Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  The bunker was dark except for the light cast by the open hatch. It was tiny, a temporary hiding place for two with nothing more than a narrow wooden bed frame and a little space beside the bed for a table built into the corner and a stool beside it. The walls were rough boards papered over with newspapers to keep the grit from coming through inside.

  “I didn’t realize bunkers could be private like this,” said Lukas. The life of partisans, for all its fugitive nature, was the life of people in groups. One was never alone.

  “I’ve been expecting you. I made arrangements. Sit on the stool and take off your shoes.”

  He set down his briefcase and did as he was told while Elena pulled the hatch shut most of the way, leaving it open a thumb’s width so a narrow crescent of light could seep in. He reached for her, but she squeezed his hand and pushed it aside. She pulled an open box with two down comforters from beneath the bed. One she placed on the bed frame as a mattress, the other she pushed to the far side of the bed so they could pull it over themselves later.

  Lukas had taken off his shoes and now he reached up for her again, and she bent to kiss him. She undressed quickly, lay down on the bed and held up the comforter like a tent. The crescent of light fell across her face, barely illuminating her body. As Lukas climbed in beside her, she drew the comforter around themselves.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m nervous.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I’ve wished for this for a long time, but I might not be good at it.”

  “Then we’ll practise together.”

  Afterward, they lay quietly for a while.

  “How was your life after you went underground?” asked Lukas.

  “I missed you while we were apart,” said Elena. “At some of the harder moments I wondered if we would ever have a time like this.”

  “Now we do.”

  “At last. Before you came it was nothing like the day we met last summer, when the camp was big and the men sang and danced. The group of partisans who took me here were so worried about my safety that they kept me in a bunker for the first three weeks. They never let me go farther than a hundred metres away unless a pair of men escorted me. They were so careful with me that I felt like I was being smothered.”

  “The Reds must have been combing the forests for you.”

  “Oh, they looked long and hard for you and me, but the trail is cold and they have other things to worry about now. So do we, I might add. My band attacked a train. Eventually the slayers and the Reds will come through here, looking for revenge.”

  “When?”

  “No one knows for certain, but soon.”

  “We’ll get going back to Flint’s when it’s dark. But along the way I need to look in on my parents by Rumsiskes. I want them to meet you.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that mean you want to marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed a little sadly.

  “What’s wrong? I thought you’d be happy.”

  “Oh, I am. I need a new family. I’ve been thinking of you for months, ever since the night we shot all those people in my room in Marijampole. I shudder to think of that now.”

  “Do you regret it?” Lukas asked.

  “Yes.”

  He misunderstood and was stung. “What part?” he asked.

  “I shot two men that night. Two on my first night. Imagine! I’ve killed more since then, but that was at a distance, in firefights. I’m not the same anymore. That night changed me forever.”

  “None of us chose this. It was thrust upon us. What else do you regret?”

  “What we did to my sister. I thought the authorities would grasp that she wasn’t involved with the executions. If she had known, we wouldn’t have left her behind. But now she’s been deported to the Komi Republic.”

  It was a bad place—very cold, worse than Siberia.

  “And is there anything else you regret?”

  “I don’t regret anything else, no.”

  Lukas kissed her again.

  “Do you really want to marry me?” Elena asked.

  “What a strange question.”

  “I mean, where will you find a priest to do it?”

  “I know one in a small parish in Nedzinge.”

  “I have another idea as well.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a new amnesty coming out. Stop! I know what you’re going to say, that the Reds can’t be trusted. But listen to me. If we married first and took the amnesty, and if they did betray us and deported us, at least we’d be together.”

  “The men and the women who were deported in 1941 were separated,” said Lukas. “It takes cattle cars a month to reach Siberia. Some of them would have been dead before they got there.”

  “But we don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they were reunited in the North. Maybe the labour camps are not as bad as we’ve heard. And who knows, the amnesty might even be real.”

  “But we’d have to betray all the men we’ve been fighting with.”

  “They could take amnesty too.”

  “Elena, listen to me. You and I shot a roomful of Red commissars. They will never forgive us for that, you understand? They won’t just deport us.”

  “Lukas, I love you, but the future doesn’t look very bright for you and me. We could throw in our lot together. I’d be like your wife and you could be like my husband. We could sleep together. We could even tell the others we were married secretly. Wouldn’t that be good enough?”

  “Why are you saying this? Why don’t you want to marry me?”

  “I do, I do. But we live with violence, you and I. Our relationship started with violence and it will end that way too. Maybe it’s better if we’re not married.”

  “How is it better?”

  “We wouldn’t bring bad luck upon ourselves.”

  “I don’t believe in luck. Besides, what we did wasn’t a crime. We were striking back at enemies.”

  “I know, I know. But it was horrible. I keep picturing Vinskis. Earlier that night he’d said someone’s head was going to roll for mistakes at work, and then I can see his head dropping after you shot him through the neck.”

  “Why are you reminding yourself of these terrible things? Put them out of your mind.”

  “I wish I could put them out of my mind. I wish I could wash my mind of that whole night, but it keeps coming back to me, especially the picture of poor Stase in the moments before you shot her.”

  “If I hadn’t done that, they would have executed her.”

  “I don’t sleep well anymore. I thought I would go out into the countryside and live free, but it feels as if the Reds have captured my soul.”

  “All the more reason to marry me, then. I’ll take care of you.”

  “Listen, Lukas, you’ve made me a good offer. But I’ve made you a good offer too. We could live together as man and wife, no strings attached. We’d be free as long as we could. But if I married you, you would be responsible for me and I would be responsible for you. If you were captured alive and imprisoned, I would die trying to free you, and you would have to do the same for me.”

  “I would anyway.”

  “Maybe you would and maybe you wouldn’t. But if you were married to me, you’d need to act against all reason.”

  “You make marriage sound so difficult. I think it’s more difficult to live without you.”

  “We’d be living on the run.”

  “That’s the way we live anyway.”

  “We’d have hardly any time alone. We’ll be in bunkers with other men.”

  “But at least we’ll be together. I’ve been thinking of you since we first met, and then again from the moment I put the bast slippers on your feet. Even in the presence of other men I can at least touch your hand.”

  “And what about the battles we might fight? Don’t you think Flint will be unwilling to have a couple fighting with him
? We’ll be a weak link.”

  “Flint would let us fight together again. We’ve proved ourselves once. Now stop raising all these objections. What about me? Do you love me?”

  “I do.”

  “Then that should be enough.”

  There was no way they could travel by train together, so they made their way overland toward the Jewish Pine Forest, skirting the villages and towns and staying as close to the woodlands as possible. Elena had given a rifle to Lukas, and they each carried a pair of grenades.

  It felt good to have Elena at his side. She had been in the forest long enough to know how to carry herself. And whenever they settled down in a quiet spot at dawn, in a thicket of bushes or tall grasses, they made love again and again, delighting in the discovery of one another’s bodies. Then he would watch over her as she slept first, studying her in the quietness of the morning, secure in the knowledge that she would do the same when he slept later.

  They searched for a long time before they found a rowboat to carry them across the Nemunas River. Once safely across on the fourth morning of travel, they made their way into the Jewish Pine Forest.

  Lukas scanned the town of Rumsiskes with his binoculars, making sure that no sunlight reflected off the lenses to give him away. The town looked peaceful enough at this distance, though there was a red flag on one of the buildings by the market square. The square was too quiet for this time of day. Something was up.

  When he was a child, Lukas had gone to the square with his father on market days, to be treated to bagels or “sailor” candies with a picture of a sailor on the wrapper so attractive that he pinned it up on the wall in his room. When they’d return from the market he’d tell his mother about all the things he’d seen: the farmers selling eggs or piglets off their wagons, the horse market, and the fights between the men who spent their profits in the tavern.

  Lukas scanned the square again with his binoculars.

  “What do you see?” asked Elena.

  “I can’t make out much—just two men in the marketplace, leaning up against a wall. Drunks, I think.”

  As they made their way through the sand dunes of the Jewish Pine Forest, Lukas recounted his childhood memories to Elena, about a fort in one tree, a goat caught with horns tangled in a thicket in another spot. It felt good to talk to her about his life before the time with the partisans. He wanted to remember himself in his childhood, a time not that long ago yet utterly remote, a time before the war, which had been going on for his entire adult life.

  They made their way down to the perimeter of the forest. All was quiet on his father’s farm and near the house. A single cow was chained in a field, slowly grazing in the range of its reach.

  “This is the place you grew up?”

  “Yes.”

  Elena squeezed his hand. She felt very close to him now, filled with nostalgia for this place even though she had never seen it before.

  For all they knew, a spy or a soldier might be watching the farm from some other vantage point. The strangeness of his situation came upon Lukas. He had never been away from home for so long, and for the first time he could see the world of his previous life laid out before him, etched all the more sharply because Elena was seeing it too. The house and fields were both familiar and unfamiliar, like a dreamscape. He half believed he could simply walk up the farm lane and re-enter his old life.

  They had been underground long enough to know to practise caution, so they established themselves in a thick clump of bushes near the edge of the property and watched, first to make sure there were no Chekists or slayers around and finally in the hope that one of his family might come outside. To Lukas it seemed a little too peaceful; there should have been more movement around the house at this time of day. If the Reds had discovered his true identity, as they might have, they could be waiting for him. Lukas and Elena needed to watch the house until they could determine if the place was safe.

  They waited a long time, watching the seas of grass shimmer in the wind, pitched one way and then another. The grass showed the wind currents, not only the general direction but the tiny swirls of microclimate as well, the sudden flattening in some places, the parting as if of a sea. Soon the grass would be cut down, but until then it was the measure of the day, an ongoing performance that left no lasting impression.

  The shadows grew short as the morning advanced toward noon, and then lengthened again in a different direction in the afternoon.

  “Who’s that?” Elena asked when someone finally came outside.

  “My sister, Angele.”

  She had come out to the well. As far as Lukas could see, no one else was around.

  “I want to get a little closer,” he said.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No. I’ll come back for you if it looks all right.”

  He made his way toward Angele, his back bent low in the hayfield to keep his profile down, like a thief in his own home. When he was close enough to call Angele’s name, he startled her. She dropped the bucket down the well and put her hand to her mouth.

  “Come over here, by the hedge,” he hissed.

  “Lukas? Is that you?”

  “Are there any soldiers around?”

  “Not anymore. They’re gone now.”

  He was going to go back for Elena, but something in Angele’s voice made him wait. She came to him then, and stood with him on a patch of earth between the currant bushes and the apple trees where they were masked from any spying eyes. She threw her arms around his neck and covered his face repeatedly with kisses. Much as he enjoyed the moment, he finally pulled her away and held her at arm’s length, laughing at her enthusiasm, and she burst into tears.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said.

  “No, wait. You need to know something first.”

  She had a hard time speaking through her tears, and Lukas was forced to wait, his unease growing with every moment.

  “What are you crying about?” he asked.

  “The slayers found Algis yesterday, right here. He’d been hiding all this time, not even with the partisans, just hiding in various places throughout the county. He’d beg for food or people would give it to him.”

  “What happened?”

  “He came to see us. He did that sometimes, appearing out of nowhere, like you just now. You frightened me, you know—I thought you might be him. Sometimes I’d look for him in the bunker under the hayfield, and he might be there or he might be gone. He’d come home to get food. He was hungry, thin and dirty. He’d just had a glass of milk by the kitchen table when the slayers appeared in the yard in a car and an open truck. There was no time to hide. Algis jumped through a window and ran. One of the slayers outside had a machine gun mounted on the truck and shot him.”

  “Wounded? Killed?”

  “Cut in two. It was terrible. Father came out and began to cry when he saw the body, and he didn’t stop sobbing until early this morning. We can’t talk to him. He doesn’t see us. He just mutters and stares at nothing.”

  “What happened to the body?”

  “The slayers took it away. They put it in the marketplace with another one. It’s terrible. They took off their shoes and socks and put bibles in their mouths and rosaries in their hands. Mother sopped up some of his blood with her shawl from the place where he fell. She says she’s going to bury the shawl so at least he has a decent burial.”

  “Who did this?”

  “I told you, four slayers.”

  “Did you know any of them?”

  “Two are Rumsiskes men. The others were from somewhere else.”

  “Tell me their names and where they live.”

  “They were a father and son, but forget that now. You have to go in to see Mother and Father quickly. Maybe your face will help Father. Then you have to get away from here as fast as you can. It’s not safe.”

  “It’s not safe anywhere. Calm down. Stop crying. Tell me how it’s been since we left.”

  “Terrible. They want more
in grain than this farm produces. They’re trying to kill us. Some of the farmers have been deported. Some are in prison. There’s talk of collectivization. Father said he’d rather sweep the streets in Kaunas than be a serf, but you can’t just leave your own farm. You need permission, and no one gives it, and there’s nowhere to run away to.” She wiped her nose on her apron. “Do you have news of Vincentas?”

  He shook his head. There was no use in telling her any more bad news. She looked at him searchingly.

  “Don’t tell Mother and Father that. Make something up. Anything.” Angele was holding his hands and staring into his eyes. Her face was etched with despair.

  Lukas let go of her hands and cautiously entered the house. He was immediately overcome with the familiar smells of home— recently baked rye bread, boiled potatoes, smoked meat.

  His father sat in a dark corner in the shadows, near the broken window through which Algis had leapt. The window was now patched with cardboard. His father’s back was upright and his hands were crossed in his lap, making him look like a man waiting patiently for a train. He looked very old, with his thinning grey hair cropped close to his head. His mother was washing dishes, wearing an apron and a scarf over her hair. She was frightened when she first saw Lukas, and crossed herself to make sure he was not a vision.

  “Mama,” he said, and her tears began to fall.

  Markulis and his son worked their spades well, given that it was dark and they were wondering if the graves they were digging were for themselves. The boy, barely twenty, was silent and afraid. The father was nervously talkative, though no less frightened.

  “It’s pretty here, by the forest’s edge. You couldn’t have picked a better place.”

  Lukas had asked them to dig three graves. The bodies of Algis and the other partisan were in a cart behind them. Two bodies. Three graves.

  Elena stood beside Lukas. He had not brought her into his house after all.

  “I hope your sister told you that it wasn’t either one of us who fired the machine gun at your brother.”

  Lukas knew that, but he didn’t know the other two slayers, and the convenience of a father-and-son team had given him an advantage. Lukas had held a knife to the boy’s throat as he explained to the father that he was to go to the market square that night, tell the guard he had been given instructions, and load the bodies up and bring them along.