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.
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.’
Chapter 40
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.
‘When night draws near your window, come to him naked.
Softly will he ripple and darken round your still beauty, touching the tips of your breasts.
I shall stand with him there, a stray wanderer, and silently we shall yearn: come into our dark.
And let your two eyes travel before us to light the way for me and my friend.’
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 finger
s 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.’
The Last Girl Page 17