Stephan Collishaw - Amber

The woman was waiting by the door of her apartment when I reached the fourth floor. She showed me inside and insisted I have a cup of coffee. The apartment was neat, but barely furnished, with a few photographs displayed. After a short while she brought in the coffee and went to sit on a hard chair close to the window. Nervously, she brushed at a loose strand of hair. She was a small woman, her face worn and tired and rutted already with deep lines.

‘I’m looking for Kolya,’ I said.

She grunted, and a bitter smile lifted the corners of her thin lips. Turning her head, she gazed out of the rain-smeared window.

‘ Nu , well, you’re not the only one,’ she said in Polish.

My Polish was not very good and I struggled to grasp her implication.

‘There is somebody else looking for him?’ I clarified.

‘Someone else?’ she said. ‘Always someone else. He’s been here two months and nothing paid.’

‘But did somebody else come here? A man? Kirov◦– his name?’

She shook her head, and I was not sure whether she had not understood me or whether she was confirming that Kirov had not been there.

‘Have you any idea where Kolya is?’ I tried.

‘The last I saw of him was Thursday. He went out for cigarettes.’

‘He didn’t say where he was going?’

The woman laughed at that.

‘Are you not concerned?’ I asked.

She shook her head despondently.

‘Kolya and I grew up together,’ I told her, ‘in the children’s home. We were drafted to Afghanistan together.’

She turned away from the window. ‘You understand,’ she explained, ‘he is not well. He has morphine addiction, his little gift from Afghanistan. He is sick.’ She shrugged. ‘There is only so much you can do. What, am I to throw him out?’

She stood up and wandered over to a large old bureau. Leafing through a pile of letters, she took a pen and wrote something on a scrap of paper. Handing it to me, she pointed to a woman’s name and an address. ‘It’ll be as good a place to start as anywhere,’ she said.

I thanked her and drank the last of the bitter coffee. As I stood she was staring out of the window into the darkening, rain-swept street. Standing in the doorway, I told her I was leaving. She glanced back over her shoulder.

‘If you see him,’ she said, ‘tell him…’ but she turned away and didn’t finish the sentence. When I emerged into the rain, she was standing there still, a ghostly shadow behind the window.

The address of the woman was on Pylimo, which was not far so I decided to walk, even though the rain had grown steadier. The clouds had fallen so low they snagged against the roofs of the city. The church spires had disappeared. The traffic was thick, moving slowly, lights shimmering on the wet surface of the road. The few pedestrians hurried by, newspapers covering their heads. I walked close in against the wall, crouched into my jacket with the collar turned up.

The young woman on Pylimo had a vicious bruise beneath her left eye. She was a short dark girl, no more than twenty. I thought possibly she was a Gypsy, and perhaps she was, but when she spoke her Lithuanian was coarse enough to be her mother tongue.

‘I’m looking for Kolya Antonenko,’ I said when she opened the door a crack.

She peered at me suspiciously through the narrow space. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for Kolya,’ I repeated.

I tried to peer into the dark room behind her, but could see nothing.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m an old friend of Kolya’s,’ I told her.

Ridiculously, I took out the letter Kolya had sent to Vassily and showed her. She took the paper from me and examined it.

‘You’re Vassily?’ she asked, and something in the way she said it suggested she knew of him. For a moment I considered lying to get past the door.

‘No,’ I explained. ‘Vassily gave me the letter. He asked me to find Kolya.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘So?’

She continued to eye me, suspicious still. Finally she seemed to come to some kind of decision and nodded. ‘Fine. Come in, then.’

She showed me through to the tiny kitchen and indicated I should sit at the table.

‘He’s not here at the moment,’ she said, ‘but he shouldn’t be long.’

She pulled a chair around the table so she was closer to me. The sleeve of her blouse was hitched up, revealing a thin row of scars across her forearm. She made no attempt to pull it down to hide them.

‘How did you know to find him here?’ she asked, extracting a cigarette from a packet. She offered me one and I took it.

‘I was given an address on Warsaw Street,’ I told her honestly. ‘The woman sent me on.’

The young woman wrinkled her nose and laughed mirthlessly. ‘His landlady? That old witch! He comes here when he can’t stand any more of her nagging him for his rent, among other things.’ She snorted. ‘I think she has a thing for him.’ Inhaling the oily smoke of the cheap cigarette, she added, ‘I’m a little more understanding of his needs.’

The apparatus of Kolya’s heroin addiction was scattered about the small apartment.

‘Kolya has been waiting for this Vassily to contact him,’ the young woman said. ‘Reckons he owes him money.’ She looked at me as though I might volunteer some.

‘Vassily’s dead,’ I told her.

She looked disappointed rather than upset. I smoked the cigarette while the girl chatted inanely about her life. She fell silent suddenly and I heard a faint scuffling sound as somebody tried to insert a key in the lock of the door. It clicked open and a few moments later Kolya appeared in the kitchen. Seeing me he stopped short, a startled look passing across his face. I gasped audibly. Kolya’s once thick figure had shrunken away. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes had receded to dark shadows burrowed beneath his brow. His shaking hand reached out to steady himself.

‘What the fuck?’ he muttered.

‘Kolya,’ I said, standing.

‘Antanas?’

He paused, gazing at me, an irritated frown furrowing the waxy skin of his forehead. In his hand he held a small brown paper package. He darted a glance at the girl, but she avoided his eye.

‘You’re going to have to excuse me,’ he said, and turned away sharply, disappearing into another room.

‘Kolya,’ I said, following him.

The girl held out her hand and grabbed my jacket.

‘Leave him,’ she said.

I turned to her.

‘He has his needs,’ she said, quietly. ‘Just leave him for a while.’

When I looked at her stupidly, her hand swept over to the syringes on the edge of the sink. The burnt spoons, crushed foil, straps. I sat back down by the table. The girl went out, following Kolya into the other room. I heard their hushed voices through the wall.

When she reappeared some time later, the young woman was wearing a very short skirt and a low top. She had combed her hair and applied some make-up carelessly. She pulled on a leather jacket. ‘I have to go out to work now,’ she said. ‘He will come out soon. He asked me to tell you not to go. Wait for him.’

I nodded. She slipped a small handbag over her shoulder and left. I glanced at my watch. It was almost ten o’clock.

It was a month before the opportunity arose to go into Jalalabad. The new recruits seemed hopelessly unprepared and had to be assessed and allocated to different units depending on their expertise, if they had any.

It was Vassily who suggested I volunteer to escort the supply trucks on a trip into the city. He had some business in Jalalabad, he told me.

‘It’s simple,’ he explained in a café in the centre of the city, grinning over the rim of a steaming glass of tea. ‘Hashim supplies me with jewels◦– sometimes it’s worked pieces he gets, gold inlaid with stones, sometimes it’s unworked lumps of lapis lazuli, beautiful pieces. Now, as you know, there is no way I am going to be able to get these pieces out of the country; they would be confiscated on the border. And selling them here isn’t an option; here it’s a buyer’s market.’