Stephan Collishaw - Amber

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?’