Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  “What a ridiculous statement. I’ve had no peace of mind for years. I’ve watched my generation die out in the forests in order to save those behind us. Don’t make me seem like a simpleton.”

  She was going to respond, but the door was thrown open and two men came out. “Lukas,” one said, “you can flirt all you want later. But now you have to come back inside and answer more questions.”

  Regretting his sharpness, he turned to offer softer words, but Monika had slipped away.

  Lukas spent the following morning in a meeting with the émigré government, establishing the groundwork for their relationship with the partisans. There was a shortage of coal in the camp and so the room was very cold, all of them working at the table in their coats and hats, the recording secretary wearing gloves with the fingers cut out. Twenty men representing the various pre-war political parties worked together uneasily, intensely competitive among themselves.

  All the discussions about future governments of Lithuania had an air of unreality about them, of detachment from anything that might happen any time soon. Lukas felt ungrounded, as if he were floating in a sea of words.

  When the morning meetings ended and Lukas was eating canned corned beef sandwiches with the others, he looked up from his long table in the cafeteria and saw Monika talking by the exit door with another woman her age, a similar-looking woman who must have been her sister. Both had light brown hair and something French about them, a hint of style in the way they wore their scarves.

  He had enjoyed the strange meat sandwich. It was a little gelatinous and pleasantly salty. He was surprised by many of the foods he found in Germany, the powdered milk and cornbread and the various tinned foods. American cigarettes were a novelty too, for both their taste and their ability to function as alternate currency.

  A priest from the émigré government was explaining that it would take time for the Pope to respond to the letter from the partisans, but Lukas was only listening with half an ear. He excused himself and walked over to Monika.

  “How are you today?” he asked.

  No emotion of any kind showed on her face. “I’m as fine as I was yesterday. This is my sister, Anne.” She was maybe a year older than Monika and looked vaguely familiar, another one of the girls from the street of his university residence.

  “I thought I might have offended you,” said Lukas.

  “You seem to find women’s opinions unserious.”

  “I take women very seriously.”

  “Do you? It didn’t sound like it.”

  “Women in the underground were everything from couriers to machine gunners. We couldn’t have got by without them.”

  Suddenly he could not speak anymore. The talk of women in the underground made him think of Elena. Her image rose up in his mind so strongly that he could almost see her, almost believe that if he looked across the room she would be sitting there with the others, wondering why he was talking to this woman.

  Lukas stopped speaking and looked up at Monika in panic, afraid he might begin to weep in public, in the middle of a crowd. He excused himself. He tore down the steps of the cafeteria to the ground floor, conscious of the clatter of his shoes and the well-wishers who were trying to say things to him as he ran past them on the steps.

  As the hero of the resistance, he was the centre of attention. People looked at him, trying to understand the meaning of this sudden flight. Even out in the yard he could not contain himself, and he walked away from the camp into the town, and then beyond it onto a road in the countryside that led from the plain up toward the nearby mountains.

  He walked fast, hoping that if he moved quickly he might even be able to escape from himself.

  Most of the snow was gone from the road and the fields, though there were still dirty banks at the roadside and against the fence rails; icy water ran in the ditches from the melt higher up on the peaks. In places there were pools of water on the dirt road and he had to step carefully around them to avoid sinking into the muck. No automobile or cart hazarded the mud on this particular road, and so he was alone. Even the fields were mostly empty, with only some faraway cows nudging the earth to look for grass shoots, their bells plinking irregularly in the distance.

  He kept walking until he felt his shoulders stop shaking and the tears dried from his face. He did not understand how this could be happening to him. He faced losses no worse than many other people had suffered, and they had seemed to survive. What right did he have to be overcome in this way? The whole room he had spoken to, the whole DP camp, had stories of loss; it was the responsibility of every man and woman to keep up morale, not to let depression get to them. Not everyone could. Some were taken away to psychiatric hospitals, and others hanged themselves in the night. Still others walked around with smitten looks, or went on drinking binges that lasted for days.

  To fall into despair was to become a casualty of one kind or another, a victim of Red success, and he was damned if he would let himself become one. But he did not know how to stop these unbearable emotions from washing over him.

  He walked for a long time. The April sun felt warm on his face, although the angle was beginning to change and the colour of the fields around him yellowed in the late afternoon light. It was time to turn around. When he did so, he saw a distant figure approaching along the road. He feared it might be Monika, and his fears were confirmed when she was close enough to be made out. There was no way to avoid her.

  She had tied her hair back in a scarf, though a strand of it showed on her forehead. There was a thick streak of dirt on her coat and on the sleeve as well.

  He spoke out first. “You’ve fallen in the mud. I’m very sorry.”

  “It’s nothing.” She was searching his eyes and put her hands out toward him as soon as she was close enough. He took them in his, startled at her sudden proximity.

  “I must have embarrassed you back at the cafeteria,” Lukas said.

  “No, I’m the one who’s at fault. I was making fun of you in a way, I suppose, and you shouldn’t make fun of some things.”

  “It’s not that. You triggered a very strong memory in me. I’ve had some losses, you know. Not more than anyone else, but still.”

  “Yes, I know about your wife.”

  He was stunned. “How can you know about her? I didn’t think anyone knew about her.” He had to hold himself back or the tears would well up again.

  “Word gets out.”

  Now Lukas was mortified. All this time, while he had been on his lecture tour talking about the suffering of the people left behind, the audience must have known about Elena. The sympathy they had lavished upon him was therefore partially due to his own story. This public knowledge of the grief he had held back from himself was completely unbearable. Where he came from, a man did not parade his feelings. There were too many feelings to be had during the war, and the agony of one person did not deserve precedence over the agony of others.

  Monika let go of his hands and slipped her arm through his, as if they were old friends. “May I walk back with you?” she asked.

  “Of course. I promise I won’t break down like that again.” He was not actually sure he could keep his promise.

  “It wouldn’t matter to me if you did.”

  They began to walk back toward the town.

  “Tell me about where you grew up,” said Lukas. He wanted her to talk as much as possible in order not to have to talk himself.

  “I was a city girl, growing up in Kaunas with my sister. My father was in the ministry of education, but his parents and my mother’s parents both came from farm families. It’s funny, but when I think of Lithuania, I don’t think of the city where I spent most of my time. I think of the two farms where we spent the summers. One was a combination farm and mill with a great millpond where we swam all summer long and our grandparents spoiled us. We didn’t have to do anything at all. We were terrible. We’d stay up late, flirting with the farmhands, and then we’d sleep in in the mornings while they had to ge
t up at dawn to go to work.”

  “And your parents?”

  “My father was taken in the first round of deportations in 1940. They would have taken my mother and us too, but we were vacationing at the farm while he had stayed behind to work in town. He never actually said anything, but I suspect he knew what was coming because he sent us off to the countryside before school was out.”

  The Reds had taken many thousands of people right up to the first weeks of June 1941 and shipped them off to the North. When the Germans attacked, the Reds took some of their remaining prisoners with them as they retreated, but many were executed. For all the rush to retreat, some of those the Reds killed were tortured first and their mangled bodies left behind in heaps as lessons to the Lithuanians about anyone who chose to be anti-Soviet. Many of the Jews were immediately massacred by collaborators and Nazis when the Germans came a week later, and most of the rest were killed afterward.

  But the fate of many others, including those taken in the first Red deportations, was unclear. They were simply gone. Monika’s father might have died in the cattle cars, or made it to Siberia or the Komi Republic and died there, or survived and be working in a labour camp with no chance of communication. Thus all losses that were indefinite provided seeds of hope. Or of despair, the result of hope that could not be sustained.

  “And how did you get to Paris?” asked Lukas.

  “My uncle was the military attaché in Paris before the war and he stayed there. He took us in quite early, at the beginning of 1944. We were lucky to be there to see the Liberation. Since then, my mother gives piano lessons and my sister and I have given up our restaurant jobs, but we’re looking for something better now.”

  “How is life in Paris?”

  “Most people would prefer to go to America. Except for the artists and philosophers—they would prefer to stay in Paris.”

  “What would you prefer?”

  “My situation is very particular. I can’t leave my mother alone and I don’t know what other country will want to take a middle-aged widow, if she is a widow. And she doesn’t want to go anywhere in case my father does show up somehow. I won’t leave her alone to live on bread and marmalade in some freezing seventh-storey room. I think I’ll have to make my life in France, unless some other opportunity opens up. I’d rather go home, but I’m beginning to think that will never happen.”

  They had walked back into the town now. It was late afternoon and the shadows covered the narrow street entirely. It was pleasant walking with Monika. Being with her was like being on a vacation from himself. They were still some distance from the DP camp gates when a young man in eyeglasses, a functionary with the exile government, rushed up to them. Monika let go of his arm, which she had been holding all this time, and stood a little apart from him.

  “There is a man who needs to see you at the camp director’s office.”

  Lukas turned to Monika. “Thank you for coming out to look for me.”

  “Do you think you could make it to Paris to speak to the refugees there?” she asked.

  “Who doesn’t want to see Paris? And besides, I’d do it for you.”

  “How will we get in touch?”

  “The meeting is very important,” the functionary said, pushing his eyeglasses up by the crossbar and peering through them like a fish through a glass bowl.

  “Wait for me by the steps to the office,” Lukas said to him. “I’ll meet you there.”

  The functionary seemed disappointed in Lukas, but he did as he was told. Lukas turned back to Monika and took her hands in his.

  “You’ve lifted my spirits in a way I haven’t had them lifted for a long time. How much longer are you in the camp?”

  “We leave by train this evening. Our papers were only for a short visit, to hear you speak. But I can write down my address if you like.”

  She took a piece of paper from her handbag and wrote out the address. Lukas looked at it carefully and made sure he understood it before folding the paper and putting it in his wallet beside his passport. He had barely finished doing that when she stood up on her toes and kissed him quickly, once on each cheek, in the French manner. He did not quite know how to respond, so he squeezed her hands and turned to go to the director’s office.

  Zoly was waiting for him, smoking a cigarette while sitting alone at a table. He smiled warmly, set the cigarette in the ashtray and rose to shake Lukas’s hand.

  “Congratulations,” said Zoly. “Everyone loves what you’re doing and the money to the émigré associations has been pouring in since you started these talks. And the spring seems right upon you here. Back in Stockholm, it’s still the dead of winter.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “Just now.”

  “Staying long?”

  “Not really. A very short time, actually. It all depends on you. Do you feel like going for a walk?”

  “I just got back from one. I’ve been on the road for a couple of hours.”

  “It makes me a bit nervous to talk here. Maybe we could walk in the street.”

  Lukas went out with him, back into the town he had just passed through. He looked around for Monika but saw no sign of her.

  “So what’s this all about?” he asked.

  “Lozorius is going back into Lithuania and he wants to know if you’ll go with him.”

  “When?”

  “In two weeks. You’d need to come back with me in the car right now. There’s a little training you’ll need first.”

  “This is all so sudden.”

  “Yes, it is, but you’ve done everything you were supposed to, haven’t you? The letter to the Pope will do its work, or not, who knows, but you can’t speed that sort of thing along. Actually, the Vatican is still wondering what to do about Martin Luther, so I don’t think there’s any chance an answer will come soon.”

  “What kind of support does Lozorius have?”

  “What do you mean by support? Technical support? He’ll get transportation and radios and ciphers and all that sort of thing.”

  “I meant long-term support. What are the British promising to give the partisans?”

  “They make no promises, Lukas. They ask for the partisans to do a few things for them. Oh, and one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lozorius would be in charge of the operation. He wanted me to tell you that unless you agreed to that, he would need to withdraw the offer to bring you along.”

  “He can be in charge until we get into the country, but I have a certain position there. I report to my superior officer, Flint.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “That’s an odd question, Zoly. Why would you want to know that?”

  “Because Lozorius or some of the others might know him.”

  “Others? What others?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “This is beginning to sound stranger and stranger. How soon would I have to go?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Then I think my answer will have to be no.”

  They spoke briefly of other things as they walked. Lukas waited for Zoly to insist, but he did not do that. They returned to the camp so Lukas could write a letter to Flint to be taken in by Lozorius.

  Zoly was pacing out in the hall, and Lukas found it hard to concentrate on the letter he was writing. There was so much to say in a very short time. Also, he needed to provide a general picture of the situation in the West without giving away any secrets. He needed to warn Flint that Lozorius was acting on his own, without the support of the émigré government and in the pocket of the British. He had to write everything in a manner that would take into account the danger of Lozorius’s being killed or the letter falling into the wrong hands.

  And all of this he needed to do while wondering why Zoly had framed the offer in a way that forced Lukas to turn it down.

  FIFTEEN

  PARIS

  MAY 1948

  OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, the plan
e trees along the Seine had just burst into full leaf, their green still fresh and vivid because the dust of the city had not yet descended on them. On a quiet Sunday such as this, Lukas felt as if he might be in the countryside rather than the city. Flashes of light came through the leaves, reflections from the barges that sailed silently by on the river.

  Having paused in the delivery of his speech to a school auditorium full of émigrés, Lukas now looked back at the men and women before him. He had spoken in public often enough and he knew he held the audience in thrall with his stories of the resistance against murderous odds back home.

  He had been a fighter transformed into an emissary, and now he had become a storyteller, a role he did not like to think about too much. He knew what he did was important, but it was so much less vital, somehow, than what he had been doing before. Yet what he did now was attractive too, holding the attention of a crowd, even though they were far more varied than the DP camp inhabitants of Germany.

  There were émigrés who had come here before the war, sympathizers of the Front Populaire who had deplored the excesses of the Reds in Lithuania but could not quite bring themselves to denounce them. There were also French Foreign Legionnaires on leave from Indochina, young men who had wagered their lives for a few more years of fighting in the hope of gaining French citizenship. Many young women had joined convents in France before the war, and so there were at least thirty women in nuns’ habits. The remnants of the pre-war diplomatic corps were there too, including Monika’s uncle, a distinguished gentleman with close-cropped white hair and a ramrod-straight back, a man who had taken a special interest in Lukas during the reception beforehand. There were labourers from the Renault plant and students, adventurers down on their luck and former bureaucrats who now worked as doormen. They were the flotsam of the war, human wreckage cast up upon this shore, yet so much luckier than the ones they left behind. They did not get along with one another all that well in spite of their shared history, but they were kind to him and generous within their means.

  After the talk was over, Lukas lunched with them at long tables in the basement of the school. He was peppered by questions all through the meal, often from halfway across the room. Once the lunch began to wind down, a few of the legionnaires took him away over the protestations of the others and marched him up the street for a few beers on the rue St-Antoine, just west of the Bastille.