Underground (15 page)

Rubbing his neck, Lukas pushed himself slightly away from the window and looked at the faces of his fellow travellers, who had watched the scene without expression or making a move to help him. Even the clerk who had told him about the murders stared at him indifferently.

Lukas stepped off the train at the country station of Mauruciai, walked out of the village and hid himself just inside a wood and slept for a while. He stayed there until nightfall, cut off a piece of the smoked bacon and ate a chunk of bread, drinking at a stream to take off his thirst.

When Lukas made it to the farmhouse deep in the Kazlu Ruda forest where he was supposed to meet Elena, the fields and yard were dark and he banged on the door a long time before the farmer appeared with an oil lamp in his hand.

“What do you want?” he asked. He had a white beard and moustache and would have looked like Father Christmas in his nightgown if not for the sour expression on his face.

“Any Reds around?”

“How should I know?”

“I was supposed to meet someone here.”

“That's your business, not mine. There's no one here but my family, and you're disturbing their sleep as it is. Good night.”

“Just a moment,” said Lukas, slipping his foot into the door before the farmer could close it. “I've been travelling and I'm hungry. Do you think you could give me something to eat?”

“My children went to bed hungry. I have nothing for you.”

“Then maybe a bed.”

“Every single pillow is spoken for.”

Something was wrong. He had arranged to meet Elena here, but the farmer was being too aggressive. He acted as if Lukas were a bandit. The most intelligent thing would be to slip away, find a place in the hay in the barn and burrow in deep until the morning. But the attitude of this farmer did not please him. Lukas had been travelling two nights and was tired.

“I'm a partisan,” said Lukas.

“Good for you. You go about your business and I'll go about mine.”

Lukas lifted his briefcase. “I'm armed. Make me a bed here on the floor by the front door, and be quick about it. Keep the other doors closed until I tell you to come in.”

For a while he wondered if the farmer would make him show the non-existent weapon, but he sullenly did as Lukas commanded.

Lukas spent a restless night and rose just before dawn when he heard the farmer begin to move around. Lukas sat at the long table and drank milk and ate bread with the grim farmer and his wife. Two girls and a boy were interested in him, but the parents would not let them speak at the breakfast table.

A face appeared through the imperfect glass in the window. Lukas recognized Elena and his heart leapt up. She waved and then walked around the house and he went to the door, which he threw open to find her in an army uniform jacket and skirt with a handmade Lithuanian tricolour patch on the shoulder.

Lukas looked at her face, half afraid that he might find coolness there, or caution, or, worst of all, determined friendliness. But instead he saw a mixture of hope and fear that mirrored his own feelings. He took her in his arms, awkwardly, for she had a rifle on a strap over her shoulder, and he held her and kissed her face.

He heard the farmer behind him and pulled away, embarrassed now in the moment after their embrace. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her.

“If I'd known you were here I would have come earlier,” she said, taking off her hat and shaking out her hair, “but I expected you two days ago and thought something had happened.” Every plan that the partisans made was contingent—on the ability to travel, on the local risk, on messages being delivered accurately.

The farmer was grasping his hand and apologizing. He had been warned not to give anything to suspicious men who appeared in the night. There were
agents provocateurs
among the Reds and the slayers, and he had assumed Lukas was one of them. His wife tried to make amends as well, heating the previous evening's soup for them, cutting squares of bread and spreading them thickly with butter, making tea.

They talked of things in general over the table, of the harvest and weather, of politics and the trainloads of goods that chugged through the forest on the railway from Germany, where the Reds continued to strip the towns and cities to rebuild their own. The farmer listened attentively, trying to glean whatever information he could. There was no real news to be had in the ordinary way, so he tried to piece together details to create some picture of what the future might hold for him.

As for Lukas, he spoke in the optimistic, encouraging way of the partisans, who saw it as their duty not only to fight the Reds but also to preserve the morale of the people. Elena did not speak much. He sensed that the farmer knew her. He looked at Elena as much as he could but tried not to stare.

After they had eaten, Lukas and Elena went out to the garden and sat on a secluded patch of grass behind the currant bushes so they could speak freely. It was the season of grasshoppers, which leapt from the newly dried grass in the morning sun. Bees hummed around the flowers in the garden by the house, and a single cricket sounded from near the foundation.

Lukas looked closely at Elena. She did not have the worn, pale look of those who spent most of their time in bunkers. It was summer, and she must have been coming out to bask in the sun, which was good for her skin but bad for her life expectancy. He intended to admonish her, to beg her to take better care of herself for his sake, but when she looked up at him he lost all need to speak and laid one hand on her shoulder to hold her as he kissed her. He held her tightly against himself for a while, stroking her hair. She smelled good to him, and he lifted her hair to nuzzle up against the side of her neck. He had been away from her for so long.

“Is there a place where we can be alone?”

She took him by the hand and led him out through the gate in the yard. She led him down the lane toward the forest, and then across a piece of scrubland along the banks of a brook to a place where the bushes grew in a dense mass and the brook flowed into a small river. At a bend of the river they came upon a high bank with a beard of roots and grasses hanging down. Elena reached down and pulled aside a mat of branches that had been woven together to camouflage the hatch of a bunker, and then pulled open this door and motioned for him to go ahead of her.

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.”