Amber

by Stephan Collishaw

  Sitting above me, on one of the metal seats along the side of the chopper, was the medic with the spectacles.

  ‘Zena,’ I said.

  He glanced down at me. His spectacles were cracked and a yellowing bandage had been wound tightly around his head. Blood had begun to seep through it, a dark stain.

  A rush of warmth flooded my senses, entirely at odds with the desperate darkness of my thoughts. I fought it. My eyelids flickered. When they slid closed, I opened them again, lifting the skin with deliberate effort. The metal beneath me lurched suddenly and somebody cursed. Somebody else was crying. My eyelids fell heavily and I could not lift them, though I tried.

  ‘Zena.’ The helicopter dipped as it turned so that my stretcher slid across the metal floor, coming to rest against the legs of the seats. Darkness enfolded me.

  ‘Let’s go now,’ Kolya said softly.

  I nodded and pulled down the sleeves of my shirt and jacket. We turned in the direction of the bridge and trudged along the dark path in silence, feet crunching on the gravel. On the back of my neck I felt a drop of rain. Glancing up, I saw the dark shape of an owl swoop down across the sky and settle at the top of a tree. From the far side of the bridge it was possible to hear the dog barking still, disturbed by some other nocturnal soul. On the bank of the river, by the end of the bridge, work was being done to create a new path through the centre of the woods to the auditorium. The earth-working equipment cast weird shapes in the darkness. Kolya shivered and hurried on towards the light of the lamp on the footbridge.

  Chapter 30

  I did not wake as the Mi-8 skimmed low through the pass, ruffling the sky-blue lakes, tossing the branches of the trees. Nor did I wake in Jalalabad when they hauled me off and lined me up on the tarmac in the darkness, with boys with missing limbs, shattered skulls, boys already zipped into bags. I did not wake on the plane that transported us across the narrow fissures, the broken-backed mountains, the jagged teeth of Afghanistan, to Kabul.

  It was dark when I came to. I could not breathe. I was tied and bound and choking. I struggled and tossed around. I have been captured, was my first thought. My grenade. One for the muj, one for yourself – our first lesson in Afghanistan. I could not move my arms. When I threw back my head to clear my windpipe a searing pain scalded me and detonated a series of mini-explosions behind my eyes. I cried out.

  I heard the clatter of footsteps. The slap of rubber on tiles. The slop of slippers. Hands were pulling at me, lifting me.

  Leave me – no – oh fuck, oh fuck.

  ‘Sedate him,’ somebody muttered.

  Lying on my back I could breathe more easily. My head continued to thump and I could not feel my limbs. Figures swam in front of my eyes.

  Zena.

  A hand reached out and clamped itself tightly over my lips.

  ‘Get it in quick, before he wakes the whole fucking ward with his screams.’

  Light. My eyelids slid open. The brightness hurt, forcing me to squint. The walls were hospital green. A low rumble sounded softly in my ears. Carefully I peered from side to side. I could not turn too far without setting off the pain. The room was lined with metal-framed beds. Two nurses lounged against a wall, one gazing out of the window. As my mind cleared a little, I realised that the low rumbling, which I had taken to be traffic on the road outside, or the murmur of an old fan, was in fact the quiet moans of a hundred men. The moans rose and fell, a continuous stream of pain ebbing and flowing around the hospital ward. It took me a few moments more to realise that I too was a part of this current, my moan joining theirs, escaping my throat involuntarily, rising to float beneath the high ceiling, with the fat flies and spiders that nestled darkly in corners.

  The nurse, noticing I had woken, wandered across to me. She took a cloth and gently dabbed the side of my face, wiping spittle from my cheek. She examined me for a moment, then straightened and turned away. I gazed after her as she wandered, seemingly aimlessly, down the ward.

  It was growing dark again when next I woke. My eyelids flicked up and my mind seemed at once to be preternaturally clear. In vivid detail I remembered Zena turning as I called to her. She straightened slightly. I noticed the look on her face, the way it was twisted with fear, with the desire to hear what I had said. The look of surprise. I saw the dark hole suddenly materialise on her smooth throat. The way her eyes opened slightly wider, astonished that death had caught her so cleanly. Saw the second hole and the flick of her head as the impact knocked her to one side. I felt her beneath me, her body bucking.

  I stared up at the ceiling of the ward. A large spider moved slowly across it towards a hole in the plaster where a light had been fixed clumsily. She straightened. The bullet pierced her throat. Her cheek. The spider made it to the dark hole and hesitated for a moment before disappearing.

  The low hum of suffering had begun to rise, led by a single voice. It was a thin wail and it rose higher and higher. As it rose the other moans followed it, snaking up towards that small dark hole in the plaster of the ceiling, after the spider. The thin wail reached a peak and broke, became a sob, a heart-rending cry, which jerked and rasped. The chorus broke with it. The ward echoed to the sound of the screams, the lonely, tortured wails of the sick. The moans and keening of the frightened, the lost.

  Feet slapped across the cold tiles. Angry voices shushed and hushed.

  ‘The new one,’ somebody said, their throat tight with panic and annoyance.

  They surrounded me. A male nurse sat on the bed and pressed down on my chest. By my side another was clumsily fumbling with a syringe, filling it, holding it to the light.

  ‘Shut the fucker up!’

  I felt the soft warmth of a pillow descending across my face, pressing down, smothering me. A stab of pain in my arm. Other memories were surfacing. They broke through the skin of my consciousness, rising like divers, spluttering for air. Children dark with blood, wide eyed, thrown back against the walls, their clothes rumpled and ragged and disarrayed. Their bodies ill placed, wrenched into positions they could never have achieved in life. I wailed into the pillow.

  Sleep was not a release. My muscles twitched and prickled torturously, my legs cramped and my arm throbbed. The scent of disinfectant became orange blossom, wild rose. Beneath the trees I saw the sudden flash of their movements. The child pulled close to her brother, hugging his thin leg. The boy’s arm snaked around her shoulder as he folded her close. The old man by the well looked up. His fingers played, I noticed, with a small sprig of blossom. The old man held my gaze.

  ‘I was following orders,’ I said to the young doctor.

  He nodded, feeling my pulse. His eyebrows were furrowed and he looked exhausted.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

  The doctor shook his head, monitoring the steady throb of my pulse.

  ‘There was a sound behind the door.’

  He let go of my arm and let it drop on to the sheets. He did not place it gently on the bed, he dropped it and stood up quickly, indicating for a nurse.

  ‘Don’t let her sedate me,’ I said to the doctor as the nurse approached.

  The doctor did not look at me; he was turning his attention already to the boy in the bed by my side, the boy who waved his legless, armless stumps continually, weeping through the darkness and the light.

  ‘Don’t let her,’ I begged. ‘I have such dreams.’

  The nurse frowned angrily. As if I were a disobedient, tiresome child.

  ‘Don’t. I will be quiet,’ I said to her. ‘I promise, I won’t shout. Please?’

  ‘Doctor,’ she muttered, and he turned back to me and nodded.

  I tried to raise myself from my pillow. I was slick with sweat and my skin prickled irritably.

  ‘Don’t put that fucking needle anywhere near me,’ I warned her. ‘I said I didn’t want it.’

  The doctor sat on the side of my bed. He soothed me. He laid a hand upon my forehead and pressed me down into the pillow.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he sa
id. ‘Don’t get upset. If you get upset we will have to punish you. You don’t want that, do you? You don’t want to have to be punished, do you?’

  From Kabul I was flown to a hospital in Tashkent and from there to Moscow. From Moscow, some time later, I was flown to Vilnius and admitted to the New Vilnia. From time to time I surfaced from the warm darkness in which they kept me imprisoned. Haloperidol was my guard; it kept me from myself.

  My thoughts wandered idly down dark passages, going nowhere. My fingers turned to rubber, and I could hardly pick up the spoon to feed myself. As clumsy as a two.-year-old, I lifted the sticky porridge to my mouth, sometimes making it, sometimes waking from some dark place to find it there, still halfway to my lips, cold and jelly-like. When, punished for my lack of progress, I bent, shivering, to clean the toilets, my hands trembled so that I could barely rub the dirty cloth against the cracked ceramic bowls.

  My lips split and I found it hard to speak. I sat on the edge of my bed, transfixed by a shaft of light that broke through the ragged curtains. For hours I would stare at it, drool soaking my pyjama trousers.

  When occasionally the haloperidol loosened its fingers, as the doctors considered releasing me, my brain tunnelled its way towards the light like a worm, working its way through the earth. My tongue untied.

  ‘Fuck Sokolov. Fuck Brezhnev and Gromyko and Andropov. I’ll fucking kill the lot of them. With my own hands.’

  ‘You can’t kill the dead,’ the doctor said, laconically, re-introducing me to my neuroleptic guard.

  At other times the doctors, frustrated by my lack of progress, tried other treatments on me. The Quiet Room was at the end of a long corridor. The windows in the corridor had been whitewashed, making it impossible to see out. The room was bare. The plaster walls were unpainted and crumbling and in the corners dark with damp, green with mould. It was unheated. In one corner was a broken sink and in the other a mattress, soiled and damp. Leather straps restrained my arms and legs. High on one wall was a small window. Dingy light filtered through a thick film of dirt.

  ‘You can’t kill the dead,’ I murmured to myself, my teeth rattling, my whole body convulsed with shaking.

  ‘You can’t kill the dead.’

  And the dead were not killed. Under the influence of the medication, though, they retreated slowly, along with all my emotions. They withered as my muscles withered. They became no more important than anything else: the mote of dust, the crack in the wall, the shaking of my hands, the swirl of whitewash on the window, too high to reach. I ceased to exist except in these tiny fragments of attention. I became a quivering shell enclosing nothing.

  Sometimes I was aware of the passing of shadows upon the wall. Sometimes I smelt the sharp stink of urine, or heard the bark of a nurse, the clang of a spoon against a metal bowl, the thump of feet on the torn linoleum floor. Laughter. Whoops of terrifying laughter that pierced the darkness and would not stop. And then for long days, weeks, I would hear nothing.

  Chapter 31

  I became aware of Vassily by degrees. At first I was conscious only that the figure beside me was not a doctor, nor a nurse. He spoke to me, his voice a quiet murmur in my ear, like a brook, like a breath of air in the linden trees. Sometimes he was there, sometimes not.

  As the weeks passed, I surfaced slowly. The doctors reduced the dosage of my tranquillisers and I did not shout or curse or threaten. The blankness, the emptiness induced by the drugs, stayed with me, even after the medication had been withdrawn completely. Vassily came frequently, sitting with me in the chilly hospital ward, talking to me, caring for me.

  ‘Just look at you,’ he said, dabbing the spittle from my chin. ‘Just look at the state of you.’

  Vassily’s face was drawn and tired. Beneath his eyes, dark sacs hung like vials of poison. His hair dangled over his forehead, his beard was unkempt and his eyes were bloodshot. His hands shook as he touched me.

  ‘Just look at you,’ he mumbled, dabbing and wiping. ‘What a fucking mess.’

  ‘Where am I?’ I asked him one day.

  ‘You’re home,’ he said. ‘Back in Lithuania. I’m going to take you with me. Look after you.’

  When, after a couple of months, the doctor considered me, if not well, then at least not dangerous, I was discharged. Vassily met me in a taxi at the gates of the hospital and we drove into Vilnius together. We stayed in a small apartment belonging to a friend of his for a couple of days before Vassily moved me to the coast to stay with a family in a small village close to the sea. Jurgis and Vaida lived with their granddaughter, Tanya, a student.

  Vassily worked with Jurgis, making pictures from chippings of amber. As the summer passed, I sat in a wooden chair Vassily had placed in the shade of a tree, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the cheap tobacco scorching my throat, watching the heron poke around the pond, the family’s dog wandering back and forth across the parched grass on which it was tethered, the quiet rhythms of village life.

  The smells and sounds of the small cottage comforted me. The scent of the wood and the dust. The sound of the rain as it beat against the roof, the wind as it crooned in the tips of the pines. The pain and nausea began to subside. I felt like a child laid up in bed, sick with fever.

  Whenever I awoke, my heart beating rapidly, the scent of smoke in my nostrils, the echoes of screams in my ears, Vassily was beside me, watching over me.

  ‘Shh,’ he would whisper as I cried out in the darkness.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘You’re home, comrade, you’re safe now. It’s OK. Sleep.’

  ‘All I can see is darkness. What is going on?’

  ‘It’s night-time.’ He stroked my head. ‘You are sick,’ he said. ‘You are tired and sick. Sleep now, tomorrow you will be fine. You will feel much better.’

  Only Tanya disturbed the stillness of my existence. Her presence acted like the dropping of a smooth pebble into the shallows of a pond; the ripples fanned out slowly, making the surface shiver, splintering the mirrored treetops and layered clouds. Guarded as I still was by the effect of the neuroleptics, perhaps I was unaware of her physical resemblance to Zena. I was aware only that I longed for her and feared her in equal measures. I explained my confused feelings to myself as guilt for being attracted to her when it was so obvious Vassily was in love with her and their relationship was budding.

  When I was feeling stronger Vassily took me on a walk through the forest to the beach. The grassland rolled down from the thick woods to the sand dunes. The land was boggy, criss-crossed with little streams. There were endless low hollows and sudden sharp inclines up the sides of hillocks. I was exhausted by the time we had covered half the distance. We sat for some time on top of a grassy knoll, looking down at a cottage close to the beach, sheltered by stubby maple and birch, bent by the winds blowing up off the sea. We did not speak. The silence was broken only by the cry of a gull, the rush of the breeze as it riffled the long grass and the sound of the waves breaking on the beach.

  Vassily shuffled along the water’s edge, bent double, his eyes not rising from the sand at his feet. I followed just behind him, watching his back, keeping close. He stopped and lightly lifted a heap of dark, tangled seaweed with the toe of his split shoe. A gull landed on the damp sand. It, too, rooted about, with its beak, hopping on a couple of paces when Vassily got too close, then foraging once more.

  Vassily stopped suddenly. I squatted beside him. Picking a pebble from the sand, he examined it, cleaned it on the cuff of his jacket and held it up.

  ‘It’s gintaras,’ he said, using the Lithuanian word. Amber.

  I held out my hand and he dropped the dirty lump of ancient resin into my palm. It was light, and warm, quite different to the feel of a pebble.

  He was standing at my side, looking down at the amber in my hand. I could feel his warm breath on my skin. He seemed nervous. He rubbed his hands together and peered at me from beneath his dark fringe. He took the amber from me and wrapped his thick fingers around it, pressing it in
to his flesh.

  As the summer passed, I quickly began to recover my strength. I walked along the beach every morning, going a little farther each time, easing my legs into an easy pace along the soft sand. One morning, waking early, I saw Tanya slip out through the room in which Vassily and I were sleeping. I followed her, pulling on a thick jumper. She was in the kitchen, tying back her hair in the dim pre-dawn light. Seeing me, she smiled.

  ‘Where are you going so early?’ I whispered.

  ‘Out to milk the cow,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come and help?’

  I followed her. The air was cold and damp. A mist rose from the dark earth, dissolving in the sharp, clear sky. The last stars were faintly visible. The pond was sheathed with a smooth, milky skin, unstirred by even the faintest breath of wind. Tanya mounted her bicycle and I walked beside her, through the village to the one narrow, metalled road that snaked away through the fields. Their cow was tethered outside the village. Tanya left the bicycle at the edge of the road, and I followed her through the wet grass, and across a brook. The cow’s breath rose in pale clouds. She lifted her head as we drew closer and Tanya hugged her affectionately. I squatted down beside Tanya as she placed the metal pail beneath the cow’s straining udders.

  ‘Have you done this before?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  She reached out and took my hand, guiding it to the cow’s teats. Her hands were warm and strong. I pressed my forehead against the firm flank of the cow, as Tanya did, and allowed her to guide my fingers. A jet of milk splashed into the pail. It trickled from our fingers and Tanya laughed and put her finger to my lips. When I sucked it, it was sweet. For a moment I held on to her hand and our eyes met and my heart lurched fearfully. Tanya pulled away and we finished off the milking.