The Last Girl (22 page)

We slept the night at a small inn on the road to Wilno. Adam refused to go inside and slept instead with the horse at the edge of the field. I did not sleep well and rose early to find that, though dawn had barely broken, Adam had already harnessed the horse – and was ready to go. Before sundown that day the spires of the city came into view. The roads were busy; lorries and cars roared by, scaring the poor country horse. Adam, too, looked apprehensive despite the fact that he visited the city whenever my father had business there.

The sun shone and the crosses glittered. Wilno unfolded its ancient arms like the boughs of an oak to welcome me. I had lodgings on Giedyminowska Street, in the centre of the city. My father's sister lived there. She was married to a Polish businessman and her sons had gone, one to America, doing business in Chicago, and the other to Moscow to study. The busy cobbled street cut straight like a knife through the city from the cathedral to the Orthodox Church on the opposite side of the river. Between west and east were the Jews. Almost a third of the population of the city was Jewish. Irena was on the doorstep when we arrived. While my father was tall and thin, Irena was short and stout, but she resembled him nonetheless.

‘Stepanushka!' she yelled with none of my father's reserve. Her fat arms shot from her sides. The brush with which she had been sweeping the dust from the doorway as she gossiped with a neighbour fell to the floor. She bustled forward, grabbing me as I slid from the back of the cart, and squeezed me hard against her firm, ample bosom.

Turning to her neighbour, with tears in her blue eyes, she said, ‘My brother's son. What a fine boy, just look at the size of him. As big as our Tomasz.' The neighbour nodded her head and clicked her tongue.

‘Come in.
Davai
, let's go. Adamushka, take up the bags and come in. I have been expecting you. You must be hungry.'

I shook my head in protest, barely able to edge a word into her ceaseless flow. Her Lithuanian was fractured by Polish. The two seemed to have been mangled into an unwieldy hybrid that caused spittle to fleck her lips as she chewed the words out. Without releasing me she turned to the opened doorway and pushed me towards it. Adam tied up the horse and picked my bags up from the cart. He sloped in behind us, through the doorway, into the dark stairwell. My aunt lived on the third floor, and she huffed up the stairs, slowing with each flight.

‘Oi, oi, oi!' she lamented by her door, trying to catch her breath, her bosom heaving like an earthquake in the mountains. ‘A nice house in the country, that is what I need. None of this up and down the stairs all the time. Will he listen to me? Phhh!' Her hands indicated her despair. ‘No. How would his friends survive without him to drink with them, heh? Oi, so I have to suffer. To the devil with him.'

He, my uncle, was sitting reading the newspaper when we opened the door. He was a lean cultivated businessman with a large grey moustache that drooped over the sides of his mouth giving him a rather hangdog look. He stood up and stretched out his hand to me, a smile struggling against the confines of the moustache. He was rarely ever to be seen without a suit and wore a smart if fairly old one now.

‘Steponas,' he said. ‘Good to see you, boy.'

Adam lingered in the doorway, darkening it with his unkempt mass, the bags in his hands. I went to take them from him.

‘Adamovich, come in and sit yourself down,' Irena shouted, stowing the broom behind the door of the kitchen.

‘No, I won't,' Adam demurred gruffly. ‘It'll soon be dark. I must be gone.'

‘
Nu
, Adam, as you wish.'

I shook his hand and he turned stiffly, avoiding my eyes, and was gone down the dark stairs.

‘Little better than an animal,' my aunt said, busying herself in the kitchen. ‘But he's honest and there's many who think they're better that are not.'

Pawel, my uncle, raised his eyebrows and grinned a canine-like, lopsided grin. Indicating for me to sit he stepped over to a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Polish vodka.

‘
Nu
, Steponas, you are a man now. You will join me for a toast.'

Shortly before the night of the poetry competition, as I escorted Rachael along the dark road to her home in the moonlight, our hands brushed. We stopped by the old birch, which shone silver, at the point where Old Mendle's path forked off the road. Her breath was ragged with nerves. We stumbled and our faces met, almost lip to lip, in the pale light. I had been in Wilno for almost three months before I saw her again.

I settled into life in the provincial capital. Lectures begin­ ning not many days after my arrival, I soon made friends with a lively group of students who introduced me to the pleasures of the city. Summer drew to a late close; autumn was delicate, golden, and then, on the first of November, out of nowhere, a flurry of snow. Winter. At a cafe just off German Street I met a group of poets and soon became a member of their fraternity. The leader of the group was a wild-haired Pole, Jerzy Szymonowicz. Jerzy was an aggressive, loud atheist obsessed with the Virgin Mother. Whilst one of his poems would be crude and mocking, the next was full of tender love.

Most evenings some members of the group would be in the cafe, discussing the latest poetry and drinking beer.

‘Mary, the mother of whores,' Jerzy exclaimed, one evening, reading a poem he had been working on. His booming voice carried across the din of the early evening cafe. Heads turned in our direction. A chair scuffed as a tall well-dressed man rose, his face an angry shade of red.

‘Jerzy,' a timid member of the group protested.

The waiter, midway to serving the couple of young women sat at the tall man's fable, hesitated. His eyes swivelled between his well-dressed customers and the group of us in the corner.

‘Immaculate madam of small town faiths,' Jerzy proclaimed, turning his attention to the red-faced diner. The man strode forward. Dextrously the waiter, switching his loaded tray from right hand to left, intercepted him. He bowed. He urged the man back into his seat, whispered to him and with great display presented the young ladies with their drinks.

‘Whose pudenda…'

A howl of rage and small, offended feminine shrieks drowned the end of the stanza. The tall man rose, his chair falling with a clatter. A delighted grin crept up Jerzy's face as the offended Catholic beat a path to the corner where we were drinking.

Later I walked Jerzy home through the old, winding city streets. His eye was swollen and the skin around it had begun to turn a deep shade of yellow. He was still giggling at the scuffle that taken place as a result of his poetry reading.

‘You're drunk,' I said, a little shocked myself.

‘How else should one be at a time like this?'

‘A time like this?'

‘We're going to be fucked. One way or the other it's coming to us.'

‘You think there will be war?'

He looked at me a little incredulously, then patted my shoulder, relegating me to the position on which he had accepted me to the group – country hick in need of a cosmopolitan education (which to him consisted of alcohol, women and poetry).

‘It's not a case of if there will be war, but who will get to invade us first, the Commies or the Nazis. One way or the other we're fucked.'

Alcohol I hardly needed educating in; there was little else to do but drink in a Polish village. As to women, Jerzy was insistent I lose my virginity at the soonest possible occasion.

‘Come on,' he said, taking my arm. ‘Let's go and get a whore.'

I shook my head.

‘How can you be a poet if you're a virgin?' he demanded.

But I refused, the image of Rachael haunting me.

‘I have a poem that reminds me of you,' he said, his arm drunkenly winding around my neck as we lurched through the darkness towards his apartment. Jerzy lived in a run-down apartment not far from the station. The sound of the trains rattled the loose windows in the room he rented. It was cold and damp and, for me, romantic. The boards were loose on the stairs and rattled as we climbed them. The fetid stairwell was filled with the overpowering odour of boiled cabbage and pig's trotters and as we passed a doorway at the top of the second storey a woman's cry pierced the air. I stood stock still, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. Jerzy waved his hand dismissively. ‘Gypsies,' he explained.

It took Jerzy some time to locate the poem he was looking for. I sat on the unmade bunk in the corner of the room, while he searched through the detritus of his life. ‘Ah!' he said at last, pulling a bundle of crumpled sheets from beneath his bed, close to my feet. ‘Here we go.' He shuffled through the poems, humming a lewd song that he had been teaching me the words to earlier in the evening.

‘David Vogel. He lived not so far from here, in Wilno, at some point. A friend of mine met him in Paris a couple of years ago. These are translations that he made. Vogel writes in Hebrew, can you believe? Can you believe that, heh?' He nudged me in the ribs and winked. ‘Almost as bad as you writing your poems in Lithuanian.'

‘Hey, what is so wrong with me writing poems in Lithuanian?'

‘You mean why write in an anachronistic peasant's language rather than our beautiful Polish tongue?'

‘It's not my tongue.'

After the poetry competition I had started using Lithuanian more. When I wrote in Polish I felt a shiver of shame run through my body. Since falling in with Jerzy's band I had translated a few into our common language. I did not tell Jerzy the real reason for writing my poems in Lithuanian; I let him believe I was a revolutionary, a romantic nationalist in the tradition of Mickevicius.

Flicking through the poems, he finally pulled out a dog­eared sheet. ‘
Nu, va!
' he said, pleased with himself. He scattered the other pages across the bare, rotten floorboards. Taking the poem he went to stand by the window. His smoked voice rolled the words across the dim room.

Silence descended upon the room like soft snowflakes, punctuated only by the stray shout of a lunatic woman in the cold street. Jerzy's long dark hair hung across his face and his shoulders slumped as though under a weight.

‘Why should that remind you of me?' I asked.

He turned from the window and sloped over to me like an old tired wolf. Slouching on the bed he rested his feminine poet's fingers on my knee. ‘Because,' he said, ‘you are a lonely soul. You stand outside the window and look in.' He pressed my knee. ‘Why don't you come in, Stepanovich?'

He pulled a bottle to his chest. ‘Look at this,' he said, displaying the thick red liquid. ‘Baba made it for me. She picked the cranberries herself in the forests. Granddad distilled the spirits in his little wooden hut down by the lake. That's the life. Here we are in the city, rotting in hell, surrounded by ignorant bastards!' He paused. ‘
Nu
, what do you say? Let's rent a cottage down by the river. We'll fish and gather mushrooms and berries in their season. We'll lie on our backs and watch the wind in the birch trees, watch the heron swoop down over the lake glittering in the sunshine. No Nazis or communists or anarchists.'

‘You think that there aren't enough ignorant people in the villages?'

‘You're right, you're right, but sometimes I look at Baba and her simple life and I just can't help but wonder.'

‘You're drunk and Polish, which is saying the same thing.'

‘Ha! Listen to the Lithuanian speak!' He laughed. He raised the bottle. ‘To Mother Poland, and her sons who are heroes and poets!' He took a long slug of the spirits, wiped his mouth with the back of his elegant hand and passed the bottle to me.

I raised it. ‘To poetry, our one true mother.' And took a swig. I coughed and water sprang to my eyes. ‘That's ninety per cent spirits,' I told him. He grinned and took the bottle back.

‘To the virgin queen. May his maidenhead soon be plucked!'

‘To the husband of whores.'

He perked up at that. ‘To whores and their daughters.'

The bottle shook as I took it back from him. Its neck was warm and sticky. I raised it.

‘To peaceful times to enjoy them.'

‘Peace? To the hours we have left to us. To these last moments. To the vodka that makes us forget and the whores and songs and friends we shall always remember.'

My head had begun to spin. My vision leapt between a seemingly preternatural clarity and a foggy blitr. Jerzy was grinning stupidly. A fierce heat billowed out from my stomach and coursed up my body, exploding through the top of my skull. I wrapped my fingers with delicate precision around the neck of the bottle. Solemnly I raised it, gazing intently into its depleted, bloody contents.

‘Never forget,' I said, my lips thick and rubbery, a little numb.

Jerzy tapped my knee. Two careful little slaps that nonetheless almost missed their mark. ‘Now,' he said. ‘My stray wanderer, standing forever outside the window. Now you tell me. Tell me all. Tell your uncle Jerzy.' One more slap, for effect, executed a little too quickly; his hand slipped off and onto the wooden floorboards.

‘Wha' you talkin' abou'?' I asked.

‘Who is she, Steponushka? Tell Jerzy, tell Baba.' He patted my head delicately, flattening the hair slightly. ‘I'll be Baba,' he said, his eyes focusing on a space somewhere inside my skull, or perhaps a couple of feet behind it. ‘
Mociute. Motule. Motute
…' Granny, nana, nanny.

Rachael. Rachael with your dark eyes, dark, mysterious eyes. Rachael with your hair that falls in waves upon your shoulders. Your voice is like the singing of a brook in the summertime. Your fingers, as they stroked my forehead that one time, like the whisper of grass in the spring breeze. Rachael. I recall how we walked in the forest, how we sat in the fields watching the beavers down by the lake building their home. Rachael. Your hair shone in the moonlight. The birch tree was silver beside us. Its leaves rustled. The insects sang. Your breath was warm and your skin scented. Your lips… Rachael.