Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  Markulis had been a small landholder, ten acres and two children, both of whom worked as hired labour as soon as they were old enough to shepherd geese, and then pigs, and finally cows. Markulis hired himself out too. He had been an angry man, prone to getting into fights, perpetually frustrated by his poverty. Joining the slayers had given him a regular income and kept his son out of the draft. It was a dirty business, but he had helped slaughter pigs and spread manure, so he was used to dirty work.

  And now this.

  “I’ve known you since you were a boy,” said Markulis. “I remember you as a child on market days, chewing on bagels.”

  “Did you remember Algis too?”

  “He should have given himself up long ago. He let two amnesties pass. Armed resistance just brings down the wrath of the Reds. You have to play along with them in order to survive.”

  “What about your country?”

  “That’s over now, and if you think it isn’t, passive resistance is the thing.”

  “That’s not resistance at all.”

  “You mean you’re loyal to that bourgeois dictator who ruled before the Reds came?”

  “There’s more to a nation than the man who rules it.”

  Markulis rested his spade for a moment. Lukas kept his distance. The safety on his rifle was off.

  “There’s no one but the Reds now. The czar ruled here for a hundred years. The Reds are going to rule here forever, and we’d better get used to it.”

  “The Germans said they’d rule forever too, and look how long they lasted. You haven’t even matched their record yet. What do you think is going to happen to you when the Reds fall?”

  “They’ll never fall. If I believed they would, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Get back to work,” said Lukas. “I want to be done before dawn.”

  Lukas had brought linen sheets from his mother’s house. He had the Markulis father and son wrap each body, place it in a grave and cover it over. His brother’s body caused some problems because it was in two pieces, but he tried not to dwell on that.

  When they were done, he told them to stand beside the empty grave. The boy was crying now. His father put his arm over his shoulder.

  “This is your grave,” said Lukas, “waiting for you if anything happens to my family or anyone else in this town. Now fill it in.” He took a deep breath. “And remember, it will be easier to dig out a second time.”

  Markulis looked up with relief that changed to confusion as he first felt the bullet rip into his stomach and then heard the report of Elena’s rifle. He looked to his son and saw the red stain spreading across his chest. The two slumped awkwardly at the side of the grave, not falling in. Neither was dead yet, each moaning in the tangle of arms and legs. Elena walked around closer to them and fired a bullet into the head of each.

  “I was going to let them off with a warning,” said Lukas.

  “If there’s to be no amnesty for us, let there be no amnesty for them.”

  “We kill only when we have to.”

  “Think of your brother, cut in two. Think of my brother, and of your father’s grief. I will forgive no one who strikes at my family.”

  “I never knew you could be so cruel.”

  “I am cruel. And you helped to make me this way.”

  “But someone may have heard the shots.”

  “Leave the bodies here, where they are. Let them take care of their own dead.”

  NINE

  NOVEMBER 1946

  THE MOON shone so intensely through the clear church windows that the priest could read the marriage ceremony from the book in his hand. The wedding party huddled by the south wall, avoiding the skewed columns of light that lay across the nave. These guests were always wary of exposure, careful of the cool radiance inside this small church in the remote village parish of Nedzinge, in a forgotten country.

  To the priest, this midnight marriage was just the latest sign of the world turned upside down. In his darker moments he wondered if this inversion of custom could be a sign of the Second Coming. The priest had heard that some of the evangelical Protestants believed the good would be taken away to heaven in rapture before the physical end of the world while the others were left behind. Was this withdrawal of good people into the darkness a sign? Stalin was said to have a diabolical sense of humour. Certainly the people running the country were imps, small demons, servants of Stalin, the village bullies and drunkards now ruled the streets. One sort of village tough had served the Nazis and now another sort rose up to strip the farmers of their land, the shopkeepers of their shops, the religious of their God and the patriots of their country. What kind of people would be left once this work was done?

  The priest looked at the couple before him. A young man filled with the ecstasy of love, a little nervous, trembling even, at the gravity of the marriage act. The woman was beautiful in the way of young women, glowing as if she were going to move to a new life in a safe home.

  The priest’s thoughts made him stumble through a few of the Latin phrases he should have known so well. He was more than a little anxious himself. If the Reds discovered this marriage, he would be shipped out in a cattle car. A third of the parish priests were already dead or in the North, and the priest himself was a little ashamed not to be one of them, but also terribly grateful. He tried to shift his thoughts away from himself and onto the couple before him. Poor young man and woman, he thought, in love while the world lay in ruins.

  He glanced up at the guests. Pale, pale, the faces of the wedding guests—Lakstingala, who had left his automatic outside in deference to the church but was nervous without it; tearful in the darkness, the drunken forger and his wife, extra burdens to the partisans because drunkards did not travel well; fearful the American, as farmers did not go out at night. And Flint, who crossed his arms and then uncrossed them, ill at ease in the knowledge that they would have to make their way back to their bunkers in this full moonlight, which he had always avoided and had warned his men to avoid as well.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Flint had asked Lukas. “It will only make life harder. It will only make the pain worse if something happens to one of you.”

  They were sure. Against all the odds, both Elena and Lukas had survived this long, through firefights, betrayals by partisans who were giving up the fight, and winters without enough food.

  Flint had so many things on his mind. The partisans would need help soon. None of the foreign radio programs mentioned Lithuania or the other two sister Baltic States. They had disappeared so thoroughly from the Western public eye that soon no one would know they ever existed, and whatever happened in a land that did not exist did not matter. Unless the situation turned around, all of the men and women in that church would soon be as inconsequential as the ghosts of Vilnius.

  As for the couple up at the altar, they were not thinking of strategies or politics at all. They were only thinking of one another and of some of those who could not be with them. How much Lukas would have liked his brothers and sister and parents and all the tribe of uncles and cousins to be there, but half of them were certainly dead and the others so far away, maybe dead as well. He would have liked to swell the numbers in the country church, to fill the nave with dead souls. As for Elena, her dead had died earlier, and so she did not think of them as much as she did of the man beside her, the one who was so in love with her. She loved him too and needed him and could no longer distinguish between the two.

  The nighttime ghost of a ceremony was comforting to Elena. It was the remains of something normal, a shadow ceremony but at least a shadow—something, instead of the blasted nothingness of the new world outside. The future did not bear consideration. She had only this moment on the altar with him. No rings, just a moment’s security as they held each other’s hands.

  The reception took place in a big bunker, one with two rooms, three hatches, stools and benches, and dug so deeply that a short man could stand upright inside. The air was good because the bun
ker had been built with clay-pipe ventilation holes, unlike some of the other places where a candle would go out from the lack of oxygen. It was too dangerous to have a bonfire aboveground as they used to in the old days, but they could have a few candles and a little low singing. Flint cut slices from a side of smoked bacon; Lakstingala had brought a loaf of heavy black bread. In addition to the litre of samagonas that the forger had for himself and his wife, he had managed to bring a bucket of milk. They all drank, and then laughed at one another’s white moustaches as if they were children. They sang a few songs together and ate the rest of their food, and then there came an awkward moment when there was not much more to do.

  “Come on,” said Lakstingala, “your wedding gift is a night in a special bunker.”

  The others hooted, making jokes about checking up on them, and encouraging them to go straight to sleep and get a good night’s rest.

  The gift of privacy was the best wedding present they could receive. The moon was far below its zenith, below the treeline, and so the light was not quite as terrible as it had been earlier. Lakstingala led them through some reeds and into a spot with a high riverbank. Then they walked for a long time until they came to the edge of a wood where it met some farm fields. Beside a large stump stood a small pine. Flint lifted this sapling, moved some mosses and opened a hatch.

  “Get inside,” he said. “I’ll replace the moss and tree once you’re in there. You can’t budge during the day without messing up the entrance, but the advantage is that they’d need to look very hard to find you here.”

  Lakstingala shook Lukas’s hand and kissed Elena on the cheek. She held him for a moment, hugging him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They crawled inside a short passageway and could hear Lakstingala covering up the hatchway behind them.

  They came into a room much smaller than the massive bunker they had left behind, actually not much bigger than a large closet turned on its side. It held two narrow bunk beds and two stools. The ceiling was so low that the person on the upper bunk would have difficulty turning himself on his side without scraping the top. Lukas lit a candle stub and found some gifts placed on a stool: a small square of chocolate, some kind of liqueur in a tiny bottle and some dried flowers in a glass.

  The fall rains had already begun and the bunker smelled damp. Even so, they had not lived in this kind of luxurious privacy since they had met again in Kazlu Ruda.

  Elena lifted the small bottle and turned it every which way, and then laughed. “It’s an Eiffel Tower, filled with cognac.”

  It was many years since anyone could have gone to Paris to pick up such a souvenir. Either it had belonged to a German during their occupation or it had come to Lithuania a very long time before that. Someone had been saving it, and now that someone had given it to them as a wedding present.

  “Let’s taste it,” said Lukas.

  The cognac was not the best ever made, just brandy designed for tourists to take back home, but neither Elena nor Lukas had tasted liquor for a long time, and what they had tasted was all home brew or rough vodka. To them it made the dream of Paris into something real. If there was still cognac, there must still be France as well as Paris.

  “Should we eat the chocolate?” Lukas asked.

  “Let’s save it for later.”

  They rearranged the bunker so the straw pallet from the upper bunk lay beside the lower one, enlarging their bed to make room enough for two. Elena undressed and Lukas did the same, and they kissed for a while before making love.

  TEN

  DECEMBER 1, 1947

  T O THE PACING SLAYER, the forest floor seemed undisturbed, a thick bed of pine needles overlaid with curled leaves of ash and poplar. He looked up. A lone rowan stood at the edge of the forest, its red berries bright against the grey sky, the leaves of the tree all fallen now. The December branches were awaiting snow—bones awaiting cover.

  Beyond the forest lay a pair of farm fields, one an abandoned tangle of weeds, its owners either fled or shipped away, the other planted with winter rye by an owner who might not live to enjoy the fruits of the harvest.

  The slayer was studying the forest floor for some sign. It was hard to see how the ground cover could be so untouched. No ants stirred on the knee-high anthill, all aslumber for the season in their tiny burrows.

  Winter was coming, and the slayer had not even been issued a decent pair of boots. And his employers knew he suffered more than others when it was cold. Slayer, he thought, such a dramatic title for someone who wore such poor clothes. Looking down, he could see the grey sock where it protruded at the split seam of one of his miserable shoes. The locals despised him for taking up arms for the Reds. Not that the Reds treated him particularly well. They seemed to believe that his bourgeois background made him untrustworthy. His uniform was cobbled together from an assortment of clothes: an army tunic, his own linen shirt beneath it, and a baggy pair of trousers, the last remains of a good suit he had once owned.

  His face was scratched along the right side, small scrapes from a drunken fall onto a stony road. He had never been much of a drinker before, but now drink was the only consolation when his clothes were too thin, his stomach half empty and his tobacco in short supply.

  The slayer felt his grievances keenly. They did not even let him carry his rifle on this particular mission. A rifle in his hands would have been another consolation.

  They were a Cheka lieutenant and twenty-three internal army soldiers in two rings around this patch of earth, the second ring all the way at the forest’s edge, by the farm fields. No one was sure exactly where the bunker was, and his examination of the forest floor had not revealed anything. The Cheka lieutenant did not speak Lithuanian, and so the slayer had been sent out to reconnoitre. An excuse, he thought. He was being used as bait. If the partisans decided to fight, he would be the first one they killed.

  Empty of birds, the forest was very quiet except for the squeak of leather on leather and the occasional rustle of forest debris as the soldiers shifted in their positions. The soldiers were as dangerous to the slayer as anyone underground. What if a trigger-happy soldier was hungover, or needed a cigarette, or was nervous and suspicious of him?

  The crunch of the leaves beneath his feet was unnaturally loud. He could use a drink, but he had been given two mouthfuls before he stepped out onto the forest floor and there would be no more until his job was complete. He looked to the lieutenant and shook his head to show that he had found no telltale signs. The lieutenant signalled that he should talk.

  The slayer sighed. The partisans would know what he was as soon as he opened his mouth, perhaps even who he was, and they hated his kind more than they hated the Reds. It was so unfair to be treated like this. He was as much a prisoner of circumstance as they were—he’d rather be doing anything but this. He would need to find some common ground with those hiding down below.

  “Brothers,” he said loudly, and waited a moment. At least no one was firing at him yet. “Here we are, you below and me above. Let me tell you, it’s better up here than down there. I know. I’ve been there. I’m twenty-six years old. Don’t do anything hasty. Listen to me.”

  He walked as he spoke. If someone were to fire from below, he did not want to be standing still in one place.

  “There’s no need to panic. A new amnesty has been declared. Come out unarmed and you’ll be pardoned. You can’t shoot your way out of this one. We have three machine guns and a hundred men.”

  There were no machine guns, and he exaggerated the number of men because he knew they would think he was lying and would cut his number in four. In his own manner he was telling them the truth. He did not mention that he had taken amnesty himself and this was where it got him.

  “Think of your mothers and fathers. I did. I’m a patriot as much as you are, but my patriotism began with my parents. What will happen to yours if you try to shoot your way out? Your mothers raised you in hope. What will they do if you die?”

  H
e had been told it was important to get them out alive. The web of the underground ran along threads that could be followed if one did so carefully. His own parents had been deported, and much as he loved them, he was in no hurry to follow them.

  “Who will help your fathers with the planting in spring? They grow old. They need your help. And if any of them has been deported, come out and talk it over with us, and we’ll bring them back. You could still have a life here.”

  It was important to give them a choice.

  “Reconcile yourselves to the way of the world. Listen, I don’t like the world I live in either. I could imagine a better place than this, but I’m a realist. The Americans are far away. The English and the French have their own problems. No one will help us, and in any case Moscow has a plan. We’ll build a better future together. They’ve made mistakes, I know. We’ve all made mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them and move on. Maybe going underground was the right thing to do when you first started. But that time has passed. Give yourselves up now. Be reasonable.”

  The slayer walked and talked for so long that he began to feel like a fool. A light rain started to come down and then grew heavier, drops gathering and falling from the bare lower branches of the pine trees. A degree or two lower and the rain would turn to snow. He was cold, and the boredom of this task irritated him more as the vodka wore off. He was becoming hungry too. But the lieutenant signalled to him to keep it up. The lieutenant was a patient man.

  The faint smell of smoke reached him. Not tobacco. The slayer looked around carefully, but he could not see where it was coming from; the wisps were too small to be visible in the rain. He looked up to the lieutenant and signalled to him. The Cheka soldier could smell the smoke as well.

  There were men below the ground somewhere, burning documents.