The Last Girl

by Stephan Collishaw

  ‘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 doorjamb. 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 alleyway 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?

  Chapter 43

  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 defian
tly 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.

  Changing in one of the booths, I sat on the grass watching the rowers work their way up and down the Wilja, which glittered in the sunlight. I could not see Rachael or her husband, Ira. To escape the sun, I took a walk in the pine forest. The air was fine and fresh. As I made my way back to the road I noticed the scarlet Tatra parked in the shade.

  It was a lovely car. The hood was folded back and I could smell the leather of the seats. A silk scarf lay on the passenger seat. Hers. Furtively I glanced around and picked it up. The silk was cool and fine when I held it to my lips, like the smell of the pine forest. Faintly there was the scent of the soap she used. I closed my eyes and drew in a deep breath.

  ‘Hello?’ a man’s voice called in Polish.

  I whirled around to find him close behind me, tense in his pale flannels. He was shorter than I, but stronger, evidently fitter.

  ‘Steponas.’

  She was a step behind him. She was pale. Her husband turned to her, an enquiring look on his face. ‘You know him?’

  She did not answer immediately. Her eyes were on the silk scarfl held in my hand still, suspended close to my lips. Slowly the dark eyes travelled up to my face and I felt them searching it. I felt weak with shame. Her deep, immeasurably deep, eyes came to rest upon my own. Silently she held my gaze.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know him.’

  I flushed scarlet, to match the smart sports car. I turned and dropped the scarf back onto the pale leather seat of the car.

  ‘Steponas Daumantas,’ Rachael said to her husband. She seemed to have recovered. ‘We’re from the same village. We went to school together.’

  lra’s face relaxed. A friendly smile spread across it. ‘No kidding? Really? Hey, that’s great.’ He was about thirty-five years of age, a compact man. His hair was cut short and his skin glowed healthily. He proffered a hand. He wore a large golden ring. His handshake was firm, manly and warm.

  ‘Ira Troiman,’ he said. ‘Proud husband of your school friend.’ He spoke with a slight American accent, an affectation popular then among the fashionable businessmen who regularly travelled abroad. He gathered Rachael into his large brown arm. She smiled faintly, her eyes not leaving my own. I nodded in acknowledgement.

  ‘Well, what a coincidence to find you here by my car,’ Ira continued gaily. ‘She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’ He slapped the side of the car affectionately.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, she is.’

  Chapter 44

  ‘Why don’t you join us,’ Ira said. ‘We were just going for drinks. It’ll give you two old buddies a chance to catch up.’

  I shook my head quickly. Though it had been my very intention to somehow insinuate myself into their company, now the opportunity had arisen I felt ashamed; the thought of going for drinks horrified me. Ira opened the door of the Tatra for Rachael. He held it while she lingered.

  ‘Come on,’ she said quietly.

  Mutely, I got into the car, feeling my legs sticky against the soft cream leather of the seats.

  We drove to a quiet restaurant on Giedyminowska, not far from my aunt’s. It was early evening, the city was quiet but for the small groups of young communists exultantly wandering the streets. Ira laughed at them good-humouredly. I considered telling him Fisk’s views on his capitalist activities, but did not. At the restaurant Ira drank German schnapps and ordered champagne for his wife.

  ‘What are you drinking, Steponas?’

  Since arriving in Wilno I had drunk little other than cheap vodka, but I indicated that I would join him with the schnapps. He raised his glass and we drank a toast to old friends. I struggled to keep the i
rony from my voice. Rachael sat in silence as Ira chatted, regaling me with his opinions on the Soviet occupation. We had not been sitting long before Ira glanced at the smart watch on his thick wrist. He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Got to be going,’ he said. ‘I’m running late.’ He stood up and leant over to Rachael. ‘Why don’t you stay and chat?’ he said, kissing her briefly on the cheek. He shook my hand warmly, looking me in the eye. ‘Nice meeting you, Steponas.’

  As he passed I smelt the subtle scent of his aftershave. Rachael studiously inspected the champagne she had scarcely tasted.

  ‘I should go too,’ I said. The schnapps was sweet and I found it quite undrinkable after the samogonas.

  I had risen from my chair before she spoke.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, not looking up from the champagne.

  ‘What do you have to be sorry for?’ I replied, belligerently.

  ‘Just sorry,’ she said. She looked up. ‘Sorry for this whole mess.’

  ‘It doesn’t look such a mess for you.’

  ‘You think you are the only one to feel anything?’ she said. ‘Do you think that I never felt anything? What was I supposed to do, would you like to tell me that? Would you like to tell me why what I did was so wrong?’

  ‘I loved you,’ I said petulantly.

  ‘And I loved you, Steponas. But we were children. We were playing. This is not a world for children. I don’t know whether you noticed but there are soldiers in the streets. They are Russians and God knows what that will mean for us, but, thank God, at least they are not the Germans. And still, if it were not for the war, this is Poland. I am a Jew and you are not. What are you asking for? I don’t understand.’

  ‘How can you be so cold?’ I dropped back into my chair, opposite her. ‘You reason about love and then just cut it from your heart?’

  ‘Ach, you are a poet! What is reason to you? But do you remember where your poetry led, Steponas? Reason is important. Maybe for you there is more room for risk, but I do not want to sit up at nights cradling my children, fearing for what might happen to them. I fear life without reason. I fear your poetry and all you poets. You are dangerous.’