‘So?’
‘So what we do is slip the stuff into coffins.’
‘Coffins?’
I spluttered tea across the table. Vassily motioned with a finger to his lips that I should keep my voice down. I glanced around, but there were only a few Afghanis morosely sipping tea at the high tables.
‘Obviously it means taking in more partners, and that splits the profits, but it’s that or nothing.’
‘What do you mean, coffins?’
‘Kolya gets the stuff into the coffins here in Jalalabad. He knows somebody who works in the morgue.’
‘That’s where he is now?’
Vassily nodded and grinned. ‘Don’t sound so outraged. They’re already dead◦– what are they going to care if they have a bit of company on the trip home? Back home we have a guy who unloads the coffins. He fences them and the cash is split.’
I shook my head in disbelief.
‘The idea came with Chistyakov,’ Vassily explained. ‘Hashim had just got this beautiful piece and I could not turn it down, but what to do with it? Kolya had the idea◦– he is taking Chistyakov’s body to Jalalabad, where it will be put into a zinc coffin and loaded on to a black tulip. Nu, va! And there we have it. What? Don’t look at me like that, comrade, there are people doing worse. Some of those coffins are going home with top-grade opium packed in them.’
‘I have to go,’ I said.
‘Hey!’ He caught my arm as I rose. ‘You won’t say… ’
For the first time I saw a dark, worried look cross Vassily’s normally jovial face.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I tell you as a friend. Maybe you want in?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry, I won’t talk.’
There was an old telephone at the back of the café. It was covered in dust and did not look as if it had been used in years, but when I picked up the receiver it buzzed healthily in my ear. On the back of a cigarette packet I had scribbled Masha from Krasnoyarsk’s telephone number. I pulled it out and began to dial. The dial spun slowly. After two numbers I put down the receiver, and considered. Glancing back through the beaded curtain, I saw Vassily drinking still at the table. I picked up the receiver again and dialled the Jalalabad hospital, my fingers shaking slightly.
The streets were busy. I pushed through the crowds towards the hospital. When I turned the corner Zena was standing outside the gate, talking to an Afghan soldier. She was wearing her white hospital gown, and her short hair was tidily pinned back. She smiled as I approached.
‘I got your message,’ she said.
I nodded mutely.
‘I only have an hour,’ she added.
We walked down to the tree-lined avenue running along the Kabul river, where there was less bustle. For some while we walked in silence.
‘Where in Russia are you from?’ she asked, breaking the silence.
We sat on the bank of the river, watching it flow past sluggishly.
‘I’m from Lithuania,’ I explained.
She raised her eyebrows.
‘You are a long way from home.’
‘And you?’ I said. ‘Are you really…’
‘My father was a Tajik, my mother a Pushtun from Kabul. My father was a communist; he has family in the Soviet Union. He is dead now, he was shot in the street in Kabul on his way home one evening. I grew up in Kabul. My father had a job in the government of the PDPA so we lived in a nice apartment built by the Soviets, in the Mikrorayon. I went to the Friendship High School built by the Soviets. I loved school. I loved studying. I joined the Communist Youth Group and was top in the class and won a holiday in Moscow. Moscow is wonderful.’
‘I’ve never been,’ I confessed.
‘You’ve never been to Moscow?’
I shook my head.
‘It is a beautiful city. Kabul is just a dirty little town, and here…’ Her nose wrinkled with disgust. ‘Moscow is so cosmopolitan◦– the theatre, the ballet, all the latest fashions.’
‘So you volunteered?’
‘We have a choice here◦– it’s the communists or the mullahs. With the communists we women are free. That is the problem the people here have with the communists, they don’t like things changing. The communists say that women have rights too, that they have control over their own bodies, that they have a right to choose their own husbands and a right to educate their daughters, and that is what makes the men so mad. You know, we hate Pakistan, it is always sticking its nose into our affairs, trying to control what is happening here, but the men, they are so against the idea that women should have any rights and worried that their place is going to be taken away from them that they are accepting aid from the Pakistanis.’
She had turned on the dry earth and was facing me now, her green eyes sparkling in the sunlight. She ran her fingers through her hair, shaking it back behind her ears. Her cheeks were flushed. Down the side of her face the fresh razor wound cut from her forehead to her jaw. She touched it carefully with the tips of her fingers.
‘You must hate it here,’ I said.
‘But I can’t just run away.’
I reached out and touched the livid wound gently, where it bulged out over the top of her cheekbone. She flinched away from my fingers, reflexively.
‘Not here,’ she said quietly. ‘You can touch me, but not here.’
For a moment I thought it was the wound she was worried about, but her eyes flicked around her, at the people, the buildings, the trees, and the slow pull of the river. ‘What about you?’ she said, her eyes falling upon me.
‘Me?’
‘Tell me something about yourself, about your family.’
I paused for a moment, gazed down at the murky water, at a woman on the far bank scrubbing a colourful rug. I thought of the children’s home, of Ponia Marija and Liuba. They seemed so far away now.
‘I never knew my father,’ I said. ‘He left when I was a baby. I lived with my mother in a small apartment in Taurage, a town in the west of Lithuania.’
I paused again, searching through the small, scattered, brittle images of my early years, which I still hoarded, like wrinkled photographs, poorly exposed, fading with age.
‘My mother drank heavily. I didn’t understand then, of course. She would shout and scream a lot, except when she had drunk a bottle or two, and then we would lie on the bed together and she would wrap her arms around me and cry. She would fall asleep and we would hold each other through the night. One night, when I was six, an ambulance took her away. A neighbour took me in overnight. They said she would be back in the morning, but she never returned. I was taken to a children’s home. No one ever told me what happened to her. She just disappeared.’
‘That’s sad,’ Zena said.
I shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago.’ I smiled. ‘I did badly at school and couldn’t defer my national service. But…’ I hesitated. ‘Seeing you in the village, seeing the work you do… I’m glad I came here. I feel useful.’
Zena smiled and reached out and touched my hand. She pressed it briefly, then withdrew. She stood up and glanced at the small black digital watch on her wrist.
‘I have to get back,’ she said.
As we walked back towards the hospital, I felt the proximity of her arm beside me. Occasionally our hands touched as they swung between us.
‘And when you studied at the Friendship High School, is this what you wanted? To be a nurse?’ I asked her. She glanced at me and grinned. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be a soldier.’
‘A soldier?’
She nodded. ‘My father used to take me hunting with him when I was young. He allowed me to shoot his gun. Well, you know, I was small so he held the gun, but he allowed me to hold it with him. I remember the feeling, the kick of the gun when he tightened the trigger, his finger pressing down on mine. The feel of his body around me, protecting me as we shot. He would say to me, “Zena, when you are big, we will go into the mountains and hunt a snow leopard.”’