Underground (32 page)

“But what if they do?” She turned to her husband. “You'll go to the district committee this week and you'll sign up to join the collective farm.”

“My father left this farm to me,” said Almis. “I can't just give it away.”

“You can and you will. Your father would prefer you alive rather than dead.” She turned to Lakstingala. “It hurts me to say this, cousin, but I don't want to see you at our door anymore. One of these days they'll make us talk somehow, and I'd rather not be the one who has to give you up to the Cheka.”

“These are the men who saved us!” said Almis. “What about the soldier back in the car? What would we have done about him?”

“I could have killed him myself. In any case, it doesn't matter. The regime wants us to give up our land. We'll do that, and we'll be safe for a while. We'll keep our heads down and wait for better times.”

The partisans dried out their clothes as best they could in two hours. Almis scrubbed the floor where Imbrasas had spilled his blood. Then he packaged up the bread and meat that he had portioned out for the dead man. Lakstingala and Lukas took one half-bottle of liquor against the cold, as the rain had not let up outside. Vida went into the next room and did not come out again, even after the men slept for two hours and then rose to take away the car and the bodies.

Almis walked them out sheepishly into the yard. “I'm sorry for what she said.”

“It's all right,” Lakstingala replied. “But try to keep the spirit of resistance in you even if you do join the collective farm. No one owns your spirit if you don't let them.”

“No, but they do put your spirit on a grindstone here. They begin to wear it away.”

TWENTY - THREE

WINTER – SPRING 1950

T
HE REDS IN EASTERN EUROPE
were like dike builders, damming up their positions to keep out the news from the West. But they could not prevent seepage from the BBC, from Sweden and even from Poland, a friend whose censorship was not all it could be.

Even within the country, underground news found its own way of flowing, persistent as water, running through the crevices and the cracks, pooling in the low places and building pressure until it burst through to the surface. Sooner or later everyone learned the same thing: the Cheka, the partisans and the farmers all heard that Lukas had done the impossible, had come into the country again.

The Cheka was eager, bordering on hysterical, to seize him, to redirect him to its own purposes. Best of all would be to get him alive in order to send disinformation out to the West, or to make him into a smiter himself, or at the very least to sound the depths of his knowledge. It would be terrible to have to kill him, but better to have him dead than running around the country like some kind of folk hero.

And to the folk he did remain a hero, a kind of invisible man who crossed borders as if they had no meaning, who evaded smiters and slew the slayers and left their bodies in cars that had been riddled with bullet holes.

And yet, for all his renown, the limits of his life were once again the damp walls of a bunker in his old partisan district, a pitifully small burrow with barely enough room for four men, and another bunker a kilometre away with room for two, a kind of citadel in case the first bunker was betrayed. Here he waited as Lakstingala sought contact along the tattered web of remaining partisans, trying to find news that would lead Lukas to Lozorius and through him to Elena.

“I'd like to go with you,” said Lukas.

“And so would the Cheka—that way you'd be easier to catch. No, no, you sit tight. The fact that you're here at all is some kind of miracle.”

“But what if something happens to you?”

“If I'm ever gone more than a week, find a new place to live. Sniff around the town of Perloja for a partisan named Hawk. I think he's still around.”

“I'd heard he died years ago.”

“That's not what I heard. You never know.”

“I came to look for Elena.”

“The way to her is through Lozorius. Nobody I know can find her and I don't want to stir up a hornet's nest by asking too broadly or too quickly.”

“I love her.”

Lakstingala winced. “I have a wife too. Have you ever heard me talk like that about her?”

“No.”

“Exactly.”

“So tell me about her. What is she like? How has she managed all these years when the Cheka must know who you are by now?”

“I think something must have happened to you out there in the West. You're not the same anymore. As our world gets more dangerous, you want to share more information. What's going to happen if one of us gets taken alive? Do you think you'll be able to stay silent under torture?”

“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 have 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?”