Underground (14 page)

“You cannot quit the partisans. There is no quitting once you're in.”

“Then shoot me dead right here. I refuse to be separated.”

“Lukas,” said Flint, “tell her I'm right.”

“I won't do any such thing. You promised.”

“Yes, I did. But not to let you stay together right away. We need to disperse for a little while.”

“How long?” asked Elena.

“A few weeks at most. Now, come on.”

“Wait,” said Elena. She took Lukas by the hands. “Do you promise to come back for me?”

“I will. As soon as I can.”

“Don't die. Be very careful not to get yourself killed or captured, if only for my sake. You owe me that.”

He kissed her, and then stepped into the other sleigh and sped down a branching road.

It had taken longer than a few weeks, but now he was going for her.

After drinking their glasses of samagonas, Petras and his wife regained their colour and set to business, laying out their stamps, inks, pens and papers. Lukas went out to join Lakstingala on sentry duty, finding him seated near the barn with his back against a haystack. Like a sailor, Lakstingala wore his stocking cap in all weather, even the summer heat. He was a comforting man to sit beside because, although he was compact, he seemed to contain great strength, a reserve of potential energy that he could harness if he needed to.

“The smell of hay always reminds me of harvests and afternoon naps. It makes me sleepy,” said Lukas, settling in beside Lakstingala. “Aren't you afraid you'll drop off?”

“I never fall asleep on sentry duty,” said Lakstingala. “If I did, I would have been dead long before this.”

They each knew many dead, in addition to Vincentas and Ungurys. Almost a dozen men had fallen that day in Merkine, and twice as many in the year afterward. New men came to join them, but Flint, Lakstingala and Lukas were among the veterans, men you could be sure of, not only because of their experience but also because of their luck. Caution and skill were important for survival, but so was luck. Why did some fall in a firefight and not others? At any moment the three dice of skill, caution and fate were tumbling; a partisan could control two of the variables, but not the third.

In the last year Flint's band had broken into smaller units of five, very few with the knowledge of where the others had their bunkers. The era of bonfires and dancing in the forest was past, and as well the time of massive attacks upon towns and garrisons. The last really bold act had been the engagement party massacre in Marijampole. That act had been both gratifying and stupid. It lifted the spirits of the Lithuanians as word got out about it, but it excited a whole hornet's nest of Reds, Chekists and slayers, who combed the woods looking for partisans.

The latest partisan battle was against the settlers, Red soldiers who were encouraged to demobilize in Lithuania and take up the farms abandoned by those who had been deported or fled to the West. Lukas wrote public proclamations in Lithuanian and Russian, warning them not to take up the farms, and then letters to the new settlers, giving them a month to vacate their land. Lakstingala led the enforcement brigades that frightened off the settlers, or executed them if they did not heed the warnings.

This type of fighting was more damaging to the soul than battles with Chekists or slayers. Sometimes the settlers resisted, barricading themselves into their houses and shooting it out. It was important to remember that these were the enemy, that they had been warned, that they could have surrendered with a white flag and been escorted with their wives and children out along the road. Still, it was hard to drop a grenade into a house with women and children inside.

Lakstingala and Lukas did not have that much in common, but they had been together in Flint's band for almost two years, and so they had become comrades. It was easier to talk to someone like Lakstingala than it was to some to the newer recruits.

“What if the Reds come up on us from the other side of the haystack?” asked Lukas. “You won't see them coming.”

“The rest of the American's family is working in the fields that way. They'll come running if anything's up.” Lakstingala took out a pouch of tobacco and some papers. He rolled a cigarette but did not light it because of the haystack. The smell of the hay at his back reminded Lukas of home.

“Going to do a little travelling?” Lakstingala asked.

They compartmentalized each other's lives, knowing some parts and staying intentionally ignorant of others. The question itself was a sign of their intimacy and comradeship.

“Personal business.”

“You're a fool,” said Lakstingala without a moment's hesitation and without a great deal of inflection.

“What do you mean?”

“Anything personal will put you at risk. You'll be caught in a moment.”

“I'll be careful.”

“There's no being careful in a trap. Once you're inside, they'll spring it on you and that will be that. And you take this risk to see Elena?”

“That's right.”

“You'd give her a better chance of survival by staying away from her. Don't you think the Reds would love to catch the two of you together? You'd be a real prize. If they caught you alive, they'd put your photos on the cover of the local
Pravda
. If they killed you, they'd set your bodies up side by side in the market square and put a wedding veil on her body to satisfy their sense of humour.”

“You're sounding a little too angry, my friend. I can't help it that I'm in love.”

“What kind of love could that be? You hardly know one another. A few meetings and one mission and your head's been turned.”

“People fall in love at a dance in one night. It happens.”

“No, you're confusing comradeship with love.”

“You're my comrade, but I don't love you.”

“Don't make fun of me. I'm serious.”

Lukas took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. “Look who's talking about love! A bachelor soldier like you!”

“I'm no bachelor. I'm married.”

“What? You never told me that.”

Lakstingala shrugged. “You never asked me.”

Lukas looked at him with new interest. “I had no idea. And you've never seen your wife all these years?”

“Not much.”

“But a little, right?”

“A little,” Lakstingala conceded.

“So why do you begrudge me?”

“Because I'm worried that you're turning soft just as things get harder, just when you should be getting tougher. We're not the first ones to go into the woods, but we've lasted longer than anyone else. How are we going to survive unless we turn our hearts to stone?”

“I don't understand you.”

“It's not the Reds that worry me. It's your feelings. Those are what are going to get you killed.”

“How is it possible to live without feelings?”

“It's not, but you have to bury them in order to fight. If you become soft, you'll see the eyes of his mother in every Red you kill and you'll hesitate, and one day you'll die yourself. The only feelings you should have are a thirst for revenge and righteous anger.”

Lakstingala looked at Lukas's face, deeply tanned now in the summer, the eyes uncannily bright against the darkness of his skin. He could see a hint of a smile in Lukas's eyes, and the condescension annoyed him.

“You take over sentry duty,” said Lakstingala. “I'm going for a smoke.”

Lukas couldn't understand why Lakstingala was so angry. He was going to get his fiancée, and if possible show her to his parents before bringing her back to Flint's band.

At the train station in Lentvaris, a town on the outskirts of Vilnius where he slipped back into the aboveground world, Lukas beheld the daylight movement of normal townspeople for the first time in a long while. The forger had assured him that the false documents could pass any inspection, but Lukas carried himself cautiously, even in this unaccustomed mass of people so large that it seemed they would breathe up all the oxygen in the air and leave none for him.

He had been a free animal, and now he stepped back into the zoo and found it stifling. Unaccustomed to wearing a shirt and tie, he felt as if he were being strangled, but did not dare loosen the knot or open the buttons of his jacket for fear of giving away the package that hung on his chest from a string around his neck.

He carried a worn leather satchel with a change of socks and underclothes, a physics textbook, notes, half a loaf of heavy black bread and two thick pieces of country bacon he might eat or use for bribes. He also had binoculars, which were slightly suspicious, but if he was searched he could say he was trying to sell them. He had no weapon except for a paring knife that he kept in his jacket pocket.

The world had changed since he last travelled through it openly, and the Lentvaris station was not as empty as he had hoped. There were dozens of new draftees, those born in 1927, as well as Red Army sergeants and officers who kept an eye on them to make sure they did not desert before reaching their training base. The draftees clutched packages of food from home and wore sturdy civilian clothes, as they'd be neither dressed nor fed during basic training. Nor issued live ammunition, because the AWOL rate was so high.

The tiny station, platform and entranceway were packed with other travellers, from Communist Party workers to demobilized Red Army soldiers, prisoners travelling with guards, beggars, and black market speculators from Byelorussia. Some had been waiting for days for a train, and they slept with their heads on their brown paper packages, pillowcases stuffed with used clothing, and suitcases full of hand soap or woollen socks or other items in short supply in one place but abundant in others. Lukas had to pick his way over them to make it to the ticket window, where dozens of travellers jostled for the right to bend down in front of the low grille and entreat the stony-faced seller to let them buy a ticket. Only the more persistent Cheka operatives with extravagantly foul vocabularies managed to squeeze tickets out of him.

Lukas searched carefully among the shouting, disgruntled travellers, the despairing old women hoping to visit their sons, the soldiers, the bewildered farmers going to appeal to government officials, and he finally identified the weary stationmaster, who walked out occasionally among the masses waiting for tickets or trains. He was slovenly and unkempt, frustrated and irritated by the impossible task of keeping order.

“Excuse me,” said Lukas, and the man looked at him, slightly pushing up his cap by the bill and then placing his hands on his hips like someone preparing for another fight. Lukas explained that he was faculty from the technical university in Kaunas and needed to make it to that city by early the next morning to give a lecture. The stationmaster shrugged and waited, and finally he did extend his hand to shake Lukas's when it was offered. Then he turned away to study the size of the bill Lukas had placed in his palm—a hundred rubles. The stationmaster turned back to him.

“Wait over there,” he said, motioning to a corner with his head. “I'll see what I can do.”

He returned in ten minutes with a ticket, for which Lukas had to pay, and asked for another fifty rubles to pay off the guard, as each car had one, whose job it was to throw off the pressing masses. Lukas suffered a twinge of guilt for the country folk, whom he knew would not get tickets. These meek people would never get what they wanted until they learned to pay bribes. They were a very long way from inheriting the earth.

The train arrived an hour later, guards standing on the steps of each car and holding on to the handrails on each side to block the way of anyone trying to get on board without their permission.

The train was full. Even those with tickets and those who had paid bribes were not permitted aboard, and immediately there were shouting matches as high officials showed their tickets and swore at the guards. Some of the bigger men, or those in twos and threes, pushed their way past the guards only to find that all of the compartments inside the cars were full, and so they settled themselves in the corridors. Others leapt onto ladders only to be beaten back by guards. But there were more wanting to travel than there were guards to beat them off, and no sooner was a ladder cleared of two or three men clinging to it than it filled again as the guard moved on to beat those who had slipped up to the open platforms between cars.

Lukas waited until one such guard had cleared a platform and moved off and then hoisted himself onto it just as the train wheels began to turn. Another man was already standing there, a clerk or government official of some kind who could not bear the crush in the corridors and had stepped outside. Lukas offered him a pre-rolled cigarette.

The man nodded, took it and lit up. “Safer out here anyway,” said the man between puffs of smoke.

“Why's that?”

“Two men were murdered in this wagon last night, and their bodies thrown out the window. Killed by demobilized soldiers having a little fun, I think. They let a couple of civilians into their compartment and then robbed them during the night and ditched their bodies.”

The distance to Kaunas was only a hundred kilometres, but the train moved very slowly and stopped at every station along the way, and at each station the scene at Lentvaris was repeated. By the time the train was halfway through its journey, it was already the middle of the night and the outdoor platform where Lukas, the clerk and half a dozen others stood was very full.

Lukas was leaning with his back by a broken window when a hand came up from inside and seized him by the neck. An opportunistic thief must have seen him as easy to kill, but many Reds had tried to kill Lukas over the last year and none had succeeded yet. Lukas crouched down as far as he could, putting pressure against the assailant's forearm, pulled the paring knife from his jacket pocket and cut across the top of the hand at his throat. He heard a yelp of pain and the hand withdrew back inside the door.