Amber (24 page)

‘He's gone,' the young medic said. He was sitting beside the boy, smoking a cigarette.

‘I want you to leave,' Zena said, not turning. ‘I want you to go now.'

I went to her, tried to touch her shoulders, but she turned and the look on her face was ferocious. She brandished the brush before her, keeping me back.

‘Go.'

Kolya stumbled on to the helicopter, his Kalashnikov slung carelessly from his shoulder, a small, private smile playing on his thick lips. Slumping beside me, his hand clutched my knee, squeezed it. I turned to look at him. His eyelids were closed. They opened slowly, revealing tiny pupils, bloodshot whites. He grinned, catlike.

‘You ever read Malraux?' he said. ‘You know what he said? Opium teaches one thing only – aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.'

The lids of his eyes slowly slid back down.

Squatted down in the corner of our room, back on the base, I accepted a bottle from Sasha. It was not the Stolichnaya we had got from Hashim, it was
samogonas
; moonshine. Water mixed with sugar and left for a week, then boiled. We drank and smoked hashish. My darkness came just before dawn. It was deep and dreamless. When I woke later the next day, Vassily placed a bottle of good vodka by my side. My fingers were not strong enough to crack open the bottle, so he did it for me.

Technically, in the medical station, where I was referred the next day, I was not allowed to drink any more. The medic preferred, however, to have me drinking something good, rather than sneaking the surgical spirits. He provided me with a bottle.

‘Enough,' Vassily said, two days later. He bent down over the low, uncomfortable bunk and grabbed the front of my vest, pulling me up sharply. I gasped, woken from a stupor.

‘That's enough now.'

Dragging me from the bed, Vassily pushed me, stumbling, towards the door. When my legs gave way and I crumpled in a heap, he pulled me up roughly. The young medic, who had raced out of his office, hearing the commotion, mounted a feeble protest. A look from Vassily quietened him; he stood back against the wall and let Vassily take me.

The brightness of the light split my skull. I begged Vassily, but he did not listen. Hauling me across the dusty parade square, he threw me to the ground close to the latrines. Turning on a hosepipe, he doused me with water. I lay on the earth, my knees pulled close to my chest, hugging them tight, burying my face in the sodden cloth of my trousers. He left me there for a while and I lay still, feeling the heat of the sun slowly warm me, feeling the cloth dry against my skin. I smelt the burnt scent of the Afghan soil, the fresh odour of wet earth, the sharp stink of my body, the heavy stench of the latrines hanging in the air like a sour cloud of gas.

‘Get up,' Vassily said.

When I did not respond he kicked me hard in the ribs. Involuntarily I let out a whimper.

‘Get the fuck up,' he snarled. ‘It's enough. Now it is time you got on with things.'

Lifting me to my feet, he put his large hands on either side of my face to steady me and drew me close.

‘Antanas, comrade, it is time to get on with life. Come on, my little brother, it's enough.'

I staggered around after him. He pushed me, prodded me, kept me working. He boiled tea and mixed large spoons of raspberry jam into it. Forced the metal cup to my lips and made me drink the sweet infusion while it was hot. I sweated hard. He sent me to shower, dressed me in clean clothes, threw my sweat-stained uniform at one of the recruits to wash. He woke me early in the morning and took me to the parade ground and forced me through exercises with the new recruits. Slowly, hour by hour, I began to improve. I threw myself into the routines of the base. Up before reveille, I exercised hard. I volunteered for extra duties. I worked and did not think.

‘Our soul is cut out bit by bit,' Kolya said, smoking his pipe. ‘And soon we will have none left.'

‘It is better not to think about it,' Vassily said, smoking, watching one of the recruits polish our boots.

‘Malraux again,' Kolya said. ‘“Don't think with your mind – but with opium”.'

‘Where did you get that fucking book?' Vassily snapped, picking up the dog-eared paperback that lay at Kolya's feet.

‘The bazaar in Jalalabad.'

After Zena had told me to leave, I went angrily.

‘Fuck you,' I said, as I left. ‘What do you know? What do you understand?'

Almost as soon as I reached the street, though, I regretted having shouted at her. I waited in front of her apartment for her to come out. When, after half an hour, she still had not emerged, I trudged back up the crumbling concrete stairs and knocked on her door. Nadia answered.

‘I'm sorry, Antanas,' she said, ‘Zena left. She slipped out through the other exit. One of the girls told her you were waiting in the street.'

I asked for paper and a pencil and wrote Zena a note, which I left on her bed, asking her to meet me the following evening, in a café not far from the river. I slept that night in the compound on the outskirts of Jalalabad.

I went to the café early, and sat outside drinking tea and watching the motorised rickshaws buzzing past. In front of the café stood an old eucalyptus. I moved my chair into its shade and thought about what I would say to her. When a soldier from the supply convoy came and sat with me, I was not able to join in with his chatter. I wished only that he would leave, fearing that he would still be there when she arrived and would carry on with his inane conversation, his stream of weak jokes and tales of his exploits with the whores from Russia.

When finally he left, in search of vodka, I breathed a sigh of relief. I waited until darkness fell, watching the street down which she would have .to walk from her hostel, but she did not appear. I found her on a street corner, head in her hands, one foot up against the wall on which she was leaning. She jumped when I touched her shoulder.

‘It's not long till curfew,' I said.

She looked around, as if surprised that darkness had already fallen upon the city.

‘I got your note,' she said.

‘But you didn't come.'

‘I was coming and that is more than you deserve.'

Her tone was softer, but she sounded tired and miserable. ‘I tore it to pieces and threw it out of the window,' she said. ‘I wanted to forget you. I was coming to tell you that, perhaps.'

She walked beside me, kicking disconsolately at the loose stones at the side of the road. Taking heart from the tone of her voice rather than her words, I put my arm around her shoulder. She shrugged it off.

‘Don't,' she said softly.

‘I love you,' I told her.

‘Well, I can't love you.'

‘You're all I live for,' I pleaded. ‘All that I think about when I am not with you is when I will see you next. I don't know what I would do if I could not look forward to seeing you again.'

She stopped and looked at me. Her eyes were dark. She had, I noticed, put on mascara and lipstick. She was wearing a thin cotton blouse beneath a soldier's
Pakistanka
, and around her neck she wore the cross I had given her.

‘They brought in some of the injured from the
kishlak
, after you had been there,' she said. ‘Children with limbs missing, old people. Of course, then I did not know you had been involved. There was talk of worse, of a massacre.' She looked at me, as if hoping I might refute this. I said nothing. ‘A soldier from your division, Kirov, was with one of the girls a few nights later – one of the girls who does it for money,' she said, not attempting to hide the disgust in her voice. ‘He was boasting about having been involved in the raid on the
kishlak
, said that it was a rebel hideout, said that a whole arms cache had been found and that there would not be an investigation because it had been proved to be a mujahidin stronghold.'

I nodded. The commander considered the raid to have been a great success.

‘The children,' Zena said, ‘you should have seen them.' Her voice trembled and her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Women were raped.'

‘I didn't do that,' I said, quickly.

She stared at me hotly.

‘Zena,' I said, ‘I don't know what to say to you. Don't blame me for this mess. When I came here, to Afghanistan, I thought I was coming to do some good. The Political Officers told us we were fighting for the revolution here, that we would be protecting the villagers from the rebels, that we would be digging wells for them, building hospitals and schools. I thought we would be welcomed. Instead everybody wants to kill us. A child might smile at me, and when I turn around he could push a knife into my back. A village welcomes us in the daytime, they shake our hands, thank us for our help, and then darkness falls and the muj use their village to shell us.

‘A few weeks ago, there was a call from one of the villages. They needed help. Bandits were firing on them from the mountains. We sent a detachment out to the village to help them. When they got there it was empty. Suddenly there was shooting from all sides – rockets, automatic fire. Only three soldiers from the detachment managed to escape alive.'

Zena was shaking her head.

‘I know this,' she said, ‘I know. But still, these are my people.'

‘They are your people? You want them to force you back into the burqa? You want them to force you out of your job? You want them to treat you like a piece of shit?'

Zena sighed. She leant back against the wall in the doorway of her hostel and closed her eyes.

‘I don't know what to think any more,' she said.

‘I love you,' I said.

She opened her eyes and looked at me sadly, but said nothing.

‘Can I see you next time I come to Jalalabad?' I said.

She nodded.

‘Maybe,' she said simply.

When I returned to the base I was sent out immediately on a raid. Afghan informants had passed on information that there were
dukhi
in a village near Hada, a centre for Buddhist pilgrims. Two divisions mounted a quick raid on the village. Information passed to Intelligence from local sources was notoriously unreliable and we entered the village with particular care.

The streets were quiet. We fanned out, shadowing the sappers with their mine-clearing equipment and their dogs, yapping and straining on leashes. Ahead of me I saw Kolya in a doorway. He motioned for me to join him. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the gloom inside the mud hut. Against one wall slouched an old man, a dirty turban fastened loosely around his head. His dark skin was heavily lined, but his eyes were surprisingly bright.

The room was bare. There was no furniture, not even a chair, in the room, only a threadbare rug covering the packed-earth floor. The sole other object was a dog-eared copy of the Koran, on the floor in the corner.

The turbaned man crouched against the wall. He did not attempt to fight, and he did not appear to be carrying any weapons. Kolya left me to guard him.

‘Shoot the fucker if he moves.'

For some moments I stood there, watching the old man, silently. He shuffled a little, shifting his weight from one leg to the other. He smiled at me, a sad, small smile.

‘I have no weapons,' he said, shrugging his shoulders, showing his dirty, calloused hands, his broken nails.

He reasoned with me gently. He spoke fluent, if heavily accented, Russian. His eyes showed no hint of fear. He watched me candidly. I shifted uneasily, the gun in my hands pointed directly at his heart. I thought of Zena, of her words the last time we spoke. I imagined her watching me. The clatter of the destruction of the village drifted in through the open doorway on the dust-clotted air. The drivers were rolling the heavy tracks of the BMPs across the demolished houses, flattening the village into oblivion.

‘We are just leading peaceable lives,' the old man said. ‘We have nothing against you. We just want to farm – to live without fear.'

‘Are you not angry?' I asked, watching his soft smile as he talked to me of his village. He laughed quietly.

‘Don't you hate us?'

‘No,' he said, shaking his head. ‘You are a child of God as much as I. How could I hate you?'

‘Is there space left in this world for compassion?'

‘Compassion?' A broad grin wrinkled his leathery face. ‘Listen, child, compassion is easy for me. Compassion is the gift of the powerless – the dying.' He indicated my gun. ‘Now, if it was the other way round, if I held the gun and you sat here defenceless, you might not find me so understanding.'

He coughed up a large gob of phlegm and spat on to my dusty boot. He smiled still, as though this was a normal thing to do, as though I could not mind.

At that moment there was a loud explosion. The ground shook and dirt shivered from the ceiling. For a moment I thought the building was going to come down on top of us. I ducked down, covering my head. The old man did not move. A resigned smile twisted his lips.

‘Now you must shoot me,' he said. ‘The village, you see, was mined. We set the mines and our “informers” gave you a little bit of information. We knew you would not be able to resist.'

He stood up. He was the same height as I, broad shouldered, and despite his years still looked strong. He tightened the dirty cotton chemise across his chest. ‘Here.' He grinned again. ‘Shoot me.'

I could hear, as the rumble of the explosion drifted on the breeze, rolling away across the plain, banking against the rise of the foothills and echoing back, the sound of crying, the desperate weeping of young men whose legs and arms lay detached from their bodies. Young men crouched over dead friends with whom, only moments before, they had been sharing a joke. A cigarette. The old man laughed.

‘Come on, shoot,' he taunted. ‘I would, if I was in your position.'

My hands trembled. I felt my heart pounding. I thought again of Zena. Of her eyes on me. The old man stepped towards me; I stepped back, waving at him, indicating he should not approach. I felt my back press up against the mud wall. A prickly sweat broke out on my forehead. I wiped it. My face was slick with perspiration. The old man's grin was friendly. He reached out a large hand, stubby fingers, grasping at the Kalashnikov.