She looked at me furiously, filled, perhaps, with the resentment she had felt the night of the poetry competition when she had sat holding her young cousin, listening to the jeers of drunken village men outside her window. I regarded her, stony faced. Shamed but bitter. She reached out her hand and rested it on my own.
‘You’re right,’ I relented.
‘Sometimes I wonder,’ she said, half burying her face in her hands. ‘I mean, I wonder if there is right and wrong. I have such dreams at night. I have such fears for the future.’
‘Things will turn out fine.’
‘I pray to God.’
‘Ira seems confident. He doesn’t seem to be worried about the communists.’
Rachael smiled. ‘Ira is incurably confident.’
‘He seems like a nice man, anyway,’ I said morosely.
‘He is a good man, Steponas. He is kind and hardworking.’
‘And rich.’
The corner of her mouth screwed up. ‘How did you get so cynical? Is that how the poets must be here?’ She regarded me disparagingly.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said and paused. ‘Rachael, the things I would like to say just don’t come out. I’m afraid. My friend read me a poem, he said it reminded him of me: “I shall stand with him there, a stray wanderer, and silently we shall yearn”. I am afraid of being that – a stray wanderer, forever outside the window.’
She placed her hand on mine again and smiled faintly.
‘I used to enjoy the talks we had,’ she said. ‘I miss them.’
‘Me too.’
‘Maybe you will come for dinner with us one day? Ira would be pleased, I am sure.’
‘Yes. Maybe.’
Rachael pulled a jacket across her shoulders. ‘I have to go,’ she said. I nodded. She turned and waved, briefly, as she left the restaurant. I downed the schnapps with a grimace and ordered vodka. Rachael’s champagne stood barely touched, a semi-circle of her red lipstick printed at its rim from where she had sipped at it. I rubbed it, smudging the lipstick onto my finger. I brought it up to my own lips and tasted it. Sweet.
Chapter 45
The Soviets, after gaining control of the city, turned it over to the Lithuanian government in Kaunas, and then withdrew. Almost immediately rioting broke out. Bands of Lithuanian thugs roamed the nighttime streets, drunk and enraged. Searching out Jews and whatever other trouble they could find.
It was October and the air was cold and damp. Jerzy and I tumbled through the half-lit streets on our way home from the Staromiejska. A thick fog had drifted across the city, blanketing it. Rounding a corner by the university we were set upon suddenly by a gang of youths. A short, stocky young man dressed in a worn dark suit and no overcoat grabbed the lapels of my coat and thrust me against the wall of the old university. Without my support Jerzy dropped to his knees and before any words were spoken a boot landed in his stomach. He doubled up with a faint groan and rolled onto the glimmering, wet cobblestones.
‘Where you been?’ the stocky youth growled in Lithuanian. There was no sense to his question beyond ascertaining what language I spoke.
I was taken aback and concerned for Jerzy, who was not moving. For a couple of seconds I did not answer, as my fugged brain tried to clear itself. I was too slow. The wind was suddenly knocked from me and my body crumpled in a painful spasm.
‘Palauk!’ I gasped. ‘Wait! I’m Lithuanian.’
My short attacker paused. He grunted. Without another word they turned and disappeared into the fog.
Jerzy had not moved. I knelt over him. The cobblestones cut into my knees painfully. A gash on his forehead was bleeding darkly. I lowered my cheek to his lips to see if he was breathing. He grimaced as I put my face close to his.
‘Don’t kiss me.’
‘You piss-head,’ I said. ‘I was hoping they had killed you. I was just going for your wallet.’
I pulled him up and looped his arm around my shoulder. Slowly we trudged up the hill winding into the ancient lanes of the Jewish quarter of the city.
‘Can’t you sing a Lithuanian song or something?’ Jerzy joked. ‘Just to let them know.’
The fog thickened, drifting down the narrow, cobbled streets. The city was full of noises it was hard to determine. We listened uneasily as we walked. The fog was illuminated suddenly as we turned into Stiklu. It glared red and the muffled sound of shouting seeped out from the glow. Oaths and a woman’s scream. Glass cascaded onto stone and there was the sound of a sudden huge intake of a monster’s breath. Flames tore through the fog. A man was shouting somewhere, discordant accompaniment to the woman’s cries. Pleading. We stopped on the corner, staring into the dim glow. The male voice was broken Russian, Polish; the woman, without control, screamed Yiddish pleas to the invisible sky. The cries were strangely muffled·by the fog, so that the scene was like a drama played in a too small theatre.
Jerzy turned. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
I stood transfixed, holding him. The fog shifted, giving a surprise glimpse of the narrow lane, like a tableau, figures arrested in violent postures. And then it closed in once more, enveloping them. Jerzy pulled at my arm but I resisted.
‘The Jews,’ I muttered. ‘They’re after the Jews.’
‘The Jews, the fucking Poles, who cares.’
A figure sprang from the fog, almost colliding with us. The man started, his face a plastic mask of fear. His forehead and cheeks were blackened and his hair oddly cut. It was only when he passed I realised it had been burnt away at the front. Jerzy broke into a shuffling run after him. The fleeing figure, looking back over his shoulder, must have thought he was being chased. He let out a piteous shriek and doubled his speed, disappearing within seconds into the hulk of the fog.
‘Jerzy,’ I called. He stopped and turned on the edge of visibility. When I did not move he sloped off.
I stood rooted to the street corner. This was the rage I had provoked in the village with my poem. That night they had gathered outside the homes of the Jews in the village. Perhaps they were outside her window tonight, too. Perhaps she was huddled behind shuttered windows, whilst they threw stones. I broke into a run. I ran through the ghostly city streets. Surreal pockets of animated hatred punctuated the dead silence. The fog isolated the attacks. It muffled the shouts, the explosions of glass, the shattering wood, preventing them from carrying beyond a few metres. In my haste I stumbled upon attackers prising cobbles from the street to lob at the windows of shops. Gelbhauer the Shoemaker. Fiszlinski the Baker. Haberkorn the Photographer.
When I reached Zawalna, it was quiet. Not even the fog stirred. I walked slowly to her house, treading the damp leaves underfoot. No lights showed in the windows. The whole street was in darkness. I lingered in the gloom, unsure what to do. For some time I paced backwards and forwards until my mind had cleared totally of the effects of the vodka we had drunk at Staromiejska. The fog made my clothes damp and the cold wet air crept in through the thin cloth and chilled my body. I stamped my feet to warm them, but the sound echoed hollowly and dark faces appeared behind windows, staring out into the street wide-eyed with fear, watching, afraid I was a rioter.
I stumbled back to our apartment. Jerzy lay sleeping and I huddled down in the bed with him, fully dressed, letting his fragile warmth soak through the damp clothes.
In the morning the city was quiet. The fog had dispersed and we walked with our heads down. But with darkness the rioting began again. The streets of the city were littered with glass and the air was acrid with the smouldering fires ignited by primitive hatreds.
Chapter 46
On 15 June 1940, as Hitler’s tanks rolled into Paris, Stalin’s returned once more to the streets of Vilnius. Smetana, the right-wing Lithuanian president, slipped out of the country in the night, along with other influential politicians and intel lectuals. We had been liberated. ‘Long live Soviet Lithuania – the Thirteenth Soviet Socialist Republic’ read a leaflet the ebullient Fisk pressed into my hand.
‘It’s
a blow to the head of the fascist thugs that ran this country,’ Fisk expostulated loudly as we walked along Giedyminowska, now Gedimino. I cringed at his high-pitched confidence, wondering how many of those in the crowds pushing along the pavement, glancing at us, were those self-same thugs who had been burning Jewish homes and murdering unfortunates in dark streets.
Fisk laughed when I shushed him. Excitedly he waved his hands at the street. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the Soviet tanks and the soldiers leaning up against them, guns slung over their shoulders. ‘Why should I be quiet? The revolution is here.’ I managed to escape him at Cathedral Square. I joined one of the long snaking queues that had formed outside a food store. Jerzy had gone to the market by the station to see if he could get bread and other basics. Rumours had been spreading that shops were running short of supplies and every shop in the city was besieged by panicked citizens trying to build up a supply to last the crisis.
‘The shops are empty, but you know why?’ a wizened babushka observed in front of me. ‘They’ve got the stuff in the back. They’re holding on to it, pretending it’s all gone, then they’ll bring out a few loaves at a time and a bit of flour and charge the earth for it.’
The old man with whom she was standing nodded knowingly. ‘Tag, tag. That’s right, the bastards. That’s if the Russians haven’t confiscated it all for their soldiers.’
‘No, you listen to me, somebody’s making a tidy packet here. Believe me. Oi! The bastards. Let us poor old people starve, they’ll be sitting pretty.’
‘They caught some Jew hoarding a warehouse full of flour and legs of pork,’ another crone chipped into the conversation. ‘He was holding on to it, waiting till prices rose.’
The shop was bare when finally I managed to fight my way in through the doorway, battling with a seventy-year old baba. A large, red-faced man was shouting at the staff behind the counter. An evil-looking scar split his face in two, intimidating the usually indomitable women. One stood in tears while another railed at him.
‘One only. No more.’
‘What’s the use of one loaf ? I’ve got to feed a family of ten.’
‘The rules are the rules. You can get only one. I don’t give a fuck how many you have to feed. What will everybody else eat when your belly is full? Eh? Tell me that? Look.’ She swooped her hand angrily, indicating the rest of us. ‘What are they going to eat, tell me?’
‘It’s a shame,’ the man argued, his face growing redder. ‘It’s a shame, I say.’
The manager of the store, a nervous dark Pole, sidled through the doorway in his neat white apron. He glanced at the crowd and the angry man, trying to assess the general mood. Various shoppers offered their opinions in rough tones.
‘Just take your loaf and let us get ours.’
‘What do they care about us? They’re making a profit, aren’t they? I bet they’ve got the back of the shop packed with goods.’
‘Tag! Bring out the stuff and let us have it, you mean bastard! You think you’ll enjoy your riches knowing how you got them?’
‘May God in heaven look down on you and see what you are doing!’ an old woman shouted, her small white face quivering beneath a heavy black scarf.
‘Please, please,’ the dark nervous shopkeeper pleaded. ‘It is not our fault. We have not got enough. The government has said one each. We have to make it fair. No speculation.’
This Soviet phrase incensed the crowd. The shop burst into an uproar of vitriol at the communist invaders and their slogans.
‘What have you got?’ Jerzy asked chirpily when I arrived home tired. He laid his goods out on the table. He had managed to get a loaf of bread, milk, potatoes, sugar and a small bag of fresh curd. I laid down all I had been able to get, the smoked sausage and the small loaf.
‘You leave it to me, my boy,’ he said heartily, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘You leave this to Uncle Jerzy.’
‘What’s the swindle?’ I asked.
His face took on an expression of child-like innocence. ‘Swindle?’ Then he grinned like a satisfied cat. I did not ask any more. I assumed he had found another generous lady benefactor. And I was right. I found out a few days later he had set about seducing a string of shop girls all of whom he milked for goods in return for his attentions.
Jerzy looked little healthier than he had during the previous winter. His pale skin was almost translucent and his hair wildly long. Despite the warm weather he had a hacking cough that he could not shake off. His energy, though, seemed to be undiminished. He had given up his studies and spent his time working on intense little poems, which he refused to let me see. Late into the night he paced back and forth mumbling to himself. ‘The words,’ he said. ‘Each word must be the exact word. Nothing superfluous. Not one letter should detract from the lyricism of the poem.’
We published a small book of our poems in late October called The Cataclysm. Jerzy managed to get it stocked prominently in the large bookstore on Gedimino and it sold well. He also befriended some Russian officers. From these he got hold of good vodka that had been impounded by the military police. The Russian soldiers, from poor villages, revelled in their wealthy position. The new Soviet puppet government pegged the Lithuanian currency at 0.9 roubles rather than the four or five it was really worth, making the poor Russians artificially rich. Jerzy introduced them to Polish girls with whom the young peasant soldiers swaggered around the town like fashionable aristocrats.
‘You should be careful,’ I warned him one day when he returned merry, giggling over a gambling swindle that had just helped him relieve some drunken communists of a small fortune.
‘Ach, they had stolen it themselves,’ he said. ‘Anyway, have you seen what your friend Fisk is up to?’
‘Fisk? No, I haven’t seen him for days.’
‘He’s working with the NKVD. He was talking about that Troiman you know.’
‘What about Troiman?’
‘Fisk informed on him and his father for exploitative behaviour and suspected collaboration with Western security forces.’
‘He accused Troimah of being a spy?’ The blood drained from my face.
‘He was off to arrest him.’
‘Fisk?’
‘The NKVD. I assume Fisk was just tagging along for the thrill of it.’
I pulled on my jacket and dashed from the room. By the time I had run across the old town to Zawalna a large crowd had gathered outside Troiman’s house. A cordon of rifle bearing Russian soldiers kept the curious crowd at bay. Fisk stood sharing a cigarette with one of the soldiers. He wore a pompous, self-important expression that looked ridiculous when you regarded the dirty, frayed collar and cuffs of his old shirt and the suit shiny with wear. I pushed through the crowd to get close to him. He grinned gleefully when he saw me.
‘Steponas, comrade,’ he said, passing the cigarette to the large-boned peasant lad in the soldier’s uniform.
‘What’s going on, Fisk?’
Fisk waved his hand dismissively, as if it was of no importance. ‘Just doing what is necessary.’
‘Jerzy told me they’re arresting Ira.’
Fisk grinned. ‘I told you the bastard would be dealt with, didn’t I?’
At that moment the door of the house opened. Two officers emerged. Ira was between them. His healthy face was pasty and he looked unusually dishevelled. Seeing the large crowd gathered outside his door seemed to make him nervous. His startled eyes flicked around the pack of faces. It was strangely unnerving to see this self-possessed, confident man looking so frightened. The heavy wooden door closed behind them. There was no sign of Rachael.
As Ira passed by, he noticed me. His step faltered a second and a half smile rose to his lips. Then he saw Fisk by my side. His expression changed. He did not look angry, rather his fear seemed to increase. He stumbled on quickly after the soldiers, who forced a passage through the quiet crowd.
They bundled him into the back of a van and drove away. The crowd dispersed.
‘Coming?’ F
isk asked. I shook my head.
When he had gone, I lingered on the pavement. Not by the house, where a soldier hung around outside the door for a while, smoking, his gun propped up against the doorjamb, beneath the mezuzah. After a while the door opened. A small group of men in civilian clothes and one uniformed officer appeared. The soldier stood to attention. They walked by him as if he was not there. The officer called for him to follow. The NKVD jumped into a black car and the two soldiers wandered away back into the city.
When I knocked at the door there was no answer. A frightened face appeared behind the net curtains in the house next door, but the Troimans’ did not stir. I looked through the brass letterbox. The long hallway was dark and quiet. At the far end, in the light cast through an open doorway, there was a broken picture frame propped up against the wall. Slivers of glass shone in the faint sunlight on the floor. In the gloom I caught a sudden movement.
‘Rachael,’ I whispered through the brass slot. The figure froze at the bottom of the staircase and for a moment did not move.
‘Rachael?’
‘Who’s there?’ a hoarse voice I could barely recognise called from the shadows.
‘Rachael? It’s Steponas.’
My words were met with silence. The figure did not stir. I could barely make out if she was standing or sitting at the bottom of the stairs. A car grunted slowly past in the road and nervously I straightened up, glancing over my shoulder. It shuddered its way down the street and disappeared. A panicky sweat had broken out on my forehead. I bent down to the letterbox again and pushed it open.
‘Rachael, it’s me. Open the door.’
She stirred then, seemingly reluctantly. Her body emerged from the darkness and shuffled across the polished wooden floorboards, kicking splinters of glass. She was hunched over. I allowed the brass flap to drop and stood up. The door opened slowly, just a fraction, not revealing her. I pushed into the darkness, checking the road to see that I had not been watched. She stepped back against the wall behind the door. With the door closed it was still hard to see much more than her vague shape in the darkness. She did not look up at me.
The Last Girl Page 20