Amber

by Stephan Collishaw

  The kishlak. Ghazis in the Hindu Kush. Once the door had been opened a crack it was hard to push shut. Crackling images fluttered like sparks in the night sky. The sand. The dust on my tongue, coating my teeth. A cobalt canvas pulled taut across the sky. Jagged mountains. Hands slick with blood.

  ‘Bring me a vodka,’ I told the girl who had idly sidled up.

  ‘It’s quiet tonight,’ I said when she returned, attempting to engage her in conversation. She looked at me sullenly for a moment, then wandered away.

  In the inside pocket of my jacket I had a photograph. I laid it before me on the stained tablecloth. It was of the two of us, Vassily and me, squatting on the beach. I had come across it in an album earlier in the day and put it in my pocket to show Vassily. In the photograph I looked small and pale and he, beside me, his arm around my shoulder, resembled a bear, his shirt opened to the waist, chest hair vying with his straggling beard. He was laughing, I sombre. Behind us a wave broke heavily on the rolls of white sand.

  I met Vassily in Afghanistan. I had been sent to that hellhole to do my national service. After those dark years, it was he who nursed me back to a semblance of health. It was he who put me back together again when I was finally discharged from hospital. He who taught me my trade, my love of jewellery. Vassily was a jeweller, the finest jeweller in Lithuania, a man whose talent was exceeded only by his capacity to waste it. He was a drunkard. A teller of tales. He was the closest friend I had and now he was dying.

  I closed my eyes, felt his bristles against my cheek. The smell of his breath; of vodka and garlic. His laugh, as large and deep as the forests of Siberia, as warm as Odessa in spring. I slipped the photograph back into my pocket. Tossing back the drink, I immediately called for another.

  At eleven I left. The streets were quiet as I walked back through the centre of the city to the trolley-bus stop. Few people braved the bitter wind. I turned up the collar of my jacket and stuffed my hands deep into my pockets. Before I reached the stop on Gedimino I heard, behind me, the rumble of wheels on the uneven cobbles and the electric click of the trolley bus. For a moment I hesitated, almost glad of the chance to miss it, to avoid going home. It pulled into the side of the road and its doors opened with a loud pneumatic hiss. At the last moment I ran, catching the doors as they were closing. They sprang back and I hoisted myself in.

  Daiva was sitting on the floor in the centre of our apart­ment, flicking through a magazine. She looked up when I came in, and raised a finger to her lips. Laura, our baby, was sleeping. Daiva’s eyes were ringed darkly, I noticed, from sleepless nights. I tried to smile, but the muscles in my face seemed paralysed and barely moved. ‘How is Vassily?’ she asked. She strained to control her voice, to soften the sharp tone that had charac­terised our conversations for so long now.

  I shrugged.

  Her eyes examined me; my cheeks were flushed from the exertion of climbing the stairs to the apartment.

  ‘You haven’t been…’ she began.

  I looked at her. Though I knew what she meant, I made her finish the question. Made her say the words once more. She faltered a moment, knowing she should not have begun but unable to hold herself back.

  ‘You haven’t been drinking again, have you ?’ she asked, her jaw setting in a hard, defiant line.

  ‘My friend is dying,’ I said slowly, enunciating each syllable with care, ‘and all you are bothered about is whether I have had a drink or not?’

  ‘Drinking doesn’t help, Antanas,’ she shot back angrily.

  I opened the door on to the balcony and stepped out into the night. A slight feeling of guilt niggled at me for having used Vassily as an excuse. Just a week before I had promised Daiva I would stop drinking. She had arrived home late one evening to find me in a stupor, oblivious to the screams of Laura in her cot in the bedroom. I had managed four days before I started again. The late traffic flowed easily down Freedom Boulevard, red lights glittering on the wet surface of the road. The television tower was lost already in the low clouds. For some minutes I stood there, as the wind blew in gusts, tousling my hair. I thought of Tanya, with whom I had shared a drink earlier, before I had gone through to see Vassily, thought of the smell of her hair, the softness of her body, the way she closed her eyes as she threw back her head and laughed.

  Daiva had not moved when I re-entered the room. I put my hand on her shoulder and felt her stiffen. She flicked over a page in the magazine, then another. I noticed she was not wearing the wedding ring I had made for her. The ring, embedded with a small, beautifully clear piece of amber, was on the table, beneath the reading lamp. I ran my fingers through her fair hair. She stood up and pulled away from me.

  ‘Don’t, Antanas,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘Daiva,’ I said.

  She stood a couple of paces from me for a moment. I tried to think of something more to say. I knew that if I apologised she might soften, might step forward and wrap her arms around me as I needed her to.

  Instead I said, ‘I’m suffering, you know.’

  But my tone was ironic, mocking, which was not how I had intended it. Daiva turned and walked rapidly away, shutting the bedroom door behind her. I slumped down on the sofa, pulling a thin blanket around me.

  Sleep washed over me as soon as my head settled against the rough cloth of the sofa arm. My eyelids drooped heavily. As I was sucked downwards, the spiral of flames exploded up towards me. The sound of crying mushroomed out of the darkness. A shriek. The sharp crackle of automatic gunfire. The heavy boom of an incoming rocket. My tongue was furred with dust. My scalp prickled. I fought to open my eyes.

  ‘Antanas. Antoshka!’

  A jagged escarpment, thin bush. Movement down there in the shadows of the ditch. A face.

  ‘Antoshka!’

  I could see it clearly now, slick with sweat, dark, fierce. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. My heart was pounding. My hands shook as I raised them. Kirov’s face jumped out of the flames. His eyes glittered malevolently. His thick lips twisted in a ferocious grin.

  ‘Antoshka,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘Shh,’ Daiva said.

  She knelt on the floor beside the sofa. Gently she stroked my forehead with the back of her hand.

  ‘It’s OK, you were dreaming,’ she said softly, drawing me up with her voice, pulling me to safety.

  I clung to her. She helped me up from the sofa and led me into the bedroom. Carefully she undressed me, throwing the sweat-sodden clothes into the laundry basket in the corner. I slipped between the cool sheets and, with trembling fingers, switched on the small lamp beside the bed. Daiva went into the kitchen and boiled the kettle. She came back a few minutes later with a cup of sweet black tea.

  ‘Are you OK ?’ she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, her forehead creased with concern.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  She took my hand and laced her fingers between my own. I felt the trembling recede, felt the muscles in my neck loosen. I sipped the tea slowly. Daiva settled in the bed beside me, close to me so that I could feel the warmth of her body. Beside us, in her wooden crib, the baby was sleeping. The hands moved slowly, cautiously, around the face of the clock. Daiva breathed gently in her sleep. It was only when the sky began to lighten and I heard the first trolley bus click down towards the Old Town that I pulled the sheet up over my head and allowed my eyes to close again.

  Chapter 3

  The summer of 1987 was hot. I was seventeen years old, nearly eighteen. School was over and the days stretched out languorously, long, sun-baked hours in which I was left to dangle. Waiting. In June I had taken my final school exams and the results had been one ‘satisfactory’ after another, to the distress of Ponia Marija, director of the children’s home where I lived.

  I had been lying on my bunk when Kolya poked his head around the door, grinning. He had come directly from her office, his results being no better than mine.

  ‘She wants to see you,’ he
said.

  I swung my legs off the bunk and got to my feet with a sigh. I paused for a moment, glancing out of the window at the younger children playing on the grass. Liuba was sitting by the side of the sandpit, in the shade of a large maple, watching her little sister dig a hole in the sand.

  ‘She’s just had a go at me!’ Kolya chuckled. ‘You’re in for it now.’

  I sloped down the corridor, gloomily resigned to a lecture, unable to affect Kolya’s nonchalance. He had been in the children’s home since he was a baby, and looked on Ponia Marija almost as a mother, while I had arrived at the age of six. I had settled in with difficulty, crying constantly for my mother, who had disappeared late one night in an ambulance and never come back.

  ‘You’re not stupid,’ she said, in her office. I gazed down at the polished wood parquet, avoiding her gaze. ‘It’s not as if you’ve no brains,’ she went on, more to herself now. She got up and looked out of the window at the young children jumping and racing across the parched lawn beneath the trees. The sound of their shouting drifted through the window, and from somewhere the faint sound of radio music: Pugacheva’s old hit ‘Harlequin’.

  ‘You’re a dreamer,’ Ponia Marija said decisively, as if the label made my lack of success somehow more palatable. She turned from the window. ‘That’s your problem. It always has been, since you were little. You were always sitting in some corner with your head in the clouds.’

  She moved closer to me and fondly ran her fingers through my hair. I shrugged.

  ‘I’ll talk to the director of the Technical School, see if we can get you a place there.’

  The director of the Technical School had, however, not been able to find room for me. As the summer wore on, burning its way steadily through the last remaining patches of greenery, I waited for the inevitable conscrip­tion papers to arrive. There was no getting out of it; there was nobody to get me a ‘white ticket’. The medical tests at school had found me fit and healthy.

  ‘It’ll be a laugh,’ Kolya said, grinning. We sat on the wall surrounding the children’s home. Kolya was looking forward to being conscripted. He lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply, wincing, his Asiatic eyes closing to a narrow slit.

  He took up an imaginary Kalashnikov and fired it, rat-a-tat-tat, in a swooping semicircle, mowing down the enemy. Liuba giggled. She was curled up in the shadow at Kolya’s feet. Kolya took another drag on the cigarette and passed it down to her. She took it delicately, between two fingers, and affected a pose she must have seen on television. I gazed out across the field that sloped away from the town, towards the lake. It was just possible to hear the screams of the youngsters splashing about in their swimming costumes.

  It seemed like a dream that I would be leaving this place and going out into the world. As a man. I imagined coming back to the doors of the children’s home, tanned, my face lined, my uniform neatly pressed, twenty years old. I imagined the way they would greet me, how Ponia Marija would look at me – ‘Antanas?’ – not believing. ‘My God,’ she would cry, ‘my God, is it you ? How you have grown, you’re a man!’

  ‘But what if… ?’ Liuba began. Her small face gazed up at Kolya, her eyes wide, her eyelashes tickling her high, broad cheekbones. ‘What if they send you to… ?’ Again she faltered.

  Kolya took the cigarette from her and kicked his heel against the wall. There was a moment’s nervous silence. ‘I’m not worried,’ he said. ‘They can send me… I hope they send me to Afghanistan. I’ll show those fucking Afghanis.’

  He seized his imaginary Kalashnikov again and this time leapt from the wall, the cigarette hanging from his thick lips. He rolled on the ground and turned to us, firing a spray of imaginary bullets. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. Liuba squealed and curled herself into a tight ball, her head disappearing between her knees. I laughed and jumped down on the other side, poking my head over with an imaginary gun of my own. Rat-a-tat-tat. Kolya came rushing at me, a blood-curdling yell splitting the warm summer air, the cigarette falling from his lips and dancing on the dusty earth. He hurdled the wall and fell on me, wrestling me to the ground. We tumbled in the grass, gripping each other hard. Liuba shouted and, feeling a burst of sudden, brilliant energy course through my veins, I pulled Kolya down and held him tight, glorying in the fact that Liuba was hanging over the wall watching me being victorious.

  Kolya and I received our conscription papers at the same time. We took the bus to Vilnius together. Liuba sobbed at the station. She threw her arms around Kolya’s neck and would not let go.

  ‘Look after him,’ she said to me, her eyes and cheeks red from sobbing.

  Even Ponia Marija had a tear in her eye. Kolya and I joked, dismissive of all the tears, which we found embarrassing. As the bus jerked forward out of the crowded bay a small jolt of fear clenched my stomach. I turned and waved to the group who had come to see us off, jostled by the crowd who had arrived for market.

  The bus pulled out on to the road and slowly picked up speed. Familiar scenes slipped past the dusty window; houses and trees and shops I knew intimately. The marketplace was already busy with stalls and shoppers. pushing each other as they competed for the first bargains of the day. Jeans and T-shirts shipped in from the West, almost new. Oily engine parts. Fresh eggs and, in the corner near the street, a little girl with a grubby face and torn dress selling kittens from a card­ board box. It was a late summer’s day, bright and warm, and it was impossible to be unhappy or tense for long. The feeling of unease, the ball of fear that lay heavily in the pit of my stomach, soon dissipated.

  It was the first time I had been to the capital and Kolya and I gaped in excitement at the size of the city. We jabbed each other, animatedly, pointing out buildings, cars, cafés and bars and, above all, girls.

  ‘Look at her!’ Kolya cried. ‘Oi!‘ He sat back with a blissful grin on his face. ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful girls in my life.’

  ‘And what about Liuba ?’ I teased him. ‘She told me to look after you and I think by that she meant keeping you in order.’

  ‘Who? Liuba who?’ Kolya grinned, eyes creasing into his high, rosy cheeks.

  ‘Me, on the other hand,’ I said, ‘I’m free to pick and choose.’

  I was envious of the attention and tears the beautiful young Liuba had spent on Kolya.

  We swaggered through the streets of Vilnius, stopping near the bus station for a drink.

  ‘How old are you two, then?’ the woman behind the bar asked with a wry smile, looking at our fresh young faces.

  ‘Old enough,’ Kolya said, trying to imitate the rough aggression of the men we had seen in bars in our town.

  The woman laughed. She leant forward, drawing her face close to Kolya’s. ‘Old enough for what ?’ she whispered, blowing the fringe of his hair away from his large square face. Her breasts rested heavily on the polished surface of the bar. Kolya’s face flushed and he fell silent. We drank our beers quietly and left.

  ‘She was too old or I would have had her,’ Kolya said as we made our way to the bus stop that would take us to the base we had been told to report to.

  I nodded. ‘She wasn’t bad, though, was she? I mean, even though she was getting on a bit.’

  ‘Fuck off, she was old enough to be your baba.’

  We laughed raucously, ignoring the crowd that pushed around us. When the bus came we shoved each other on, fighting through the bodies, giggling and jabbing each other. The passengers watched us good-humouredly, knowing where we going.

  Chapter 4

  Nobody was in the apartment the next morning when Tanya telephoned. The small red light blinked on the answerphone when I returned just after lunch. I hesitated a moment before pressing the button. Tanya’s voice filtered nervously from the clumsy apparatus. She sounded fragile and distracted.

  ‘Antanas? It’s Tanya.’ She paused. ‘They’ve taken Vassily into hospital.’ She hesitated again and I heard her laboured breathing above the crackle of the telephone, as if she were stifling a sob. ‘Perh
aps you should come to see him. They don’t seem hopeful.’

  For some moments, I heard the soft sound of her breath as she continued to hold the telephone receiver close to her lips. Then, quietly, gently, she replaced it.

  A dim light illuminated Vassily’s bed. In a steady, slow rhythm his chest rose and fell. His hands, punctured by drips, lay on the sheet by his side. I took his fingers between my own. The flesh was hard, calloused. Black hairs bristled from them. I felt the warm pulse. Life. His face was more shrivelled than it had been when I had seen him the previous day. His beard hung over the fold of the sheet. Closing my eyes, I caressed his fingers between my own. Fingers that had taught me so much.

  ‘He’s in and out of consciousness,’ Tanya told me when I bumped into her in the corridor. ‘Mostly he’s sleeping, but every so often he wakes. Sometimes he is very lucid and at times not at all.’

  ‘What have the doctors said ? Have they…’

  She shook her head but said nothing. I looked away down the corridor. We stood together awkwardly in the semi-darkness. I could see by the way her chest swelled and by the tightening of her jaw muscles that she was close to tears. She blinked twice. I laid a hand on her shoulder and she staggered slightly. We embraced clumsily, our stiff bodies colliding in the grimy corridor.

  ‘I’d better go in,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You will let me know if there is any change?’

  She nodded. For a moment longer she lingered, as if there were something more to be said. I longed to hold her, but did not move. She slipped through the doorway into the ward. The nurse came and I gave her a box of chocolates I had bought from a shop on the way, and some fruit from the village; the small expected bribes to make sure the patient was well treated. A bottle of champagne had already gone to the doctor. The nurse smiled, dourly.