The Last Girl Read Online Free Page A

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 ugly 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