‘There’ll be other work,’ he said, leaning back against the windowsill. He chuckled darkly. ‘There’s plenty of work. Perhaps Kasimov will hire us.’
The daylight had begun to fade and the room was grimly shadowed.
‘We’ll get the money, Misha,’ she said. ‘We’ll get enough.’
‘One thousand dollars? Some hope.’ Misha scratched his scalp with one of his thick fingers. ‘Without a job? Where would we get that kind of money?’
‘We’ll get it,’ Svetlana said. Her fingers sought out the plastic bag that lay near her on the bed. She caressed it. ‘We’ll find a way.’
‘I could try going to England myself,’ Misha said, thoughtfully.
‘With no papers? They wouldn’t let you in. They would send you straight back. You would just waste your money.’
‘There’s nothing here.’
‘We’ll get the money. We will.’
Outside, she felt the shirts that were dancing a slow polka in the breeze. They were still damp. She walked down Stepono to the shop on the corner and bought some bread and a small bag of milk with the last of the money Pumpetiene had given her. Returning she spotted Nikolai playing quietly in the rubble of the old Jewish school.
The building sagged. Its roof had fallen in, and each floor had given way. Thick joists hung like broken ribs. Windows gaped. The walls stood, still, stooped like old soldiers remembering the dead on the ninth of May.
Svetlana crossed the road and paused at the cavity, which had once been a doorway, before the war. She called out to her son. Hearing her voice, Nikolai crooked his head. He was squatted on the heap of fallen floors, sifting through the broken bricks and dust. He scuttled away, into the darkness of a room left standing. Svetlana, fearing for him, stepped through the doorway and clambered across the rubble.
The centre of the building opened out into a large room, sheltered now only by dark clouds. On the walls, the Hebrew script was clearly discernible. In all the years she had lived across the street she had never been inside the shell of the building. She had never associated it with its past. Seeing the writing on the wall, faded but clear, it struck her now. She thought of the metal box in her room. The pitiful treasures.
‘Nikolai,’ she called.
In the darkness she heard scuttling, a small cascade of rubble, the rattle of an old tin can. Silence. She peered in. There was no sign of him. She edged towards the dark doorway, straining her eyes in the growing gloom.
‘Nikolai,’ she whispered.
‘Svyeta!’ a voice called from the street.
Svetlana jumped. She turned, stumbling on the loose building scree. In the gaping doorway, which gave out onto the street, stood Jonas. He grinned. The streetlight above him flickered on, casting a sickly light upon his deformed face. A cold flush of revulsion and fear surged over Svetlana. She stooped and took in her hand a half brick.
‘Stay away from me, Jonas,’ she called, her voice low and threatening.
‘Just saying hello,’ he said, grinning still. He waved, then turned back into the street. She could hear him chuckle as he made his way towards Pylimo. She waited until his footsteps had faded before she stumbled out of the building.
Before gathering the clean shirts into her arms, she washed her hands carefully in a small bowl of water. She brought the shirts into the room. Misha had gone. Moving the television, she carefully laid a clean sheet across the table and ironed the shirts. Folding them precisely, she wrapped them in paper and tied the package with string.
It was only then that she glanced at the bed and realised it had gone. For a moment she could not believe it. Rooted to the spot she stared at the rumpled sheets. At their emptiness. The freezing dread rolled back over her, a vicious wave that nearly toppled her. She stooped and peered into the blackness beneath the bed. She turned on the small lamp and scanned the room. Every surface. She opened cupboards, upended piles of clothes. Stupidly, irrationally, she bent down and rolled back the threadbare rug. Taking a knife, she levered up the floorboard, prising out the rusted nails. She lay on her belly and thrust her hand into the gap beneath the boards. Further, her arm extending into the vacant opening. It was not there. It had gone. She had known the moment she glanced at the bed and saw its absence. She had known then where it was. Who had taken it.
She pressed her forehead onto the rough wooden floorboards and cried. That was how Nikolai found her, when he slid in from the darkness fifteen minutes later.
Chapter 30
A medal, a ring, a handkerchief. Svetlana spread them out around her. Someone’s memories. In her right hand she cradled the bottle of vodka. She lifted it to her lips. Nuzzled it. Drank. Nikolai, in the corner, gazed out into the darkness, vacantly. The bottle fell away from her lips. Empty. She dropped it over the side of the bed onto the floor. The sudden clatter startled Nikolai. He looked up. For a moment he gazed at the bottle spinning on the floorboards. Then his eyes shifted, back to the shadows.
He had been taken. When she woke the next morning her father was not there. She made believe it had been a dream. She could do that then. Under the sheets she lay listening to the silence of the apartment, imagining the hour was early yet. That her father was still sleeping. Elaborately she planned her day, and he was there, in his place. She did not allow the silence to undo her. The absence of his voice, the slop of his slippers, the rubber breaking loose of its stitching again, slapping on the parqueted floor in the corridor. She took only shallow breaths and so did not notice the absence of his morning cigarette, the aroma of his coffee.
When finally she slipped back the sheets, acknowledging the time the clock displayed, and washed and dressed in the unnatural silence and went to the kitchen, still she allowed herself to believe it had been a dream. Her mother sat at the table, eyes rimmed scarlet, lips white and her hair dishevelled. Svetlana said nothing. They avoided each other’s eyes. Carefully she stepped around her mother, breakfasted. A sandwich like her father made her. She packed her books into her school bag and left the apartment, closing the door behind her quietly.
The class was subdued. Eyes flicked up from their books and studied her. She wrote carefully, forming each word with pedantic neatness. Sofia Petrova, the teacher, stood behind her. She felt the teacher’s presence but did not look up. It was only when Sofia Petrova placed a hand upon her shoulder that she felt the bubble of tears rise to the surface and she woke from the dream. The pen shook in her hand and the neat word that she had just written disappeared under a thin blue pool of ink. Her eyes blurred and a pain stabbed at her heart so violently she bent forward. The sob caught in her throat and for a moment she could not breathe. It came out then, a howl, which sent a shiver down the spine of her teacher.
Sofia Petrova took her by the arm and led her from the classroom. In the small office, used by the teachers, she sat that morning, gazing out across the rooftops to the forest. The tips of the pines trembled in the breeze. Blond insubstantial clouds were pulled apart and dissolved against the chilly blue celestial canvas. When Sofia Petrova returned at the lunch hour, she carried a small package. She sat down on one of the low stools beside Svetlana.
‘This is for you,’ she said, and handed her the package, wrapped in brown paper.
Svetlana took it. She folded back the crisp, thick paper and pulled a picture from the package. It was an icon of Christ crucified.
‘You must not say anything to anybody,’ Sofia Petrova said. Svetlana saw the anxious look in her eyes. She understood the trouble her teacher would be in if the Communist authorities discovered she was giving religious icons to her students.
‘I won’t, Sofia Petrova,’ she said.
The teacher stroked her hair. Svetlana gazed down at the image in her hands. The colours were bright and new, the sky blue, Christ glistering gold. It was vivid, cheerful, despite the bloody crimson tears of the pierced Saviour.
‘Svetlana – your name means light,’ Sofia Petrova told her.
Svetlana nodded.
/> ‘You should try to be a light to others, to your mother in these difficult times.’
Svetlana frowned, but she nodded again, out of respect for her teacher. She slipped the image of Christ back into its paper wrapping and hid it in her school bag.
She concealed the glittering icon beneath the neatly folded pile of clothes in the drawer beside her bed. When she knelt beside her bed that night, to pray as her father had taught her, she took it out and placed it before her. Hearing her mother’s footsteps, she tucked it quickly beneath her sheets, interrupting her prayer for her father.
Her mother stood in the doorway.
‘It won’t be long,’ she said. ‘They won’t keep him for long. It will just be a for a few weeks, a month or two at the most.’
Her mother’s voice was brittle with emotion. Svetlana leaned her forehead against the bed. She heard her mother approach behind her. A hand reached out to her nervously, the fingers trembled as they rested on her shoulder. They felt cold through her nightdress. Svetlana stood up quickly, moved away. She slipped in between the sheets, and turned her back on her mother. For some moments her mother lingered, silently, and then she went, turning off the light before she closed the door. By her feet Svetlana could feel the cold hard frame of the icon. She pulled it up and hugged it to her breast.
He did not return. Not after a few weeks, nor after a couple of months. In late October a letter arrived. He had died due to complications arising from undiagnosed ulceration of the stomach. This her mother explained to her, sat at the table in the kitchen where he had breakfasted each morning, and smoked his first cigarette of the day from behind Izvestiya.
She did not look at her mother. Nor did she say anything when her mother’s words had dried up, finally, on her thin lips.
‘Svyeta,’ her mother said. She extended her hand across the table. ‘Svyeta.’
‘It was you,’ she said to her mother, as calmly as she could. ‘It was your fault.’ She looked her mother in the eye. Took pleasure in the pain she saw registering in those little eyes.
Drew strength from the knowledge that she could hurt as well as be hurt.
‘You killed him,’ she said. And turned and left the room. In the woods, the shabby copse of willow and birch and maple that shrank back from the apartment blocks, she wept. Her heart was torn with the pain of her loss and the pleasure of her assault on her mother. Her mother had told. Don’t say a word, her father had told her, and she had not, it was their secret. But her mother had told, twisted with fear, blackmailed by the Party representative at the school, as Svetlana was later to learn.
Svetlana gathered the ring, the medal and the handkerchief together and dropped them back into the tin. She glanced inside the jug beneath the grubby Christ but there was no bottle there.
‘Nikolai,’ she said. She rummaged about, grubbing together some small coins. ‘Go get me a bottle.’
He took the coins in his slim little hand and sloped off into the darkness.
Chapter 31
The vodka saw her through the night. She was sleeping when Ivan returned. In the morning he was tense. He paced back and forth around the room, glancing at the clock. Svetlana watched him from the bed. Her head felt thick and her body ached.
‘Listen,’ Ivan said finally. ‘Jonas was supposed to come. You tell him when he arrives to meet me tonight.’
She nodded. When he had gone she dragged herself up. A pile of washing was piled by the door and she knew it must be done, but could not bring herself to pull the large tin tub in from the courtyard. She boiled some water for tea, then found the unfinished bottle of vodka. She turned off the gas and fell back onto the bed.
They walked around each other, Svetlana and her mother. Wary. Distrustful. At first her mother had reached out a tentative hand, a thin, claw-like hand unused to caresses – to caressing. Svetlana shied away, her lip curling. She never attacked so openly again. But the hostility grew. Her mother, unable to continue her work as a teacher, despite the letter she had been forced to write to the local newspaper denouncing her husband, managed to gain work in a shop.
‘You don’t know,’ her mother sobbed, one evening, worn down by the brutal silence. ‘What do you know? What could you know? You are a child, what do you understand about these things?’
She stood in the centre of the kitchen, her red eyes puckered. Her face was worn, prematurely aged. Deep wrinkles cut away at her pale flesh. The tears distorted her face. Svetlana got up from the table and turned from her. She went out to the door and opened it. The cool breeze blew in her hair. Her mother moaned. A dog barked and she heard the wind surge through the tops of the trees, tossing them violently.
When the vodka was finished she dozed. When she woke again her head thumped and her tongue was swollen and dry. She needed a drink. She eased herself from the bed. Her pockets were empty and when she checked beneath the cracked jug, where sometimes she hid cash, there was none.
The pain pulsed behind her eyes. Head in hands she tried to think. Cautiously, she got up and knelt by the pile of junk in the corner. She hesitated. She lifted the tangle of clothes, the broken toys and the split box, the brick. The envelope was there. Again she hesitated. Pressing her fingers onto her eyes she squeezed back the pain. Fumbling with the envelope, she opened it. She licked her lips, attempting to moisten them, and pulled out a ten-dollar note. She glanced around. Gloom was settling on the room. The corners were lost in shadow. Creasing the note into her hand, she replaced the envelope, pushed back the rubble. She slipped the note into her pocket.
She struggled into an old coat, stepped out into the court yard and pulled the door closed behind her. For a moment she lingered, back against the door, resting on it. In her pocket, she clasped the crisp note tight. She made her way down Stepono and crossed Pylimo into the centre of the Old Town.
The Three Friends was bustling with early evening trade. Svetlana noted the sidelong contemptuous glance of a waitress, as she squeezed in through the doors. The waitress, the same she had previously met in the toilets, elbowed a security guard and pointed her out. The guard nodded but did nothing. Svetlana found an unoccupied table in the corner.
She did not notice Jonas until he stood over her.
‘Svyeta!’ he greeted her expansively. He was drunk. He rested his fingers on the edge of the table to steady himself.
Svetlana stiffened. Beneath the table her fists clenched tight, her nails biting into the palms of her hands.
‘What do you want, Jonas?’
‘Want? Nothing. I have a little bit of business.’ He grinned a lopsided, unpleasant grin and tapped the side of his nose. ‘Feeling lucky?’ he chuckled, pushing her shoulder with his spatula fingers. He winked, throwing his whole face into a grimace. ‘Buy you a drink? Pay me later?’
Svetlana knocked his hand off her shoulder. She clenched her teeth, containing her growing fury.
‘Hey, Svyeta, don’t be like that,’ he said, not in the least deterred. He shifted the blue bag he had been holding from one hand to the other. Svetlana recognised it immediately.
‘You bastard,’ she breathed. ‘You took it.’
He grinned.
‘I want it back, Jonas,’ she said, her voice low, trembling with anger.
He shook his head.
‘You stole it.’ Her voice rose. ‘Give it me.’
Jonas chuckled. He held the package behind his back. Svetlana rose to her feet. She stood at the same height as Jonas. Her face was flushed with anger.
‘It’s mine, Jonas,’ she shouted. ‘I want it.’
A hand grabbed her. She turned to the security guard. With a swift, smooth movement he propelled her towards the door, before she could say a word. At the door stood the waitress, face smeared with contempt.
Outside he let her go. Svetlana turned to kick him. Placing one of his large hands on her chest he held her off. Behind him she saw Jonas slope out of the bar, a twisted grin on his face. She pulled away from the guard and advanced on him. He hu
rried away across the grass.
‘Give it me, you bastard,’ she shouted.
He waved it in the air. ‘What, this?’ he mocked. ‘You want this?’
Breathless, she caught up with him. She reached forward to take the bag, but he hit her clumsily. He had been drinking and had not intended to hit her so hard. He was quite pleased to see her fall to her knees before him, gasping.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, cheerfully, ‘I’ll let you have it.’ Svetlana looked up from her kneeling position.
‘For a price, a small price,’ he said.
‘I haven’t got any money,’ she said. ‘And why should I pay for something you stole from me?’
‘I don’t want money, Svyeta,’ he said.
She observed the excitement in his eyes. The nervous rise and fall of his chest. She considered. For a few minutes’ work she could have it back. With it she could go to Daumantas. And Daumantas… maybe, just maybe, could help.
Jonas stroked her cheek roughly. ‘You can have it, if you want it. Just pay me right.’
She nodded and dragged herself to her feet.
Chapter 32
Jonas leaned heavily against her, causing her to stagger. Drink had slowed him. Keen to be rid of him, Svetlana looped her arm beneath his and half carried him through the dark streets. When he stumbled and fell in the courtyard, he dragged her down, scraping the skin from her knees. He kept the blue bag well away from her, atavistic greed checking his drunken carelessness.
Inside the small room it was mournfully dark. The air was stale and cold. Svetlana did not switch on the light, preferring the darkness to its frail glow.
‘What about a drink?’ Jonas grumbled, settling on the bed.
The Last Girl Page 13
