Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  The slayer followed the smell to where it was strongest. The damned rain was dripping off the end of his cap, distracting him, but he cleared away a few leaves, scraped aside a sheaf of pine needles and revealed a clay pipe set in the earth. The ventilation hole showed the smoke more clearly once the leaves were gone. The pipe was too narrow to drop a grenade down it, but a shot fired below might get lucky.

  He gestured for the lieutenant to come over and see for himself, but the lieutenant refused. Instead, he had four men go back to the farm, and they returned with rakes. They set about clearing the leaves and pine needles from the ground, exposing two more air vents and, finally, the lid of the opening, which had been covered with a woven matt of moss and pine needles. Once it was exposed, the lieutenant assigned three men to cover the exit.

  “Keep talking,” said the lieutenant, and so the slayer walked from air vent to air vent, cajoling the partisans, urging them to give up. As the hours passed, the soldiers became ever more restless. The light was already noticeably poorer by early afternoon. Finally the lieutenant instructed the slayer to stuff a rag into each of the air vents to speed up the deliberations below.

  “Did you recognize the voice?” Lukas asked.

  Elena shook her head.

  “It’s Ignacas. I’m sure of it. I just wish I could get my fingers around his neck.”

  “Let’s find a way out of this,” said Elena, her lips pressed close to Lukas’s ear. He looked into her eyes. There was only a single candle burning inside the bunker, its light unreflected by the bare wooden walls. He looked to see if any of the others had heard her. What she said was almost treasonous, a suggestion that they should take their chances with the amnesty.

  She understood his disapproving look but refused to avert her eyes. They had talked often of this moment, trying to anticipate how the end would come—to lessen their fear by rehearsing it. But there was no way to accustom herself to her own death, especially not now.

  Life had become harder and harder over the past year. So many of their kind had died. Some were taken prisoner and Flint’s band had had to relocate more than once in case the captured partisans broke down under torture and betrayed the locations of the bunkers. But in a way it had been an exhilarating time too. She and Lukas fought together and slept together, and she had never imagined she could live so wholly in a relationship. Flint sent them out on missions together, because the anxiety of one was always high if the other was gone. They were both husband and wife and comrades, and she was not afraid as long as he was with her. Until now.

  She had hoped that death, if it came, would catch them unawares— a swarm of bullets in an ambush. These last few hours and this slow reflection on their impending death had been unbearable. The danger nauseated her. Before she married she might have accepted it, but now she wanted to hold on to life more than ever before.

  Elena was the only woman among ten people who sat tensely in the bunker. The most important documents were burned and the air was getting scarce since the slayer had plugged the air vents, but they did not spread out, although someone should have been listening by the other two trap doors to determine if they had been uncovered as well.

  The bunker was a command post, with a small storage room and a latrine in addition to the room where they were huddling. It was a fine piece of work, for all the good it did them.

  The fact that they were still alive was contrary to standard operational procedure, which called for partisans to blow themselves up with grenades as soon as all documents were burnt. The grenades were to be held close to their faces.

  The thought of destroying Elena’s features was intolerable to Lukas, but what choice did he have? Elena’s brown hair curled to her shoulders, though she gathered it with a band at the back. He knew her brown eyes and lashes, the fine nose and strong cheekbones. He should not think of details like that. One should simply do what one must do. Lukas held her hand as they waited.

  The feel of her hand in his was bittersweet.

  Flint should have made sure they were dead by now. Lakstingala would have reminded him of his duty, but Lakstingala was not there, off on some mission. It would be within Flint’s rights to drop a grenade to stun them and then finish them off. But he seemed unwilling to do that, delaying as long as he could, having them search the bunker’s two rooms for the smallest piece of paper, empty their pockets of anything that might give them away.

  There was precious little air in the bunker now. The partisan named Vilkas had wanted to fire a shot up through the air vent to dislodge the rag that blocked it, but that would have been a fool’s game. He was restless and needed to do something.

  “The longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be,” he said. He was the toughest of them all, a realist. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Just a moment,” said Lukas. “They found the main hatch but not the back ones. We could take them by surprise and try to shoot our way out.”

  “Too risky,” said Vilkas.

  Flint should have been leading the discussion, but he hesitated. No one talked about accepting the amnesty, but it was hard not to consider it.

  “What are we waiting for?” In one smooth movement Vilkas drew his Walther from his pocket, put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The smoke and the noise made them jump, but even in his shock Lukas noted that the shot blew out the back of Vilkas’s head but not the front. To protect Vilkas’s parents, Lukas reached for the butt of his light machine gun and smashed in the face of his dead comrade. The others looked away, but Flint did not stop him. Elena made a sound of disgust in her throat and moved to the far corner of the bunker.

  The slayer formerly known as Ignacas walked up to the lieutenant.

  “They’re starting to kill themselves. I suggest we throw a couple of grenades through the hatch and then wait. Some of them will survive and we can take them for questioning.”

  “How many did the farmer say they were?”

  “He didn’t say. A lot, whatever that means.”

  “Once the hotheads have shot themselves, the others might give up. We wait.”

  “How long?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  Just before nightfall, the hatch flipped open and a stick came up with a white handkerchief on the end. It seemed unnaturally bright in the last light of day.

  “You’ve made the right decision,” called the slayer. He stood behind the three men whose automatics were trained on the opening. They lay on the ground, but he knelt behind to see over them and to speak to the surrendering partisans as they stepped out of the bunker.

  “Remember your discipline,” the lieutenant shouted in Russian. He didn’t want anyone getting nervous and firing.

  “Show your hands first as you come out of the hole,” said the slayer.

  There was some kind of movement he could not make out in the poor light. The slayer heard a thump and looked to his feet, where something had landed. It was a German grenade, the kind with the long handle. In the moment before it blew, he considered that he had always been unlucky. Why should the end of his life be any different?

  The explosions of the grenades set all the guns firing, and the greatest danger for the Red soldiers inside the first ring came from their compatriots behind them who might fire right into the backs of their heads.

  There was no way to kill the person throwing up the grenades unless someone tossed a grenade into the opening, but before this could happen another lid opened some distance away, grenades came flying from it, and men scrambled out, firing in a circle. Yet another lid opened and the melee was unleashed. Bullets flew in every direction, and many of the Cheka soldiers huddled down to protect themselves from the undisciplined fire. Finally the lieutenant himself threw a grenade into the first opening, the one from which the white flag had appeared, and with one less centre of fire the Cheka soldiers were able to still the other two as well.

  When the lieutenant called for a ceasefire, he saw the bodie
s of half a dozen partisans on the forest floor. Some had probably gotten away, he thought, although it would be hard to tell for sure until the smoke cleared and he questioned the other men.

  Out in the weed-filled field, Flint and Lukas huddled down.

  “Did you see what happened?” Lukas asked. He had lost Elena in the firefight.

  “I saw her fall and then reach for a grenade. I’m not sure where it blew. I’m sorry.”

  Without a word, Flint pushed Lukas ahead of him and forced him to escape through the overgrown farm field. Flint would have to get him away from the scene before the terrible fact of his wife’s death sank in, and before the others began to look for them.

  PART TWO

  ELEVEN

  LITHUANIA, PRUSSIA, POLAND

  JANUARY 1948

  SIX MEN MARCHED in single file through the snow of the winter night, all but the first stepping in the footprints of the man before him; the last one swept the snow behind them with a pine bough. They stayed close to cover whenever they could—copses of trees or bushes, where once a startled owl flew out before them and another time a hare raced out across the snow.

  They came to a river at the former border, found a rowboat by a stretch of open water and rowed across. The men made their way onward into the abandoned fields of Prussia, now filled with frozen weeds as thick as fingers and as tall as men, prickly grasses that tore at their clothes and faces as they passed and threatened to pull the grenades from their belt loops. When they approached a particularly dense patch of grass, a troop of feral pigs rose squealing from a flattened place and fled.

  Five partisans, Lakstingala among them, had volunteered to take Lukas into Poland through East Prussia, and from there he would get himself to the West. The border with Poland was easier to cross at East Prussia because all of the former inhabitants had been expelled by the Reds to pay for the crimes of the Nazis. Prussians had lived here for hundreds and thousands of years, but now they were gone. The new Red settlers had not arrived yet. There was still a place called Prussia, for the time being, but there were no more Prussians. All of them were dead or gone, and soon the name would be gone too.

  The men marched steadily. They had a long way to go.

  Although it was very cold, Lukas was sweating, weighed down by his automatic rifle, the grenades on his belt, and the backpack filled with photographs, declarations, summaries of the atrocities by region and a letter to the Pope. He was tired, but grateful both for his fatigue and for the mission.

  They found no footprints on the road when they finally reached it. No light shone from the ruined farmhouses they passed, and all the Prussian milestone markers lay fallen at the crossroads. The roads did not follow the direction the men wanted, so they cut cross-country, tiring quickly by trudging through the snow, hoping to find a place to rest. In some places there were canals or broad ditches, which they crossed using logs or fallen trees. One man slipped off one of these and fell into the water up to his chin.

  After he extricated himself, he and the others ran awkwardly through the snow in order to keep him warm until they finally found a cellar two kilometres farther on, where they hunkered down for a rest and built a fire to warm themselves, allowing the wet man to change and partially dry his clothes. They made raspberry cane tea, their mothers’ recipe against catching cold, and then they rose again and marched until dawn, when they came upon a ruined manor where they decided to spend the day. The manor and its outbuildings were empty of living souls, some of the various roofs collapsed or burnt, the windows broken, the yard full of empty tins and papers half covered by blown snow. The doors and even their hinges were all gone, packed up and sent to Russia as war reparations.

  On the second floor of the main house they found a room with a view on three sides and a fireplace on the fourth. They jammed boards into the window frames to keep down the draft, found a battered tin oven and brought it inside, running a pipe into the fireplace chimney. A nearby tree masked the smoke. They had intended to eat first, but they were too tired to wait for the water to boil and fell asleep in the sudden heat emanating from the thin walls of the tin stove.

  Lukas took first watch. When the kettle boiled, he tossed in some raspberry canes and set the kettle on the floor. Then he took the lid and set it upside down on the stove and cut in some pieces of bacon and laid a few small sausages on top. As he had expected, the men woke from the sleep they had so recently fallen into, ate and drank, and were asleep again as soon as their empty cups hit the floor. Lukas sopped up the grease from the lid with a piece of bread, ate it and then set himself up by a window in order to keep watch. It was a little colder at the window, all the better to keep him awake.

  A dog barked in the distance and he could see a thin column of smoke to the east, but not the house it came from. A Red Army truck drove by but did not turn into the lane. Shortly after that a man walked by carrying a hunting rifle over his shoulder.

  Elena came to him then, leaning into his side so he could almost feel the weight of her. He did not want to look that way, preferring to think she might really be there, just outside his peripheral vision, and hoping against all reason that she might move into some place where, out of the corner of his eye, he could at least catch a glimpse of her.

  Two weeks later, Lukas stood out on the sidewalk at the corner of the street in the city of Gdynia, waiting until a lingering woman left the bakery. She was an old woman, probably chatting up the cashier.

  From where he stood on the cobblestones he could smell the sea, but he could not see it, the port one block over but obscured by the backs of the warehouses at the waterfront, some still shattered. A crane swung into view between two buildings, but he could see neither the ship nor the pier from where he stood, just the finger of steel and the cable hanging from it.

  The smells of the city were coal smoke, dust, tobacco, diesel exhaust and, beneath them all, the salt tang of the sea. He could hear the call of seagulls as they fought over scraps, their harsh maritime tune the nautical equivalent of the screeches of crows in the countryside.

  “I’m not going out to the West,” Lukas had said to Flint when he first received his orders. “Elena died here and I’m going to die here too, but before I do I’ll find her body and give it a proper burial.”

  “You’ll never find her body if you haven’t found it by now, and as for dying here, what good is that supposed to do?”

  “At least I’ll be in the same country.”

  “Others would leap at a chance like this.”

  “Not me.”

  “No. But you’ll follow orders like anyone else.”

  “Why choose me?”

  “Because you have some English and a little French. Because you’re wallowing in depression. You’re dangerous to me here.”

  “Then release me from my oath and let me go.”

  “And lose a good fighter? Absolutely not. Listen to me. We need to re-establish ties with the West. At this rate we’ll be crushed slowly and no one will ever know the difference. Get to Sweden and find out if Lozorius is still alive. Contact the Americans and the English. Carry a letter to the Pope.”

  “I’m not a diplomat.”

  “No, but you speak well enough and you can write. Lakstingala will help you get out.”

  “Is he coming too?”

  “Only as far as Warsaw. I need him here.”

  “And what happens once I get news out to the West? How am I supposed to get back here?”

  “Any way you can.”

  The old woman finally left the bakery, and through the window Lukas saw the shopgirl at the counter begin to take the short, dark rye loaves from a basket and set them out on a shelf. She turned to face him as soon as he came in, a working woman, economical in movement, a little reserved to discourage male banter.

  She was a few years older than him, her dark hair tied up under a baker’s cap. Her name was Sofia, but he did not address her.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Andrew�
�s cousin sent me along,” said Lukas.

  “What for? I don’t know anybody by that name.”

  “Julius said I should come too.”

  Lukas heard the knob of the bakery door turning behind him. The cashier leaned toward him to speak quietly before another customer entered.

  “We close for lunch in an hour. Come to the back door then.” She set half a loaf of bread on the counter. Lukas took it and left the bakery.

  He walked down to the quay to look at the ships being loaded out on the piers. The port had been heavily bombed during the war, but most of the damage had been cleaned up, if not repaired. There were inner and outer harbours, a distant breakwater, and long piers with ships at their sides. It would not do to draw attention to himself by dawdling, so he walked as if he had some purpose, trying to memorize the layout of the port in case he ever needed it. After twenty minutes he turned back up toward the city and bought a glass of tea at a kiosk and ate some of the bread with it. Then he made his way back to the alley behind the bakery and knocked on the door.

  Sofia unbolted the door and opened it, looked him over and beckoned him inside. They were in a warm antechamber with steps leading down to the bakery ovens below. She took him downstairs, where the baker was sitting at a small table with honey cake and three small glasses set out before him. The baker was a barrel-chested man named Dombrowski, a Pole, Sofia’s husband. He beckoned Lukas over and Sofia joined them at the table. He poured three measures of Zubrowka into their glasses, they drank it, and then Sofia poured tea.

  “I have some bad news first,” said Dombrowski. “We might as well get that out of the way. One of your companions was killed on their way back in to Lithuania.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lakstingala or someone else? One more to join the ranks of the dead. Lukas felt as if a kite string had been snipped and he was now in danger of zigzagging down to earth. He held the edge of the table to maintain his balance.