Amber (7 page)

I exhaled slowly, wearily. The chances were, in any case, that my drinking had gone on too long for Daiva to want to start building bridges back across to me. There had been too many arguments, too many of her friends alienated by my behaviour, too many scenes. She needed those bridges down, I suspected. I had hurt her too much. Let her down too often. Promised too much, time and again, but changed nothing.

She got up and put her cup by the sink. For some moments she stood above me in the gloom, perhaps waiting for me to reach out and stop her. Perhaps giving me one last chance to say those words I could not find. Then she sighed and turned away. I heard her putting on her coat and rummaging in the bottom of the cupboard for her handbag. She opened the door and for a few seconds she paused again, or perhaps she was just checking she had all she needed. The door closed and I heard the click of her heels on the stairs.

In the cupboard above the sink there was a bottle of her brandy. The bottle Daiva kept there in case friends came around, which they never did any more. Taking the bottle and a glass, I went to the balcony and poured myself a drink. It was a few minutes before she emerged. There was a taxi waiting which she must have ordered before I came home. She stepped into it and it drew away slowly, jolting in the deep potholes. I watched until it turned into the thick flow of traffic on Freedom Boulevard.

Lying on the sofa, I drank some more of the brandy. Daiva had forgotten to take Laura's teddy bear, I noticed, the one I had bought her some weeks before. I picked it up and fondled it. When I lay down, though, it was of Vassily that I thought. He lay silent now. His stories had been stilled. Vassily had rebuilt me, had enabled me to forget, to find new purpose in life. But now he was gone.

When I awoke the next morning, Laura's teddy bear was clasped tight in my hand, while beside me, on the floor, the bottle of brandy lay on its side, empty. With my ear pressed painfully to the floor, I could hear the sound of the couple in the apartment below shuffling through their morning routines – the run of water, a man's cough followed by the trumpeting of his nose, the sharp bark of his wife calling him and his responding grunt; the sound of their feet moving slowly across the floorboards, unhurried, following their accustomed patterns, patterns that had taken them through thirty years of marriage, the birth and rearing of children, the loss of their eldest boy in Afghanistan, communism, revolution, jobs and unemployment.

I rolled on to my back and felt a paralysingly sharp pain shoot down my spine. My arm was numb and my fingers cold and lifeless. I flexed them, working some blood back into circulation. Beneath me I heard the sound of a chair being pulled out from the table and its creak as my neighbour sat down to his breakfast.

My own apartment was eerily silent. Laura always woke early. It was the first sound of the day, her small cry, followed by the sound of Daiva turning in her sleep, waking slowly. Laura would stand at the bars of her cot and call to us. Daiva's voice would be thick and rough with sleep, and the bed would dip as she levered herself up. They would wander out to the kitchen, leaving the door open so I could hear them talk as Daiva lit the hob and warmed some milk. Later she would drop Laura on the bed beside me, and put a cup of coffee on the small table beside me, and I would sit up then and watch as my daughter played.

Once the feeling returned to my left side, and the pain had receded from my neck, I raised myself into a sitting position. The curtains were not drawn and a tentative early morning glow lightened the room. Far away, in the distance, the clouds had broken up a little and there was a glimmer of bright sky. My head throbbed and the clothes I was still dressed in felt soiled. I stripped them off, letting them drop on to the sofa.

The water in the shower was hot and beat against my skin. For a long time I stood there, allowing it to wash over me, warm me, ease the muscles knotted in my shoulders. I held my face up to the surging jets and closed my eyes.

The moment I turned off the shower tap, the telephone rang. Its shrill tone echoed in the empty apartment, jangling, insistent. The sudden burst of noise made my pulse race. I stood riveted in the bathtub, the water trickling around my feet, listening to the sound. Looking down at my hands, I noticed they were shaking.

Reproving myself, I stepped out of the bath. Taking a towel from the hot-water pipe, I rubbed myself down quickly. It would be Daiva, I thought, and a sudden small bubble of hope rose from deep within me and burst through the surface of my consciousness. I opened the door and hurried across the hallway to the telephone, my bare feet leaving damp prints on the wooden tiles. As I put my hand on the heavy black receiver it fell silent. I knew, even before I had put it to my ear, that I had missed her.

I dropped the receiver back on to its cradle and squatted by the small table, chin resting on my knees, watching the telephone, willing it to ring again. I sat until the water dried on my skin, and a draught from beneath the door had chilled my feet. The telephone remained stubbornly silent.

It had been early February, seven years before, when the snow lay thick upon the city, that Daiva had first come to see me in the workshop Vassily and I owned. I took off my mask and unplugged the lathe.

‘Were you looking for Vassily?' I asked.

‘No,' she said, avoiding my gaze. ‘I was looking for you.'

‘Perhaps we can go out for a little lunch, then,' I suggested. ‘I know a place not far from here.'

‘Fine.'

The café was busy. As we sat by the window, our knees touched beneath the table and I felt the warmth of her legs against my own. Her blonde hair fell across her face as she looked down the menu and she twisted it between her thin fingers. Her nails were painted a deep pink. Her features were finely shaped, delicate. She smiled nervously when she looked up, catching me examining her.

‘The
chanahi
is good,' I said.

The clay pots of
chanahi
were still sizzling when the waiter placed them before us. When we opened the lids the aroma was released in a spicy cloud – stewed mutton, potatoes, onion and tomatoes. For some moments we ate in silence. I noticed the smoothness of her skin, the cherry-red fullness of her lips and the deep shadow at the base of her throat.

‘Shouldn't you be at university?' I asked to break the silence.

‘Yes,' she said, not looking up. She scraped her fork against the clay pot, lifting off the crisp potato baked to the inside of the rim.

‘You decided to take the day off?'

‘Yes.'

For a few moments longer I examined her, unsure of her feelings. When we left the café it was snowing; tiny, powdery, paper-light flakes that danced on the breeze. Blue sky edged the broken clouds and the sun glittered on the rooftops. A network of narrow paths had been trodden in the snow between the low trees. The fine snow fell around her, glistening in a stray beam of sunlight, so that she was encircled by a halo of golden flakes. She turned on the track in front of me, frozen clouds of breath suspended in the sun. I stopped a few paces from her and gazed at her. She looked like an angel.

I came to her and she did not move away. Her breath was warm against my skin. Her eyes closed as she sank against me. Her lips and tongue tasted of the spices of the
chanahi
. Sharp. Rich.

We hurried through the snow, slipping down a steep bank on to the street, tumbling and falling in the thick snow, not letting go of each other. My icy fingers fumbled with the lock on the back door of the workshop. Inside, I pulled a rolled-up mattress from the cupboard and took a couple of blankets and laid them on top of the large tiled stove. Daiva laughed, opening the door of the stove to check it was not burning too high.

She gasped when my fingers worked through her clothes to find her skin, rough with goose bumps.

‘You're freezing!'

She slipped her hand beneath my jumper, her icy fingers dancing across my stomach, making me shiver, so that I shouted too, bellowed into the air, shaking the dust-laden cobwebs on the ceiling above us. She looked fragile in the wan light reflected off the snow outside the window, inverting the shadows on her body.

The heat rose from the stove beneath us, warming us, relaxing muscles tautened by the cold. I felt her hands, the tickle of her lips gliding across my chest, the soft brush of her hair against my throat.

‘At first – when you came to Vilnius – you didn't like me,' she said later.

She hitched herself up, cradling her chin in the palm of her hand, and traced lines across my face with the tip of a finger. I closed my eyes and pictured her as I had first seen her, in Tanya's apartment, the evening Vassily and I had arrived in the city.

‘You were pretty sharp with me,' I said. ‘I think I was scared of you.'

‘Was I sharp with you?'

She leant down and brushed my skin with her lips. I pulled her close, letting her weight press me down into the thin, warm mattress.

‘I was nervous,' she said. ‘I thought you would laugh at me. I felt like a young girl with you, as if I knew nothing.'

‘I like that,' I told her, ‘that you ask nothing. I feel I can forget with you.'

The draught from beneath the door began to chill me and I got up from beside the telephone.

Once I had dressed, I searched through the cupboards to find some breakfast. Daiva had bought food, presumably for me to survive on, as her departure seemed to have been planned further ahead than I realised. Opening the wardrobe in the bedroom, earlier I had found that she had taken a suitcase and many of her clothes. I sliced some smoked sausage and cut a thick slice of bread, boiled the kettle and made a strong coffee. On the window sill was an old radio and I turned it on, tuning it to the Polish station.

Before leaving the apartment, I stopped by the telephone. I picked up the receiver, and was about to dial Daiva's mother's number, but hesitated. Though it seemed the most likely place for Daiva to have gone, there was still a possibility she hadn't, and then I would be forced to explain myself to her mother. And anyway, I thought, what was I going to say? What was there left to say that had not already been said? I replaced the receiver, pulled on my jacket and left the apartment.

The workshop was on the edge of the Old Town. Mainly we sold the jewellery we produced in the cramped room behind the shopfront. Several other craftsmen sold their goods through us too. The door was locked when I got there and already, after an absence of only a few days, the place looked dusty and neglected. I shut the door behind me, keeping the ‘closed' sign in place in the window. The shop felt cold and damp. I switched on the light and lit a small paraffin heater in the back to take the chill from the air.

The workshop was strewn with work. Pulling my chair close to the heater, holding out my hands to the blue flames to warm them, I recalled the promise Vassily had made, soon after he had taken me from the hospital to Tanya's village.

‘I will teach you how to work amber,' he said. ‘We will be jewellers, the two of us, craftsmen of the highest order, the best on the Baltic coast. I will teach you all you need to know. We will make jewels and forget about the past.'

A neighbour in the village, a stooped elderly man with wild silver hair, had machinery for working amber. The workshop was in the basement of his house. Its tiled floor and cabinets were white with dust from the worked amber. Even the cobwebs were heavily sugared with it. The walls were lined with templates and everywhere there were tubs full of amber chips, some buttery yellow, others chalk white, whilst others were rich shades of orange or red. A pot of small black amber beads was like a tub of caviar. Held up to the sun, they were blood red. Heated, the small oxygen bubbles at their heart exploded, giving the pieces a crazed look.

In a crudely built outhouse were the machines for polishing and firing the amber. A barrel filled with cubes of oak turned for two days, smoothing and polishing the surface of the ancient resin.

As I was remembering, the telephone on the shelf above the heater sprang abruptly into life, rattling harshly, causing my heart to flutter in panic. For a couple of seconds I sat and watched as it rang on the shelf, then I snatched it up and held the receiver to my ear. My heart was beating rapidly, and crazily, for a moment, it was Vassily's voice I was expecting to hear, longing to hear.

‘
Da?
' I said into the echoing silence. ‘Who is there?'

The telephone hissed and crackled but nobody answered.

‘Who is it?' I called.

Faintly, I thought, I could hear the sound of breathing, but it might have been only the wind, or the sound of cavernous space that occasionally opens up between one telephone and another.

I waited a moment longer then replaced the receiver. Sitting down again, I lit a cigarette. When I had stubbed it out in the overflowing saucer, I got up and went back over to the telephone. I dialled the number for Vassily's apartment and listened as it rang and rang.

When it became clear than Tanya was not home, I turned on my desk lamp and pushed aside the piles of invoices and orders strewn across it. Beneath the sheets were some pieces of amber I had been working a few days before. I picked up one of the small tear-shaped pieces and held it up to the lamp, examining the way the light entered it and hung suspended in its heart.

‘You know where amber comes from?' Vassily said, one evening, in the village. We were beside the pond, close to Tanya's grandparents' cottage. Vassily had given Tanya a necklace he had fashioned. Each piece of amber had been shaped and smoothly polished and strung on to a silk thread. In the centre of the string of beads was a larger piece, a translucent, golden tear.

‘Many years ago, when the forest grew thick here, when this land was under the care of other gods, when the spirits lived in the trees and Perkunas, the God of Thunder, ruled in heaven, the most beautiful of the goddesses was a young mermaid called Jurate.'