Amber (14 page)

‘One day, while she was wandering along the border of her kingdom, her eyes fell upon the most beautiful necklace she had ever seen.

‘Her kingdom bordered that of the Black Dwarfs. As she peered through the trees and the thick undergrowth she caught sight of the gleam of gorgeous stones. Four dwarfs were crafting a beautiful necklace, which caught the sun whenever they held it up. Entranced, Freyja could not stop herself from slipping into the glade where the dwarfs were working and going to admire the necklace.

“‘How much does it cost?” she asked them. “Tell me, I will pay whatever sum you ask for.”

‘The dwarfs shook their heads. “This,” they told her, “is the Brisingamen. There is no price you could pay.” But Freyja begged them. It was the most beautiful jewel she had ever seen and she could not imagine living without it.

‘You see,' he said, ‘you have to know the power a piece of jewellery can have on you. You have to know the pull some stones have.' He paused a moment longer. ‘Freyja would have paid anything to have that necklace. The four dwarfs huddled together and discussed the price for which they would be willing to sell the Brisingamen. Finally they decided. “We will sell you the necklace,” they said to her, “but there is only one price we will accept.”

“'What is it? Just name it,” said Freyja.

“'You must make love with each one of us,” the dwarfs said. And such was the power the beautiful necklace had on her, Freyja agreed to the price instantly and with joy. Betraying her husband, she slept with each dwarf for a day and a night, pleasuring them with whatever sensual delights they wished for. And on the fourth day she left with the necklace strung around her neck, radiating beauty.

‘But she had betrayed her husband,' Vassily said, quietly emphatic. ‘And when you betray somebody you are sure to be found out sooner or later.

‘Freyja had been seen,' he continued. ‘The odious Loki had seen everything. He went to her husband and told him all he knew. Od would not believe that snivelling spirit of evil. He demanded Loki prove his tale to be true.

‘But how could Loki prove his tale?' Vassily drained his glass of vodka and poured a new one. ‘Freyja had hidden the jewel.' He paused again for effect, looking around at each one of us sitting around the table. ‘Loki turned himself into a mosquito. He flew into Freyja's chambers and bit her as she slept. The bite irritated her and she scratched and tossed and turned in her sleep. Loki grabbed the necklace from beneath her pillow and took it straight to Od.

‘Od flew into a rage. He threw the necklace aside and the next day he disappeared. When Freyja woke the next morning, she discovered that both her necklace and her husband had gone. Ever since that day she has wandered the earth looking for her husband, weeping continously. The tears that fall upon the rocks, seeping into the seams, turn into gold. Those tears that fall upon the sea turn into beads of amber.'

‘Seven years ago,' Tanya said. ‘It seems a lifetime.'

She put the necklace on the low table and picked up some more of the scattered fragments of jewellery and amber pieces.

‘There wasn't much money here,' she continued. ‘You know what Vassily was like – as soon as it came in it went out, he had no desire to hoard it beneath the mattress and anybody who knew him would have known that.' She paused, surveying the mess of papers and books. ‘It seems,' she said, ‘that they were after some of his papers or his books. It doesn't make any sense to me.'

‘I think it could have been Kirov,' I said quietly.

‘Kirov? Why?'

I shrugged. ‘He may have thought there would be something here that would reveal where Kolya is. Where the bracelet is.'

Tanya shivered.

‘What scares me,' she said, ‘is that I have no idea what is going on. It is like standing on the edge of an abyss in the darkness. This great hole has opened up before me and I don't know how to deal with it. Vassily and I told each other everything. We had no secrets, we would never lie to each other, that was what we said again and again.'

She stood up and kicked out at an upturned book.

‘Fuck him!' she cried. ‘How could he die and leave this mess? Why did he not let me know what was going on, Antanas? Why did he lie to me?'

She kicked another volume, sending it ricocheting across the small room. I stood up and took hold of her arms.

‘How could he have done this to me, Antanas?' she said bitterly.

‘Calm down,' I said. ‘I know as little as you.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said, red eyed.

I tried to draw her down on to the sofa, to calm her.

‘You must find Kolya,' she said. ‘He is the only one who can explain what this is all about.'

‘I'm worried,' I said. ‘The more we get involved in this, the more dangerous it is for you.'

‘Why should it be dangerous for me?'

I shrugged. ‘Who knows what Kirov will do.'

‘I'm becoming more frightened of the shadows,' Tanya said, ‘the empty spaces, the not knowing.'

She went into the kitchen to make some coffee, and I turned my attention to the mess. I gathered the books and replaced them on their shelves, collected the scattered sheets of paper, stacking them on the sofa to sort later into their appropriate files. Tanya reappeared with coffee, put it down and began to sweep up the splinters of glass and broken fragments of vase and cups. We had more or less finished when I noticed, behind us, the shadow of a figure standing in the doorway.

Hearing feet on the tiles behind her, Tanya started and spun round, her face ashen.

‘The door was open,' Zinotis said. ‘I knocked but nobody answered.'

‘This is Professor Zinotis,' I explained to Tanya, my own heart beating rapidly from his sudden appearance. ‘A friend of Vassily's.'

‘I'm sorry,' Tanya said, ‘I'm a little on edge today.' She held out her hand and Zinotis took it and shook it warmly. ‘Vassily has mentioned you,' she added. ‘It's strange we never actually met when he was alive.' Her lips tightened as she said this, and I was afraid she would break down again, but she didn't. She offered him a seat, taking from it a pile of the papers we had collected together. He declined the coffee she offered him, but took out an old pipe.

‘Would you mind?' he asked.

‘Not at all,' Tanya said.

It was obvious Zinotis had not been expecting me to be there. For some moments he seemed at a loss as to what to say. He covered this with the careful packing of his pipe. He lit it and exhaled the rich, spicy smoke.

‘I came over to offer my condolences,' he said.

Tanya smiled and thanked him.

‘We spent many afternoons together,' Zinotis added. ‘Swapping stories about various jewels, legends.' Turning to me, he said, ‘I've been giving some thought to what we talked about this morning.'

‘Have you had any ideas?'

‘I thought perhaps Tanya would know something,' he said, ‘but I suppose you have already discussed that yourself.' He smiled apologetically.

‘I'm bewildered by the whole thing,' Tanya said. ‘Do you know anything about this bracelet? Or what it is Vassily wanted Kolya to tell Antanas?'

Zinotis sucked on his pipe thoughtfully. His shoulders lifted slightly in a shrug.

‘No,' he said. ‘Little more than what Antanas told me earlier.' He paused and gazed out of the window. ‘Vassily was involved in smuggling jewellery while he was in Afghanistan,' he continued after a few moments. ‘The bracelet is presumably something they brought back from there.'

Tanya sat up. ‘He told you this?'

‘He talked about it a little,' Zinotis said.

Tanya turned to me. ‘Did you know about this?'

I nodded. ‘A little,' I conceded. ‘It was not something I wanted to get involved in.'

Tanya shook her head. ‘He said nothing about it to me,' she murmured, more to herself than Zinotis or me.

‘He got the piece in a village called Ghazis,' I told Zinotis, ‘over in the east of Afghanistan.'

Zinotis raised his eyebrows and nodded. He brought the pipe to his mouth but, discovering it had gone out, took out a packet of tobacco and began to refill it. ‘By all accounts,' he said, ‘there were a lot of jewels and artefacts swimming around in Afghanistan. Like those from Bagram, the summer capital of the Kushan Empire, which was on the Silk Route that connected Rome with India and China. Alexander the Great founded a city there. In 1936 an archaeological excavation in Bagram uncovered one of the greatest finds of the century. The coins and jewellery dug up were on display in the Kabul Museum.'

‘Were
on display?'

‘The museum was plundered after the Soviet army withdrew. Little remains of the collection.'

‘You're suggesting Vassily bought something stolen from there?'

‘I'm not suggesting anything,' Zinotis said, shaking his head. ‘I was just speculating. During the period of our occupation the museum was well guarded. Unfortunately the American-backed rebels were not quite so concerned about the cultural heritage of the country they were liberating. However, even though the collection was guarded well when our troops were there, the fact is pieces did go missing. There was a trade in artefacts.'

‘But would they have had amber in Afghanistan?' I asked. ‘I mean in the time of Alexander the Great or during the period of the Kushan Empire?'

‘You would be amazed,' Zinotis said. ‘Amber from our coast has been traded since the dawn of time. Despite the fact that this was one of the remotest parts of Europe, pagan until the fourteenth century, merchants ferried our amber across the world thousands of years ago. Pieces were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, who lived in Egypt almost one and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ. The Phoenicians transported it around the coast into the Mediterranean. The Greeks were fascinated by it.'

I smiled. ‘You remind me of Vassily, a walking encyclopaedia of amber.'

Zinotis laughed. ‘What a store of information he had! We spent hours swapping stories over drinks.'

Having tamped down the tobacco in his pipe, he took out a match and attempted to light it. For some moments he sucked at it, then lit another match and tried again. The fragrant aroma of the tobacco filled the room. Thick smoke plumed up around his head, shrouding his pinched face for a moment.

‘The Chinese were fascinated by amber too,' he continued. ‘They believed it was the soul of a tiger which had died and passed into the earth, giving it magical properties. The Tibetans call it perfumed crystal. There are many routes it could have taken to get to Afghanistan.'

He paused again, sucking pensively on his battered old pipe, his eyes casting around the room, tidy now, though the books and papers were disordered.

‘But the important thing is to find Kolya, yes?' he said. ‘Vassily wanted him to have the bracelet.'

I nodded.

‘Still,' he continued, ‘smuggled jewellery needs a seller.' He smiled. ‘You might have need of me. I know a little about the market. If you hear anything about Kolya…'

He levered himself up from the armchair.

‘Thank you for your help,' Tanya said.

‘What do you think?' she said later, when Zinotis had left.

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘It's true Vassily was dealing in artefacts. It wasn't something I paid much attention to when we were out there. I just considered it to be part of his love of jewellery.'

Tanya sighed.

‘Will you stay?' she asked later, when darkness had fallen.

‘Yes,' I said, looking over at her curled in the armchair, the dim light of the standard lamp casting shadows over her small, pretty face, and thinking of my own empty apartment. ‘Maybe it's better I stay with you tonight.'

‘Memory is a funny thing,' I said as we lay enveloped by the thick darkness and stillness of the night. ‘I remember the scent of oranges. I can still remember the way it used to smell in spring.'

‘Vassily would say that,' Tanya said. ‘You should smell the spring in Jalalabad, he would say to me, when the snow melts on the mountains, when the trees blossom.'

‘I remember the smell of charred flesh, too, the smell of bombs and dust and sweat and fear.'

Tanya reached out, under the sheet, and took my hand in hers, caressing my fingers gently with her thumb.

There had been orange blossom on the trees at the time of that first raid. We had regrouped at the foot of the mountains. The pine and spruce growing higher up had given way to ash and oak. An orange grove rambled across a low hill. The trees were decked with blossom. When we scrambled out of the APCs we were greeted with the scent of narcissi, which grew in profusion on the grassy banks of the road, scarlet and yellow.

I sat in the dust, still cradling the lifeless body of Pavlov, gazing out across the orchard as we waited for the medical choppers to arrive to take the dead and injured to Jalalabad. In the centre of the orchard, on the brow of the hill, stood a small cottage only partly visible between the trunks of the orange trees and their blossoming branches.

Vassily squatted down beside me and followed my gaze out over the hill towards the cottage.

‘What a beautiful place,' I said.

Vassily nodded and placed a hand on my knee. ‘Beautiful and terrible.'

He lifted the shattered body of Pavlov and laid him in line with the other corpses at the side of the road. There were five. Taking out a rag he used for testing the oil in the KamaZ, Vassily wiped the blood from my face. We stood in silence over the bodies of our friends for some time.

‘I remember the scent of narcissi,' I told Tanya, drawing closer to her in the darkness.

When the Mi-8s arrived we loaded the bodies into their trembling, swollen bellies. Vassily picked a handful of the brilliant yellow narcissi from the side of the road and laid them on the chests of the soldiers in their body bags. The helicopters shuddered and rose with a roar.