Vassily paused as the jar of vodka came round to him. He took a large slug of the spirit and grimaced. ‘Fucking appalling,’ he said, wiping his lips on the back of his sleeve. He passed it on to me.
‘Phaeton was so happy. He raced across the sky, showing the world how great he was. But suddenly the horses bolted. He lost control. The chariot swooped down close to the earth, setting it ablaze. Whole forests burst into flame, mountains exploded, fertile planes became parched deserts. He swooped down so low over Africa that all the people were scorched black.
‘Zeus struck Phaeton dead with a bolt of lightning, to save the earth, and his body fell into a river, which bubbled and simmered from his heat. Phaeton had three sisters. The three beautiful young women went in search of their brother. When they found the river in which he had fallen they stood by it and wept. Day and night, week after week, they stood and wept beside the river, until their bodies wasted away. Their feet rooted themselves in the earth and their waving arms grew leaves. The trunks of their bodies became thick with bark. They became poplars wailing in the evening breeze. Long after they had been turned into trees they continued to cry and their tears turned into amber, which rolled down the smooth bark of their bellies and dropped into the river.’
Over the following week the sporadic gunfire coming from the woods, across the river, became more sustained. The night was disturbed by the shudder of incoming rockets. The mudbrick buildings we had built shook and dust billowed around the small space, coating us thickly. The rolling explosions from the two howitzers that opened up from within our compound made sleep impossible.
At daybreak, after one particularly heavy night, the CO informed us of a plan to strike back at the dukhs – the insurgents. Information from Military Intelligence suggested that the dukhs were sheltering in a village ten kilometres away, on the other side of the river. The sappers headed out first, checking the road through the forest for mines. We followed, two APCs, the mobile command centre and a BMP bringing up the rear, its caterpillar tracks tearing up the rough surface of the road.
We advanced slowly, the road winding through the trees, climbing steadily. Deep gullies dropped away at our side, and along their bottoms fierce streams crashed down from the mountains.
‘We should burn these fucking trees down,’ said Sasha Goryachev, another new recruit, his face drawn tight with nerves. He was sitting on top of the APC beside me, stiffly upright in his bulletproof vest, his ammunition belt slung across his belly. Dust billowed up from the road, thickly caking our clothes and faces. The muj loved the trees. Green meant snipers – trees meant hidden dukhs just waiting to spring their ambush. Whole forests had been felled by our troops across the country. Deserts were safer than jungles.
I cradled my gun across my lap; my eyes flicked from tree to tree, searching in the darkness for a glint of the enemy. My pulse raced and I felt a strange mixture of exhilaration and numbing fear. I glanced over at Kolya, who was sitting next to Vassily on the APC in front. He raised his thumb and grinned. We perched lightly on the tops of the APCs in case of mines. If you were stuck inside when a mine exploded you had no chance.
The village was just above the tree line, its baked walls rising above the verdant treetops. It was situated on a rocky outcrop, which was riddled with dark holes. The village slumbered silently beneath the hot sun, its walls shimmering in the haze of heat bouncing up off the rock. We paused while a small group of granddads headed for higher ground to get a clearer view of the village. They returned after an hour not having seen movement within the walls.
As the armoured cars moved in, we sheltered behind them, covered, in case any hidden snipers should try to pick us off. The streets between the high walls were too narrow for the vehicles and the commander split the platoon into small groups to comb through the enclosures. I followed Chistyakov, Sasha and two granddads down towards a small wooden door at the end of the street, attempting to imitate the feline movements of the granddads, who slipped among the shadows with none of the shivering fear the new recruits were showing.
The door was locked. A shiny new metal padlock glittered in the afternoon sunlight.
‘They’ve fucked off,’ Pavlov, one of the granddads, said. He kicked the door hard, shattering the wood. Through the hole he tossed a grenade and we fell back quickly. The explosion ripped the wooden gate from its hinges, tossing it high in the air into a neighbouring enclosure. The mudbrick wall around the gateway billowed out and crumpled into dust. We darted forward across the rubble into the courtyard of the house.
‘Watch for trip wires, watch for booby-traps,’ Pavlov called across his shoulder. Our eyes scanned the ground as we ran forwards.
The village was empty. Each house had been padlocked and deserted. We sacked the rooms, scattering the contents of the house in search of anything worth stealing. In a storeroom there were some sacks of rice, which we loaded on to one of the vehicles, but there was little else of any value.
‘They’ve fucked off down the kirizes,’ Pavlov commented, referring to the irrigation channels that honeycombed the country, running beside roads, under fields and villages.
‘Fall back,’ the commander instructed.
We took up our places on the personnel carriers while the BMP opened fire on the houses with one of its heavy guns. The dust rose in choking clouds, forming a dark pillar above the village. I felt oddly disappointed. My pulse still raced, my heart hammered and the adrenalin continued to surge through my veins. I wanted to run and fight, to burn the energy that bubbled up within me. I noticed my hands were shaking; yet now I felt not a trace of fear.
At that moment Pavlov, who had been sitting beside me, jumped forward off the APC. His knees crumpled as he hit the ground and he stumbled forwards. I laughed. I was about to jeer at him when I noticed that the back of his skull was missing. For some moments I stared at his figure sprawled awkwardly in the dust, trying to grasp what I saw. As I hesitated another figure toppled forward off the APC, crunching into the dust beside Pavlov. He twisted slightly, squirmed as though he were trying to burrow into the dust, then lay still, his hand reaching out and gently touching Pavlov’s.
‘We’re under fire,’ a voice shouted.
‘Dukhs!’
I glanced around desperately. It was unclear from which side the shots had come. I slithered down off the back of the APC, and crouched in close against the shuddering warmth of its metal side.
‘There,’ somebody was calling. ‘From over there.’
I glanced across at the second APC. Kolya and Vassily crouched in the dust, staring out at the trees on the other side of the vehicle, their guns raised. I felt a sudden rush of adrenalin and, swinging myself around to the front of the APC, emptied a magazine in the direction of the thick undergrowth. The air rattled with the noise of sub-machine-gun fire. I heard the rapid thwack of bullets bruising the metal above me, and then their shrill whistle as they passed above my head. I dodged back behind the APC. Glancing up at the BMP, I noticed its gun dancing back and forth, bewildered, unable to fix upon a target. The ground shook under the impact of a rocket launched from the thick cover of the forest. The metal jerked behind my back and a rush of hot air and dust billowed out from beneath the APC.
The BMP finally decided upon its target and fired. The trees burst into flames. The roar of heavy gunfire grew deafening. So deafening I did not hear the rapid rattle of bullets on the side of the APC above my head. It was the startled look of the commander, who half turned before he fell, and the dancing trail of dust that raced past my feet which alerted me to the fact that we were coming under fire from behind. I became aware at that moment that the APC was moving. As the BMP gun continued to pound the forest, we jumped into the APCs, dragging inert bodies from the dust, holding them tight against us as we squeezed inside.
The APCs raced down the rough track shuddering and jolting. The bullets sang against the metal skin around us. I curled myself over the body I was clutching and buried my head into its chest.
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br /> Chapter 12
I folded the letter carefully and put it in the pocket of my jacket. Finishing the coffee, I left the café, ignoring the looks of the waiting staff, and walked up towards the workshop. The letter was addressed from the Santariskes Clinic on the northern edge of Vilnius. Kolya’s message disturbed me. Santariskes Clinic had specialised units for dealing with tuberculosis and Aids, among other things.
The letter had been posted a couple of months previously, and though it was quite possible Kolya was no longer there, it seemed the best place to start looking for him. I had not seen him since returning to Lithuania. Though we had grown up together and had both been posted to Jalalabad, our friendship had become more strained as the months passed in Afghanistan. As Kolya’s problems became worse, he became more unpredictable, irritable and often violent in his treatment of new recruits.
The workshop, when I arrived, seemed colder and more uninviting than ever. It had normally been Vassily who arrived first in the morning. When I got in he would have the paraffin heater burning and would already be working at the lathe, or at his work table, fitting the amber to golden rings, stringing them on silken threads, bagging them up to send on to Riga where the Japanese dealers would buy them for the market in the Far East.
The letters I had collected from the post office, en route from the Uzupis Café to the workshop, included a fair number of new orders and enquiries concerning work ordered some time ago. I dropped the letters on the desk and switched on the light above my lathe.
Vassily had taught me the basics of the trade in Tanya’s village as soon as I began to recover my strength and the shaking of my hands had subsided.
‘Come,’ he said one morning, ‘I will teach you to work amber.’
Sitting me down by the machine, he turned on the tap. The lathe whirred and the water trickled down across the spinning wheel. Taking a piece of amber, he showed me how to clip it on. Gently I pressed it up against the wheel. A light hung low over the machine. The waste water dripped away into a sink, pooling beneath a surface yellow with scum. The diamond skimmed away the skin from my fingers and dark drops of blood stained the dusty white surface of the work table.
‘When you pick it from the beach,’ Vassily said, taking a piece of unworked amber and showing it to me, ‘look, it could just be a pebble, it’s nothing special. It’s blank. To reveal the beauty inside it, its warmth and light, and the inclusions in the heart of it, it must be worked with love and care.
‘Some people can work amber, others can’t,’ he continued. ‘Amber is like that. Immediately I can tell who will be good and who isn’t. The amber you work is warm, Antanas, comrade, it has energy.’
When the amber crumbled on the lathe as I tried to cut it, I would curse and leap up, my fingers bloodied. Vassily laughed. ‘It is an important fact,’ he would tell me, ‘the age of the amber. It needs to be, you see, about fifty million years old. Less and it is no use.’ He took the crumbled amber from the lathe and rolled the chips in his fingers. ‘Twenty million years, thirty million years, it is too young, the quality is not good enough, it will just crumble when you try to work it. As you see.’ He threw the chips into the fire.
‘And how do you tell?’ I asked, running my fingers under the tap. ‘How can you tell which are the older pieces, the better pieces?’
He laughed again. ‘You work it and if it crumbles then you know. Don’t worry,’ he added, pointing at my fingers, ‘amber is a natural antiseptic, you won’t get an infection.’
I worked hard at the lathe for a couple of hours, transforming the light, dull lumps of amber into gleaming drops of fire, dropping the finished pieces into plastic butter tubs. I was taking a break, sitting at my desk sorting through the orders that had arrived in the post, when the telephone rang. After a moment’s hesitation I picked up the receiver. It was Tanya. Her voice sounded brittle and tense, as though at any moment she might break down and cry.
‘Can you come over?’
‘I was hoping to,’ I said. ‘Are you feeling OK?’
‘Come over,’ she said, and put down the receiver.
Turning off the lathe and the light, I took a few of the letters to deal with later and locked up the shop. I was concerned by the tone of Tanya’s voice. Though she had been upset, she had not sounded so on edge before. As I wandered distractedly down the road, I dropped one of the letters as I was pushing it into my pocket. The envelope fluttered to the ground and I had to lunge and grab it before it landed in a puddle created by a blocked drain.
As I straightened up, out of the corner of my eye I saw a rapid movement, a dark shape flitting from one shadow to another. I turned. The street was busy and, glancing around, I could see nothing out of the ordinary. The fear of shadows, of sudden movements glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, was the shared inheritance of all Afghan veterans. Like beaten dogs we flinched at every sound, shied from every flicker. Stilling my heart, I walked on.
When I got to Tanya’s apartment block, I was about to push open the door when I heard a shout from behind me. Tanya stood in the doorway of the beer hall on the opposite side of the road. Tucking a scarf around her throat, she came over.
‘I couldn’t sit in there on my own,’ she said, looping her arm through mine, pressing her cheek against my shoulder.
‘A bad day?’
She grimaced. ‘Come upstairs and see.’
‘What do you mean?’
She did not reply, but took my arm and pushed me through into the dingy stairwell. She led the way up the stairs, taking them two at a time. She paused before fitting her key into the lock and indicated that I should look. Leaning close to the door, I noticed that the wood was scuffed around the area of the lock, and there were sharp splinters in the jamb. The lock itself was gleaming steel. New.
‘You had a breakin?’ I asked.
In answer, she slid the key into the new lock and turned it. Holding the door open, she indicated for me to enter first. A little apprehensively I crossed the threshold into the apartment. There was little evidence in the small hallway of any signs of a disturbance. Tanya’s handbag sat on a table by the door, the pictures were undisturbed and the wooden floor shone in the shaft of light falling from the kitchen window.
‘I had just managed to clean up the apartment, after feeling so ashamed when you were here,’ Tanya said.
Puzzled, I slipped off my shoes and stepped across the hallway to the sitting room. Pushing open the door, I stopped abruptly. The room was strewn with books and papers. Stepping forwards, the better to see the confusion, I trod painfully on the sharp debris carpeting the floor.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Tanya stood behind me in the doorway, looking over my shoulder.
‘As far as I can see,’ she said, ‘they have taken nothing of any value.’
I gazed around the room. Books had been pulled off shelves and tossed on to the floor, on to the sofa, the armchair. The standard lamp had been knocked off balance by the weight of a tome on St Petersburg; a flying volume of Pushkin had shattered the vase on a small table by the wall. Folders of papers had been scattered and now lay like chilly drifts of snow across hillocks of Russian literature, mounds of books on jewellery, knolls of poetry. Pieces of amber, Tanya’s jewellery, fragments of vase and broken glass gravelled the floor.
‘Who did this?’ I gasped.
‘Somebody was looking for something specific, I think,’ Tanya said. ‘I was at work when the police telephoned to tell me a neighbour had reported a disturbance in my apartment. Mrs Gaskiene was worried I had gone mad in my grief. She came to knock on the door, only to find it gaping open and this mess in the front room.’
As I bent to pick up an amber necklace that lay on the carpet by my feet, I sensed immediately that this had been the work of Kirov.
‘What do you think they were looking for?’ I asked Tanya, not voicing my fear. I recalled the comment he had made in the workshop. I know where Tanya lives. She’s all on her own now. Wa
s this a warning? I wondered. Or was he looking for the bracelet, or evidence of Kolya’s whereabouts?
‘No jewellery seems to be missing,’ Tanya said, bending down beside me, taking the necklace from my fingers. ‘Vassily made this for me,’ she added. ‘You remember?’
‘Yes,’ I said, the memory of that moment flooding back as I fingered the beads of the necklace. ‘Just before you left the village to come to Vilnius.’
We were in the kitchen, in her grandparents’ home, around the large old table. It was late evening and the room was dark and warm, the door of the tiled stove open in the corner, providing us with light and heat. Tanya had told us she would have to return to the capital to continue with her studies. Vassily attempted to convince her to stay, but, though she seemed genuinely sad to be leaving, she was determined to go back to university.
‘I will bribe you to stay,’ he said.
‘There is nothing you could offer,’ Tanya shot back.
Vassily laughed. From his pocket he pulled out a necklace. Each of the amber beads on the silk string was a different shade. Translucent yellow, the shade of sunshine, to currant black. He held it up. ‘Women are not able to turn from the power of finely made jewellery. When they see a piece of jewellery they love, there is nothing they will not do to get hold of it. It has always been so, since the beginning of time. You know the story of Freyja?’
Tanya laughed. ‘No,’ she mocked, ‘but I’m sure you will tell us.’
‘She was the goddess of love,’ he said with relish, smacking his lips. ‘She was beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the ancient world. Not only was she the goddess of love, she was the goddess of the sexual act; she loved beauty and sensuality. But she was also goddess of the dead and was mistress of a secret magical science that could read the fates of men and brought fecundity and birth. She was married to Od, god of fury, and was happy.
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