The Last Girl (19 page)

‘Where's Povilas?' I asked Jan.

Jan nodded down the road. In the dip, where the wooden bridge crossed the brook, I saw Povilas. He walked slowly up the road to meet us, kicking the dust as he came. He flopped onto the grass, a lop-sided grin on his face.

‘How's life?' he asked in his heavily accented Polish. Jan spoke no Lithuanian.

Jan threw another stone into the millpond. I smiled, and shook Povilas' hand.

‘What's up with him?' Povilas asked, inclining his head in the direction of Jan, who lay silent on his stomach. I shrugged.

‘Nothing is up with me,' Jan said, turning over. His eyes flicked in my direction and I could see that he was angry. For a moment he seemed about to comment on something, but held back.

‘So what about going down to the beach?' Povilas grinned. ‘Glorious day for a swim!'

‘Nah, and why not!' Jan said. ‘Better than some suggestions I've heard today.'

Povilas raised his eyebrows and I could only shrug again. Jan got up and stretched. He kicked my leg. ‘You coming?' he asked. I shook my head. I watched as they walked down the deep rutted road towards the river. Jan limped, his leg lame from polio.

When they had crossed the wooden bridge I got up myself and trudged towards Old Mendle's farm.

Old Mendle was in the large old farmhouse eating breakfast when I arrived. The old manor had once been home to the
grafas
, the local nobility, Lithuanian gentry who knew not a word of Lithuanian. Lithuanian was the language of the peasants. They had lost the house at the end of the war. Count Matulevicz, the last of the family, had squandered the dwindled inheritance in St Petersburg on champagne and gambling debts. Matulevicz's son, a man who physically and temperamentally mirrored his scarlet-faced father, died at Tannenburg, face down in the mud, his carefully pressed Russian officer's uniform trampled in a chaotic retreat. Old Mendle bought the property from the old count's humbled wife, who returned to her family in Krakow.

‘Steponushka!' Old Mendle called from the end of the table. A long, grey beard straggled over his large chest. He wiped his mouth with a white handkerchief. ‘Come sit with me.'

Daiva, his Lithuanian maid, pulled out a chair for me and fetched a rich, honey-sweetened tea. Old Mendle's eyes were quick still, and quite blue. Though he was an observant Jew, he favoured the ideas of the enlightenment, the Haskala. He was fluent in Russian, Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish and spoke passable Lithuanian; to talk to his workers, he said, and better still to listen. Young Mendle revered the works of Marx and Lenin rather than the Talmud and Torah and his father did not complain. For all that, Old Mendle looked every bit the Yiddish patriarch.

‘Rachael tells me you'll be going to Vilnius.' He used the Lithuanian name rather than the Polish or Yiddish. I nodded, wondering that she had spoken of me to him.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And what will you be studying?' he asked.

‘Law.'

He clicked his tongue. ‘
Nu
! A lawyer. A blessing to the family.' He grinned, revealing a prominent golden tooth. ‘Your mother and father will be able to enjoy their latter years.'

‘The farm is profitable enough,' I said, ‘for them to feel safe.'

He nodded his head, peeling an egg with his long, delicate fingers. ‘That is the truth. A good bit of land they have there.' He paused a moment. Thoughtfully he sprinkled salt onto the egg and bit it with his golden tooth. ‘Hmm,' he said and his eyes fixed me, strong blue eyes. ‘I've been looking for a bit more land myself.' He paused again, not taking his eyes from me.

‘Oh,' I said, in his pause.

‘Perhaps,' he said. But he did not finish the sentence. At that moment the door opened and Rachael appeared. Her usually melancholic eyes shone brightly. Seeing me, a small smile crept across her lips, but she affected not to have noticed my presence. She wandered over to her grandfather, who opened his arms to greet her.

‘
Liebchin
,' he said.

Seeing her, I felt my heart pound. I felt a hot flush in my cheeks and hoped that neither she nor Old Mendle noticed. Old Mendle slipped his strong arm around the waist of his granddaughter. His eyes flicked back across the table, considering me beadily.

‘I was just going to ask young Steponas if he knew of any land in the village that might be for sale,' Old Mendle said, addressing Rachael.

‘Why would Steponas know?' Rachael asked. Her voice was soft and quiet. Each word seemed to have been considered carefully before it was uttered.

I flushed again and this time I knew Old Mendle had noticed. The truth was my father's farm was not as profitable as I had intimated. A fact Old Mendle was aware of. The old man knew, too, that my father could perhaps have been persuaded to sell some pastureland by the river. The land brought my father little profit and the cash would have enabled him to invest in a tractor of the kind Old Mendle used on his farm.

‘
Nu
! You're right,' Old Mendle said, pushing the young girl away and getting up. He shook the crumbs from his dark waistcoat and the white fringes of his undershirt danced.

Old Mendle had already approached my father about the land. I heard my father speaking of it over the kitchen table.

‘He's offering a good price.'

‘To Mendle? The Jew? Our good pastureland?' My mother was quietly outraged.

My mother was born in Zematija, the ancient, obstinate inheritors of the Samogitian spirit. She was a stubborn down-to-earth woman. When my father married her she was a handsome woman and, while the years of labour showed, she remained attractive with the deep, engrained common sense of the ancient peasant stock she was raised from. Often her thinking was circumscribed by folk wisdom, and more often still by fear of what the neighbours thought.

‘Justas, think,' she told him, her voice fearful with concern. ‘The village, what will they think of you selling up to the old Jew? And how much land does he want anyway? Has he not already got enough?'

‘What do I care about the village?'

I heard the clink of the bottle of samogonas, spirits brewed in the forest, against my father's glass.

‘What do you care for the village?
Durnas
! Blockhead,' she scolded. ‘And who buys the milk from your cows? Who buys your cheeses and your vegetables?'

‘Me a blockhead?' My father was heated by the spirits. ‘They're the blockheads. Tomasz Bozek is a blockhead. Pawel Polmanski is a bullshitter.
Durnius! Idiotas!
'

‘Oi, oi!' my mother gasped, hands over her ears. ‘What do you want to do to us?'

My father growled. Totnasz Bozek and Pawel Polmanski were local councillors and agitators, who believed the right­ wing dictatorship was too restrained. I feared to pass them in the street, when walking with my father, in case he lashed out at them. Their frequent, Nazi-inspired diatribes roused my father to fits of rage.

For all that, and for all his learning, my father was wise enough to listen to my mother's peasant wisdom. She left him alone at the table, with his bottle.

‘
Nu
, and as you wish.' She shrugged. ‘I'm your wife and I'm not so proud that I won't wear rags.'

She skipped away as my father roared and slammed his glass down upon the scarred surface of the old kitchen table.

Old Mendle let the subject drop. He adjusted his yarmulka and stepped, sprightly, across the room to the door.

‘Well, Steponas, you've come to give me a hand today.'

I followed him through to the hallway. Rachael called me back. We stood in the doorway, nervous. Her eyes were both mournful and playful, in a way, perhaps, only a young girl could manage.

‘Steponas, will you take a walk with me later?'

I nodded, mutely.

*

In the field Old Mendle was waiting. We walked around to his large barns, where a group of workers stood assembled around a large tractor. He introduced me. The older man I recognised, he had worked for my father some years before. He nodded slightly. He wore a flat cap perched jauntily on the side of his greying head. His moustache bushed out across his cheeks, quite white against his dark, leathery skin. Over his shirt he wore a dark, stained waistcoat, and his trousers fell down onto the peasant's clogs on his feet. His hand rested proudly on the tractor by which he stood. I ran my hand along the smooth metal flank of the machine. It stood almost as high as a horse. Its engine thrust out before it and the enormous metal wheels rose up around the driver.

‘Fine,
ne
?' Old Mendle said.

‘Fine,' I said. ‘Really fine.' But whilst my hand caressed the metal, hot already from the sun, my mind was on Rachael.

She was waiting for me at the corner of the road, out of sight of the farmyard, wearing a long red dress with a black shawl thrown over her shoulders. Under her arm she held Adam Mickiewicz's Ancestors, a book we had been studying in class. We ducked under the trees and for a while walked in silence. The maples offered a cool shade. The sun dappled the grass; there was not even a breeze to stir the leaves above us. It was not unusual to walk in silence with Rachael and I felt no compunction to make conversation. There were few sounds; our breath, the rustle of clothing, a man's voice somewhere back in the fields, faintly shouting.

‘What do you think about when you are so quiet?' I asked her later.

‘I don't know,' she said, ‘maybe I'm not thinking at all.'

‘You must be,' I insisted. ‘Tell me.'

She was quiet again then, thinking. A small crease appeared across her clear forehead. ‘Sometimes I feel sad and I don't know why,' she said. ‘Do you know what I mean?' Her eyes searched my own, but I didn't know what she meant, I could only look back at her blankly.

‘Sometimes it just comes over me, I feel this wave of sorrow rolling through me so that I feel like crying, only there doesn't seem to be a reason for it.'

We sat with our backs against the solid, elegant trunks of the maples. Only now, perhaps, can I be thankful that I did not know how to answer her and was silent; that I could find no words to cheer her. Silence is a mercy. A small but precious one. These long years it has been the greatest I have been able to enjoy.

‘Sometimes I dream that I am in the forest,' Rachael continued. ‘In the dream it is nighttime and we are all there, my father, grandfather, Mama, Rivka from the village and her little Yosef. We are running through the forest, deeper and deeper. It feels so scary in the forest at night, but I dare not leave it. The fields and the village fill me with dread.'

She stopped. We sat listening to the rustle of birds picking through the leaves, searching for insects.

Later, on the way back to the farm, we ran down the slope to the brook. Rachael laughed as I chased her and then she snagged her dress on the brambles of a blackberry bush. Carefully I unhooked the red fabric, trying to avoid it unravelling. When she was free, she rewarded me with a blackberry, which she pushed through my lips. Its juice ran down her fingers, bloodying them. She beamed gleefully, immobilising me. I grinned back stupidly.

I went to bed that night thinking of her smile, grinning myself, still, in the darkness of my room.

At the beginning of August my cousin was married. My father and I harnessed the horses early and I drove my mother in the gig to my uncle's farm on the other side of the village. Whilst our farm was situated on a rise, with pastureland falling away from it down to the river, Uncle Stanislovas' was nestled in the crook of the river valley as it meandered sharply out of the village. The farm was smaller and less profitable. The cottage, however, shaded as it was by a copse of birch and poplars, with the river running fast and loud across the dirt track, had always been a romantic spot for me. Doubtless this impression was not discouraged by the fact that my cousin was a beautiful girl. Asta was two years older than I.

When we arrived we were surprised to hear shouts coming from the cottage. My mother rushed in through the open door and, as I was tying up the horses, I heard her voice join those of her sister-in-law and niece. I hurried after her. Uncle Stanislovas, the cause of the fury, was slumped in his worn armchair, seemingly oblivious to the commotion going on around him and the insults that were being hurled at him by the women. My mother turned, hearing me enter.

‘Get him outside, Steponas,' she ordered.

She lifted Stanislovas' left arm while I took him by the right, managing to prise the bottle from his hands as I did so. He looked surprised and annoyed at this assault and tried to fight his way back into the seat.

‘What's the matter with you?' he complained. ‘Can't a man celebrate when his daughter's to be married?'

‘You're a disgrace,' my mother railed.

‘Today, of all days,' his wife moaned.

‘
Tetis!
' cried Asta.

I dragged him out into the yard and sat him down in the grass by the well. He leaned back against the wall of the well and closed his eyes, enjoying the early rays of sunlight that filtered through the dense covering of verdant leaves. I pulled up the bucket and was about to discharge the contents over his head when he opened an eye.

‘You just try it,' he said.

Nervously I lowered the bucket and placed it on the grass by his feet. He sighed and hauled himself up. Bending over the bucket, he cupped some of the cool water into his hands and splashed it onto his face, wringing his beard dry. If he had really been drunk he had achieved a remarkable degree of sobriety by the time my father arrived.

The cottage rattled with activity. Neighbours and relatives arrived and while the women took voluble control, the men gathered by the barn to smoke and drink. At eleven o'clock a gang of four young men arrived on the back of an old cart. They reined in the horses at the gate and stood up to shout into the house. The men broke away from the barn, calling back through the trees at the bridegroom's brothers and friends.