The Last Girl (20 page)

‘We've come for the dowry,' a young man shouted, leaping down from the cart, a grin on his face.

‘Get away with you,' my uncle shouted, ‘how do we know you're not just scoundrels and thieves?'

‘Come on, you old skinflint,' the young man called back. ‘You know who I am, hand over the goods.'

‘Who are you calling a skinflint?' Stanislovas shouted, pulling his jacket off and rolling up his sleeves.

The men laughed. Three of the dowry carriers vaulted the gate while the fourth kept hold of the reins. They broke through the crowd, which jostled and jeered at them, and banged their fists on the cottage door.

‘Open up!' the young man shouted.

When the door opened my mother stood in the entrance, hands on her wide hips, an indomitable expression on her stern Zematijan face. For one moment I thought she intimidated the young man. He hesitated. Then he grinned and pulled off his hat, bowing low.

‘Ponia,' he addressed her respectfully. ‘We have come to claim the dowry.'

The three men were jostled from behind by the crowd, and fell through the doorway, shouldering my mother aside. A scream went up from the women in the cottage.

There was the sound of a scuffle then a voice. ‘Sit on it, sit on the chest.'

A young woman squealed and laughed as the men tried to dislodge her from the dowry chest.

‘Hey, now, no getting fresh!'

‘Oi! She bit me!'

‘Serves you right, thug!'

The young men emerged, moments later, dragging the chest between them, their clothing dishevelled. They hauled the wooden chest, with its decorative carvings of stork-filled trees, onto the back of the waiting cart and then, with much shouting and insults and vulgarity, trundled back down the road to the bridegroom's farm.

We drove to the village church for the service, the gig bedecked with flowers. Passing through the village, I drove by Young Mendle's blacksmith shop. Rachael was seated beneath a tree reading a book, while the regular ring of a mallet on metal reverberated from the gloomy interior where her father was working. Looking up, she saw me and waved. Soberly I lifted the whip, aware of my mother's disapproving glance.

On the way back to the farm young men had hung flower­entwined ropes across the lane, delaying the bride and groom on their return from the service. At each stop the match­maker and principal dowry carrier bargained the couple's passage through with sweets and bottles of whisky. At one rope the cheering gang of men pushed forward a blushing young girl from a nearby village, demanding a kiss from the matchmaker.

It was at one of these ambushes, perhaps, that the damage was done to the wheel of the wedding cart. By the time the bride and groom had arrived back at the cottage, the cart bobbed and creaked and one of the horses had developed a limp. Stanislovas clicked his tongue, assessing the damage done to the wheel and lifting the hoof of his horse.

‘We're going to have to get somebody out from the village,' he said.

‘What about Mendle?' my father said. ‘He'll get the two sorted quick enough.'

‘I'll go for him,' I volunteered.

My mother frowned, but Father nodded. We hitched up the horses and I took the gig back into town, hurrying it along the lane so that the dust billowed up from the wheels and the hooves of the horses, covering me in a fine layer of dirt.

When I got to Mendle's shop it was quiet. Rachael was nowhere to be seen. Disheartened I ducked into the entrance of the workshop. The day was warm and with the furnace blazing fiercely in the dark workshop it was intensely hot inside. One small window, high up in the wall, lit the room. It took my eyes some moments to adjust.

From the shadows a large figure stepped forwards. A hefty hammer swung in his hand. His thick, black hair stuck angrily from his head, forming an alarming silhouette against the light of the furnace. I stepped back.

‘Sir,' I addressed him politely in Polish, trying to suppress the nervous tremble in my voice. ‘My father sent me to ask you to come out to Stanislovas' farm urgently.'

He squinted at me. ‘Stanislovas'?'

At that moment Rachael appeared by his side. ‘Steponas!' she said brightly.

‘You're Daumantas' son,' Mendle said, placing me. I nodded.

‘
Nu
, in that case I'll come. Your father's a good man. What is it then? A horse in need of a shoe?'

‘That and a cartwheel.'

‘You're looking very smart,' Rachael said, eyeing my wedding suit.

‘A wedding,' I said.

‘
Tatinka
,' Rachael said to her father. ‘Can I come?'

Mendle nodded. ‘Why not?'

‘I have space for you,' I offered.

I let the horses find their own pace on the road back to the cottage. Mendle soon passed us. When we got back to the Stanislovas farm, the sound of singing drifted from the cottage. The guests were seated around the long table. ‘The food is bitter, bitter,' they were singing, banging their spoons on the wooden table, ‘when the bridegroom kisses the bride it will be sweeter.'

While Mendle went to work on the cartwheel, Rachael and I wandered across the lane. A small wooden bridge spanned the river, where the banks drew in close between tWo low hills. It was old and little used and we had to cross with care, picking out the planks that did not look as if they would give way.

‘Who is getting married?' Rachael asked when we were sitting on the crest of the knoll, on the far bank of the river.

‘My cousin, Asta. Stanislovas' daughter.'

For some moments we sat in silence, gazing back across the river through the trees to the cottage and barns and work sheds. The sound of singing and shouts was just audible above the rush of the river through the.narrow banks.

‘I have something to give you,' I said.

‘Oh?'

I pulled a small metal disk from my pocket. There was a hole punched into it, through which ran a thin chain. On the disk was the engraving of a knight seated on a rearing horse, his sword swinging above his head. I gave it to her. She examined it closely.

‘It's a Vytis,' I told her. ‘The emblem of Lithuania. This insignia was on coins minted in the times of Vytautas the Great, one of the early Grand Dukes of Lithuania.'

She looked up at me. Her eyes were dark, almond shaped, shaded with thick, curled lashes.

‘Thank you,' she said softly, and touched my hand.

‘Vytautas was one of Lithuania's greatest Grand Dukes,' my father told me, one evening, sat at the table, drinking, after supper. Often he taught me the history of Lithuania in the evenings. At school we were taught only what the Poles wanted us to learn about the history of our united countries. ‘It was he,' my father continued, ‘who defeated the Teutonic knights in the battle of Tannenburg. For years the German Orders had been trying to invade our country, interested more in snatching land and riches rather than spreading the gospel. Latvia and Estonia were already theirs, and they were bleeding them dry. They never fully recovered from the defeat at Tannenburg.'

More and more often my father returned to this tale. The contemporary resonance of the story of that struggle between the German knights and the Lithuanian people was growing more pronounced each day. The Nazis were agitating in Klaipeda, laying claim to the region, which had been part of the empire taken from them by the Versailles Treaty. There were daily demonstrations organised by local Nazi party members, protesting against the ill-treatment of German citizens.

The German government had initiated a trade embargo against Lithuania, in protest at the country's abuse of its German minority. This was a heavy blow to Lithuania, as Germany was its main trading partner. The Nazi party in the Klaipeda region of Lithuania was demanding that the Nuremberg Laws be applied to what they called Memelland. Many of the region's Jews were retreating into safer areas of Lithuania.

It was for his treatment of the Jews that I held Vytautas in esteem. He drew up a charter that gave the Jews in his empire legal autonomy, safeguarded their business interests and outlawed the blood libel, attempting to put a stop to the accusations of Jews murdering Christian children for their Passover preparations. He initiated an era of religious tolerance the like of which Western Europe would not enjoy for hundreds of years.

‘I will keep it with me,' she said. ‘It'll be my good luck charm.'

She wrapped it carefully in her handkerchief and slipped it into the pocket of her dress. When we returned to the cottage, the wedding guests were spilling out onto the grass. Mendle had finished and Rachael joined him on his gig. I stood in the road and waved as they drove down the lane towards the village. When I turned back to the cottage, I noticed my mother was watching me.

The kitchen was the heart of my home; it was the place I loved to be. In the evenings, by the light of a candle, I worked at the scrubbed table. A large stone held the door open, in the summer, and the fragrance of the night hung on the air. In the winter the kitchen was the warmest of the rooms in the house. The large oven glowed in the corner and all day the house was filled with the smell of bread baking. At nights, in the winter, there was the delicious smell of pork as my mother slow-cooked kugelis through the night. For breakfast we ate the grated potatoes soaked through with the fat of the pork.

When my schoolwork was finished I worked on my poems. They were filled with tales of the Grand Dukes, heroes of the old empire battling the German knights, or of woods and valleys and clear lakes, of the Nemunas and simple peasants, the country that existed in literature, more than in reality. I was very much under the influence of the romantic Lithuanian poets, Mickiewicz and Baranauskas, and the father of Lithuanian poetry, Donelaitis. My father was exceptionally proud of these poems I wrote; they were to his taste. I wrote in both Lithuanian and Polish. Whilst my Lithuanian poems flew with exuberant metaphors, my Polish poems were more tempered, precise and often gloomy.

In the late summer of that year the annual poetry reading festival was held in the village hall. I entered myself with a couple of poems I was proud of and had worked at intensely. The poems, in Polish, were nationalistic in tone. One, called simply Hymn, took as its starting point the village itself, its humble wooden buildings, dusty roads, its hard working folk, the fields and forests that surrounded it. Its gaze widened further out to the rolling hills, the cities and then finally the whole nation, from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathians, from Poznan to Wilno, Krakow to Gdansk. My father grunted when I read it to him. Wojciech Rudnicka, my schoolmaster, was enthusiastic. He clapped energetically when I read it out to the class. ‘Bravo,' he called, and ‘Good poem'. As I left he clapped his friendly hand on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, ‘You'll be entering the tournament, I hope, Steponas.' He spoke of it always as if it was a medieval jousting rather than a poetry reading contest.

I took extraordinary care when I dressed for the competition. I hurried home from the fields where I had been working and carelessly rushed my tasks, apologising to the chickens that I stepped on in my hurry. A large bowl of steaming water was waiting for me in my room and I peeled off my clothes and washed the dust and sweat from my body. My mother had laid out my best clothes, neatly pressed. They smelt clean and were stiff against my body.

‘Oi,' my mother said, ‘what a son I have! He is a man already.'

‘He's been a man a long time,' my father grunted, forking potato pancakes into his mouth. ‘Works like a real man,' he added proudly.

‘
Nu
, but of course,' my mother said, beaming. Grandmother, in black, hovered in the doorway, a gentle smile on her face.

I met Jan and Povilas on the road into the village. They were going to the village hall though they had not entered the competition. They were boisterous and tried to lift me onto their shoulders. I pushed them off, worried they would mess up my appearance. The village was busy and in carnival mood. There was music and in front of the village hall girls from the school in traditional dress were dancing. A small crowd milled around, mainly students and teachers from the schools in the neighbouring villages. As I pushed through the crowd my excitement grew. It was not so much the sight of Jurczyk, editor of the local paper, that made my hands tremble nervously, it was the knowledge that in the crowd of spectators Rachael would be sat listening. I very much wanted to impress her.

At the doors of the large, wooden village hall I met Itzikl, a cousin of Rachael. He was a thin boy with yellow skin. He was tough enough, though. If he was provoked he did not hesitate to settle the argument with his fists at the edge of the wood, by the millpond, where all school disputes were settled. He grinned, seeing me. His teeth were all out of place and one of them was black and dead. I smiled.

‘I see you entered the competition,' I said.

‘You bet.'

‘What's your poem?'

‘It's satirical.' He grinned his mash-toothed grin.

Itzikl's father was a communist, a member of the Bund. He was a big, good-looking, blond-haired man. He played the guitar well and sang communist songs. Itzikl was so unlike him that there were many who laughed at the ‘bastard'. ltzikl worshipped his father though, and enthusiastically embraced his communist ideals. So passionately did he spread the ideas that he had heard among the students at school that even mild mannered Wojciech Rudnicka was forced to give him a warning.

‘Good luck,' I said and shook his bony hand.

The hall filled. The competitors sat on a row of wooden chairs on the low stage. I sat stiffly, scanning the sea of heads for her dark hair. I could not find it. To my right sat ltzikl, grinning confidently. He would follow me. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. My mnd flicked over the lines of the poem I had learnt by heart, rehearsing it as I worked in the fields.