Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  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.

  Lukas looked at his younger brother in wonderment. Did Vincentas not see what he was doing by this outright refusal? And couldn’t he hear himself talking down to these men?

  “Stop this nonsense,” said Lakstingala, his voice as cold as the winter day. “I order you to shoot the slayer.”

  In one smooth action, Lukas lifted his rifle, sighted and fired, the crack of the gunfire a blow to the ears, the smell of cordite immediate.

  Lukas lowered his rifle. The slayer had been shot in the chest and went straight down. Vincentas looked at him in horror.

  “Lukas, how could you do it?”

  “I put him out of his misery.”

  Lukas said the familiar words to calm his brother, but they did not reflect his own feeling, the strangeness of having committed an irreversible act. Before that moment he had been a student hiding out in the woods. Now he was something else, but the sensation was so new that he didn’t yet know the creature he’d become.

  Neither Lakstingala nor Ungurys was entirely happy about the way the morning had played out, but as the slayer was dead, there was no point in making Vincentas shoot him again. But Ungurys was still irritated, and he made Vincentas come up last behind them and reprimanded him twice for being sloppy in masking their footprints with the pine branch he was forced to carry.

  FIVE

  MARCH 1945

  THE TRAVELLING SHOEMAKER from Merkine warily approached the wooden footbridge on his way out of town.

  He watched for movement on the country road on the far side of the river, high now with chunks of ice and spring runoff. He had heard gunfire upstream and did not want to run into a firefight or a group of drunken soldiers trying out their new weapons.

  Gunfire in the countryside was as common as the cries of ravens. Rifles, hand grenades, pistols and bombs littered the forests and fields; one could find them in blueberry bushes, under stones or at the bottoms of rivers among the crayfish. The previous year, children had gone looking for them after the wild strawberry and mushroom seasons, when the ferns began to curl in the frost and revealed the scattered arms below their withered fronds. The children amused themselves by firing these weapons, sometimes shooting one another or blowing themselves up when trying to fish with grenades.

  The lost and discarded firearms had lain hidden by the snow over the winter but were reappearing with the irregular melts of early spring, only to be hidden again at the next snowfall. The harvest of firearms was so common that no one remarked on the occasional gunshot or explosion in the forest or fields.

  A red rocket arcing across the sky, on the other hand, festive as Stalin’s birthday fireworks, was a signal to Cheka troops that a major concentration of partisans had been found and help was needed. Sustained bursts punctuated by single shots from various types of arms, as well as explosions of grenades or tank rounds, meant that a fight was going on. The partisans fought pitched battles across the country that winter and spring, taking on troops by the hundreds. The Reds ruled the cities and towns, but much of the countryside and some of the villages went back and forth between the hands of the partisans and the Reds.

  The gunfire the shoemaker had heard was prolonged. It was a battle, but not a large one. He listened carefully before risking the narrow bridge where he would be exposed as he crossed six or seven metres in full spring flood, but he heard nothing more and stepped onto the boards. He stopped midway to look at the swollen stream, filled with clumps of ice a
nd clods of earth. Something white was floating on the water, bumping against the far bank. The shoemaker hurried to the far side, found a stick and pulled the item to shore.

  It was a prayer book, opened in the middle. He read the pages there, in particular the prayer for the dead: Raise your eyes to the heavens and pray for me, for though my body has been consigned to the underground, we will rise again together in a better life.

  The book had not been in the water very long; the middle pages were not yet thoroughly soaked. Flint would want to see this. The shoemaker made his way onto the forest road and began to take various paths. He stopped from time to time to listen for the snapping of branches that would signal he was being followed, but heard none.

  His home base was Merkine, but he did not spend much time there. The ancient town had once been a city, swept over by so many armies that military buttons from various centuries lay in strata in the fields nearby. The hill town at the confluence of the Merkys and Nemunas Rivers had an ancient church with a steeple, a wooden Russian Orthodox church from the time of the czar and even a stately red-brick high school, two storeys high. It had once been a Jewish school, but since their murder no more Jews were left to fill it. The town was now a patchwork of a few old brick or stucco houses and many wooden ones.

  The itinerant shoemaker had worked out of Merkine for over thirty years, walking to the farms within a radius of fifteen kilometres of his home, leaving the town trade to his lifelong competitor, a richer but older and stouter man who did not like to walk. With any luck the older town cobbler would die soon and the shoemaker could take over his trade. The travelling shoemaker was getting too old for so much walking, and it had become dangerous since the war started.

  Someone had denounced him as a spy, and Flint had ambushed him on the road and taken him deep into the forest for interrogation. The partisans were ferocious with spies, who sometimes lay in ditches to watch the comings and goings of partisans and then sold the information to the Cheka. The shoemaker protested his innocence and even offered to fix the partisans’ shoes to prove his good intentions. Luckily for the shoemaker, he had a straightforward manner, and some of the partisans had been in the forest for a year with the same boots.

  The shoemaker had intended to stay in Flint’s camp for a week at most, but he had so much work that he remained into December. He would have been working even longer if it hadn’t been for the coming snows, which made the partisans stay close to their winter bunkers. The Cheka loved the snow, and awaited it with all the joy of a hunter anticipating the opening of his season.

  It would have been better if the partisans had had wings to take them through the trackless sky. In that case they might have flown up to see that they were deep, deep in the Red-controlled zone, and there seemed to be no massing of American and West European troops coming to free them.

  This lack of troops would have been perplexing. The French and English had gone to war over Poland, so why did the Westerners let their young men die if not to save that country? Surely the next to be liberated after Poland should be Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which thought of themselves as part of the European family.

  No one else did. The English had decided to give the three Baltic countries to the Soviets if they ever asked, but the Reds never bothered. They believed they didn’t need to. Had the partisans been birds, one of them might have perched on a branch in Yalta, where Roosevelt told Stalin he could keep the Baltics as long as he was discreet. As for Ukraine, where the partisan movement was much bigger and fiercer, Roosevelt did not even think it was worth mentioning.

  And if the partisans could have looked into the future as well as into the distance, they would have seen a fog descending over Eastern Europe, a haze of ignorance in which much of what the Reds said was believed in the West. Anyone who had run away from the place, the Reds claimed, must have been a Nazi, and anyone who stayed behind to fight must have been one too. As the old archives were locked up, no respectable historian would write about the place because no respectable historian would work from secondary sources. As for what the partisans and émigrés wrote or said, their words could not be taken seriously. They were at best just pawns in a game they could not see properly, and at worst an entire race of criminals who hid out in the forests because they had nowhere to flee with their crimes.

  But the partisans, of whom Lukas was now a member, were confined to the time they lived in, to the earth they walked upon, often living beneath it in bunkers, where the papered walls grew mould in the corners, the ceilings leaked drops in every thaw, and the air was thin during the day because it was dangerous to put in too many air vents, which gave off steam in the cold. The bunker was a home and a trap, safe if secret, but deadly if found out.

  Now that the spring thaws had begun, the partisans could come out of their burrows from time to time, and the shoemaker could visit them. The shoemaker did not mind staying with the partisans as long as there was enough to eat and the men appreciated him, admiring his work and thanking him extravagantly, far more than customers who paid for their repairs with money. It was almost like being with a hunting party. The shoemaker spent his time more happily among these men than he had anywhere in years, even though his wife would scold him for being away so long and coming home with no money.

  At his house in Merkine, his wife kept the vegetable garden, a cow and a goat, and he returned every week or two, depending on the season and his business. She was the only person who made him hesitate about retiring in town once the other cobbler died. Sometimes there were moments of tenderness when he returned from a long walk among the farms and hamlets, especially if he brought home a little money. What would happen to those moments of tenderness if they lived together all the time?

  After finding the prayer book in the river, the shoemaker took half a day of circuitous forest travel to reach Flint’s camp. He told Flint his story and gave him the prayer book, and then set himself up by the fire, opening the wooden box he carried on a leather strap over his shoulder. Soon he was working on a pair of boots that needed new heels, and three men waited their turn, having no other shoes but the ones they wore on their feet.

  Flint sent a pair of scouts to find out how a prayer book had ended up in the river, and they came back with news soon enough. Three partisan couriers had stumbled upon a Cheka ambush and there was a firefight. The partisans withdrew as far as the river, and when their ammunition ran out, they opened their packages and flung their documents, letters and belongings into the river to keep them out of enemy hands, and continued to fire until they ran out of ammunition altogether. Then they blew themselves up.

  Flint reflected on the news as the men stood about, downcast. “Did they manage to destroy their faces?” Flint asked the scout.

  The families of dead partisans were singled out for harassment, sometimes for prison or deportation. Those killing themselves tried to destroy their distinguishing marks, particularly their faces, but whether the faces were destroyed or not, the Chekists set the bodies up in the marketplace as a kind of display. The Chekists took away their shoes and socks so the bodies looked poor, and sometimes they ordered people to beat the dead bodies with sticks.

  The Lithuanians were somewhat used to these types of displays. As far back as 1863, when Murayev “The Hangman” had been sent by the czar to suppress rebellion and the dead were permitted to rot on their nooses, displaying corpses was a means of inflicting terror. The Chekists watched to see who reacted.

  The job of identifying the dead was often left to old women, bobos, kerchiefed grandmothers, widows or beggars. Not even the Cheka bothered to imprison or deport them. Grandmothers knew the bodies of the young men well; they had taken care of them since childhood. A mole on the palm of the hand, a signature scar, a deformed thumbnail—any of these signs was enough. But how was an old woman to keep from crying out in grief if she saw such a sign?

  Flint did not know these particular partisan couriers; his men were all accounted for. They must have belo
nged to a neighbouring band.

  He couldn’t let the spring begin like this, with a defeat within his territory. It would not do for morale. And the thought of the bodies lying in the town square was unpleasant.

  “This is so very sad,” Flint said to the men gathered around for a meeting at the camp where Lukas and Vincentas had first met him. “But being sad all the time won’t do us any good. I think we should teach the Cheka some respect.”

  Lukas agreed along with the others that it would be good to act. He had not been away from the camp since the incident on the road. His study of English was not going well. Sometimes Flint would come to the communications bunker and listen to the French news, which he understood, and then translate it back to Lukas. But Flint wanted the BBC news. He believed that hope lay with the Anglo-Saxons, who were closer to the Americans.

  And it would be good to get out for the sake of Vincentas, who was spending more and more of his evenings praying. Maybe this was natural for a man who intended to be a priest, but Lukas wondered what he could say to God over two hours that couldn’t be said in half that time. Or less.

  Lukas missed his home, but he missed his university residence and his student friends even more. He had been on the brink of a new and better life, but that life had receded from him now. The only hope of ever bringing it back was to fight.

  It took a day to make contact with the neighbouring partisan bands and draw up plans to seize Merkine. It would show the Chekists they could not act with impunity. Six bands would attack different objectives simultaneously, and an assassin would shoot the two most ardent Reds in town. Others would bring back the bodies in the marketplace.

  Flint sent the shoemaker home to Merkine and told him to take his wife to another town and visit relatives for a few days. The shoemaker tried to do as he was told, but when he got home his wife was not tender at all, and she was in no mood for travelling on the muddy roads of spring. She called her husband a fool to his face for trying to get her to travel. She repeated her complaints about her husband to the women she saw every day after morning Mass, and word of his pressing need to leave town began to filter through to his neighbours.