Amber (21 page)

‘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 back. 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.

She pulled a photograph from the wall by the head of her bed and showed it to me. It was a black-and-white picture of her standing before St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, the domes rising behind her. Her hair was longer. It hung silkily across her shoulders. She was wearing a school uniform, a blue dress that rode quite high up her thigh. Against the plain cloth of her dress, the Komsomol badge she wore was clearly visible on her breast. She had a broad grin on her face.

‘When I was in Moscow,' she explained.

‘You look very happy.'

‘I was. I want another life. I want the freedom there is in Moscow. I can't stand it here, where to be a woman is to be nothing, to be less than an animal.'

She leant closer to me, and I placed the coffee cup back on the table. She sank down on to the edge of the bed beside me. Her skin was warm. When I touched her a gentle electrical pulse throbbed from the downy hairs, and flesh goose-pimpled beneath my fingertips. I lowered my head into her shirt, pressing my forehead against the warm firmness of her chest, tasted the sweetness, the saltiness of her skin on my tongue. Her fingers massaged the back of my head. My lips brushed each eyelid, and I traced the tip of my tongue down her scar, sucked the flesh at her throat. My hands traced the curves of her figure, pushing back the stiff cotton of her green shirt, resting on the gathered cloth of her trousers. My lips skimmed her belly, tickled by the roughness of her excited skin.

The sounds of the street faded, along with the mountains and valleys, the dust and dirt, the violent sun and the bone-shaking night. For one moment it slipped from me and I was alone with her beneath the cotton sheets. Time snagged; the minute caught its breath. The bed sighed and enfolded us in its warm oblivion. We lay side by side, gazing empty-eyed at the ceiling and felt the damp sheets dry beneath us.

When I pulled on my clothes, she stood brushing her hair, gazing into a fragment of mirror perched on top of a cabinet. I slipped a small metal cross from around my neck. It was on a thin chain. Liuba had given Kolya and me the crosses the evening before we left. Her cool, full lips had brushed our cheeks, and I had noticed the blush spread across Kolya's face.

‘I would like to give you this,' I said to Zena. She turned from the mirror and took the chain from the palm of my hand. She gazed at it for a few moments before she looked up.

‘A cross?'

‘Just for luck.'

She held it out for me to take from her. I glanced at her questioningly, and a small sharp pain stung my heart. She noticed the hurt flicker across my eyes and smiled.

‘I would like you to put it on me,' she said.

‘Oh, I see.'

I took the thin chain, and with fumbling fingers looped it around her. The back of her neck was furred with fine dark hairs that led down to her spine.

‘Shit,' she said, glancing at the clock, ‘I'm going to be late.'