The Last Girl (21 page)

‘We are very pleased to have a real live poet among us today,' Wojciech Rudnicka said, rubbing his soft, scholar's hands together. Being Master of Ceremonies he had dressed up for the occasion in a dinner suit. He flicked his lank, dark hair back from his forehead and half turned from his position at the front of the stage to indicate a round, red-faced, seedy man seated at the back of the stage by the purple curtain. The real live poet bowed his head slightly in acknowledgement of the polite applause that rippled around the village hall. His shoulders were white with flakes from his scalp. His lips were large and moist. He surveyed the audience suspiciously and did not seem to notice the nervous line of young poets beside him.

‘As you can see we have ten talented young folk entered for the competition this year, and I can guarantee you that each one stands a strong chance of winning. A fine talented bunch that give us faith in the future of our noble Polish language and its strong tradition of poetry.' Wojciech Rudnicka flicked back his hair and jutted out his weak chin. ‘Maybe one of these young folk here,' he said with a florid sweep of his pink hand, ‘will one day be as admired as our esteemed guest. Who knows?'

Again the audience rippled with applause. Wojciech Rudnicka smiled. ‘It only remains, then, for me to introduce the first of our young poets this evening.' The first competitor was a boy called Karol. He stepped forward, confidently, to the edge of the stage, closed his eyes, lifted his head and shouted his poem to the wooden beams that held up the roof. I noticed the fleshy, wet-lipped poet cringe by the curtain. He closed his eyes too, a crease scarring his pink forehead, and looked as though he wished he were anywhere else. Karol's poem ricocheted around the rafters and fell dead at the back of the hall. He stopped suddenly as though he had forgotten his last line. For a moment the audience held its breath, but then he opened his eyes and bowed deeply. The audience clapped enthusiastically. Wojciech Rudnicka jumped back onto the stage nodding and clapping. He smiled enthusiastically at the cringing poet, who managed to raise a weak smile in return.

Each poet stood in turn and took their place at the edge of the stage. Somebody opened the window and above the sound of the audience fidgeting it was possible to hear the sound of the men standing outside the door, with the horses, waiting, smoking, drinking and laughing.

As my turn approached I grew more confident that the poem I had written was far superior to those of the other competitors. I did not, however, get much satisfaction from this confidence. And then I noticed Rachael. She slid through the doors stealthily and sat on a wooden bench by the back wall, among a group of women.

The competitor to my left stood up and edged towards the front of the stage. I did not hear her words but willed her only to be finished quickly so that I might get my chance. There was a spattering of applause from the bored audience as the girl bowed shyly and retreated to her seat. The greasy poet seemed to have fallen asleep. His head was sunk low against his chest and his eyes were closed. I took that as a challenge. I stepped confidently to the edge of the stage and looked out across the faces. I paused before I began and sought out her eyes. She smiled.

Turning to the sleeping poet, I addressed him, loudly, in Polish, ‘
Proszae Pana!
Sir! With respect I would like to dedicate this poem to our nation. Ladies and gentlemen, my poem is titled Hymn.'

The poet awoke with a start and regarded me with a spark of malice in his liquid eyes. Sure of his attention I began.

I imbued each line with as much pride and longing as I could. The words seemed to spin out from me like smooth pebbles across a clear cold lake. They dropped like fresh dew into the laps of the audience. A silence fell upon the room. I felt my words become pregnant with meaning, each one swollen with love for our country. The images of the nation from its tiny villages to its ancient cities, its forests and lakes and mountains, its heroes and heroines, kings and queens, resounded in the silence.

As my voice rose to the last stanza I heard a noise growing in the audience. They had become blurred before my eyes. I sensed them shifting, the sound of feet and voices. I drew the last word from my heart and tossed it to them, and then felt it explode like a bomb. I opened my eyes to the audience on its feet cheering. A wave of heat coursed through my veins. A sense of sweet exultation lifted me from the boards of the stage. The damp poet was beside me, his arm around my shoulder, shaking my hand. Wojciech Rudnicka was beaming and clapping vigorously at the edge of the stage.

‘A young poet for the nation,' the lank-haired poet said to my teacher. ‘Moving. Most moving. God in heaven, a poem to rouse the soul of our nation.'

I bowed, trying to pull back the smile from my lips. I edged back to my seat, aware that still the audience was clapping. My cheeks burned red. Rachael had seen my moment of triumph. My joy was without bounds.

Itzikl clapped a hand on my knee and smiled at me wanly. He pulled himself to his feet and stepped slowly forward ‘to the edge of the stage. The audience was still on its feet. At the front, I noticed, stood Tomasz Bozek and Pawel Polmanski, the councillors. Shouts resounded in the small wooden hall. The doors opened and the men who had been waiting outside pushed through, cheap cigarettes between their thin lips and vodka bottles, half empty, still clutched in their hands. Itzikl stood motionless at the front of the stage. Wojciech Rudnicka moved forward to the edge of the stage but then hesitated, drew back. A word was thrown forwards from the audience. It seemed to hit Itzikl like a physical blow for he staggered back a step. It was thrown once more, and this time it came from more than one mouth.

‘Ty Zydzie!'

‘Swinia!'

‘Ty Zydzie!'

Jew. Pig.
Blyad
. Jew-pig.
Zydzie! Zydzie!
The words hailed down upon the stage. They roared in my ears. I felt the blood draining from my face. Itzikl stood still on the edge of the stage, colourless, his poem arrested on his lips.

‘Give us the national poet!' somebody shouted. ‘Get rid of this fucking Yid!'

To my horror I heard my name on the lips of the drunken men. Tomasz Bozek was grinning at me, his bald head glistening in the late light that slanted through the windows. ‘Give us the Polish boy,' they shouted. ‘Let's hear the Polish boy again.'

Itzikl crept back to his seat beside me, cringing away from me. I tumed to him, but he backed away as if I was about to hit him. Fear lit his eyes.

Wojciech Rudnicka spoke into the ear of the guest poet. He hustled him forward to the edge of the stage. The poet cleared his throat and held his hands out like Moses about to part the waters before him. Slowly the noise began to drain from the room. Wojciech Rudnicka crept across the stage behind the poet-prophet and pulled Itzikl up by the arm.

He pushed him through a door behind the stage and closed it behind them. I sat silent, rooted to my wooden chair, hot and cold flushes washing through my body. Painful waves. Rachael, I noticed, had left.

Wilno. Its church spires rose above the winding streets. Gediminas' tower stood on the ancient hill, the birth-site of the ancient city. On this hill the greatest of the Grand Dukes had fallen asleep one night, on a hunting trip in the deep old forests. As he slept he dreamt of an iron wolf howling at the moon from the hilltop. In the morning he summoned a wise old man to him and told him the dream. The bearded pagan priest interpreted it. On this hill the Grand Duke was to found a city. It would be a powerful city. The howling of the iron wolf signified how the fame of the city would spread out around the world.

I climbed the hill on the morning of my first day in Wilno and looked out across the city. The early autumn mist clung, still, to the hollows of the valley, shrouding the town. Below me the two rivers joined, the rivers where the first Christian missionaries met their watery end, martyred by the fierce natives, the last of Europe's pagan tribes. Below me, too, stood the cathedral, which even as I watched began to glisten under the rays of the sun that had climbed above the hills and cut through the milky sheets of mist. The pope had won in the end and set his church in the place of the temple of the ancient gods.

My mother said nothing as she stood by the old cart that was to take me to the city. She cried silently into her handkerchief. My father shook my hand and then embraced me. He had dressed in his best suit to see me off. Clumsily, uncomfortable in the stiff, tight three-piece, he loaded sacks of apples and pears, potatoes, onions and garlic onto the back of the cart for me to take to the city. Adam, one of my father's workmen, sat at the front of the old cart, with a sack rolled as a cushion. Having embraced my father and said a last goodbye to my mother, I jumped up onto the cart and Adam flicked the whip across the smooth flank of the horse.

As the cart bumped down the dirt track towards the forest I looked back at my home with a feeling of both sadness and joy. My parents stood, still watching on the dust road, and behind them, in the doorway of our home, I could see the dark smudge that was my grandmother. By the millpond, a heron, startled, took clumsily to the air. The fields, brown now after the long hot summer months, rolled down towards the village, the roofs of which were just visible. I waved to my parents and then we were in the forest, its cool scented arms enclosing us.

I inhaled deeply the sharp smell of pine. Adam drove the cart in silence, flicking the horse's flank occasionally, uttering a barely comprehensible encouragement to it. He wore an old cap that was pulled down to his ears. Steel grey hair burst out of the cap, bristling against his thick neck. He had the large hands of a peasant, and his fingers were like the oars of a galleon. Adam had worked on my father's farm for more years than I could remember. He had been a brooding, silent presence since I was a baby. On the odd occasions that he spoke I would look at him in terror, as a child, incapable of understanding his thick Polish dialect. Even when I learned to speak Polish myself, it had hardly helped; his pronouncements remained as unintelligible as the growl of a dog.

Adam lived in a hovel on the edge of the woods. The floor was of beaten earth and the walls were bare plaster, dark with the damp and dirt that rose from the floor. The cottage consisted of two rooms and little furniture. It had a small well in the garden where each morning Adam would wander, badly hung over. Summer and winter he would draw up a bucket of water from the depths of his well and balance it on the crumbling wall. He would plunge his large, spade-like hands into it and throw the water at his blunt red face. In the winter months it took him a while to break through the ice to get the water. When he staggered back to the door of his home, his steely hair would be stuck up in a frozen halo about his face.

I was glad of his silence as we drove through the forest. My last weeks in the village had been like the torturous itch of a mosquito bite and it was good now to be on the road, to be gone. I lay on my back, amid the sacks of food and layers of fresh hay my father had strewn for the journey, and watched the delicate wisps of cloud caught and pulled at by gusts of wind far up in the sky.

I had not said goodbye to Rachael, nor to her grandfather, Old Mendle, to whom I owed a debt of kindness. To my shame I was awarded first prize for the best poem at the poetry festival. I collected it red-faced, my ears burning at the applause of the rowdy audience of village drunkards and raucous nationalists. Wojciech Rudnicka handed me the prize awkwardly. He patted me on the shoulder, noticing the look of mortification on my face. My eyes scanned the noisy, red-faced crowd, but tears had welled up in them and all was a blur. I knew that Rachael had gone, though. I could see the dark space at the back where she had been. I could see her absence.

As soon as I decently could, I tried to escape the fetid, smelly village hall. The poet collared me as I made for the door, and for fifteen minutes I had to stand patiently as he stood, fleshy hand holding my shoulder. He bent his soft pink face, with its large moist lips, close to mine. His breath smelt. ‘Good poem,' he said. I muttered my thanks and tried to struggle free, but the fingers remained tight.

‘You remind me of when I was young. Passionate, full of love.' He looked at me meaningfully. ‘Obviously there were faults in the poem, but that is to be expected of a young boy in the sticks. Still, it had promise. The spark was there. I was moved.' He shook my hand damply, holding on to it too long so that droplets of perspiration beaded my own forehead.

The air outside the hall was still warm, though the sun had fallen below the trees. Dark clouds rolled across the dusky sky, swelling thick and morose. A storm was brewing. I pulled my starched collar from my neck. Perspiration had defeated it and it hung limp in my hand. Noticing the glances of the drunken men by the horses I fled quickly from the village hall, up the street past Young Mendle's blacksmith shop which was shuttered up and dark. As I ran the angry taunts from the village hall pummelled my brain. Yid. Pig. I had been the cause of that hatred, that rage. I had roused that feeling through my poem. I recalled how Itzikl had shied away from me when I sat down. I saw, again, the fear in his eyes. A shiver of horror ran through my body.

I kept on running up the hill, beyond the path to our farm. In the distance I saw the lights shining from its windows as the inky clouds rolled heavily over it.I ran on to Old Mendle's place. Standing at the point where his path forked off the road I looked down towards the old house. There were no lights visible. I dared go no further. I knew I would not be welcome. I slumped to the grass and sat beneath the old birch tree, until the last glimmer of sunshine had been snuffed out and the ominous clouds had veiled the sky. I sat on, still, after the first large drop of rain splashed against my cheek. A cold tear.

School was finished and the days dragged. ltzikl had gone to stay with family in Wilno, I heard. He had got an apprenticeship in a tailor's owned by his uncle. I was glad I did not have to speak to him; I would not have known what to say. My father said nothing when he heard what had happened. He laid his large hand upon my shoulder and sighed. Mother, still, was proud that her son had won an award and started to say so, but my father shushed her angrily. I put all my energy into work on the farm, raising a grunt of amazement from Adam, even, at the ferocity of my labours.