Amber (25 page)

The image of Zena's face interposed itself between the old man and me. A fleeting image of her supple body twisting beneath me, the soft warmth of her ochre skin. I closed my eyes and felt the gun shift in my hands as the old man's fingers wrapped themselves around it.

A familiar metallic chatter jerked back the lids of my eyes. The old man stepped away. He held his hands to his chest. Blood seeped through the cracks of his fingers. It bubbled up like a warm geyser beneath his hands. He coughed, almost as if he were clearing his throat. Blood spilt, crimson, from his full lips, trickled on to his white beard. He fell to his knees before me. His face twisted and his throat gurgled and for a moment, as I stood there, bewildered, watching him, I thought he was laughing. A hand took hold of my arm and pulled me roughly through the doorway.

‘What the fuck is the matter with you?' Kolya rasped. ‘If I hadn't shot him he would have taken your gun.'

I nodded, blindly. He pushed me forwards and we ran through the smoking, dust-hazed streets.

‘Warsaw Street?' I said to Kolya. ‘I'm not sure that's such a good idea. If Kirov or Zinotis did follow me tonight, they might be watching your apartment.'

Kolya gazed at me for a second and I wondered if he was taking in what I said, or whether the fix he had had earlier and the vodka he had consumed since had dulled his comprehension.

‘If they followed you, they could well be outside now,' he said, nodding towards the door. ‘It seems you have given them more than enough opportunity.'

He continued to gaze at me, his expression remaining vacant as his tone grew more ironic.

‘If Kirov and Zinotis have any idea where I am, it will be because they followed you. I don't really think you are in a position to advise me on my safety.'

‘OK,' I agreed.

Kolya pulled on a thick coat, turning its collar up around his ears. We left the apartment, slipping out through the doors into the street as unobtrusively as we could. Standing in the shadow of the doorway, I checked each parked car, each shadow, each pool of darkness. There was no sign of anybody. It was late and there were no pedestrians, no cars on the road. We hurried down the side streets, taking a longer route back to the Rasa district, looping up around the cemetery and back down towards Warsaw Street from the far side. As we approached Kolya's apartment block, he touched my arm and indicated for me to follow him into the darkened area behind the buildings. A door at the back of the apartments opened on to a small yard of muddy earth, criss-crossed with lines for hanging out washing and beating rugs.

We walked up the shallow stairs to the front entrance of the apartment block, where Kolya reached for the light switch in the stairwell. I told him to wait. Pushing open the door I scanned the street carefully. There were few cars and no sign of anybody watching, lingering in the shadows. I relaxed a little.

We climbed the stairs to the fourth floor in silence. Kolya made slow progress, pausing every few steps to take a gulp of air into his lungs. At the end of every minute the light clicked off and I had to press the switch again. When we reached the fourth floor it did not come on.

‘It was working when I came here earlier,' I said.

‘They're always going,' Kolya muttered. ‘It's the cheap bulbs they buy.'

The door to the apartment was open slightly. Kolya pushed it gingerly, to see whether the safety chain was on. The door swung open with a squeak. He looked up at me. I raised my finger to my lips. We stood in the silence of the early hours of the morning, listening for noises coming from within. There was none.

‘It looks like there have been visitors,' Kolya said, his voice low.

‘Your landlady…' I said, but he had turned away.

The apartment was in pitch darkness. Kolya edged around the door, his trembling fingers feeling along the wall for the light switch. Beneath our feet, papers were strewn, barely visible in the pale light of the street lamp glowing through the dirty windows of the stairwell. Kolya's fingers found the switch and pressed it. I heard the hollow click, but no light came on. From somewhere deep inside I heard a strange low muttering.

I felt Kolya's hand on my arm, his fingers gripping my sleeve tightly, the nails digging through the damp cloth and biting into my flesh. It was impossible to see his face in the darkness. We moved forwards, together, down the corridor. Beneath our feet shattered glass crunched; a large sharp object scraped my ankle painfully. We moved slowly, listening. The muttering had ceased and, apart from the soft crunch of our footfalls, the only other sound was of water running in the bathroom.

Kolya flicked on the bathroom light switch and immediately the square around the door was illuminated brightly. Seizing the handle, he pulled the door open, the slab of light falling painfully brightly across the chaos of the corridor. The bathroom floor glistened, the old linoleum slick with water dripping from the overflowing sink. A mirrored-door cabinet hung from the wall, askew, disembowelled, its contents filling the sink, cotton-wool plugs stopping the flow of tap water escaping through the drains. Pills were scattered colourfully in the stained bath.

‘Shit,' Kolya muttered.

He turned from the bathroom and crunched quickly to the front room. The light from the window was enough to indicate the uselessness of trying to switch on the lamp. Its bulb was shattered. The old sofa on which I had been sitting only a few hours earlier had been slashed; its stuffing poured out over the floor. The large bureau was overturned, its contents spewed around it.

‘Kristina,' Kolya called.

The low muttering began again, closer, a little louder than before. I turned, trying to place where it was coming from. Kolya stepped away across the debris. He opened the door to a side room and disappeared inside. I followed him.

The bed was rumpled, sheets strewn across the floor, the mattress slashed, stuffing exploding out, pictures wrenched from the wall, the nails pulled out along with lumps of plaster.

In the corner Kolya was bent in the darkness. The muttering was louder, more pitiful. A moan, a thin wail, a sob.

‘Who was it?' Kolya was saying, his voice impatient.

He gripped the shadow and shook it.

The shuddering wail grew louder, more strident. Kolya stood suddenly and turned. He pushed past me, hurrying back into the sitting room. For a moment I lingered, staring down at the small area of darkness in which the woman was hunched, listening to the sharp catch of her breath, her wail, the soft thud of her head banging against the wooden cabinet by her side, then I turned and followed Kolya.

He was standing by the window, gazing out into the street. When he turned his face was twisted with tension. He ran his hand through his thinning hair and surveyed the damage done to the apartment.

‘You little bastard, Kirov,' he said with venom.

He stepped over the papers and fallen bureau, the sofa stuffing and the overturned chairs, out into the corridor. In the bathroom, he knelt down in the water pooling on the linoleum, wetting the knees of his trousers. Fitting his fingers into the corner of the wooden panel beneath the bath, he tugged it away. Reaching under the old bath, he pulled out a small parcel. A cloth wrapped tight and tied with string. With trembling fingers he untied the knot and opened out the flaps of the cloth. Inside the parcel was a Makarov pistol. Oiled and gleaming. Beside it a clip of ammunition.

He weighed the gun in his shrunken hand. Slotting the clip into the pistol, he checked the mechanism. He lifted the pistol and sighted it on the tap. Turning to me, he gazed into my eyes.

‘Antanas,
tovarich
, we grew up together.' He put his hand on my shoulder. Through my jacket I felt it trembling. ‘We were boys together, we were called up together. We went all the way together, right into the very belly of hell. What happened to us there – it tore us apart. Gutted us. Every noble sentiment, every decent feeling, was reduced to ashes. We died then, on the fields around Jalalabad, in the mountains. It was not us that came back, it was our ghosts. Our spirits, forced to wander the world, empty, deranged.'

He took his hand from my shoulder and wandered out into the corridor. From a peg behind the external door he took down a shoulder holster. Clipping it on, he fitted the pistol into it, pulling his thick jacket over the top.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘There is nothing that will compensate for what has been lost. No jewel will pay for the pain we suffered, or relieve our nightmares. But there is one thing that will give me a little happiness.'

He grinned. In the pale light that shone from the bathroom his face looked as though the flesh had been sucked from it, like the skull of a cadaver.

‘The idea of beating Kirov. The thought that I have something he wants. Come on. I will tell you about the bracelet. About what happened in Ghazis.'

Ghazis lay in the east of Afghanistan, in Nangarhar province, on the road over the mountains to Peshawar, to Pakistan. The first time I heard of it was from Zena. It was a couple of weeks after the disastrous raid on Hada before I was able to see her again. When I tried to contact her she . put me off with excuses. She had become involved with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and was visiting villages, setting up literacy schemes, exerting pressure on the authorities to allow the girls in rural areas to be educated.

Desperate to talk to her, I volunteered for escort duty for the supply trucks. When I got into Jalalabad I telephoned the hospital and asked for a message to be passed to Zena. I waited at the café by the river for two hours but she did not come. Despondently, I wandered past the large hospital complex.

Plucking up my courage, I entered the hospital. It took a while to track her down to a ward in the east wing where she was working.

‘What have you come here for?' she asked, wiping perspiration from her brow.

‘I needed to talk to you.'

‘I'm busy.'

‘I sent you a message.'

‘Like I said, I'm busy.'

Her face revealed nothing; she glanced back over her shoulder to the ward I had fetched her from.

I longed to talk to her about what had happened in Hada, to tell her that I had failed to kill the old man, but it seemed suddenly ridiculous to boast of such a thing.

‘When will you be free?' I asked. ‘I really need to talk to you.'

‘I'm busy now,' was all she would say. ‘Some other time.'

We stood for a few moments in silence. I gazed at her; the pink scar, a bead of perspiration clinging to the top of it, green eyes, her short, boyish haircut. I thought of the nights we had spent together, wrapped in each other's bodies, which already seemed so long ago. Reaching out, I touched her hand. She pulled back, away from me.

‘I have to get back to work now,' she said, quickly.

And she turned and walked at a smart pace back down the corridor to her ward. The doors swung shut behind her with a sharp crack.

When I returned to the base, Kolya had, I discovered, told Vassily about the incident at Hada.

‘What is going on, Antanas?' he asked, urgently.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Kolya told me about Hada.'

I shrugged. Lit a cigarette. Exhaled and watched the smoke rise and dissipate slowly in the heavy air. A storm was brewing. Dark clouds massed over the mountains. The weather was so oppressive it felt as if we were all being crushed into the earth.

‘It was nothing,' I said. ‘Kolya has exaggerated, I am sure.'

‘The old man was about to take your weapon. You were stuck with your back against the wall, your eyes closed, sweat pouring from you. Like a frightened porker off to the slaughterhouse.'

‘Was that your analogy or his?'

‘What happened?'

‘I don't know what happened,' I said, irritably.

Over the mountains the low clouds thundered ominously, and the darkened ravines flashed with lightning, heaven's howitzers opening up at last, joining in the struggle to reduce the country to total ruin.

‘Comrade, I am concerned,' Vassily said, earnestly. ‘We were sent here to do our International Duty. That was shit, we know it. They told us we would continue the brave and noble work of the soldiers who had gone before us, who had begun the struggle to bring peace and revolution to Afghanistan. We know what they did before we came – they dug a big fucking cesspool for us to fall into. We were deceived. Such a lot of lies they fed us. Of course they did, would they tell us the truth? Can you see it as a headline in
Komsomolskaya Pravda
– “Heroes of Soviet Union rape Afghan women”? Or a special report on the TV show
Vzgliad
about young Russian boys getting their legs blown off? Of the drugs here? Of how our girls come out here to be prostitutes for the “regimental elite”? Of the massacres?
Niet
, comrade, it was all a big fucking lie – but, Antanas, that is not the point. We must survive, we must get home. That is the only truth there is left for us now, our own fucking survival. The only way we can poke the bastards who sent us here in the eye is to make the most of our time, make a little money and get home safely.'

Vassily was absently picking at a wound on his leg, a cut that refused to scab over properly and seemed to be growing by the day.

‘If you have lost the ability to kill, you have lost the ability to live,' he concluded.

‘That's it?' I said. ‘It's that simple?'

‘You shouldn't make it any more complicated,' he said.

‘But what if I don't think my life is worth the killing of innocent children and women, the demolishing of villages. What makes my life so valuable?'

Vassily's brow furrowed.

‘That girl has been filling your head with rubbish,' he muttered.

‘Don't bring Zena into this,' I snapped. ‘She is one of them. She is trouble, Antanas. If you need a woman, fuck one of the Russian girls, pay them and do it. Anything else is not healthy.'