The Last Girl

by Stephan Collishaw

  Chapter 4

  It was in the silence of a church, on a day when the sun cut particularly cleanly across the nave, illuminating as it did the head of Mary, the Mother of God, that I saw my last girl. The church of the Holy Mother of God stands on a hill towards the river. It is a little farther up the road from the beautiful, gothic St Anne’s and Bernadine’s. It is not so impressive, but when sitting at this desk not writing a word for days on end is sending me crazy, I go there to sit in the perfect stillness. To look at the way the light can slice the darkness. To admire the beauty of enclosed space. The quality of silence.

  For years I have tried to pray, but I cannot. The words simply do not come. I get to my knees and lift my eyes to the picture of our saviour, but I am unable to get beyond this point. Instead I kneel in silence.

  I thought my photographic obsession was burning out. I had not taken a picture for over a week and felt no desire to do so. That very morning I got up with something approaching energy and optimism. Whilst boiling water on the old stove for a coffee, I sat at my desk and opened my large jotter. For one whole hour I wrote. The words poured out with a vigour and freshness I had not felt for years. And then they dried up. It was like a fleeting, cool shower in the desert. The bright mood with which I had awoken dissolved in a flash.

  After boiling the kettle once more and sipping my way through a good too many coffees, I slammed the jotter shut. It is a mistake to try to force the words. Like a butterfly they flutter on, somewhere farther out of reach with each swoop of the net. I had pushed too hard. I should have been content with those words that I had got down, those thoughts that I had managed to frame with my clumsy scribbling. Angry and trembling with the effect of too much caffeine, I paced the small room. Through the wall that used to be a doorway into my second bedroom, my neighbour’s small child kept up a consistent high-pitched wail. I clenched my fist hard. I needed to walk.

  I pulled on a light jacket and slammed the door of my apartment behind me. The dirty windows prevented much light from entering the stairwell and I descended the stairs with customary care. The air outside was warm. My old neighbour, Grigalaviciene, was sitting on the bench outside the doors, knitting in the sunshine. She smiled and nodded and seemed about to create a space for me to sit by her. I paused and looked down at her. Her grey hair was thinning and her skin creased softly. For a moment I considered sitting with her, but I knew from experience that once she started talking there was no stopping her and I was in no mood for conversation. I nodded and, buttoning my jacket, moved on briskly.

  The air in town was fresh. It was a pleasant day for a walk, the sky was beautifully clear. The colours seemed to palpitate under the sun’s warm fingers. I had half a mind to sit in a café, but the amount I had already drunk put me off. I walked quickly, feeling the movement relax me. I tried to divert my mind from my writing. As I paced down the narrow lanes I played a game that I have played for years. Looking out for a notable person I tried to decide which novel they were from. Almost immediately an old man hurried up the street towards me. He kept to the shadows as though he wished nobody to see him. He looked sixty or more, though perhaps, upon closer inspection, he might have been younger. He had a doleful, careworn face. He presented me with no difficulties at all. This was obviously Balzac’s poor Goriot. In his pocket was some jewel he was hurrying to sell to raise money for his daughters. A man being slowly killed by his love. Love’s monstrous, plump fingers beckoning him on, always on, to his death. I shook my head. I love you with darkness and death.

  The church seemed empty when I came to it. I allowed its cool darkness to swallow me. I crossed myself, fingers following the worn, ancient ritual, finding in it a certain comfort. For so many years we were denied this. I sat on a pew at the back of the church, my head bowed. Though I could not pray, the church in itself, in its silent space, created an atmosphere of prayer. Just to sit there in silence was to be in communion with something greater, even if that greatness was only the purity of the silence and the way that the sunlight cut through the stained glass of the window.

  As I sat with my head bowed I heard footsteps entering the church behind me. A woman’s heels clicked on the flagstones and the church door thudded softly. The clicks stopped momentarily and I heard, not far behind me on my left, the soft rustle of a dress as she genuflected. In the silence, also, the delicate breath of a child as it sighed. The heels clicked past me, and from where I sat, head bowed to the floor, I saw her legs stride by. The muscles in her calves tensed beneath her stockings. I watched as she walked down the aisle to the altar. She sat the small child on the front pew and approached the altar alone. She knelt before it and crossed herself and buried her head in her hands as she prayed.

  I watched her as any might that sat in that silent space, alone. She knelt before the altar for at least five minutes and perhaps the thought that was uppermost in my head was one of wonder at the young child who through this entire period uttered not one sound.

  *

  She turned then and picked up the child. She hugged it to her and kissed it. She did this in such a natural way as if they two were alone in that space, as if she had not noticed my presence. Tucking the child onto her hip she turned back up the aisle. In the dimness of the church it was difficult to discern much of her appearance from the back pew. To make it more difficult she was wearing a collar that rode up high around her face, obscuring it. She was about five feet from me when she stepped into a pool of light that fell from a high window.

  Her face was illuminated with the suddenness of a revelation. My heart froze and my hand flew to my mouth. She heard my stifled groan and noticed me for the first time. There was a look of surprise in her eyes. Our eyes met and her step faltered for the smallest part of a moment. That look was fifty years old. It cut me to the quick. In that moment the madness of my photographic craze became clear.

  She walked quickly past. I remained in the pew, my heart racing. My face burned and my thoughts scattered across the decades. I faintly heard the clicks receding behind me and the soft thud as the door of the church closed behind her. A sudden panic took me then. I stood up and hurried to the large wooden doors. In the darkness I stumbled on some loose matting and fell with a crash, hitting my face. I sat in the darkness, rubbing my head.

  Outside the church she seemed to have disappeared. My eyes darted around searching for her. And then I saw her. She was pushing a colourful pram down towards the corner of Maironio Street. On this corner was the gated entrance to the park. As I watched she turned in through the gates. I set off after her, not hurrying, comfortable in the assumption that she would be there when I arrived.

  Sure enough, turning through the gates, I saw her kneeling beside the sandpit. A small café was open, but deserted. A middle-aged woman swept the dust behind the building. I wandered to the serving hatch and called into the back. There was no immediate response. Eventually I heard the scuff of old shoes on the tiles. The woman appeared indolently behind the serving hatch. For as long as possible she ignored my presence.

  ‘Well?’ she muttered finally.

  ‘Coffee,’ I said.

  She pulled a chipped cup from a pile that was drying and threw it beneath the machine. The machine hissed and steamed as angrily as she did. She slopped the drink onto the counter in front of me. Even though it was nowhere near full, still it managed to spill over the side. She stood there looking at me, not bothering to inform me of the price. I put a Litas note on the counter, which she snatched up. In the Old Town they are politer now. Tourism has forced a change. After all we’re Europeans now, not Russians. It was comforting then to find this woman still serving the coffee as I had always had it served, without the smile, without the pleasantries that mean nothing. I smiled. She grunted. She turned and went back to her sweeping.

  I sat at a dirty table and watched the young woman. She played for a long time. It was difficult to see much of her from behind. Her hair was long and dark, as the Russian girl’s had been. That
did not escape me, of course. I saw the meaning in that. I realised what it was that had made me run out into the street, then, to see her. But with the Russian girl it had only been the hair, the hair and the baby. I had started searching for the wrong thing, then, looking for all those young women with their babies.

  It had taken that flash of her eyes in the light of the church. That momentary vision had sped me back across the years, years full of movement, ambition and energy. Full of writing and arguing and desperate forgetting. And I had forgotten. I had forgotten and continued to forget with the same fury. Continued to bury, to cover over, though I was no longer aware why.

  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.

  Chapter 5

  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 ugl
y 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.

  Chapter 6

  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.