Amber

by Stephan Collishaw

  Vassily nodded and grinned. ‘Don’t sound so outraged. They’re already dead – what are they going to care if they have a bit of company on the trip home? Back home we have a guy who unloads the coffins. He fences them and the cash is split.’

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  ‘The idea came with Chistyakov,’ Vassily explained. ‘Hashim had just got this beautiful piece and I could not turn it down, but what to do with it? Kolya had the idea – he is taking Chistyakov’s body to Jalalabad, where it will be put into a zinc coffin and loaded on to a black tulip. Nu, va! And there we have it. What? Don’t look at me like that, comrade, there are people doing worse. Some of those coffins are going home with top-grade opium packed in them.’

  ‘I have to go,’ I said.

  ‘Hey!’ He caught my arm as I rose. ‘You won’t say… ’

  For the first time I saw a dark, worried look cross Vassily’s normally jovial face.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I tell you as a friend. Maybe you want in?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry, I won’t talk.’

  There was an old telephone at the back of the café. It was covered in dust and did not look as if it had been used in years, but when I picked up the receiver it buzzed healthily in my ear. On the back of a cigarette packet I had scribbled Masha from Krasnoyarsk’s telephone number. I pulled it out and began to dial. The dial spun slowly. After two numbers I put down the receiver, and considered. Glancing back through the beaded curtain, I saw Vassily drinking still at the table. I picked up the receiver again and dialled the Jalalabad hospital, my fingers shaking slightly.

  The streets were busy. I pushed through the crowds towards the hospital. When I turned the corner Zena was standing outside the gate, talking to an Afghan soldier. She was wearing her white hospital gown, and her short hair was tidily pinned back. She smiled as I approached.

  ‘I got your message,’ she said.

  I nodded mutely.

  ‘I only have an hour,’ she added.

  We walked down to the tree-lined avenue running along the Kabul river, where there was less bustle. For some while we walked in silence.

  ‘Where in Russia are you from?’ she asked, breaking the silence.

  We sat on the bank of the river, watching it flow past sluggishly.

  ‘I’m from Lithuania,’ I explained.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘You are a long way from home.’

  ‘And you?’ I said. ‘Are you really…’

  ‘My father was a Tajik, my mother a Pushtun from Kabul. My father was a communist; he has family in the Soviet Union. He is dead now, he was shot in the street in Kabul on his way home one evening. I grew up in Kabul. My father had a job in the government of the PDPA so we lived in a nice apartment built by the Soviets, in the Mikrorayon. I went to the Friendship High School built by the Soviets. I loved school. I loved studying. I joined the Communist Youth Group and was top in the class and won a holiday in Moscow. Moscow is wonderful.’

  ‘I’ve never been,’ I confessed.

  ‘You’ve never been to Moscow?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It is a beautiful city. Kabul is just a dirty little town, and here…’ Her nose wrinkled with disgust. ‘Moscow is so cosmopolitan – the theatre, the ballet, all the latest fashions.’

  ‘So you volunteered?’

  ‘We have a choice here – it’s the communists or the mullahs. With the communists we women are free. That is the problem the people here have with the communists, they don’t like things changing. The communists say that women have rights too, that they have control over their own bodies, that they have a right to choose their own husbands and a right to educate their daughters, and that is what makes the men so mad. You know, we hate Pakistan, it is always sticking its nose into our affairs, trying to control what is happening here, but the men, they are so against the idea that women should have any rights and worried that their place is going to be taken away from them that they are accepting aid from the Pakistanis.’

  She had turned on the dry earth and was facing me now, her green eyes sparkling in the sunlight. She ran her fingers through her hair, shaking it back behind her ears. Her cheeks were flushed. Down the side of her face the fresh razor wound cut from her forehead to her jaw. She touched it carefully with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘You must hate it here,’ I said.

  ‘But I can’t just run away.’

  I reached out and touched the livid wound gently, where it bulged out over the top of her cheekbone. She flinched away from my fingers, reflexively.

  ‘Not here,’ she said quietly. ‘You can touch me, but not here.’

  For a moment I thought it was the wound she was worried about, but her eyes flicked around her, at the people, the buildings, the trees, and the slow pull of the river. ‘What about you?’ she said, her eyes falling upon me.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Tell me something about yourself, about your family.’

  I paused for a moment, gazed down at the murky water, at a woman on the far bank scrubbing a colourful rug. I thought of the children’s home, of Ponia Marija and Liuba. They seemed so far away now.

  ‘I never knew my father,’ I said. ‘He left when I was a baby. I lived with my mother in a small apartment in Taurage, a town in the west of Lithuania.’

  I paused again, searching through the small, scattered, brittle images of my early years, which I still hoarded, like wrinkled photographs, poorly exposed, fading with age.

  ‘My mother drank heavily. I didn’t understand then, of course. She would shout and scream a lot, except when she had drunk a bottle or two, and then we would lie on the bed together and she would wrap her arms around me and cry. She would fall asleep and we would hold each other through the night. One night, when I was six, an ambulance took her away. A neighbour took me in overnight. They said she would be back in the morning, but she never returned. I was taken to a children’s home. No one ever told me what happened to her. She just disappeared.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ Zena said.

  I shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago.’ I smiled. ‘I did badly at school and couldn’t defer my national service. But…’ I hesitated. ‘Seeing you in the village, seeing the work you do… I’m glad I came here. I feel useful.’

  Zena smiled and reached out and touched my hand. She pressed it briefly, then withdrew. She stood up and glanced at the small black digital watch on her wrist.

  ‘I have to get back,’ she said.

  As we walked back towards the hospital, I felt the proximity of her arm beside me. Occasionally our hands touched as they swung between us.

  ‘And when you studied at the Friendship High School, is this what you wanted? To be a nurse?’ I asked her. She glanced at me and grinned. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be a soldier.’

  ‘A soldier?’

  She nodded. ‘My father used to take me hunting with him when I was young. He allowed me to shoot his gun. Well, you know, I was small so he held the gun, but he allowed me to hold it with him. I remember the feeling, the kick of the gun when he tightened the trigger, his finger pressing down on mine. The feel of his body around me, protecting me as we shot. He would say to me, “Zena, when you are big, we will go into the mountains and hunt a snow leopard.”’

  ‘Can I see you again?’ I asked.

  She hesitated for a moment and looked away from me.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, quietly. ‘I would like that.’

  Vassily was still in the café when I returned, Kolya with him. He looked up as I entered. On the table in front of them was an unmarked bottle of vodka, half empty. Kolya gazed at me vacantly as I sat down. He was chewing lazily.

  ‘Nu?’ said Vassily, eyeing me. ‘How did it go?’ I shrugged and slipped into the chair opposite Kolya.

  ‘Is he all right?’ I asked.

  Vassily glanced across at Kolya, as though he had just noticed he was sitting there. He slapped him on the bac
k. Kolya looked up a fraction of a moment later and grinned.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Vassily said. ‘Let’s get back to base before we’re missed.’

  Almost as soon as I had left Zena, on the corner, close to the hospital, I longed to see her again. When I returned with Vassily and Kolya to the barracks I felt little desire to join in the laughter and jokes. Now we were the granddads the burden of work had eased. The breathless, ceaseless occupation of our first year shuddered to a halt. I lay back on the low, uncomfortable bunk and stared up at the wooden ceiling. Kolya slumped on the edge of his bed, smoking a cigarette, flicking the ash irritably to the floor. When a new recruit came in with his washed clothes, Kolya eyed him bad-temperedly.

  ‘Your clothes,’ the recruit muttered, placing them carefully on the end of the bunk.

  Kolya leant across and tipped them off. They landed with a dull thud on the packed-mud floor. The recruit bent quickly, scooping them from the earth and patting off the dust. He went across to the flimsy wooden cabinet that stood in the corner and, opening the door with care so that it would not fall from its hinges, placed the clothes tidily on a shelf.

  ‘Go and fetch us some tea,’ Kolya said as the recruit was leaving. He lay back on the bunk and sighed. ‘Liuba sends her “love” to you.’ He pronounced the word ironically, and immediately coughed up some phlegm and spat through the open door, as though the sentiment disgusted him.

  ‘Liuba? You’ve heard from home?’

  Kolya took a thin sheet of paper and dropped it from the bunk. It fell slowly, twisting away from me towards the door. I reached out and took it. The paper was of poor quality; it seemed to have been carefully ripped from an exercise book. Liuba’s tiny, neat handwriting filled both sides of the page. I attempted to read it, but gave up after a couple of minutes.

  I tried to imagine Liuba’s pretty face and found I could not. All I achieved was a hazy outline framed by the burden of her hair. I recalled her sitting with Kolya and me on the wall by the children’s home, smoking gracefully, the cigarette held between her fingers in the pose she had appropriated from a television film.

  For some minutes we lay on our bunks in silence. The sounds of the camp drifted in on the breeze. Kolya tossed his cigarette out of the door and I heard a match strike as he lit another.

  ‘What is the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?’ he said after a while.

  ‘When I get home?’

  The idea seemed incredible. For the first six months in Afghanistan I had dreamt of nothing else. In the few hours of sleep I managed to snatch, the rolling landscapes and lush greens of our home town visited me with such intensity that the taste of them lingered long into the hectic heat of the day. I could close my eyes and summon up immediately the dark pine forests, the clear lakes, the reed beds and the taste of porridge. My senses haunted me. Now I closed my eyes and saw the dusty plain, the fields of wheat as you approached Jalalabad swaying in the wind, orange blossom and startling bougainvillea, the mountains dark and hard against the taut blue sky. I smelt sweat and wood smoke, dust, cheap vodka. I closed my eyes and saw a young woman, a livid scar running down the side of her face, her lips slightly open, the tip of her tongue protruding as she concentrated on something. I saw the flash of her eyes, heard the sound of her laughter, the authority in. her command, the guttural rasp when she spoke in Pashtu.

  ‘Are we going home?’ I said., lifting myself up on an elbow. ‘Can you imagine that? Do you think it will ever happen?’

  ‘I’m going to move to the coast,’ Kolya said. ‘Get a little cottage near the sea, spend my time fishing.’ The recruit entered with a battered metal pot of tea, a jar of raspberry jam confiscated from another new recruit and a couple of chipped cups. He carried them on a tray fashioned crudely from a plank of wood, which he placed on a small, rickety table beneath the window.

  ‘Do you want me to pour?’ he asked.

  ‘No, just fuck off,’ Kolya said.

  Kolya heaved himself off his bunk and dropped to the floor. He was wearing sports trousers and a white vest, cleaned and ironed by one of the recruits. He poured the steaming tea into the cups and removed the lid from the jam. Before spooning it into the tea he put his nose to the jar and sniffed. He sighed.

  ‘Just smell that,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘Just smell that fruit.’

  When he waved the jar in front of my face, I pushed him away. I had no desire to bring back the sensations of that other life. It was gone, there was no point thinking about it. Kolya stirred the jam into the tea and passed me a steaming cup. I sipped it slowly.

  Kolya had grown quieter as the Afghan months shambled by. While his grin had always been coupled to a violent temper, we heard his laughter less and less. Often he did little more during the day than lie on his bunk, smoking cigarettes he had stolen or bullied from new recruits. His moments of animation became rarer, and when they came they were often spent producing opium tea.

  Inside the hut he would pour out from a sack the dozen of poppy heads he had gathered and begin the slow, awkward process of extracting the seeds from the pods. The pods were dark, almost purple, and though brittle still had the suggestion of moisture in them. Once the pods were emptied he pounded them in a pestle, grinding them to a fine, dirty powder. He rarely looked up from his work. Beads of perspiration ran down his forehead and dripped from the tip of his nose.

  ‘I’ve not seen you working so hard since you came here,’ Vassily joked once, slumped back on a bunk, watching him.

  ‘Why don’t you just buy the fucking stuff?’ Kirov said. ‘It’s not as if it’s going to cost you much. They’re happy enough to have us smoking it, they’ll give it you for nothing in town.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ was all Kolya would say.

  Young boys from the neighbouring village brought marijuana and opium to the edge of the camp. Standing on the outside of the high wire fences surrounding the base, they would call through in almost perfect Russian. Small wads of afghanis were folded into a tin can that we pitched across the two fences. The small boys would pick up the can, extract the money and replace it with the opium or marijuana wrapped carefully in paper, then toss it dextrously back, making sure it did not drop down among the mines between the fences.

  When Kolya had reduced the pods to a powder he poured it into the toes of a clean sock he reserved especially for this purpose. Rigging up a kettle over a fire outside the hut, he would sit by it, poking sticks into the flames, keeping the heat high to quicken the boiling. When the water had come to a boil, he removed it from the fire and carried it carefully into the hut. Hanging the sock in the boiling water, he would allow it to infuse for fifteen minutes, while he sat back for a cigarette.

  No matter how much we made fun of him for the effort he put into producing the opium tea, we never declined it when he offered. It stank. A dirty sludge lined the bottom of the cup. We drank with bitter grimaces. Kolya reboiled the kettle and more tea was produced. We drank slowly and steadily as the heat of the afternoon passed and the sounds of activity gradually ceased to irritate us and we sank back against the walls and smiled and felt the tension rise from our bodies.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Kolya said, relaxed now, and ready to join us in conversation, ‘I see all our fear and anger and hatred just rising up out of the top of our heads, or through our ears like from a kettle. I can see it sometimes; it settles beneath the ceiling in a cloud.’ He grinned.

  Another time, later in the evening, when darkness had descended upon us suddenly and we were smoking marijuana laced with opium by the light of a candle, Kolya worried. ‘Do you think it’s OK?’

  ‘What?’ I asked drowsily.

  ‘The cloud. You know, that cloud that settles beneath the ceiling, do you think it’s dangerous?’

  ‘Why should it be?’

  ‘Sometimes when I’m lying here I can see it grow. Sometimes I worry that it’s breeding evil spirits or something.’

  I laughed. Sleep was taking me gently and
I was giving myself to it, allowing it to siphon me off.

  Kolya had started smoking opium when diarrhoea set in, sending him dashing for the stinking latrines every few minutes. A dembel, finishing his two-year tour of duty, advised him that the muj traditionally used opium to treat diarrhoea. He even provided Kolya with a small amount wrapped in a paper twist. Kolya smoked it and immediately went to buy more. The opium worked – worked better than the vodka binge that one of the officers tried – and Kolya stuck with it.

  At the next opportunity I got, I volunteered for escort duty on a trip to Jalalabad for provisions. I managed to get a message through to Zena before I left.

  She met me by the gates of the hospital. Touching my hand lightly, she moved quickly down the street and I followed her. Zena lived in a modern, concrete hostel constructed by our Soviet builders in the early years of the decade. Already it had a shabby appearance. The stairwell was dirty, and smelt of urine. The lift was out of order. I followed her up the stairs to a door on the third floor. As we entered she put her finger to her lips.

  ‘Most of the girls are out at work,’ she said, ‘but a couple that work night shifts will be sleeping.’

  From farther down the long corridor I could hear the slow, rhythmic creak of old bed springs. A lazy, slow rasp of rusting metal. Zena pushed me through a doorway and indicated for me to sit on one of the two unmade beds. The small room was littered with the debris of two girls’ meagre life. Chipped cups, dirty plates, a crumpled newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda. A dusty window provided a view over the small stretch of Soviet apartments and a jumble of low, clay-coloured buildings.

  ‘I share the room with Nadia, from Tajikistan,’ Zena explained. She disappeared down the corridor, returning a couple of minutes later with a tray. Sweeping papers and books from a small table, she laid a clean cloth over the scarred wooden surface. From the tray she produced paper place mats and arranged a coffee pot and two cups neatly. On a plate she had arranged a few biscuits.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, a little overwhelmed by the feminine care.

  We drank in silence. The coffee was scalding, but I sipped it because I could not think what to say.