Svetlana on Sv Stepono had cleaned my shirts. She took the few Litas I offered her, slipping. them into her palm, folding her fingers over the rumpled notes. She was obviously in need of the money but seemed embarrassed to take it from me. She insisted I stay for tea. I sat on the edge of the rumpled bed, which in the daytime served as both sofa and wardrobe for her teenage son’s clothes. The windows of her cramped room were mercifully small. Only one pane of glass was unbroken, the others were covered with plastic bags from one of the new supermarkets in the city. I doubted she shopped there. I had given her one of the bags with my washing in. She had wrapped my washing neatly in brown packing paper tied with string. On the walls of the one room she had hung the three dresses she owned. One was a modern looking black-and-white dress with sequins patterning it. I commented on it.
‘Mrs Pumpetiene gave it me,’ she said in Russian. ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, trying to imagine where she might wear it.
I had known Svetlana for a number of years. Often when I dropped off clothes for her to wash, we sat and talked. She did not speak much about herself but she had once told me her father had been arrested when she was a child by the Communist authorities for propagating Christianity and producing samizdat books. Her parents had been moved to Vilnius from Russia under the Communist government’s policy of mixing ethnic populations.
In the small annex, which served as kitchen-cum-porch, water boiled on the electric ring. Svetlana poured it into a small, old, blackened samovar. She poured me a sweet tea, and sat watching as I drank it. It was too hot to do anything but take the smallest of sips. Svetlana’s cheek was, I noticed, slightly swollen near her left eye. She smelt of vodka.
‘Your husband back?’ I asked.
She touched her cheek self-consciously and nodded. ‘Did you find out where he had been?’
She laughed and shook her head. She swore in Russian. ‘Boozing some place, with some tart, I should think.’
‘And Misha?’
I had met her son on a couple of occasions. He was about eighteen years old, with short, cropped hair. He looked like a thug but was unfailingly polite and spoke good Lithuanian, unlike his mother.
‘He’s working,’ she said brightly. ‘On the building site, five dollars for a ten-hour day. They pay him by the day, but there’s plenty of work, he says. Should be able to keep going there just so long as no government sneak goes snooping around, checking on papers.’
I grunted.
‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘They keep thinking up these new laws. They want to force us to take exams in Lithuanian before they will let us become citizens. They are just trying to punish us.’
‘They don’t know what they’re doing,’ I said. I drained the last of the tea, scalding my throat. I didn’t like talking politics; an old reflex tied my tongue.
‘Thanks for the tea, Svetlana,’ I said, taking my brown paper package.
‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, ‘I had a bit of a drink earlier.’
I smiled. ‘I’m going for mine now,’ I said.
Her eyes lit up. ‘You want one now? I’ve got half a bottle left.’
I shook my head and gently pulled away from the grip she had suddenly taken of the front of my clothing. ‘Another time,’ I said. She released me. I let myself out of the door into the dirty courtyard. The wooden walkway of the second floor sagged dangerously outside her doorway. Looking back, I saw in the dimness that she had already taken out the bottle and was pouring vodka into a glass. She stood with her back to me in front of an image of Christ crucified, askew on the dirty wall.
Closing the door of my apartment I flung the brown-paper package of clean shirts on to a chair in the small hallway. I opened the windows of the flat to let in some air. Then I started to work on my table. Carefully I replaced all the books in their places on the shelves. I took the many saucers and ashtrays, over-spilling their stale, grey ash on to my papers, and emptied them into the small bin in the kitchen. I gathered the scattered sheets of papers into random piles; they would have to be sorted at some other time. I pulled down the numerous photographs and prints that had been collecting on the walls and stowed them in a drawer. Taking a cloth, I wiped the spilt ash and the coffee rings from the table and placed my typewriter squarely in the centre, in front of my chair.
I sat down at my work desk and fed a clean, blank sheet of paper into the typewriter. For a moment I sat looking at the pristine blankness of the page. I pressed my fingers into my eyes. A shudder ran down my spine. With my eyes closed I was able to picture her. I did not see her figure, or the clothes that she wore. I did not see, either, the subtle flush on her cheeks, or the way her hair was tucked back behind her ears. I saw only her eyes. Those eyes that she shared with a woman fifty years ago.
I opened my eyes and typed out, ‘Resurrection’. I scrolled down the page an inch and wrote, ‘In the summer of 1938 I was living in a small village west of Vilnius.’