Stephan Collishaw - Amber

The nurse, noticing I had woken, wandered across to me. She took a cloth and gently dabbed the side of my face, wiping spittle from my cheek. She examined me for a moment, then straightened and turned away. I gazed after her as she wandered, seemingly aimlessly, down the ward.

It was growing dark again when next I woke. My eyelids flicked up and my mind seemed at once to be preternaturally clear. In vivid detail I remembered Zena turning as I called to her. She straightened slightly. I noticed the look on her face, the way it was twisted with fear, with the desire to hear what I had said. The look of surprise. I saw the dark hole suddenly materialise on her smooth throat. The way her eyes opened slightly wider, astonished that death had caught her so cleanly. Saw the second hole and the flick of her head as the impact knocked her to one side. I felt her beneath me, her body bucking.

I stared up at the ceiling of the ward. A large spider moved slowly across it towards a hole in the plaster where a light had been fixed clumsily. She straightened. The bullet pierced her throat. Her cheek. The spider made it to the dark hole and hesitated for a moment before disappearing.

The low hum of suffering had begun to rise, led by a single voice. It was a thin wail and it rose higher and higher. As it rose the other moans followed it, snaking up towards that small dark hole in the plaster of the ceiling, after the spider. The thin wail reached a peak and broke, became a sob, a heart-rending cry, which jerked and rasped. The chorus broke with it. The ward echoed to the sound of the screams, the lonely, tortured wails of the sick. The moans and keening of the frightened, the lost.

Feet slapped across the cold tiles. Angry voices shushed and hushed.

‘The new one,’ somebody said, their throat tight with panic and annoyance.

They surrounded me. A male nurse sat on the bed and pressed down on my chest. By my side another was clumsily fumbling with a syringe, filling it, holding it to the light.

‘Shut the fucker up!’

I felt the soft warmth of a pillow descending across my face, pressing down, smothering me. A stab of pain in my arm. Other memories were surfacing. They broke through the skin of my consciousness, rising like divers, spluttering for air. Children dark with blood, wide eyed, thrown back against the walls, their clothes rumpled and ragged and disarrayed. Their bodies ill placed, wrenched into positions they could never have achieved in life. I wailed into the pillow.

Sleep was not a release. My muscles twitched and prickled torturously, my legs cramped and my arm throbbed. The scent of disinfectant became orange blossom, wild rose. Beneath the trees I saw the sudden flash of their movements. The child pulled close to her brother, hugging his thin leg. The boy’s arm snaked around her shoulder as he folded her close. The old man by the well looked up. His fingers played, I noticed, with a small sprig of blossom. The old man held my gaze.

‘I was following orders,’ I said to the young doctor.

He nodded, feeling my pulse. His eyebrows were furrowed and he looked exhausted.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

The doctor shook his head, monitoring the steady throb of my pulse.

‘There was a sound behind the door.’

He let go of my arm and let it drop on to the sheets. He did not place it gently on the bed, he dropped it and stood up quickly, indicating for a nurse.

‘Don’t let her sedate me,’ I said to the doctor as the nurse approached.

The doctor did not look at me; he was turning his attention already to the boy in the bed by my side, the boy who waved his legless, armless stumps continually, weeping through the darkness and the light.

‘Don’t let her,’ I begged. ‘I have such dreams.’

The nurse frowned angrily. As if I were a disobedient, tiresome child.

‘Don’t. I will be quiet,’ I said to her. ‘I promise, I won’t shout. Please?’

‘Doctor,’ she muttered, and he turned back to me and nodded.

I tried to raise myself from my pillow. I was slick with sweat and my skin prickled irritably.

‘Don’t put that fucking needle anywhere near me,’ I warned her. ‘I said I didn’t want it.’

The doctor sat on the side of my bed. He soothed me. He laid a hand upon my forehead and pressed me down into the pillow.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Don’t get upset. If you get upset we will have to punish you. You don’t want that, do you? You don’t want to have to be punished, do you?’

From Kabul I was flown to a hospital in Tashkent and from there to Moscow. From Moscow, some time later, I was flown to Vilnius and admitted to the New Vilnia. From time to time I surfaced from the warm darkness in which they kept me imprisoned. Haloperidol was my guard; it kept me from myself.

My thoughts wandered idly down dark passages, going nowhere. My fingers turned to rubber, and I could hardly pick up the spoon to feed myself. As clumsy as a two.-year-old, I lifted the sticky porridge to my mouth, sometimes making it, sometimes waking from some dark place to find it there, still halfway to my lips, cold and jelly-like. When, punished for my lack of progress, I bent, shivering, to clean the toilets, my hands trembled so that I could barely rub the dirty cloth against the cracked ceramic bowls.

My lips split and I found it hard to speak. I sat on the edge of my bed, transfixed by a shaft of light that broke through the ragged curtains. For hours I would stare at it, drool soaking my pyjama trousers.

When occasionally the haloperidol loosened its fingers, as the doctors considered releasing me, my brain tunnelled its way towards the light like a worm, working its way through the earth. My tongue untied.

‘Fuck Sokolov. Fuck Brezhnev and Gromyko and Andropov. I’ll fucking kill the lot of them. With my own hands.’

‘You can’t kill the dead,’ the doctor said, laconically, re-introducing me to my neuroleptic guard.

At other times the doctors, frustrated by my lack of progress, tried other treatments on me. The Quiet Room was at the end of a long corridor. The windows in the corridor had been whitewashed, making it impossible to see out. The room was bare. The plaster walls were unpainted and crumbling and in the corners dark with damp, green with mould. It was unheated. In one corner was a broken sink and in the other a mattress, soiled and damp. Leather straps restrained my arms and legs. High on one wall was a small window. Dingy light filtered through a thick film of dirt.

‘You can’t kill the dead,’ I murmured to myself, my teeth rattling, my whole body convulsed with shaking.

‘You can’t kill the dead.’

And the dead were not killed. Under the influence of the medication, though, they retreated slowly, along with all my emotions. They withered as my muscles withered. They became no more important than anything else: the mote of dust, the crack in the wall, the shaking of my hands, the swirl of whitewash on the window, too high to reach. I ceased to exist except in these tiny fragments of attention. I became a quivering shell enclosing nothing.

Sometimes I was aware of the passing of shadows upon the wall. Sometimes I smelt the sharp stink of urine, or heard the bark of a nurse, the clang of a spoon against a metal bowl, the thump of feet on the torn linoleum floor. Laughter. Whoops of terrifying laughter that pierced the darkness and would not stop. And then for long days, weeks, I would hear nothing.

I became aware of Vassily by degrees. At first I was conscious only that the figure beside me was not a doctor, nor a nurse. He spoke to me, his voice a quiet murmur in my ear, like a brook, like a breath of air in the linden trees. Sometimes he was there, sometimes not.