Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  “Of course he is, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live without him. Life is hard.” He hadn’t meant a great deal by the statement, but it seemed to strike her in some way. She let the flower drop and reached forward and took his hand and squeezed it. For a moment he was afraid he might burst into tears. He crushed the emotion.

  “Yes, it’s very hard,” she said. “Sometimes I think it’s unbearable and there’s no escape from it. I feel like I’m in a vise that’s being tightened by a quarter turn each day.” She let go of his hand and looked away to the newspapers lying in the sun. “If the ink won’t dry, why don’t you blot the sheets?”

  “Paper is scarce and I can’t be wasting every second sheet.”

  “I had farm cousins,” said Elena after a while. “Their mother laid out linen on the grass to bleach it in the sun.”

  “My mother used to do that too. Maybe she still does,” he added.

  “You haven’t seen her for a while?”

  “About a year now. Not the rest of the family either.”

  “At least you still have them. I just have my sister.”

  This was the sort of conversation she could never have in the city anymore. There it was unsafe to say too much, but here she could say whatever she pleased.

  “What happened to your family?” asked Lukas.

  “Our house took a direct hit when the Reds were coming in the second time. My mother died right away and the house was destroyed.”

  “And your father?”

  “The Reds took him the first time they came.”

  “So they deported him to the North?”

  “I think so. He was in prison in Kaunas for almost a year. I know they knocked out his teeth. His body wasn’t there with the others the Reds shot when they pulled back before the Germans, so they probably took him to Siberia.”

  Or they might have shot him on the way, but Lukas did not say this. “He must have been important.”

  “He was a high school principal, but his brother owned a car dealership in America. It was enough. They took him in the first days. Then, when the deportations started, my mother and I went to Kaunas and walked out among the boxcars to look for him. There were a lot of people like us, carrying packages with clothes or food for the families stuffed inside the cars. We called up to the air holes, where there was always someone listening. But we never found him. It was a hot day and the guards were getting irritated. They threatened to put us on the trains if we stayed around any longer.”

  Elena was going to say more, but Lukas heard something and rose to go to the radio and bent over to listen.

  “What is it?” asked Elena.

  “Be quiet a moment.”

  She watched him listen, two furrows of concentration forming between his eyes. “Get me a pencil,” he said, and she went to the partisan who had been writing the letter when she first arrived. When she returned, Lukas took the pencil and began to make notes.

  “Well?” she asked, but he shushed her and continued to make notes until the radio broadcast ended.

  “Good news,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “I have to speak to Flint first.”

  He walked to where the partisan leader was talking with the others, and the two of them conferred. A little breeze came up and stirred the newspapers laid out on the grass. Elena tested the ink to see if it had dried. It had, and she stacked some of the sheets carefully, leaving others to dry more.

  Flint called the men together and all came around except for the sentries. Flint gave the floor to Lukas, who stepped forward and spoke from his notes.

  “The Americans have dropped a bomb on a city in Japan,” he said. He repeated what he had heard in the broadcast. “It’s a very big bomb. It destroyed everything.”

  “How big?” one of the men asked.

  “Half a city was wiped away.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a city’?”

  “I don’t know, but the radio said over a hundred thousand dead.”

  “That’s impossible. A bomb that big could never be loaded into an airplane.”

  The men broke in with many technical questions, most of which Lukas could not answer. He knew only what he had heard on the radio.

  Elena was unsure of what to make of the news, but the same was not true of the other partisans. Once they had understood properly what Lukas had said, they took the explosion of the atomic bomb as very good news, the best news they had heard in a long time. They began to cheer and applaud.

  Elena elbowed her way through them to Lukas. She took him by the sleeve and pulled him aside.

  “What are they so happy about? Think of all those dead civilians.”

  Lukas was flushed and happy. “We hoped the Americans would go to war with the Reds once the Germans were beaten, but they didn’t. Probably this means they weren’t strong enough to finish off the Japanese while taking on a new enemy. But now they are. Now that the Americans have this bomb, they can destroy the Reds. They can beat them back. We might be on the verge of freedom.”

  “In that case, God bless the Americans.”

  He looked at her and found her beautiful. How had he missed this before? All it took was a moment of hope and he could see clearly again.

  “Do you think you could help me?” Lukas asked.

  “To do what?”

  “You work in an office. Your typing is probably better than mine. If I wrote out the news story, could you type it up on the stencil for me?”

  “Yes, I can do that.”

  Elena waited as Lukas wrote out his summary of what he had heard on the news. The entire camp was buzzing with conversations about the announcement and how soon their lives would be changing. She listened for a while to the news from Warsaw, but there was no mention of the bomb on that station. Moscow said nothing about the bomb, but it did repeat word of its declaration of war against Japan.

  Elena typed out the stencil with a typewriter set on the stump, with Lukas hovering over her. He was so anxious about getting the words right that he kept suggesting changes to his own handwritten article. She drove him away until she was done. When he returned, he read over her work carefully.

  “I’ll start printing these up now,” said Lukas, and then he paused, slightly unsure of himself. “Will you wait? If you do, I can walk you to the train station.”

  By the time Lukas finished the printing and set the newspapers out to dry, evening was drifting into night. The men who had been scanning the radio stations for fresh news had heard nothing and tuned back to Warsaw, which was playing popular music, a foxtrot with a fast beat.

  Lukas felt regret that he could not quite understand when another man asked Elena to dance. There were no other women in the camp, but three other couples formed, the men dancing the women’s roles, hamming up their femininity, others waiting their turn as the only woman was passed from one partner to another through foxtrots, polkas and waltzes until she broke the heel of her shoe and had to sit down to rest. Lukas would have liked to dance with her too, but there were too many men who wanted her attention.

  Soon it would be dark and the dew would settle on the newspapers Lukas had printed. He walked over to where they lay in the fading light, like rectangles of snow on the grass. The ink was not as dry as he would have wished, but the papers had been printed on one side only, so he stacked them back to front, trying hard not to shuffle them so they wouldn’t smudge. He put the typewriter back in its case and cleaned the press.

  Euphoric, the partisans celebrated by building a bonfire. They sang and danced like a forest hunting party, wishing they could drink as well. Lukas was just finishing when Elena came to him, limping slightly on one foot.

  “Are the papers ready?”

  “Do you still want them?” he asked, unable to keep out of his voice his envy of the men who had danced with her.

  “Of course I still want them. Do you still want to walk with me to the train station?”

  �
��You’re limping.”

  “I broke my shoe, but I can go barefoot if you come along with me.”

  His envy evaporated in a moment. “You city people aren’t used to walking barefoot, especially at night. I have a pair of bast slippers I could give you.”

  “But how would I return them?”

  “They’re made out of bark. You could throw them away, or you could return them to me when you come back.”

  “Do you want me to return?”

  “I do.”

  “Then I will.”

  Lukas brought the bast slippers for her, but she was unaccustomed to bark shoes and, sitting on the stump in the darkness, could not see how they were fastened.

  “Let me help you,” said Lukas. He knelt at her feet. The slippers were too large, but he could fold them in a way that would do to get her back to town. The straps were of bast as well and needed to be wound in a particular way to hold the slippers tight.

  Lukas felt a slight tingle as he handled her feet. She was shy of her feet, but Lukas delighted in their touch. “How do the slippers feel?” he asked when he was done and she stood up in them.

  “Very well. Thank you.”

  Lukas told Flint his intentions and received reluctant approval to walk Elena back to the train station as long as he stayed off the main road and did not approach the station itself. Like a shepherd, Flint liked to keep his flock close; Reds and slayers prowled day and night.

  It was not good to speak while travelling at night because one needed to listen for the snap of branches under other feet, and to keep one’s own feet as quiet as possible. But they talked a little in murmurs when they passed running water, which helped to cover the sound of their voices and the noise of the forest floor underfoot.

  It was hard to see because there were only stars in the sky and no moon. Elena put her free hand under Lukas’s arm and he pressed it to his side. He had not been touched in a very long time and he enjoyed the pressure of her hand on his arm.

  “I’m very happy about the news of this gigantic bomb,” whispered Elena, “but I hope they use it soon. I can’t go on like this much longer.” She stepped on a branch that broke with a loud crack, and the noise set off the baying of a farm dog somewhere not far away.

  Lukas touched her shoulder to make her stand still as he listened for other sounds. She stirred and he touched her again to keep her still. He removed his rifle from his shoulder and waited, listening intensely, but after the dog stopped howling all he could hear was the sound of her breath in the night, and he stood still a little longer in order to drink in the sound. He bent toward her to tell her quietly that they could go on now, but as he moved forward she turned her face up to him, and with her lips so close to his he kissed her.

  He set the rifle against a tree and she put down her sack and leaned back against another tree. The touch of her felt very fine, the smell of her hair something vaguely sweet and feminine mixed with woodsmoke from the fire and the outdoor smells of leaves and grass. They kissed for a long time, and he let his lips go across her cheek and up her neck to her ear.

  “Let’s sit down,” he said.

  It was dry on the earth and for a moment he wondered if she would permit him to continue to kiss her. She did, and more than that, she put her arms around him and they lay side by side, sometimes kissing and sometimes just holding each other. After a while he shifted a little, but she pulled him in tight.

  “Don’t let me go,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  He squeezed her very hard and she did the same, and something about the tightness squeezed out some of the pain of the death of his brother.

  “Let’s sit up now,” she said after a while.

  “Be very quiet. We’re not far from the road.” And then, after they had sat up, “Can you stay here a little longer?” he asked.

  “Not much. There’s only one more train to Marijampole tonight.”

  “Go tomorrow.”

  “No, I can’t stay. I wish I could, but I have to be at work in the morning and I need to leave these papers at home.”

  “When will you come back?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  Time was running out. They stood and she brushed herself off. He took her in his arms one more time, kissed her, and let her go.

  SEVEN

  VILNIUS

  NOVEMBER 1945

  T HE CITY OF VILNIUS, the new capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania, was a city of ghosts and a city of strangers. The ghosts originated with the Jews and the old Polish ruling class, dead or deported but haunting the city, alarmed by its drastic changes, not so much in architecture, although whole neighbourhoods had been bombed, as in the wholesale disappearance of survivors.

  The Polish Home Army had helped seize the city from the Wehrmacht in 1944, only to be disarmed by the invading Reds and deported north to die for their trouble. The Reds gave the city back to the Lithuanians and deported whatever Poles remained to within the new borders of the new Polish state. The Jews, of course, were mostly dead already.

  Vilnius had been a provincial city for three hundred years, but now it became a capital again. The Lithuanians who streamed into the city to work as teachers and bureaucrats functioned under the tight leash and watchful eye of their Red masters. The bureaucrats had jobs to do: counting the square footage of destroyed apartments, forming work brigades to clear the rubble where the city had been shelled, and removing religious paintings from the churches so the buildings could be changed into warehouses and museums. Much as the Vilnius residents despised their new overlords, they were under too much scrutiny to organize resistance. Opposition lay with the partisans in the countryside.

  As for the ghosts, their sadness went unnoticed by the new inhabitants. If anyone knew about the sorrow of these ghosts, it was those who had managed to escape and live elsewhere, in New York, or Tel Aviv, or Warsaw. With no one to haunt properly, Vilnius’s ghosts were malnourished and sickly, doomed to fade more quickly than phantoms at other sites.

  As a result of the war and the emptying of the old inhabitants, Vilnius was both a free city and a dangerous city, empty in so many quarters that a vagabond could live unnoticed for weeks in the rubble yet be subject to unpredictable sweeps by militia, Chekists and Red Army soldiers, who pointed their rifles first and asked for documents second. The detritus of the war, the widows and widowers, the orphans and the estranged, the hurt and the unhealthy, the angry and the mad—all of these pools of people appeared in the city as if from nowhere, speaking languages unrecognized locally and thus as lost as the ghosts.

  For all the policing, the place was also full of thieves: desperate men, women and children who could not leave, because either they had no documents, or their offences were too well known, or they had a natural taste for crime and longed to be among others of their kind.

  Lukas walked into the city just after dawn with a rough cigarette on his lips, a cap over his eyes and a basket that contained eight cooked beets in their shrivelled skins. He arrived unremarked, among country people who straggled into town to sell whatever they could spare in the marketplace or, better yet, to barter for things they needed.

  He made his way across town, through the ruins of the larger Jewish ghetto and over toward the Dawn Gate, one of the medieval city gates where a miraculous painting of the Virgin hung in a shrine untouched by the Reds, the better to attract suspicious elements. Lukas ducked into a side street before he reached that choke point where there was bound to be a documents check. He had false documents, but he did not want to test them.

  He walked through the first courtyard and looked for the chalked circle on the archway, found it as expected and then walked into a ruined building, following broken stone steps down to a closed cellar door.

  When Elena opened the door, she didn’t recognize him at first, and spoke sharply in Russian and then Polish.

  “It’s me,” said Lukas.

  She pushed the cap up off his face to reve
al his hair falling on his forehead. “Shame on you for frightening me like that.”

  Elena pulled the hand-rolled cigarette out of his mouth and threw it on the landing outside before taking him by the sleeve and pulling him into the room. Then she took his face in her hands and pulled him forward to kiss him on the lips.

  Each meeting was a gift now that they had found each other. But every joy was sharpened by the knowledge that it might be the last one. The sheer luck of their survival, to say nothing of the ability to meet, was like a small miracle. Lukas pulled away, put down the basket and held her in his arms for a while before kissing her again.

  The cellar was dark and cool and smelled of mould. An artillery shell had come through the roof and both floors to embed itself unexploded in the cellar. It would lie there quietly until 1971, when an ambitious and ahistorical home renovator would tap its side with a hammer and blow up himself and the old woman living in the flat above. But for now it lay quiet, waiting.

  The only light in the cellar came from the hole the shell had left in the floor above, a miniature skylight.

  “No one else came with you?” asked Elena.

  “No.”

  “So what happened to that atomic bomb of yours? I haven’t heard anything about Moscow in flames, have you?”

  “Not yet. That’s what this meeting is going to be about.”

  “Do you think there’s still hope for a war?”

  “Oh yes, eventually. We just have to keep our spirits up.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  It was hard to see Elena clearly in the dimness, especially with the light from the air shaft to her back, but he didn’t really need to see her face in detail. He felt her presence, her warmth, an emission of tenderness that needed no light to be seen.

  “My spirits are good,” said Lukas. “If you feel bad all the time, the Reds have won. I want them to feel the sting of my whip on their asses. That uplifts me. When I looked around the city on my way into town, I saw nothing but downcast people on their way to work. We’re becoming a nation of serfs. I, for one, refuse to be downcast.”