Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  He struggled with this project of turning himself into an automaton. On the one hand, he did not want to think about his lost brother, whose body was never found, and he did not want to humanize his enemies, because those kinds of feelings would make him weak in the work he must do. On the other hand, if he had no emotions at all, he would not love his parents or his country or any-one else. He began to understand poor Ungurys a little better now. He had been taciturn in the extreme, but his sister, Elena, was warm. Ungurys must have shared some of this warmth until his life in the partisans hardened him. And yet it was strange that love of country should make one a killer, that love should lead to its opposite.

  The longer the partisans lived in the countryside, the more feral they became; a bookbinder, a teacher or a carpenter ceased to be any of those people in the forest and became another creature instead.

  The genus Partisan adapted and differentiated according to the places where the fighters found themselves. Flint’s band belonged in the species of Field Partisans. It consisted of foxes that ran along the roadsides, among the brambles and through woodlots to dart into the fields and granaries when opportunities presented themselves. Visiting farmhouses at night, they knocked on the shutters to ask for food and news of slayer squads and Cheka interior army forces. If their luck was bad, the field partisans found their enemies on the other side of the shutters.

  When the Cheka interior army hunted them with hounds, the field partisans dabbed their shoes with lamp oil to throw off the dogs, and slunk into thickets or underground bunkers, some cavernous and others no bigger than burrows. They built hideaways whose entrances were halfway down wells, under woodpiles or haystacks, or right out in the open fields. They fought viciously when cornered.

  Field partisans ate better than the other species because they ventured out among people so often, but sometimes they did not return from their sorties. Their bodies joined masses of carcasses thrown into the marketplaces, shoeless and bloody, heaped up like Red trophies of the hunt.

  Flint’s band was attending a parliament held in the forest, an attempt to forge an alliance among the last free beings in the land. It was safer for partisan bands to be free-standing units because they were less likely to be traced, but they also needed to know what the other bands were doing. Somewhere far away, Lozorius was reputed to be working to keep open the lines of communication among them, but no one was sure what he was doing or even if he was alive. He was like a miracle, more an article of faith than a fact.

  The summit was hosted by the Pine forest Partisans, who carried themselves far less watchfully than their field cousins. The deep pine forests covered the poorest, sandy land in Lithuania, where farmsteads were few and the Cheka rarely dared to sweep. Whole forest counties remained untamed by the Reds, whose quislings slept together in fortified houses in towns by night, and went out by day only in armed bands.

  Tanks could not pierce forests, and rocket flares did nothing to illuminate the deep shadows of the woods. As a result, these forest partisans held themselves more upright in stature. They were lively and good-natured by the massive bonfires they built at night, secure in their forest cover.

  But for all their humour and easy-going nature, they were a hungry lot because there was so little food to feed them, and they had to rely more heavily on the few farmers nearby, who were not well fed themselves. Pine forest partisans foraged for wild strawberries and mushrooms, grazing on wild greens when they could find them.

  The forest partisans were wood bison, a little slow and heedless, but well defended by their horns whenever they came under attack. Always slightly hungry, they forayed out in groups to strike at remote food warehouses or railway lines.

  The Bog Partisans were yet another species, men who lived on secret islands in the swamps. The bogs were vast and deadly to those ignorant of the underwater bridges that the partisans had built. The bog partisans were beavers, industrious in their engineering. They hid in the reeds, kept boats among the bushes, and saved ammunition by leading their enemies into sinkholes of mud, where a fully armed Cheka soldier might descend into the bog to join bodies that had been resting there since the Iron Age.

  But the bog partisans paid the same price for their security as the pine forest partisans, namely hunger. They fished when they could, cut down trees in which ravens had built nests, and snared whatever rabbits lived nearby. Their damp surroundings and lack of food made them pale and watchful. Persecuted by mosquitoes, they either grew indifferent to their bites or went mad.

  The bog and forest partisans preyed on caravans heading east. Now that Germany was defeated, the Reds were stripping it to feed their own people. Disassembled German factories rolled by on trains, as did houses, including doors and windows and even nails, straightened by prisoners of war before being set in boxes. Food went the same way. No one thought too much about what the remaining Prussians would eat. They were going to be driven out of the country anyway, and if some died, there would be fewer to move.

  At present the local partisans had robbed a food train of sugar, and sprinkled it on everything the other partisans had brought, from barley soup to cucumbers. A year later, when the sugar had all been eaten, they would regret the lack of partisan dentists, and cure themselves with pliers.

  Lastly there were Town Partisans, but these were few. They lived legally, or semi-legally with false documents, and helped to bring word of army movements and deportations, as well as lists of traitors who had signed up to become slayers or Red functionaries. The city partisans were mice, secretive and silent, but susceptible to capture in the traps set for them.

  Elena was a town partisan, an underground courier who had come into the realm of the forest partisans first in order to visit her brother and then to collect copies of the underground newspaper to circulate back in her hometown. Now that Ungurys was dead, her visits to the free realm of the countryside were coloured by melancholy.

  She slowly became aware that her workplace lay in the heart of an experimental agronomical project, an attempt to uproot the native growth and to sow the land with seeds that made a new sort of person. But the uprooting was an ongoing problem. The native growth was stubborn. And she came to realize she was an ally in this project of uprooting, or, if not an ally, then at least a functionary in the apparatus of destruction.

  She would have to get out. She hated them all, from the affable but slovenly Gedrius, who was to be avoided in the cloakroom, to her roommate, the born-again Komsomol girl. It amused her sometimes that so many important officials of the new regime did not know they had an enemy in their midst, the quiet woman working the abacus and adding columns of numbers.

  At first she had enjoyed the thought that her brother fought against these people in the forest. After his death, her loathing of the functionaries grew so much that she knew she wouldn’t be able to disguise it much longer.

  Elena had very large brown eyes and was aware that men found her eyes attractive, but she usually masked them with unnecessary glasses when she was at work. In any case, she did not normally look up very much, because her workplace was full of wolves that could tear her apart. Even Antanas Snieckus, the chairman of the Lithuanian Communist Party and a hard-core Stalinist if ever there was one, the man who had deported his own brother to Siberia in 1940, the man whose own mother fled Lithuania in 1944 before he returned with the Reds—even he had paused to look at Elena’s eyes during an official visit.

  Now she was sorry she had not taken the opportunity to kill him.

  Elena’s gentleness and simplicity were fading, and she was transforming into something different, hardening around the lips. She kept her shoulders square and wore a working woman’s business suit and carried a leather satchel, altogether like a secretary on her way to work.

  The partisan newspaper that Elena was supposed to pick up was three days late due to a lack of ink for the rotary printer, and the parliament of partisans was four days late because the bog partisans had had to make it through two se
parate swarmings of Chekists.

  The parliament gathered in a forest meadow with a few trees inside the clearing, and in the shade of one of these Lukas was running off the last of the newspapers and laying them out in the sun to dry. He worked with the radio on a stump beside him, listening to the BBC, much of which he could now understand after a winter and spring of study with the American farmer. Nearby on the grass sat Ignacas in a jacket with a ripped collar and only one button. He had a switch in his hand and was idly whipping it back and forth in the air to keep off the flies. The BBC announcer said something in a voice slightly more inflected than the usual monotone.

  “What did he say now?” asked Ignacas.

  “Nothing much.”

  “But what nothing in particular?”

  “They were announcing the scores of the British football games.”

  Ignacas sighed, partially in resignation and partially in envy. There were no football games in this part of Europe, not even high school against high school. The football coach might have been deported to Siberia, a child’s parents might have fled to the West, and countless others had simply disappeared. Ignacas wished he could disappear as well.

  He was hopelessly inept and never sent out on missions. He was not a good writer, dithering over his sentences too much to be of any use on the partisan newspaper. Worst of all, he was perpetually hungry and had been reprimanded once for stealing food from the stores. One more such incident and he might get court-martialled, which could lead to only two possible results: a further reprimand or execution by firing squad. And yet he considered himself a patriot.

  Lukas pitied Ignacas and helped him when he could, but the man had become mournful unless he was eating, and Lukas could listen to only so much misery without having it weigh him down.

  Ignacas looked about them to make sure no one was within earshot. “There are a few more days to go until the amnesty runs out,” he said.

  The Reds had declared an amnesty after the war ended in Germany, and many partisans had taken up the offer. Some of the bands forbade it, but Flint let his men make their own decisions. The only rules were that they leave behind any good weapons they might have and take poor ones, and that they not betray their old comrades. The first part was easy, but not the second. How was one to placate a new master without betraying a former one? Lukas asked him this very question.

  “Here’s my plan,” said Ignacas. “I’ll wait until this parliament is over and then I’ll slip away. When I turn myself in, I’ll do it in some village, where it will take a while for them to work their way up to the proper authorities. Then I’ll bring them here as a sign of my sincerity. But all of you will be gone, you see? I’ll have betrayed nothing.”

  “The Reds aren’t stupid. Do you think they’ll believe that?”

  “I’m a good liar.”

  “Even under torture?”

  “They wouldn’t torture me, would they?”

  “They do sometimes.”

  “But not ones who give themselves up. I don’t think they do. But even if they did rough me up a little, by the time I told them anything, all of you would have moved on.”

  “Except yourself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know they never keep their promises. You know your father owned too much land. You’re an enemy to them by category—anything you say won’t change that.”

  “I can’t think like that. I need to believe in something, and I need to believe they’re at least partially sincere. They’re building a new world, but they’re still fighting a war with people like us. They’ll become gentler over time.”

  “You’re sounding more and more Red with every sentence. Maybe you do belong with them.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t turn on me like that. You knew me back in school. You knew what I was like then. But let’s face it—I’m useless as a partisan. I wasn’t meant for this kind of life. It’ll kill me in the long run.”

  “If they don’t kill you first.”

  “I never realized you were such a hard-liner.”

  “I’m not. I’m just cornered. I know I have to fight because I have no other choice.”

  “You do have a choice, and so do I. Why should our generation be sentenced to death? What did we do? We need to find some way to live, some way to go on.”

  “Taking amnesty won’t do it.”

  “Maybe not for you, but what about me? Would you hold it against me?”

  “Each of us has to do what he must.”

  “But will you tell Flint about my plans?”

  “What you just told me isn’t a plan, it’s an idea. And I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  Ignacas nodded, seemed about to speak again, but decided against it and turned to waddle away. He was no longer a fat man, but he still carried himself as if he were. No matter how much he gave in to them, the Reds would find he stank of “bourgeois.”

  Elena made her way past a small group of older partisans by a smokeless fire where Flint was speaking with the leaders of the other bands. They fell silent as she passed. Farther on, a trio of young men sprawled on the grass, two cleaning their rifles and a third writing a letter. They tried to engage her in banter, but she did not have time to talk. She was looking for the latest newspaper and sought out Lukas among his newspapers laid out on the grass.

  Absorbed with his work, Lukas did not look up from the press he had been cleaning. He had his sleeves rolled up and wore an apron to protect his clothes from the ink. Sensing someone nearby, he began to speak without glancing up. “I didn’t have enough alcohol to thin the ink properly. It’s still sticky, and I’m hoping the sun will dry it out. It would be a waste to let the newspapers smudge after all this work.”

  Lukas’s hair was long, curling over his ears. Like the other partisans, he was a little feral, but he wasn’t coarse. He looked swift and comfortable, though there was trouble on his face. When he finally did look up at her, the trouble evaporated and his beautiful mouth broke into a smile.

  “It’s you,” he said.

  They had not seen each other since early spring, just before the seizure of the town of Merkine.

  “I was afraid you might not come anymore,” said Lukas, “after you lost your brother. I’m very sorry about that, but I’m glad to see you here. I lost my brother that day too.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  She had hardened her heart to help get over the loss. She had thought she could get on with things now, but when she heard of Lukas’s loss it reminded her of her own and she could barely speak. Lukas sensed her feelings and came forward and took her hands in his. She looked down, surprised yet gratified, and saw that the ink of his hands had smudged onto hers.

  “My brother’s real name was Tomas,” she said finally, squeezing his hands before letting them go. “I didn’t like his code name—it made him sound slippery and cold. He wasn’t like that at all, at least when we were younger. After he went into the forest, he changed and started to become taciturn. I think he was killing his old self in a way because he was afraid of being soft. I never had a chance to see him much in the winter because it was so hard to get around. And then the next thing I knew, I received word that he was dead. Now I wish I’d tried harder to see him.”

  “How could you have known? None of us knows when our time is coming.”

  “No. You say you were with him on the final mission?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  It was not that Lukas didn’t want to be with her, but he wished they could talk of something else.

  “Lakstingala was there and they’d been friends for a long time. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I already have. He told me in his rough, country way, his soldier’s way.”

  “What do you expect me to add?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you just tell me what it was like?”

  “All right.”

  Lukas
took off his apron and they sat down on the grass. The radio was playing on the stump nearby, and the conversation of men murmured indistinctly at the other end of the clearing like the sound of a brook.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.

  “I gave them up. The smell of tobacco smoke carries quite a distance, and I didn’t like the cravings for it when we were on a mission and I couldn’t smoke.”

  “Then tell me what happened.”

  Lukas stretched out, leaning on one elbow, and related the day’s events in Merkine. He trod carefully through the story, leaving out the part about Ungurys catching fire. He told Elena he was shot cleanly by the sniper and died before knowing what hit him.

  “And you retrieved his body?”

  “Yes. We buried him a few kilometres away, in a forest.”

  “How did you dig the earth in the winter?”

  “We used an old bunker.”

  “I would like to visit that place someday.”

  “I could show you, if you like.”

  He looked at her then and thought he would like very much to travel with her to that place, sad though it might be. A pair of bees flew slowly about the field flower she held absently in her hands, and she observed them for a moment, and when she looked up, she caught him staring at her face. He was embarrassed, and she blushed in turn.

  “Did you bury your brother near mine?” she asked.

  “No, we couldn’t get the body. I didn’t even know he was dead for a couple of days. I kept waiting for him to find his way back to me.”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t captured?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Miracles happen sometimes. I’ve heard of people surviving and showing up much later. I almost wish I knew less about the death of my brother, just so I could have a little hope. Lakstingala tells me I should be very proud of him. Everyone knows about the day the partisans took Merkine. There are stories about it all across the country. He’s some kind of hero, I guess.”