Amber (15 page)

We watched as they soared sinisterly over the orange grove, black against the bloody sun. Beneath them the pale blossom shivered and fell like snow upon the cooling earth. Vassily laid his hand on my shoulder.

‘Death will not go hungry tonight.'

It was while we were away on that first raid that Kirov met Hashim. I pictured the Afghani merchant, his thin straggly beard, dirty shalwar-kameez and dark turban, his uneven smile and the way he used to cough up phlegm and spit it on to the floor in large dark pools, stained with
naswar
, tobacco mixed with opium.

In the short time Kirov had been in Afghanistan he had already learnt how to abuse the system. Following the incident in Jalalabad, when he had paid for vodka with a grenade, he had begun buying all kinds of privileges with stolen goods and services. Rumour had it that his mafia connections in his home town of Kaliningrad would have bought him a ‘white ticket' out of national service if he had not been implicated in the violent rape of a teenage girl, which made a two-year break in central Asia seem sensible, until things quietened down.

When Kirov went to pick up some goods from Jalalabad one day, he met a merchant who told him he had something that might interest Kirov. Hashim had various things at the back of his store – jewellery, Western cigarettes, Russian vodka, tape players and televisions from Japan.

It was late when we arrived back at the base after the raid. Kirov was lying back on his crudely made bunk, smoking Marlboro cigarettes and listening to a Western cassette – Kim Wilde, on a new Japanese tape player.

‘What the fuck?' Kolya muttered.

Kirov sat up with a sly grin and proffered the packet of cigarettes. We each took one and stood around the tape player, gazing at it in wonder.

‘How many
cheki
did it cost?' Kolya wanted to know. Kirov shrugged. He pulled a bottle of Stolichnaya from beneath his blanket and waved it before our eyes.

‘Get some glasses,' he said.

‘Stolichnaya!'

‘Where the fuck?'

‘Shhh! If the rest hear they'll all want some.'

‘Turn off the light.'

The glasses clinked in the darkness. We sat beneath the small window, listening to music playing softly on the tape player, smoking the beautiful, smooth Marlboro cigarettes and drinking Stolichnaya, which tasted as sweet as milk after the spirits we had been making for ourselves.

‘Maybe we died too,' Kolya said, his voice weary, but cheerful. I could see his wide grin in the faint light from the window. ‘Maybe we were killed and are in heaven, like the muj think.'

‘Don't they get whores too?' asked Vassily.

‘Where did you get all this stuff?' I asked Kirov.

‘A trader in Jalalabad,' he answered.

The next time the convoy drove into Jalalabad for supplies, we went to Hashim's small store near the hospital. It was then we discovered the prices we could get for things. Anything. The wing mirrors from the KamaZ, spare wheels, ammunition, uniforms, medical supplies. We could get a hundred thousand
afoshki
for a Kalashnikov. Bulgarian biscuits from the army store would fetch a good price, as would sweets, canned milk.

With the
afoshki
we earned selling equipment we had stolen from the base, we were able to buy products from the West coming through from Pakistan. Cigarettes, good vodka, cassette players, video players and presents we could take home when our service was over. We sold our boots, which we rarely wore owing to their extreme unsuitability for the terrain we were in, and our flak jackets, sleeping bags and uniforms, which were all so uncomfortable in the hot climate that they were never used either. They did not fetch much money, but it was often enough for us to buy better equipment, which the mujahidin were smuggling into the country. The only time we were required to wear uniforms was when senior officers visited from Kabul or Jalalabad, which was rare. Generally full uniform was only insisted on for the newest recruits.

It was the jewellery which caught Vassily's eye. He lingered over the huge lumps of lapis lazuli, the beryl and the gold and silver, some of which was obviously antique.

‘Where did. you get this stuff?' he asked. ‘Is there more?'

‘This?' Hashim said. ‘This is just shit. If you want some real pieces, then I can get you some that would interest you.'

‘What kind of pieces do you have?'

Hashim waved his hand above his head, as though rare, precious pieces of jewellery were so common in Afghanistan he could just pluck them from the air.

‘Many pieces. Not far from here was once an ancient and important Buddhist site. There are many pieces of jewellery and other things you might be interested in. You're interested in Buddhist icons? No? There are many more things that will interest you. But…' He rubbed his thumb and index finger together, ‘… they cost.'

‘You find me something interesting and I will find the way to pay you,' Vassily said.

I fell asleep with Tanya's fingers curled in my own, the warmth of her body close to me. In the darkness, a vision of the waves of pale blossom rolled over me. I was walking beneath the trees, reaching up, plucking a sprig from a low branch, examining the delicate petals, marvelling at the careful colouring of each miniature canvas. A child laughed. The blossom slipped from my fingers and fluttered to the ground. The earth was dark, rich. I bent to retrieve the pale petals. My fingers loosened the earth, searching delicately.

‘Leave it,' somebody said. ‘Wait for the sappers.'

I inched forwards across the ground, eyes straining for evidence of the buried mines. I stiffened. A child was crying. My fingers reached out again to loosen the earth.

‘Leave it,' a voice said.

A child was crying, a pitiful ululation, a desperate, heart-rending sob.

‘Just wait for the fucking sappers.'

The earth was stippled. Tiny plumes of dirt rose before me. Little pillars of dust. The dull thwack of bullets entering a tree trunk.

‘Sniper!'

‘Find cover!'

I lay still, lips pressed tight against the hot earth, ears pricked like a dog's, heart thudding in the dry soil, a searing pain slitting my skull in two. I rolled, was trapped. Could not move.

I gasped, my mouth gaping, drawing in air, as though surfacing from beneath the waves. My eyes opened wide, straining against the darkness. My hands flayed, pulling at the sheet wound tight around me, balled in my fists, suffocating me. I sat up, struggling to catch my breath, placing myself slowly, feeling the edge of the bed, the tight knot of sheets, the worn carpet beneath me. Tanya still asleep. I buried my head in my knees, pressing my eyes shut.

When the panic had receded and my pulse calmed, and I had unwound the sheets from around my body, I sat on the edge of the bed. My head throbbed and, lifting a hand and touching it gingerly, I discovered I was bleeding. I had banged it against the corner of the side table, falling from the bed.

I got up, pulled on Vassily's old dressing gown and slipped out of the bedroom, pulling the door quietly closed behind me. There was a half-drunk bottle of brandy on one of the bookshelves in the sitting room. I took a glass and poured myself a large one. Turning on the standard lamp, I settled in the armchair. By its arm there was a pile of photo albums Tanya had not tidied away. Many of the photographs had fallen from the pages when they had been pulled from the shelf and she had put them by the chair, planning to sort them out.

Flicking through the albums, I looked at my friend, young, full of life. I came across a photograph I had taken the summer after we moved to Vilnius. Vassily stood on the beach dressed in a pair of shorts, clasping Tanya to him. Sea water was still streaming from his hair and beard so that he looked like Neptune risen from beneath the waves, and Tanya was screaming, pulling away from him, her dark hair swinging out against the shimmering light bouncing from the surface of the sea. I picked the photograph up, examining closely the two bright, happy faces.

‘Amberella, Amberella,' Vassily was shouting. I could hear his voice, remember its exact cadence, remember the way they had fallen, struggling, to the sand the moment after this picture had been taken, Tanya laughing and screaming and shouting for help. It was the summer after Tanya had introduced me to her university room-mate Daiva. She was standing behind me, watching the two of them. Slipping her arms around me, she rested her chin on my shoulder. It was a moment of pure joy.

‘Amberella was a beautiful young girl who lived here in the village,' Vassily had told us the evening before. It was late June and we had borrowed a car and driven to the coast to visit Tanya's grandparents. We took a bottle and settled on the beach, watching the sun set, listening to the wash of the waves on the sand. It was a sultry evening but later we built a small fire, for its light, not warmth.

‘Her father was a fisherman and they lived in a small hut,' Vassily continued. ‘Though their house was the smallest and meanest in the village, Amberella was the prettiest girl for miles around and her father and mother adored her.

‘Each morning she would run out to this beach and take an early morning swim in the sea. One morning, as she was swimming, the current caught her and she was dragged down beneath the waves, down into the depths of the sea. The prince of the sea had seen the beautiful young woman bathing in his waters and fallen in love with her. It was he that had reached out and drawn her down to his palace in the rocks, far below the surface. Amberella was his prisoner. The sea prince kept her as his princess, in his fabulous palace built with bricks of amber.

‘Poor Amberella was heartbroken. She wept and begged the prince to return her to her parents, who she knew would be stricken with grief at losing their only daughter. The prince was angry that Amberella wept and begged him daily to let her go. Finally, however, moved by her pleas, he harnessed his frothing white horses and rose with her to the surface of the sea in a raging storm.

‘Amberella's father was in his fishing boat when his daughter rose from beneath the sea in the prince's chariot, with a crown of amber on her head and amber beads laced about her neck. As she plunged once more beneath the tossing waves she pulled the amber beads from her neck and threw them to her father. And that was the last he saw of her.

‘When the storms rage and the waves crash upon the beach, still Amberella tosses her amber beads from the window of her palace beneath the sea, hoping they will wash up on the shore to show her parents that she loves them and thinks of them always.'

Putting the photo album aside, I stood up. A photograph spiralled to the floor from my lap. Bending down, I picked it up to slip back into the album.

It was a black-and-white photograph and the quality of the image was very poor. It was of a group of uniformed men, arms draped around each other's shoulders, caps awry, Kalashnikovs held casually in hands, grins on most faces. Behind the group was a large tree, a eucalyptus.

I recognised the group immediately and found myself at the back beside Vassily. My eyes scanned down to the foreground of the photograph. Chistyakov knelt at the front, his legs and knees indiscernible, fading into the poorly developed edge of the photograph, as though when the photograph had been taken his very existence was already draining away.

I turned the photograph over. On the back, in pencil, somebody had scrawled ‘Jalalabad 1988'.

‘June,' I said, and poured myself another brandy.

The morning after the photograph was taken, two helicopters were scrambled from the base to deal with sniper fire coming from a village on to the road to Jalalabad. Chistyakov joined the small group of granddads boarding the Mi-24s.

‘Have a last cigarette, before you go,' Kirov said, proffering his packet of Marlboros.

‘Don't say “last”!' Chistyakov snapped. ‘What's the matter with you?'

Kirov grinned maliciously. Superstitiously we never used the word ‘last'. As the helicopters disappeared into the distance, I joined the supply trucks' military escort heading into Jalalabad. The wind was gathering force and raising dust in dark swollen clouds, which rolled across the plains and hung above the city like a thick autumnal mist, blurring the sun. The dust stuck to our slick, sweaty bodies. Each movement we made grated; our tongues were thickly furred with the fine Afghani soil, our hair stiff and white. The Afghans pulled their shawls tightly around themselves, covering their faces. The whole city seemed to be shrouded under a suffocating, billowing grey burqa.

We were returning to base slowly, an APC before and behind the supply trucks, when a call came through that the two helicopters that had gone on the morning raid had been brought down by the mujahidin, and that Chistyakov was missing.

We were met by a couple of BMPs just outside the village. One of the granddads who had been on the morning raid came over to parley with us.

‘I thought the muj brought your two helicopters down,' Lieutenant Zhuralev said.

‘Did they fuck!' the granddad spat. ‘The pilot crashed. We landed just outside the village. It was quiet, so we were going in to take a look around. The wind got up, blowing like hell, so we could barely see a fucking thing. We should have pulled out then. As we got close to the village the
dukhs
opened fire. Not from the village but from some
kirize
behind us. As we were retreating, one of the pilots panicked – he started to take off. What with the wind and dust storm he comes down in some trees. In the confusion we lost some of our boys. Chistyakov is unaccounted for; we think the muj must have taken him.'

As we wound slowly down the rutted lane to the village, which was situated on an incline, the wind began to drop. The sun appeared, bloody and heavy, sagging towards the hazy horizon. The fields and trees were white with dust. As the late rays of sun caught them they shone scarlet. We were a kilometre from the village when Kolya, sitting beside me, spotted the dark shape in the dirt a little way off the road.