Stephan Collishaw - Amber

When the cathedral bell tolled the hour, not wanting to return home, I headed slowly in the direction of a café. Settling myself at a table overlooking the river, I reached into my pocket for a packet of cigarettes. My fingers curled around the letter Vassily had given me. Pulling it out, I examined it. Kolya’s handwriting was spidery, small letters trailing away towards the bottom right-hand corner of the yellowing envelope. My fingers trembled as I screwed it into a ball. Tossing it out into the night, I saw it catch in a mesh of twigs, a little farther down the slope towards the river.

I smoked the cigarette quickly, greedily. I was agitated and angry with Vassily. An unspoken agreement had been broken, a door had been opened on to the darkness, a door I had spent years struggling to keep closed. I had little doubt Kolya’s letter was just a begging letter, pleading for more money to support his drug habit. Though Kolya and I had grown up together, and he was as close to family as I had, we had grown apart in Afghanistan, wary of each other as he became more and more dependent on the opium and marijuana he was smoking. I made no attempt to contact him after my slow recovery, fearful of once more raking up memories of those times. I flicked the cigarette out in the direction of the snagged ball of paper. Behind it, the lights of the city shimmered on the oily flow of the river.

The kishlak . Ghazis in the Hindu Kush. Once the door had been opened a crack it was hard to push shut. Crackling images fluttered like sparks in the night sky. The sand. The dust on my tongue, coating my teeth. A cobalt canvas pulled taut across the sky. Jagged mountains. Hands slick with blood.

‘Bring me a vodka,’ I told the girl who had idly sidled up.

‘It’s quiet tonight,’ I said when she returned, attempting to engage her in conversation. She looked at me sullenly for a moment, then wandered away.

In the inside pocket of my jacket I had a photograph. I laid it before me on the stained tablecloth. It was of the two of us, Vassily and me, squatting on the beach. I had come across it in an album earlier in the day and put it in my pocket to show Vassily. In the photograph I looked small and pale and he, beside me, his arm around my shoulder, resembled a bear, his shirt opened to the waist, chest hair vying with his straggling beard. He was laughing, I sombre. Behind us a wave broke heavily on the rolls of white sand.

I met Vassily in Afghanistan. I had been sent to that hellhole to do my national service. After those dark years, it was he who nursed me back to a semblance of health. It was he who put me back together again when I was finally discharged from hospital. He who taught me my trade, my love of jewellery. Vassily was a jeweller, the finest jeweller in Lithuania, a man whose talent was exceeded only by his capacity to waste it. He was a drunkard. A teller of tales. He was the closest friend I had and now he was dying.

I closed my eyes, felt his bristles against my cheek. The smell of his breath; of vodka and garlic. His laugh, as large and deep as the forests of Siberia, as warm as Odessa in spring. I slipped the photograph back into my pocket. Tossing back the drink, I immediately called for another.

At eleven I left. The streets were quiet as I walked back through the centre of the city to the trolley-bus stop. Few people braved the bitter wind. I turned up the collar of my jacket and stuffed my hands deep into my pockets. Before I reached the stop on Gedimino I heard, behind me, the rumble of wheels on the uneven cobbles and the electric click of the trolley bus. For a moment I hesitated, almost glad of the chance to miss it, to avoid going home. It pulled into the side of the road and its doors opened with a loud pneumatic hiss. At the last moment I ran, catching the doors as they were closing. They sprang back and I hoisted myself in.

Daiva was sitting on the floor in the centre of our apart­ment, flicking through a magazine. She looked up when I came in, and raised a finger to her lips. Laura, our baby, was sleeping. Daiva’s eyes were ringed darkly, I noticed, from sleepless nights. I tried to smile, but the muscles in my face seemed paralysed and barely moved. ‘How is Vassily?’ she asked. She strained to control her voice, to soften the sharp tone that had charac­terised our conversations for so long now.

I shrugged.

Her eyes examined me; my cheeks were flushed from the exertion of climbing the stairs to the apartment.

‘You haven’t been…’ she began.

I looked at her. Though I knew what she meant, I made her finish the question. Made her say the words once more. She faltered a moment, knowing she should not have begun but unable to hold herself back.

‘You haven’t been drinking again, have you?’ she asked, her jaw setting in a hard, defiant line.

‘My friend is dying,’ I said slowly, enunciating each syllable with care, ‘and all you are bothered about is whether I have had a drink or not?’

‘Drinking doesn’t help, Antanas,’ she shot back angrily.

I opened the door on to the balcony and stepped out into the night. A slight feeling of guilt niggled at me for having used Vassily as an excuse. Just a week before I had promised Daiva I would stop drinking. She had arrived home late one evening to find me in a stupor, oblivious to the screams of Laura in her cot in the bedroom. I had managed four days before I started again. The late traffic flowed easily down Freedom Boulevard, red lights glittering on the wet surface of the road. The television tower was lost already in the low clouds. For some minutes I stood there, as the wind blew in gusts, tousling my hair. I thought of Tanya, with whom I had shared a drink earlier, before I had gone through to see Vassily, thought of the smell of her hair, the softness of her body, the way she closed her eyes as she threw back her head and laughed.

Daiva had not moved when I re-entered the room. I put my hand on her shoulder and felt her stiffen. She flicked over a page in the magazine, then another. I noticed she was not wearing the wedding ring I had made for her. The ring, embedded with a small, beautifully clear piece of amber, was on the table, beneath the reading lamp. I ran my fingers through her fair hair. She stood up and pulled away from me.

‘Don’t, Antanas,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’

‘Daiva,’ I said.

She stood a couple of paces from me for a moment. I tried to think of something more to say. I knew that if I apologised she might soften, might step forward and wrap her arms around me as I needed her to.

Instead I said, ‘I’m suffering, you know.’

But my tone was ironic, mocking, which was not how I had intended it. Daiva turned and walked rapidly away, shutting the bedroom door behind her. I slumped down on the sofa, pulling a thin blanket around me.

Sleep washed over me as soon as my head settled against the rough cloth of the sofa arm. My eyelids drooped heavily. As I was sucked downwards, the spiral of flames exploded up towards me. The sound of crying mushroomed out of the darkness. A shriek. The sharp crackle of automatic gunfire. The heavy boom of an incoming rocket. My tongue was furred with dust. My scalp prickled. I fought to open my eyes.

‘Antanas. Antoshka!’

A jagged escarpment, thin bush. Movement down there in the shadows of the ditch. A face.

‘Antoshka!’

I could see it clearly now, slick with sweat, dark, fierce. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. My heart was pounding. My hands shook as I raised them. Kirov’s face jumped out of the flames. His eyes glittered malevolently. His thick lips twisted in a ferocious grin.

‘Antoshka,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

‘Shh,’ Daiva said.

She knelt on the floor beside the sofa. Gently she stroked my forehead with the back of her hand.