Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  In the last year Flint’s band had broken into smaller units of five, very few with the knowledge of where the others had their bunkers. The era of bonfires and dancing in the forest was past, and as well the time of massive attacks upon towns and garrisons. The last really bold act had been the engagement party massacre in Marijampole. That act had been both gratifying and stupid. It lifted the spirits of the Lithuanians as word got out about it, but it excited a whole hornet’s nest of Reds, Chekists and slayers, who combed the woods looking for partisans.

  The latest partisan battle was against the settlers, Red soldiers who were encouraged to demobilize in Lithuania and take up the farms abandoned by those who had been deported or fled to the West. Lukas wrote public proclamations in Lithuanian and Russian, warning them not to take up the farms, and then letters to the new settlers, giving them a month to vacate their land. Lakstingala led the enforcement brigades that frightened off the settlers, or executed them if they did not heed the warnings.

  This type of fighting was more damaging to the soul than battles with Chekists or slayers. Sometimes the settlers resisted, barricading themselves into their houses and shooting it out. It was important to remember that these were the enemy, that they had been warned, that they could have surrendered with a white flag and been escorted with their wives and children out along the road. Still, it was hard to drop a grenade into a house with women and children inside.

  Lakstingala and Lukas did not have that much in common, but they had been together in Flint’s band for almost two years, and so they had become comrades. It was easier to talk to someone like Lakstingala than it was to some to the newer recruits.

  “What if the Reds come up on us from the other side of the haystack?” asked Lukas. “You won’t see them coming.”

  “The rest of the American’s family is working in the fields that way. They’ll come running if anything’s up.” Lakstingala took out a pouch of tobacco and some papers. He rolled a cigarette but did not light it because of the haystack. The smell of the hay at his back reminded Lukas of home.

  “Going to do a little travelling?” Lakstingala asked.

  They compartmentalized each other’s lives, knowing some parts and staying intentionally ignorant of others. The question itself was a sign of their intimacy and comradeship.

  “Personal business.”

  “You’re a fool,” said Lakstingala without a moment’s hesitation and without a great deal of inflection.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anything personal will put you at risk. You’ll be caught in a moment.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “There’s no being careful in a trap. Once you’re inside, they’ll spring it on you and that will be that. And you take this risk to see Elena?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’d give her a better chance of survival by staying away from her. Don’t you think the Reds would love to catch the two of you together? You’d be a real prize. If they caught you alive, they’d put your photos on the cover of the local Pravda. If they killed you, they’d set your bodies up side by side in the market square and put a wedding veil on her body to satisfy their sense of humour.”

  “You’re sounding a little too angry, my friend. I can’t help it that I’m in love.”

  “What kind of love could that be? You hardly know one another. A few meetings and one mission and your head’s been turned.”

  “People fall in love at a dance in one night. It happens.”

  “No, you’re confusing comradeship with love.”

  “You’re my comrade, but I don’t love you.”

  “Don’t make fun of me. I’m serious.”

  Lukas took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. “Look who’s talking about love! A bachelor soldier like you!”

  “I’m no bachelor. I’m married.”

  “What? You never told me that.”

  Lakstingala shrugged. “You never asked me.”

  Lukas looked at him with new interest. “I had no idea. And you’ve never seen your wife all these years?”

  “Not much.”

  “But a little, right?”

  “A little,” Lakstingala conceded.

  “So why do you begrudge me?”

  “Because I’m worried that you’re turning soft just as things get harder, just when you should be getting tougher. We’re not the first ones to go into the woods, but we’ve lasted longer than anyone else. How are we going to survive unless we turn our hearts to stone?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “It’s not the Reds that worry me. It’s your feelings. Those are what are going to get you killed.”

  “How is it possible to live without feelings?”

  “It’s not, but you have to bury them in order to fight. If you become soft, you’ll see the eyes of his mother in every Red you kill and you’ll hesitate, and one day you’ll die yourself. The only feelings you should have are a thirst for revenge and righteous anger.”

  Lakstingala looked at Lukas’s face, deeply tanned now in the summer, the eyes uncannily bright against the darkness of his skin. He could see a hint of a smile in Lukas’s eyes, and the condescension annoyed him.

  “You take over sentry duty,” said Lakstingala. “I’m going for a smoke.”

  Lukas couldn’t understand why Lakstingala was so angry. He was going to get his fiancée, and if possible show her to his parents before bringing her back to Flint’s band.

  At the train station in Lentvaris, a town on the outskirts of Vilnius where he slipped back into the aboveground world, Lukas beheld the daylight movement of normal townspeople for the first time in a long while. The forger had assured him that the false documents could pass any inspection, but Lukas carried himself cautiously, even in this unaccustomed mass of people so large that it seemed they would breathe up all the oxygen in the air and leave none for him.

  He had been a free animal, and now he stepped back into the zoo and found it stifling. Unaccustomed to wearing a shirt and tie, he felt as if he were being strangled, but did not dare loosen the knot or open the buttons of his jacket for fear of giving away the package that hung on his chest from a string around his neck.

  He carried a worn leather satchel with a change of socks and underclothes, a physics textbook, notes, half a loaf of heavy black bread and two thick pieces of country bacon he might eat or use for bribes. He also had binoculars, which were slightly suspicious, but if he was searched he could say he was trying to sell them. He had no weapon except for a paring knife that he kept in his jacket pocket.

  The world had changed since he last travelled through it openly, and the Lentvaris station was not as empty as he had hoped. There were dozens of new draftees, those born in 1927, as well as Red Army sergeants and officers who kept an eye on them to make sure they did not desert before reaching their training base. The draftees clutched packages of food from home and wore sturdy civilian clothes, as they’d be neither dressed nor fed during basic training. Nor issued live ammunition, because the AWOL rate was so high.

  The tiny station, platform and entranceway were packed with other travellers, from Communist Party workers to demobilized Red Army soldiers, prisoners travelling with guards, beggars, and black market speculators from Byelorussia. Some had been waiting for days for a train, and they slept with their heads on their brown paper packages, pillowcases stuffed with used clothing, and suitcases full of hand soap or woollen socks or other items in short supply in one place but abundant in others. Lukas had to pick his way over them to make it to the ticket window, where dozens of travellers jostled for the right to bend down in front of the low grille and entreat the stony-faced seller to let them buy a ticket. Only the more persistent Cheka operatives with extravagantly foul vocabularies managed to squeeze tickets out of him.

  Lukas searched carefully among the shouting, disgruntled travellers, the despairing old women hoping to visit their sons, the soldiers, the bewildered farmers goi
ng to appeal to government officials, and he finally identified the weary stationmaster, who walked out occasionally among the masses waiting for tickets or trains. He was slovenly and unkempt, frustrated and irritated by the impossible task of keeping order.

  “Excuse me,” said Lukas, and the man looked at him, slightly pushing up his cap by the bill and then placing his hands on his hips like someone preparing for another fight. Lukas explained that he was faculty from the technical university in Kaunas and needed to make it to that city by early the next morning to give a lecture. The stationmaster shrugged and waited, and finally he did extend his hand to shake Lukas’s when it was offered. Then he turned away to study the size of the bill Lukas had placed in his palm—a hundred rubles. The stationmaster turned back to him.

  “Wait over there,” he said, motioning to a corner with his head. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He returned in ten minutes with a ticket, for which Lukas had to pay, and asked for another fifty rubles to pay off the guard, as each car had one, whose job it was to throw off the pressing masses. Lukas suffered a twinge of guilt for the country folk, whom he knew would not get tickets. These meek people would never get what they wanted until they learned to pay bribes. They were a very long way from inheriting the earth.

  The train arrived an hour later, guards standing on the steps of each car and holding on to the handrails on each side to block the way of anyone trying to get on board without their permission.

  The train was full. Even those with tickets and those who had paid bribes were not permitted aboard, and immediately there were shouting matches as high officials showed their tickets and swore at the guards. Some of the bigger men, or those in twos and threes, pushed their way past the guards only to find that all of the compartments inside the cars were full, and so they settled themselves in the corridors. Others leapt onto ladders only to be beaten back by guards. But there were more wanting to travel than there were guards to beat them off, and no sooner was a ladder cleared of two or three men clinging to it than it filled again as the guard moved on to beat those who had slipped up to the open platforms between cars.

  Lukas waited until one such guard had cleared a platform and moved off and then hoisted himself onto it just as the train wheels began to turn. Another man was already standing there, a clerk or government official of some kind who could not bear the crush in the corridors and had stepped outside. Lukas offered him a pre-rolled cigarette.

  The man nodded, took it and lit up. “Safer out here anyway,” said the man between puffs of smoke.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Two men were murdered in this wagon last night, and their bodies thrown out the window. Killed by demobilized soldiers having a little fun, I think. They let a couple of civilians into their compartment and then robbed them during the night and ditched their bodies.”

  The distance to Kaunas was only a hundred kilometres, but the train moved very slowly and stopped at every station along the way, and at each station the scene at Lentvaris was repeated. By the time the train was halfway through its journey, it was already the middle of the night and the outdoor platform where Lukas, the clerk and half a dozen others stood was very full.

  Lukas was leaning with his back by a broken window when a hand came up from inside and seized him by the neck. An opportunistic thief must have seen him as easy to kill, but many Reds had tried to kill Lukas over the last year and none had succeeded yet. Lukas crouched down as far as he could, putting pressure against the assailant’s forearm, pulled the paring knife from his jacket pocket and cut across the top of the hand at his throat. He heard a yelp of pain and the hand withdrew back inside the door.

  Rubbing his neck, Lukas pushed himself slightly away from the window and looked at the faces of his fellow travellers, who had watched the scene without expression or making a move to help him. Even the clerk who had told him about the murders stared at him indifferently.

  Lukas stepped off the train at the country station of Mauruciai, walked out of the village and hid himself just inside a wood and slept for a while. He stayed there until nightfall, cut off a piece of the smoked bacon and ate a chunk of bread, drinking at a stream to take off his thirst.

  When Lukas made it to the farmhouse deep in the Kazlu Ruda forest where he was supposed to meet Elena, the fields and yard were dark and he banged on the door a long time before the farmer appeared with an oil lamp in his hand.

  “What do you want?” he asked. He had a white beard and moustache and would have looked like Father Christmas in his nightgown if not for the sour expression on his face.

  “Any Reds around?”

  “How should I know?”

  “I was supposed to meet someone here.”

  “That’s your business, not mine. There’s no one here but my family, and you’re disturbing their sleep as it is. Good night.”

  “Just a moment,” said Lukas, slipping his foot into the door before the farmer could close it. “I’ve been travelling and I’m hungry. Do you think you could give me something to eat?”

  “My children went to bed hungry. I have nothing for you.”

  “Then maybe a bed.”

  “Every single pillow is spoken for.”

  Something was wrong. He had arranged to meet Elena here, but the farmer was being too aggressive. He acted as if Lukas were a bandit. The most intelligent thing would be to slip away, find a place in the hay in the barn and burrow in deep until the morning. But the attitude of this farmer did not please him. Lukas had been travelling two nights and was tired.

  “I’m a partisan,” said Lukas.

  “Good for you. You go about your business and I’ll go about mine.”

  Lukas lifted his briefcase. “I’m armed. Make me a bed here on the floor by the front door, and be quick about it. Keep the other doors closed until I tell you to come in.”

  For a while he wondered if the farmer would make him show the non-existent weapon, but he sullenly did as Lukas commanded.

  Lukas spent a restless night and rose just before dawn when he heard the farmer begin to move around. Lukas sat at the long table and drank milk and ate bread with the grim farmer and his wife. Two girls and a boy were interested in him, but the parents would not let them speak at the breakfast table.

  A face appeared through the imperfect glass in the window. Lukas recognized Elena and his heart leapt up. She waved and then walked around the house and he went to the door, which he threw open to find her in an army uniform jacket and skirt with a handmade Lithuanian tricolour patch on the shoulder.

  Lukas looked at her face, half afraid that he might find coolness there, or caution, or, worst of all, determined friendliness. But instead he saw a mixture of hope and fear that mirrored his own feelings. He took her in his arms, awkwardly, for she had a rifle on a strap over her shoulder, and he held her and kissed her face.

  He heard the farmer behind him and pulled away, embarrassed now in the moment after their embrace. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her.

  “If I’d known you were here I would have come earlier,” she said, taking off her hat and shaking out her hair, “but I expected you two days ago and thought something had happened.” Every plan that the partisans made was contingent—on the ability to travel, on the local risk, on messages being delivered accurately.

  The farmer was grasping his hand and apologizing. He had been warned not to give anything to suspicious men who appeared in the night. There were agents provocateurs among the Reds and the slayers, and he had assumed Lukas was one of them. His wife tried to make amends as well, heating the previous evening’s soup for them, cutting squares of bread and spreading them thickly with butter, making tea.

  They talked of things in general over the table, of the harvest and weather, of politics and the trainloads of goods that chugged through the forest on the railway from Germany, where the Reds continued to strip the towns and cities to rebuild their own. The farmer listened attentively, trying to glean whatever
information he could. There was no real news to be had in the ordinary way, so he tried to piece together details to create some picture of what the future might hold for him.

  As for Lukas, he spoke in the optimistic, encouraging way of the partisans, who saw it as their duty not only to fight the Reds but also to preserve the morale of the people. Elena did not speak much. He sensed that the farmer knew her. He looked at Elena as much as he could but tried not to stare.

  After they had eaten, Lukas and Elena went out to the garden and sat on a secluded patch of grass behind the currant bushes so they could speak freely. It was the season of grasshoppers, which leapt from the newly dried grass in the morning sun. Bees hummed around the flowers in the garden by the house, and a single cricket sounded from near the foundation.

  Lukas looked closely at Elena. She did not have the worn, pale look of those who spent most of their time in bunkers. It was summer, and she must have been coming out to bask in the sun, which was good for her skin but bad for her life expectancy. He intended to admonish her, to beg her to take better care of herself for his sake, but when she looked up at him he lost all need to speak and laid one hand on her shoulder to hold her as he kissed her. He held her tightly against himself for a while, stroking her hair. She smelled good to him, and he lifted her hair to nuzzle up against the side of her neck. He had been away from her for so long.

  “Is there a place where we can be alone?”

  She took him by the hand and led him out through the gate in the yard. She led him down the lane toward the forest, and then across a piece of scrubland along the banks of a brook to a place where the bushes grew in a dense mass and the brook flowed into a small river. At a bend of the river they came upon a high bank with a beard of roots and grasses hanging down. Elena reached down and pulled aside a mat of branches that had been woven together to camouflage the hatch of a bunker, and then pulled open this door and motioned for him to go ahead of her.