Stephan Collishaw - Amber

‘You three, huh?’ he said, jumping down. ‘Playing heroes or just trying to die as quickly as possible?’

The windscreen of the KamaZ was shattered, and the headlights broken. The dented driver’s door had been forced open. We peered in. The driver lay slumped across the steering wheel. Kozlov pulled him back. His face was a bloody pulp. I stared at the glistening fatty tissue.

‘Fuck!’ Vassily muttered behind me.

‘He ran into some local kid,’ Kozlov said. ‘He radioed in for help, but as you can see he was too late.’

‘The child?’ I said.

Kozlov shot a glance at me.

‘Was it…?’

‘Dead? Let’s hope so. One less sobaka to worry about.’

I glanced down the street to where the young girl had been standing. She had gone. I wandered back, looking around warily. In the dust where she had been standing was the short length of gold ribbon. I bent down and picked it up. It felt soft and smooth between my fingers. I stroked it against the skin of my cheek. The fine cloth snagged on the coarse bristles that sprouted unevenly across my jaw.

‘Antanas, comrade,’ a voice called. I looked up. From the truck Vassily was waving for me to join him. ‘Come on, my friend, let’s go.’

As the afternoon gave way to evening and the light began to fade, I remained at my desk, staring blankly out through the dirty glass door into the street. Around me rose the spectral kishlak Ghazis. The village lay east of Jalalabad, towards the border with Pakistan. An old stone bridge spanned a lively river, which plummeted from the mountains through ash and juniper woods and into the walnut orchard in the low winding foothills around the village. The marketplace was crowded. It was hot and noisy.

‘It was in Ghazis,’ Vassily had said, ‘in the Hindu Kush. You remember it?’

I remembered Ghazis. There are some places that sear themselves on to the skin of your being, that mark you so indelibly no amount of drugs or alcohol or work or love will wash their shadow away.

I stood up. In a cupboard beneath the sink there was a bottle of vodka. We kept it there for when we stayed late. Sometimes, when we had finished the day’s work and settled at the desk, paperwork strewn between us, untouched, unread, bills unpaid, Vassily would begin one of his tales, a snippet of information he had learnt and was eager to share, which would develop into a story. On these occasions we would get out the bottle and a couple of glasses and drink and talk until the telephone rang and Daiva demanded to know whether I would be coming home that evening.

The bottle was three-quarters full. Setting it on the desk, I rinsed a glass under the tap by the lathe. Choking smoke burnt the back of my throat and the flames crackled in my ears as they rushed along the dry wood, shrivelling the grass. Ghazis. Unscrewing the top of the bottle, I poured a generous measure into the glass. I raised it to my lips. The smoke plumed from the hilltop, like a volcano. From nowhere, then, the pitiful cry of a child arrested me, catching all at once the hate, the raging anger from my heart. The glass hesitated against my lip. I stopped, the dust rising in swirls around me, the smoke, forced down by the wind, curling into the trees. I looked back up towards the barely visible village, the sun behind it dark and brooding. Lowering the glass to the table, I rolled up my shirtsleeve and examined the crinkled skin.

A soft knock at the door startled me. Pulling down my sleeve awkwardly, I twisted around, half expecting to see Kirov’s face once more. But it was Tanya who stood in the doorway, the light of a street lamp illuminating her from behind. I unlocked the door and let her in.

‘You’re all in darkness,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you were here.’

I looked around. A buttery slab of light from the street fell through the glass in the door, faintly illuminating a patch of floor. The rest of the shop had dissolved into the evening gloom.

Tanya took off her coat and shook it, before hanging it over the back of a chair. She relit the paraffin heater and turned on my desk lamp.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked, noticing the opened bottle, the glass on the table and my shirtsleeve, hanging loosely around my wrist.

‘Kirov was here,’ I said.

‘Kirov?’

‘Vassily never spoke of him?’

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘Not that I can remember.’

‘We served together in Afghanistan. Vassily told me he was in prison.’

A look of concern crossed Tanya’s face. ‘Did he hurt you?’ she said. ‘What happened?’

‘No, he didn’t hurt me,’ I reassured her. ‘He wanted to know about the bracelet.’

Tanya pulled the two chairs close to the heater and drew me down next to her. I held my fingers up before the flames. They were, I noticed, shaking.

‘I can’t stop them,’ I said to Tanya, ruefully. ‘Every time I look at them, they’re trembling like leaves on the trees.’

She took my hands in hers and held them tight, massaging them gently with the tips of her fingers.

‘Tell me about Kirov,’ she said. ‘Tell me what he said.’

For a moment I weighed in my mind whether I should tell her of the veiled threat he had made against her. I decided not to.

‘He is under the impression,’ I said, ‘that I am after this bracelet. He was warning me off, I think. He is after Kolya.’

Tanya shook her head, a bewildered frown creasing her forehead.

‘Kirov was taunting me,’ I added. ‘He suggested Vassily was not the friend I thought he was, that he was not as honourable as I believed.’

‘Its not true, Antanas,’ Tanya said. ‘You know Vassily has been a good friend to you.’

‘Of course, Tanya,’ I reassured her. ‘He rescued me. He nursed me back to health. If it was not for him I would not have survived, I wouldn’t have found the strength to carry on.’

Tanya stared into the flickering jets of flame for a few moments, silent. They were changing slowly from blue to orange as the heater warmed up.

‘Do you know where Kolya is?’ she asked finally.

‘No.’ I shrugged. ‘Not unless it said on the letter.’

‘Does this Kirov know where he is?’

I shrugged again. ‘I don’t know what Kirov knows.’

‘Would he harm Kolya?’

If I paused before I answered, it was not because I had any doubts about whether Kirov would be prepared to kill to get what he wanted.

‘We were on a patrol, once, in the mountains,’ I said to Tanya, ‘when we got cut off. Snipers had opened up on us from behind the walls of a ruined village, driving us farther up the mountain. Darkness fell, trapping us at the top of a ravine. The temperature dropped well below zero and we were hopelessly equipped. We sat huddled up in a crater, fearing that at any moment the muj would discover us and if they didn’t the cold would kill us before the night was out.

‘There was an Uzbeki boy, Yuri. He decided he was going to make a break for it. If he had been seen or captured he would have drawn attention to the rest of us. We tried to stop him but he would not listen. As he climbed out of the crater, Kirov caught him. Covering the boy’s mouth with one hand he slit his throat. He held the boy tight as he jerked about, blood squirting out across the rock, pooling at our feet. Not one of us said a word. Kirov held him until he was dead, then pushed him into the corner. We sat through the night with his body there, waiting until first light when some back-up finally arrived.’

Tanya shuddered.

‘Kirov will kill without compunction,’ I said, realising, as I said the words, their significance.

‘What are we going to do?’ Tanya said, after a while.