Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  “What if there is no one waiting for me outside? Couldn’t I just walk away?”

  “Yes, of course. You might be able to survive for a while and so might I, but I need to keep the child. It’s the first thing they’ll use against me. If I confess to being a courier, they’ll send both the child and me to Siberia. Maybe things will not be so bad in the camps for mothers and children. They don’t separate mothers and children anymore. Maybe we could stay alive. But if they really do discover all I’ve done, they’ll torture me too. And they’ll put him in an orphanage. You have to do whatever is right. I’m not sure what that is, but I do know he’d be better off with me in Siberia than in an orphanage here.”

  It was unbearable to speak of these things, and so they whispered about other things, of people they had known and what had happened to them. They whispered under the sound of the radio. Time and again Lukas would stop to look at the boy. Time and again Elena reminded him that he could do as he chose.

  Lukas sat with Elena through most of the night. He wanted to drink up the sight of the boy and the sight of her as well. He wanted to wait until there was a little light on the street, and when he saw the window begin to brighten, he looked long at the boy again and then returned to what would happen next.

  “What should I tell them about you?” he asked.

  “You must hold out for a while. You can’t tell them everything immediately or they won’t believe you. I was a courier once, you can say that. Say you came here hoping for a letter from your parents.”

  He was afraid to kiss her because he was afraid of waking Jonas, but he had been afraid to kiss her before, years earlier, and he had found a way. Now he found a way again. She let him, heedless of who might be watching. He kissed the boy too, who awoke and cried out, pushing him away before settling back into his mother’s shoulder.

  “I’m going to tell you an address,” said Lukas, “of a place in America. If you could get a letter out there somehow, I’d be very grateful.”

  “I don’t know what I can do.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be right now. Whenever you can. Even if it’s years from now. But you mustn’t write down the address, so you’ll have to memorize it.”

  “All right.”

  He gave her an address in America, the address of Monika’s uncle. He also told her what to say to Lakstingala if she had a chance to speak to him. They talked about the people they knew who had died. After the music from Warsaw ended for the night, she left the radio on and it gave off a sound of static that she did not turn down.

  “I understand you were out of the country, in the West,” said Elena.

  “Yes. I was in Sweden and Germany and France.”

  “Tell me about those places.”

  He described Stockholm and Paris and the towns he had visited in Germany. She asked him questions for a long time.

  “It’s good to know life goes on somewhere,” she said.

  Then much too soon it was full dawn. Lukas looked at the brightening window and then at Elena.

  “Please don’t cry,” said Lukas.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you do, I will too, and I don’t want to be taken with my eyes full of tears.” He paused. “Will you tell Jonas about me? Not for a while, but later, when he’s old enough to understand. Tell him I saw him and admired him and I knew he would be all right.” He could not say more for a moment.

  “I will, I will.”

  “And if you can, tell him about my parents’ farm by Rumsiskes. When this is all over, maybe someone will be left alive, my mother or my sister. It would be good for him to know there is family somewhere.”

  “I will.”

  It was all so hard. He had been willing to suffer, but he did not know it would be like this.

  He wanted to stay longer, but it was time to go. He touched her hand and kissed her wet cheeks. Elena could not help herself after all. Neither could he.

  Lukas went to the door and opened it. He wasn’t sure, but he thought there was a little movement at the periphery of his vision. He kept his hands visible but turned back to face the two of them at the table before he closed the door.

  “I always loved you, Elena,” he said. Then he stepped out from the underground and turned to face the street.

  TWENTY - SEVEN

  CANADA – LITHUANIA

  AUGUST 1989

  THE OLD STORIES stayed underground in Lithuania, and others like them in Estonia and Latvia, in Poland and Ukraine and other places. As for knowledge of them in the West, they were forgotten in the malls, suburbs and high-rises of America. A generation of immigrant children grew up and joined the mainstream, forgetting their sources, the springs and rivulets they had come from, except for a few who were caught in the eddies, turning endlessly, in neither the present nor the past, mulling over the unknowability of history and the banality of the present.

  By 1989 the Soviet Union was collapsing, although no one guessed it at the time. As the restrictions eased, every trembling mole was digging its way out of the underground and brushing itself off. Seeds long dormant began to sprout and reach out for the light. Messages began to travel again. Many went to addresses where no one lived any longer, but some found their way to the proper destinations.

  In early spring of that year, a letter arrived in the mailbox of Luke Zolynas, a high school French teacher who lived in Toronto, Canada. He was a tall, gentle man with eyeglasses that slipped down his nose when he was in a rush, to the amusement of his students, and he was always in a rush because he had three children between the ages of two and eight and his wife worked in a bank and he ran both the drama club and the chamber quartet after school. His father had died young of lung cancer and his mother in a car accident a few years after that. Luke would have liked to know more about his past, but his parents were dead, his one aunt lived far away, and anyway, he was busy with everyday life.

  The letter came from Jonas Petronis in Lithuania, and it explained that the Lithuanian basketball coach had discovered they were half-brothers. Could Luke come for a visit?

  Luke was startled, then curious, and eventually ambivalent about this alleged half-brother, who appeared to disrupt the busy flow of his life. Everyone came from somewhere, and memory was a mixed blessing. Look what happened to immigrant kids who didn’t forget: they became enthusiastic ethnics, slightly comical figures in folk costumes, objects of derision. Or else they nurtured ancient hatreds and let them fester.

  Luke Zolynas loved Canada, in a way, not that he would ever put it in those words. But to him it never felt altogether like home. Sometimes he wondered if he’d landed in the wrong country, and now this letter confirmed some complications about his origins.

  Luke’s father had been a very discreet man. His one weakness was cigarettes, which he sometimes held, maddeningly to Luke, between his thumb and forefinger, as if he were a villain in a European movie. He smoked a pack and a half each day, never leaving home without a spare pack in his briefcase. He’d worked for a couple of decades as a clerk at city hall. He didn’t talk a lot about his own origins.

  Luke’s mother was a nurse who was often out, working shifts. His mother and father had always had a cordial if slightly cool relationship, unlike the relationships of most of his parents’ friends, who bickered passionately. His parents had had separate bedrooms for as long as Luke could remember. They even took their vacations separately.

  It had never occurred to Luke that the man who helped raise him, whom his mother had always called Zoly, was not his biological father. But after he received the letter from Lithuania, when Luke phoned his French aunt in Lyon, she confirmed that Zoly was his stepfather, and told him a whole series of stories about his mother’s first husband. In a second letter from Jonas Petronis, Luke learned the outlines of another part of his father’s life.

  In late June of that year, after school was out, Luke flew to Vilnius, where an athletic man with curly brown hair and thick eyeglasses as well as an atrocious plaid
suit met him at the airport intending to drive him by car to the town of Merkine, where he lived.

  Jonas Petronis was not exactly warm but not exactly hostile either. He was ambivalent too. He seemed to study Luke’s good shoes and luggage too long, to resent him a little. On the drive to his hometown he explained that any such visit would have been against the law a year earlier, when the old travel restrictions were being enforced and tourists were not permitted to leave the capital. It was still against the law technically, but no one was really paying attention anymore.

  The countryside they drove through was made up primarily of pine forests that had been planted because the Soviet planners decided the sandy soil was too poor, and so the old farms had been liquidated, the fences dismantled, the houses bulldozed and the people resettled; geography was a slate that could be wiped clean, within limits. The rivers still flowed in their courses, but the farms that had once hugged their banks were gone, their people scattered. History, like geography, could be wiped away within reason as well, but like shards of pottery from ancient settlements it had a way of working up to the surface. A determined man or woman could piece some of it back together.

  Jonas Petronis wanted to get to Merkine before dark. His eyes were poor because he’d suffered malnutrition as a boy in a Siberian work camp. But they were unavoidably delayed by road construction, and so they drove slowly down the empty country roads by night, where the darkness of the forest beside them was greater than the slightly less dark night sky above them.

  They talked awkwardly about the past, two strangers trying to reassemble the stories of their parallel lives. Jonas Petronis had not known a great deal about the past either until, after the funeral of the aunt who raised him, his uncle Povilas had taken him aside at a place far out in the country, in order to fill him in on a little family history. Povilas was not really an uncle, just a family friend who had started hanging around with his aunt in the sixties.

  Povilas had a half-acre garden plot in the country and a storage shed that he had enlarged until it was more like a small cottage. There, over shashlik cooked on an open fire and a few glasses of Armenian cognac, he’d told Jonas some surprising things. Povilas told him that his aunt was not really his aunt, but his mother.

  The information was all a bit much for Jonas. He only half believed what he was told. He remembered Siberia from his childhood— the fleas the children played with, the potatoes that were sweet because they’d been left in a heap in the fields to freeze. Jonas had half thought Povilas was beginning to lose his mind. But some renegade historian, calling himself an “underground” historian, had looked up Jonas Petronis and asked him questions about his father, about whom Jonas knew nothing yet others seemed to know something.

  It was all very unsettling, and it all became more unsettling. Jonas found out that his story had layers, and one of them lay in Canada.

  For his part, Luke would have doubted the story even now if not for a pair of letters on the dashboard, which he read by the overhead light. They were from his mother, Monika, to Jonas’s mother, Elena, and they had been written in the late sixties.

  Jonas had ferreted out a few more details from his uncle Povilas, once known by his code name, Lakstingala, stories about their father, who had been executed some months after his capture in 1950.

  Down through the tunnel of darkness the two half-brothers drove, on the road to Merkine, Jonas’s home, where soon monuments to the Lithuanian partisans would join the monuments to the Red partisans and the Red Army. There was no shortage of cemeteries, for the Polish partisans who had fought in the region at various times, for German soldiers in the First World War and Napoleonic soldiers before them.

  First there had been no more Jews in the Jewish Pine Forest, and then there was no longer a pine forest at all. In 1959 the Soviet engineers and the bulldozers came, and the hill, the forest and the south of old Rumsiskes were drowned to form the Kaunas Reservoir.

  If the pressure were great enough and the time long enough, the sand of the dune forest would form into shale, and the stories that lay there would be pried apart by the archaeologists and geologists of the future.

  Acknowledgements

  This novel could not have been written if not for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Lithuania in 1991. These events opened up various archives and personal memoirs that led to the publication of a large number of histories about the partisan resistance to the second Soviet occupation in 1944. The story of partisan resistance not only in Lithuania but also in Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine and Poland remains largely unknown in the West. The partisan resistance in Lithuania was strongest in the early years, with as many as thirty thousand active participants and many more supporters. By the early fifties, numbers were down to a couple of thousand, and these were being slowly exterminated. Curiously, First Deputy Prime Minister Laver-entiy Beria had one of them, Jonas Zemaitis (code-named Vytautas), brought to Moscow for talks about accommodation, but Beria was executed and Zemaitis as well, leaving one to wonder how things might have turned out if both had survived.

  There has been speculation, unsubstantiated, that the British attempts to land agents on the Baltic coast were compromised by the infamous turncoat Kim Philby. One thing is certain: the Soviets infiltrated the British operations quite thoroughly, and many agents dropped inside were double agents and those who went with them were doomed. One of these agents, however, survived prison and lived to see independent Lithuania. He apparently asked for thirty-five years of back pay from the British. I don’t know if he received it.

  Before 1991, few of the details of the partisan resistance were known beyond the stories told in Juozas Luksa’s Partizanai, published in 1950 when Luksa came out to the West, fell in love and married, and then returned to Lithuania, where he was betrayed and shot in an ambush. I used the outlines of the Luksa story for this novel, but what you find here is in no way meant to tell Luksa’s story. His love story was entirely different and even more romantic than the one I have told. Notwithstanding the many differences, I couldn’t resist using a simple anagram of “Luksa” to create the name of the protagonist of this novel.

  Those familiar with the partisan literature will see that I have drawn not only from Luksa’s book but from several other classics of the genre that came to light after 1991, most of them available only in Lithuanian. These include, but are not limited to, the following: Daugel Krito Sunu by Adolfas Ramanauskas (code-named Vanagas), Sita Paimkite Gyva by Povilas Peciulaitis (code-named Lakstingala), Pavarges Herojus by Liutas Mockunas, and Partizano Dzuko Dienorastis by Lionginas Baliukevicius (code-named Dzukas). Another valuable resource was Roger D. Petersen’s Resistance and Rebellion, an excellent study of partisan support structures in a typical Lithuanian village. There are now many, many other books about the partisans. An excellent new study of the partisans in Eastern Europe appeared just as I was proofreading this novel, too late to have an impact but too important to leave unmentioned: The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands by Alexander Statiev. Another important background history to the partisan movement is Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands.

  I should add that a certain number of accusations against the partisans do exist, holding that they were all simply bandits or fascist criminals, but I have found no documented evidence of large-scale crimes. However, there is no doubt there were partisans who went bad. Some were executed after court martial. As far as I can tell, the broad accusations against the partisans as a whole are based on a Soviet piece of disinformation called Vanagai is Anapus [Hawks from the Other Side], published in 1960. This novel depicts all the historical partisans and their supporters as criminals, cynics or fools. Although no one who reads this mass market–style novel could take it seriously, some of the accusations in it seem to have lingered right up to the present, demonstrating that any story, even a bad one, can have an afterlife.

  Thanks: above all to Snaige, who was a supportive and intelligent reader during the tumultuous
period of a few highs and numerous lows during which this novel was being written; and to my sons, Dainius and Gint, who were valuable sounding boards. Thanks as well to Anne McDermid, my agent, who continued to believe in this project; to Patrick Crean of Thomas Allen, whose enthusiasm for the novel was exhilarating; to Janice Zawerbny, whose insight into its structure was critical to its successful completion; to my first readers and critics, Joe Kertes, Wayson Choy, Madeleine Matte, Charlotte Empey and Nathan Whitlock; to the Canada Council, whose funding helped cover my research trips; and to two surviving partisans who told me the details of their lives as well as their sufferings in prison—Juozas Jakavonis (code-named Tigras, who should have been there for the seizure of Merkine but narrowly missed the event) and Tekle Kalvinskiene, on whose father’s farm on the Polish side of the border many partisans, including Juozas Luksa, took refuge.

  Thanks to in-country helpers and advisers Dr. Arvydas Anusauskas and Darius Ross; and to all the following, in no particular order, though with great love and appreciation for their kindness: Saulius and Silva Sondeckis, Antanas and Danule Sipaila, Jonas Jurasas and Ausra Marija Sluckaite-Jurasiene, Giedrius Subacius, Neringa Klumbyt, Leonidas Donskis, Violeta Kelertiene, Darius Kuolys, Paulius Sondeckis, Justinas Sajauskas, Stasys Stacevicius, Aldona Raugalaite, Grazina Siauciunas, Egle Jurkeviciene and Habib Massoud (of the office of the Canadian embassy in Lithuania), Genius Procuta, Richard Handler, John Bentley Mays, Wodek Szemberg, Monica Pacheco, Laimonas Briedis, Milda Danyte, Ruta Slapkauskaite, Daiva Mikalonyte, Egidijus Aleksandravicius, Algis Mickunas, Jurate Visockaite, Birute Garbaravicius, Arturas Petronis, Algis Ruksenas, Vilis Normanas and Gitana Judvytyte.