‘My mother survived the war in a village,’ Egle said. ‘She was the only member of the family who did, as far as I know. The story is vague; I remember the details only from my childhood, long ago. I can tell them now, but who is interested to listen?’
Jolanta leaned against her in the dim light. Her eyes had closed and I could tell from the gentle and regular rise and fall of her chest that she was sleeping. Egle stroked her hair.
‘Tell me,’ I said simply, for it seemed that at last the ghost had risen and I must sit and listen.
‘We lived in Vilnius before the war. When the Nazis came, my father went to join the Soviet forces, to fight against them. ‘My mother was pregnant with me, though she did not know it. My father, you see, was not to know he had a daughter. My mother moved around. I was born in a village close to the Latvian border, where she had found refuge. It was not safe, but safer than in the city. A family there sheltered us. My mother pretended to be Polish. God was gracious, the Angel of Death passed over the small cottage we lived in.
‘At the end of the war, who could believe that things were safe? My mother lived on in the village and married the son of the family who had sheltered us. They were poor farmers. She kept to her story of being Polish. She invented a whole life for herself. She was from Krakow, an educated family that had been destroyed by the Nazis for their patriotic behaviour. They changed my name to Egle. That was how I grew up, a proud Polish girl, the daughter of an impoverished farming hqme. Only at night, when I was small, she sang that song to me as I went to sleep.
‘Vividly I recall her sitting by my small bed in the corner of the room, leaning over me, her long hair falling across her face. Tears misted her eyes as she sang, her voice sweet, low, full of longing and of loss. I didn’t know the story then, of course, and I didn’t understand why she cried. I did not understand the words of the song, but learnt them anyway, as a child will, from her singing.
‘She died when I was ten. I grew up, then, with no one left who knew of my past. Anyone who could remember died or forgot as the years went by. Nobody cared, any way, about the past of such a little girl. I was thin, a ragged waif.
‘But by the age of ten, I knew. My mother, as she lay dying, told me it all, forcing me to swear to secrecy. And why would I tell? What kind of a thing was that to tell? I preferred the story of the Gentile life in Krakow, the stories of the brave resistance of my noble grandfather and invented father. That was a story of heroism and pride and I had no intention of giving it up in favour of the Jewish tale of poverty and persecution.
‘But I was a lonely child. At night I cried myself to sleep, in the small cottage, singing that song. If ever my father heard me singing it he would curse and kick me and tell me to sing a good Lithuanian song. So I sang Lithuanian songs to him and that, alone, in my bed.
‘I was a good student, and did well at school. But when I was sixteen, I met a young man. He was a good man. A real Soviet hero. He was tall and well built, blond with blue eyes. He would walk down the main street with a shovel tossed carelessly over his shoulder whistling communist working tunes. He would call the other young men out into the fields to work; the young women went too. We worked hard. For the revolution, he said. We girls worked for him. He was our idol, our god, and we followed him everywhere he went.
‘We got married, but for many years we could have no children. Arunas was sad about this. He was a good husband; God could not have given me a better one. He did not drink and he didn’t hang around with the women. He worked hard and built this house for us. And then we had a child, a daughter, a gift from God.’
She stroked her daughter again, sleeping gently beside her. A beautiful smile lit the soft curves of her face and her bobbed hair glistened in the dim light of the lamp.
‘And I remembered the song. For many years I had forgot ten it. It lay in some dusty drawer of my mind, locked away, during the happiness of my married life. I was afraid, at first, to sing it in front of my husband and would only sing it when he was out in the fields and the two of us, Jolanta and I, were alone. But one day he heard it. He told me to sing it to him. He knew, of course, but said nothing. A beautiful song was all he said. A beautiful song, and he looked at me with his pure blue eyes and looked at his dark daughter so like her mother and understood.
‘One day he was out in the fields. They came home and told me. They stood by the door holding their caps in their hands not daring to lift their faces. I ran out to the fields but he was dead. We carried him back home. I did not get to say goodbye.’
The silence of the night descended on the cottage and I was too afraid to break it. We sat looking at each other. Jolanta stirred and half opened her eyes.
‘Sing the song,’ I asked her quietly.
She sang in a soft, low voice.
Sleep, my child, my comfort, my pretty,
Sleep my darling
Sleep my life, my only kaddish.
Lu link Ju Ju
Sleep my life, my only kaddish.
Later Egle pulled a blanket over her daughter and we left her to sleep on the couch. She showed me my room and we said goodnight. As I lay waiting for sleep to take me, I sang the song to myself. Did she sing that song to her child? She too could have escaped to a village and her child would have grown up there, a skinny waif. She would have grown up beautiful.
The ghosts floated around my bed and I sang the song to lull them to sleep with me.
When I awoke in the morning, I was disorientated by the silence. I lay listening to the song of the birds and the absence of traffic. Of people. The sun shone through the net curtains warming me. After a while I heard Jolanta’s voice and then that of her mother. The baby shouted and burbled happily. It was good to lie there listening to their voices. Jolanta, smiling, brought me a cup of tea.
‘Mama is happy this morning,’ she said.
I simply smiled and thanked her for the drink. She left grinning, pleased with herself. I heard her taking the baby and then calling to her mother that she was going into the village. I got up, and dressed, and looked out of the windows across the green fields behind the house. Egle poked her head through the doorway and called me to breakfast.
I wandered around the village that day, hoping its peace would calm my taut nerves. Jolanta had said nothing about the manuscript, but I knew I was going to have to broach the subject. As the hours passed so grew my dread of shattering the calm composure that Jolanta had managed to achieve. That evening, before sunset, I asked her to walk down to the river with me. She lifted the baby and carried it with her. It wrestled in her arms. On the gentle slope of the river she allowed Rasa to wander around, keeping a close eye on her. The fear that had afflicted me couple of days previously, when I had made my slow way to the restaurant, returned, constricting my chest so that my breath came in short, shallow gasps. Jolanta looked at me, concerned.
‘We walked too quickly,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m fine.’
I explained to her then what had happened to the manuscript. She listened carefully. I told her of how I had gone to meet her at the restaurant, so fearful, and then come away even more fearful when she had not arrived. I told her of Jonas and his deal over the manuscript.
‘I will get it back, I assure you,’ I said, my face flushing with shame that I had not just given Jonas the one hundred dollars. ‘As soon as I get back to Vilnius I will get it from him.’
At first she did not respond. She watched her daughter playing with some sticks. Finally she turned to me. ‘Well,’ she said, and then she seemed at a loss what to say next.
Again I started to apologise and to reassure her that I would get it back, but she laid her hand on my arm.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I am sure you will. It’s my fault. I should never have imposed on you like that in the first place.’ She pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead. ‘I don’t know, all this with Kestutis, it’s been crazy. It’s so good to come out here and forget about it.’
Rasa crawled up to her and she took the baby into her arms and clasped her tight against her breast. Her eyes screwed up and a tear slipped down across her cheek. Despite her words I could see how concerned she was. Earlier in the evening I had heard her speaking on the telephone, her voice soft, pleading, as her husband’s tirade drifted tinnily from the telephone receiver, audible across the room.
‘It was the only copy of the manuscript?’ I asked, hopelessly.
She nodded glumly.
‘I will get it,’ I said, her misery piercing my heart. I reached over and stroked her hair. She leaned back against me and I hugged her. ‘The thing is, from what I read I was very impressed,’ I said. ‘I was moved by it.’
‘Really?’ she said.
‘Absolutely. There was a passage about him gripping a letter, fearing he was lost. It was good writing.’
She smiled and wiped the tear from her cheek. The sun had set and shadows were creeping up from the river. The air had grown chill.
‘We should get back,’ she said.