Once the feeling returned to my left side, and the pain had receded from my neck, I raised myself into a sitting position. The curtains were not drawn and a tentative early morning glow lightened the room. Far away, in the distance, the clouds had broken up a little and there was a glimmer of bright sky. My head throbbed and the clothes I was still dressed in felt soiled. I stripped them off, letting them drop on to the sofa.
The water in the shower was hot and beat against my skin. For a long time I stood there, allowing it to wash over me, warm me, ease the muscles knotted in my shoulders. I held my face up to the surging jets and closed my eyes.
The moment I turned off the shower tap, the telephone rang. Its shrill tone echoed in the empty apartment, jangling, insistent. The sudden burst of noise made my pulse race. I stood riveted in the bathtub, the water trickling around my feet, listening to the sound. Looking down at my hands, I noticed they were shaking.
Reproving myself, I stepped out of the bath. Taking a towel from the hot-water pipe, I rubbed myself down quickly. It would be Daiva, I thought, and a sudden small bubble of hope rose from deep within me and burst through the surface of my consciousness. I opened the door and hurried across the hallway to the telephone, my bare feet leaving damp prints on the wooden tiles. As I put my hand on the heavy black receiver it fell silent. I knew, even before I had put it to my ear, that I had missed her.
I dropped the receiver back on to its cradle and squatted by the small table, chin resting on my knees, watching the telephone, willing it to ring again. I sat until the water dried on my skin, and a draught from beneath the door had chilled my feet. The telephone remained stubbornly silent.
It had been early February, seven years before, when the snow lay thick upon the city, that Daiva had first come to see me in the workshop Vassily and I owned. I took off my mask and unplugged the lathe.
‘Were you looking for Vassily?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, avoiding my gaze. ‘I was looking for you.’
‘Perhaps we can go out for a little lunch, then,’ I suggested. ‘I know a place not far from here.’
‘Fine.’
The café was busy. As we sat by the window, our knees touched beneath the table and I felt the warmth of her legs against my own. Her blonde hair fell across her face as she looked down the menu and she twisted it between her thin fingers. Her nails were painted a deep pink. Her features were finely shaped, delicate. She smiled nervously when she looked up, catching me examining her.
‘The chanahi is good,’ I said.
The clay pots of chanahi were still sizzling when the waiter placed them before us. When we opened the lids the aroma was released in a spicy cloud◦– stewed mutton, potatoes, onion and tomatoes. For some moments we ate in silence. I noticed the smoothness of her skin, the cherry-red fullness of her lips and the deep shadow at the base of her throat.
‘Shouldn’t you be at university?’ I asked to break the silence.
‘Yes,’ she said, not looking up. She scraped her fork against the clay pot, lifting off the crisp potato baked to the inside of the rim.
‘You decided to take the day off?’
‘Yes.’
For a few moments longer I examined her, unsure of her feelings. When we left the café it was snowing; tiny, powdery, paper-light flakes that danced on the breeze. Blue sky edged the broken clouds and the sun glittered on the rooftops. A network of narrow paths had been trodden in the snow between the low trees. The fine snow fell around her, glistening in a stray beam of sunlight, so that she was encircled by a halo of golden flakes. She turned on the track in front of me, frozen clouds of breath suspended in the sun. I stopped a few paces from her and gazed at her. She looked like an angel.
I came to her and she did not move away. Her breath was warm against my skin. Her eyes closed as she sank against me. Her lips and tongue tasted of the spices of the chanahi. Sharp. Rich.
We hurried through the snow, slipping down a steep bank on to the street, tumbling and falling in the thick snow, not letting go of each other. My icy fingers fumbled with the lock on the back door of the workshop. Inside, I pulled a rolled-up mattress from the cupboard and took a couple of blankets and laid them on top of the large tiled stove. Daiva laughed, opening the door of the stove to check it was not burning too high.
She gasped when my fingers worked through her clothes to find her skin, rough with goose bumps.
‘You’re freezing!’
She slipped her hand beneath my jumper, her icy fingers dancing across my stomach, making me shiver, so that I shouted too, bellowed into the air, shaking the dust-laden cobwebs on the ceiling above us. She looked fragile in the wan light reflected off the snow outside the window, inverting the shadows on her body.
The heat rose from the stove beneath us, warming us, relaxing muscles tautened by the cold. I felt her hands, the tickle of her lips gliding across my chest, the soft brush of her hair against my throat.
‘At first◦– when you came to Vilnius◦– you didn’t like me,’ she said later.
She hitched herself up, cradling her chin in the palm of her hand, and traced lines across my face with the tip of a finger. I closed my eyes and pictured her as I had first seen her, in Tanya’s apartment, the evening Vassily and I had arrived in the city.
‘You were pretty sharp with me,’ I said. ‘I think I was scared of you.’
‘Was I sharp with you?’
She leant down and brushed my skin with her lips. I pulled her close, letting her weight press me down into the thin, warm mattress.
‘I was nervous,’ she said. ‘I thought you would laugh at me. I felt like a young girl with you, as if I knew nothing.’
‘I like that,’ I told her, ‘that you ask nothing. I feel I can forget with you.’
The draught from beneath the door began to chill me and I got up from beside the telephone.
Once I had dressed, I searched through the cupboards to find some breakfast. Daiva had bought food, presumably for me to survive on, as her departure seemed to have been planned further ahead than I realised. Opening the wardrobe in the bedroom, earlier I had found that she had taken a suitcase and many of her clothes. I sliced some smoked sausage and cut a thick slice of bread, boiled the kettle and made a strong coffee. On the window sill was an old radio and I turned it on, tuning it to the Polish station.
Before leaving the apartment, I stopped by the telephone. I picked up the receiver, and was about to dial Daiva’s mother’s number, but hesitated. Though it seemed the most likely place for Daiva to have gone, there was still a possibility she hadn’t, and then I would be forced to explain myself to her mother. And anyway, I thought, what was I going to say? What was there left to say that had not already been said? I replaced the receiver, pulled on my jacket and left the apartment.
The workshop was on the edge of the Old Town. Mainly we sold the jewellery we produced in the cramped room behind the shopfront. Several other craftsmen sold their goods through us too. The door was locked when I got there and already, after an absence of only a few days, the place looked dusty and neglected. I shut the door behind me, keeping the ‘closed’ sign in place in the window. The shop felt cold and damp. I switched on the light and lit a small paraffin heater in the back to take the chill from the air.