Steponas, she wrote. When I woke this morning you were still sleeping and I did not want to wake you. I want to thank you for your kindness. I’m sorry I could not explain to you all that has happened. I will, I promise you. I feel I have thrown myself on you, first with the novel and now this. I’m sorry. I do not wish to be a burden.
I need to sort out Rasa, my daughter. Last night she was with a friend, but I am taking her to my mother’s in the village where she will be safe. I will stay there for a few days myself. My mother’s telephone number is at the top of this page. Perhaps you could call?
Jolanta.
The telephone number was at the top of the page. I folded it carefully and slipped it into my pocket. She had not indicated which village her mother lived in, nor had she mentioned how she would be travelling there, so I had no way of knowing what time she might arrive. I would have to wait till evening.
I walked over to the Church of the Holy Mother of God where first I had seen her. Sitting in a pew near to the altar I silently offered my first prayer in many years. Though to whom, I don’t know.
When I returned home, I telephoned Jonas. He was not in but his daughter answered, as timid as she had been during our previous conversation. I could only guess how Jonas treated her and, for a moment, felt guilty for having got him so drunk the previous evening. I was sure the young girl would not have enjoyed his hangover that morning. She offered to take a message, but I decided to catch him at work.
He was sitting on a bench in the small dirty courtyard when I found him. For a moment I thought perhaps he was sleeping, but when I touched his arm he jumped up. Seeing me he sat down again and clutched his head. He scowled.
‘What do you want?’ he grunted.
I laughed. ‘Feeling delicate?’
He looked murderous but said nothing.
‘I thought it was clear what I wanted,’ I said.
‘If you want it, pay up the money,’ he said. ‘If you don’t then get lost.’
‘Is that what Ivan says?’ I said.
He looked up quickly and the faintest quiver of fear flickered in his eye. He examined me closely for a second before deciding I was bluffing. He sneered. ‘Yeah, that’s what Ivan says.’
I sighed and took the fifty dollars from my wallet. I waved them beneath his nose. He made to grab them, but the drink had slowed him and I pulled them away.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘You don’t get these till I get the manuscript.’
He rubbed his face. I could see that thinking came with difficulty. Wiping his hands on his dirty trousers, he nodded.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But you give me twenty-five now, or I won’t go for it. Call it security.’
I gave him a ten-dollar note, seeing that nothing would get done without this little bit of oil. ‘That’s all you get until I have the manuscript,’ I said.
‘The Red and Black tonight then,’ he said. ‘I’ll see Ivan this evening. Let’s say ten?’
Reluctantly I agreed.
Chapter 16
I did not meet Jonas at the Red and Black that night. I sat in the crowded, noisy bar for an hour before finally giving up on him. It was raining when I wandered home. I cursed him, not knowing then that he was living his last hours. Or, perhaps, was already dead. Heavy-heartedly I dialled the number at the top of Jolanta’s note.
Jolanta answered the telephone, sounding cheerful and relaxed. Her baby was shouting and the voice of another woman soothed it. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, hearing my voice. ‘I’m glad you called.’
The words eased my heart, as words have not for many years now.
‘I wanted to thank you for last night,’ she said.
‘I was worried about you,’ I told her. ‘I am worried about you.’
‘I’m fine now, you don’t need to worry any more,’ she assured me.
‘What happened?’
‘It’s hard’ to talk now,’ she said, her voice low, confidential.
Then she said brightly, ‘Why don’t you come out to see us? The country is lovely now. Get away from Vilnius for a day.’
I paused, taken aback. The desire to see her was so sharp I could not respond for a few moments. ‘I don’t even know where you are,’ I said.
‘Svencioneliai.’
‘I have no car.’
‘Nor do I,’ she said. ‘But I managed it! You can stay the night. Mama would like that.’ She laughed.
‘Are you serious?’ I asked. A nervous old man.
‘Of course,’ she said, and her voice sounded bright with delight.
‘Then I shall come.’
The next morning I caught the bus to Svencioneliai. The route took us out north, along the grass banks of the Neris, its water running fast and smooth. I sat back in my seat, closed my eyes and allowed the city to drop away behind me.
The fields shone under the clear blue sky. The sun rose above the trees, stealing the dew from the tips of grass on the verdant banks of the road. The small villages that we passed through were quiet; wizened ladies, scarves tied tightly around their balding skulls, hobbled out into their gardens, or met on dusty street comers to share a juicy morsel. Soviet era Zigulys rattled along the rutted, pockmarked streets. At midday the bus pulled into the centre of Svencioneliai. I walked out to the farm on the edge of the village, following the instructions Jolanta had given me on the telephone.
‘Steponas!’ Jolanta called, seeing me at the gate.
She was sitting on the back step of the cottage, peeling potatoes on to a sheet of newspaper. She dropped the potato and knife and jumped up to greet me, wiping her hands on the flowery apron she was wearing. Beneath the apron she was wearing a loose shirt and jeans. Her hair was tied back, behind her head, and on her forehead was a dark smudge from her dirty hands. Her eyes flashed in the sunlight. The dark rings around them were fading. Her skin shone. Her whole body spoke of the freshness of the country.
‘Mama,’ she called as she let me in through the gate into the large yard. A handsome woman poked her head out of the yellow, wooden house.
‘Steponas is here,’ Jolanta called. Against my protest Jolanta took the small bag I had packed. ‘Come and meet my mother,’ she said, dancing along the path beside me. I was bewitched once more by her, by those eyes, her dark hair. A shiver ran down my spine, a shiver of pleasure and fear. This was a beautiful haunting.
Her mother stepped out to greet me. ‘Egle,’ she said and we shook hands. The middle-aged original of her daughter. And the impression was there too, the faint shadow of her in the eyes, the hair and the way she held her head. Older, though, older as I never saw her. Older as I could never see her, never gave her the chance to be. Rachael, I thought, and a pain stabbed my chest. The two women looked at me with concern as I clenched my fist against the pain.
‘Are you all right?’ Jolanta asked, gripping my arm, supporting me.
I gasped, feeling the pain dig deep into my chest. ‘Tired,’ I said. Her mother clucked sympathetically and, taking my other arm, led me into the cool darkness of the kitchen. Jolanta boiled some water and made me a herbal infusion. I sipped it gratefully.
‘My father died some years ago in an accident in the fields,’ Jolanta said, later, as we sat by the small river that ran along the foot of their land. ‘He was the foreman of the collective farm. He was a big man. You look a little like him.’
‘A little older, I would think,’ I said.
‘You don’t look so old,’ she said. ‘Anyway, Mama has been on her own since then. It’s not good,’ she added. ‘She should find somebody to keep her company. Did you see the way that she was looking at you?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘She was,’ Jolanta teased.
‘You must tell me,’ I said, changing the subject, ‘what happened?’
Jolanta brushed her hands across her bruises and her face darkened. A thin breeze swept across the river and lifted her hair. ‘Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to live on your own,’ she said.
‘It was your husband?’
‘Kestutis is…’ She paused. ‘Since the army… I don’t know… Sometimes moods take him and it’s like he is somebody else. Usually he just rants and rages, he doesn’t normally hit me.’ She felt her bruises once more and I saw the tears start and glisten in her eyes. One swelled and rolled across her dark lashes. It dropped onto her cheek and sat there, fat, like a child’s tear.
‘Things have been strained just recently. He has been drinking more than usual. And then his medicine… It was getting late and I had gone to bed. Kestutis was in a fury earlier because the baby was crying when he was trying to work. He was drunk. I told him to go to sleep, that the baby would stop. He began swearing at me. I knew that I would have to sit and listen to him. There is no way to stop him once he has started. He can’t be quietened or pacified, I just have to sit and listen. He began to shout and I was afraid. I tried to quieten him but that just made him angrier.’ She stopped and looked out across the river. She shivered violently and clasped her arms around her body.
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to go on.’
‘He hit me,’ she said, looking out, far across the river. ‘It seemed that once he started he could not stop. Like a dam had burst, a tap opened, something. He has never done that before. As bad as it has been, he has never done that before.’ She fell then into silence. I was sorry that I had forced the subject and I told her so.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s better to talk about it. I had to get away. I needed to hide away. I knew that here, in the village, I would be safe. I feel safe here.’
I need to hide away. A molina. The village. The words took wing and flew across the years, black crows against the blue sky. I heard them as she had said them, her voice tight with fear, full of the horror that we did not know, yet knew. Yes, knew. After so many years of hiding, of covering up, those words were rising from the unsacred ground in which I had buried them. The ghosts were rising; they hovered in the twilight air, by the river, where it had begun to grow cold. I shivered.
Seeing me shiver roused Jolanta from her thoughts. She wiped her eyes and attempted a smile. ‘You’re getting cold,’ she said. ‘Let’s·go in and see what Mama has cooked for supper.’
She offered me her hand, and I took it. We walked slowly back to the house, her hand in mine. The light faded between the branches of the apple trees. The evening was still and preternaturally quiet. Beyond the river, the hills rose steeply and their tips caught the last bloody light of the day. The ghosts followed through the trees, skimming above the dew-damp grass, closing the dandelions gently in upon themselves.
Egle had soup in the large oven. She pulled it out and set it in the centre of the table. The room was warm. The light came mainly from the oven where, through the open door, a fire burnt brightly. A pair of flies buzzed dozily around the unlit lamp. I sat heavily in a seat by the table, opposite the young, beautiful girl. Her eyes sparkled in the light of the fire and her hair shone. Egle fussed over us quietly. She ladled large bowls of soup and cut thick slices of dark bread. The smell of roast meat filled the room. As she served me, Egle came close so that I could smell the soap on her body. Her hair was cut shorter than her daughter’s, but it was handsomely dark. She had a shapely, full body.
When it had grown quite dark Egle switched on a dim lamp in the corner. We drank beer and I listened to the women singing together. They sang about girls who met boys and lost them abroad, about boys wanting girls and having to pay the price. The boys rode white horses and the girls wore white dresses. Songs I had grown up with. Melodies to keep the ghosts outside the shuttered windows.
Later in the evening, when tiredness was pulling at my eyelids, they sang a new song, the lilt of which was not familiar. I listened quietiy, recognising the strange non-Baltic harmonies.
Shluf Meine Kind, they sang, their dark heads together.
By dine veegel zitzt dine mame,
Zingt a leed un vaynt.
Sleep, my child,
My comfort, my pretty,
By your cradle sits your mama,
Sings a song and weeps.
You’ll understand some day most likely,
What is in her mind.
‘You’re Jewish?’ I said, astonished.
Egle nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I am Jewish. My husband wasn’t. I remember that song. My mother sang it to me when I was a child.’
Chapter 17
‘My mother survived the war in a village,’ Egle said. ‘She was the only member of the family who did, as far as I know. The story is vague; I remember the details only from my childhood, long ago. I can tell them now, but who is interested to listen?’
Jolanta leaned against her in the dim light. Her eyes had closed and I could tell from the gentle and regular rise and fall of her chest that she was sleeping. Egle stroked her hair.
‘Tell me,’ I said simply, for it seemed that at last the ghost had risen and I must sit and listen.
‘We lived in Vilnius before the war. When the Nazis came, my father went to join the Soviet forces, to fight against them. ‘My mother was pregnant with me, though she did not know it. My father, you see, was not to know he had a daughter. My mother moved around. I was born in a village close to the Latvian border, where she had found refuge. It was not safe, but safer than in the city. A family there sheltered us. My mother pretended to be Polish. God was gracious, the Angel of Death passed over the small cottage we lived in.
‘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.
Sleep, my child, my comfort, my pretty,
Sleep my darling
Sleep my life, my only kaddish.
Lu link Ju Ju
Sleep my life, my only kaddish.
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.
The Last Girl Page 8