Zinotis laughed. ‘Vassily and I always talked about ancient jewellery. He had a fascination with the history of amber and its spread around the ancient world. He had some wonderful stories about its origins.’ I nodded and paused. Zinotis raised his eyebrows, waiting.
‘I’m looking for somebody,’ I said, ‘and I thought there was the smallest chance you might be able to help me.’
‘I can try.’ He smiled, a little bemused.
‘Kolya. Kolya Antonenko,’ I said. ‘He served with Vassily and me in Afghanistan. Perhaps you have heard something about him through the veterans organisation?’
‘Kolya Antonenko?’ Zinotis played with his half-moon spectacles. He thought hard, then blew out his cheeks. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Have you any idea who might be able to help me find him?’
Zinotis twisted the spectacles between his fingers. His watery blue eyes examined me.
‘It’s important, is it?’ he asked.
I hesitated a moment, considering what I should tell him.
‘Before Vassily died,’ I said, ‘I went to visit him. He was sick, but very lucid. He told me about a jewel. He wanted Kolya to have it.’
Zinotis followed my words with evident interest. When I paused he urged me to continue.
‘Did he describe the jewel?’ he asked.
‘You know what he was like with his tales,’ I said. ‘Perhaps this was no more than one of those. He said it was a bracelet. A filigree gold band which held an oval piece of amber. The amber was a large piece, I believe, and without flaws, but what interested him were the inclusions in it. There were two beetles, perfectly preserved, copulating.’
‘This bracelet,’ Zinotis clarified, ‘it is something Vassily had? He gave it to you?’
I hesitated again. ‘No,’ I said, ‘not exactly, but he wanted Kolya to have it.’
At that moment there was a knock on the door. Zinotis stood up. He looked across at the door and seemed to consider whether he should answer it. After glancing at me, he stepped over to it and, opening it, poked his head into the corridor. When, a few moments later, he closed the door and turned back to me he was once more polishing his spectacles on the sleeve of his pullover.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. He paused and fitted the spectacles back on to his nose and gazed at me through them, as if weighing me up. ‘I can certainly ask around. This bracelet, though… would be very interesting to see, if you were able to bring it to me. It might be worth quite something, if it’s as good an example as you suggest.’
‘I’m not interested in the jewel,’ I said. ‘Vassily wanted me to find Kolya. There is something he wanted me to hear from Kolya, something about the bracelet. I don’t know, it makes little sense to me.’
Zinotis continued to stare at me. His gaze was at once penetrating and absent. ‘Kolya Antonenko,’ he said, turning the name on his tongue. ‘Maybe I did meet him, with Vassily, now that you mention it – years ago. I will have to make some enquiries.’
I stood up, a little disappointed that he knew no more.
‘I’m sorry to have taken up your time,’ I said, holding out my hand.
‘Not at all,’ Zinotis replied. ‘You must pass on my deepest sympathy to Tanya. He was a great companion, he will be missed by many people.’
Despondently, I retraced my route back towards the bridge over the Vilnia. It was mid-morning and the traffic was a little quieter. The Uzupis Café had just opened when I reached it. A young woman was unfolding the glass double doors and securing them with bricks. Inside, the staff were wiping tables and arranging chairs. I ordered a coffee and took it out to the decked area at the back of the café. Glancing down towards the river, I saw the letter immediately, suspended in the tangle of twigs and branches where I had thrown it.
The land sloped steeply from the back of the café to the bank of the river. I slipped down the grass and, holding the wiry trunk of a young birch, hung out over the water to retrieve the ball of paper. It was damp. Delicately I eased it from its resting place without ripping it.
As I clambered back up to the café platform, I noticed the waiter leaning against the door jamb watching me.
‘Just doing my bit to keep the city tidy,’ I said, taking my place back at the table where I had left my coffee.
He raised his eyebrows and turned back inside.
With care I straightened out the envelope, smoothing it gently with the palm of my hand. Untucking the flap, I pulled out the single sheet inside the envelope. The letter was relatively dry. Kolya’s spidery handwriting ran down the page, a little faded but quite visible. My heart was pumping hard, I noticed, and my fingers trembled as I held down the corners of the page while I read.
Vassily,
Forgive me for writing to you when I promised I would leave you alone. You are my last hope, and I don’t believe you will, after all, turn your back on me.
When we spoke a few years ago, things got heated. We both said things that should not have been said. We were all to blame over the bracelet. The years have flown, and yet it seems only yesterday we were in that shit-hole of a country. Not a day goes by when I do not think about it, nor a night in which those years and what happened don’t revisit me and terrify me once more.
But now I am in desperate need of your help, my old comrade. I am ill. I have returned to Vilnius to get treatment at the clinic, but it is expensive. I need money. I need my share from the bracelet – after all, I have suffered too.
Kolya
On the back of the letter, when I turned it over, I found some scribbled instructions in Vassily’s hand.
Chapter 11
At the end of our first week in Kabul, junior officers flew in from around the country to take their pick of the new recruits. A tanned, wiry officer with blue eyes that seemed barely able to open in the startling sunshine chose a small group of us to replace the dembels from his platoon stationed near Jalalabad, east of Kabul, towards the border with Pakistan. Kolya and Vassily were posted with me. A small helicopter was waiting at the airport to transport us across the mountains. We were each issued a parachute as we climbed into the belly of the chopper. The helicopter was already piled high with goods. A dembel held out a packet of cigarettes.
‘Have a smoke,’ he said with a laugh. ‘It’s going to be your last.’
As the helicopter rose into the clear sky, we watched Kabul drop away behind us. Every few minutes flares whistled out from the sides of the helicopter.
‘The muj have got better equipment than we have,’ the blue-eyed officer said. ‘They’ve got Stinger missiles. The CIA are funding the insurgents, channelling arms through from Pakistan.’
Deep mountain fissures ran between Kabul and Jalalabad. The rocks erupted from the earth as sharp as knives, baking in the intense heat. Gorges dropped away, hundreds of metres deep, so that they seemed like narrow channels into the very heart of the earth.
The sides of the mountains were clothed with ragged skirts of thorny bushes. Occasionally, in valleys, on the banks of bubbling torrents, there were willows and poplars and mulberry trees. On the plains, beside pockmarked roads, lay ruined villages, their dry mud bricks crumbling back into the ground they were raised from.
I gazed down at the passing scenery in wonder. Camels slumped sullenly beside a dusty track. On a plain by the river lean goats flocked around a large vaulted black tent and small children shouted and danced, arms flapping as we passed. Villages rose from the parched earth with narrow streets running between high-walled compounds. From the outside these family enclosures, with only small wooden doors opening out on to the world, looked barren and dusty, but inside were pleasant courtyards with flowers and vegetable patches shaded by large trees. All this was roofed by the sky, a tautly stretched cerulean awning, punctured by the towering peaks of the mountains.
As we flew east towards Jalalabad the day grew warmer, the vegetation more lush and the air heavier. Jalalabad was a large town, gr
een and hot and lively. We were overwhelmed by the sudden sweet scent of ripe fruit, the startling blaze of colour and the frenzy of noise – donkeys, cars, parrots, stalls, monkeys, turbaned men, the blare of Hindi film classics; the dust rising in choking clouds, cars rattling and jolting along streets that were barely passable.
Our base was twenty kilometres out of Jalalabad, but the road was so poor it took almost an hour to get there. Around the base on every side rose mountains capped with snow, which glittered dazzlingly in the sun. A river ran close to the base, sucking noisily at the pebbles and rocks as it passed. Beyond the river grew a small wood of poplar and willow, skirting the lower slopes of the rising foothills. Two walls of fencing topped by barbed wire encircled the base, ten metres apart. Between them the ground was mined. The base was rudimentary; the officers had constructed basic huts for themselves but the rest of the soldiers still lived in large tents that billowed in the breeze.
Our first task was to construct huts for the granddads, who spent most of the day lounging in their tents, nursing bottles of vodka and smoking. Hardly a single granddad was dressed in uniform; they slopped around in vests and sports trousers with slippers on their feet. To build the huts we dug holes in the earth and filled them with clay and water. We worked the clay all day and then put it into ammunition boxes and left it to set. These rudimentary bricks we bound with wet clay. The huts we built were small and dark. At first we fitted glass into the windows, but at the end of the first week there was an attack and the exploding rockets shattered the windows, so we made do with polythene.
A granddad took us in the KamaZ with an accompanying APC to a deserted village a few kilometres down the road to get wood for the roofs.
‘When we first set up camp here,’ the granddad explained, ‘we got fired on from this village. One of our soldiers got hit in the stomach. We rounded up all the men and interrogated them, but how the fuck were we going to find out who it was? There were fifty of them. Some were little kids and then there were the grizzled old granddaddies with their long white beards and their big fucking turbans. We took one of the men, an ugly fucking git, and shot him to teach them a lesson. The next thing we know the whole fucking village has uprooted and headed off for the mountains.’
The village was at the top of a slight incline surrounded by irrigated fields. The road ran at the foot of the rise, a track leading from it, winding into the centre of the village. The high walls had begun to crumble. Between each of the compounds ran narrow, rutted lanes. We let in a couple of dogs to check there were no mines or booby-traps. In the centre of each courtyard was a well, and around it several complexes of rooms, with beaten-earth floors and sun-dried brick . walls painted with lively patterns.
The purpose of the APC soon became clear. Systematically the driver set about destroying one of the compounds. From the dusty rubble we pulled what wood we could find and loaded it on to the back of the KamaZ. It was only once the huts for the officers and granddads had been finished that we were able to construct shelters for ourselves.
Of the thirty-five soldiers stationed on our base, twenty of us were new recruits, and we were from all parts of the Soviet Union, as was general policy. New recruits were not allowed to drink alcohol. Though, technically, we got a small allowance of vodka per week, this was taken by the granddads.
‘What are you fucking looking at?’ one granddad barked in my ear, catching me eyeing a bottle on his desk. ‘Do you understand you are not even allowed to look at vodka, you little shit? Get your little beady eyes off it.’
I lowered my eyes to the floor, as he had indicated, and apologised, but my contrition was not enough to divert a beating. In fact the beatings came so often that it was strange to collapse on to my bunk at the end of the day without some bruise or tender flesh to nurse.
‘I can’t sleep unless I’ve had a beating,’ Vassily chuckled, one night.
In our bunks, Vassily regaled us with tales he had heard and laughed at the indolent brutality of the granddads. ‘Did you hear about the recruit stationed not far from here?’ he said, one night. ‘His base was at the top of a mountain to the north of Jalalabad. One night one of the granddads sent him out to get some milk. The boy was scared – who knows what band of rebels he might have stumbled across in the darkness? But as he was working his way down the mountainside he was attacked by a snake.’
‘A snake?’ We sat up in our bunks, watching Vassily in the dim light of the oily candles.
‘The snake wound around him and began to crush the life out of him, so he could hardly breathe. It held him in its grip like that for half the night, and then as first light was dawning it let him go. He struggled free and made his way back to his base at the top of the mountain, only to find that while he had been gone the mujahidin had raided the base and killed the whole lot of them.’
One weekend, when the granddads were particularly drunk, we slipped off base and drove into Jalalabad to buy alcohol. Discarding our uniforms, we took our Kalashnikovs and stuffed a couple of grenades into each pocket. Vassily took a KamaZ and Kolya and I jumped into the back. At the last moment we were joined by another recruit, a lean, dark-haired Russian called Kirov. New recruits guarded the gates and we bullied and bribed our way through with little difficulty.
The market in Jalalabad was a riot of noise and colour. We slipped through the streets, attempting to remain inconspicuous, glancing nervously over our shoulders. The crowds milled and jostled around us and forced us forwards, towards the heart of the market. The street was lined with stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables – bananas, nuts, oranges, tangerines, pinky-yellow carrots, delicious-smelling bread piled high like pancakes at home. Other tables displayed hats, sheepskin coats, ox hides, TVs, digital watches, videos, tea and coffee sets from China and India. Vassily was drawn to the stalls at the side of the market selling trinkets and jewellery fashioned from local stones.
‘Look at this,’ he said, picking up a necklace fashioned from amethyst. ‘Look, comrade, my friend, how beautiful. You know, the word amethyst comes from the Greek for “not drunken”. The ancients used to believe amethysts prevented drunkenness; they made their cups from it. And lapis lazuli, look, my friend.’ He picked up some of the beautiful blue stone. ‘As clear and beautiful as the Afghan sky.’ He held it up as if to compare and, in fact, the two did glow with a similar brilliant luminescence. ‘This is one of the ways they are financing their insurgents, their arms deals. They smuggle it over the mountains into Pakistan.’
‘You seem to know a lot about these things,’ I said.
‘I’m a jeweller,’ he explained. ‘It is my job to know about jewels.’
We slipped into a small store at the side of the market where Vassily knew vodka could be purchased illicitly. Being a driver, he had accompanied older soldiers into Jalalabad on previous occasions. A small, wizened man with a straggling white beard stood in a dark doorway at the back of the store, wrapped tightly in the cloth the Afghans employed universally. The cloth served as a turban, a wrap and something to spread beneath them when they sat. By the side of the man stood a small boy, who stared at us frankly.
‘Drink?’ Vassily said, tilting back his head and miming emptying a bottle into his mouth.
‘What you got?’ the old man asked in broken Russian.
Vassily indicated Kirov, who was carrying a plastic bottle of fuel, which we had drained from the KamaZ. Kirov placed the bottle on to a scarred wooden desk beside the man.
‘Phh!’ The old man waved his hand dismissively. ‘You drink that.’
‘What’s the matter with this?’ Vassily demanded. ‘Last week you take it.’
‘Last week you was with different men,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘I know them… ’ He waved his hands indolently in the air. ‘Years.’
‘How much?’ said Vassily.
‘What you got?’
‘You’ve seen.’
‘What else?’
He wafted his thin, strong hands towards us. Kirov sli
pped a grenade from his pocket and laid it beside the bottle of fuel. Vassily glanced at him and then at the grenade. For a moment I thought he was going to snatch it up, but he didn’t. The old man smiled thinly and nodded his head. He nudged the boy, who slipped through the door behind them and returned a few moments later with a jar of clear liquid. Vassily unscrewed the top and smelt it. He took a small sip, then nodded.
‘Good.’
The old man nodded but did not smile again. We made our way quickly back to the KamaZ, which we had left some streets away. Kolya, whom we had left to guard the truck, was in the back, his gun resting across his chest. He sat up with a start as we jumped in beneath the canvas.
‘It’s only us,’ I said.
He set the gun down. ‘Well?’
Vassily held up the bottle. A broad grin broke across Kolya’s large, square face. He reached for the bottle and kissed it.
‘So what are we waiting for? Crack it open.’
We passed the bottle around between us and Vassily took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and handed them out.
‘Where did you get these?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Ah!’ He tapped the side of his nose.
The alcohol burnt our bellies, unpicked our cares. Three of us settled back against the side of the truck, while Kirov sat with his legs dangling from the back, his gun across his lap, keeping watch.
‘I was in Lithuania,’ Vassily said. ‘Once, on my way to Kaliningrad.’
‘What were you doing in that shit-hole?’ Kolya asked.
‘Amber.’
‘You are interested in amber?’ I asked.
‘You know where amber comes from?’
‘From beneath the sea,’ I said.
‘But originally? Let me tell you the tale of the origin of amber.’
‘Oi!’ Kolya protested, but Vassily ignored him.
‘Phaeton wanted more than anything to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky like his father the sun god. But his father wouldn’t let him; wild horses pulled the chariot and only Phoebus was strong enough to control them. But Phaeton would not let his father alone. Finally he gave in.’
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