Amber (5 page)

‘Make me.'

The kettle shrilled more loudly. The rising pillar of steam jigged in the breeze from the window. My hand flew up from my side. I felt it move as if I had no control over it. It rose in slow motion; we both watched it rise. I felt the sharp sting on my palm as it made contact with her cheek. Saw her head jerk aside. Her hair flicked forwards, hiding her face. She gasped. My hand hung suspended in the air, where her face had been, the palm itching. I drew it back, rubbed it. The kettle juddered on the hob, the steam billowing up towards the ceiling, clouding the kitchen. Daiva dropped to her knees and crumpled forwards. For a moment she was silent and then a low howl broke from her. Her body trembled. She curled over into a ball, shuddering, lost in her crying.

Kneeling beside her, I felt the tears welling in my own eyes. Gently I touched her on the shoulder. I brushed the hair back from her cheek, ran my fingers across the smooth silk curve of her back. I took her arm, tried to pull her close to me. She resisted. She clenched herself tightly. A ball of pain.

‘I'm sorry,' I whispered.

Above us, on the hob, the kettle shrieked. I stood and lifted it carefully, using a towel so as not to burn my fingers. I turned off the flame and stood and leant forwards across the cooker, feeling the scorching heat of the steam dampen my forehead, condense in my hair like dew on a spider's web. On the floor behind me Daiva did not move. She cried softly, unstoppably.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, but already my heart was hardening, irritated by her refusal to listen. A bitter little thought niggled at the back of my head. She had won. I crushed the idea immediately.

‘Really, I'm sorry,' I said. But I turned then, feeling the anger building again.

Going into the bedroom, I dressed quickly. The baby was still sleeping in the cot and I stopped for a moment by her side and leant down and brushed my fingers across the soft down on her head. When she stirred, I stepped back quickly, fearing I had woken her. I hesitated in the doorway. Daiva had not moved.

Outside, I lifted my head and gazed up into the darkness. The clouds hung low, scraping soft-bellied across the roofs of the nine-storey apartment blocks. I closed my eyes, pressed my fingers into the sockets, squeezing, until star bursts kaleidoscoped across the skin of my eyelids. A ripple of sorrow brushed across my face. Settled on it. When I lifted my fingers and opened my eyes, the dots and stars whirled across the sky, flashing among the street lamps and the brilliant sudden glow of headlights. A car engine roared, as someone revved it hard. My mind was spinning in the tail of the light particles. I felt the ground shift and open a crack. My hands trembled and my feet almost turned in the direction of the bar on the corner, in the basement of the five-storey block just off Freedom Boulevard. I stopped, Davia's voice tolling in my ear. ‘It won't help. It's not an answer.'

‘I know,' I said, then looked around, momentarily embarrassed that I had actually spoken the words aloud. I ran a hand through my hair. I know. Did she think I did not know? Did she continually need to tell me it wasn't the answer? Did she not understand that if there was an answer, if there was a relief from this crushing fear, this darkness, I would have taken it? Would gladly have taken it, whatever it might have been.

A sob of desperation welled up inside me. ‘Oh God,' I murmured. A shower of images scattered across my mind. Scorching, brilliant sparks that settled and burnt the thin membrane of forgetting I had woven to protect myself. A scream. A shout. A body, split like a ripe fig at the side of the road. The sweet-sour stench of death. Hot dust in the back of my throat. The crackle of gunfire.

My mind wobbled, trembled, shivered on the edge of the abyss. I had worked so hard to forget those years in Afghanistan. I had manhandled a thousand rocks into the hole: my craft, friends, marriage, child, love and anger, the rubble of life, and now I turned to find it still open, yawning darkly, waiting to swallow me.

The base we reported to was a sprawling site to the north-west of Vilnius. We were handed uniforms: green suits with a red band on the shoulder, boots as stiff as wood, so inflexible we could not move our feet. We laughed, tramping around the barrack room, clumsy as elephants, our heads newly shaved. Clowning, excited still.

Later we were divided into different companies and told we would be going abroad. Kolya and I found ourselves in the same company.

‘Look at the belts they gave us,' Kolya said, slapping his down across the bunk.

‘What about them?'

‘Look how badly made they are. It's clear, isn't it?'

A small group gathered around the bunk, examining their belts.

‘What do you mean?' someone asked.

‘You know how it goes?' Kolya said. ‘They give the good belts to those going to Germany or somewhere nice, and to those going out east…'

The group fell momentarily silent. We stared at the belts as though they held the key to our futures. There was no doubt the belts we had been given were of an inferior quality, even by the standards Kolya and I were used to in the children's home.

‘You don't know shit,' someone said.

There were mutterings of agreement and the crowd dispersed quietly. The clowning stopped, though, and when we did physical exercise the next morning we threw ourselves through the assault course with violent determination, toughening ourselves up, welcoming the cuts and bruises and aching muscles.

Kolya was right about the belts. At the end of our first month of training we were put on to a plane at Vilnius airport. We were not told our destination, but the long flight took us south-east, across the vast plains of Russia to central Asia. When dawn broke it illuminated, thousands of metres below us, barren scrubland, stretching to the horizon. As the sun climbed higher and its rosy flush spilt across the earth, the foothills of a distant mountain range bubbled up darkly from the plain. A city was spread out below us, dissected by a sinuously curving river, still shrouded in the grey light of early dawn. Only the upper tips of the acres of high-rise apartment blocks were caught by the sun, reaching like bloodied fingers for the underbelly of the plane. We landed in Tashkent in the early hours of morning.

At the airport a row of KamaZ trucks were waiting for us, their tarpaulins flapping and billowing in a strong breeze. We jumped up into the trucks, tired and bleary eyed, and gazed out in amazement as we bumped through the huge city; streets lined with poplars, monumental tower blocks the like of which I had never seen in my life. Fountains glittered in the morning sunlight; the squares seemed wider than the small town I had been raised in.

The trucks took us to a large base outside the city, which, in contrast to its barren surroundings, was lined with trees beneath which stretched tidy green lawns. Large portraits of politburo members hung at regular intervals down the long avenue that ran from the main gates of the compound to the large concrete barracks and parade ground.

Training began in earnest almost immediately. Equipped with backpacks, filled with soft sand till they weighed thirty kilos, and wearing eighteen-kilogram bulletproof vests, we were marched up mountains. Boots slipping on the dusty scree, my hands were soon covered in a thousand small cuts and bruises mottled my body. My muscles ached, my feet were blistered, and my lungs burnt in the hot dry air. Though it was late autumn, it was still hot in the daytime. In the evening, as soon as the sun dropped, the temperature plummeted.

One morning, Oleg Ivanovich, our company commander, drove us into the desert. The low, stony scrub stretched away into the distance, disappearing into the early morning haze some kilometres away, with barely a ripple in the earth. He ordered the driver to stop when the desert surrounded us on all sides and no evidence of civilisation was to be seen. Ivanovich nodded at a pile of shovels in the back of the KamaZ.

‘You drive exactly one kilometre up the road,' he said, jerking his chin ahead now, to where the road shimmered into liquid on the horizon.' Then you pull off and take these shovels and dig a hole deep enough so that I cannot see a fucking trace of this ugly truck. Is that understood?'

Quick nervous glances flicked between us. Kolya looked as though he was about to protest but as he opened his mouth Yuri, a pale young Uzbeki conscript, broke in.

‘Yes, sir,' he said.

Ivanovich glared around at us. ‘Good,' he said, and a thin sarcastic smile twisted his lips. He reached beneath a seat and pulled out a bottle of vodka. From the back of the truck he took a stool and wandered away from the road.

‘What the fuck ?' Kolya said, making sure Ivanovich was well out of earshot. He turned on the young Uzbeki boy. ‘You stupid little fucker. If you're so keen, you can go dig the hole yourself.'

‘Leave him alone, Kolya,' I said. ‘It's not his fault Ivanovich is such an arsehole.'

‘I was just keeping you out of trouble,' Yuri protested. ‘If you go shooting your mouth off, he'll be on your back again.'

‘I don't need your help,' Kolya snarled.

We drove a kilometre down the road and the driver pulled off into the low scrub. We took the shovels from the back of the truck and Yuri measured a large rectangle in the firm, dry earth. He subdivided the rectangle and apportioned each of us an area to dig. Kolya glowered at him. The earth was cracked and hard. The shovel bounced from the dusty surface, jarring my arm. Using the edge, it was possible to lever up small clods, which we tossed over our shoulders. Beneath the baked surface the earth was less resistant. We worked hard, dispensing with our jackets, feeling the sun beat heavily on our backs, charring the skin on our necks. We worked until every muscle strained and it seemed impossible to continue gripping the shovel, the finger muscles cramping, raw blisters rising and tearing, until our hands were pink with blood and split flesh. We dug down into the parched Uzbeki earth, and felt it rise around us like a grave, dug until all we desired was to lie on the cool earth and give ourselves to eternal rest.

When we had dug so deep the sinking sun could no longer torture us, there was a cry. We stopped and clambered out on to the sloping mounds of earth, lay on our backs and gazed into the cool blue sky. We heard the engine of the KamaZ fire, but did not look up. Yuri trotted away across the sand, turned one hundred metres away and waved the driver on. The truck rolled down the slope into the hole and we lay and waited on Yuri's verdict.

‘I ain't moving. I don't give a shit, I'm not digging any more,' Kolya said.

Yuri stood by the road, shimmering in the light of the sun, which was setting. We watched him. He did not call or indicate whether he could see the top of the truck, which was close to the edge of the hole, but came trotting slowly back across the sand towards us. We sat up and watched him approach. His pace slowed as he came close and he slouched wearily across the last twenty metres of sand, his shoulders drooping.

‘It's fine,' he said. ‘You can't see anything.'

Kolya stood up. His face was set like concrete and his eyes flickered with fury. He slipped down the slope to where Yuri was standing, and grabbed the young Uzbeki's dirty vest.

‘You fucker!' Kolya spat.

‘What?'

‘Why didn't you just call from over there?'

‘What do you mean?'

Kolya pushed Yuri back. Yuri looked at him, fearfully.

‘You know what I mean, you little arsehole.'

He jabbed Yuri hard with his fist. Yuri stumbled, raising his arms to defend himself. We watched in silence from the low mound of earth. No one had the energy to move and intervene. As Yuri fell to the ground Kolya kicked him viciously. Yuri screeched, a shrill, fearful protest.

At that moment the figure of Oleg lvanovich staggered into view, black against the setting sun. He approached slowly, weaving from side to side, stumbling occasionally in the brush. His face, we could see when he drew closer, was scarlet. He stopped when he was close to us and gazed around with an irritated but bewildered look on his face.

‘Where's the fucking truck ?' he yelled, gaping distractedly from one face to another. ‘What the fuck have you done with it ?'

‘He's sunburnt,' someone whispered.

‘And pissed.'

‘He must have fallen asleep in the sun.'

‘He's probably got sunstroke.'

lvanovich staggered forward towards Kolya, who was still standing over the cowering figure of the Uzbeki conscript. He raised a finger and stabbed it against Kolya's chest.

‘Where's the truck ?' he snarled, and bent over and vomited on Kolya's boots. He straightened up, but his eyeballs were floating loosely around the whites of his small eyes and a few moments later his legs gave way and he crumpled to the ground with a thud. We gathered around his supine figure, a silent, bemused crowd.

‘Is he dead ?' Yuri whispered, his voice shaking.

‘Don't be so stupid.'

‘Better get him back to base as quick as we can.'

We loaded Ivanovich on to the back of the KamaZ and drove back to base. The sun had already set and it was dark by the time we dragged his unconscious body into the medical wing.

Word of our posting came through at the end of our period of training. All of us had heard whispered stories about Afghanistan. For the first years of the conflict the reality of the situation was kept secret by the government. Even when the zinc coffins began coming home on the planes they called black tulips, the silence was maintained. There was no suggestion on the grave­stones of those first young men that they had died in battle. But as the years passed and conscripts returned to their homes after service, rumours fluttered like dark angels from ear to ear, with stories told in hushed voices of soldiers flayed, of limbs chopped from bodies, of coffins filled with earth because there was nobody left to fill the uniform of dead sons sent home.

In the faces of some the panic was visible – tight, pale lips and eyes that flickered rapidly from one object to the next, as if searching for something. Others disguised their fear with coarse jokes and laughter that was a little too loud.