Amber (20 page)

She stood up and wandered over to a large old bureau. Leafing through a pile of letters, she took a pen and wrote something on a scrap of paper. Handing it to me, she pointed to a woman's name and an address. ‘It'll be as good a place to start as anywhere,' she said.

I thanked her and drank the last of the bitter coffee. As I stood she was staring out of the window into the darkening, rain-swept street. Standing in the doorway, I told her I was leaving. She glanced back over her shoulder.

‘If you see him,' she said, ‘tell him…' but she turned away and didn't finish the sentence. When I emerged into the rain, she was standing there still, a ghostly shadow behind the window.

The address of the woman was on Pylimo, which was not far so I decided to walk, even though the rain had grown steadier. The clouds had fallen so low they snagged against the roofs of the city. The church spires had disappeared. The traffic was thick, moving slowly, lights shimmering on the wet surface of the road. The few pedestrians hurried by, newspapers covering their heads. I walked close in against the wall, crouched into my jacket with the collar turned up.

The young woman on Pylimo had a v1cious bruise beneath her left eye. She was a short dark girl, no more than twenty. I thought possibly she was a Gypsy, and perhaps she was, but when she spoke her Lithuanian was coarse enough to be her mother tongue.

‘I'm looking for Kolya Antonenko,' I said when she opened the door a crack.

She peered at me suspiciously through the narrow space. ‘What do you want?'

‘I'm looking for Kolya,' I repeated.

I tried to peer into the dark room behind her, but could see nothing.

‘Who are you?' she asked.

‘I'm an old friend of Kolya's,' I told her.

Ridiculously, I took out the letter Kolya had sent to Vassily and showed her. She took the paper from me and examined it.

‘You're Vassily?' she asked, and something in the way she said it suggested she knew of him. For a moment I considered lying to get past the door.

‘No,' I explained. ‘Vassily gave me the letter. He asked me to find Kolya.'

‘Oh,' she said.

‘So?'

She continued to eye me, suspicious still. Finally she seemed to come to some kind of decision and nodded. ‘Fine. Come in, then.'

She showed me through to the tiny kitchen and indicated I should sit at the table.

‘He's not here at the moment,' she said, ‘but he shouldn't be long.'

She pulled a chair around the table so she was closer to me. The sleeve of her blouse was hitched up, revealing a thin row of scars across her forearm. She made no attempt to pull it down to hide them.

‘How did you know to find him here?' she asked, extracting a cigarette from a packet. She offered me one and I took it.

‘I was given an address on Warsaw Street,' I told her honestly. ‘The woman sent me on.'

The young woman wrinkled her nose and laughed mirthlessly. ‘His landlady? That old witch! He comes here when he can't stand any more of her nagging him for his rent, among other things.' She snorted. ‘I think she has a thing for him.' Inhaling the oily smoke of the cheap cigarette, she added, ‘I'm a little more understanding of his needs.'

The apparatus of Kolya's heroin addiction was scattered about the small apartment.

‘Kolya has been waiting for this Vassily to contact him,' the young woman said. ‘Reckons he owes him money.' She looked at me as though I might volunteer some.

‘Vassily's dead,' I told her.

She looked disappointed rather than upset. I smoked the cigarette while the girl chatted inanely about her life. She fell silent suddenly and I heard a faint scuffling sound as somebody tried to insert a key in the lock of the door. It clicked open and a few moments later Kolya appeared in the kitchen. Seeing me he stopped short, a startled look passing across his face. I gasped audibly. Kolya's once thick figure had shrunken away. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes had receded to dark shadows burrowed beneath his brow. His shaking hand reached out to steady himself.

‘What the fuck?' he muttered.

‘Kolya,' I said, standing.

‘Antanas?'

He paused, gazing at me, an irritated frown furrowing the waxy skin of his forehead. In his hand he held a small brown paper package. He darted a glance at the girl, but she avoided his eye.

‘You're going to have to excuse me,' he said, and turned away sharply, disappearing into another room.

‘Kolya,' I said, following him.

The girl held out her hand and grabbed my jacket.

‘Leave him,' she said.

I turned to her.

‘He has his needs,' she said, quietly. ‘Just leave him for a while.'

When I looked at her stupidly, her hand swept over to the syringes on the edge of the sink. The burnt spoons, crushed foil, straps. I sat back down by the table. The girl went out, following Kolya into the other room. I heard their hushed voices through the wall.

When she reappeared some time later, the young woman was wearing a very short skirt and a low top. She had combed her hair and applied some make-up carelessly. She pulled on a leather jacket. ‘I have to go out to work now,' she said. ‘He will come out soon. He asked me to tell you not to go. Wait for him.'

I nodded. She slipped a small handbag over her shoulder and left. I glanced at my watch. It was almost ten o'clock.

It was a month before the opportunity arose to go into Jalalabad. The new recruits seemed hopelessly unprepared and had to be assessed and allocated to different units depending on their expertise, if they had any.

It was Vassily who suggested I volunteer to escort the supply trucks on a trip into the city. He had some business in Jalalabad, he told me.

‘It's simple,' he explained in a café in the centre of the city, grinning over the rim of a steaming glass of tea. ‘Hashim supplies me with jewels – sometimes it's worked pieces he gets, gold inlaid with stones, sometimes it's unworked lumps of lapis lazuli, beautiful pieces. Now, as you know, there is no way I am going to be able to get these pieces out of the country; they would be confiscated on the border. And selling them here isn't an option; here it's a buyer's market.'

‘So?'

‘So what we do is slip the stuff into coffins.'

‘Coffins?'

I spluttered tea across the table. Vassily motioned with a finger to his lips that I should keep my voice down. I glanced around, but there were only a few Afghanis morosely sipping tea at the high tables.

‘Obviously it means taking in more partners, and that splits the profits, but it's that or nothing.'

‘What do you mean, coffins?'

‘Kolya gets the stuff into the coffins here in Jalalabad. He knows somebody who works in the morgue.'

‘That's where he is now?'

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.”'