Amber (8 page)

Vassily's face reflected the glow of the sun, which was setting across the village. On the opposite side of the pond a heron rooted among the reeds.

‘Jurate was the most beautiful mermaid,' he continued. ‘Her hair was golden and her eyes blue, bluer than the sky on midsummer's morning. She lived not far from here, just off the coast, beneath the waves in a palace built of amber.

‘In a small village like this one, there lived a young fisherman called Kastytis. Kastytis would take his boat and fish in the waters of the beautiful Jurate's kingdom. Jurate sent her mermaids to warn him away, but Kastytis paid no attention to the messengers of the goddess beneath the waves. He continued to sail out and cast his nets on the water above her palace.

‘One morning Jurate herself rose to the surface to confront the fisherman. But when she approached him in his boat, she instantly fell in love. She took the young fisherman with her, beneath the waves, to her amber palace, and there they lived.'

Vassily stubbed out his cigarette in the dirt. Clumsily the heron took to the air, its wings beating over our heads, up across the trees towards the seashore.

‘And they lived happily ever after?' Tanya asked.

She was sitting by him and with a small pang of jealousy I noticed their closeness. Vassily shook his head. He took another cigarette and Tanya lit it for him. The flare of the match illuminated their faces in a warm, bright glow. The sun had settled behind the trees and the air was pink and blue and cool.

‘Jurate, you see, was already promised to another,' Vassily continued. ‘Long before, Perkunas had promised the young goddess to the god of the waters. Perkunas was furious when he discovered that Jurate was in love with a mortal. He cast a bolt of lightning down from his heavenly throne, shattering the goddess's palace of amber. Jurate was imprisoned within the rubble of her ruined palace for all eternity.

‘When the winds are high and the waves break heavily upon the shore, the sea throws up fragments of her palace. And sometimes, too, it throws up these.' He touched the tear-shaped amber drop on the necklace that lay at Tanya's throat. ‘The tears of Jurate, a prisoner still, crying beneath the waves for her lost love, Kastytis.'

Before I turned off the desk lamp, I glanced around to see whether there was anything needing my urgent attention. There were bills that needed settling, but I was in no mood to deal with them. I gathered them together and pushed them into a leather briefcase to take with me. Switching off the lamp, I turned to the heater. As I extinguished the flame and bent to check it, I noticed a shadow flit across the door. Straightening up, I turned to call that the shop was closed. A dark shape stood outside, face pressed to the dirty glass, peering through.

‘We're closed,' I shouted.

The figure did not move. Irritated, I took the key from the desk and shuffled over. As I approached, the figure stepped back, away from the glass. It was an old lock, and the key fitted awkwardly, so that I had to jiggle it to get it to turn. It undid with a solid clunk. The door flew open, catching my wrist, twisting it painfully. Astonished, I stepped back as the figure moved forward rapidly, entering the shop, pushing the door closed.

‘
Zdrastvuy
, Antoshka,' the man said. ‘It has been a long time.'

‘Kirov.'

The lean figure nodded and grinned humourlessly, turning the key in the lock.

‘Don't want any of your customers disturbing us, now, do we?' he said.

‘I thought you were in prison…' I stammered.

Kirov laughed. He threw back his closely shaved head, his mouth opening to reveal gold teeth that glinted dully.

‘I would have come to see you at home,' he said, ‘but when I telephoned this morning you were not in.' I was about to explain I had been in the shower, but stopped myself. In his presence the familiar feelings flooded back; feelings I thought I had left behind, that the years and the haloperidol and vodka had scratched from the surface of my memory. The stink of thornbush. The scent of wood smoke. Oil. Sweat. Fear. Dust billowing up from the wheels of the APC. For a moment I was back there, in Afghanistan. I stood rooted to the spot, unable to speak, unable to move. It was as if he had leapt from my dreams; my nightmares.

‘What do you want, Kirov?' I asked, finally.

‘To renew old acquaintance.' He chuckled, wandering over to my desk. He placed the door key on the table and picked up one of the tear-shaped amber beads, examining it closely. ‘In these times of mourning it is important we all pull together, no?' He grinned again, dropping the amber on to the table.

‘He always was fascinated by amber,' Kirov continued, settling himself in Vassily's chair. He waved his hand, indicating I should sit. Reluctantly I did so, opposite him. ‘Never understood it myself,' he said, ‘not unless it was worth something. Very few of the stones and jewellery we smuggled out of Afghanistan were worth much. There was just the one, really. Just the one.'

His fingers formed a tight steeple, the tips resting against his lips. He gazed over them, his piercing grey eyes settling on me, examining me.

‘You would know all about that one, wouldn't you,' he said.

I shook my head. ‘No, Kirov, I know nothing.'

‘Oh, come now, Antoshka, he told you nothing? You know nothing of the bracelet?'

Again I shook my head.

‘We got it in Ghazis,' he said, gazing at me, openly examining the effect of his words. He laughed as if this were funny, but as he chuckled his eyes continued to stare at me stonily.

‘Vassily told me nothing,' I said. ‘You really are talking to the wrong person.'

‘You think you owe him something? I know, you're an honourable man, Antanas. The question is, was he?'

‘What do you mean?' I said.

Kirov eased himself forward in Vassily's chair. A sly grin crept across his face.

‘Vassily. Was he an honourable man? Was he worthy of your gratitude, your respect?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' I said.

I got up and took the key from my desk, indicating to Kirov I considered our conversation ended. Kirov, however, did not move. He watched me closely. With deliberate care he slid a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and extracted one. Slouching back into the chair, raising his feet and resting them on the edge of the desk, he lit the cigarette and blew a cloud of thin blue smoke into the air above his head.

‘No, you don't,' he said at last. ‘You have no idea what I am talking about, do you? How much did our friend Vassily…' He paused mid-sentence, took another drag on his cigarette and tapped the ash from it on to the floor. ‘How much did he tell you? About what happened there, in Afghanistan?'

‘We didn't talk about it.'

Kirov laughed. ‘I'll bet he didn't.'

‘I said “we” didn't talk about it,' I corrected him pointedly.

Kirov rose from his seat suddenly. He stepped over to me, raised a finger and prodded my chest.

‘There are things you should know,' he whispered. ‘There are things he should have told you. The kind of things a friend would have told you. You think he was being considerate of your feelings, stepping around the past, keeping it from you? You think it was for your sake he did not say anything? You're mistaken, Antanas. You're very mistaken. There are some stories Vassily should have told you. There are some confessions he should have made.'

He drew steadily closer, until I could feel his hot breath against my face. His eyes had narrowed and his lips were trembling. With a shudder I recalled the almost sexual thrill he had taken from killing in Afghanistan. Recalled the way he would lick his lips before we went on a raid, the way they would tremble like this as he tested the blade of his knife against the soft pad of his thumb, drawing a little blood, sucking it up, savouring it on his tongue.

I recalled the evening when, drunk, he had grabbed me in the heavy darkness by the latrines, the blade of his knife cold and sharp against my throat.

‘I've seen you watching me,' he whispered, his breath hot in my ear. ‘In the showers.'

I had heard of his reputation. I tried to pull away, but he pressed the blade deeper so that it bit into the soft flesh of my throat. I felt his hand reaching, searching. A torch beam startled him and I was able to slip out of his grip.

‘I'll get you,' he whispered.

‘Wouldn't you like to know what Vassily did?' Kirov taunted me. ‘Wouldn't you like me to tell you?'

I stepped away from him and stumbled against a worktop. As I steadied myself, my hand came down on a pair of shears we used for cutting metal. My fingers curled around them, behind my back, opening the blades. Kirov advanced on me. His eyes glittered maliciously. A sudden image of him bent over a body flashed through my mind, the knife bloodied in his hands as he slit around the ear of the dead Afghani. Taking the lobe, he lifted it with the care of a chef and eased it away from the side of the skull as his knife sawed at the gristle.

‘It's not a pretty story.' Kirov grinned. ‘But then that's why I like it so much.'

I whipped the shears from behind me and flicked the blades threateningly in his face. He stepped back, startled. Not giving him a chance to recover, I thrust them at him again, forcing him to take several paces backwards and stumble on the bags of unworked amber.

‘I want you out of here,' I said, my voice trembling. ‘I want you out and I don't want to see you back.'

‘Now, Antanas…'

‘Get the fuck out of my shop.'

I stabbed the shears forcefully towards him, and he had to step back again. This time he tripped and sprawled on the floor, in the soft pale dust of the amber.

‘I want you out, Kirov,' I breathed, standing above him, ready with the shears to slash him if necessary.

He got to his feet, dusting himself off as he rose. For a moment I thought he was going to lunge forward and fight, but he grinned and backed away. When I unlocked the door and opened it, he lingered a moment longer.

‘That bracelet, Antanas, it belongs to me,' Kirov said. ‘I paid for it with all those years rotting in a cell. Kolya has it,
da
? You know where he is? Is he here in Vilnius? I will get it – and him for what he did to me. While I was in prison, he thought he was safe, but now…'

‘I've not seen him, Kirov.'

Kirov nodded and grinned, as if he did not care whether or not this was the truth.

‘I'll find him,' he muttered. ‘You just stay out of it. If you don't…' He smiled. ‘I know where Tanya lives. She's all on her own now…'

When he left I locked the door immediately. Taking the key from the lock, I drew the blinds down over the windows. Without turning on the lamp, I slumped into my chair by the desk and waited until I had stopped shaking.

Kabul. February. The sky had cleared and the temperature had risen a few degrees. The mountains that ringed the city were thick with snow. Kabul was fragrant with the scent of wood fires, the air blue with smoke and sharp, bitter cold. The plane left Tashkent on the first. Our last days in Uzbekistan were an unbearable strain and Andrei Konstantinovich, a plump, red-faced conscript from Estonia, blew a hole in his hand while on sentry duty.

‘Don't fucking think you'll get out of it like that, you fat little bastard,' Oleg Ivanovich screamed, as the young boy lay moaning in the medical wing, three of his fingers missing. ‘I'll get you sent to the worst fucking hellhole you have ever seen. You'll wish it was your stupid fucking pimple of a head you had blown off!'

Kabul glittered faintly in the darkness below us. As the plane dipped down towards the earth, helicopters rose to escort us. Flares arced across the sky from the choppers, illuminating the night with their brilliant colours. We pressed our faces to the window and watched the spectacle like children on New Year's Eve. Kolya whooped.

‘The flares are for our protection,' the pilot explained.

‘The muj have ground-to-air heat-seeking missiles. The heat from the flares deflects them.'

We gazed down then into the dark creases of the hills, as if we might see, huddled in the shadows of night, small, fierce bands of insurgents. The hills were black, though, revealing nothing of the danger that might be lurking in them. The airfield, as we swooped down towards it, was dotted with hundreds of small fires, which glittered so that it seemed, for a moment, as if the plane had been upturned and beneath us stretched a starry expanse of sky. As we drew closer, we could see, huddled around these fires, the tents of the
dembels
– soldiers who had served their two years and were waiting for their flight home.

A large crowd of them gathered around the plane as it drew to a stop at the end of the runway. They surrounded us, staggering drunkenly, laughing and calling.

‘You don't stand a chance…'

‘You won't survive…'

‘Better to kill yourselves now. You don't want to know what they will do to you…'

We stumbled through the crowd to the trucks awaiting us, to take us through the town to our base. The moon hung heavily over the city, as though it were closer to the earth here than it had been back home. The streets were deserted, only soldiers visible at the corner checkpoints, waving us through peremptorily.

‘Curfew,' the driver explained.

In the centre of our barracks, on the edge of the city, a large eucalyptus spread its bare branches across a well-trimmed lawn. The dusty parade ground glimmered in the moonlight. I took a deep breath of the sharp night air and stood for a few moments gazing over the rooftops towards the mountains. They shone milky blue against the pitch darkness of the sky.

The rhythm of life soon established itself. Six a.m. reveille. Physical training. Breakfast. Line-up. Political studies. Weapons-cleaning. Lunch. Duties. Dinner. Lights · out. Reveille had to be perfect; three seconds and one hundred and eighty men had to get out of bed and fall in. After forty-five seconds we had to be in full uniform. One person failed and we all did it again. And again. And again until we were perfect.