The Last Girl Read Online Free Page B

morning it was still raining and my cold was worse.

Chapter 6
    On Thursday morning I woke early and cleared out the bottles from beneath my bed. I washed and shaved, as well as I could, considering the shaking of my hands, and chose from my wardrobe the cleanest of the shirts. The rest I packed into a bag to take to Svetlana on Sv Stepono who does my washing. I emptied the ashtrays into a small plastic bin and sat by the window waiting for the dustmen to arrive. At ten thirty I heard the long vulgar blast of their horn and carried the rubbish down the stairs with my neighbours. Grigalaviciene nodded at me sternly; she could smell the cheap brandy from the distance of a floor. I smiled at her. She turned her back and huffed her tidy rubbish bin down to the lorry.
    When I had deposited my bag of clothes with my woman on Sv Stepono I caught the number thirteen trolley bus from Gedimino and took the ride up to Karoliniskiu. The weather had improved a little.The rain had held off since the previous afternoon, and the clouds flew high and unthreatening. A wind blew, catching paper bags and tossing them into the air, taking the trees and giving them a good shake. At the junction with Seliu, as the road turned up the long hill between the green banks of grass, I was tempted to get off the trolley bus, to nip this madness in the bud and go take a stroll in Vingis park. A walk under those large old trees would do me more good, I thought. In years past they had helped me with my writing. Often I used to catch the trolley bus out and walk there. But I stayed on, to the top of the road, and got off where she had.
    I had not gone there following any kind of a plan. I did not know which was her apartment, and even if I did I could hardly just go and knock on her door. Instead I sat on a bench opposite the apartment doors, having little hope that she might appear. My bench was on the edge of the playground and a woman with her grandchild soon joined me. She waved the child away. Go and play, she told the child. Go and swing. The child wandered off to the broken play things; a roundabout that swung in a loop taking you from ground-scrapingly low to high in the air in its circle, a swing that sagged dangerously in its seat and a bare metal rocket climbing frame mocking Soviet dreams in its austere dilapidation.
    I watched the child kicking at the damp soil. The grandmother sat on her bench for a while looking around for some one to talk to. When I avoided her eye she grew bored and shouted for the child to come. I stayed there, watching the figures emerging from the doorways. The first drops of rain had started falling when I finally moved.
    I walked past her doorway, then, impulsively, turned back and entered. I called the lift. I travelled up to the top floor and stepped out. Four doors stared back at me blankly, anonymously. Was she behind one of them? There was a sound. A door handle and a man’s cough. I quickly stepped back into the lift and descended.
    On the way home I bought a bottle of cranberry spirits to help the cold. I bought the paper and at the small stall opposite the cathedral that sells religious items I picked up a thin book on icons. In my apartment I laid the book open on my desk, running my thumb down the centre of the spine, flattening it open on the page of a Madonna and child I had not seen before. I took a razor and sliced the picture as neatly as I could from its spine. I stuck it to the wall with my photographs and, sitting back with my glass of Bobeline, compared them.
    This Madonna, I thought, was not sad. She was melancholic, but she was not sad. Did that painter not feel the pain of knowing your child is lost? Did he not want to vulgarise his goddess with such emotions as those that Marija felt as she gazed at her baby and knew with God-given knowledge that he had to die? That fearful knowledge I knew from her eyes. Knew and yet was able to turn from. I say that, and yet each night those eyes are upon me