The room broke out in laughter.
Ignacas was a good-natured man, so he laughed at himself along with the others. He laughed so hard that he had to wipe tears from his eyes before going on. “Europeans are one big family, and the Americans are just an extension of that. They would no more forget us than they’d forget their children.”
“My father forgets me whenever I ask for money,” said the engineer, “but he remembers me again when it’s time to harvest back at the farm. The Americans are like that too. They’ll remember us when they need us.”
This statement brought on a note of sobriety, because no one could think of anything the Americans would need the Lithuanians for.
The next day, Lukas was asked to go out with an expedition to dig peat for the coming winter to heat the university buildings. It was already September, too late to dry the peat well for the winter, but the university was desperate. Thus, for a week Lukas spent his time digging up squares of peat and then going back the next day to turn them so they dried more quickly. The expedition had difficulty finding transportation to bring the peat back to Kaunas because farm horses were in short supply due to the war and the harvest season, but eventually they had the damp squares stocked in the sunny library courtyard in the hope that they would dry in time to be used during the winter.
When Lukas finally made it back to his dormitory room at midday a week later, he found Lozorius sitting on the bed. Lozorius had prominent ears and eyes a little more widely spaced than most. He was usually in high spirits, but when Lukas looked at him Lozorius stared back with a stricken face.
“What are you doing here?” asked Lozorius.
“I’ve come back from the peat expedition. I was just going to clean up and go to my afternoon class.”
“I thought they might have taken you. Ignacas was taken away this morning. They’ve taken your brother too.”
“Taken Vincentas? Where?”
“To prison.”
“What for?”
“Nobody knows for sure. They took me too, but they let me go.”
Lukas’s first thought was for his brother, but Lozorius continued to wear an odd look. “What happened to you?” asked Lukas, sitting down beside him.
“They signed me up.”
“Who did?”
“The Cheka.”
These were the secret police, the interior and exterior troops who called themselves NKVD or KGB or MVD and various other names. But to the people, they were Cheka. To join them, to become a Chekist, was to join the Reds at their worst.
“Why did you agree?”
“Not much choice. No one knows where my father is. He went to visit his brother while the front moved across Lithuania and he never came back. Maybe he’s been killed or maybe he went west. But they said his absence makes me suspect. They said they’d have to keep me under lock and key unless I agreed to work for them.”
“Doing what?”
“Reporting on what all of you say.” Lukas grimaced involuntarily, and Lozorius put his hand on his forearm as if to hold on to their friendship. “I can’t stand to be locked up. I need to be free.”
“Some freedom.”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this. But do me a favour. Spread the word about me, will you? I don’t want anyone talking politics in my presence.”
Lukas drew his arm out from under Lozorius’s hand. No matter how much his friend protested the impossible circumstances of his situation, Lukas was slightly disgusted by him. He should have found another way out. More pressing, though, was the matter of Vincentas.
The seminary was a short walk from the university, in a walled compound of a former Bernardine convent. It had been a very beautiful place, with a fine baroque church, but both the German and Red armies had used the seminary, and the walls were broken in places and the roof of one of the stables had caved in. The late summer air made the benches beneath the trees seem attractive at a distance, but the bench that Lukas passed had a turd on it.
The cleric at the reception desk seemed preoccupied, even angry, and could tell Lukas nothing about his brother. Lukas had to search out his brother’s roommates, whom he found smoking outside the library. They were not much more forthcoming than the cleric at the reception desk, but Lukas did find out that his brother had been one of three seminarians taken away to prison. No one knew why.
The prison administration would tell him nothing either, whether Vincentas was there or had been shipped out, but a pasted notice in the reception room said packages were accepted for inmates between ten and noon each working day. That night Lukas put together a parcel containing bread, smoked meat from home, a change of clothes, a comb, soap, toothpaste and a toothbrush. The package was accepted the next day. Now, at least Lukas knew where his brother was.
The mood back at the dormitory had changed since Ignacas had been taken away. People spoke far less than they used to, and there was a kind of sullenness in the air. No one threw parties. Lozorius was preoccupied as well, absent most of the time, but silent and furtive when they met.
Three days later, Vincentas appeared at Lukas’s classroom door as the students were leaving. Lukas embraced him, relieved that he would not have to write the dreadful letter to his parents. Vincentas looked tired and frightened. His spectacles were crooked and Lukas could see thumbprints on them.
Their parents were religious, and of all the children, Vincentas had taken to religion most. He always seemed to look through the surface of things to something good beyond. But now he seemed to have seen something less than divine.
“Did they beat you?” Lukas asked.
“A little. Not much. Not as badly as some of the others. They just kept questioning me about a paper I was supposed to have been aware of. The cell was very full and it was hot in there.”
“What paper?”
“Some sort of subversive document they found in the room next to mine. I was supposed to have known about it.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Vincentas broke off and looked at Lukas searchingly. Lukas was not sure what he wanted at first, but divined that Vincentas was seeking some sort of support or direction from his older brother.
“You should go back to the seminary and get some sleep,” said Lukas.
“Somebody betrayed me there. I wouldn’t feel good. And besides, the authorities released me.”
“You weren’t guilty.”
“No, but the other two were kept behind and I know one of them was beaten badly. If I was released, the others will think I’ve been let go to spy among them.” Vincentas looked down, as if he could not bear to look into his own brother’s eyes.
This was not the same Vincentas who had walked to Kaunas with Lukas several weeks earlier. It seemed odd that he should be so shaken by what had happened. Anyone so shaken after three days in a cell and lucky enough to have been released would not do well under greater pressure.
Refusing to do so much as step into a classroom at the seminary, Vincentas moved in with Lukas, who tried to get leave documents that would permit them to return home for a few weeks. But the noose around the necks of men of their generation was tightening. Travel documents were getting harder to obtain and there was talk that the humanities department would be closed down altogether.
Vincentas brooded in Lukas’s residence room day after day and week after week, stretched out on one of the beds most of the time. There was room now: Ignacas and the lowlander were gone, and Lozorius had disappeared. In an effort to distract Vincentas from his musing, Lukas made him go with him to some of the classes at the university. They were returning from just such a class late one winter afternoon when they ran into Lozorius, walking along the narrow sidewalk of an empty quarter in the old town.
Lukas’s fellow student was utterly transformed from the distracted Cheka recruit of a few short weeks before. He walked with an easy step that one hardly ever saw on the streets any longer. He was slightly cocky, his eyes prominent and bright, his
shoulders square. As always, his ears were turned out, making him seem a little funny too.
“Vincentas!” said Lozorius happily. “You got out of prison. Congratulations! Did the Cheka try to recruit you?”
“No,” Vincentas said awkwardly, removing his glasses and wiping them distractedly, “they just beat me. A little.”
“Consider it a positive sign of your true heart. They knew you could never betray anyone from the moment they saw you. Believe me, the Chekists are some of the best psychologists in the country.”
Lukas looked around uneasily. One did not have these kinds of conversations in the street any longer. The Jewish quarter was mostly empty, many of the windows just gaping holes in the buildings, the glass and even the frames smashed. But there could be squatters in there somewhere among the abandoned houses and courtyards, people who might be scavengers of information they could sell to the Cheka. Three people talking together on the street would also be suspicious to police or military patrols. The army would want to know why they were not in uniform, and the police would separate them and ask what they had been talking about. Anyone who did not behave as if he were hunted was an affront to the hunters, an insult to their power.
Lukas tugged on Lozorius’s sleeve. “Come in here.”
They stepped through the broken door of a wooden house, and then went more deeply inside to another room that had no other light but what came in through the doorway. The place smelled of mould and cat piss. When they could go no farther, Lukas turned and looked at Lozorius, whose face beamed unnaturally in the gloom.
“You look well,” said Lukas.
“I feel it.”
“Did you reconcile yourself to working for the Cheka?”
“The opposite, actually. I decided that I couldn’t live like a slave. I needed to be free, so I made myself free in my mind.”
Lukas believed in good spirits and a light tone, but the world they were living in was getting darker. They were under their third occupation in six years, and had become like grain in a mill—soon the stones would grind them to dust.
“So what are you doing here?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you around for weeks.”
“I have to organize the transport of a printing press, no easy matter these days.”
“A printing press?”
“I’m with the partisans now.”
“Keep your voice down,” said Lukas.
Lozorius laughed, his voice echoing slightly in the empty room. “Nothing to fear around here. The place is deserted. Anyway, with the printing press, we make up our own documents. I’m moving around with forged documents myself. I passed through three checkpoints today without any problem.”
Lukas considered the information. Under the Reds, one could not go anywhere without some kind of document. Papers were needed to leave town, to live in town and to undertake any sort of trip at all.
“Our younger brother, Algis, is hiding out at home because he’s afraid to be taken by the army,” said Lukas.
Lozorius reached into his breast pocket. “No problem. I have some blank military exemptions. Here, take two. The only things you need to be careful about are the official stamps, but if you have any skill at all with carving tools you can make those up yourselves.”
“You’re not afraid?” Vincentas asked.
“Not anymore. The forests are full of people like me. We rule the whole countryside by night, and some parts by day as well. It’s only in cities like this where young men tremble.” He looked at his watch, squinting to make out the hour in the gloom of the abandoned house. “I have to get moving. It’s a complicated job, because even a small press is heavy. Good luck in your studies. I’ll see you around.”
Although it had been good to see Lozorius, the street seemed all the more forlorn after he left, the dormitory all the more unwelcoming for his absence. Vincentas lay down on an empty bed and stared at the ceiling as Lukas sat at the desk and tried to read. The university had quickly instituted an obligatory course on Marxism-Leninism, but there were not enough texts and he had to read his own quickly before passing it on. The economic theory was deathly boring and did not hold his interest.
The dormitory was unusually quiet for late afternoon, a time when students should have been returning to their rooms.
In winter the night came early, and soon it became too dark to read. Lukas turned on the overhead lamp and looked over to see if Vincentas was sleeping. He was not. Behind his eyeglasses, his eyes were open and fixed upon the ceiling.
Vincentas sensed Lukas’s look. “It’s only a matter of time before they come for me,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know. The Germans are collapsing. When the war finally ends, they won’t care about young men like us anymore. We’ll be all right.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
Lukas wondered how it was possible for younger brothers to be both needy and touchy at the same time. Vincentas tested his patience.
“What do you want me to say? That you’re doomed? First, I don’t believe it, and second, even if it was true, I wouldn’t say it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s unlucky and does you no good. Didn’t they teach you anything at the seminary? Isn’t despair supposed to be a sin?”
“Yes, it is.”
“So how are you supposed to fight it?”
“With prayer.”
“Well?”
“I’ve been praying for weeks, and it doesn’t seem to do me much good. I wish we could go home. I miss the open fields and the forest. I feel hemmed in here.”
“We could make ourselves some forgeries.”
“It would probably take too long.”
A door banged downstairs and some muffled voices made themselves heard through the walls and doors. Even at a distance, even muffled, the words sounded harsh and brought no liveliness to the building.
“I want to live like Lozorius,” said Vincentas.
“A partisan?”
“They’re free.”
“Winter’s just beginning. What do you think it’s going to be like in that season? Shivering in the cold in some barn.”
“It’s going to be cold here too. There’s no coal. We’re hungry all the time.”
“You were never very good on the farm. You’re an intellectual from the first. You’d make a great priest or a teacher or some kind of administrator. The woodland life of a partisan isn’t for you.”
“You think you know everything, don’t you?”
“I’ve watched you grow up. I was barely out of diapers when I had to take care of you.”
“But I finally did grow up—you don’t need to take care of me any longer. I’m going to find Lozorius and join the partisans.”
“Speak a little more softly, will you?”
“Listen to yourself. You’re behaving like a slave already. We’re afraid here. I’m sick of being afraid.”
“Do you think skulking through the forest is going to be any better?”
“I do.”
Lukas studied Vincentas, whose face was flushed with emotion and whose eyeglasses were in danger of fogging up from his passion. His chest was narrow and his manner nervous. There was no way Lukas could permit his brother to go into the forest alone. He would go with Vincentas, just for a while. Lukas’s studies would have to wait.
THREE
LITHUANIA
DECEMBER 1944
ASAD, SINGLE OIL LAMP burned in the window of a farmhouse where a middle-aged man hunched over a newspaper. Sleepless, he flipped the pages, looking for something to distract him.
His right hand was missing the index and middle fingers, and his right shoulder sagged a bit lower than the left, scars of industrial accidents from his other life in America. His wife and three children lay asleep on benches and beds in the combined farm kitchen and parlour, the warmest room now that the December cold had descended on them.
The locals called him the American. Unlike the others who had disappeared into America to
make new lives for themselves, he had returned, a migrating bird that lost its way.
Back in the 1920s, as an immigrant to America, he’d worked hard in the Worcester Spinning and Finishing Mill. In those days he suffered from homesickness. He couldn’t get used to the endless noise of the looms, the shouting of foremen and the honking of cars out in the street. The mill was dangerous, taking first one finger and then another. He became slightly deaf and didn’t hear a truck backing into him, breaking his right shoulder. He thought then that he was living in hell and dreamt of returning to the fields of his homeland.
Little by little he put money aside, until he could stand America no more and returned to Lithuania in 1931 to buy almost forty acres of land. He married and had children. His hand and his shoulder could not be healed, but the rest of him felt stronger in compensation. His colour became better from working out of doors and eating well. If anything, he worked harder on the farm than he had back in the U.S.A., but he could see the fruits of his labour, and he imagined his dead parents, a landless farmhand and a maid, looking on approvingly from up in heaven at their landowner son.
If there was such a thing as heaven. Over the last few years, as his luck began to turn for the worse, he had started to doubt there was any divine plan at all.
The Red requisitions were stiff enough in 1940, when farmers were forced to sell produce to the state at very low prices, and then the German requisitions were higher still. And now the farmer had a glimpse of the future, and he didn’t like what he saw.
The numbers the new regime asked of him were frightening: four hundred kilos of meat, so he had to kill two of his cows and thereby fell behind on his milk requisition; one thousand kilos of wheat, although it had been trampled in the fields by both the German and Red armies; a thousand kilos of potatoes, although there had been no farmhands available to dig them out because all the hired hands, the workers, had been drafted or fled to the forests. And maddeningly, the potatoes and wheat that he did manage to deliver were dumped in a yard and left to get wet and rot because there was no room in the warehouse.
The state policies didn’t make sense. He couldn’t understand why they wanted to destroy him and his farm. Wouldn’t these actions destroy the Reds as well? He wished he could go crazy if only to reconcile himself to living in a madhouse. His neighbour, Javas, the one with the big mouth who couldn’t learn to keep his thoughts to himself, was already in jail for failing to meet his quota. Two of the neighbouring farms were empty, gone to seed, one through deportation of the family and the other because the farmer had fled west. The farms were going back to wilderness, back to weeds and grass. Left long enough, they’d go back to the forests they’d been carved from hundreds of years before.
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