Underground (23 page)

“You were a neighbour of mine back in Lithuania,” she said.

He looked at her more closely. She was younger than him, around twenty-two he guessed, with light brown hair, a high forehead and high cheekbones. He did not remember her.

“Are you from Rumsiskes?” he asked.

“No, Kaunas. My parents had a house on the same street as the university residence, and I would see you and the other students going to lectures when you were in your first year. My sister and I were still schoolgirls and we used to admire you all from a distance.”

“Admire us? What for?”

“Because you were older and seemed so sure of yourselves. We didn't even know what we wanted to do yet, and there you were, you and your friends, sailing along on the journey of life.”

That period seemed utterly remote to him now. “What's your name?” Lukas asked.

“Monika, but sometimes they call me Monique, since I live in France.”

Lukas had been approached like this many times in the last few weeks, and although it was flattering to have admirers, they made him feel awkward. They considered him many things: a hero, the embodiment of their anger, and a symbol of the life of resistance that they had not chosen because they had fled. He felt like a fraud in all these roles and he longed sometimes for the old friends who knew him from before. And yet that person was gone.

In the eyes of the young people in particular, those his age, he seemed to represent what might have been. They were bored, these DP camp residents, over three years in barracks, some of them, caught between worlds and still unsure of the future. Some of the teenagers who had been schoolchildren when their parents fled now wanted to go back with him to fight.

The poor darlings. No one needed teenagers in the partisan fight, and in any case there was no easy way to get back there.

“I wonder,” said Monika, “if you have any information about those who were deported to Siberia in 1940.”

“Not in particular. None of them ever came back as far as I know, and a lot more followed them.” He hated to disappoint Monika, but there was no use in raising false hopes.

She nodded sadly. “I wanted you to know that I found your talk very moving. I'm very impressed by everything you've done.”

“Thank you very much.”

She hesitated and then went on. “I don't mean to be unfriendly when I ask this—I didn't want to say anything during question period—but do you think it's right to continue fighting?”

“What do you propose instead?”

“A whole generation is being cut down. Who will be left in the country in the long run if all of them are killed? Wouldn't passive resistance be better than fighting?”

“You're not the first person to say that.”

“I never claimed I was original. I was just wondering.”

“It's the line that the Chekists try to sell. They keep apologizing for the ‘excesses' and telling us we should lay down our arms if we really love our country.”

She reddened. “So you think I'm a Chekist too?”

“I didn't say that. I'm sure your ideas are sincere.”

“But naive?”

“Completely. If you repeat the party line of the Cheka, then you're helping them whether you know it or not. You must never become confused about your enemies.”

“Maybe it's no longer a time to kill. Maybe it's a time to heal.”

“Are you a Catholic?”

“I'm not really all that religious. In my own way I'm a doubter. It's the more honest reaction, don't you think? Because if you are a true believer, your cause is assured. It gives you peace of mind.”

“What a ridiculous statement. I've had no peace of mind for years. I've watched my generation die out in the forests in order to save those behind us. Don't make me seem like a simpleton.”

She was going to respond, but the door was thrown open and two men came out. “Lukas,” one said, “you can flirt all you want later. But now you have to come back inside and answer more questions.”

Regretting his sharpness, he turned to offer softer words, but Monika had slipped away.

Lukas spent the following morning in a meeting with the émigré government, establishing the groundwork for their relationship with the partisans. There was a shortage of coal in the camp and so the room was very cold, all of them working at the table in their coats and hats, the recording secretary wearing gloves with the fingers cut out. Twenty men representing the various pre-war political parties worked together uneasily, intensely competitive among themselves.

All the discussions about future governments of Lithuania had an air of unreality about them, of detachment from anything that might happen any time soon. Lukas felt ungrounded, as if he were floating in a sea of words.

When the morning meetings ended and Lukas was eating canned corned beef sandwiches with the others, he looked up from his long table in the cafeteria and saw Monika talking by the exit door with another woman her age, a similar-looking woman who must have been her sister. Both had light brown hair and something French about them, a hint of style in the way they wore their scarves.

He had enjoyed the strange meat sandwich. It was a little gelatinous and pleasantly salty. He was surprised by many of the foods he found in Germany, the powdered milk and cornbread and the various tinned foods. American cigarettes were a novelty too, for both their taste and their ability to function as alternate currency.

A priest from the émigré government was explaining that it would take time for the Pope to respond to the letter from the partisans, but Lukas was only listening with half an ear. He excused himself and walked over to Monika.

“How are you today?” he asked.

No emotion of any kind showed on her face. “I'm as fine as I was yesterday. This is my sister, Anne.” She was maybe a year older than Monika and looked vaguely familiar, another one of the girls from the street of his university residence.

“I thought I might have offended you,” said Lukas.

“You seem to find women's opinions unserious.”

“I take women very seriously.”

“Do you? It didn't sound like it.”

“Women in the underground were everything from couriers to machine gunners. We couldn't have got by without them.”

Suddenly he could not speak anymore. The talk of women in the underground made him think of Elena. Her image rose up in his mind so strongly that he could almost see her, almost believe that if he looked across the room she would be sitting there with the others, wondering why he was talking to this woman.

Lukas stopped speaking and looked up at Monika in panic, afraid he might begin to weep in public, in the middle of a crowd. He excused himself. He tore down the steps of the cafeteria to the ground floor, conscious of the clatter of his shoes and the well-wishers who were trying to say things to him as he ran past them on the steps.

As the hero of the resistance, he was the centre of attention. People looked at him, trying to understand the meaning of this sudden flight. Even out in the yard he could not contain himself, and he walked away from the camp into the town, and then beyond it onto a road in the countryside that led from the plain up toward the nearby mountains.

He walked fast, hoping that if he moved quickly he might even be able to escape from himself.

Most of the snow was gone from the road and the fields, though there were still dirty banks at the roadside and against the fence rails; icy water ran in the ditches from the melt higher up on the peaks. In places there were pools of water on the dirt road and he had to step carefully around them to avoid sinking into the muck. No automobile or cart hazarded the mud on this particular road, and so he was alone. Even the fields were mostly empty, with only some faraway cows nudging the earth to look for grass shoots, their bells plinking irregularly in the distance.

He kept walking until he felt his shoulders stop shaking and the tears dried from his face. He did not understand how this could be happening to him. He faced losses no worse than many other people had suffered, and they had seemed to survive. What right did he have to be overcome in this way? The whole room he had spoken to, the whole DP camp, had stories of loss; it was the responsibility of every man and woman to keep up morale, not to let depression get to them. Not everyone could. Some were taken away to psychiatric hospitals, and others hanged themselves in the night. Still others walked around with smitten looks, or went on drinking binges that lasted for days.

To fall into despair was to become a casualty of one kind or another, a victim of Red success, and he was damned if he would let himself become one. But he did not know how to stop these unbearable emotions from washing over him.

He walked for a long time. The April sun felt warm on his face, although the angle was beginning to change and the colour of the fields around him yellowed in the late afternoon light. It was time to turn around. When he did so, he saw a distant figure approaching along the road. He feared it might be Monika, and his fears were confirmed when she was close enough to be made out. There was no way to avoid her.

She had tied her hair back in a scarf, though a strand of it showed on her forehead. There was a thick streak of dirt on her coat and on the sleeve as well.

He spoke out first. “You've fallen in the mud. I'm very sorry.”

“It's nothing.” She was searching his eyes and put her hands out toward him as soon as she was close enough. He took them in his, startled at her sudden proximity.

“I must have embarrassed you back at the cafeteria,” Lukas said.

“No, I'm the one who's at fault. I was making fun of you in a way, I suppose, and you shouldn't make fun of some things.”

“It's not that. You triggered a very strong memory in me. I've had some losses, you know. Not more than anyone else, but still.”

“Yes, I know about your wife.”

He was stunned. “How can you know about her? I didn't think anyone knew about her.” He had to hold himself back or the tears would well up again.

“Word gets out.”

Now Lukas was mortified. All this time, while he had been on his lecture tour talking about the suffering of the people left behind, the audience must have known about Elena. The sympathy they had lavished upon him was therefore partially due to his own story. This public knowledge of the grief he had held back from himself was completely unbearable. Where he came from, a man did not parade his feelings. There were too many feelings to be had during the war, and the agony of one person did not deserve precedence over the agony of others.

Monika let go of his hands and slipped her arm through his, as if they were old friends. “May I walk back with you?” she asked.

“Of course. I promise I won't break down like that again.” He was not actually sure he could keep his promise.

“It wouldn't matter to me if you did.”

They began to walk back toward the town.

“Tell me about where you grew up,” said Lukas. He wanted her to talk as much as possible in order not to have to talk himself.

“I was a city girl, growing up in Kaunas with my sister. My father was in the ministry of education, but his parents and my mother's parents both came from farm families. It's funny, but when I think of Lithuania, I don't think of the city where I spent most of my time. I think of the two farms where we spent the summers. One was a combination farm and mill with a great millpond where we swam all summer long and our grandparents spoiled us. We didn't have to do anything at all. We were terrible. We'd stay up late, flirting with the farmhands, and then we'd sleep in in the mornings while they had to get up at dawn to go to work.”

“And your parents?”

“My father was taken in the first round of deportations in 1940. They would have taken my mother and us too, but we were vacationing at the farm while he had stayed behind to work in town. He never actually said anything, but I suspect he knew what was coming because he sent us off to the countryside before school was out.”

The Reds had taken many thousands of people right up to the first weeks of June 1941 and shipped them off to the North. When the Germans attacked, the Reds took some of their remaining prisoners with them as they retreated, but many were executed. For all the rush to retreat, some of those the Reds killed were tortured first and their mangled bodies left behind in heaps as lessons to the Lithuanians about anyone who chose to be anti-Soviet. Many of the Jews were immediately massacred by collaborators and Nazis when the Germans came a week later, and most of the rest were killed afterward.

But the fate of many others, including those taken in the first Red deportations, was unclear. They were simply gone. Monika's father might have died in the cattle cars, or made it to Siberia or the Komi Republic and died there, or survived and be working in a labour camp with no chance of communication. Thus all losses that were indefinite provided seeds of hope. Or of despair, the result of hope that could not be sustained.

“And how did you get to Paris?” asked Lukas.

“My uncle was the military attaché in Paris before the war and he stayed there. He took us in quite early, at the beginning of 1944. We were lucky to be there to see the Liberation. Since then, my mother gives piano lessons and my sister and I have given up our restaurant jobs, but we're looking for something better now.”

“How is life in Paris?”

“Most people would prefer to go to America. Except for the artists and philosophers—they would prefer to stay in Paris.”

“What would you prefer?”

“My situation is very particular. I can't leave my mother alone and I don't know what other country will want to take a middle-aged widow, if she is a widow. And she doesn't want to go anywhere in case my father does show up somehow. I won't leave her alone to live on bread and marmalade in some freezing seventh-storey room. I think I'll have to make my life in France, unless some other opportunity opens up. I'd rather go home, but I'm beginning to think that will never happen.”