‘Are you OK?’ she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, her forehead creased with concern.
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
She took my hand and laced her fingers between my own. I felt the trembling recede, felt the muscles in my neck loosen. I sipped the tea slowly. Daiva settled in the bed beside me, close to me so that I could feel the warmth of her body. Beside us, in her wooden crib, the baby was sleeping. The hands moved slowly, cautiously, around the face of the clock. Daiva breathed gently in her sleep. It was only when the sky began to lighten and I heard the first trolley bus click down towards the Old Town that I pulled the sheet up over my head and allowed my eyes to close again.
Chapter 3
The summer of 1987 was hot. I was seventeen years old, nearly eighteen. School was over and the days stretched out languorously, long, sun-baked hours in which I was left to dangle. Waiting. In June I had taken my final school exams and the results had been one ‘satisfactory’ after another, to the distress of Ponia Marija, director of the children’s home where I lived.
I had been lying on my bunk when Kolya poked his head around the door, grinning. He had come directly from her office, his results being no better than mine.
‘She wants to see you,’ he said.
I swung my legs off the bunk and got to my feet with a sigh. I paused for a moment, glancing out of the window at the younger children playing on the grass. Liuba was sitting by the side of the sandpit, in the shade of a large maple, watching her little sister dig a hole in the sand.
‘She’s just had a go at me!’ Kolya chuckled. ‘You’re in for it now.’
I sloped down the corridor, gloomily resigned to a lecture, unable to affect Kolya’s nonchalance. He had been in the children’s home since he was a baby, and looked on Ponia Marija almost as a mother, while I had arrived at the age of six. I had settled in with difficulty, crying constantly for my mother, who had disappeared late one night in an ambulance and never come back.
‘You’re not stupid,’ she said, in her office. I gazed down at the polished wood parquet, avoiding her gaze. ‘It’s not as if you’ve no brains,’ she went on, more to herself now. She got up and looked out of the window at the young children jumping and racing across the parched lawn beneath the trees. The sound of their shouting drifted through the window, and from somewhere the faint sound of radio music: Pugacheva’s old hit ‘Harlequin’.
‘You’re a dreamer,’ Ponia Marija said decisively, as if the label made my lack of success somehow more palatable. She turned from the window. ‘That’s your problem. It always has been, since you were little. You were always sitting in some corner with your head in the clouds.’
She moved closer to me and fondly ran her fingers through my hair. I shrugged.
‘I’ll talk to the director of the Technical School, see if we can get you a place there.’
The director of the Technical School had, however, not been able to find room for me. As the summer wore on, burning its way steadily through the last remaining patches of greenery, I waited for the inevitable conscription papers to arrive. There was no getting out of it; there was nobody to get me a ‘white ticket’. The medical tests at school had found me fit and healthy.
‘It’ll be a laugh,’ Kolya said, grinning. We sat on the wall surrounding the children’s home. Kolya was looking forward to being conscripted. He lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply, wincing, his Asiatic eyes closing to a narrow slit.
He took up an imaginary Kalashnikov and fired it, rat-a-tat-tat, in a swooping semicircle, mowing down the enemy. Liuba giggled. She was curled up in the shadow at Kolya’s feet. Kolya took another drag on the cigarette and passed it down to her. She took it delicately, between two fingers, and affected a pose she must have seen on television. I gazed out across the field that sloped away from the town, towards the lake. It was just possible to hear the screams of the youngsters splashing about in their swimming costumes.
It seemed like a dream that I would be leaving this place and going out into the world. As a man. I imagined coming back to the doors of the children’s home, tanned, my face lined, my uniform neatly pressed, twenty years old. I imagined the way they would greet me, how Ponia Marija would look at me◦– ‘Antanas?’◦– not believing. ‘My God,’ she would cry, ‘my God, is it you? How you have grown, you’re a man!’
‘But what if…?’ Liuba began. Her small face gazed up at Kolya, her eyes wide, her eyelashes tickling her high, broad cheekbones. ‘What if they send you to…?’ Again she faltered.
Kolya took the cigarette from her and kicked his heel against the wall. There was a moment’s nervous silence. ‘I’m not worried,’ he said. ‘They can send me… I hope they send me to Afghanistan. I’ll show those fucking Afghanis.’
He seized his imaginary Kalashnikov again and this time leapt from the wall, the cigarette hanging from his thick lips. He rolled on the ground and turned to us, firing a spray of imaginary bullets. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. Liuba squealed and curled herself into a tight ball, her head disappearing between her knees. I laughed and jumped down on the other side, poking my head over with an imaginary gun of my own. Rat-a-tat-tat. Kolya came rushing at me, a blood-curdling yell splitting the warm summer air, the cigarette falling from his lips and dancing on the dusty earth. He hurdled the wall and fell on me, wrestling me to the ground. We tumbled in the grass, gripping each other hard. Liuba shouted and, feeling a burst of sudden, brilliant energy course through my veins, I pulled Kolya down and held him tight, glorying in the fact that Liuba was hanging over the wall watching me being victorious.
Kolya and I received our conscription papers at the same time. We took the bus to Vilnius together. Liuba sobbed at the station. She threw her arms around Kolya’s neck and would not let go.
‘Look after him,’ she said to me, her eyes and cheeks red from sobbing.
Even Ponia Marija had a tear in her eye. Kolya and I joked, dismissive of all the tears, which we found embarrassing. As the bus jerked forward out of the crowded bay a small jolt of fear clenched my stomach. I turned and waved to the group who had come to see us off, jostled by the crowd who had arrived for market.
The bus pulled out on to the road and slowly picked up speed. Familiar scenes slipped past the dusty window; houses and trees and shops I knew intimately. The marketplace was already busy with stalls and shoppers. pushing each other as they competed for the first bargains of the day. Jeans and T-shirts shipped in from the West, almost new. Oily engine parts. Fresh eggs and, in the corner near the street, a little girl with a grubby face and torn dress selling kittens from a card board box. It was a late summer’s day, bright and warm, and it was impossible to be unhappy or tense for long. The feeling of unease, the ball of fear that lay heavily in the pit of my stomach, soon dissipated.
It was the first time I had been to the capital and Kolya and I gaped in excitement at the size of the city. We jabbed each other, animatedly, pointing out buildings, cars, cafés and bars and, above all, girls.
‘Look at her!’ Kolya cried. ‘Oi!‘ He sat back with a blissful grin on his face. ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful girls in my life.’
‘And what about Liuba?’ I teased him. ‘She told me to look after you and I think by that she meant keeping you in order.’