The Last Girl (32 page)

She sat on the bed beside me, the blue plastic bag on her lap. It was ripped and dirty. She pulled the thick sheaf of papers out of the bag and they were crumpled and ripped and dirty too.

‘Where did you get these?' I said, finally.

She seemed a little embarrassed. ‘You left them, in a cafe. I picked them up meaning to return them to you…' Her explanation petered out. She handed them to me.

I stared at the crumpled sheets in my hands, the manuscript finally returned. A little thrill of relief shuddered through my body. I clutched the papers tightly. For some moments we sat in silence.

‘I'm sorry,' she said then, perhaps misinterpreting my quietness.

‘There's no need to be,' I said. ‘I'm just a little confused. I thought somebody else had them.'

There was then a knock at the door. A young girl entered, no older than thirteen. She was a pretty girl, but there was something harsh about her features. The smile on her face dissolved the moment she saw me. She eyed me suspiciously and when Svetlana explained who I was she did not shake my hand. Svetlana got up and boiled some water on the small stove. She made me a cup of tea and I drank it gladly.

‘How's Misha?' I asked to break the uncomfortable silence that had descended on us.

‘Fine,' Svetlana said. ‘They laid him off at the building site. He left yesterday for England.'

‘England?' I said, my eyebrows rising.

‘To find work. I managed to borrow some money.'

She smiled and it struck me that I could not remember having seen her smile before. As if reading my thoughts she· said, ‘My husband has gone.'

‘He left?'

‘The police took him, the day after I saw you last.' She shrugged. ‘He was doing the dirty work for some guy called Kasimov. I don't know. It's just a fucking relief to have him out of the way.'

‘Kasimov?'

‘Mafia,' she said, her nose wrinkling with contempt.

‘A lot has happened since last I was here!'

‘A problem doesn't like to walk without company, as they say.' She smiled again, but this time it was tempered with weariness.

As I was leaving, the young girl, whom Svetlana called Ruta, was pulling Svetlana's tub in from the courtyard. She did not smile or acknowledge me when I said goodbye.

‘You have a girl working for you?' I asked Svetlana, curiously, as we walked out to the street. She flushed and turned away from me.

‘She's living here now that Ivan has gone,' she said. For a moment it seemed that was all she was going to say and I was about to say goodbye when she added, ‘She's a good girl. Life has been hard. We live the best way we can.' She held my arm and looked into my face. ‘We just do what we can to survive. It's easy to say that it's not right, but sometimes we have little choice…'

She looked up at me as if she wished for my concurrence. Her face was lined with doubt, but her head was tilted back as if to suggest she would not care if I disagreed. I was a little confused and unsure how to reply. I took her hand and gripped it.

‘Svyeta,' I said, ‘God knows I'm not the one to be telling you what is right.'

She pressed my hand and smiled at me.

The waiter in Markus and Ko did not seem to recognise me. He brought a menu when I sat down at the table by the window. I shook my head and ordered a coffee. My pocket bulged as I sat, Marcinkevicius' dog-eared volume pressing against my side. I did not take it out. I love you with hands black from crying. The waiter brought the coffee and I made a point of laying the money out on the table for him to take. Perhaps then he remembered, for he hesitated as he picked up the coins.

I love you with darkness and death. Forgetfulness and light. Yes, with pain. With guilt. Grass on a sunken grave. In the moonlight, our hands brushed. We stopped by the old birch, which shone silver, at the point where Old Mendle's path forked off the road. Your breath was ragged with nerves. We stumbled and our faces met, almost lip to lip, in the pale light.

I lit a cigarette and brushed away a tear, but another welled up to take its place. let them fall. The smoke rose blue from my cigarette. My eyes blurred. Through the window I saw a woman pass and then hesitate. Her hair fell dark around her face. In her arms she held a child. She looked in through the glass and I had to rub my eyes to see her clearly. She smiled. My heart jumped with a painful little leap of joy and I beckoned for her to come in. She nodded.

When I had returned from Svetlana's the previous day, I got out the volume on the development of Western art I had borrowed from the library. Clearing a space on the table, I turned over to Daddi's Triptych. I switched on the small reading lamp. It struck me as I examined the reproduction that in the side panel depicting Christ on the cross, the emotional heart of the picture was in the bottom left corner, where the apostles stand supporting the Holy Mother. They lead her away, her shawl pulled tight around her, as Christ looks on. I took out a cigarette and lit it, taking care not to exhale on the print. The gospel story told by Daddi is the mother's story. The young virgin, the tender mother, the aged widow who has lost her son.

The waiter smiled as the woman pushed through the door into Markus and Ko. She crossed the restaurant and slid into the seat opposite mine. The young child looked at me curiously.

‘I wasn't sure I would find it,' Egle said, cradling her granddaughter. I ordered her a glass of wine.

It struck me that there is something uncomfortable about Daddi's portrait of Christ on the cross. The way that the figures reach up to him. There is something a little hysterical about it. Theatrical. As I gazed at the image a thin crease of light ruptured the darkness inside me. It reminded me of something I had read in the manuscript Svetlana had returned to me. It had taken me a while to rearrange the pages. Some were ripped and a couple seemed to be missing altogether.

He wrote,
As he pinned the medal to my breast I had a sudden vision of her standing at the edge of the village, the smoke rising behind her, the charred timbers tilting awkwardly, her scarf pulled tight beneath her eyes so that I could not see the sting of loss on her face. Our truck pulled away and she was lost in the swirl of dust. This medal, I understood then, was earned by her sacrifice – nourished by her suffering.
‘It has been a few years since last I was in the city,' Egle said.

‘And do you find it changed?'

‘Everywhere you go they are painting, rebuilding. It's beautiful.'

‘I worry sometimes,' I said. ‘I fear that all the memories are being plastered over. They are painting over the cuts and bruises of the city. It may well be pretty when they have finished, but will it have a soul?'

Egle laughed. She laid a hand on my own and looked into my eyes. ‘Daumantas the poet!' she mocked. ‘Look.' She held up Rasa, in her arms. ‘Is it for her that you are wanting to save the rubble?'

Later Jolanta joined us. She looked worn. She drank a coffee and stared out of the window.

‘I read your husband's novel,' I said.

She turned to me. As soon as I had arrived home from Svetlana's with the manuscript I had telephoned to let her know I had it. She had been a little short with me on the telephone – had thanked me, and said we would discuss it when we met. I had suspected she had been crying.

‘It's good,' I said. ‘He writes perceptively about the war, as if he was there.'

She nodded. ‘Yes, he served in Afghanistan.' She paused and looked back out through the window. ‘He is back in hospital. They have given him some medication and he is calmer.'

‘What is the matter with him?'

‘He has always been highly strung. After he finished his degree he was conscripted into the Soviet army. He never told us what happened. He came home safely, thank God. Then one day I received a telephone call to say that he had been admitted to hospital. They would not let me see him, nor would they tell me what had happened.

‘When he was discharged, on medical grounds, he was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in New Vilnia for some months. When finally he came home, it was as if he didn't know me. And I did not know him. Sometimes he is in control and there are days when he is almost like the man I used to know. And then… Reading the book I feel I can understand a little, but he will not tell me if what he has written is true.'

Egle slipped her arm around her daughter's shoulders.

Looking across the table I felt helpless.

‘If there is any way that I can help you…' I said. ‘As to Kestutis' manuscript I will pass it on to a friend, an editor at the Vaga publishing house, if your husband agrees.'

She smiled and reached out her hand to take my own. ‘Thank you.'

Later, I suggested we drive out into the country. Some twenty kilometres out of the city, on the road to Trakai, there is a small lane that cuts off the highway. After a few miles it turns to dirt track for the rest of the way to the village. In die centre of the village stands a small church. During Soviet times it was used as a storehouse. The priest lived in a small cottage adjoining it.

I parked the old Moskovich beneath the silver birch. The roots of the tree had toppled the low stone wall around the church. The leaves danced in a gentle gust of wind. Inside the church it was cool and gloomy. It smelled vaguely of hay, of the farm, along with the incense that the priest had burned, cleansing his church once the Russians had gone.

A heavy, autumnal slab of light fell from the windows near the altar. We stood in front of three canvases.

‘They're beautiful,' Jolanta said.

‘A woman I knew during the war years painted them,' I told her. ‘Her name was Rita.'

In the central canvas sat the Mother of God. She sat upon a throne, resplendently swollen with child. Gently her hands rested upon the bulge under her dress. She was weeping.

Standing beside me, Egle slipped her hand into mine and rested her head upon my shoulder. Jolanta sat on the front pew, cradling her daughter. Rasa. A drop of dew. Fresh as the morning. The small child sang, playing with her mother's fingers.

Outside the church, the birds sang. Down the road was Ponar. In the forest glade the birds would be singing too. The sun, there, would cut across the treetops as it cut across the treetops outside the village church. Grass had grown over the pits, and trees too. They towered, those trees that had been planted at the end of the war. Blackberries, currants, mushrooms. The foxes made their homes and the birds their nests.

The city is quiet. Somewhere a bell is tolling and a child wanders down the narrow lane singing. She has not seen me. I stand on the corner and watch her as she disappears around the slow twist of the ghetto street. Birds lift from the rooftops and are caught dazzlingly in the net of the sinking sun. A soft breeze.

In the square a woman brushes the leaves. The twig broom scrapes rhythmically. Switch. Switch. Switch. Unhurried. A man sits on the grass and lights a cigarette. He pulls off his battered cap and mops his brow. Beside him his scythe. Patiently the horse waits with the cart.

The city is still. It slips from late afternoon into the evening's blue coolness. A thin haze hangs over the court­ yards. A bonfire burns, the blue-yellow flames devouring the leaves and long, dry grass.

The city is calm. Night slides up through the valleys, snaking into the city on the back of the river, and the first star appears. The moon, crisp and distant, balances on the broken-tiled rooftops, with the roosting birds.

The cupolas and the crosses, the onion domes and the ornate spires. I sit alone in my room. The window is open. I have moved the desk so that I can write looking out through the window. The night has come. But I am no longer alone. Outside is the city. And here, on the desk before me, on the left of my typewriter, is a photograph of a mother holding her child. And behind her is her mother, a child plucked from oblivion. And tomorrow I shall see them.

Vassily was slumped in an armchair beneath a standard lamp, a blanket tucked around his thin legs. It was painful to look at him, to see the damage he had suffered. His strong figure had been ravaged. His beard, once so full and wild, hung limply on his chest. It was late in the evening and I knew he would be tired, that I should go soon. But when I tried to make my excuses, he laid one of his hands, still large, on my knee and prevented me.

‘I'm dying,' he said.

There was no hint of self-pity in his voice. He paused a moment and looked into my eyes. I struggled to find something to say, but no words came.

‘There is something you need to know,' he continued, ‘something I should have told you many years ago, but didn't.'

He paused again, watching me intently, trying to read, perhaps, the expression on my face.

‘Should have, but couldn't.

‘There was a bracelet,' he said, after a few moments.

‘I feel, perhaps, I should tell you this story in a spirit befitting legends and fairy tales...'

His breath came unevenly. When he took the glass of water from the table beside him, his hand shook. Drawing the glass to his lips,he took a small sip, just enough to wet his mouth.