The Last Girl (18 page)

He was breathing hard. She noticed the quick rise and fall of his chest. The rapid dance of his Adam's apple. She knew she should thrust, now, that it would only take a determined jab. She faltered. He moved swiftly, knocking the knife from her grasp. It clattered on the cobbles. She bent for it as he ran. Her fingers scraped through the warm urine and she plucked them back, disgusted. When she stood he was at the entrance to the courtyard, framed in the faint light. He looked back, once, swiftly, over his shoulder and saw her following. He stepped out.

A shower of gravel sprinkled the wall of the building. Car tyres squealed. There was a dull thud and a small surprised cry. For a few moments there was silence, then the car engine roared into life and skidded away down the narrow street. She stopped in the shadows. Still. Slowly she turned and walked under the sagging walkway, through her door.

She did not go to look through the small windowpanes, which gave out onto the street. She stood with her back to the door, her hands to her face. She vomited in the sink. Wiping the bile from around her mouth she fell onto the bed.

The Gates of Dawn was busy. Svetlana pushed past a large party of Poles and mounted the stairs. A cold wind was blowing in the street and the upper room was warm and thickly scented with incense. She bent before the Madonna, not raising her eyes to the beautiful image. She was bustled from either side as more worshippers attempted to push into the confined space.

‘
Przepraszam
.'

Excuse me.

‘Move up, there's no space.'

A sweat broke out on her forehead. She closed her eyes. She clasped her hands. It was too crowded for her to get to her knees.

The bodies and languages swirled around her. Banter, prayers, entreaties. We should have come later. The bus is leaving at five. I prayed last year. The Holy Father was here, I saw him. A miracle. At the window. My son, his leg. It's so busy. A remarkable experience. He was cured, praise God and the blessed Holy Mother.
Przepraszam
.
Przepraszam
.

She steadied herself against the wall. She worked her way through the crowd to the window. Opening the window, she breathed in the cool air deeply. Her head cleared a little. Her breath came easier. She rested her elbows on the sill, holding her head in her hands.

It had been an hour before she had gone out into the street the previous evening. She lay on her bed and listened. Heard the passers-by, the ambulance, the police. The low voices, and then the return of the night's silence, broken only by the hum of the trolley buses, an occasional car, the shout of a drunk. The papers were scattered across the street. She gathered them carefully. They were ripped and creased and soiled. Some lifted on the wind and danced away, out of her reach. She bundled them up and brought them inside.

‘Are you all right?'

A priest stood behind her. She nodded and turned away from the window. The busload of Poles had left. A few old women remained, on their knees, crossing themselves fervently, muttering beneath their breath, their toothless gums working without pause. She glanced up at the Madonna. Her gown shone in the light of the candles, her crown glittered. She inclined over her folded hands, listening.

‘Forgive me,' Svetlana whispered. ‘Forgive me. It's for him. For Misha. You know what it is to give yourself for your son…'

It was dark when Svetlana alighted from the bus in front of the train station. Taxi drivers milled around in small groups and a few girls paced the street, hugging their shoulders to keep warm. She stopped briefly in the small café inside the station. She paid fifty cents to the old woman seated at the door of the toilets, and a further fifty for some coarse grey tissue. In front of the polished surface of the tin mirror she wiped her face with the dampened tissue. She straightened her hair with her fingers and tried to smooth some of the lines from her face, massaging it gently with the tips of her fingers. Carefully she applied her lipstick.

The tin mirror was misshapen and the figure reflected back was indistinct and distorted. She was wearing the dress Pumpetiene had given her. She stroked smooth the glittering sequins across her chest. Her arms, she noticed, were bruised. She pulled the sleeves down to hide the yellow­brown marks.

Throwing the damp ball of tissue into the wastebasket she examined herself once more, delaying the moment rather than nervous of her appearance. And then she left. Down the hill towards Kauno Street, to the cafe where she knew she would find him, ignoring the stares of the taxi drivers, the cool appraisal of the young girl she passed on the corner. And then there was Ruta, in a doorway, sheltering from the wind. Svetlana hesitated. The thirteen-year-old stared out from the darkness. A hundred paces down the road was the red glow of the bar. Her gaze moved from the bar to the girl huddled in the shadows. Ruta raised a finger in a coarsely aggressive gesture. ‘Fuck off.'

Svetlana had been thirteen when she danced that last bitter, silent waltz with her mother. She ran away. She was caught and taken home. And ran away. Thirteen. In an apart­ment where she had taken refuge with a girl she met, men approached. They laughed. Silver teeth and vodka on their breath. The window was open. She hunched up on the sofa, wrapping her arms around her thin legs. Knowing nothing of sex, except that they wanted it. Outside it was dark. She did not know how far it was to the floor. When the man unbuckled his belt, when she heard the tone of their laughter and saw the look in their eyes, she ran for the window. She landed on her side. The pain shuddered through her, paralysed her. She looked up and saw their faces at the window. They laughed down at her as she cried into the grass.

‘Fuck off,' Ruta said again.

Svetlana turned away. She walked slowly down towards the bar. She heard the steady thump of the music. Faintly, the sound of laughter. The door opened and the noise spilled out into the street.

Mindaugas was at the bar. She slid onto the stool beside him. He half turned. She did not greet him. He bought her a drink. A glass of Alytus champagne, Saldus – sweet.

‘I need some money,' she said.

He nodded.

‘It's not like the old days,' he said, with a small grin. ‘No more of the Americans and Germans at Hotel Lietuva, at the Gintaras.'

Svetlana nodded. ‘I know.'

She tasted the champagne. It made her feel neither good nor nauseous. She drank it quickly. No dark wave enveloped her. In the mirror, behind the bar, behind the bottles of vodka and cranberry spirits and English gin and Grant's whisky, she could see herself. She looked better than she had in the station toilet. She attempted a smile, a small one, and was half pleased with the result. When she replaced the glass on the bar her hand shook and it nearly overbalanced.

In the summer of 1938 I was living in a small village west of Vilnius, or Wilno as it was called then. The farm on which we lived lay on the edge of the village. Rolling pasture fell down from the house to a small river where we fished for trout. Across the river the forest started. The dark green leaves cloaked the rising hill and wound around the village protecting it, cutting it off. One road wandered through the forest's depths, grey and dusty in the summer, and in the winter, rutted and dark and treacherous. Its meandering route cut south-east towards the Polish capital, whilst fifty kilometres to the north the road took you to the ancient capital of the Lithuanian people, to Vilnius.

June was hot. The sun rose early. It peaked the forest and seeped through the dirty windows of the small room, at the top of the house, in which I slept. It woke me and for some moments I lay without moving, feeling its fingers caress my face like a grandmother, with hands smooth and leathery with age.

‘
Sunus
,' my mother called. ‘Son.'

I pulled back the sheets and stretched. Choosing some warm clothes, I hurried outside. The early morning was fresh and dew clung to the grass, glittering like strewn diamonds in the low sunlight. The sun, which had been so warm behind the glass in my room, was freshened by a nip in the air, left by the clear, cold night. The scent of the pine forest was pungent and lively. I breathed it in deeply. In the distance I could · hear the cattle. Setting off down the path to where the cows were tethered, my feet sprang on the wet grass and the dew quickly soaked my shoes. I hummed a melody I had heard on the wireless the evening before. It was a Polish tune. Since the war our village had found itself within Poland's borders, though most of the village's inhabitants were Lithuanian or Jews, with only a scattering of Poles.

The udders of the cows were full and they lowed irritably. I stroked the smooth warm flanks of Ramune and reassured her. The frothy milk splashed into the cold metal bucket. Having eased the udders of the cows, I wandered back up the path to the house, the bucket sloshing and steaming. The small meadow flowers had begun to open up to the sun and a heron poked around by the rivr. By the door of the house, on the brim of the hill, my grandmother, seeing me ambling up the path, stood and smiled her gap-toothed smile. As always she was dressed in black. Having lost her husband in the war, she had worn black ever since.

I lowered the bucket to the ground and rubbed the palm of my hand. Standing with my grandmother, I took in the morning scene with the delight of a boy who knows that soon he will leave it. It was all the world I had known. A peaceful world. Idyllic.

My father, though a farmer, was a cultured man. Before the war, during the Russian occupation, he read the underground papers and built up a library of illegally published Lithuanian books. The Polish occupation of the region had been a blow to him as a nationalist. But he was a businessman too, a realist, and though, still, he harboured hopes of a larger, united Lithuania, he threw his energy into his Polish farm and educated me, his son, as best he could in the hope of my becoming a doctor or a lawyer. I tried hard not to disappoint him. I worked stubbornly and gained entry into the university in Wilno.

My last months in the village were sweet with the nostalgia of expected departure. I worked on my father's farm, enjoying feeling my strained muscles, hearing the sound of the birds and, in the afternoons, wandering in the dark silences of the ancient forests. In the evenings I went down to the river, where the young people from the village gathered, and sat fishing and talking, and singing as the moon rose above the forest.

After delivering the warm, fresh milk to my mother, I scooped out a cup for my breakfast. I sat at the scarred old table that stood in the kitchen and hurriedly ate some heavy brown bread and cheese. The day would be a fine one and I did not wish to lose a moment of it. I slipped out, once more, into the sunshine and headed for the dusty road where I had arranged to meet a couple of my school friends.

Jan, I saw, was there waiting, on the edge of the road, casting stones into the stagnant millpond. Seeing me, he raised his hand in greeting. I threw myself down onto the grass beside him and rolled onto my back to gaze up into the high blue sky. For a moment we lay there in silence.

‘Nah! And what are we going to do then?' Jan asked, casting another stone into the pond. The stone made a thick plop as it broke the moribund surface. A bullfrog croaked, lustfully. There was barely a breeze to stir the tips of the tall trees further down the road and the early morning chill had evaporated. The sun was strong and the dust road quivered under its heat.

‘Mendle has some work going. He said to come over.'

‘Working for the Yid?'

‘What does it matter that he's a Yid?'

‘
Blyad!
' Jan swore in Russian. He spat into the grass contemptuously.

‘Ach!' I muttered and turned over, irritated.

Old man Mendle had a farm on the edge of the village, a couple of miles from our own. He was a prosperous old man in his sixties. His son, Young Mendle as he was known, worked as a blacksmith. His shop was in the centre of the village but he still lived in his father's large farmhouse with his own child. Young Mendle's daughter was dark haired and thin and, to me, mysterious. Sitting in the corner of the village schoolroom, she stared out of the large, dusty windows, across the fields, to the forest. My gaze followed hers, losing itself in the darkness of the trees.

‘Christ killer,' Jan said. He ran a hand through his short, blond, Polish hair.

When school finished Rachael tucked her books under her arm and wandered slowly down the dusty lane to the village. My way home took me past her father's shop, where I would see her leaning up against the wooden door. Her father had a fierce, black beard that jutted out aggressively before him. He was a communist and agitated in the village. When my father first took me to the workshop with one of our horses, I cowered in the corner. The furnace cast hellish shadows around the room. Young Mendle stood in the centre of the workshop with a large mallet in his blackened hand, beard bristling. Sweat glistened on his furrowed forehead as he brought the mallet down with furious blows onto a shining horseshoe.

‘Young Mendle's a good man,' my father said on the way home. ‘He does a good job for a good price. Better than Polish shit.'

After leaving her father's shop, Rachael cut across the fields. She liked to skirt the edge of the forest on her way home and I would follow her.

‘It has a power all of its own,' she said one day, as we sat in the shadow of a birch tree. Our schoolbooks lay scattered on the thick green grass. I read to her from Baranauskas' long, rambling poem, inspired by the deep primeval forests of Lithuania.

‘Sometimes the forest scares me,' she said. ‘And sometimes it seems to be the safest of places.'

I nodded. Many times when I was with her I was not sure how to respond to her comments. I would nod, only, and gaze at her. Her hair was dark and played on her narrow shoulders. Her eyes always wore a far-away look.