The Last Girl (11 page)

‘At the end of the war, who could believe that things were safe? My mother lived on in the village and married the son of the family who had sheltered us. They were poor farmers. She kept to her story of being Polish. She invented a whole life for herself. She was from Krakow, an educated family that had been destroyed by the Nazis for their patriotic behaviour. They changed my name to Egle. That was how I grew up, a proud Polish girl, the daughter of an impoverished farming hqme. Only at night, when I was small, she sang that song to me as I went to sleep.

‘Vividly I recall her sitting by my small bed in the corner of the room, leaning over me, her long hair falling across her face. Tears misted her eyes as she sang, her voice sweet, low, full of longing and of loss. I didn't know the story then, of course, and I didn't understand why she cried. I did not understand the words of the song, but learnt them anyway, as a child will, from her singing.

‘She died when I was ten. I grew up, then, with no one left who knew of my past. Anyone who could remember died or forgot as the years went by. Nobody cared, any­ way, about the past of such a little girl. I was thin, a ragged waif.

‘But by the age of ten, I knew. My mother, as she lay dying, told me it all, forcing me to swear to secrecy. And why would I tell? What kind of a thing was that to tell? I preferred the story of the Gentile life in Krakow, the stories of the brave resistance of my noble grandfather and invented father. That was a story of heroism and pride and I had no intention of giving it up in favour of the Jewish tale of poverty and persecution.

‘But I was a lonely child. At night I cried myself to sleep, in the small cottage, singing that song. If ever my father heard me singing it he would curse and kick me and tell me to sing a good Lithuanian song. So I sang Lithuanian songs to him and that, alone, in my bed.

‘I was a good student, and did well at school. But when I was sixteen, I met a young man. He was a good man. A real Soviet hero. He was tall and well built, blond with blue eyes. He would walk down the main street with a shovel tossed carelessly over his shoulder whistling communist working tunes. He would call the other young men out into the fields to work; the young women went too. We worked hard. For the revolution, he said. We girls worked for him. He was our idol, our god, and we followed him everywhere he went.

‘We got married, but for many years we could have no children. Arunas was sad about this. He was a good husband; God could not have given me a better one. He did not drink and he didn't hang around with the women. He worked hard and built this house for us. And then we had a child, a daughter, a gift from God.'

She stroked her daughter again, sleeping gently beside her. A beautiful smile lit the soft curves of her face and her bobbed hair glistened in the dim light of the lamp.

‘And I remembered the song. For many years I had forgot­ ten it. It lay in some dusty drawer of my mind, locked away, during the happiness of my married life. I was afraid, at first, to sing it in front of my husband and would only sing it when he was out in the fields and the two of us, Jolanta and I, were alone. But one day he heard it. He told me to sing it to him. He knew, of course, but said nothing. A beautiful song was all he said. A beautiful song, and he looked at me with his pure blue eyes and looked at his dark daughter so like her mother and understood.

‘One day he was out in the fields. They came home and told me. They stood by the door holding their caps in their hands not daring to lift their faces. I ran out to the fields but he was dead. We carried him back home. I did not get to say goodbye.'

The silence of the night descended on the cottage and I was too afraid to break it. We sat looking at each other. Jolanta stirred and half opened her eyes.

‘Sing the song,' I asked her quietly.

She sang in a soft, low voice.

Later Egle pulled a blanket over her daughter and we left her to sleep on the couch. She showed me my room and we said goodnight. As I lay waiting for sleep to take me, I sang the song to myself. Did she sing that song to her child? She too could have escaped to a village and her child would have grown up there, a skinny waif. She would have grown up beautiful.

The ghosts floated around my bed and I sang the song to lull them to sleep with me.

When I awoke in the morning, I was disorientated by the silence. I lay listening to the song of the birds and the absence of traffic. Of people. The sun shone through the net curtains warming me. After a while I heard Jolanta's voice and then that of her mother. The baby shouted and burbled happily. It was good to lie there listening to their voices. Jolanta, smiling, brought me a cup of tea.

‘Mama is happy this morning,' she said.

I simply smiled and thanked her for the drink. She left grinning, pleased with herself. I heard her taking the baby and then calling to her mother that she was going into the village. I got up, and dressed, and looked out of the windows across the green fields behind the house. Egle poked her head through the doorway and called me to breakfast.

I wandered around the village that day, hoping its peace would calm my taut nerves. Jolanta had said nothing about the manuscript, but I knew I was going to have to broach the subject. As the hours passed so grew my dread of shattering the calm composure that Jolanta had managed to achieve. That evening, before sunset, I asked her to walk down to the river with me. She lifted the baby and carried it with her. It wrestled in her arms. On the gentle slope of the river she allowed Rasa to wander around, keeping a close eye on her. The fear that had afflicted me couple of days previously, when I had made my slow way to the restaurant, returned, constricting my chest so that my breath came in short, shallow gasps. Jolanta looked at me, concerned.

‘We walked too quickly,' she said.

‘No,' I said, ‘I'm fine.'

I explained to her then what had happened to the manuscript. She listened carefully. I told her of how I had gone to meet her at the restaurant, so fearful, and then come away even more fearful when she had not arrived. I told her of Jonas and his deal over the manuscript.

‘I will get it back, I assure you,' I said, my face flushing with shame that I had not just given Jonas the one hundred dollars. ‘As soon as I get back to Vilnius I will get it from him.'

At first she did not respond. She watched her daughter playing with some sticks. Finally she turned to me. ‘Well,' she said, and then she seemed at a loss what to say next.

Again I started to apologise and to reassure her that I would get it back, but she laid her hand on my arm.

‘Don't,' she said. ‘I am sure you will. It's my fault. I should never have imposed on you like that in the first place.' She pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead. ‘I don't know, all this with Kestutis, it's been crazy. It's so good to come out here and forget about it.'

Rasa crawled up to her and she took the baby into her arms and clasped her tight against her breast. Her eyes screwed up and a tear slipped down across her cheek. Despite her words I could see how concerned she was. Earlier in the evening I had heard her speaking on the telephone, her voice soft, pleading, as her husband's tirade drifted tinnily from the telephone receiver, audible across the room.

‘It was the only copy of the manuscript?' I asked, hopelessly.

She nodded glumly.

‘I will get it,' I said, her misery piercing my heart. I reached over and stroked her hair. She leaned back against me and I hugged her. ‘The thing is, from what I read I was very impressed,' I said. ‘I was moved by it.'

‘Really?' she said.

‘Absolutely. There was a passage about him gripping a letter, fearing he was lost. It was good writing.'

She smiled and wiped the tear from her cheek. The sun had set and shadows were creeping up from the river. The air had grown chill.

‘We should get back,' she said.

The next day I was in no rush to leave. I appreciated the quietness of the country and apart from wanting to get my hands on the manuscript found no other reason to want to hurry my return to Vilnius. I took a long walk in the forest then wandered to the village to buy a newspaper. The old woman who ran the shop, a wizened crone with barely a tooth in her head, quizzed me.

‘Who are you?'

‘Daumantas,' I told her.

‘You're not from here.'

‘No,' I told her, ‘I live in Vilnius.'

‘So for what are you here then?'

‘Visiting.'

‘Who?'

‘Jolanta Rimkiene,' I told her.

‘You mean Egle?
Nu
, a good girl.' And she looked at me critically. ‘Her husband was a good man,' she told me. ‘Oi, but life goes on.' She looked me up and down again, assessing whether I was good enough.

Walking down to the river I felt Rachael's presence. Her ghost followed me. It was as though she were happier, here, out of the city, away from the horror of those narrow streets. Here was where she should have been. Here she would have been happy and safe. She had entreated me, but I had turned my back. Fearful, I had not taken her. But now, at last, she was with me. She hovered beside me, raven-haired beauty, with the small child in her arms. As I walked through the forest, the slim branches bent softly against the weight of her delicate body.

Rachael.

I sat beside her on the stump of a log.

I'm sorry, Rachael.

Sorry does nothing, she told me. Sorry means nothing. Sorry heals nothing.

Still I'm sorry, I told her. Ihave no other words. The words of Marcinkevicius came back to me.

Later I sat on the low wooden bench outside the cottage, thinking of her. The cherry-red, late evening sun shone on my face. Tears welled from my eyes and settled on the skin of my cheeks. Egle sat beside me and took my hand between hers. She wiped the tears from my cheeks, but said nothing.

Later she said, ‘You came here to cheer Jolanta up and now you are the sad one.'

‘I'm sorry,' was all that I could say.

‘You don't need to say you're sorry,' she said. ‘What is sorry for? Perhaps,' she said, ‘you could tell me about it.'

I shook my head. ‘For so many years I could not even tell myself about it,' I told her. ‘For fifty years I have kept it locked up deep inside me, covered. I have buried it and I thought that it was lost, but now it's here again. First I must tell myself. I am only beginning, just now.'

She nodded. She stroked my cheek with her finger, softly and with care.

The next morning, Jolanta came to my room with a smile. ‘Come,' she said.

‘What is it?' I asked, but she would not tell. Egle stood in the doorway. They smiled like conspirators. Taking my hands they led me out into the garden. We walked across the grass to the old wooden outbuildings, the sauna and the disused work shed. Egle took a key from her pocket and opened the door. The room had been cleaned. A desk stood by the wall draped with a neat white cloth. On the table stood a sheaf of paper and a collection of pens. Light streamed from a high window.

‘Jolanta told me you are a writer,' Egle said. ‘I thought, perhaps, you should have somewhere to work while you are here.'

Looking at the table, I felt my stomach turn to ice. Not that I feared trying to write, on the contrary, I realised that the time had come. I knew the words would flow. I had to start peeling back the thick layers of my life; layers carefully piled one on top of another. Deliberately obscuring. For fifty years I had struggled to bury it, but it would remain buried no longer. The spirits were calling and at last I would confront them.

Still I procrastinated. After fifty years a few days, perhaps, would make little difference. I sat in the chair and looked at the blank sheets of paper. I weighed the pens carefully. I wan­dered the small wooden space examining the pine-clad walls, smelling its sweet fragrance. I listened to the quality of its silence. I did not think of her but I knew my mind was drifting across the years, slowly making its way back. Egle left me in peace, knowing, intuitively, that what I was to write had to be written and that it would need space and time and silence.

Two mornings later I awoke, having slept well, without dreams. She no longer burst out at me, I felt her presence always. I got up and washed carefully from a bucket of cold, fresh water, on the grass, by the well. Before going to the room I went for a short walk in the woods. The leaves rustled in a gentle breeze and, hearing a tap-tapping, I traced a woodpecker to the top of a gnarled old tree, digging for food in the dead wood.

Returning to the cottage I made my way straight to the writing room. Pulling the chair up to the table I took a clean sheet of paper. Carefully I selected a pen from the small pile. After pausing for only a moment, I wrote a sentence. ‘In the summer of I938,' I wrote, ‘I was living in a small village west of Vilnius, or Wilno as it was called then.'

For the rest of the morning, I continued writing. When, at lunchtime, I paused, my hand was tired and my eyes ached from looking so closely and intently at the page. Egle had left a tray of food covered with a clean white cloth. I sat on the grass and ate the cheese and sausage and drank the beer. After, I returned quickly to the room to continue with my writing. Digging. Digging away at the layers of soil. Clearing the ground.

Having spent the better part of the afternoon drinking hard, Svetlana went to the café late. As soon as she entered she noticed Daumantas. She was about to approach when she heard Jonas' voice. She shrank back into a quiet corner. There, steadily, slowly, she drank, pacing oblivion, watching the old man.