Read Online Amber by Stephan Collishaw - Free Book Online Page B

eyes and pictured her as I had first seen her, in Tanya’s apartment, the evening Vassily and I had arrived in the city.
    â€˜You were pretty sharp with me,’ I said. ‘I think I was scared of you.’
    â€˜Was I sharp with you?’
    She leant down and brushed my skin with her lips. I pulled her close, letting her weight press me down into the thin, warm mattress.
    â€˜I was nervous,’ she said. ‘I thought you would laugh at me. I felt like a young girl with you, as if I knew nothing.’
    â€˜I like that,’ I told her, ‘that you ask nothing. I feel I can forget with you.’
    The draught from beneath the door began to chill me and I got up from beside the telephone.
    Once I had dressed, I searched through the cupboards to find some breakfast. Daiva had bought food, presumably for me to survive on, as her departure seemed to have been planned further ahead than I realised. Opening the wardrobe in the bedroom, earlier I had found that she had taken a suitcase and many of her clothes. I sliced some smoked sausage and cut a thick slice of bread, boiled the kettle and made a strong coffee. On the window sill was an old radio and I turned it on, tuning it to the Polish station.
    Before leaving the apartment, I stopped by the telephone. I picked up the receiver, and was about to dial Daiva’s mother’s number, but hesitated. Though it seemed the most likely place for Daiva to have gone, there was still a possibility she hadn’t, and then I would be forced to explain myself to her mother. And anyway, I thought, what was I going to say? What was there left to say that had not already been said? I replaced the receiver, pulled on my jacket and left the apartment.
    The workshop was on the edge of the Old Town. Mainly we sold the jewellery we produced in the cramped room behind the shopfront. Several other craftsmen sold their goods through us too. The door was locked when I got there and already, after an absence of only a few days, the place looked dusty and neglected. I shut the door behind me, keeping the ‘closed’ sign in place in the window. The shop felt cold and damp. I switched on the light and lit a small paraffin heater in the back to take the chill from the air.
    The workshop was strewn with work. Pulling my chair close to the heater, holding out my hands to the blue flames to warm them, I recalled the promise Vassily had made, soon after he had taken me from the hospital to Tanya’s village.
    â€˜I will teach you how to work amber,’ he said. ‘We will be jewellers, the two of us, craftsmen of the highest order, the best on the Baltic coast. I will teach you all you need to know. We will make jewels and forget about the past.’
    A neighbour in the village, a stooped elderly man with wild silver hair, had machinery for working amber. The workshop was in the basement of his house. Its tiled floor and cabinets were white with dust from the worked amber. Even the cobwebs were heavily sugared with it. The walls were lined with templates and everywhere there were tubs full of amber chips, some buttery yellow, others chalk white, whilst others were rich shades of orange or red. A pot of small black amber beads was like a tub of caviar. Held up to the sun, they were blood red. Heated, the small oxygen bubbles at their heart exploded, giving the pieces a crazed look.
    In a crudely built outhouse were the machines for polishing and firing the amber. A barrel filled with cubes of oak turned for two days, smoothing and polishing the surface of the ancient resin.
    As I was remembering, the telephone on the shelf above the heater sprang abruptly into life, rattling harshly, causing my heart to flutter in panic. For a couple of seconds I sat and watched as it rang on the shelf, then I snatched it up and held the receiver to my ear. My heart was beating rapidly, and crazily, for a moment, it was Vassily’s voice I was expecting to hear, longing to