Kneeling beside her, I felt the tears welling in my own eyes. Gently I touched her on the shoulder. I brushed the hair back from her cheek, ran my fingers across the smooth silk curve of her back. I took her arm, tried to pull her close to me. She resisted. She clenched herself tightly. A ball of pain.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.
Above us, on the hob, the kettle shrieked. I stood and lifted it carefully, using a towel so as not to burn my fingers. I turned off the flame and stood and leant forwards across the cooker, feeling the scorching heat of the steam dampen my forehead, condense in my hair like dew on a spider’s web. On the floor behind me Daiva did not move. She cried softly, unstoppably.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but already my heart was hardening, irritated by her refusal to listen. A bitter little thought niggled at the back of my head. She had won. I crushed the idea immediately.
‘Really, I’m sorry,’ I said. But I turned then, feeling the anger building again.
Going into the bedroom, I dressed quickly. The baby was still sleeping in the cot and I stopped for a moment by her side and leant down and brushed my fingers across the soft down on her head. When she stirred, I stepped back quickly, fearing I had woken her. I hesitated in the doorway. Daiva had not moved.
Outside, I lifted my head and gazed up into the darkness. The clouds hung low, scraping soft-bellied across the roofs of the nine-storey apartment blocks. I closed my eyes, pressed my fingers into the sockets, squeezing, until star bursts kaleidoscoped across the skin of my eyelids. A ripple of sorrow brushed across my face. Settled on it. When I lifted my fingers and opened my eyes, the dots and stars whirled across the sky, flashing among the street lamps and the brilliant sudden glow of headlights. A car engine roared, as someone revved it hard. My mind was spinning in the tail of the light particles. I felt the ground shift and open a crack. My hands trembled and my feet almost turned in the direction of the bar on the corner, in the basement of the five-storey block just off Freedom Boulevard. I stopped, Davia’s voice tolling in my ear. ‘It won’t help. It’s not an answer.’
‘I know,’ I said, then looked around, momentarily embarrassed that I had actually spoken the words aloud. I ran a hand through my hair. I know. Did she think I did not know? Did she continually need to tell me it wasn’t the answer? Did she not understand that if there was an answer, if there was a relief from this crushing fear, this darkness, I would have taken it? Would gladly have taken it, whatever it might have been.
A sob of desperation welled up inside me. ‘Oh God,’ I murmured. A shower of images scattered across my mind. Scorching, brilliant sparks that settled and burnt the thin membrane of forgetting I had woven to protect myself. A scream. A shout. A body, split like a ripe fig at the side of the road. The sweet-sour stench of death. Hot dust in the back of my throat. The crackle of gunfire.
My mind wobbled, trembled, shivered on the edge of the abyss. I had worked so hard to forget those years in Afghanistan. I had manhandled a thousand rocks into the hole: my craft, friends, marriage, child, love and anger, the rubble of life, and now I turned to find it still open, yawning darkly, waiting to swallow me.
Chapter 6
The base we reported to was a sprawling site to the north-west of Vilnius. We were handed uniforms: green suits with a red band on the shoulder, boots as stiff as wood, so inflexible we could not move our feet. We laughed, tramping around the barrack room, clumsy as elephants, our heads newly shaved. Clowning, excited still.
Later we were divided into different companies and told we would be going abroad. Kolya and I found ourselves in the same company.
‘Look at the belts they gave us,’ Kolya said, slapping his down across the bunk.
‘What about them?’
‘Look how badly made they are. It’s clear, isn’t it?’
A small group gathered around the bunk, examining their belts.
‘What do you mean?’ someone asked.
‘You know how it goes?’ Kolya said. ‘They give the good belts to those going to Germany or somewhere nice, and to those going out east…’
The group fell momentarily silent. We stared at the belts as though they held the key to our futures. There was no doubt the belts we had been given were of an inferior quality, even by the standards Kolya and I were used to in the children’s home.
‘You don’t know shit,’ someone said.
There were mutterings of agreement and the crowd dispersed quietly. The clowning stopped, though, and when we did physical exercise the next morning we threw ourselves through the assault course with violent determination, toughening ourselves up, welcoming the cuts and bruises and aching muscles.
Kolya was right about the belts. At the end of our first month of training we were put on to a plane at Vilnius airport. We were not told our destination, but the long flight took us south-east, across the vast plains of Russia to central Asia. When dawn broke it illuminated, thousands of metres below us, barren scrubland, stretching to the horizon. As the sun climbed higher and its rosy flush spilt across the earth, the foothills of a distant mountain range bubbled up darkly from the plain. A city was spread out below us, dissected by a sinuously curving river, still shrouded in the grey light of early dawn. Only the upper tips of the acres of high-rise apartment blocks were caught by the sun, reaching like bloodied fingers for the underbelly of the plane. We landed in Tashkent in the early hours of morning.
At the airport a row of KamaZ trucks were waiting for us, their tarpaulins flapping and billowing in a strong breeze. We jumped up into the trucks, tired and bleary eyed, and gazed out in amazement as we bumped through the huge city; streets lined with poplars, monumental tower blocks the like of which I had never seen in my life. Fountains glittered in the morning sunlight; the squares seemed wider than the small town I had been raised in.
The trucks took us to a large base outside the city, which, in contrast to its barren surroundings, was lined with trees beneath which stretched tidy green lawns. Large portraits of politburo members hung at regular intervals down the long avenue that ran from the main gates of the compound to the large concrete barracks and parade ground.
Training began in earnest almost immediately. Equipped with backpacks, filled with soft sand till they weighed thirty kilos, and wearing eighteen-kilogram bulletproof vests, we were marched up mountains. Boots slipping on the dusty scree, my hands were soon covered in a thousand small cuts and bruises mottled my body. My muscles ached, my feet were blistered, and my lungs burnt in the hot dry air. Though it was late autumn, it was still hot in the daytime. In the evening, as soon as the sun dropped, the temperature plummeted.
One morning, Oleg Ivanovich, our company commander, drove us into the desert. The low, stony scrub stretched away into the distance, disappearing into the early morning haze some kilometres away, with barely a ripple in the earth. He ordered the driver to stop when the desert surrounded us on all sides and no evidence of civilisation was to be seen. Ivanovich nodded at a pile of shovels in the back of the KamaZ.
‘You drive exactly one kilometre up the road,’ he said, jerking his chin ahead now, to where the road shimmered into liquid on the horizon.’ Then you pull off and take these shovels and dig a hole deep enough so that I cannot see a fucking trace of this ugly truck. Is that understood?’