Amber

by Stephan Collishaw

  ‘“It will make you ejaculate,” Hashim told him with a grin.’

  The taxi stopped at the end of Birutes. The road was quiet. Few lights illuminated the windows of the large houses. A dog barked, woken by the noise of the taxi. I paid the driver.

  ‘Should I wait?’ he asked.

  Kolya shook his head.

  The earth sloped away from the road, down towards the river, invisible in the pitch darkness. It was possible to hear its faint murmur as it flowed swiftly around the edge of the forest. On the high footbridge spanning the river, street lamps burnt dimly. The trees of Vingis Park were darkly visible against the gloom of the cloudy night sky. After looking at Vassily’s instructions a moment longer, Kolya waved his hand in the direction of the other side of the river.

  ‘We need to go over there,’ he said.

  The taxi pulled away from the side of the road and drove slowly back down the hill towards the centre of the Old Town. Above the sound of its engine, the bark of the dog and the ripple of water washing against the muddy bank, I heard the sound of another car engine approaching. It turned into Birutes, at the bottom of the hill, and, pulling up at the side of the road beneath the trees, cut its lights.

  ‘Just some girl earning her keep,’ Kolya said, following my gaze.

  He set off towards the footbridge. I stood for a moment longer, peering down the hill, my eyes straining to pierce the darkness.

  ‘Come on,’ Kolya called quietly.

  I followed him, carefully picking my way across the wet earth towards the path. Kolya’s footsteps echoed in the night’s stillness as he hurried on to the bridge, the metal railings reverberating softly. In the shadow of a tree I paused and looked back: nothing stirred down the long hill. I stepped into the light of the street lamp and followed Kolya on to the bridge.

  ‘Where in the park is it?’ I asked, catching up with him halfway across.

  ‘Not far, according to this,’ he said. ‘Just a little way into the woods.’

  Above us, the trees rose darkly now. Below, obscured by the night, the river ran swiftly, tumbling, revealed only by the small, glittering, globular reflections of the street lamps. Kolya was breathing heavily, and as we passed beneath a lamp I noticed that a thin film of sweat coated his forehead, even though the night was cool. Across the centre of the bridge rainwater had pooled in the cracked and sunken concrete, forming a puddle of some depth. We waded through it and hurried on towards the shadow of the trees.

  On the far side of the bridge the bank rose up into the woods. The footpath branched off in two directions. Kolya took the left fork, running parallel with the river, along the edge of the park. I followed him as he paced up the track, muttering under his breath, casting his eyes from side to side in the gloom, seemingly searching for some object.

  ‘Is there a marker?’ I asked.

  He waved his hand, irritably, for me to be quiet. A few moments later he paused and dug a lighter from his pocket. In the dim light of its small flame he read from the back of the letter. Turning from the path, away from the river, he plunged in among the trees. Glancing back along the path, deserted and quiet, I followed him, hurdling low brush, ducking beneath the branches, arms up to protect my face from the sharp back-slash as Kolya pushed through them before me.

  ‘How can you be sure this is the right route?’ I called to Kolya impatiently, as my shoes sank in the soft earth.

  As if in response Kolya stopped dead, looked around, glanced back towards the path, and turned. He brushed past me and made his way back to the path. There he stood, as a stray beam of moonlight broke through the heavy layer of cloud, illuminating the woods with a cool light, looking around him, hand against his forehead.

  I glanced at my watch. It was two o’clock. Kolya slipped down the bank from the path again and examined the bark of the closest tree. Turning from it, he examined those on either side. Shaking his head, he moved off, down the tree line, feeling the rough bark.

  ‘Blyad! Are we going to have to examine every single tree in the park?’ I complained.

  Kolya ignored me, working quickly from the bark of one to another. A few metres along the path, his fingers found what they were looking for. He gave a little cry of pleasure.

  ‘Found it,’ he said, and plunged once more into the wood.

  He progressed more cautiously this time, working his way from one tree to another, following the signs carved into the trunks of the thick pines. Occasionally he would stop, unsure, moving from one tree to the next, discovering small clearings where trees had fallen, having to work past them, picking up his trail on the far side.

  ‘Two trees,’ he said, turning to me, his face obscured in the darkness. ‘There are two trees marked in a particular way. Between the two of them, exactly halfway, it is buried.’

  I caught up with him.

  ‘Here.’

  He took my hand and placed the tips of my fingers on the cool, coarse bark. I felt the grooves cut deep into it, a cross, thick and long.

  ‘Stand here,’ he said.

  He moved, feeling his way from trunk to trunk until he had found the one he was looking for. He stood with his back to it, resting, his face a pale blotch. There in the earth between us, the box was buried. I felt a childlike thrill at the thought of it. And Kolya, I noticed, as he paced deliberately across the space towards me, was grinning.

  Finding the spot, Kolya knelt down on the damp earth and brushed back the thick drift of pine needles that had settled across the ground. I knelt beside him, my heart beating fast. Kolya took a penknife from his pocket. Opening out the blade, he dug it into the earth, loosening the soil.

  ‘It’s buried not far beneath the surface,’ he explained, his voice quivering a little.

  He was scrabbling with his fingers now, pulling up clods of soil, his hand cupping the loose earth and swooping it out of the small hole. His fingernails scratched against metal. Working quickly, he cleared the earth from the top of the box and worked his fingers around it, prising it up from its shallow grave.

  He laid it on the slippery bed of pine needles by the hole and for some moments we sat in silence, gazing at its rusting surface. Blue paint flaked from it.

  He shook the box gently. There was a soft knock as something moved inside. Taking out his penknife again, Kolya slipped it under the lid and pulled it up. The rusted metal gave easily. He slipped his fingers inside the box, which was barely visible in the gloom, and grinned.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘When we got to Ghazis,’ Kolya explained as we worked our way back through the trees towards the path, the box tucked beneath his arm, ‘we slipped away from the platoon, into the backstreets where Kirov had arranged to meet his contact. The man we met took us down a passage into a courtyard. Vassily feared we were being lured into a trap. We were taken up to a large room at the top of some stairs. To our surprise, we found Hashim was there.

  ‘Three or four other men were in the room. Shady looking characters. Kirov’s friends. KHAD, as we were to find out later. To begin with Hashim took out some pieces of jewellery, lapis lazuli, nothing of any significance. I could see Vassily was beginning to get restless. He threw the pieces contemptuously across the floor.

  ‘And then Hashim took a leather pouch and went and squatted down by Vassily. Taking his hand, he shook out the contents of the pouch on to Vassily’s palm. We could all see it was just one bracelet. Vassily sat perfectly still, the bracelet resting on his palm, hardly breathing. Kirov, noticing his expression, wandered over. Slowly Vassily turned it over and examined it carefully from every angle. He asked whether Hashim knew what it was, whether he had any idea what he’d given him, Hashim told him that it was stolen from the Kabul collection.

  ‘Kirov nodded to the KHAD agents and they left. We didn’t realise its significance then; we didn’t know the full price we were paying for the bracelet. You see it, wasn’t just the arms they wanted.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘What was the price?’


  ‘The government was trying to crack down on the anti-Soviet revolutionary women’s group, Rawa. They were, as you know, orchestrating campaigns against the activities of the government. They were stirring up trouble everywhere they went.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ I felt my heart flutter with fear.

  Kolya paused. He looked at me for a moment, then turned away. ‘KHAD wanted Zena.’

  I stopped on the path. I felt my knees tremble and begin to give. Kolya paused and looked back. The frail light of the moon, which struggled still against the rain-heavy clouds, cast a waxy sheen over his thin face. He looked apologetic.

  ‘She was sold for the bracelet?’ I whispered.

  Kolya nodded. ‘Kirov had organised it all,’ he said.

  ‘It had all been planned before we got to Ghazis.’

  Chapter 27

  We met up with the Agitprop Brigade outside Jalalabad and headed east towards the border with Pakistan, passing Qala Akhuud and Gerdi Kac. The convoy moved slowly, negotiating the broken road with care. On both sides the mountains rose jaggedly. The rain had moved off, leaving the sky clear, sparkling, as beautiful as lapis lazuli. Sitting on top of my APC I could see Zena a few trucks behind.

  The road cut through barren plains, greenery sprouting from rustred rocks. Cerulean lakes mirrored the sky. When we passed villages, the children chased behind our vehicles, screaming, begging, hands reaching out for sweets, money, their eyes full of menace. Beside the road lay the charred corpses of APCs, cars and the shattered skeleton of a helicopter, picked clean by village vultures.

  In the afternoon we pulled cautiously into a small town a little off the road, where the loudspeakers were set up to pump out local songs with rousing revolutionary words. While we kept the heavy guns trained on the village and covered the milling crowd with assault rifles, the medics doled out an array of medicines, examined the diseased, pulled rotten teeth, then stretched a large sheet between two trees, erecting their portable cinema.

  ‘If I have to watch Anna Karenin one more time!’ Kolya moaned.

  Occasionally new films were sent out to us from the Union, but usually it was the ageing Anna Karenin, Tolstoy’s tortured story of love, or a Second World War era patriotic film. This time, though, the images flickering faintly against the stretched cotton sheet were those of a propaganda film, showing grinning Afghan workers, new apartment blocks, roads, parks, peasants working in the fields, looking up and waving, and a soldier grinning back from the turret of an APC. The children ran around in excited circles, shouting obscenities in perfect Russian; old men limped up the queue for half a tablet and a small bag of rice. There were few healthy young men to be seen.

  We were not able to relax until we pulled out in the late afternoon, back on to the main road. Lieutenant Zhuralev kept up a continual, voluble, muttered protest about the exercise and snapped at anybody who addressed him.

  That night we were stationed at a small base close to the road. The barracks, a large stone building, was surrounded on three sides by linked trenches. The latrines, ornately constructed from green ammunition boxes, stood some fifty metres away by a clump of eucalyptus. Sand-filled barrels dotted the base at regular intervals, providing cover from the bullets and shell fragments that were a regular feature of everyday life there.

  The small company stationed at this far-flung base consisted of a wild-looking group of Uzbeks. They greeted us cheerily, especially when they discovered we had brought them rations of vodka. They stared at Zena, who was one of only two women in the Agitprop Brigade’s company, with ravenous eyes, and I feared that all their military discipline would be an inadequate check on their obvious needs.

  The darkness was punctuated by the regular zip of sniper fire from the mountains, and the occasional thump of mortars. The Uzbeks paid little attention to the gunfire. Occasionally their conversation would falter as they cocked their heads to listen to the mortars, ascertaining the level of threat, but once they were sure they were not going to score a direct hit, they immediately picked up the thread of their conversation and didn’t even blink when the ground shook and the plastic covering the windows billowed out.

  ‘Don’t you fire back?’ Kolya asked, crouching on the floor as another shell exploded less than a hundred metres away.

  The Uzbeks drew our attention to a deep thump. ‘One of ours.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the bearded commander of the garrison commented, ‘we are at the edge of their range when they are shooting from the mountains and they rarely venture down on to the plain where they would be able to score a direct hit.’

  Later, seeing that Zena had left the stuffy, smoke-filled room, I slipped out into the darkness. She stood outside the door. The night air was fresh and clear, sharp with the scent of conifer and the cool dampness of the river that bordered the base. Zena felt comically large when I wrapped my arms around her. She was wearing the bulky standard-issue flak jacket, which like most of the equipment issued to us was more of a hindrance than an aid to survival. Dodging from barrel to barrel, we worked our way through the darkness down towards the river. Beneath a eucalyptus we made love quickly and fiercely, afraid only that someone would stumble upon us, or a shell would disturb us before we found relief.

  ‘I long for our bed,’ she whispered, as we sat, backs pressed against a wall of sand-filled barrels. My heart jumped with delight that she considered her hostel bed ours. Later we wound our way back to the barracks, avoiding the drowsy Uzbek on sentry duty, squatting by a small hut, one of our vodka bottles nestled between his legs.

  The next day followed a similar pattern. We set up warily in several villages and provided cover while the Agitprop Brigade did their job. In the early afternoon we arrived in a larger village called Ghazis. The mountains rose steeply behind the village and the area was heavily wooded, with ash and juniper and an orchard of walnut trees.

  Lieutenant Zhuralev cursed as we wound up the low foothills away from the main road to the village. On the crest of a hill, a little lower than the village, was a small hamlet, a few households surrounding a dusty square.

  ‘We’re a sitting duck!’ Zhuralev muttered furiously. ‘Why do we have to do this? Fucking Agitprop Brigade!’

  Unlike in the majority of villages we had visited, a large group of young men milled around among the jostling crowd in the marketplace as the cinema screen and distribution tables were erected. Seeing them made Zhuralev more jittery than ever.

  ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like it one fucking bit,’ he snarled.

  The afternoon passed quietly, though. Strolling about the village marketplace, keeping a sharp eye on the crowd, I glanced frequently at Zena, who worked at a furious pace with the young bespectacled medic, distributing pills and examining yellow-faced elderly men and sickly children. The young men, who had been boisterous when we first arrived, settled down and sat in the dust, watching the faint, flickering images of the propaganda film with rapt attention.

  Lieutenant Zhuralev breathed a sigh of relief when the Agitprop Brigade began to pack away their gear. I brushed by Zena as she stood by the Agitprop’s APC. She caught my arm.

  ‘I want you,’ she whispered in my ear. Her breath was warm and dampened my skin. I felt a blistering burst of desire in my groin.

  As we organised the vehicles into a convoy, and the first BMP rolled out of the village, I noticed Vassily emerge from a doorway. He loped across the marketplace and jumped up on to the back of an APC. Behind him came Kirov. Their heads ducked together in conversation.

  Chapter 28

  ‘It can’t be,’ I protested to Kolya.

  He gazed at me in the moonlight, his expression troubled. Shifting the metal box from beneath one arm to the other, he nodded solemnly.

  ‘That’s how it was, Antanas, tovarich. That was the deal.’

  ‘But…’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It was Kirov,’ Kolya repeated. ‘It was he who organised everything. They wanted her, Ze
na. KHAD wanted her out of the way. They considered her dangerous. Kirov had organised with KHAD that she would be arrested; they would cart her off to the Pol-e-Tcharkhi prison. She had relatives in high positions. Her uncle, her father’s brother, was a figure of some importance in the government. They would not be able to keep her long.’

  My mind raced back to those events, events that for years I had tried to forget, events that tortured my dreams. I saw them playing back across my mind. Every movement caught in slow motion; an indelible looped videotape. Playing, playing, playing.

  ‘But it didn’t happen like that,’ I whispered.

  ‘No,’ Kolya agreed. ‘It didn’t.’

  Winding down the low hill, the convoy passed with care beneath the overhanging trees, the telescopic radio antenna projecting from the turret of the APC clicking against the branches above. The Agitprop Brigade’s APC was towards the end of the convoy. Behind, protecting it at the rear, was a BMP with a grenade launcher and a heavy machine gun fitted on top. At the foot of the hill, the track twisted through a clump of trees and forded a shallow stream thick with reeds. Close by the road stood a pair of ramshackle, isolated buildings. The mud walls had begun to crumble, and the windows were blackened holes. Close to the buildings was a small cemetery, coloured rags, faded by the weather, fluttering from sticks. On the low hill behind them was the family compound, its modest buildings huddled around the little square.

  The first vehicles forded the stream and disappeared from view behind the thick undergrowth the drooping foliage. The APC I was seated on slowed as it approached the stream. I clung tight as it dipped into the hollow. Glancing back, I glimpsed Zena laughing with the bespectacled medic. She closed her eyes as she laughed, throwing back her head.

  The APC splashed into the stream. The water shimmered in the dappled light that broke through the thick canopy of oak and ash. The water had run off the mountains, and was icy cold. The coolness rose from its surface. The APC had slowed sufficiently for me to leap from it. I landed on the sandy bank of the stream. Crouching down, I dipped my hands into the water and threw it up against my dusty face.