The Last Girl Read online

  Stephan Collishaw

  The Last Girl

  In the dying days of the last century an elderly poet wanders the streets of Lithuania’s capital, haunted by a terrible secret. For years he has been unable to write, fearful of fanning the embers of his memories.

  But now those embers are glowing once again.

  Vilnius is a city that has been dealt a cruel hand by history, where the rubble of the Jewish ghetto lies alongside toppled statues of the communist era, and teenage girls with painted smiles fight for dollars. Through the debris of its kaleidoscopic past and bittersweet present, the story of a girl called Rachael, of a poet’s great love and even greater betrayal, begins to coil its way to the surface, demanding to be told.

  Praise for

  The Last Girl

  ‘Tense, vivid, effortlessly real… a novel of dramatic width and ambition [which] encompasses passion, morality, history and art’

  JULIE MYERSON

  ‘Wonderful… that rare novel which no-one, having once read, will be able to forget.’

  ALAN SILLITOE

  ‘Haunting… has an extraordinary ring of authenticity… fascinating.’ WASHINGTON TIMES

  ‘I liked this novel very much. It has energy and it has assurance, and the story is really powerful. Stephan Collishaw has a great gift for showing the dailiness of terrible times… This sense of lived reality really touches one’s imagination. The betrayals and compromises which these characters have to negotiate feel so intimate.’

  HELEN DUNMORE

  For Marija

  I

  Jolanta

  Lithuania

  Mid 1990s

  Chapter 1

  I smoked the cigarette down to the very nub, until it almost scorched my lips. Through the blue veins of smoke I glimpsed her as she walked down the narrow alley. In her arms she held a child. My insides wrenched, suddenly, sharply. She held the child so tight against her breast. It was that, perhaps, that caught a ladder in my heart.

  The café was called Markus and Ko. I had been reading the poems of Marcinkevicius.

  I love you with hands black from crying,

  I love you with darkness and death

  forgetfulness and light

  with the low grass on a sunken grave

  I love –

  I stubbed the cigarette out in the saucer of my coffee cup and struggled up, pushing my arms clumsily into my jacket, which tore as my fingers caught the thread of the lining. I hurried out into the cobbled alleyway, glancing down the street after her. The tops of the buildings were washed with brilliant sunlight, but at street level it was gloomy. She had not gone far. Behind me, from the bar where he had been standing, the waiter called out. I had not paid. I paused a second, snagged by the authoritative tone of his voice, but the young woman was walking fast. I followed her, my heart racing. She had reached the corner by the time I caught up with her. In the door of the café the waiter stood calling after me. Hearing the commotion, the woman turned, her dark hair sweeping across her shoulder as she flicked her head. The baby lay quiet in her arms.

  I have an old Russian camera, a Triplet 69.3, presented to me by the university twenty-odd years ago on my fiftieth birthday. This morning I had picked it up as I left, struck by the quality of the light which nestled in the tips of the waking trees and caught in the tangle of church spires above the city. I stood on the corner, foolishly, with the shout of the waiter echoing from the stone walls, and the woman looking at me as if I was a madman.

  ‘Can I take your photo?’ I asked.

  ‘My photo?’ she said in Russian, a frown creasing her brow.

  I put the camera to my eye and took one hastily, before she had a chance to refuse. I managed to get the baby in the frame too. It slept on completely unaware. My finger trembled as it pressed the shutter. She turned then and walked off at a smart pace.

  The waiter caught my arm. I had not heard the sound of his approach as I stood watching her figure recede, my mind skimming back across the years, my chest heaving as I struggled to catch my breath.

  ‘You didn’t pay,’ the waiter said abruptly.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ I said, turning to him.

  ‘You have now.’ His hand thrust out for the money.

  ‘For kopecks you want to be so rude?’ I asked.

  ‘Just pay.’

  I live in a small apartment not far from the café. Originally the apartment had been bigger, with three rooms, but I live on my own and what do I want with so many rooms? I sold one to the family in the next apartment. As soon as the money was on the table the young man was around with two friends, knocking a hole in the wall and sealing off my doorway with some crude brickwork. I’m not complaining, God knows I need the money badly enough.

  Often I sit by the window of my apartment and look out over the courtyard. Inthe summer the trees canopy the whole area, and in the autumn they turn a beautiful bronze. On the benches beneath the trees I see my neighbours gossiping or knitting, or staring vacantly out into the world that has changed so much they no longer recognise it. Sometimes I go and talk with them but more often than not I just sit and watch from the window.

  When I arrived home that day, my head was pounding and I found it hard to breathe. The excitement had been too much. I felt unaccountably distressed and a little bewildered by what had happened at the café. I sat down in a chair by the table for a while and had another drink. My hand continued to tremble and I spilled the hot coffee, scalding myself.

  I have a small darkroom in the bathroom. I took the film and developed the picture of the girl. My fingers fumbled stiffly with the coiled film. It wasn’t a good shot. I had not had time to focus it properly and it was slightly blurred. It looked as if she was carrying a small sack of potatoes rather than a child. I pinned it to the wall by my writing desk. Her startled eyes looked straight out from the photograph, into my own. She stared at me with such confidence, such affront. I sat at the desk for a long time just looking at that poor image of the girl on my wall.

  Later I took the creased book of Marcinkevicius’ poems from my pocket. As I read, I felt her watching me. That was a good feeling. It was a comfort to have her eyes on me as I turned the pages.

  In the hours when I should have been writing but couldn’t, when the books lay unread on my desk, I stared up at the photograph of the Russian woman and her child on my wall. I might have been able to believe that my action was simply the result of a moment’s madness, if the same thing had not occurred a week later.

  I was sitting on a park bench in Ghetto Square when once more the sight of a young woman struck me painfully. She walked slowly across the grass towards me looking down at her baby in its pram, oblivious to my presence. She cooed softly down to the child, soothing it. Her long brown hair was tied neatly back behind her head. Her hands rested on the handles of the pram.

  She paused for a moment about ten paces from me. I took my camera from the wooden bench by my side. My heart beat disturbingly as I raised it to my eye. I felt as if I was committing a crime. Focusing the lens with shaking fingers I took the photo quickly. The click of the camera exploded in my ears and seemed to carry across the grass of the park, drowning the sound of cars rushing by. She did not look up. I placed the camera back on the bench beside me. I felt flushed and ashamed.

  A moment later she straightened up and continued once more on her path. She passed within a few feet of me. Her scent cut into my nostrils. Her coat rustled against her legs. There had been something about the way she had looked down at the child that ruffled my heart. As soon as she had disappeared from view, I clutched the camera and hurried back to my apartment. Arriving breathless once again, I threw my keys onto the table and took the camera into the bathroom. Standing over the s
loshing fluids I watched the blurred image slowly appear on the paper.

  When the print was dry I unhooked it from the line in the bathroom and pinned it to the wall beside the Russian. They hung there together on the wall: two mothers, both young and undeniably pretty. The Russian was dark with long hair and this new one was just a little lighter. While the Russian stared out of the photo, challenging, the other gazed down into the. pram, unaware.

  For a full hour I sat at my desk and stared up at these two photographs. One by one I smoked a packet of twenty Prima cigarettes. The lines of Marcinkevicius winged like dark angels above my head; I love you with hands black from crying. With darkness and death. The earth, I felt, was beginning to shift, and the long dead were stirring.

  Chapter 2

  My apartment is along the back of Vokieciu Gatve, German Street. This is now becoming a desirable place to live; it was not always so. If you leave my flat and walk for ten minutes you come to Ghetto Square, or the Square of the Sacrifice of the Ghetto. This is a walk I take often in the mornings. After crossing the square, I can take a choice of streets, but almost always chose Zydu Street – Jewish Street – a narrow lane typical of the ghetto. The plain four-storey buildings curve with a fluidity and beauty that the Soviet architects were completely incapable of understanding. This strikes me always. The old town has grown out of nature; it bends to the shape of the rivers that run through it, it listens to the shape of the hills. It winds and flows and hugs the earth as though it were lichen, a beautiful moss spread across an ancient log.

  There are no trees or flowers on Jewish Street, just the plaster and brick of the houses and the cobbles on the street. In the autumn there are the leaves, crinkled and brown, which blow here and catch in crevices. But there are no flowers. Even so it is not barren. Not sterile like the housing projects of the Soviets. The shape of the street is like a river, like a hill.

  At the top of Jewish Street, as it suddenly halts in the car park behind my apartment, amputated, there is a statue of the Vilna Gaon. I stop there and run my fingers over the Hebrew script I cannot read. At its other end Jewish Street runs out into a small triangular junction, the confluence of rivers, the veins of a leaf. Here it runs into Gaon Street and I follow that, down the hill, past the buildings that are now being carefully restored.

  The ghetto is flourishing. For years these streets bore little sign of what they had been. They fell silently into decay. Windows gaped, empty sockets, great weeping holes. Buildings bereft of their owners, of their past. Now the plaster is renewed, the floors are re-timbered. The roofs are re-tiled and the cobbles are re-laid. The facades are repainted and walls wear signs recounting the history of the ghetto. But for years those decaying broken-backed buildings were signs. Now they are gone and we have smart boutiques, restaurants and Western cafés.

  There is a doorway, here, where often I pause. The lintel sags and rusted hinges hang from the doorpost. I peer in, straining my eyes against the darkness, as though searching for something in there. There is nothing. Only the damp sour scent of decay, stale air. I was stood at the door early one morning, gazing blankly in, when my eyes caught a movement in the gloom. I stepped back, afraid. A dog emerged. It stared at me startled, then loped away. My heart began to pound as I continued with my walk. What did you think it was? I chided myself, the spirit of the dead stirring in the darkness?

  On Gaon Street a plaque relates how the Jews were marched out of the ghetto through the gates that used to stand here. They left their homes for the forests outside the city, for the deep forests from which they would never return. To Ponar.

  Gaon Street opens out into a square. If you look at the old maps it becomes clear that these spaces are wounds; that once synagogues stood here. This space is now the Square of the Sacrifice of the Ghetto. Each morning, when the weather is good, I come to sit here and think of all the stories that could be written.

  I used to write. Twenty years ago I wrote. I taught at the university and published my poems and novels. But now I cannot. I sit at my desk in front of my typewriter but no words come. They have left me. Instead I reach up to my shelf and take down Marcinkevicius or Miloz. But I cannot write.

  On my way home I stop once more by the bust of the Vilna Gaon. I rub the script and feel the Semitic curves beneath my fingers. I feel the cool hardness of the stone, the sharpness of the edge of the script carved with such care, such brilliant precision. That was how I used to feel about the words of my poems. They were carved with precision.

  I have a sketch of the Gaon above my desk, alongside which I have pinned the photographs of the young mothers I saw in the street. His long, full beard flows down over his chest. His nose is crooked. His eyes are large almonds suffused with benign wisdom. What strikes me though, when I look at this picture of the Gaon, is the deep, single crease that lines his forehead. That crease speaks to me. It speaks of the concern of a scholar, the concern of a saint. I imagine he must have looked more wasted than this. Certainly he looks thin, and there are bags beneath his beautiful eyes, but still I imagine in his poverty he was more stooped, that his beard was not so full and healthy, that his cheeks sank deeper.

  Eliyahu, the Gaon, was born wise. He was born at Easter in 1720. By the age of three, legend says, he knew Chumash and the Siddhur by heart. By four he was expert in Kaballah. By six he was debating with learned rabbis and Talmud scholars.

  The streets of Vilna were busier then. These narrow alleys with their uneven cobbles were, in winter, lost beneath rivers of mud, in summer carpeted with dust. The streets rang with the noise of horses and the rasp and scrape of metal cartwheels on the stones beneath the dirt. Men crowded these streets, talking, singing perhaps. Arm in arm they made their way to the Beth Midrash, to their job in the glass works. Women leaned from the window shouting to neighbours, to their urchin children begging from passers-by. The narrow alleys rang with the sound of Yiddish.

  When he was older, his wife went out to work and Eliyahu studied. He studied always by candle, keeping the shutters firmly closed against the world. Blocking himself off from its noise, its fun, its temptations, even from its light, he created a new world to inhabit, a world shared by other scholars before him, a world raised out of the letters of Talmud, Torah. A world of words.

  He tormented his body, depriving it of sleep. Of nourishment. Instead of meat, he fed himself bread soaked in water and this, even, he opened his throat to, letting it pass down without touching his tongue to deprive himself of the pleasure of its taste. Working in his cold room with his bare feet dipped into a bucket of cold water he wrote words of wisdom, words that would be cherished by thousands after him.

  But this city is no longer his city, despite this bust and the signs and the streets and squares named after him. It is not his city or the city of his children. The city has been cleansed of them. Cleansed. What a bitter taste that word has when we roll it on our tongues. Yet still I feel that their ghosts linger, in the odd neglected building. Whispering.

  Chapter 3

  A madness descended upon me. Those hours I was not at my desk surrounded by scattered books and papers, by saucers overflowing with ash and cigarette butts, I was wandering the streets of Vilnius with my camera. The women I photographed were mothers with small children.

  At first I took the shots surreptitiously. Sitting on a bench in the park, my camera at the ready, set for the right distance and the right light, I waited. Hidden behind my copy of the Lithuanian Morning, I pretended to be engrossed in the innumerable political scandals which in truth depress me heartily, and which I avoid. On most other benches were pensioners like myself, some talking earnestly, others gazing away blankly, across the grass, lost in their memories. By mid-morning the mothers would come, drawn out by the warmth of the sun. Unobtrusively I would pick up my camera, take the picture, and disappear once more behind the newspaper.

  Later I grew more courageous. I approached the women to ask if they minded me taking the photo. The fact that I insisted they had
the baby with them, preferably in their arms, relaxed them. After the first few attempts I invented a story. I was a newspaper photographer taking shots of citizens relaxing in the park. I did not have to go into details; it was enough to call myself a reporter.

  There were times of course when it was hard for me to tell whether the young woman was the mother or a nanny, but this was important to me. I took time to engage her in conversation, ask about the child. It was important that she should be the mother; the picture would lose its authenticity if she were not.

  After I had taken on the role of photojournalist the whole thing seemed less mad, less questionable. I began to defend it aesthetically. In fact, as I continued, I took more time posing the shots. It was only those first photographs that were rushed and blurred. Later they were of a good quality. Often I shot in black and white, but I also experimented with colour. The women were happy to pose on park benches or standing beneath the emerald canopy of old trees.

  One Friday evening I hurried to the library and took out a lavishly illustrated text on the development of Western art. Late into the night, I pored over the pictures in the dim light of the apartment. Centred in Daddi’s Triptych of 1348 is a rosy cheeked, fair-haired Madonna. The infant God nestles in the crook of her left arm. It is a painting of wonderful warmth and tenderness. It is not the shining gilt that draws the eye. Neither is it the image of Christ glorified, or Christ hanging grey from the cross, scarlet blood spurting from the wound, spraying his disciples. The dying Christ is pushed to the side. In the centre of this image, under the dark sky glittering with golden stars, before the beautifully worked red and yellow backdrop, is the simple picture of a woman looking down with gentle indulgence at the child nestled in her arms. While she cradles with her left arm, her right hand lifts and gently strokes the baby’s chest. And he, the young child, looks up with equal adoration at his mother. He lifts, too, his right hand, as if to caress the cheek of his mother. The apostles linger at the feet of the mother. Here, one says, looking straight out of the frame at us. Here, this is what you have to look at, this is what is important. Yes, this is to be the object of our worship, the mother and the child.