Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  The Petronis family had thought of withdrawing behind the German lines in the summer of 1944, but what would life be like in Germany? They would be refugee foreigners in a land under attack from two sides. Besides, staying might not be all that bad even if the Reds did come back. What did a farmer have to fear? Petronis owned a modest fifty acres of land, and a farmer was only designated an enemy of the people, a “bourgeois,” at seventy-five acres. He was safe as long as the category was not enlarged to include him.

  He was uneasy about that. The Reds had coined a new term: “debourgeoisation,” an excellent bureaucratic word for expropriation. A tailor could not have thought of a better term, because it was like a bolt of cloth that could be cut to fit any size. During the first Red occupation it had been applied to large landowners, policemen, government ministers, deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers, people with relatives abroad, anti-government activists, school principals, and even the one-legged jazz saxophonist in the Metropolis Café in Kaunas, along with his wife, a hairstylist. One could not be sure the category wouldn’t be adjusted again.

  It was the end of July and very hot, but the windows were shuttered, an oil lamp on the table casting poor light and adding to the heat. The family was eating lunch at a long table. Above the thatched roof of the wooden farmhouse, German and Russian mortars crossed paths. Occasionally the distant sound of tank rounds was heard, as well as automatic fire. There was nothing to do but wait it out, so Petronis senior dipped his spoon into his bowl of beet greens soup and the others followed.

  Then they waited throughout the day, old man Petronis anxious in case the shelling lasted so long it kept him from milking his cows. Late that afternoon, the firing moved west.

  About an hour before sunset, the Jewish Pine Forest dune began to move, with wave upon wave of Red Army soldiers coming over the hill. Hundreds of them came on, their faces tired and dirty, their uniforms torn.

  They were hungry because the front lines travelled without field kitchens, so the men had to live off the land. Father Petronis sent his daughter inside and the three brothers brought out a table on which they cut up slices of bread and laid out pieces of sausage as well as poured out all the milk they had into jugs. About twenty of the soldiers ate there while others fanned out to neighbouring farms, but they did not stay long because they had to rejoin their units before nightfall.

  The first day had ended fairly well. The soldiers were just young men after all, tired and hungry. Maybe they were afraid too. Maybe things would turn out all right.

  The German lines stiffened near the East Prussian border, so the lack of Red Army field kitchens became a burden to the local farmers, especially those who lived near the main roads and whose farms were easily accessible. The Red Army rode about in Studebakers, Lend-Lease gifts from the Americans.

  Red soldiers believed that food, at the very least, was their due. Declaring themselves liberators and guests, they could show up at any time in groups of four or six. If food was a soldier’s due, liquor was his reward, and these same soldiers appeared with farm goods, guns, grenades, saddles and even horses, which they traded happily for buckets of home-distilled samagonas. A farmer’s joy at a good trade could be marred, though, when another farmer from a few kilometres away recognized his saddle or his horse and demanded its return.

  Once drunk, the soldiers reflected on the unfairness of their own poverty and that of their families back on the collective farms, and began to steal from the farmers at night. The barking of the farm dogs did not deter them; the soldiers shot barking dogs. They emptied storerooms of food and took farm implements. The people of the countryside no longer wore wristwatches. It was also dangerous to be thoroughly cleaned out by the thieves, because subsequent thieves became angry if they wasted a walk up a farm lane only to find there was nothing left to take.

  More worrisome than theft was the Red Army’s hunger for labour and recruits. Trenches needed to be dug in case the German army counterattacked. And the front was a maw that devoured young men who were thrown at it without arms or training. Since Lithuania had been occupied by the Reds before the German occupation, Lithuanians were deemed Soviet citizens, whose duty it was to fight the Germans. Any who chose not to fight were deemed fascists themselves.

  And so the Petronis boys, Lukas, Vincentas and Algis, went to their uncle’s farm a dozen kilometres away, where the locals did not know them well, and helped to bring in the August rye. The young Petronis men passed for labourers, and whenever Russian cars or press gangs appeared, the women warned them and they hid in the forest or in a pit under the barn floor.

  Lukas and Vincentas found out that university students and seminarians were being given draft exemptions, and so they left their younger brother behind and made their way home. They packed bags with food and clothes to go to Kaunas to have their passports stamped with military exemptions so they could continue their studies.

  The Lithuanian capital had been moved to Vilnius, so many of the buildings in Kaunas were abandoned and some were in ruins. Even so, the streets were full of soldiers and trucks as well as country folk, often women in head scarves, scavenging for lamp oil or aspirin or any other items that were no longer available in the countryside. The Jewish houses were empty and long since sacked.

  Lukas was relieved to be back in Kaunas, relieved to get back to his life. He wanted to get on with things now, to live in a city, to read books and talk in cafés, to see movies and listen to the radio. Above all, he was tired of armies and wars, which had already eaten up enough of his twenty-three years. He was slight and quick, and he liked to laugh. He had been an excellent shot as a hunter and a very good explorer of the Jewish Pine Forest as a boy, but he intended to study literature and teach in a high school, or even the university if he was lucky. Vincentas was not that different from him, and they looked something alike, although Vincentas wore glasses. But the younger brother was otherworldly; he adored vestments and incense and had practically taught himself Latin before he even started high school. Only their brother Algis preferred life in the countryside.

  Having left Vincentas at the nearby seminary, Lukas went to the main office of the university, which hummed with phone calls, secretaries carrying sheaves of papers, and some of the younger professors, huddled in committees, discussing their various tasks to get the university up and running in some fashion for the fall semester. Kuolys, the long-haired Latin professor who had terrorized Lukas in his first year, now looked up, smiled and came over.

  “Just in time,” said Kuolys. “Do you have your exemption?”

  Lukas held out his hand.

  Kuolys took his hand and shook it distractedly.“Put your bag in the corner there and go out to check on the library archive for me, will you? I’m on the housing committee and nobody has a place to stay. But I’m worried about the Latin books I’ve stored in the stacks. Who else would care?”

  “I don’t have anyplace to stay either,” said Lukas.

  “Then come back here after you’re done and camp out with the rest of us. Plenty of us are at loose ends. Is everyone in the family all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Vincentas back at the seminary?”

  “I just dropped him off there.”

  “You might tell your brother that I could put him in an advanced Classics class here, if he wants. It might be safer. The new regime doesn’t like priests much.”

  “He always wanted to be a priest. He’s like a bird who only knows one song.”

  “We’ll all have to learn to sing new songs now. Get to that archive. I have someone to help you.”

  Rimantas was a student as well, a year younger than Lukas and a year behind in his studies. Rimantas was reedy and tall and walked with a slight stoop, as if to minimize his height. He had a pale, scholar’s face, and the habit of chewing on the inside of his right cheek, which gave him a twisted, comical look.

  “I’m glad they’re sending us to the archive,” said Rimantas.

 
“Why?”

  “We’re literature students, aren’t we? I haven’t read anything decent for months. Maybe we can borrow something. Have you read anything good recently?”

  “Who’s had time to read? I had to help with the farm work over the summer, and spent my nights hiding from the Reds.”

  Rimantas nodded skeptically. “True enough. But I can’t stand doing nothing with my mind. I waited for two hours for my turn with the officer who stamped our exemption papers. I was dying of boredom. No newspapers in the waiting room. Everyone a stranger. I tried to compose poetry in my head because I didn’t have any paper to write on, but I couldn’t even settle on a single couplet.”

  For all the bustle at the university, Rimantas seemed lethargic. Having him around was like dragging a reluctant, talkative donkey. “Poets need to suffer,” said Lukas.

  “Yes. They say the best always need to suffer. Is that a homespun shirt I see beneath your tie?”

  Lukas reddened. Homespun was a sign of country folk, looked down upon by the sophisticates. Lukas had been proud of his homespun shirt, made from flax grown in the family fields, but it would do no good to defend farm values against Rimantas.

  Although Lukas had been attracted to the idea of café society in the city, he found Rimantas a little too artistic for his taste. Rimantas had stood out in university by wearing dramatic clothing in his first year, a long black raincoat, too hot in the fall and too thin for the winter. For a while he’d even worn a beret. His mother was a minor opera singer, so Lukas forgave him his pretensions, believing that a child raised in cafés was bound to be different from one raised on a farm.

  A collapsed arch blocked the entranceway to the courtyard in which the library archive lay. The front of the building had been either shelled during an artillery barrage or blown up by the retreating Germans, although it was unclear what military significance it might have had. The young men searched through the alleys before they found another way into the courtyard. Cigarette butts, papers and tins lay on the cobblestones, and the door to the archive was locked. But the bars on the window to the right had been torn off and the glass was broken. Lukas reached inside, opened the window latch, and the two clambered in.

  Someone had been in before them. Hundreds of books lay open on the floor, some of them burned and some of them ripped. To see such destruction of expensive books troubled Lukas more than the sight of the ruined buildings in the streets.

  The archive was uncannily quiet. Dust motes rose into the air and hung there in the shafts of light that came through the small windows. All of Kaunas was dusty from the earth churned up by military vehicles, from mortar and stone and soot particles that rose up after explosions and hung in the air for days and weeks at a time before settling on the city, ready to be stirred again.

  Lukas and Rimantas talked quietly to one another, as if a stern librarian might appear at any time, and yet they were possessed by an unexpected sense of adventure, never having had such access to so many books before. If they had had food, they could have settled down in those rooms and read until Germany surrendered.

  A translation of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine lay open on a table as if someone had been interrupted while reading it. Glancing at the Wells book, Lukas reflected that the world had been turned inside out: the Morlocks had come up from the underground to rule, and now the Eloi would need to burrow down to escape their slaughter. Either that or find a little of the Morlock in themselves.

  Outside, a sudden roar rose up and a motorcycle rattled the windows before echoing down the narrow street.

  When the two students made their way deeper into the stacks, they found a long study table heaped with files. They were the students’ records, and among them they found their own files.

  “Listen to this,” said Rimantas, reading about himself. “‘Keeps irregular hours. Missed final Latin exam—claimed to be ill. Has a knack for writing satiric verse.’”

  “Sounds about right,” said Lukas.

  “Yes, but listen to the rest: ‘Editor of the second-year student paper. Writes spoofs of Stalin.’” Rimantas looked up at him.

  “Well, did you?”

  “Of course I did! How can you not make fun of Stalin? That moustache and that pipe! Ridiculous. His clothes are a fright, and yet he’s the leader of a country—he could wear anything he wants. What does your file say?”

  “‘Member of Catholic Youth League in high school.’”

  “A death sentence,” hissed Rimantas. “This is all subversive activity.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “But it will do you no good. ‘Religion is the opium of the people,’ remember? We need to destroy these.”

  “What if we ever need transcripts? We’ll be killing our academic careers if we do that.”

  “And we’ll be killing ourselves if we don’t. Nobody is going to ask for your transcripts in prison. We have to save ourselves—that’s our first responsibility.”

  They burned the files in a large fireplace. Once their own sins had been turned to ashes, they regarded the stack of files on the table. Hundreds of other students, their friends, would go to hell if their pasts were uncovered. So they burned everything, though the chimney was partially blocked and smoked terribly, and the soot from their files rose up to join the rest of the dust hanging over the city.

  The chaos at the university made going back to school all the more exciting that fall. Some of the lecture and study halls had no electricity, and it was difficult to take notes in them or read on overcast days. Other rooms had no desks, and the students sat on their books and coats like novices in an Asian monastery. Most of the food shops were closed because there were no goods to be had, and the students with farm relatives fed themselves with supplies from home and exchanged homegrown tobacco for rare items such as lighter flints, fountain pens and blank paper upon which to write.

  At first the only danger lay with soldiers who resented the sight of able-bodied young men going about ordinary lives. Students were liable to be stopped on the streets for document checks in order to justify their being in the city instead of at the front. Some of the soldiers were not that impressed by university exemptions and needed to be bought off with cigarettes, liquor or food.

  Lukas ended up living in a dormitory with bedrooms on the upper two floors and a kitchen and common room on the ground floor. His place was on the third floor, where he was one of five young men assigned to a room with two double beds and two desks. Farm boys were used to sharing beds; better to share a bed than be the last one in at night and consigned to sleeping on the floor.

  In addition to Rimantas, Lukas shared the room with Lozorius, Ignacas and a quiet lowlander, the latter a friend of his brother’s who had left the seminary when he lost his calling. Some studied history and others literature, and their room became the centre of activity in the dormitory because the engineers, chemists and architects found the humanists entertaining.

  Lukas came in one night after dark to find that his roommates had several guests in the common room. Ignacas had received a package of food from his parents in the country, and Lozorius had brought in a couple of litres of home-distilled samagonas. The room was full of smoke and laughter, the first such party that Lukas could remember since the arrival of the Reds.

  Steadily supplied by his parents with smoked sausages and butter, and somewhat richer than the others as an only child, Ignacas had a ruddy face at the best of times, and now it shone brightly with sweat and alcoholic elation. He was the only fat young man that Lukas knew. As the donor with the most food to contribute to the party, he had been given the most to drink by Lozorius, whose ears turned red when he drank. Ignacas’s cheeks were as red as Lozorius’s ears, and he was holding forth on the political situation, egged on by the less talkative engineers.

  “I predict that the war with the Americans will begin as soon as the two armies meet in Germany,” he said. “The Americans will take one look at their so-called allies, the Reds, reco
gnize them for what they are, and push them all the way back to Moscow.”

  Lukas’s smile faded and he looked around the room to make sure he knew everyone there. It was not the kind of subject one raised in public. But none of the students present belonged to the Komsomol and none of their parents, as far as he knew, worked for the Reds.

  “Do you think those Soviet soldiers want to be there any more than we do?” said the lowlander. “They’re not even real Reds. They’re Byelorussians, Mongolians, Ukrainians and who knows what else. The Reds gathered up all the provincials to throw at the Germans first, to wear them out.”

  “Politics, politics,” said Rimantas. “Hasn’t anyone read any good poetry lately?”

  The others hushed him.

  “Don’t think the Americans will go to war because they don’t like the look of someone’s face,” said an engineer. “Why should they keep on fighting after the Germans are beaten?”

  “Because they signed the Atlantic Charter,” said Ignacas. “Roosevelt and Churchill met in Newfoundland before the Americans even entered the war. The charter says we all have the right to self-determination and no territorial changes will be made without the agreement of the people.”

  “All very sweet,” the engineer replied, “but what do the Reds care about this charter?”

  “They signed it too,” said Ignacas.