The Last Girl Read Online Free

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