The Last Girl (3 page)

I wanted her to turn so that I could once more see those eyes. Her eyes. To check whether it had been the light, the church, the strange madness that had possessed me for those last weeks. But she did not turn.

After a while she straightened up and pulled the baby from the sand. She held it up for a few seconds, drawing it close to her face. The baby was moaning. It struggled slightly. against her embrace. She spoke to it in a voice that was no more than the faintest of murmurs. She kissed it and, faintly, I could hear that, too, the smack of her lips on the soft flesh of the child's cheek.

Quickly then, she bent and laid the baby in the pram. She did not pause. It was as if she had suddenly remembered something and realised that she had to rush, though she did not look at a watch. She pushed the baby down the path, past the tennis court, back through the green pathways of the park to Cathedral Square.

I followed her at a distance, longing to see that gaze once more.

At the peak of the cathedral, a large new golden cross sparkles in the sunlight. A brighter echo of the three white crosses that top the green hill behind it. These newly re-erected crosses stand, a memorial to the first missionaries to venture into these last pagan reaches of Europe. For their pains, they were murdered and their bodies dumped in the river that flows at the foot of the hill. Or so the legend goes.

Monuments come and go. Now, we, the last of the pagans, rebuild monuments to our dear Catholic faith. We are eager to seem Western after years of being forced to face east. The communist heroes we were surrounded with have all gone. Lenin Square, where he stood so proudly, is now Lukiskiu Square. Lenin has gone, lying broken, no doubt, on some waste ground. This city is a master in the art of reinvention.

It's not just the monuments that have gone. The street names too have disappeared. Good Lithuanian heroes have replaced all those good communists. Those massacred by the Russians in '91 are on the street plaques now. The KGB offices are now a museum. The nationalists call for a full indictment of Soviet war criminals. To listen to them, to see this disassociation, would make you think that none of them had been involved with our country for the last fifty years. Ah yes, we are masters at reinventing ourselves, at distancing ourselves from what we were.

But this was once a Jewish town. It is hard to imagine that now. Before the war nearly a third of the population was Jewish. Synagogues huddled in with the churches. The rustling of the pages of the Talmud vied with the clicking of the rosary. What evidence of that is there now? The communists had no use for the niceties of fact. The Jewish dead were subsumed into the general toll of the victims of fascism.

It's still possible, though, to see the remnants of that old city. Often I walk up towards the train station. In one of the dirtiest streets, where the buildings are crumbling with neglect, is an old Jewish school. It stands, like a rotten skull, its windows cavernous holes. Daring to enter beneath the slumping brickwork it is still possible to see the Hebrew script on the walls.

When I found that I could no longer write I turned my time and attention to studying. My teaching at the university kept me abreast with literature, but for myself I read what I could · of that other city I inhabited. The ghost city. The city of spirits. The darkened shells, the neglected parts of town, the spaces that stand strangely vacant. I read of the Gaon, I read Mera's writing. I read of the Jewish Vilnius destroyed by the Nazis.

She crossed Cathedral Square in the direction of Gedimino Prospect. I followed at a little distance; I had no camera, no facade behind which I could approach her. Without that mask I felt a little lost, I had become quite dependent on it in my relations with these unknown women.When she stopped, waiting to cross the main road, I lingered under the canopy of trees. She crossed without looking back. Why should she?

I hurried after, obscured by the crowds that pushed along the pavement. A trolley bus trundled along the cobbled main street. She moved forward, collapsed the pushchair, taking the baby in her arms. A man held her arm, steadying, as she boarded. A wave of panic tightened my chest. I lurched forward and slipped through the back doors of the trolley bus as they were closing. The doors, catching on my arms, sprang back open. Breathless, I pulled myself aboard. I grabbed the handrail. I did not look to see where she was, fearing I had drawn attention to myself.

There were no free seats and I was forced to hang on as the trolley bus picked up speed down the uneven road. At the corner it slowed, its two tentacles feeling tentatively for the electric wires. Looking along the bus I could see that she was close to the front, the baby on her lap. She gazed ahead of her. There was no mistaking the similarity. It was not just the physical features; it was the quality of that stare. As though she was pondering on something. As though she was able to see into the future and knew that it was bleak.

A pain stabbed my heart. Not a poetic pain, a genuine physical one that almost made me gasp. The last time I had seen that look I had turned from it. Had turned my back upon it. I pressed my forehead against the cool window.

The trolley bus swung out of the busy Old Town streets and headed north to the district of Karoliniskiu. Winding up the hill the bustle of the city dropped away. The road climbed through green hills, the trees of Vingis Park spreading a green balm through the scattered apartment blocks.

At the top of the hill, she got up suddenly. Holding the baby in her arms, she pulled the pushchair awkwardly from the trolley bus. I alighted after her and, feeling bold, offered to help put up the pushchair. She smiled. I bent over the colourful chair and struggled with its complicated locking system. In the end she was forced to bend and flick a small red lever I had missed. The chair folded out into its proper shape. She thanked me. I lingered; she had not even looked at me.

When she straightened up, the baby strapped into its seat, our eyes met with a sickening jolt, with a sense of indecency. Feeling this too, perhaps, she quickly lowered her gaze. She turned and walked away. I watched her figure receding. How must she have felt, when I turned from her? When I could not look at her, unable to bear the truth that eyes cannot help but tell. Could not bear that intimacy of eye nakedly appealing to eye. How did she feel as I turned my back? Did she stand and watch my figure recede down the street? My back which refused to turn, even for a last look?

I followed her. She did not glance back so I presumed her unaware. In truth I may have exaggerated our contact. It is quite possible that at this time she was completely oblivious to me, that in fact each time we had seen each other it was I seeing her rather than she seeing me. I rewrite this history like all historians of my city.

She turned inside an apartment block. Unless she lived on one of the lower floors she would be taking the lift, assuming it worked. It would have been impossible for me to follow her further without really drawing attention to myself. I loitered on the dirty broken pavement outside the doors. Inside I heard the lift creak and groan as it made its slow way down through the centre of the building. The creaking stopped and the doors rumbled open. Moments later the creaking started once more. For a long while I stood listening to its groans as it climbed, seemingly, endlessly higher.

Before taking the trolley bus back to the centre I bought a copy of the
Lithuanian Morning
. Right wing politicians fulminated over the proposed opening of a park of Socialist era statues. The idea that Lenin and Marx would once more raise their ugly heads in the land, even in the noble capitalist cause of getting tourists to part with their money, was too much for them to bear. The past was dead, why resurrect its leaders?

In the centre it began to rain. A light refreshing rain. I trudged back through the busy streets. The dead do not like to lie silent. We write over and again, but the pages are too thin and finally the past texts begin to show through. Ghostly words can be seen beneath our fresh ink. As I wandered up the hill into the confines of the old ghetto I heard the fragile melody of the dead whistling through the scaffolding.

The next day I lay in bed late. My head throbbed and I knew that I was going to come down with a cold. I poured a liberal dose of vodka into my coffee. For the rest of the day I sat in my chair barely moving, an old sheet wrapped around me. I looked out across the trees in the courtyard. The fine weather had broken and a soft wind blew the light rain in flurries against the glass. My breath steamed the glass as I looked through it. When the vodka was finished I found, to my disappointment, that I did not have another bottle. In the evening, consequently, I moved on to the bottle of sweet cherry brandy. When I awoke the next morning it was still raining and my cold was worse.

On Thursday morning I woke early and cleared out the bottles from beneath my bed. I washed and shaved, as well as I could, considering the shaking of my hands, and chose from my wardrobe the cleanest of the shirts. The rest I packed into a bag to take to Svetlana on Sv Stepono who does my washing. I emptied the ashtrays into a small plastic bin and sat by the window waiting for the dustmen to arrive. At ten thirty I heard the long vulgar blast of their horn and carried the rubbish down the stairs with my neighbours. Grigalaviciene nodded at me sternly; she could smell the cheap brandy from the distance of a floor. I smiled at her. She turned her back and huffed her tidy rubbish bin down to the lorry.

When I had deposited my bag of clothes with my woman on Sv Stepono I caught the number thirteen trolley bus from Gedimino and took the ride up to Karoliniskiu. The weather had improved a little.The rain had held off since the previous afternoon, and the clouds flew high and unthreatening. A wind blew, catching paper bags and tossing them into the air, taking the trees and giving them a good shake. At the junction with Seliu, as the road turned up the long hill between the green banks of grass, I was tempted to get off the trolley bus, to nip this madness in the bud and go take a stroll in Vingis park. A walk under those large old trees would do me more good, I thought. In years past they had helped me with my writing. Often I used to catch the trolley bus out and walk there. But I stayed on, to the top of the road, and got off where she had.

I had not gone there following any kind of a plan. I did not know which was her apartment, and even if I did I could hardly just go and knock on her door. Instead I sat on a bench opposite the apartment doors, having little hope that she might appear. My bench was on the edge of the playground and a woman with her grandchild soon joined me. She waved the child away. Go and play, she told the child. Go and swing. The child wandered off to the broken play things; a roundabout that swung in a loop taking you from ground-scrapingly low to high in the air in its circle, a swing that sagged dangerously in its seat and a bare metal rocket climbing frame mocking Soviet dreams in its austere dilapidation.

I watched the child kicking at the damp soil. The grandmother sat on her bench for a while looking around for some one to talk to. When I avoided her eye she grew bored and shouted for the child to come. I stayed there, watching the figures emerging from the doorways. The first drops of rain had started falling when I finally moved.

I walked past her doorway, then, impulsively, turned back and entered. I called the lift. I travelled up to the top floor and stepped out. Four doors stared back at me blankly, anonymously. Was she behind one of them? There was a sound. A door handle and a man's cough. I quickly stepped back into the lift and descended.

On the way home I bought a bottle of cranberry spirits to help the cold. I bought the paper and at the small stall opposite the cathedral that sells religious items I picked up a thin book on icons. In my apartment I laid the book open on my desk, running my thumb down the centre of the spine, flattening it open on the page of a Madonna and child I had not seen before. I took a razor and sliced the picture as neatly as I could from its spine. I stuck it to the wall with my photographs and, sitting back with my glass of Bobeline, compared them.

This Madonna, I thought, was not sad. She was melancholic, but she was not sad. Did that painter not feel the pain of knowing your child is lost? Did he not want to vulgarise his goddess with such emotions as those that Marija felt as she gazed at her baby and knew with God-given knowledge that he had to die? That fearful knowledge I knew from her eyes. Knew and yet was able to turn from. I say that, and yet each night those eyes are upon me now and try as I might I am not able to turn from them.

The next day I had barely arrived at her block when she emerged without the child. She turned and walked quickly across the park towards the trolley-bus stop. I followed her. The wires clicked and whistled, a trolley bus trundled through the traffic so that we were forced to break into a run. Its doors had opened by the time we reached it, she before I. I felt sick from the exertion as I grabbed hold of the rail and pulled myself inside. The doors swung shut with a heavy thud. I closed my eyes and gasped, trying to recover my breath. The trolley bus lurched out into the traffic and immediately picked up speed, forcing me to hold tight to the rail to stop myself from falling.

Opening my eyes I noticed she was watching me. She edged across her seat to give me space. I saw a look of concern in her eyes and realised that she saw me as an old man, frail and weak. I straightened myself up. I wanted to banish that image, but as I lowered myself carefully onto the seat beside her I was aware of the smell of spirits that clung to me. I saw the heavy thickness of my hands and the brown, old coarseness of my skin, the veins bulging up like ruts in a country road. I noticed the thin worn quality of my trousers. I tried to smooth them with my hand.

Her hand was on her knee. As I smoothed my trouser leg her long fingers rested delicately only inches from my own. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her nails were clean and short. There was no movement in her fingers, no tremble, no shaking as there was in my own. Her leg was thin too. My eyes gazed at our two hands resting now almost side by side, only a fraction of space apart. Only a fraction and yet how great was that gulf, how many years, how many different things kept me from sliding my own blunt old finger those few inches and touching the tips of hers. It has been too long, and though she appears to me as clear as crystal each night, even though now I can close my eyes and picture her, it is not possible to reach back across the years and change that moment, to reverse it. It is done and she is gone. The distance is too great.