Underground (7 page)

“We've barely had a chance to meet.”

“I come by every once in a while. Are you going to be stationed here, with this band?”

“I think so.”

“Then take care of my brother, will you?”

“She says that to everyone,” said Ungurys. “It's embarrassing.”

The fireside felt empty after they left. The songs the men sang became melancholy as the evening wore on, and Lukas did not want to let himself fall into that mood. He roused his brother and they returned to their lean-to for the night, but Lukas could not fall asleep for a long time.

FOUR

FEBRUARY 1945

L
IKE BEARS
in hibernation, many of the partisans hunkered down during the winter, moving as little as possible to keep their footprints off the snow. Vincentas and Lukas were moved to a bunker three kilometres away where the rotary press, typewriter and radio were kept. Here they studied English grammar and practised listening to the BBC, and finally typed up the underground broadsheets and printed them for distribution to the villages.

Learning English was very difficult because the voice that came over the radio made noises that were barely comprehensible to someone who had only a grammar book to study from. Lukas and Vincentas began to take language lessons with the American farmer. This helped a little, but the American's accent was vastly different from that of the BBC announcer. The American's wife served them chicory coffee, black bread and butter, but her hospitality was grudging. She loved her children more than she loved her country, and if the partisans left tracks in the snow, the Cheka would ask questions.

Even in winter, the partisans carried printed sheaves out to the villages and towns to pass on to the couriers. The men posted handbills in prominent places and ripped down Red proclamations. The couriers' houses were also letterboxes through which personal messages could sometimes be sent. Lukas wrote to his parents to let them know he and his brother were alive and well.

Lukas was used to hard work from his farm childhood, but he had never had to live out of doors for a long time. Even though he and Vincentas were privileged to work and live in a bunker that was heated by night, his fingertips never really warmed up and he hit the keys of the typewriter awkwardly.

There was so much to write about the progress of the war farther west, to exhort the people not to collaborate with the Reds, to forbid the young men from joining the slayers.

Slayers
. Lukas found the Reds went straight to the point with their vocabulary. The word came from the Russian
Istrebitel
. It described Lithuanians who joined the Cheka as auxiliaries to hunt down “bandits” such as Lukas and Vincentas. In return, the slayers did not have to go into the army. Lukas could understand that a desperate man might become a slayer, but this understanding came without any sympathy. In order to preserve himself, the slayer had to hunt down his own people. Some of the slayers tried to play both sides of the game by acting incompetently, but their Red masters soon caught on to this. An incompetent could always be sent to the front. Ever the humane soul, Vincentas tried to moderate Lukas's hatred of slayers, but without much success.

Vincentas held prayer meetings because he was not ordained and could not say Mass. He listened to the confidences of troubled men, but he could not listen to confession, nor offer absolution. Those who were troubled or religious found their way to him and he offered them some comfort, even if his own comfort was in short supply. Like their friend Ignacas, Vincentas could not easily bear the cold. He was thin and developed a cough.

“Put another couple of sticks in the stove,” said Lukas when he heard his brother's chest heave yet again as they were working in the bunker one night.

Lukas was typing up the stencil by oil lamp, and Vincentas was waiting to crank out the next issue of their “newspaper.” It was a flattering term for a mimeographed sheet.

“Lukas,” said Vincentas, “are you busy?”

Lukas glanced over at his brother. They were only a metre apart and both sitting at the small table where Lukas squinted at the stencil and typed slowly in order not to make any mistakes.

“I'm typing.”

“Have you ever thought about what it's like to act ethically in war?”

“Not really,” said Lukas. He spoke slowly between hitting the keys.

“We discussed it in the seminary during the time the Germans occupied the country. We discussed how the normal rules of behaviour were lifted during war.”

“Yes,” said Lukas, slightly impatiently. “People kill people in war.”

“But not without cause. Even during a war, there is a system of values.” This was exactly the sort of talk that Vincentas was known for. He used to wonder about all sorts of abstract notions even as a boy on the farm. He had wanted to know if birds had afterlives, if it was immoral to eat meat, even on non-fast days, if women, since they were not permitted to be priests, had fully formed souls.

“I think there is a system of values, yes,” said Lukas, listening with half an ear. “Even during a war.”

“So are we at war?”

“We fire at one another.”

“But no one declared war between the Lithuanians and the Reds, did they?”

“No, because it's to the Reds' advantage not to. They call us bandits.”

“And how is a bandit to act ethically?”

“But we're not bandits. I've just said to you, we're at war.”

“I'm not sure I could ever kill anyone.”

“With any luck, you won't have to. But I hope that if somebody is threatening me or one of the others, you'll defend us.”

“I'll try.”

Lukas became slightly exasperated with his brother. “Think of the world we live in. Think of what we've seen already—our people killed by the retreating Reds in '41, the Jews cut down, soldiers shot to pieces, children blown up under artillery fire. You're talking as if you've never seen violence.”

“I've never had to carry arms before. I'm really a pacifist, you know.”

“The Reds will thank you for not defending yourself. Then they'll shoot you dead or haul you away to Siberia.”

“But I don't think I could ever shoot anyone.”

“So you won't be covering my back?”

Vincentas ignored the question.

Lukas stopped trying to type. He turned to his brother, intending to give Vincentas a good talking-to, the kind their father used to give the boy when he was philosophizing too much on the farm. But Lukas held back. His brother was hugging himself for warmth even though the wood stove made the underground room quite comfortable. Lukas would have to speak to Flint about getting Vincentas out of the partisans. Perhaps there was some distant village where he could live semi-legally as a clerk.

On a Sunday night in February, when the air was so cold the trees seemed to cry out in pain, Flint called the brothers up from their bunker. Outside, they found Ungurys and Lakstingala, both of them swaddled thickly against the cold and wearing knapsacks and carrying their weapons. Flint's pipe was unlit, but his breath streamed like smoke in the air.

“All right, you two,” he said, “you've been sitting around too long. You're going to get fat this way. Besides, it's time for your baptism.”

“Baptism?” Vincentas asked.

“By fire. Don't worry—nothing too exciting. Two of my best men will be with you.”

“Let's get moving,” said Ungurys through the scarf over his mouth. “If we stand still, we'll freeze to the spot.”

Vincentas and Lukas went with the other two and made their way to the market village an hour and a half away.

Lukas was glad to be going out, to be doing something besides listening to the radio and typing up news, if only to stretch his muscles. The mission was like a night game of the kind he used to play with the other farm children, but instead of a staff he carried a rifle strapped to his back; instead of a pocketknife, a long blade in his boot; instead of a flashlight, a grenade at his side. Still, it felt a little like a game. The men carried proclamations as well as other materials in knapsacks on their backs. The four walked across frozen streams and woods until they came to a spot along the main road out of the town, about a kilometre from the centre.

While Ungurys and Lakstingala kept watch from a hill alongside the road, Vincentas and Lukas nailed proclamations to each of three telegraph poles. They were posters depicting Stalin as a ghoul, consuming the country. Above each proclamation they nailed a warning sign forbidding passersby to remove the posters. At the third pole, the one farthest away from the town, Ungurys and Lakstingala took over, first wiring the poster to a device behind the pole and then setting up a primitive picket fence topped with barbed wire.

“What's that all about?” Vincentas asked.

“You do your job, we do ours,” said Ungurys.

Lakstingala tended to be talkative, but Ungurys had a slightly determined air, as if his missions were more important to him than they were to others. It was a form of seriousness that made him curt at times. Lukas liked him well enough, but not as much as his sister, who had been by once and come to look for Lukas to share a cup of tea with him. They didn't really know each other well, and she had sat in the bunker with Lukas while Vincentas asked her questions about her spiritual life.

Lukas and Elena had twice shared glances as Vincentas spoke, and in the first sliver of time a trace of understanding formed between them. She sensed that the older brother indulged the younger one in the same way that she took care of her own brother. They looked at one another again and this time they sensed something else, which made it impossible to look a third time.

Ungurys and Lakstingala took a long time, and it was shortly before dawn when they finished. Vincentas and Lukas were very cold, and they trotted up and down the road to warm themselves.

“Now we withdraw to a vantage point and watch,” said Lakstingala.

“Flint didn't say anything about that,” Lukas said.

“Not to you he didn't. He only tells you what you need to know.”

Using pine boughs, they erased their footprints and moved more deeply into the forest, up a slight rise and behind a thicket of bushes, which camouflaged them but permitted them a view of the road below.

Lakstingala and Ungurys lit cigarettes and smoked them, then buried the butts in the snow. They each carried a light machine gun, which they unslung from their shoulders and rested on their laps. Lakstingala instructed Vincentas and Lukas to ready their rifles, and they waited.

It was very cold, and they had been up all night, which made the cold bite even more. Ungurys gave Vincentas a dirty look every time he coughed, and so he tried to do it into his gloves whenever the need arose, muffling the sound.

An hour after dawn they heard a Studebaker coming out of the village, its exhaust a funnel of steam in the morning sunlight. The car drove past the first proclamation and then stopped and backed up.

Three slayers, the driver and a Cheka officer got out. The slayers cut the proclamation off the post with a knife. They did the same at the second telegraph post. When they came to the third, the officer and his driver stayed in the car and only the three slayers got out. Two of them, looking not much older than boys, stepped forward to remove the barbed wire and the poster. The third, considerably older, stood back to watch them work.

The explosion was so great that it blew the one man apart, toppled the pole onto the second and made the third throw his hands to his face, which had had bits of barbed wire driven into it. One of the side windows of the car was blown out as well and from inside it the partisans could hear the officer shouting at the driver. After a few moments the car circled and drove back into town.

The wounded man was disoriented, blinded, turning around and around as if expecting help to come from the car. He moaned and shouted incoherently. Ungurys snorted.

“The fool's expecting help. The other two will be shaking in fear and looking through the back window all the way home. They won't return until they have thirty men with them.”

“All right,” said Lakstingala. “Let's go home.”

“What about the poor man on the road?” asked Vincentas. Lukas looked at the man too. He was howling, his hands over his eyes and blood running down his cheeks.

“What about him?” asked Lakstingala.

“Aren't you going to take him prisoner?”

“We don't take prisoners. We have no place to put them.”

“You can't just leave him like that,” said Vincentas.

“You're right,” said Ungurys. “Put him out of his misery.”

“What?”

“If you feel so bad, you should shoot him.”

“Vincentas is new,” said Lakstingala. “He still has scruples. You can shoot him yourself.”

“The machine gun isn't accurate at this distance, and I'm not about to go down and up this hill in knee-deep snow just to save some slayer a little pain. You, Vincentas, shoot the man.”

Vincentas blanched and shook his head.

“I told you to shoot him.”

“There's no need.”

Lakstingala now sided with Ungurys. “You brought up the subject. Anyway, he's your enemy. He's probably condemned priests to death. You'd better shoot the slayer or Ungurys will have you up before Flint. He said you were supposed to be baptized, so get on with it.”

“I won't do it,” said Vincentas. Lukas noted a sudden change in his tone, a supercilious air that might provoke a man. Lakstingala noticed it too, the arrogance of the superior man, the intellectual who will not stoop so low as others.

“
Won't
do it?” asked Lakstingala. He was the more civilized of the two, the more genial, but a partisan was a soldier. Soldiers followed orders and expected others to do the same, especially unbaptized partisans.