The Last Girl (31 page)

At night I slept in ditches, by day I wandered, begging food in the villages. Crusts of bread, rotten fruit. I drank milk from goats early, before the farmers rose. The villagers were nervous and suspicious. I moved on quickly.

My mother cried when she saw me. She fell to her knees and hugged her stinking, dirty son to her. My father hobbled from the shadows. An old man, fearful and broken.

He held me and I wept.

It was dark when I stopped writing. I laid down my pen and picked up the oil lamp. The air was still and cool. I stood in the doorway leaving the memories behind. It was done. There was a light glowing in the cottage across the grass. Egle and Jolanta would be there, I knew, but I did not feel like going over to them. Instead I blew out the small flame in the lamp and left it by the door of the wood-panelled writing room.

Passing the cottage I walked through the thick grass to the trees. The moon shone brilliantly from a clear sky. The woods were silver and black. A thin breeze stirred the leaves. I startled a fox and sent it scurrying through the undergrowth, a cub clamped in its jaws. For fifty years I had buried these memories. When the Soviets returned I was conscripted and served for two years in the Red Army. Despite the efforts of the partisans who fought from the forests, Vilnius became the capital of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania.

The Soviets had no desire to investigate the massacre of the Jews; we were all victims of the fascist oppressor. And so the rubble of the devastated synagogues was slowly cleared. The vacant Jewish homes were reallocated to the needy. Thugs who had gone Jew-hunting for kopecks during the war years wandered the old alleys free and unmolested. We all forgot. We all buried the rubble of war. Hid the sores. Turned our attentions to new enemies, new struggles.

I took a job at the university teaching literature. I wrote poetry in Lithuanian and was celebrated, in a quiet way. My work was not confrontational, it didn't provoke the authorities, but it was Lithuanian verse, it spoke to the Lithuanian people about themselves, of their history, customs, of their place in the world. And for that I gained a reputation I enjoyed, but did not deserve.

I moved into the flat on German Street, not far from the university. But despite walking those streets daily, bathing in the Vilija in the summer, smoking in cafes in the winter, I did not think of her. Each day I forgot her. And forgot and forgot. Buried her under a mountain of words, and cigarette butts, casual affairs with students, drinks with friends. Under poems and novels and two plays. Under study and teaching. Under the mountain of deadness that grew round my heart.

Coming out of the forest, the river shone brilliantly in the moonlight. I sat on the bank and gazed into the rippled light. Bats turned erratically above my head. The breeze carried the sound of drunken singing from the village.

And then the words stopped flowing. The poems dried up and the novels refused to take shape. I've retired, I told them. You've heard enough from me; it's time for the younger generation to make their voice heard. I managed to pen some articles for the newspapers and edited and collated anthologies. The young students stopped reading my work and stopped being impressed. They became more careless of my attentions.

And as the cracks began to appear in the walls of the Soviet system, the whole building began to grumble and totter. As the plaster fell in dusty clouds and the bricks tumbled, I began to feel my own building tremble.

Egle found me sitting by the river. She took my arm and led me back through the woods.

‘I've finished my writing,' I told her as we pushed through the thin, supple branches of the pines, trying not to lose our way in the darkness. She pressed my arm but said nothing.

‘I would like you to read it,' I said.

‘If you would like me to.'

‘I think you should know.'

When we returned to the cottage I gathered the papers from my desk and gave them to Egle. She stowed them on a shelf out of the way of the fingers of little Rasa. It was late and we went to bed. For some time I lay beneath the cool sheets, gazing out at the distant silver disc of moon caught in the apple tree's mesh of twigs.

I awoke early and let myself out before either Egle or Jolanta had risen. There was a small chapel on a rise some two kilometres out of the village. I walked across the fields to it. Later I had lunch in the village. In a shallow hollow, beneath a copse of aspen, I slept for an hour. I watched the sun make its slow passage across the sky and the pale ghost of a moon rise from behind the trees.

I walked in the woods, listening to the sound of the birds and my feet rustling through the long grass. The sun sank and silence settled upon the land. Fearful, I still put off going back to the cottage.

It was late when finally I turned and made my way home. In the darkness I stumbled slowly along the rutted road, nervous of the reception awaiting me. How would she feel, knowing? She who could have been Rachael's daughter. She who was saved by a peasant family's courage – a family with more courage than I. The windows were dark, no lamp burned. I pushed open the kitchen door, relieved and disappointed. Moonlight glittered on the window pane but did little to illuminate the interior. I almost tripped over her.

She was sitting silently on one of the wooden stools by the kitchen table. On the table in front of her were the papers I had left her to read. I cried out, so startled was I to stumble upon her.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I didn't mean to startle you.'

‘I didn't see you.'

‘I was reading.'

‘Without a light?'

She looked around as though she had only just noticed that it had grown dark.

‘No,' she said. ‘Earlier.'

I pulled a stool up to the table and sat down. Taking the cigarettes from my pocket I offered her one. She took the cigarette and we smoked silently for a while, little else visible but the glowing tips of our cigarettes and the moonlight glittering on the glass. The night was warm. She slipped her hand across the table and let it rest gently across my own.

‘What can you think of me?' I said finally.

She did not answer immediately. She did not remove her hand from mine. She breathed the smoke out in a long, thoughtful exhalation. ‘It should seem closer to me, shouldn't it? As if this was in some way my story, or rather not my story. How my story could have been.' She paused, drawing deeply on her cigarette. ‘It doesn't though. It was a long time ago, Steponas. Many people did things they regret. Many people did things they were ashamed of, even if it didn't seem that they were.'

‘I thought that if I wrote it down, if I faced up to it after all these years, it would make me feel better.'

‘And does it?'

‘No. It doesn't. The memory doesn't bring forgiveness.'

‘But it is good to remember, even if there is no hope of forgiveness.'

She squeezed my hand and brushed it against her soft cheek. Somewhere in the dark house I heard the baby cough and stir.

It cried out. Jolanta's voice, heavy with sleep, shushed it. The baby quietened a little and I heard Jolanta singing, her voice soft and low.

On that, my last night in the village, I did not sleep. I lay on my bed staring out into the darkness. The earth had shifted, and the long dead had risen. I had looked once more into the eyes of the love I had betrayed. But still, there was so much more left buried. I have not remembered all. Cannot.

One hundred thousand Jews were killed in the Vilnius region, in those few years. Not everyone was marched from the ghetto to their death in the forest glades at Ponar, or at the Ninth Fort, or in the concentration camps in Estonia. Some were left. The inhabitants of a hospital were left. They closed the doors and locked them. Boarded up the windows, and doused the building in fuel and set it alight. They were left. The doctors, the sick, the elderly, the infirm.

When the Russians returned to the streets of Vilnius, the remnants of the Jews trickled into the city from the villages, from their molinas, from their forest hideouts, from the holes beneath floors, secret compartments, tunnels beneath the earth, where they had been forced to live like animals. Several thousands; the thin, harried, destitute leftovers of the Jerusalem of the north.

They established a school on Zigmond and a museum and a memorial to the ones that they had lost. But these were soon to disappear. The communists had no appreciation for a separatist, ethnic counting of the dead. We were all one, neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free. We were all communists.

I too became a communist. I was cynical about it. When I told Rita of my decision we had a furious row. What would Jerzy have said? she demanded. There was one of two choices, I told her, either you were for the communists or for the Nazis; that was how the world stood. There were other choices, of course, but I was not ready to acknowledge them. Splitting the world by this neat division was the easier route. To be communist was to be against the Fascists, and the Fascists were the root of the evil that had overshadowed our nation. Communism was a balm. It allowed us to forget.

And we forgot. Nobody spoke of those years, our lips were sealed. We did not tell our children or our grandchildren what we had done in the war. It was a closed book and best left to the communist texts and teachers in the schools who had been trained to say the right thing. We did not sit in bars and reminisce. We did not chat idly about those times, over beers. The communist Party arranged the days of remembrance and we knew they served political purposes and were not about remembering what happened in the war. Yes, the communists defended us against our pasts. They allowed us to forget. They allowed us to bury the dead beneath slogans and platitudes, beneath the suffocating layers of lies and deception and the rewriting of history.

I saw less and less of Rita. At the time I believed that it was I who had became uncomfortable with her; I avoided going to her studio where she was working hard on a triptych of Madonnas. Perhaps though it was she who withdrew. She was preoccupied and her eyes wore a haunted look. One night after drinking a little too much I told her that she needed to put the past behind her, to get out more. She gazed at me intently, sending a shiver down my spine. I flush with shame now, remembering that moment. It was one of the last times I saw her.

* * *

The moon shone through the window of the cottage, and the branches of the apple tree stirred in a light breeze. I did not sleep. I watched through the night, till the new day dawned.

The television tower soared above the forested hills. The boulevards were busy with cars and trolley buses. The road dipped down a long curving slope and the Old Town emerged from behind the grassed banks, shimmering under a haze, south of the river.

Grigalaviciene was sitting on the wooden bench outside the door to our block. She was sewing. When she saw me she said nothing, just grunted and continued embroidering the pretty little handkerchief. I nodded to her, and smiled. The flat was cold and musty. I dropped my bag inside the door and opened the window. The soft afternoon breeze blew in, stirring the curtains and the photographs pinned to the wall. I boiled some water for a coffee and sat down at my writing table. The Russian girl stared out at me from the photograph.

When I had finished the coffee, I took down the photographs from the wall. The afternoon passed slowly. Grigalaviciene called around to see if I needed anything. She shuffled on the doorstep, but didn't come in when invited. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, as if she could not trust me. I shut the door on her impatiently.

The next morning I walked across the ghetto to Svetlana's on Sv Stepono, for the small bag of laundry I had left with her and in search of company. She did not answer the door when I knocked. I tried to peer through the windows, but they were opaque with dirt. On a chance I pushed at the door and it creaked open. I stepped into the gloom. The room was empty. On the bed was a picture of the crucifixion. I sat next to it. Dirt obscured the lower part of Christ's face. Vaguely I noticed how feminine the upper half of His face looked.

A voice caused my heart to jump. A figure stood in the doorway. The light was behind her and in the gloom it was impossible to see her features. Her hair shone golden in the sunlight. She stepped forward and the gloom revealed her.

‘Oh,' she said, recognising me. Her face flushed.

‘Svetlana,' I said, getting up hastily. ‘I'm sorry, I knocked and no one answered.'

She was dressed in pink sports clothes, her sleeves rolled up revealing her arms, which were red. She had been working, washing clothes I assumed. I noticed her glance at the sequined dress hung carefully on the wall.

‘Please, sit down,' she said, laying a package on the end of the bed.

Clumsily I sat back down. Noticing that I still held in my hands the icon, I held it out to her and she took it. She hung it on a nail on the wall. She seemed nervous, a little embarrassed perhaps.

‘Would you like a drink?' she said then.

‘I came for the washing,' I said, uncomfortably.

She nodded. It was wrapped neatly in brown paper on a pile of junk in the corner of the room. She took it and handed it to me. She hesitated then turned away.

‘I have something else of yours,' she said.

She spoke quietly and I had to strain to hear her. She returned to the pile in the corner and began shifting the layers of clothes that lay on top of it. I was a little bewildered. I was not aware that I had left anything else. I guessed that perhaps it had been a shirt I had left some time before. But she pulled a bag from the jumble. For some moments I did not recognise it.