The APCs raced down the rough track shuddering and jolting. The bullets sang against the metal skin around us. I curled myself over the body I was clutching and buried my head into its chest.
Chapter 12
I folded the letter carefully and put it in the pocket of my jacket. Finishing the coffee, I left the café, ignoring the looks of the waiting staff, and walked up towards the workshop. The letter was addressed from the Santariskes Clinic on the northern edge of Vilnius. Kolya’s message disturbed me. Santariskes Clinic had specialised units for dealing with tuberculosis and Aids, among other things.
The letter had been posted a couple of months previously, and though it was quite possible Kolya was no longer there, it seemed the best place to start looking for him. I had not seen him since returning to Lithuania. Though we had grown up together and had both been posted to Jalalabad, our friendship had become more strained as the months passed in Afghanistan. As Kolya’s problems became worse, he became more unpredictable, irritable and often violent in his treatment of new recruits.
The workshop, when I arrived, seemed colder and more uninviting than ever. It had normally been Vassily who arrived first in the morning. When I got in he would have the paraffin heater burning and would already be working at the lathe, or at his work table, fitting the amber to golden rings, stringing them on silken threads, bagging them up to send on to Riga where the Japanese dealers would buy them for the market in the Far East.
The letters I had collected from the post office, en route from the Uzupis Café to the workshop, included a fair number of new orders and enquiries concerning work ordered some time ago. I dropped the letters on the desk and switched on the light above my lathe.
Vassily had taught me the basics of the trade in Tanya’s village as soon as I began to recover my strength and the shaking of my hands had subsided.
‘Come,’ he said one morning, ‘I will teach you to work amber.’
Sitting me down by the machine, he turned on the tap. The lathe whirred and the water trickled down across the spinning wheel. Taking a piece of amber, he showed me how to clip it on. Gently I pressed it up against the wheel. A light hung low over the machine. The waste water dripped away into a sink, pooling beneath a surface yellow with scum. The diamond skimmed away the skin from my fingers and dark drops of blood stained the dusty white surface of the work table.
‘When you pick it from the beach,’ Vassily said, taking a piece of unworked amber and showing it to me, ‘look, it could just be a pebble, it’s nothing special. It’s blank. To reveal the beauty inside it, its warmth and light, and the inclusions in the heart of it, it must be worked with love and care.
‘Some people can work amber, others can’t,’ he continued. ‘Amber is like that. Immediately I can tell who will be good and who isn’t. The amber you work is warm, Antanas, comrade, it has energy.’
When the amber crumbled on the lathe as I tried to cut it, I would curse and leap up, my fingers bloodied. Vassily laughed. ‘It is an important fact,’ he would tell me, ‘the age of the amber. It needs to be, you see, about fifty million years old. Less and it is no use.’ He took the crumbled amber from the lathe and rolled the chips in his fingers. ‘Twenty million years, thirty million years, it is too young, the quality is not good enough, it will just crumble when you try to work it. As you see.’ He threw the chips into the fire.
‘And how do you tell?’ I asked, running my fingers under the tap. ‘How can you tell which are the older pieces, the better pieces?’
He laughed again. ‘You work it and if it crumbles then you know. Don’t worry,’ he added, pointing at my fingers, ‘amber is a natural antiseptic, you won’t get an infection.’
I worked hard at the lathe for a couple of hours, transforming the light, dull lumps of amber into gleaming drops of fire, dropping the finished pieces into plastic butter tubs. I was taking a break, sitting at my desk sorting through the orders that had arrived in the post, when the telephone rang. After a moment’s hesitation I picked up the receiver. It was Tanya. Her voice sounded brittle and tense, as though at any moment she might break down and cry.
‘Can you come over?’
‘I was hoping to,’ I said. ‘Are you feeling OK?’
‘Come over,’ she said, and put down the receiver.
Turning off the lathe and the light, I took a few of the letters to deal with later and locked up the shop. I was concerned by the tone of Tanya’s voice. Though she had been upset, she had not sounded so on edge before. As I wandered distractedly down the road, I dropped one of the letters as I was pushing it into my pocket. The envelope fluttered to the ground and I had to lunge and grab it before it landed in a puddle created by a blocked drain.
As I straightened up, out of the corner of my eye I saw a rapid movement, a dark shape flitting from one shadow to another. I turned. The street was busy and, glancing around, I could see nothing out of the ordinary. The fear of shadows, of sudden movements glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, was the shared inheritance of all Afghan veterans. Like beaten dogs we flinched at every sound, shied from every flicker. Stilling my heart, I walked on.
When I got to Tanya’s apartment block, I was about to push open the door when I heard a shout from behind me. Tanya stood in the doorway of the beer hall on the opposite side of the road. Tucking a scarf around her throat, she came over.
‘I couldn’t sit in there on my own,’ she said, looping her arm through mine, pressing her cheek against my shoulder.
‘A bad day?’
She grimaced. ‘Come upstairs and see.’
‘What do you mean?’
She did not reply, but took my arm and pushed me through into the dingy stairwell. She led the way up the stairs, taking them two at a time. She paused before fitting her key into the lock and indicated that I should look. Leaning close to the door, I noticed that the wood was scuffed around the area of the lock, and there were sharp splinters in the jamb. The lock itself was gleaming steel. New.
‘You had a break-in?’ I asked.
In answer, she slid the key into the new lock and turned it. Holding the door open, she indicated for me to enter first. A little apprehensively I crossed the threshold into the apartment. There was little evidence in the small hallway of any signs of a disturbance. Tanya’s handbag sat on a table by the door, the pictures were undisturbed and the wooden floor shone in the shaft of light falling from the kitchen window.
‘I had just managed to clean up the apartment, after feeling so ashamed when you were here,’ Tanya said.
Puzzled, I slipped off my shoes and stepped across the hallway to the sitting room. Pushing open the door, I stopped abruptly. The room was strewn with books and papers. Stepping forwards, the better to see the confusion, I trod painfully on the sharp debris carpeting the floor.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Tanya stood behind me in the doorway, looking over my shoulder.
‘As far as I can see,’ she said, ‘they have taken nothing of any value.’
I gazed around the room. Books had been pulled off shelves and tossed on to the floor, on to the sofa, the armchair. The standard lamp had been knocked off balance by the weight of a tome on St Petersburg; a flying volume of Pushkin had shattered the vase on a small table by the wall. Folders of papers had been scattered and now lay like chilly drifts of snow across hillocks of Russian literature, mounds of books on jewellery, knolls of poetry. Pieces of amber, Tanya’s jewellery, fragments of vase and broken glass gravelled the floor.
‘Who did this?’ I gasped.