpsed her as she walked down the narrow alley. In her arms she held a child. My insides wrenched, suddenly, sharply. She held the child so tight against her breast. It was that, perhaps, that caught a ladder in my heart.

The café was called Markus and Ko. I had been reading the poems of Marcinkevicius.

I love you with hands black from crying,
I love you with darkness and death
forgetfulness and light
with the low grass on a sunken grave
I love –

I stubbed the cigarette out in the saucer of my coffee cup and struggled up, pushing my arms clumsily into my jacket, which tore as my fingers caught the thread of the lining. I hurried out into the cobbled alleyway, glancing down the street after her. The tops of the buildings were washed with brilliant sunlight, but at street level it was gloomy. She had not gone far. Behind me, from the bar where he had been standing, the waiter called out. I had not paid. I paused a second, snagged by the authoritative tone of his voice, but the young woman was walking fast. I followed her, my heart racing. She had reached the corner by the time I caught up with her. In the door of the café the waiter stood calling after me. Hearing the commotion, the woman turned, her dark hair sweeping across her shoulder as she flicked her head. The baby lay quiet in her arms.

I have an old Russian camera, a Triplet 69.3, presented to me by the university twenty-odd years ago on my fiftieth birthday. This morning I had picked it up as I left, struck by the quality of the light which nestled in the tips of the waking trees and caught in the tangle of church spires above the city. I stood on the corner, foolishly, with the shout of the waiter echoing from the stone walls, and the woman looking at me as if I was a madman.

‘Can I take your photo?' I asked.

‘My photo?' she said in Russian, a frown creasing her brow.

I put the camera to my eye and took one hastily, before she had a chance to refuse. I managed to get the baby in the frame too. It slept on completely unaware. My finger trembled as it pressed the shutter. She turned then and walked off at a smart pace.

The waiter caught my arm. I had not heard the sound of his approach as I stood watching her figure recede, my mind skimming back across the years, my chest heaving as I struggled to catch my breath.

‘You didn't pay,' the waiter said abruptly.

‘I haven't finished,' I said, turning to him.

‘You have now.' His hand thrust out for the money.

‘For kopecks you want to be so rude?' I asked.

‘Just pay.'

I live in a small apartment not far from the café. Originally the apartment had been bigger, with three rooms, but I live on my own and what do I want with so many rooms? I sold one to the family in the next apartment. As soon as the money was on the table the young man was around with two friends, knocking a hole in the wall and sealing off my doorway with some crude brickwork. I'm not complaining, God knows I need the money badly enough.

Often I sit by the window of my apartment and look out over the courtyard. In the summer the trees canopy the whole area, and in the autumn they turn a beautiful bronze. On the benches beneath the trees I see my neighbours gossiping or knitting, or staring vacantly out into the world that has changed so much they no longer recognise it. Sometimes I go and talk with them but more often than not I just sit and watch from the window.