Underground (33 page)

“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 brilliant.”

“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

T
HE 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.

Some little movement was happening in the animal kingdom: rats ran above the earth and moles dug a series of tunnels, their underground paths now visible on the earth as humps on the grass, and the magpies and ravens called their harsh warnings in the air. In one place, his eye attracted by a slight reflection, Lukas came upon a tiny spider spinning an optimistic web for insects that were barely awake yet.

By moving from copse to copse, by following overgrown fencelines where the bushes were high, as he ranged a little farther each day Lukas began to understand better where Lakstingala had hidden him, especially when he came upon the farmstead of the American farmer, the traitor who had attempted to drug the partisan Anupras. Lukas watched this place from a distance, and when he moved cautiously forward it became clear that the house was abandoned. No animals moved about the yard and the barn door hung open. The windows at the back of the house were broken and inside he could see smashed bottles and loose papers scattered about.

Nearby was the place where he and his brother had first started their underground lives, and like a man returning to childhood haunts he found the places he remembered much diminished by time. This wreck of a house was the place where he had sat with Flint and the drunken forger to plan his trip to meet Elena.

Twice during his rambling, Lukas caught sight of Rimantas in the distance. The poet had not been shown Lukas's bunker, but he must have divined it was not far from the place where he was typing the newspaper in his own tiny burrow. Just as soon as the earth dried out a little, Lukas and Lakstingala would need to decamp and dig new bunkers somewhere else. Old bunkers attracted bad luck— sooner or later the Cheka dogs sniffed them out no matter how much lamp oil was sprinkled around.

Upon his cautious return from one such walk, Lukas saw movement near his bunker, and he hung back in the trees to see who was there. From a distance one of the men looked like Lakstingala, but he was not alone. There were some people whom Lukas could trust, and Lakstingala was one of them, but it was good to be cautious just in case Lakstingala himself was being duped. Lukas drew closer with his assault rifle at the ready, but when he was within thirty yards he recognized the unmistakably turned-out ears of the second man and he went to them.

“I was afraid I wouldn't find you alive,” said Lukas.

“I told you once before, they can't kill me. They've tried again and again. Besides, what kind of a host would I be if I weren't around to welcome you after I invited you? So you made it into the country all right?”

Lozorius's colour was very poor. He was like a frog coming out of hibernation, pale, almost translucent. But for all his bad colour, by virtue of being alive, Lozorius was still on a winning streak.

They went inside the bunker and closed the lid behind them. The upper bunk was hopelessly wet, but they could lay their jackets and arms on the lower one and sit around the small table with their feet in a shallow puddle of water.

“Lozorius was almost impossible to get here,” said Lakstingala. “When I finally found him, he grilled me up and down about you. Then he didn't want to come here, and he wouldn't let me bring you to his own bunker.”

“What's this all about?”

“I transmit from my bunker. I run the radio antenna up at night and I send out messages. I also receive. As far as I know I'm the only free radio sending information out of this country, and if the Cheka gets me, the last bit of light will stop escaping from here. No one comes to my bunker.”

There was a flash of the spirit that Lukas remembered, the confidence that made Lozorius so attractive.

“Don't you give yourself away if you keep transmitting from the same place?” asked Lukas.

“Not if I'm very brief and infrequent. Did you bring a radio?”

“Not me personally. The others I came with might still have theirs, but I don't know what happened to them.”

“I do. At least one of them is working for the Cheka, but I don't know if he was always with them or if he was forced into this only after you landed.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because he's sending information to Stockholm that contradicts mine,” said Lozorius. “He's trying to undermine my credibility.”

“The Cheka know about you?”

“Of course they do. They're looking for me so hard I'm afraid to breathe. I'm the last free transmitter in this country—they need to close me down. And here is the irony: I know your compatriot is compromised, and so is Stockholm, for all the good it does me. The villains know I'm here and I know about the villains, but those who might still be honest back in Stockholm can't tell us apart.”

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying there is a hole in security somewhere. I had a farmer up in Palanga freelancing for me personally. The forest was full of Cheka troops before you landed, so you were expected. They set a trap for you, but you still managed to slip out. I'm amazed you got away.”

“I was lucky,” said Lukas.