Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  “I don’t know.”

  “Exactly. So the less you know about me, the better. It’s bad enough I let slip that she existed at all.” Lakstingala looked away, and then took out a pouch and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit it and took a couple of puffs and then studied the ember. “As for love, you’re not the only human being in this country.”

  Lakstingala left him alone after that, going out again to forage for information.

  Lukas had no radio of his own, no contacts beyond Lakstingala, no farmers he knew of nearby. He felt as if he had fallen asleep with the drugged partisans of 1948 and was awaking now to a place he didn’t know anymore.

  The winter rain continued without end, working to wear him down with its drip, drip, drip through the ceiling of the leaky bunker. The hideaway had been built in an old gravel pit and not much earth was layered over the ceiling. The upper bunk was covered with bowls to catch the drips, but the place was still damp and stank of mildew.

  After slinking across the country for weeks, it was hard for Lukas to be still like this, awaiting news from Lakstingala. It was impossible to become used to life in a wet hole. Lukas read a German novel about a couple of artists who forswore their bohemian ways in order to find happiness in working the land and raising a family. The novel helped to pass the time, but when he was finished he realized it had nothing to do with him. It might as well have been science fiction.

  He opened up the hatch to the outside and listened to the wind rattling the leafless branches.

  Every few days, or sometimes at longer intervals, Lakstingala would return, but he rarely brought any uplifting news, just fragments of stories, scenes disconnected from some bigger narrative. He had seen two young women escaping from the Cheka, running barefoot across frozen fields, their feet bleeding, being pursued by soldiers who fired wildly at them from a distance. No one knew where the women came from or how the story ended. With his own eyes Lakstingala had seen a boy of around seven or eight sitting on a huge sack at the roadside and crying. The child was incapable of speaking through his tears, and Lakstingala could not help him in any way, although he was probably an orphan with no place to call home. Lakstingala left the boy behind and continued his search for Lozorius.

  These were the kinds of scenes that excited Lukas’s impotent fury. There were perhaps a dozen partisans left in the district, living as he did with mouldy belts holding old bullets that could not be relied on. How much could they do? And yet for all their impotence and dwindling numbers, the partisans occasionally found a recruit who wanted to join them, and Lakstingala brought news of just such a one.

  “He claims he knows me?” Lukas asked.

  “He never said your name, but he said he was in university in Kaunas at the same time that you were. I thought you might be able to look him over and see if you remember him.”

  Lukas agreed. He made his way to a barn three kilometres away and waited there as Lakstingala went out to bring in the new man. Lukas kept his assault rifle at the ready. He had checked out the back of the barn and looked out of the window there to familiarize himself with an escape route if he needed it. Then he watched the partially opened doorway from within the darkness and finally saw two men walking across the yard. The first was the new man, and behind him came Lakstingala.

  The man was tall and reedy, slightly stooped, and Lukas’s first thought was that such a tall man would be no good for life in a bunker. His second thought was that he knew him.

  As soon as the two stepped inside the door, Lukas signalled them to stay there and stand in the light.

  The man had barely aged since Lukas had known him half a dozen years earlier. He still had the beaklike face and the habit of appearing to be a snob because he kept his nose slightly elevated and therefore seemed to be looking down it. His clothes were a shambles, a wrinkled raincoat and beret, yet somehow a little stylish, something he must have learned on the lap of his artistic mother.

  “Well, if it isn’t Lithuania’s answer to Charles Baudelaire,” said Lukas.

  The man looked at him as if he were an insolent toad. “Do I know you?”

  “We shared a room together when we were students in Kaunas.”

  “That feels like so long ago.”

  “We burned each other’s student files in the Kaunas library stacks.”

  “You were reading H.G. Wells,” said Rimantas. “It’s beginning to come back. You must be Vincentas Petronis.”

  “That was my brother, you fool. My name is Lukas. Come here and sit down.”

  Lukas brought him to a bench while Lakstingala stayed by the door to keep watch over the yard.

  “You were studying literature the last I heard of you,” said Rimantas. “Did you keep that up?”

  “No, I went into the forest. You must have known.”

  “Oh, students were disappearing one after another in those days. I didn’t know if you’d run away, been deported or been killed, not that I put much thought into it. I just kept my head down and hoped no one would think of me. I suppose I got lucky.”

  Lukas now remembered so well the mixture of rueful delight and exasperation that Rimantas used to excite in him, but because the emotions went back so far, to his student life, he enjoyed them more than he used to in the past.

  “Why do you want to join the partisans?” he asked.

  “I wanted to do something, you know, for my country. I thought I could contribute my talents to the underground press—unsigned, of course.”

  “The press needs help. We’ve lost a lot of our writerly types. We could certainly use another one, although you’d probably have to print the paper as well as write it and edit it.”

  “I’m not very technical, you know, but I’m a good critic and a good writer.”

  “Tell me a little about your life since I last saw you.”

  “Well, I finished my studies and wanted to do graduate study, but the university is all about engineers and statisticians now. They don’t give a damn for the humanities. They told me I was going to be a teacher in some godforsaken provincial town, but first I had to do my military service. Now, there was a comedy. They never did find clothes that fit me, not even shoes. The sergeants were all bullies and it was just terrible what they put me through. By then the war with the Germans was long over, of course, so they didn’t have a front to throw me against, and I ended up peeling potatoes in Ukraine, which was dangerous enough in its own way. They have partisans too, you know, and to them anyone in a Red Army uniform is a Red. I’m lucky I didn’t get shot. By the time I got back I thought the authorities would have dreamed up something better for me to do, but it doesn’t look like it. It’s gotten worse. They assigned me to a hamlet on the Byelorussian border, all swamps and illiterate peasants, and I’m to teach in an elementary school. In any case, I’m not going to put up with that. So I came down here, where I have an uncle, and let out the word that I wanted to join the partisans.”

  Lukas listened to Rimantas with a mixture of annoyance and wonder. It was said that God loved drunkards because he saved them from so many accidents, but if that was true, God must love fools too, because Rimantas should have been imprisoned or deported long ago. To be so unaware and yet survive was a kind of crime.

  “Joining the partisans isn’t going to make your life any easier than teaching in a provincial school,” said Lukas. “You’d have to live in hiding and on the run most of the time. I don’t think you’re up to that.”

  “Don’t underestimate me. I’m tougher than I look.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, but maybe you could help us while living above ground instead of going underground. How is it that you’re not at the school right now?”

  “I knew a doctor who sold me a medical condition, but I couldn’t afford anything longer than half a year. I’ll have to go to Byelorussia by next September.”

  “Maybe in the meantime you can just help us out.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, I know we ha
ve a drum copier and some alcohol, but we don’t have any stencils or paper. Do you think you could get us some paper?”

  “How much?”

  “Whatever you can. Maybe a thousand sheets, if possible, even if you can’t get the stencils. If worse comes to worst, we’ll type out triplicates with carbon paper. Do you think you could do that?”

  “To tell you the truth, it’s a little disappointing. I was hoping you could assign me to a partisan group where someone like me could be head of propaganda.”

  “Maybe we should just start with this. But you must be very secretive and tell no one what I’ve asked.”

  Rimantas gave him a withering look. “I am not as stupid as I seem.”

  “I’m sure you’re not.”

  “I know partisans have code names. What’s yours?”

  “It wouldn’t be much of a code name if I told it to you when you already know my real name.”

  “I see. Well, maybe I could choose a code name of my own.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “I’d like to be called Poe.”

  “Like the Italian river?”

  “No, like the American writer, with an e on the end. Poe. Do you understand?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Do you live here, in this barn? Should I come here when I have the paper you want?”

  “No. This is a neutral place. Someone will contact you to check and we’ll choose another meeting place.”

  “It sounds a little like you don’t trust me.”

  “Nothing personal. These are just operating procedures.”

  “Do you still read poetry?”

  “When I can.”

  “Would you like it if, when I came, I brought some of my poetry?”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  “I’ve had a few things published in a journal called Lighthouse. Have you heard of it?”

  “I don’t get magazines very often.”

  “Well, try to see if you can find it. I’ve always valued your opinion.”

  Lukas and Lakstingala left soon after Poe made his way down the wet road.

  “He sounds like an idiot,” said Lakstingala when Lukas explained the conversation they had had.

  “He was always eccentric. He’s a narcissist. But maybe he can help us.”

  “Fools are dangerous. They mean no harm but get you killed anyway.”

  “We can take another look at him later and reassess.”

  “Just don’t let him anywhere near the bunkers. I don’t trust him yet and winter is no time to go digging new holes in the earth.”

  “The ground isn’t even frozen.”

  “No, but it’s wet. Every shovelful weighs twice what it would in the summer.”

  Shortly after Lakstingala left on one of his sorties, it snowed heavily in the night and then a cold front came in. The dripping of the water stopped, but it was impossible to go outside because Lukas’s feet would break through the crust of snow and then there would be no way to mask his tracks. Lakstingala would not be coming back any time soon for the same reason.

  Lukas opened the trap door and looked out onto the blindingly white snow. He felt pale and grey and would have liked to climb out and bathe himself in sunlight, but it was some consolation to be looking out on the brightness from the passageway, even if it meant that he needed to keep a blanket over his shoulders to protect himself from the cold.

  He could see only tree trunks and some open meadow beyond them. There were no houses visible, but somewhere within a few kilometres lay Merkine, the town they had once taken and where his brother had died. And somewhere beyond that, he didn’t know where, Elena was apparently living.

  He would need to get word out to Zoly somehow, to have a rubber raft come to pick them up at Palanga. But Lukas had no radio, and was not sure a raft would come even if he asked for one. Could he and Elena live somewhere in the country with false documents? Perhaps, but the drunken forger was long gone and Lukas did not know where one got false documents now.

  They could give themselves up and hope to have some sort of life if they survived deportation, but Lukas had not heard of anyone coming back. Besides, he had killed too many Reds and would not be pardoned unless he betrayed others, such as Lakstingala. Maybe not even then.

  Just as Lakstingala had said some things were not to be talked about, so some things did not bear much thought. This must be the way animals lived, in the here and now. He would wait and see. He would deal with his future as it came at him.

  Three days later, the weather warmed and it started to rain. The earth was still frozen, but soon it would warm enough for the roof to begin leaking again. Lukas watched the snow melt with all the interest of a farmer waiting for spring. Anything was better than waiting out the winter in a hole. One day, patches of mud began to show amid the snowbanks, and the following morning, just before dawn, Lakstingala tapped four times on the door twice, their agreed signal. Lukas embraced him as a combination comrade and friend, and even as a kind of uncle who came bearing gifts.

  On the tiny underground table Lakstingala set out a cheese, three sausages, a brick of heavy black bread, a jar filled with soup that was still a little warm, and a small bottle of liqueur. And then, from his knapsack, he took a small portable typewriter and a stack of carbon paper, as well as twenty sheets of typing paper.

  “You still can’t move around much,” he said, “so at least we can put you to work in your old profession, writing the newspaper. The typewriter has no ribbon, but if you strike the keys hard enough you can get four carbon copies.”

  “And have you brought me news as well?” asked Lukas.

  He had. Lozorius would meet him in the bunker in a week. In the meantime Rimantas had found some paper and wanted to see Lukas again.

  This time they met in a granary, a small building with barely enough room for the two of them to fit inside. Lakstingala stood outside on the porch as Rimantas and Lukas huddled inside on a bench, their knees almost touching.

  “I brought a little of my poetry,” said Rimantas. “Can I read it to you?”

  The building had a small window and Lukas could see the outline of Lakstingala as he surveyed the farmyard.

  “By all means.”

  And so Rimantas began to read as Lukas listened with a growing sense of unreality. He liked Rimantas and remembered him fondly from their student days, but this poetry of his was terrible. How dark it all was, as dark as plowed earth in the rain.

  Rimantas read at great length about inner anguish, about pain and fear. Intellectually, Lukas could see that everything Rimantas wrote was true, a reflection of the lives of the people in the country, but emotionally he could barely stand to hear it. Lukas himself had not been feeling all that hopeful, but there was nothing like seeing someone in a darker mood still to make him realize he had always been better off than he knew.

  “Well,” said Rimantas after an interminable reading, “what do you think of my poetry?”

  “I think you handle the language very well. I think that your themes are very dark, though.”

  “Yes, exactly. I’m the only writer who’s telling the truth. Nobody is writing about the interior lives of the people in this country. It’s as if we became prepsychological or something. Dostoevsky would never get into print today.”

  “So there you have it—another reason to fight for freedom, in order to be able to print this kind of poetry.”

  “I brought along the Lighthouse magazine too. I’m involved a little bit there.”

  “You’re an editor?”

  “Not exactly. I’m the informal correspondent from the Byelo-russian marches.”

  “That’s the place where you’re going to teach in the fall, right?”

  “It will be more bearable if I’m assigned to write from there.”

  “And how are your typing skills?”

  “I am an excellent typist. When I was a student before the war I worked in the theatre office. I’m fast and my accuracy is bril
liant.”

  “Good. I have some handwritten articles about life in the West. Do you think you could type those up?”

  “I could, but I don’t have a typewriter.”

  “We have a typewriter.”

  “But I couldn’t very well type at home. Someone would hear the machine and get suspicious, and I don’t have a permit for a typewriter.”

  “If we found a place for you to type up these articles, would you do it?”

  “Of course I would. I want to make myself useful to the cause.”

  Lukas left him where he was and walked out to talk to Lakstingala. Resources were few, but Lakstingala agreed that Rimantas could use the fallback bunker to type. It was dangerous to give up the place, but they had to find somewhere for Rimantas to work, and it would lift the spirits of the partisans and the people if Rimantas wrote out one-page articles that could be circulated.

  “Congratulations,” said Lukas when he went back to see Rimantas, “you’ll be writing notes from the underground. You’ll be our partisan Dostoevsky.”

  “Let’s not get carried away with our admiration for Dostoevsky,” said Rimantas. “He had his shortcomings.”

  TWENTY - FOUR

  SPRING 1950

  THE MUD of a Lithuanian spring was legendary, marooning farmers at their homes because the roads were impassable, leaving children barefoot when their boots became stuck in the mud on the way home from school, sinking the horses of reckless riders to the stirrups. No cars ventured into the country. It was a very boring time of year for those who were tired of the winter, but on the other hand it promised weary farmers a little relief from the visitations of government officials, who were well on their way to eliminating the last of the private farms.

  Lukas’s hideaway was near a forest, and once the snow was off the ground he could walk there without fear because the bed of needles both supported his weight and then sprang back to wipe out any sign of his passage. Even the barren woods and fields of early spring were fascinating to eyes accustomed to the gloom of a bunker or the single view available from the bunker’s passageway.