No matter how much we made fun of him for the effort he put into producing the opium tea, we never declined it when he offered. It stank. A dirty sludge lined the bottom of the cup. We drank with bitter grimaces. Kolya reboiled the kettle and more tea was produced. We drank slowly and steadily as the heat of the afternoon passed and the sounds of activity gradually ceased to irritate us and we sank back against the walls and smiled and felt the tension rise from our bodies.
‘Sometimes,’ Kolya said, relaxed now, and ready to join us in conversation, ‘I see all our fear and anger and hatred just rising up out of the top of our heads, or through our ears like from a kettle. I can see it sometimes; it settles beneath the ceiling in a cloud.’ He grinned.
Another time, later in the evening, when darkness had descended upon us suddenly and we were smoking marijuana laced with opium by the light of a candle, Kolya worried. ‘Do you think it’s OK?’
‘What?’ I asked drowsily.
‘The cloud. You know, that cloud that settles beneath the ceiling, do you think it’s dangerous?’
‘Why should it be?’
‘Sometimes when I’m lying here I can see it grow. Sometimes I worry that it’s breeding evil spirits or something.’
I laughed. Sleep was taking me gently and I was giving myself to it, allowing it to siphon me off.
Kolya had started smoking opium when diarrhoea set in, sending him dashing for the stinking latrines every few minutes. A dembel, finishing his two-year tour of duty, advised him that the muj traditionally used opium to treat diarrhoea. He even provided Kolya with a small amount wrapped in a paper twist. Kolya smoked it and immediately went to buy more. The opium worked◦– worked better than the vodka binge that one of the officers tried◦– and Kolya stuck with it.
At the next opportunity I got, I volunteered for escort duty on a trip to Jalalabad for provisions. I managed to get a message through to Zena before I left.
She met me by the gates of the hospital. Touching my hand lightly, she moved quickly down the street and I followed her. Zena lived in a modern, concrete hostel constructed by our Soviet builders in the early years of the decade. Already it had a shabby appearance. The stairwell was dirty, and smelt of urine. The lift was out of order. I followed her up the stairs to a door on the third floor. As we entered she put her finger to her lips.
‘Most of the girls are out at work,’ she said, ‘but a couple that work night shifts will be sleeping.’
From farther down the long corridor I could hear the slow, rhythmic creak of old bed springs. A lazy, slow rasp of rusting metal. Zena pushed me through a doorway and indicated for me to sit on one of the two unmade beds. The small room was littered with the debris of two girls’ meagre life. Chipped cups, dirty plates, a crumpled newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda. A dusty window provided a view over the small stretch of Soviet apartments and a jumble of low, clay-coloured buildings.
‘I share the room with Nadia, from Tajikistan,’ Zena explained. She disappeared down the corridor, returning a couple of minutes later with a tray. Sweeping papers and books from a small table, she laid a clean cloth over the scarred wooden surface. From the tray she produced paper place mats and arranged a coffee pot and two cups neatly. On a plate she had arranged a few biscuits.
‘Coffee?’
‘Thank you,’ I said, a little overwhelmed by the feminine care.
We drank in silence. The coffee was scalding, but I sipped it because I could not think what to say.
She pulled a photograph from the wall by the head of her bed and showed it to me. It was a black-and-white picture of her standing before St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, the domes rising behind her. Her hair was longer. It hung silkily across her shoulders. She was wearing a school uniform, a blue dress that rode quite high up her thigh. Against the plain cloth of her dress, the Komsomol badge she wore was clearly visible on her breast. She had a broad grin on her face.
‘When I was in Moscow,’ she explained.
‘You look very happy.’
‘I was. I want another life. I want the freedom there is in Moscow. I can’t stand it here, where to be a woman is to be nothing, to be less than an animal.’
She leant closer to me, and I placed the coffee cup back on the table. She sank down on to the edge of the bed beside me. Her skin was warm. When I touched her a gentle electrical pulse throbbed from the downy hairs, and flesh goose-pimpled beneath my fingertips. I lowered my head into her shirt, pressing my forehead against the warm firmness of her chest, tasted the sweetness, the saltiness of her skin on my tongue. Her fingers massaged the back of my head. My lips brushed each eyelid, and I traced the tip of my tongue down her scar, sucked the flesh at her throat. My hands traced the curves of her figure, pushing back the stiff cotton of her green shirt, resting on the gathered cloth of her trousers. My lips skimmed her belly, tickled by the roughness of her excited skin.
The sounds of the street faded, along with the mountains and valleys, the dust and dirt, the violent sun and the bone-shaking night. For one moment it slipped from me and I was alone with her beneath the cotton sheets. Time snagged; the minute caught its breath. The bed sighed and enfolded us in its warm oblivion. We lay side by side, gazing empty-eyed at the ceiling and felt the damp sheets dry beneath us.
When I pulled on my clothes, she stood brushing her hair, gazing into a fragment of mirror perched on top of a cabinet. I slipped a small metal cross from around my neck. It was on a thin chain. Liuba had given Kolya and me the crosses the evening before we left. Her cool, full lips had brushed our cheeks, and I had noticed the blush spread across Kolya’s face.
‘I would like to give you this,’ I said to Zena. She turned from the mirror and took the chain from the palm of my hand. She gazed at it for a few moments before she looked up.
‘A cross?’
‘Just for luck.’
She held it out for me to take from her. I glanced at her questioningly, and a small sharp pain stung my heart. She noticed the hurt flicker across my eyes and smiled.
‘I would like you to put it on me,’ she said.
‘Oh, I see.’
I took the thin chain, and with fumbling fingers looped it around her. The back of her neck was furred with fine dark hairs that led down to her spine.
‘Shit,’ she said, glancing at the clock, ‘I’m going to be late.’
Chapter 21
It was some time before Kolya reappeared from the back room of the apartment. Exhausted by the activities of the long day, I was dozing when he staggered into the kitchen, knocking over a basket of laundry. Waking from a dream of Laura, I sat up sharply. The dream had been bright and pleasant and it was painful to wake from it to see Kolya’s emaciated figure stumbling around the kitchen and the girl’s underwear spread across the floor, the cold grime of the apartment.
Kolya cracked a bottle down on to the table, pushing aside the dirty cups and plates. Sitting on the bench by the window; he opened it and took a crushed packet of cigarettes from his pocket. It took him a while to extract a broken cigarette without losing all the tobacco. He offered me the packet, but I indicated I had my own. He filled two glasses to their rim, pushed one over to me and took up the other. Despite his clumsiness, his hand shook less now.
‘Nu, tovarich,’ he said, raising his glass.
He drank quickly, smacking his lips.
‘It’s been a long time, Antanas.’
His eyes wandered around the kitchen, avoiding my own. Suddenly he seemed to notice the dirt, the underwear, the plates and glasses, the overflowing ashtrays, the detritus of his addiction; he scowled and rubbed his head vigorously.