The Last Girl

by Stephan Collishaw

  ‘I have a message,’ she breathed. ‘A message?’

  ‘From the ghetto. Come. Quick.’ Her attractive face was drawn and hard, the skin taut across her skull. She pulled my arm, turning me from the gates of the ghetto. I ran behind her.

  ‘The girl, your girl, the one you were telling me about. She sent a message through one of our boys.’

  ‘Rachael?’

  ‘Yes, Rachael.’

  We ran through the winding narrow lanes, skirting the outside of the ghetto, keeping clear of the guards, who were jittery and suspicious. Ducking into a narrow alley Sister Martha took my hand and put a finger to her lips. At the end of the alley was a blank wall built crudely from poor quality bricks. A portion of the wall had collapsed and had been boarded up tightly with planks. Barbed wire spiralled the top of the fence.

  The alleyway was dark and it stank of sewage. In the centre of the street was a manhole and Sister Martha pointed to it. ‘From here it is a quick journey into the ghetto. It is the route that our boys take sometimes.’

  ‘We’re going into the ghetto?’ I asked. My heart froze at the thought. To be caught in the ghetto would mean instant death. The place would be swarming with soldiers. Indeed we could hear their menacing voices echoing in the narrow lanes little more than a few houses away. Sister Martha shook her head.

  ‘She will come. She should be here.’ She took a thin, long knife from her pocket and slipped it between two boards. They came apart with remarkable ease. The hole she made was just large enough for someone to slip through. A child perhaps, or a lean, small adult.

  Sister Martha was tense. She glanced at the watch on her wrist. Her eyes flicked around the damp alleyway. ‘There is a regular patrol,’ she said. ’You need to listen.’ She waited a few moments more, though I could see her growing increasingly edgy.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’ve got to give help to the others. You must stay. She will come. I’m sorry.’

  I nodded mutely. She turned to go then halted. She turned back and her eyes brimmed with anxious tears. ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Be very careful.’

  I watched as she dashed down the alleyway. The noise from the ghetto grew louder. Shouting vibrated the air. From somewhere came a scream. A chilling, heart-rending scream. A scream that made my knees tremble with fear. I pressed my forehead against the wall and tried to control my breathing. A vision of Jerzy swinging from the bow of the old oak flickered across my mind. Murdered for helping a Jew.

  And suddenly she was there. Pressed against the wooden boarding. Pulling the loose boards out. The small child was quiet in her arms. Her eyes were wide with fear. Her lip was shivering. My heart leapt; she looked painfully fragile.

  ‘Steponas,’ she said and her voice trembled so much it was hard to make out my name. The yellow star on her coat was dirty and frayed. Her hair was lifeless, dangling down the sides of her face like a spider’s web. Her cheeks were sunken and her skin yellow and tired. My hand reached out to her. She did not move as I touched her cheek. She was deathly cold. I pushed another board from the fence, enlarging the hole she had made.

  As the board clattered to the floor, I heard the heavy click of military boots on the cobbles. The ring of barked commands. Shouting. German accents. Rachael trembled so much she could say nothing more. She stared at me a moment in silent supplication, her discoloured teeth rattling.

  ‘Take me,’ she stammered.

  ‘Take you?’

  Take you where? To the forest where you would be safe. To a molina, a hideaway, beneath the church on Rudnicka where I knew there to be one. To Sister Martha and her convent to find safety with the partisans there. To the village, to my own home hidden in the forests, tucked in the hills. I reached out to her, my own hands shaking as they passed through the fencing.

  The boots sounded loud on the road. They echoed in the narrow alleyway. Her eyes reached out to me. The soldiers turned into the small courtyard behind where Rachael was standing. They peered into the gloom, their guns cocked and ready. Rachael glanced back swiftly over her shoulder. One of the soldiers spotted her and called out, his young voice ringing sharply against the stone walls.

  ‘Take my child. Keep her safe. Keep her safe.’ She thrust the muzzled child at me. It lay quiet in the threadbare blanket it was wrapped in. It was small and emaciated. Like a little sack of potatoes. A little Russian doll.

  The soldier was running, demanding. He raised his gun. I jerked back from the fence.

  ‘Steponas,’ she called.

  My eyes could not meet hers. Those beautiful eyes. I could not look into them. She thrust the child forward, but my shivering hands did not reach out to take it. Jerzy had swung on the tree, when the wind caught him. His thin body hung so awkwardly. So uncomfortable with its neck wrenched out of place. His eyes were open. They popped from their dark, tired sockets.

  ‘Hey, what is going on? Hey, you!’

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  God in heaven. Dear God in heaven. My mind shivered between love and fear. My own teeth rattled. The child was close enough to take. The soldiers clattered up behind her.

  I turned away.

  ‘Stop!’

  I scrambled quickly down the alleyway. She did not cry out or call after me. The soldiers were shouting, cursing. My feet scuffed the cobblestones and in my hurry I stumbled. From behind me I heard a small cry. I did not turn. I picked myself up quickly and lurched on. I did not turn. I ran. I broke out of the gloom into a courtyard. I ran and I did not turn back.

  Chapter 54

  I threw myself down on the bank of the river. It was dark. A thick layer of cloud hid the moon. I wept. A cold wind blew across the river. My heart burned with pain. Framed by the broken boards she held out the little child. Her eyes caught mine and would not free them. I dared not think where she was. Where she was going. I stood on the edge of the river, the current flowing fast and dark beneath me. Oh God, I thought, what have I done? And that was all. I could allow no other thought. I dared let in no other thought.

  When dawn broke timidly over the city spires, my legs trembled still. I pulled myself up from the bank of the river which I had not the courage to throw myself in. I stumbled away from the city, following the serpentine flow of the river out into the forest.

  At night I slept in ditches, by day I wandered, begging food in the villages. Crusts of bread, rotten fruit. I drank milk from goats early, before the farmers rose. The villagers were nervous and suspicious. I moved on quickly.

  My mother cried when she saw me. She fell to her knees and hugged her stinking, dirty son to her. My father hobbled from the shadows. An old man, fearful and broken.

  He held me and I wept.

  Epilogue

  Lithuania Mid 1990s

  Chapter 55

  It was dark when I stopped writing. I laid down my pen and picked up the oil lamp. The air was still and cool. I stood in the doorway leaving the memories behind. It was done. There was a light glowing in the cottage across the grass. Egle and Jolanta would be there, I knew, but I did not feel like going over to them. Instead I blew out the small flame in the lamp and left it by the door of the wood-panelled writing room.

  Passing the cottage I walked through the thick grass to the trees. The moon shone brilliantly from a clear sky. The woods were silver and black. A thin breeze stirred the leaves. I startled a fox and sent it scurrying through the undergrowth, a cub clamped in its jaws. For fifty years I had buried these memories. When the Soviets returned I was conscripted and served for two years in the Red Army. Despite the efforts of the partisans who fought from the forests, Vilnius became the capital of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania.

  The Soviets had no desire to investigate the massacre of the Jews; we were all victims of the fascist oppressor. And so the rubble of the devastated synagogues was slowly cleared. The vacant Jewish homes were reallocated to the needy. Thugs who had gone Jew-hunting for kopecks during the war years wandered the old alleys free and unmo
lested. We all forgot. We all buried the rubble of war. Hid the sores. Turned our attentions to new enemies, new struggles.

  I took a job at the university teaching literature. I wrote poetry in Lithuanian and was celebrated, in a quiet way. My work was not confrontational, it didn’t provoke the authorities, but it was Lithuanian verse, it spoke to the Lithuanian people about themselves, of their history, customs, of their place in the world. And for that I gained a reputation I enjoyed, but did not deserve.

  I moved into the flat on German Street, not far from the university. But despite walking those streets daily, bathing in the Vilija in the summer, smoking in cafes in the winter, I did not think of her. Each day I forgot her. And forgot and forgot. Buried her under a mountain of words, and cigarette butts, casual affairs with students, drinks with friends. Under poems and novels and two plays. Under study and teaching. Under the mountain of deadness that grew round my heart.

  Coming out of the forest, the river shone brilliantly in the moonlight. I sat on the bank and gazed into the rippled light. Bats turned erratically above my head. The breeze carried the sound of drunken singing from the village.

  And then the words stopped flowing. The poems dried up and the novels refused to take shape. I’ve retired, I told them. You’ve heard enough from me; it’s time for the younger generation to make their voice heard. I managed to pen some articles for the newspapers and edited and collated anthologies. The young students stopped reading my work and stopped being impressed. They became more careless of my attentions.

  And as the cracks began to appear in the walls of the Soviet system, the whole building began to grumble and totter. As the plaster fell in dusty clouds and the bricks tumbled, I began to feel my own building tremble.

  Egle found me sitting by the river. She took my arm and led me back through the woods.

  ‘I’ve finished my writing,’ I told her as we pushed through the thin, supple branches of the pines, trying not to lose our way in the darkness. She pressed my arm but said nothing.

  ‘I would like you to read it,’ I said.

  ‘If you would like me to.’

  ‘I think you should know.’

  When we returned to the cottage I gathered the papers from my desk and gave them to Egle. She stowed them on a shelf out of the way of the fingers of little Rasa. It was late and we went to bed. For some time I lay beneath the cool sheets, gazing out at the distant silver disc of moon caught in the apple tree’s mesh of twigs.

  I awoke early and let myself out before either Egle or Jolanta had risen. There was a small chapel on a rise some two kilometres out of the village. I walked across the fields to it. Later I had lunch in the village. In a shallow hollow, beneath a copse of aspen, I slept for an hour. I watched the sun make its slow passage across the sky and the pale ghost of a moon rise from behind the trees.

  I walked in the woods, listening to the sound of the birds and my feet rustling through the long grass. The sun sank and silence settled upon the land. Fearful, I still put off going back to the cottage.

  It was late when finally I turned and made my way home. In the darkness I stumbled slowly along the rutted road, nervous of the reception awaiting me. How would she feel, knowing? She who could have been Rachael’s daughter. She who was saved by a peasant family’s courage – a family with more courage than I. The windows were dark, no lamp burned. I pushed open the kitchen door, relieved and disappointed. Moonlight glittered on the window pane but did little to illuminate the interior. I almost tripped over her.

  She was sitting silently on one of the wooden stools by the kitchen table. On the table in front of her were the papers I had left her to read. I cried out, so startled was I to stumble upon her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  ‘I didn’t see you.’

  ‘I was reading.’

  ‘Without a light?’

  She looked around as though she had only just noticed that it had grown dark.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Earlier.’

  I pulled a stool up to the table and sat down. Taking the cigarettes from my pocket I offered her one. She took the cigarette and we smoked silently for a while, little else visible but the glowing tips of our cigarettes and the moonlight glittering on the glass. The night was warm. She slipped her hand across the table and let it rest gently across my own.

  ‘What can you think of me?’ I said finally.

  She did not answer immediately. She did not remove her hand from mine. She breathed the smoke out in a long, thoughtful exhalation. ‘It should seem closer to me, shouldn’t it? As if this was in some way my story, or rather not my story. How my story could have been.’ She paused, drawing deeply on her cigarette. ‘It doesn’t though. It was a long time ago, Steponas. Many people did things they regret. Many people did things they were ashamed of, even if it didn’t seem that they were.’

  ‘I thought that if I wrote it down, if I faced up to it after all these years, it would make me feel better.’

  ‘And does it?’

  ‘No. It doesn’t. The memory doesn’t bring forgiveness.’

  ‘But it is good to remember, even if there is no hope of forgiveness.’

  She squeezed my hand and brushed it against her soft cheek. Somewhere in the dark house I heard the baby cough and stir.

  It cried out. Jolanta’s voice, heavy with sleep, shushed it. The baby quietened a little and I heard Jolanta singing, her voice soft and low.

  Shluf Meine Kind,

  By dine veegel zitzt dine mame,

  Zingt a leed un vaynt.

  Sleep, my child, my comfort, my pretty,

  By your cradle sits your mama,

  Sings a song and weeps.

  You’ll understand some day most likely,

  What is in her mind.

  Chapter 56

  On that, my last night in the village, I did not sleep. I lay on my bed staring out into the darkness. The earth had shifted, and the long dead had risen. I had looked once more into the eyes of the love I had betrayed. But still, there was so much more left buried. I have not remembered all. Cannot.

  One hundred thousand Jews were killed in the Vilnius region, in those few years. Not everyone was marched from the ghetto to their death in the forest glades at Ponar, or at the Ninth Fort, or in the concentration camps in Estonia. Some were left. The inhabitants of a hospital were left. They closed the doors and locked them. Boarded up the windows, and doused the building in fuel and set it alight. They were left. The doctors, the sick, the elderly, the infirm.

  When the Russians returned to the streets of Vilnius, the remnants of the Jews trickled into the city from the villages, from their molinas, from their forest hideouts, from the holes beneath floors, secret compartments, tunnels beneath the earth, where they had been forced to live like animals. Several thousands; the thin, harried, destitute leftovers of the Jerusalem of the north.

  They established a school on Zigmond and a museum and a memorial to the ones that they had lost. But these were soon to disappear. The communists had no appreciation for a separatist, ethnic counting of the dead. We were all one, neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free. We were all communists.

  I too became a communist. I was cynical about it. When I told Rita of my decision we had a furious row. What would Jerzy have said? she demanded. There was one of two choices, I told her, either you were for the communists or for the Nazis; that was how the world stood. There were other choices, of course, but I was not ready to acknowledge them. Splitting the world by this neat division was the easier route. To be communist was to be against the Fascists, and the Fascists were the root of the evil that had overshadowed our nation. Communism was a balm. It allowed us to forget.

  And we forgot. Nobody spoke of those years, our lips were sealed. We did not tell our children or our grandchildren what we had done in the war. It was a closed book and best left to the communist texts and teachers in the schools who had been trained to say the right thing. We d
id not sit in bars and reminisce. We did not chat idly about those times, over beers. The communist Party arranged the days of remembrance and we knew they served political purposes and were not about remembering what happened in the war. Yes, the communists defended us against our pasts. They allowed us to forget. They allowed us to bury the dead beneath slogans and platitudes, beneath the suffocating layers of lies and deception and the rewriting of history.

  I saw less and less of Rita. At the time I believed that it was I who had became uncomfortable with her; I avoided going to her studio where she was working hard on a triptych of Madonnas. Perhaps though it was she who withdrew. She was preoccupied and her eyes wore a haunted look. One night after drinking a little too much I told her that she needed to put the past behind her, to get out more. She gazed at me intently, sending a shiver down my spine. I flush with shame now, remembering that moment. It was one of the last times I saw her.

  *

  The moon shone through the window of the cottage, and the branches of the apple tree stirred in a light breeze. I did not sleep. I watched through the night, till the new day dawned.

  Chapter 57

  The television tower soared above the forested hills. The boulevards were busy with cars and trolley buses. The road dipped down a long curving slope and the Old Town emerged from behind the grassed banks, shimmering under a haze, south of the river.

  Grigalaviciene was sitting on the wooden bench outside the door to our block. She was sewing. When she saw me she said nothing, just grunted and continued embroidering the pretty little handkerchief. I nodded to her, and smiled. The flat was cold and musty. I dropped my bag inside the door and opened the window. The soft afternoon breeze blew in, stirring the curtains and the photographs pinned to the wall. I boiled some water for a coffee and sat down at my writing table. The Russian girl stared out at me from the photograph.