‘Can I see you again?’ I asked.
She hesitated for a moment and looked away from me.
‘Yes,’ she said, quietly. ‘I would like that.’
Vassily was still in the café when I returned, Kolya with him. He looked up as I entered. On the table in front of them was an unmarked bottle of vodka, half empty. Kolya gazed at me vacantly as I sat down. He was chewing lazily.
‘Nu?’ said Vassily, eyeing me. ‘How did it go?’ I shrugged and slipped into the chair opposite Kolya.
‘Is he all right?’ I asked.
Vassily glanced across at Kolya, as though he had just noticed he was sitting there. He slapped him on the back. Kolya looked up a fraction of a moment later and grinned.
‘He’s fine,’ Vassily said. ‘Let’s get back to base before we’re missed.’
Almost as soon as I had left Zena, on the corner, close to the hospital, I longed to see her again. When I returned with Vassily and Kolya to the barracks I felt little desire to join in the laughter and jokes. Now we were the granddads the burden of work had eased. The breathless, ceaseless occupation of our first year shuddered to a halt. I lay back on the low, uncomfortable bunk and stared up at the wooden ceiling. Kolya slumped on the edge of his bed, smoking a cigarette, flicking the ash irritably to the floor. When a new recruit came in with his washed clothes, Kolya eyed him bad-temperedly.
‘Your clothes,’ the recruit muttered, placing them carefully on the end of the bunk.
Kolya leant across and tipped them off. They landed with a dull thud on the packed-mud floor. The recruit bent quickly, scooping them from the earth and patting off the dust. He went across to the flimsy wooden cabinet that stood in the corner and, opening the door with care so that it would not fall from its hinges, placed the clothes tidily on a shelf.
‘Go and fetch us some tea,’ Kolya said as the recruit was leaving. He lay back on the bunk and sighed. ‘Liuba sends her “love” to you.’ He pronounced the word ironically, and immediately coughed up some phlegm and spat through the open door, as though the sentiment disgusted him.
‘Liuba? You’ve heard from home?’
Kolya took a thin sheet of paper and dropped it from the bunk. It fell slowly, twisting away from me towards the door. I reached out and took it. The paper was of poor quality; it seemed to have been carefully ripped from an exercise book. Liuba’s tiny, neat handwriting filled both sides of the page. I attempted to read it, but gave up after a couple of minutes.
I tried to imagine Liuba’s pretty face and found I could not. All I achieved was a hazy outline framed by the burden of her hair. I recalled her sitting with Kolya and me on the wall by the children’s home, smoking gracefully, the cigarette held between her fingers in the pose she had appropriated from a television film.
For some minutes we lay on our bunks in silence. The sounds of the camp drifted in on the breeze. Kolya tossed his cigarette out of the door and I heard a match strike as he lit another.
‘What is the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?’ he said after a while.
‘When I get home?’
The idea seemed incredible. For the first six months in Afghanistan I had dreamt of nothing else. In the few hours of sleep I managed to snatch, the rolling landscapes and lush greens of our home town visited me with such intensity that the taste of them lingered long into the hectic heat of the day. I could close my eyes and summon up immediately the dark pine forests, the clear lakes, the reed beds and the taste of porridge. My senses haunted me. Now I closed my eyes and saw the dusty plain, the fields of wheat as you approached Jalalabad swaying in the wind, orange blossom and startling bougainvillea, the mountains dark and hard against the taut blue sky. I smelt sweat and wood smoke, dust, cheap vodka. I closed my eyes and saw a young woman, a livid scar running down the side of her face, her lips slightly open, the tip of her tongue protruding as she concentrated on something. I saw the flash of her eyes, heard the sound of her laughter, the authority in. her command, the guttural rasp when she spoke in Pashtu.
‘Are we going home?’ I said., lifting myself up on an elbow. ‘Can you imagine that? Do you think it will ever happen?’
‘I’m going to move to the coast,’ Kolya said. ‘Get a little cottage near the sea, spend my time fishing.’ The recruit entered with a battered metal pot of tea, a jar of raspberry jam confiscated from another new recruit and a couple of chipped cups. He carried them on a tray fashioned crudely from a plank of wood, which he placed on a small, rickety table beneath the window.
‘Do you want me to pour?’ he asked.
‘No, just fuck off,’ Kolya said.
Kolya heaved himself off his bunk and dropped to the floor. He was wearing sports trousers and a white vest, cleaned and ironed by one of the recruits. He poured the steaming tea into the cups and removed the lid from the jam. Before spooning it into the tea he put his nose to the jar and sniffed. He sighed.
‘Just smell that,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘Just smell that fruit.’
When he waved the jar in front of my face, I pushed him away. I had no desire to bring back the sensations of that other life. It was gone, there was no point thinking about it. Kolya stirred the jam into the tea and passed me a steaming cup. I sipped it slowly.
Kolya had grown quieter as the Afghan months shambled by. While his grin had always been coupled to a violent temper, we heard his laughter less and less. Often he did little more during the day than lie on his bunk, smoking cigarettes he had stolen or bullied from new recruits. His moments of animation became rarer, and when they came they were often spent producing opium tea.
Inside the hut he would pour out from a sack the dozen of poppy heads he had gathered and begin the slow, awkward process of extracting the seeds from the pods. The pods were dark, almost purple, and though brittle still had the suggestion of moisture in them. Once the pods were emptied he pounded them in a pestle, grinding them to a fine, dirty powder. He rarely looked up from his work. Beads of perspiration ran down his forehead and dripped from the tip of his nose.
‘I’ve not seen you working so hard since you came here,’ Vassily joked once, slumped back on a bunk, watching him.
‘Why don’t you just buy the fucking stuff?’ Kirov said. ‘It’s not as if it’s going to cost you much. They’re happy enough to have us smoking it, they’ll give it you for nothing in town.’
‘It’s not the same,’ was all Kolya would say.
Young boys from the neighbouring village brought marijuana and opium to the edge of the camp. Standing on the outside of the high wire fences surrounding the base, they would call through in almost perfect Russian. Small wads of afghanis were folded into a tin can that we pitched across the two fences. The small boys would pick up the can, extract the money and replace it with the opium or marijuana wrapped carefully in paper, then toss it dextrously back, making sure it did not drop down among the mines between the fences.
When Kolya had reduced the pods to a powder he poured it into the toes of a clean sock he reserved especially for this purpose. Rigging up a kettle over a fire outside the hut, he would sit by it, poking sticks into the flames, keeping the heat high to quicken the boiling. When the water had come to a boil, he removed it from the fire and carried it carefully into the hut. Hanging the sock in the boiling water, he would allow it to infuse for fifteen minutes, while he sat back for a cigarette.