The Last Girl (23 page)

Snowflakes settled on the window pane. The first few dissolved in the weak light, but one by one they grew braver, stronger. A thin layer of crystals formed. The apartment settled into a night silence. A silence almost as profound as that in the woods when the snow is two feet thick and you are alone. Then Jerzy, sleeping, caught a breath. He snorted and turned uncomfortably on the floor. I struggled to pull him onto his small bunk. He murmured in his sleep and the empty bottle fell from his grasp and rolled across the floorboards. I piled what clothes I could find on top of the thin blanket I had covered him with. He opened his eyes, as I was about to leave.

‘Forever outside the window,' he said and grinned.

Not many days later I saw her. I was staring out of the steamy window of a café having just finished a cigarette. For a moment I thought my eyes had tricked me. I almost rubbed them to be sure. She was walking down the narrow street, shadowed from the fine winter sun by the walls of the buildings. On the pavement a thin hard crust of snow glistered brilliantly. The air was sharp and fresh.

I had been sitting in lectures since the early hours and the last thing I felt like doing when they finished was returning to the stuffy flat on Giedyminowska Street. Instead I wandered around the old streets of the city, enjoying the bright winter weather. After an hour I was chilled to the bone and found a small café on Pilies Street. It was mid-afternoon, and the café was quiet as I sat by the window drinking sludgy coffee and smoking cheap Russian cigarettes. I was about to order another coffee from the emaciated girl behind the counter when Rachael came into view.

I sat transfixed. She was lost in thought, kicking the toes of her boots absently at the crust of snow as she walked, billowing it into sparkling showers. A fashionable scarf covered her dark hair. I rose immediately, dropping a pile of kopecks onto the wooden table.

‘God in heaven!' she exclaimed when I caught her elbow.

‘Rachael.'

‘Steponas!' She looked dismayed.

I held her elbow and pulled her to a halt. Her dark eyes looked into my own questioningly.

‘It's good to see you, Rachael,' I stammered.

‘Listen, Steponas, I am going somewhere.' She glanced around as·if worried somebody might see her. She tried to pull her arm away.

‘Rachael, please don't just run away.'

‘I really am in a hurry.'

‘Have a drink. A quick one.'

She shook her head. A strand of chocolate dark hair broke loose from the colourful silk scarf and curled across her forehead.

‘Rachael, you must. I won't keep you long. Please.'

She melted a little. She shook her head again, but not so confidently. Again her eyes flicked around the street and she seemed nervous. ‘I don't know,' she said.

‘Come,' I said, directing her to the little café from which I had just emerged.

‘No,' she said. ‘Not there.'

We ducked into a narrow alley-way and she led me to a small Armenian café with room for little more than one wooden table.

‘I know you're angry with me,' I said. ‘Rachael, you do not know how sorry I am for what happened at the competition. I had no idea.'

She shook her head again and I feared that she would not allow me to apologise; that she would not find it in her to forgive me.

‘You know I am not like that,' I told her. ‘It was a mistake that they reacted that way. I would never have read the poem if I knew that they would respond like that.'

She shook her head again and laid one of her hands on my sleeve. She wore elegant black gloves. ‘You don't understand,' she said. ‘I know you did not mean to cause the problems with your poems. I know you are not one of those Polish shits.' She smiled weakly. ‘But still, you know, your poem did that. And after all you are not a Jew, such poems will not be visited upon your head. Such mistakes will not bring bottles through your window, or cause drunken men to jeer at you in the street.'

It was my turn to shake my head.

‘Steponas, you do not understand, and how could you unless you had been born a Jew? All that night I held my little cousin in my arms because a crowd of yobs gathered outside Rivka's house, singing and cursing and threatening to burn it to the ground. Thank God nothing happened.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I know you are sorry, Steponas. I know that, you fool.' She squeezed my arm. My eyes lit up once more and a little of the painful guilt lifted from my heart.

‘Could you forgive me?'

‘What is there to forgive? You didn't mean any harm. It's not your fault the world is so full of fools.'

The old Armenian clattered in the kitchen of his tiny café. The room was filled with moist clouds of steam, fragrant with spices. Rachael was well dressed, she looked more beautiful than ever. I took her slim gloved hand. She quickly pulled it from me.

‘No, Steponas.' ‘But, Rachael…'

‘You don't understand.' ‘You said…'

‘I said you don't understand.' Her voice rose and she flushed red. A pained look passed over her face. The Armenian bustled up to the table, cauterising her words. He took the two small cups in his large paws. She looked down. The Armenian grinned. His large face was accentuated by a moustache, which bristled out like an unruly thorn bush.

‘More?' he demanded in heavily accented Russian.

I looked at Rachael but her face was down. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes, two more.'

When he had retreated I put my hand beneath her chin and lifted it. She resisted.

‘What is it, Rachael?'

‘I am to be married.'

‘Married?' The word stumbled from my lips.

Her eyes flashed. ‘Yes, married,' she said. ‘Is there anything wrong with that?'

I was wounded. My hand fell from her delicate chin. I was glad when the large Armenian intruded once more. He set the small cups of wickedly strong coffee before us and then lingered. ‘A couple of small pastries to go with these perhaps?' Rachael shook her head. He withdrew to his steaming kitchen.

‘What did you expect, Steponas?'

‘Not this.'

‘Then what? Did you think that there could have been any other way? I am a Jew, Steponas, and you are not.'

‘We would not have been the first.'

‘You know others?'

‘Love does not care for these things.'

‘Love may not, Steponas, but Hitler does. The Poles do. My father does.'

‘I thought your father was a socialist.'

‘He's a socialist and a Jew. And if I mentioned your name after that poetry competition he would have thrown me out of the house.'

A gloomy silence descended upon us. What had I thought? What had I expected? I had, I realised, thought nothing. The future had been shrouded in a rosy haze. It could not have been any other way than this.

‘Who are you marrying?' I asked.

‘Rivka's cousin. He is a good person and his family own a haberdasher's.'

‘Where?'

She shook her head and would not answer.

‘And you are happy?'

The ironic edge to my voice did not escape her. She laid one of her elegantly gloved hands on my arm.

‘Yes, Steponas. I am happy. What else could I have asked for?'

When she left I stayed on at the table. I ordered another coffee from the hirsute Armenian and stared gloomily from the steamy windows into the dark, narrow alley-way. The words from Vogel's poem came back to me. ‘I shall stand with him there, a stray wanderer, and silently we shall yearn.' Maybe Jerzy had been right; it had been allotted to me to be ever standing outside the window looking in. A wave of bitter feeling for Rachael washed over me. I had loved her. I did love her. Why had it been so easy for her to forget me? I moodily pictured her bourgeois fiance.

‘Women trouble, eh?' the Armenian said, rubbing his large hairy hands on a grubby rag.

I nodded.

‘Oi, the women, always they are a problem,' he said. ‘You need some medicine.'

‘Medicine?'

‘The fix for all the broken hearts.' He disappeared into his steaming inferno, reappearing seconds later with some Armenian brandy. He set it down on the table with a thump and clinked two small glasses down beside it. Deftly he flicked the lid from the bottle and sloshed a sticky amber substance up to the rim of the glasses.

‘Well,
gaspadin
! Let us drink to women.' He licked his lips, whether at the idea of women or in anticipation of the brandy I could not tell. ‘
Na zdarovje
.'

‘
Na zdarovje
,' I said, raising the sticky glass to my lips. I winced at its sweetness. The liquid burned a sticky rivulet down my throat.

‘Jewish?' the Armenian asked, nodding his head sideways at the door through which Rachael had left. ‘Not a bad looker. A special toast to this girl of yours, eh?' We tossed back two more of his undrinkable brandies. The Armenian smacked his lips. The brandy hung in golden droplets from the bottom of his bushy moustache.

‘You don't move,' he told me. He disappeared, a few moments later reappearing once more, bearing chipped plates on his large arms.

‘Not a good idea to drink on an empty stomach,' he said, poking at his head as he spoke. He spread the plates between us. Pickled green peppers stuffed with chopped vegetables. Thin Armenian cracker bread. Cheese. A dip of crushed chickpeas and crushed sesame seed. He pointed at the bread. ‘
Patz hatz
. Armenian bread. Great with the dip. Eat.'

But when I left, the feeling of bitterness had not dissipated. I kicked down Pilies Street keeping to the icy shadows. Not having anything better to do I pushed in through the large doors of the cathedral below Gediminas Hill. It was quiet and I sat for some while contemplating the painting of the Virgin Mother. Her benign face regarded the child in her arms, a fat healthy baby boy, the blue cloth falling away from his ruddy body. My grandmother kept a small icon of the Virgin by her bed and prayed to it night and morning, touching it till the face shone in the candlelight with the grease from her fingers. The image did not move me. I tried to pray to Her as I knew that my grandmother would be praying on my behalf. But no words came.

I left the mother and her child, the bitterness still burning my insides, like cheap brandy. I pushed open the doors to see the sun setting, violet, above the spires and tumble of city roofs. I turned in the direction I knew I would find Jerzy.

Snow settled deep upon the city. The clouds that clipped the tiled roofs were heavy, pregnant. Men and women huddled around their radios listening for news. Jerzy and I took to the streets, trekking from one drinking den to another. The city opened up to me. It opened like a flea-bitten mongrel wanting to be scratched. And I delighted in scratching it. Poems flowed from me as they had never before. Late into the night we sat· around a bottle and the stub of a cheap candle that burnt an acrid smoke, to argue over the merits of things we had discovered in our reading.

Our poetry group moved out of the café off German Street following the scuffle Jerzy's Virgin Mother poems had provoked. We were no longer welcome. We set up in Chaim's, closer to the station. There the clientele of drunken Jews did not mind our poems, oblivious in the fug of cigarette fumes. On Saturday evenings an old man, his beard tickling the whistling lungs of his accordion, sat up at the back of the spartan bar. We forgot our poems then, losing ourselves in the wheezing chords, the stamping feet and the cheap vodka.

I moved out of my aunt's flat on Giedyminowska Street and set up with Jerzy in an apartment on Rudnicka Street. There was a church nearby, outside which stood an old and beautiful maple tree, denuded by winter. The block had once been grand. Time had not been generous to it, however, and the plaster in the stairwell fell in chunks onto the decorated stair tiles. It was, still, grander than we could have afforded as students. What we could not afford in money, I came to realise, Jerzy paid the landlady, a widow in her forties, in kind. ‘Who am I to complain?' he protested when I found out.

And indeed, in the end, it was to her, old enough to be my mother, that I surrendered my virginity. Her name was Tzalka. She was a dark-haired, faded beauty, half Karaite, half Pole. She arrived late one night on our doorstep looking for Jerzy. Jerzy had gone out to scavenge some food for us and I was expecting him back. I invited her in. She wore a thick, bright wrap pulled tight around her shoulders, a present from the elderly husband who had widowed her young, she explained. The same wrap she would be wearing when the Soviets pushed her onto the cattle car that took her to the freezing steppes to die. She sat on the old chair we had been given by another of Jerzy's friends, with a wry grin on her pretty face. I suspected she had been drinking.

‘So, you are Mr Szymonowicz's young friend,' she said, regarding me squarely. She spoke a correct but slightly accented Russian. When I replied in Polish she frowned. ‘You are a poet, are you not?' she told me. ‘You should speak in the language of poets. Polish is just so… parochial.'

‘Poland has its poets, too,' I ventured.

She ignored me. ‘My husband was Russian. He was acquainted with members of the royal household. He was a great but very modest man. He once dined with Mayakovski, you know, the year before he died. My husband, that is. They were in Nice. “You are wrong, wrong, wrong,” my husband told him. He could not agree with the Bolsheviks. But what a handsome man he was, Mayakovski.

Jerzy quoted me that one.' She looked suddenly miserable. ‘The young fucker.'

She jumped up from the seat restlessly. I stood by the door to the small kitchen watching her nervously. Her wrap had fallen from her shoulders to reveal a rather flimsy dress of the type you would wear for an evening at a club. It seemed a little insubstantial, considering the snow outside. She strode over to an old gramophone that stood in the corner on a low table. It had been in the apartment when we moved in with a small collection of wax discs. She chose one and wound up the machine. Music blared from the dinted horn. She twirled round, flaring the bottom of her dress, displaying shapely calves.