Amber (18 page)

‘What the fuck have you been up to?' Zhuralev demanded again when I reached the APC.

‘Escorting the doctors, sir.'

‘Well, next time, get fucking permission.'

Vassily was on the back of the APC. He grinned as he pulled me up.

The address the receptionist had given me was on Warsaw Street in the Rasa district, just behind the railway station. On the trolley bus home I stared at the slip of paper. I had not, I remembered with regret, asked the receptionist whether she knew what Kolya was being treated for. The chances were, however, that she would not have told me.

My first memory of Kolya was of when we were six years old. He was sitting in the brightly painted, metal-framed playhouse in the garden of the children's home. Ponia Marija pushed me through the door and pointed towards the sunlit lawn.

‘Go play, Antanelis,' she whispered in my ear. Her voice tickled. I could not remember anybody whispering to me before. I brushed my ear and stepped out into the garden, leaving Ponia Marija to speak to the woman who had brought me to the children's home.

Shrinking back into the shadows, I watched as the children dashed past, screaming and shouting. A small girl paused, staring at me curiously, before she was tugged away by another child. I wandered across the grass towards the fence. Beyond the garden the land sloped away towards a copse of trees and a large lake. Looking out over it, I wondered whether my house lay that way.

‘Hey!' a voice called from behind me.

A square-faced boy with small dark eyes was hanging out of the playhouse on the grass.

‘I'm a cosmonaut,' the boy shouted, ducking back into the shade of the hut.

I trotted over to the playhouse and stood by it, gazing in at the boy.

‘I'm a cosmonaut,' he repeated.

I climbed in beside him and sat on the hard wooden bench.

‘Five!' he shouted.

I joined in, pressed close to his side, feeling the warmth of his leg against my own.

‘Let's be soldiers,' he said after a while, bored with counting from five to blast-off.

‘I'm not here long,' I told him. ‘Just until my mama comes out of hospital.'

He gazed at me for a moment. ‘Let's play soldiers,' he said.

The centre of the Old Town was crowded with people finishing work and the trolley bus I caught was packed tightly. I jumped off a few stops before my apartment and walked slowly up the hill, enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. The clouds that had hung over the city for the past week had broken up; they sailed like the high snow-capped mountains around Jalalabad, far above us.

As I approached my apartment block, the door of a car opened, narrowly missing my leg. I jumped back against the wall, stumbling in my panic.

‘Are you OK?' Zinotis said, stepping out of the car.

I nodded, shakily.

‘I gave you a shock.' He smiled.

‘I thought you were somebody else,' I said.

‘Oh?'

‘It's nothing.' I waved my hand, self-consciously. ‘Come up for coffee. I found that book Vassily borrowed from you some while ago.'

He looked perplexed for a moment, then seemed to remember.

‘Ah!' He grinned.

As I boiled some water, Zinotis leafed through the volume on jewellery from the Kushan Empire.

‘I just happened to be passing,' he called through from the front room, ‘and I thought I would pop in to tell you some interesting things I discovered a little earlier.'

When I entered the room with the coffee, he was putting on his half-moon spectacles to inspect a picture.

‘I was talking to a colleague,' he said, not looking up from the book, ‘from the Department of Antiquities. I told him about the bracelet and he said he thought he knew what it was I was referring to.'

I sipped my coffee and watched him. He took off his glasses and slid them back into the breast pocket of his jacket.

‘He was convinced the bracelet you described was one which was fashioned first for the Emperor Nero. The Romans were obsessed with amber – northern gold, they called it. A Roman soldier was sent north to get some and came back with such an immense quantity that the nets at Nero's games in the Colosseum were decorated with it, as was the armour and swords of the gladiators. Pliny writes about it.

‘Pliny also mentions a jewel Nero wore in his
Historia Naturalis
. He refers to it in terms of the inclusions, which were of scientific interest to him.'

He fished inside his jacket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

‘Legend has it,' he continued, opening out the paper, a photocopy, and looking at it absently, ‘that the bracelet was later presented by an Egyptian princess to Tamerlane, the great warrior king born in Samarkand, who went on to build a bloody empire stretching from Delhi to Baghdad.

‘It was one of those artefacts I told you about before, unearthed in Bagram by a British adventurer and displayed in the Kabul Museum. It was stolen from the collection in the mid-eighties.'

Leaning over, he handed me the piece of paper.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘I copied it a couple of hours ago in the library. It's a newspaper article. My colleague mentioned he thought he had seen it at one point and I was able to trace it.' I took the paper from him and glanced at it. Faded, barely distinguishable, it showed a photograph of a bracelet. The filigree band was intricate and thick, as was the clasp that held the large oval piece of amber. The amber was spherical, beautifully translucent. The inclusions were spectacular, so perfectly centred, so clear, it seemed as if they had been especially arranged for display.

‘Ancient amulet stolen from Kabul collection,' the caption ran beneath the photograph.

‘You know,' he said, when I had finished reading, ‘this bracelet would be worth a lot of money on the black market.'

I nodded. ‘Are you sure this is the one?'

‘It fits,' Zinotis said. ‘The description he gave you… Afghanistan…'

He rubbed his chin furiously. ‘Of course, it would be necessary to examine it to make sure it was not a fake.'

‘But surely,' I said, ‘it's not possible to fake the inclusions in the amber?'

‘Of course you can,' Zinotis said. ‘There have been some very clever examples.'

For a few moments we both lapsed into silence, each preoccupied by our thoughts.

‘If you have this bracelet,' Zinotis said, ‘I would be very keen to have a look at it.'

‘I don't have the bracelet,' I told him. ‘I'm not interested in it.'

He looked up, questioningly. ‘Oh?'

‘It's Kolya I need to find.'

Zinotis smiled. ‘Of course,' he muttered. ‘So you said yesterday morning.'

He gazed at me for a few moments, as if he was trying to judge what my real interest was. I realised how strange my behaviour must seem to him.

‘But when you find him,' Zinotis continued, leaning forwards, interrupting my thoughts, ‘you will have to give him the bracelet. Would he know what to do with it? Would he know somebody who could sell it for him?'

‘I don't know anything about that.'

‘He could get into trouble, of course, selling stolen goods.' He smiled. ‘It would be worth a lot, though, on the black market.' His smile turned into a roguish grin. ‘If you can't find Kolya…'

‘I have his address,' I told him. ‘If Kolya needs your help I will tell him to contact you.'

He stood up and held out his hand.

‘I will help in whatever way I am able,' he said.

We shook hands and he left. For some while I did not move as I pondered the situation. What, I wondered, did Vassily want me to know, which only Kolya could tell me? Why was he not more explicit? Why could he not tell me himself? The price was too great, he had said. If there was one thing I had learnt from Vassily it was that beautiful jewellery shouldn't be sullied by talk of money. As I sipped my coffee, I remembered a conversation we had had shortly after we had arrived in Vilnius and started up our business.

‘We need to get our own supply of amber,' Vassily said. We were sitting in the beer hall across the street from his apartment. ‘To buy our amber here in Vilnius would cost too much. If I tried to get some out of the bastard we are working for, there would be no profit in doing the work. We need to go to Kaliningrad to get some for ourselves; it is the only way.'

There was a large factory that processed amber in Ribachi, a small village in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Amber was excavated from the Curonian Lagoon, then cleaned and processed at the factory.

‘I know the place,' Vassily told me. ‘There are people at the factory I know from the old times. You see, the thing is, comrade, you don't want to be paying too much tax to import the amber. What kind of a profit are you going to make then? What is the point in you doing the business, just to feed some greedy border guards? No, no. On one set of papers you buy a tonne of amber and then from my friend the second tonne, and that travels without papers. This way you can make a profit. It can be done.'

‘Where do they get the amber from, these friends of yours?' I asked.

‘They steal it from the factory.'

‘A tonne of amber?'

He glanced at me to see whether I was joking. ‘Are you stupid or what?' was all he would say. He slammed his empty beer glass down on the table in front of me. ‘Go get me another beer.

‘Listen, let me tell you,' he continued when I returned with two more litre glasses of foaming beer and a plate of fried garlic bread. ‘Since you have so many scruples about stealing from those fucking bastards who think they can trawl the amber from beneath the waves and sell it at whatever cost they think fit – let me tell you about amber.

‘For many centuries people have collected amber from along the Baltic shore, when the winds have risen and the stormy sea has tossed it up on to the sand. They fished for it with nets, delving into the seaweed. Some, later, would swim out into the sea, or the lagoon, with a wooden paddle, and dive for the amber beneath the water, prising it from the seabed. Can you imagine that, eh, comrade? The danger they risked to get hold of it. Later, of course, the capitalists took over and they, as always, were wanting to improve the efficiency of the business and so introduced new machines, dredgers ploughing up the whole bed of the sea, sifting out the amber.

‘It used to be that the person who found the amber, it belonged to them, but that changed over time. The dukes and local lords began to control the trade; there was money in it, so of course they wanted their cut. They were the Amber Lords. What was washed up from the sea belonged to them. The Beach Masters and the Beach Riders were the only ones authorised to collect the amber. If you collected it illegally, as the poor peasants did, to earn a few roubles, you would be fined heavily if you were caught. If you were too poor for a fine, then there was always the gallows. In the old city of Konigsberg there were executioners whose sole job it was to put to death the poor collectors of amber who had been picked up in the early morning by the Beach Riders.

‘Listen, my little brother, my comrade,' Vassily said. He leant over the table, grabbing my arm. ‘This is what we will do. We will go to Kaliningrad, I will borrow a truck, I know where I can get one, and we will bring back our own amber, good stuff, and we will make jewellery. Good jewellery, not cheap rubbish, beautiful jewels like I used to make before the war. We will open the shop and be known as the best jewellers in Vilnius.
Niet
?'

‘In Vilnius? In the whole of Lithuania!'

‘In the whole fucking reach of the inglorious former Soviet fucking Union.'

‘And we will be rich.'

‘Rich?' He put down his glass and looked at me seriously. ‘No, my little friend, not rich. Fuck riches. What is money? Money is nothing. Money is shit, a pocketful of shit. Start to want it and it is like a disease, it will grab you around the throat and throttle you. It will kill you. Have you ever looked into the eyes of a rich man? They're empty. Empty, I tell you. Fuck money, money is the opposite of beauty, and, comrade, I love beauty. She is my goddess.'

‘To beauty,' I said, raising my glass.

Vassily raised his own glass. The excitement had slipped from his face. His brow was furrowed and his eyes gleamed darkly. ‘Once I got mixed up – thought jewellery should be prized only for its worth. I was wrong.'

The telephone rang loudly, suddenly, making me jump. I levered myself from the armchair and crossed over to it. Daiva spoke before I had a chance to say anything.

‘It's me,' she said.

She sounded composed, but quiet. It took me a few moments to respond.

‘Hello.'

Silence lapped around our words. I could hear the sound of her breathing; tense, short breaths. I imagined her lips close to the telephone, the rise and fall of her chest. The way her hair fell down across her cheek and tickled her nose.

‘Where are you?' I asked.

‘Are you OK?' she said, ignoring my question.

‘I'm fine.'

‘You found the food I left you?'

‘Yes, I found it.'

I could hear the quiet murmur of a voice behind her. Perhaps it was just the television. When she spoke again her voice was strained, but she spoke clearly and loudly enough for me to understand she was on her own.

‘I'm sorry, Antanas, I'm sorry, but I had to get away, just for a while. I couldn't think.'

I said nothing. She paused, as if waiting for me to respond. If I had had a drink perhaps I would have said something. Perhaps she was trying to gauge that; how much I had drunk. My silence seemed to make her more nervous, as if it were an accusation.

‘Your drinking is getting worse and I don't know how to help you any more,' she said, her voice cracking with emotion. In the subtle change in her tone, I heard the first tear slip down her cheek. A wave of sorrow washed across me.