The Last Girl Read online

  When I had deposited my bag of clothes with my woman on Sv Stepono I caught the number thirteen trolley bus from Gedimino and took the ride up to Karoliniskiu. The weather had improved a little.The rain had held off since the previous afternoon, and the clouds flew high and unthreatening. A wind blew, catching paper bags and tossing them into the air, taking the trees and giving them a good shake. At the junction with Seliu, as the road turned up the long hill between the green banks of grass, I was tempted to get off the trolley bus, to nip this madness in the bud and go take a stroll in Vingis park. A walk under those large old trees would do me more good, I thought. In years past they had helped me with my writing. Often I used to catch the trolley bus out and walk there. But I stayed on, to the top of the road, and got off where she had.

  I had not gone there following any kind of a plan. I did not know which was her apartment, and even if I did I could hardly just go and knock on her door. Instead I sat on a bench opposite the apartment doors, having little hope that she might appear. My bench was on the edge of the playground and a woman with her grandchild soon joined me. She waved the child away. Go and play, she told the child. Go and swing. The child wandered off to the broken play things; a roundabout that swung in a loop taking you from ground-scrapingly low to high in the air in its circle, a swing that sagged dangerously in its seat and a bare metal rocket climbing frame mocking Soviet dreams in its austere dilapidation.

  I watched the child kicking at the damp soil. The grandmother sat on her bench for a while looking around for some one to talk to. When I avoided her eye she grew bored and shouted for the child to come. I stayed there, watching the figures emerging from the doorways. The first drops of rain had started falling when I finally moved.

  I walked past her doorway, then, impulsively, turned back and entered. I called the lift. I travelled up to the top floor and stepped out. Four doors stared back at me blankly, anonymously. Was she behind one of them? There was a sound. A door handle and a man’s cough. I quickly stepped back into the lift and descended.

  On the way home I bought a bottle of cranberry spirits to help the cold. I bought the paper and at the small stall opposite the cathedral that sells religious items I picked up a thin book on icons. In my apartment I laid the book open on my desk, running my thumb down the centre of the spine, flattening it open on the page of a Madonna and child I had not seen before. I took a razor and sliced the picture as neatly as I could from its spine. I stuck it to the wall with my photographs and, sitting back with my glass of Bobeline, compared them.

  This Madonna, I thought, was not sad. She was melancholic, but she was not sad. Did that painter not feel the pain of knowing your child is lost? Did he not want to vulgarise his goddess with such emotions as those that Marija felt as she gazed at her baby and knew with God-given knowledge that he had to die? That fearful knowledge I knew from her eyes. Knew and yet was able to turn from. I say that, and yet each night those eyes are upon me now and try as I might I am not able to turn from them.

  The next day I had barely arrived at her block when she emerged without the child. She turned and walked quickly across the park towards the trolley-bus stop. I followed her. The wires clicked and whistled, a trolley bus trundled through the traffic so that we were forced to break into a run. Its doors had opened by the time we reached it, she before I. I felt sick from the exertion as I grabbed hold of the rail and pulled myself inside. The doors swung shut with a heavy thud. I closed my eyes and gasped, trying to recover my breath. The trolley bus lurched out into the traffic and immediately picked up speed, forcing me to hold tight to the rail to stop myself from falling.

  Opening my eyes I noticed she was watching me. She edged across her seat to give me space. I saw a look of concern in her eyes and realised that she saw me as an old man, frail and weak. I straightened myself up. I wanted to banish that image, but as I lowered myself carefully onto the seat beside her I was aware of the smell of spirits that clung to me. I saw the heavy thickness of my hands and the brown, old coarseness of my skin, the veins bulging up like ruts in a country road. I noticed the thin worn quality of my trousers. I tried to smooth them with my hand.

  Her hand was on her knee. As I smoothed my trouser leg her long fingers rested delicately only inches from my own. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her nails were clean and short. There was no movement in her fingers, no tremble, no shaking as there was in my own. Her leg was thin too. My eyes gazed at our two hands resting now almost side by side, only a fraction of space apart. Only a fraction and yet how great was that gulf, how many years, how many different things kept me from sliding my own blunt old finger those few inches and touching the tips of hers. It has been too long, and though she appears to me as clear as crystal each night, even though now I can close my eyes and picture her, it is not possible to reach back across the years and change that moment, to reverse it. It is done and she is gone. The distance is too great.

  ‘Only just made it,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking up into her face. Not the eyes, I could not look into those eyes. She was still looking at me and I traced in her voice a note of concern, a delicate probing to ask if I was all right.

  ‘I’m getting too old for running,’ I laughed.

  She laughed, ‘It’s not so easy for me.’

  ‘You’re the picture of health,’ I said. ‘It does you good when you’re so young.’

  ‘I don’t feel so young.’

  I dared then to look beyond the fresh pink of her flushed cheeks, beyond the smooth curve of her nose and the soft hair that downed her face. Beyond the thick, dark eyebrows to her eyes. She was smiling; smiling with her eyes, though there was barely the trace of a curve on her lips. A prickling sweat broke out on my forehead.

  My fingers trembled beside hers. Mine blunt, hers elegant. The sun shone through the grimy windows, warming them. And then, on a corner, the trolley bus rocked awkwardly, causing her to lean against me. Her thigh pressed against mine and the tips of our fingers touched as she tried to balance herself. We withdrew immediately. I smiled and she smiled too, before turning and looking out of the window. We were descending the long hill, the green banks rising on each side of us, the trees barely moving in the breeze.

  We did not speak again. The trolley bus fought its way through the traffic into the centre of the Old Town. She got up as we lurched slowly into Gedimino Prospect. I let her past me and then followed. When she turned, I looked studiously out of the window as if my getting off had nothing to do with her. She walked swiftly down Gedimino and into the department store. I stood for a moment debating then crossed the road and entered the new American restaurant, McDonald’s. It was crowded and I had to wait in a queue to be served. I sat by the large plate-glass windows and watched the department store doors. She did not reappear. Maybe, standing in the queue, I had missed her. The coffee was tasteless and the seat hard. I did not stay long.

  I dreamed of her that night. She was walking down the road with her child in her arms, imploring me. I could read in her eyes the fear and desperation. I saw too, in the corner of my eye, the men approaching. I turned my back. But each time I turned she was in front of me again, and behind me the men drew closer. I awoke a number of times but each time my eyes closed heavily again, I had to turn from her once more. In the morning I was exhausted.

  Shortly after sunrise I pulled on my coat and walked across the grass, beneath the trees, to the top of Zydu Street. I stopped by the bust of the Gaon and rested my head against the cold stone. My blunt fingers felt the sharp edge of the engraved Semitic sentences. I tried to find words to say to him, but I couldn’t. I stood for some time, my back resting against him, glad to have that solid presence behind me. I smoked three cigarettes one after another and then went home.

  The next time I saw her was in fact quite by accident. She was again pushing her child. I had been in the bookshop on Gedimino when, through the window, I saw her pass by. I slipped out of the store and hurried after her. I caught u
p with her at the door of the McDonald’s restaurant. I was able to hold it open for her. Only then did I affect to recognise her. “’Hello,’ I said. She smiled, remembering me.

  ‘You’re eating here?’ she asked somewhat incredulously.

  ‘The coffee’s good,’ I lied.

  ‘The coffee’s terrible,’ she laughed.

  ‘Well, maybe I can buy you a cup of America’s worst coffee?’ I asked. She smiled but seemed to hesitate.

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  Sitting once more by the plate-glass windows, I was able to watch her now across the table. She spooned yogurt into her child’s mouth. The baby was blonde. Her small blue eyes sparkled clearly. She watched me while her mother fed her. She was not at all like that baby. That had been dark, its skin sallow and its hair fine. It lay quietly in its mother’s arms, in the dark Vilnius alleyway. Had it ever grown?

  ‘And what’s your name, young lady?’ I asked to clear my mind. The baby looked at me suspiciously, continuing to eat the yogurt fed into her mouth.

  ‘Rasa,’ the mother answered for her.

  ‘Rasa, a good Lithuanian name,’ I said. ‘A beautiful fresh droplet of dew. And yours?’ I asked.

  She hesitated a moment again before answering. She looked into my face, as if she would find there whether to trust me or not. ‘Jolanta,’ she said. So there it was. Jolanta. Not Rachael. Jolanta. I breathed in deeply, inhaling that name which was not her name, allowing it to fill my lungs with a fresher air than the putrid air of painful dreams.

  ‘And you?’ she asked.

  I stood up formally and held out my hand. ‘Steponas Daumantas.’ She took my hand and I pressed it. I held it a second. ‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance.’

  She nodded and withdrew her hand. ‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance too,’ she said, ironically, but with humour and a smile.

  ‘And what do you do, Mr Daumantas?’

  I laughed. ‘Me, I’m an old man, a pensioner. What did you think I was, a soldier?’

  ‘You don’t look so old and anyway, age is in the mind,’ she said with the simple-minded confidence of the young.

  ‘I’m old in the mind too.’

  ‘Well, what did you do then, Old Mr Daumantas?’

  I toyed with the idea of lying, of creating another person for her. Her eyes were upon me and I did indeed once more feel young in my mind. If being young means confusion and stuttering nervousness.

  ‘I am, I was a writer,’ I corrected myself.

  ‘Was?’ she asked. ‘Surely that’s one thing you can do no matter what your age?’

  ‘Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. I find it hard now,’ I said, wishing I had not introduced the topic. It trespassed on an area that was far too closely related to why I was sitting in front of her.

  At that moment the baby shouted angrily. The spoon of yogurt, which had remained for the past few moments suspended in mid-air between tub and mouth, found its way to its destination. Jolanta fed the baby quietly for a moment. Then she turned back to me and said, ‘Perhaps, then, you could help me?’

  ‘Help you?’ I asked, taken aback. ‘Of course. I would be delighted to help you.’

  Tiring of our chatter Rasa began to cry, demanding attention. Jolanta lifted her up and shushed her. She wailed loudly. I waited patiently but the baby was not at that moment going to let us finish our conversation. Jolanta glanced at her watch, awkwardly, holding the baby in her arms.

  ‘I’m late,’ she commented to herself as much as to me. She stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I have an appointment now. Would you seriously be willing to help me?’

  ‘Of course,’ I assured her, standing too.

  ‘Perhaps we could meet again?’ she asked a little nervously, as if she felt that she might be imposing upon me.

  ‘I would be delighted,’ I said. ‘Would you like me to take your telephone number and call you?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘No, no need. We can meet again tomorrow if you are free?’

  ‘Yes, I will be,’ I said.

  ‘Shall we say here then, at twelve?’

  ‘Perhaps I could take you somewhere a little nicer for lunch?’ I suggested. I indicated the polystyrene cup. ‘The coffee here really isn’t drinkable.’

  ‘That would be nice.’ She smiled. Her eyes were beautifully bright. My heart pounded. Foolishness, I said to myself once more. Pure foolishness.

  Chapter 7

  Svetlana on Sv Stepono had cleaned my shirts. She took the few Litas I offered her, slipping. them into her palm, folding her fingers over the rumpled notes. She was obviously in need of the money but seemed embarrassed to take it from me. She insisted I stay for tea. I sat on the edge of the rumpled bed, which in the daytime served as both sofa and wardrobe for her teenage son’s clothes. The windows of her cramped room were mercifully small. Only one pane of glass was unbroken, the others were covered with plastic bags from one of the new supermarkets in the city. I doubted she shopped there. I had given her one of the bags with my washing in. She had wrapped my washing neatly in brown packing paper tied with string. On the walls of the one room she had hung the three dresses she owned. One was a modern looking black-and-white dress with sequins patterning it. I commented on it.

  ‘Mrs Pumpetiene gave it me,’ she said in Russian. ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, trying to imagine where she might wear it.

  I had known Svetlana for a number of years. Often when I dropped off clothes for her to wash, we sat and talked. She did not speak much about herself but she had once told me her father had been arrested when she was a child by the Communist authorities for propagating Christianity and producing samizdat books. Her parents had been moved to Vilnius from Russia under the Communist government’s policy of mixing ethnic populations.

  In the small annex, which served as kitchen-cum-porch, water boiled on the electric ring. Svetlana poured it into a small, old, blackened samovar. She poured me a sweet tea, and sat watching as I drank it. It was too hot to do anything but take the smallest of sips. Svetlana’s cheek was, I noticed, slightly swollen near her left eye. She smelt of vodka.

  ‘Your husband back?’ I asked.

  She touched her cheek self-consciously and nodded. ‘Did you find out where he had been?’

  She laughed and shook her head. She swore in Russian. ‘Boozing some place, with some tart, I should think.’

  ‘And Misha?’

  I had met her son on a couple of occasions. He was about eighteen years old, with short, cropped hair. He looked like a thug but was unfailingly polite and spoke good Lithuanian, unlike his mother.

  ‘He’s working,’ she said brightly. ‘On the building site, five dollars for a ten-hour day. They pay him by the day, but there’s plenty of work, he says. Should be able to keep going there just so long as no government sneak goes snooping around, checking on papers.’

  I grunted.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘They keep thinking up these new laws. They want to force us to take exams in Lithuanian before they will let us become citizens. They are just trying to punish us.’

  ‘They don’t know what they’re doing,’ I said. I drained the last of the tea, scalding my throat. I didn’t like talking politics; an old reflex tied my tongue.

  ‘Thanks for the tea, Svetlana,’ I said, taking my brown­ paper package.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, ‘I had a bit of a drink earlier.’

  I smiled. ‘I’m going for mine now,’ I said.

  Her eyes lit up. ‘You want one now? I’ve got half a bottle left.’

  I shook my head and gently pulled away from the grip she had suddenly taken of the front of my clothing. ‘Another time,’ I said. She released me. I let myself out of the door into the dirty courtyard. The wooden walkway of the second floor sagged dangerously outside her doorway. Looking back, I saw in the dimness that she had already taken out the bottle and was pouring vodka into a glass. She sto
od with her back to me in front of an image of Christ crucified, askew on the dirty wall.

  Closing the door of my apartment I flung the brown-paper package of clean shirts on to a chair in the small hallway. I opened the windows of the flat to let in some air. Then I started to work on my table. Carefully I replaced all the books in their places on the shelves. I took the many saucers and ashtrays, over-spilling their stale, grey ash on to my papers, and emptied them into the small bin in the kitchen. I gathered the scattered sheets of papers into random piles; they would have to be sorted at some other time. I pulled down the numerous photographs and prints that had been collecting on the walls and stowed them in a drawer. Taking a cloth, I wiped the spilt ash and the coffee rings from the table and placed my typewriter squarely in the centre, in front of my chair.

  I sat down at my work desk and fed a clean, blank sheet of paper into the typewriter. For a moment I sat looking at the pristine blankness of the page. I pressed my fingers into my eyes. A shudder ran down my spine. With my eyes closed I was able to picture her. I did not see her figure, or the clothes that she wore. I did not see, either, the subtle flush on her cheeks, or the way her hair was tucked back behind her ears. I saw only her eyes. Those eyes that she shared with a woman fifty years ago.

  I opened my eyes and typed out, ‘Resurrection’. I scrolled down the page an inch and wrote, ‘In the summer of 1938 I was living in a small village west of Vilnius.’

  Chapter 8

  We met the following day. I shaved carefully and pulled on a fragrant and stiff shirt, clipping the cuffs with a couple of simple links. I arrived at the American fast food restaurant ten minutes early. She was not there, of course. The weather was fine so I paced about outside wondering what it was she wanted my help with.