Stephan Collishaw - Amber

‘Look at her!’ Kolya cried. ‘ Oi! ‘ He sat back with a blissful grin on his face. ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful girls in my life.’

‘And what about Liuba?’ I teased him. ‘She told me to look after you and I think by that she meant keeping you in order.’

‘Who? Liuba who?’ Kolya grinned, eyes creasing into his high, rosy cheeks.

‘Me, on the other hand,’ I said, ‘I’m free to pick and choose.’

I was envious of the attention and tears the beautiful young Liuba had spent on Kolya.

We swaggered through the streets of Vilnius, stopping near the bus station for a drink.

‘How old are you two, then?’ the woman behind the bar asked with a wry smile, looking at our fresh young faces.

‘Old enough,’ Kolya said, trying to imitate the rough aggression of the men we had seen in bars in our town.

The woman laughed. She leant forward, drawing her face close to Kolya’s. ‘Old enough for what?’ she whispered, blowing the fringe of his hair away from his large square face. Her breasts rested heavily on the polished surface of the bar. Kolya’s face flushed and he fell silent. We drank our beers quietly and left.

‘She was too old or I would have had her,’ Kolya said as we made our way to the bus stop that would take us to the base we had been told to report to.

I nodded. ‘She wasn’t bad, though, was she? I mean, even though she was getting on a bit.’

‘Fuck off, she was old enough to be your baba .’

We laughed raucously, ignoring the crowd that pushed around us. When the bus came we shoved each other on, fighting through the bodies, giggling and jabbing each other. The passengers watched us good-humouredly, knowing where we going.

Nobody was in the apartment the next morning when Tanya telephoned. The small red light blinked on the answerphone when I returned just after lunch. I hesitated a moment before pressing the button. Tanya’s voice filtered nervously from the clumsy apparatus. She sounded fragile and distracted.

‘Antanas? It’s Tanya.’ She paused. ‘They’ve taken Vassily into hospital.’ She hesitated again and I heard her laboured breathing above the crackle of the telephone, as if she were stifling a sob. ‘Perhaps you should come to see him. They don’t seem hopeful.’

For some moments, I heard the soft sound of her breath as she continued to hold the telephone receiver close to her lips. Then, quietly, gently, she replaced it.

A dim light illuminated Vassily’s bed. In a steady, slow rhythm his chest rose and fell. His hands, punctured by drips, lay on the sheet by his side. I took his fingers between my own. The flesh was hard, calloused. Black hairs bristled from them. I felt the warm pulse. Life. His face was more shrivelled than it had been when I had seen him the previous day. His beard hung over the fold of the sheet. Closing my eyes, I caressed his fingers between my own. Fingers that had taught me so much.

‘He’s in and out of consciousness,’ Tanya told me when I bumped into her in the corridor. ‘Mostly he’s sleeping, but every so often he wakes. Sometimes he is very lucid and at times not at all.’

‘What have the doctors said? Have they…’

She shook her head but said nothing. I looked away down the corridor. We stood together awkwardly in the semi-darkness. I could see by the way her chest swelled and by the tightening of her jaw muscles that she was close to tears. She blinked twice. I laid a hand on her shoulder and she staggered slightly. We embraced clumsily, our stiff bodies colliding in the grimy corridor.

‘I’d better go in,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You will let me know if there is any change?’

She nodded. For a moment longer she lingered, as if there were something more to be said. I longed to hold her, but did not move. She slipped through the doorway into the ward. The nurse came and I gave her a box of chocolates I had bought from a shop on the way, and some fruit from the village; the small expected bribes to make sure the patient was well treated. A bottle of champagne had already gone to the doctor. The nurse smiled, dourly.

‘Take good care of him,’ I said.

She nodded, a little severely. ‘Of course.’

Outside, the weather had begun to clear. I found a quiet café off the main street, ordered a coffee and lit a cigarette. It had been to Tanya’s grandparents’ cottage that Vassily had taken me when I was discharged from hospital after Afghanistan. The cottage was roofed with corrugated tin sheets that were brown with rust, blending naturally into the autumnal colours of the overhanging trees. The door stood open, a net curtain trailing across the packed-earth doorstep. Tethered to a stake in the garden, a large dog barked furiously. A young woman stepped out, barefoot on the worn earth. Her hair fell around her shoulders, framing a hand­ some face. I paused for a moment, seeing her. There was something familiar about her face. It attracted me and frightened me simultaneously.

‘Tanya,’ Vassily said.

‘You’re back, then,’ she said.

‘ Da ,’ he said, with a grin, ‘I’m back, as I promised.’ His tongue licked nervously at his lips, but I could see his eyes devouring her. After a moment he collected himself.

‘And this,’ he said, with a flourish of his large hand, ‘is Antanas, my comrade in arms, my brother and friend, as I have also promised to you.’

Tanya appraised me for a few seconds, her eyes travelling up my emaciated body, resting finally on my own. ‘Vassily tells me you have been ill.’

I shrugged, sheathed still in the dark haze of the neuroleptics the hospital had been feeding me. Slowly her features worked their way into my mind, teasing out the memory of other features, of feelings numbed over the long months◦– years◦– of medication.

We followed her as she stooped through the low doorway, brushing the curtain aside. After the bright afternoon light, the gloom of the small room into which we stepped was, for several moments, impenetrable.

‘ Senele ,’ Tanya called, ‘Vassily is back. He has brought his friend, the Lithuanian boy.’

The shuffle of broken slippers on the stone floor drew my eyes to the doorway leading off from the kitchen, through which a woman appeared, a twig broom in her hand. Moving closer, she nodded to Vassily. She examined me.

‘Just look at the state of you,’ she said, and despite the twist of her lips and the angry way she said this I could see she was concerned.

Tanya led me through to the back room and laid me on a large sofa beneath the window.

‘Vassily has told me a lot about you,’ she said, kneeling beside me.

I nodded, unsure how to respond. I found the idea of conversation difficult. She lingered a moment longer and then got up and went back into the kitchen, leaving behind only the scent of her body. I lay listening to the sound of her voice in the next room. Transfixed by it.

When I had finished the coffee, I ground the cigarette out in the ashtray and left the café. It was early enough to go back to the workshop for a couple of hours, but I could not face it. I caught a trolley bus home and waited in the gathering gloom for Daiva and the baby.

Tanya telephoned again the next morning. Daiva roused me from the sofa, where I had been sleeping. In the kitchen Laura was crying. ‘It’s Tanya,’ Daiva said, her voice coloured with too many implications. My heart shrank and my hand trembled as I picked up the receiver. Tanya’s voice was thick with sorrow, choking on the news of her husband’s death. I stood on the cold tiled floor, barefoot, in silence.

‘He’s gone,’ she said. I heard the catch in her throat and there was a short pause as she steadied herself. ‘This morning. Early.’