The Amber Knight by Katherine John

they turned off on to the secondary road that meandered up to Braniewa and the border. Adam pulled up in a forest clearing outside Frombork soon after dawn broke. Heeding Josef’s advice that the most public areas were the safest, he parked the car between a truck bearing the logo of a west German company and a battered kiosk that dispensed rolls and coffee. Opening the boot he lifted out the hamper. Magdalena poured coffee from a flask into plastic cups and distributed salami rolls as the shadows between the trees lightened from dark to pale grey-green.
     
     
    They crossed the border at Mamonowo. Joining the queue for travellers with Western passports, Adam wondered why an hour spent at a border post crawled by at the same snail’s pace as an hour under the dentist’s drill. Magdalena buried her head in a book on the Deutsche Ostmesse, the huge trade fairs that were held in Konigsberg between the wars, and Elizbieta either slept, or pretended to. Being Polish they would have been waved through if Adam hadn’t been with them and all three of them knew it.
    As soon as Adam’s passport was returned to him, they crossed into Byelorussia and Adam felt as though they had entered a colder, starker world. The buildings were utilitarian, the atmosphere sterile, even the forest seemed less green, as though spring had chosen to by-pass the country.
    ‘We’re almost in Kaliningrad,’ Elizbieta muttered from the back seat after an hour of steady driving. ‘I can smell the river Pregolye.’
    ‘How do the locals stand it?’ Adam fought to overcome his revulsion at the stench.
    ‘Used to it, I suppose,’ she suggested.
    ‘No one could get used to that.’ He pressed the button set in the door and closed all the car’s windows.
    ‘Is that the cathedral ahead?’ Magdalena checked the map as Elizbieta finally opened her eyes.
    ‘What’s left of it.’
    ‘Wasn’t there some talk of rebuilding it?’ Adam asked.
    ‘Talk has always been plentiful in Russia.’ Elizbieta produced a packet of cigarettes.
    ‘No smoking in my car,’ Adam ordered.
    ‘Would you prefer the smell of the river or tobacco?’
    ‘The river.’ He joined the flow of traffic that twitched sluggishly over the bridge. Choking in a fug of exhaust fumes, they looked down on the river island and the skeletal ruins of the old cathedral, the only discernable structure in a desert of dereliction.
    ‘Pity they didn’t rebuild the old quarter after the war, like they did in Gdansk.’ Magdalena flicked through her book until she found a nineteenth-century etching of the cathedral tower rising out of an undulating plain of medieval rooftops.
    ‘What the hell is that?’ Adam stared at an enormous H-shaped building that dominated the skyline.
    ‘That is what the Russians built on the site of Konigsberg Castle,’ Elizbieta informed him.
    ‘The Russians blew up the Castle in 1964.’ Magdalena reverted to her book, preferring the etchings to reality. ‘It had stood on the site for over seven hundred years.’
    ‘There wasn’t that much left to blow up,’ Elizbieta chipped in.
    ‘There goes every idea I had of looking for clues as to the fate of the Amber Knight here, but you haven’t said what that monstrosity’s supposed to be.’
    ‘It was the House of the Soviets, there’s talk of turning it into a business centre.’
    ‘The guide book describes it as the ugliest creation in Soviet architecture.’ Magdalena snapped the book shut as if she could no longer bear the comparison between old Konigsberg and modern Kaliningrad.
    ‘I didn’t think anything could be uglier than some of the monuments the Communists built in Poland, but I have to admit, it wins hands down.’
    ‘For God’s sake don’t stop here,’ Elizbieta begged when he slowed the car, ‘between the traffic fumes and the river I’ll throw up.’
    ‘Which way do I go?’
    ‘We want the other side of the city. Turn left at the next junction, then right.’
     
     
    Magdalena