The Last Girl (24 page)

‘Come and dance,' she told me in her accented Russian. ‘Do you have a girl?' she asked. I almost told her about Rachael but did not.

‘Do you think I look old?' she demanded, pressing close to me. She glared into my eyes. Thin lines explored the edges of her fiery eyes and her skin was olive-yellow. Her body was supple and her closeness aroused me. Her heavy perfume filled my nostrils and her firm, strong hands caressed my back, pressing me tight against her breasts.

Jerzy discovered us in bed. He stood in the doorway laughing into the darkness, waking me. I sat up quickly.

‘I'm sorry,' I began.

He tiptoed theatrically towards me and caught my head in his hands. ‘I love you, baby,' he said in English and kissed me drunkenly on the forehead. ‘The whore has made a man of you.'

She snorted in her sleep. Jerzy and I collapsed in silent laughter.

*

Jerzy had a steady stream of young women to distract us from the news of the coming war. We laughed in the face of darkness. ‘We're going to be fucked any which way, so let's fuck,' Jerzy reasoned. I did not argue. Jerzy had started to drink harder than ever.

I stood in the snow outside a haberdasher's in an old winding street in the Jewish quarter. Muffled figures passed quickly in the street muttering in Yiddish, old men going to study at the Beth Midrash. Ravens against the deep pure snow that had fallen overnight. A light burned in the shop. The windows were steamed up so I could not see in. But I knew she was in there.

I had been on my way home as the sky was beginning to lighten. Lidya, the Polish whore, lived in the courtyard of an apartment across the river and it was a long trek back to Rudnicka. I saw Rachael hurrying through the uncleared drifts past the Church of Mary the Solacer. I fell into step behind her, keeping a safe distance between us. She walked fast and did not look back. She ducked, finally, into the haberdasher's shop in a narrow alley.

‘Where have you been?' Jerzy muttered when I pushed open the door of our apartment. He was sat at the table, fully dressed. An empty bottle had fallen over onto the floor. His eyes were like hollow pits in his lean face. I was cold and went to pull the thin blanket from our bed. I wrapped it around me and joined Jerzy at the table.

‘Lidya's,' I told him. He gazed blankly at the table, his unshaven chin resting on his arm. ‘Have you slept?'

He grunted derisively. ‘Sleep?'

‘Jerzy, you need to take it easy,' I said, getting up and moving closer to him. He pushed my hand away from him, irritably.

‘There'll be plenty of time for sleeping,' he said ironically.

‘An eternity of sleep. It can wait.'

‘Come,' I said and took him under the arm. ‘Let's go and catch some sleep. I didn't get so much myself.' Iforced a grin.

Jerzy grinned too. ‘Good old Lidya,' he said.

We lay on the sagging mattress, sharing the blanket, huddling up for some heat. Jerzy's body was thin, not much more than a covering of skin across his bones. He kicked around in the bed and sloped off some time after I had dropped into a fitful sleep. As the days wound around past New Year, he wrote fewer poems and those that he showed me now were more vicious. ‘What is the point of poems?' he asked one night as we drank our way down a bottle of spirits.

I returned to the haberdasher's on a fairly regular basis, drawn by a compulsion I felt unable to control. Usually I would find my way there after a night with some whore Jerzy had found for me. I stood in the ice and snow, watching the comfortable light burning in the window, resenting Rachael her happiness. Often I was overwhelmed with self-loathing, and would stalk away determined to leave her alone, but I could not stay away from the shop for long. I did not go in. I was nervous of talking to her and I had no money to buy anything. Her clients were fashionable Jews. Elegant, well­groomed men, hats pulled low against the weather, hurrying from their cars left in the small square, to her door. They re­emerged with packages neatly wrapped under their arms and scurried back up the alley. Water was dripping from the long icicles that hung from the eaves by the time I saw her next.

The door of the shop opened and I heard the bright tinkle of her laughter drift out across the dark slush. I stood suddenly alert. My legs were stiff and I was very cold. I had not even been thinking of her. I had been standing for perhaps half an hour in the opposite doorway deliberating on whether to change my discipline at the university. Jerzy had been urging me to move to the literature department where he was finishing his studies. My legal studies were dreary going and I was only continuing with them to keep my father happy.

For a moment the door stood open. From the shadows I watched intently. No customers had gone into the shop. They had hired a young girl some weeks earlier and it was usually she who popped out mid-morning. I had half formed the intention of getting acquainted with the girl and had on one occasion followed her. She had walked several blocks and perhaps suspected I was following her. She had glanced over her shoulder a couple of times, then she turned suddenly into an old courtyard and when I slipped in through the crumbling archway she had disappeared. I felt so ashamed after this incident that I didn't go back to the shop for another week. It was not the girl though. A short man appeared in the doorway. He stopped on the threshold, his fingers reaching out to the small box on the door-jamb. He was dressed in a smart suit. He pulled on an expensive overcoat and fastened it up against the cold. He was smiling. He called back into the shop, jovially, in Yiddish. And a moment later she appeared at his side. She, too, was dressed stylishly. A beautiful scarf wrapped around her throat and hair, revealing only the soft olive oval of her face. She stopped in front of her husband and carefully buttoned his coat. He laughed. She was smiling. She slipped her arm through his then and they stepped out into the dirty melting snow, the door swinging firmly shut on their bright and inviting shop.

I pressed myself back into the shadows. I felt then the stubble on my chin. The lankness of my hair and the damp unwholesomeness of my clothes, which needed both washing and pressing. I felt the loose unhealthy quality of the skin on my hands, the dirtiness of my broken nails, the corns pressing on my too tight shoes. I felt the hunger in my stomach and the longing in my heart. I watched her step quickly down the alley-way by the side of her short, smart husband. His hair was thinning, but he pulled a dashing hat over it, tilting it rakishly over his forehead.

I pressed my own forehead against the cold damp plaster in the dark doorway. In the moonlight, our hands had brushed. We stopped by the old birch tree, 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. Had it been allotted to me to be ever standing outside the window looking in? Rachael?

It was late summer and we were sitting in a café when Nathan Fisk, a young, red-haired communist, burst in with the news. ‘They're coming,' he called. His face was alive with excitement and he could not keep still when he reached our table. Hopping from one foot to the other, he pounded a fist into the palm of his ink-stained writing hand. Jerzy pushed back his chair and ran a hand through his hair. A sardonic smile flickered over his face.

‘Who is coming?' asked Jankowski, an expressionist painter, his head lowered almost to the rim of the bowl from which he was supping beetroot soup. He lifted a potato from the creamy, red liquid and sucked at it noisily.

‘The Red Army,' Fisk said breathlessly.

Jerzy snorted derisively.

Fisk's excitement was dampened by Jerzy's withering gaze. He squirmed a little and then dropped into a free seat at the table. ‘It was on the radio. They should be in Wilno before darkness falls.'

‘Hurrah for the Red Army,' Jerzy jeered.

‘Daumantas should be happy,' Jankowski said, his mouth full of potato.

‘And why should I be happy?' I asked.

‘They've made a deal, haven't they? With your government in Kovno. Wilno will be handed back to Lithuania.'

Fisk looked anxiously from Jankowski's face to. mine, trying to weigh our feelings. I shrugged. I had heard the news from a soldier I had met at the railway station earlier in the day. Jankowski went back to his soup. It was early afternoon and Jerzy was in a foul mood, recovering from a night with our landlady, Tzalka. He kicked Fisk's chair hard. Fisk started back, a look of panic on his creamy-pink face.

‘Fuck off, Fisk. Go and share the good news with some of your commie friends,' Jerzy growled.

Fisk's face reddened. Kicking back his chair, he attempted something like aggression. When he turned, however, he was forced to right the chair in order to pass it. Huffily he left the café. Jerzy stared after him, blackly. ·

‘Got to be going,' I said. ‘I'll see you later.'

I caught up with Fisk outside All Saints' Church, near our apartment. He looked reproachful when I caught his arm.

‘If you've come to jeer, forget it, I've got to get to a meeting.'

‘I'm not jeering, Nathan.'

‘What's wrong with Jerzy?' he whined. ‘Is he a fascist? Would he prefer that it was the Wehrmacht marching into Wilno?'

‘Jerzy's just in a bad mood,' I reassured him. ‘You know that he isn't a fascist.'

‘Yes, well, it's all right him thinking he is above it all. He takes this grand detached view, as if he is such a great poet that it is all irrelevant. But you tell me, what is the use of poetry unless there is something in it that can make our world a better place? It's up to us poets to set the moral agenda. It's up to us to voice the feelings of the masses, those not able to make their voices heard.'

Fisk's pink face had gone red. He was punching his fist into the palm of his hand again, too, as we walked down the narrow lane.

‘Yes, yes,' I reassured him, though my own poetry was defiantly resistant to the ideological programme he held so dear.

‘It's not just that I am a communist,' Fisk continued. ‘Who knows what the Germans will do if they invade? Listen, Steponas, my uncle went to Germany, to Augsburg to attend my cousin's wedding. He was arrested. You don't know what it is like for the Jews there. Every day their lives get harder. They are being forced out of their jobs, intimidated. The police pick them up without any justification. My uncle is kept in Augsburg still.'

I nodded. ‘I know, Fisk, I have heard these things.'

‘I hear that your government has been in negotiations with Berlin as well as Moscow, to get Wilno back?'

I stared back at him blankly.

‘I heard it at a Party meeting.'

We walked on in silence. Despite the nationalist reputation I had gained, as a result of writing my poems in Lithuanian, that country's attempts to claw back the old capital held very little interest for me.

‘Fisk, I wanted to ask you something.'

‘Yes?'

‘Do you know a certain Troiman? Owner of the haberdasher's.'

‘Ira Troiman? Oi! What do you want with him?'

‘You don't like him?'

‘What's to like? He's a bastard. The whole family is. How do you know him?'

‘A bastard, eh?'

‘Listen, they're big in the textiles and treat their workers like shit.'

‘Capitalist bastards?'

‘They have a factory. A couple of months ago a worker there got his arm ripped off, working on one of their old machines. His fault, Troiman said. They refused to give a kopeck in compensation to his family. They said he wasn't married, despite the fact this woman had been with him near enough fifteen years and they had five kids. The Party tried to intervene on his behalf; the foreman at the factory was a Party member. So they sacked him. Spread his name around as an agitator, trouble causer. Tried to stop him getting another job.'

‘This Troiman owns the factory? Ira Troiman?'

‘His father. Ira stands to inherit when the old man goes. When the Soviets come we'll kick the filthy bastards out. That'll teach them.'

‘Ira Troiman is married?'

Fisk shrugged. ‘What do I know? Do I look like the local gossip? Why are you so interested?'

I shrugged. ‘Come for a drink?' I asked.

‘Meeting,' he said. ‘Why don't you come along?' I shook my head and left him on the corner of Stefanska.

The Soviet troops began entering the city after darkness. The sound of tanks and rattling engines disturbed the city's sleep. We lay in our beds trying to interpret the sporadic outbursts of gunfire. By daybreak Wilno was theirs.

The streets were noisy. A group of young Jewish communists hailed the armoured cars rattling through the city. ‘
Da zdravstvuyet krasnaya armija!
– Long live the Red Army!' I slipped through the thin knots of pedestrians idling on street corners watching the liberators.

I had discovered from another contact that in the summer Ira Troiman spent much of his free time down by the Wilja at the Maccabee athletic club.He was a keen rower. For a couple of Sundays I kept a watch on him. He drove down to the club dressed in smart sports clothes in his imported scarlet Tatra 57. The banks of the river were lined with young women in their bathing costumes, swimming, sunbathing, gossiping, watching the young athletes pulling hard at the oars on the sparkling surface of the water.

I borrowed a bathing costume from Tzalka. It had belonged to her husband and was hopelessly old-fashioned. I invited her to join me by the river, but Jerzy had been cruel to her and she would not come out of the darkened room I found her in. In the end I went alone. I had half hoped that Fisk would accompany me, but he was busy meeting with Party members. Later in the afternoon I saw a group of them waving flags and placards, cheering a group of Kazak soldiers in battered green lorries.

Rolling the bathing costume into an old towel I made my way down to the river. The day was hot. The church spires reached up into the magnificent September sky. The war seemed a long way away, despite the Soviet tanks and battalions streaming into the city. It was hard to imagine that on this pleasant day the German forces were pounding their way across France. On the banks of the river there were a fair number of bathers and sun-worshippers catching their last rays before the winter set in.