Underground (10 page)

“The partisans don't need your help now,” said Vincentas. “You can serve your country by finishing your studies and learning how to be good men and women. And the first thing you have to learn is not to betray one another. You, young woman, is it true you're in the Komsomol?”

She could not reply. She was weeping.

“Well, it doesn't matter. As long as you never intended to hurt anyone. And even if you have joined the Komsomol, you must love your classmates. How can you love your country unless you love the people in it? Study hard, and be good students.”

Vincentas suddenly became aware of himself, a dirty, wet man with a rifle in his hand giving a small sermon to the boys and girls. How long had he been gone from Lakstingala's band? He wasn't sure. He had to get out of there. He told the high school students to stay on the floor and listen to their teacher and not move until all the firing in the town had stopped.

Back out on the street, he heard very little gunfire. It occurred to him that the partisans might have retreated without him. Flint had drawn a rough map of the town and made them memorize it, and now that he knew he was at the school he might be able to orient himself and find his way back to the square.

But the snow and the smoke were bewildering, and soon he lost his orientation again. Two figures in white appeared in front of him, both of them dressed in battle gear, as Lakstingala and some of the others had been. He raised his hand to wave to them, and realized too late they were Reds. He raised his rifle at them and pressed the trigger but had forgotten to take off the safety. Rather than reach for it, he muttered the opening words of the last act of contrition.

SIX

AUGUST 7, 1945

T
HE WAR
had ended for the Westerners in Europe on May 8, 1945, after which Germans and Americans, English and French and others all laid down their arms and began the hard road to peace, the rebuilding of ruined cities, the denazification that would clear away the old enemies, and the counting of the dead that would lead to an understanding of the horror that innocent people had suffered through.

But in the East, no such end came. Instead, in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in Ukraine and Byelorussia and parts of Poland, the war went underground. For a while the partisans fought pitched battles from fixed positions, but now that Germany was defeated, the Reds could turn and devote their strength to making the new lands conform to their plan.

In the West, the demobilized soldiers went home to build homes and garages and to fill them with refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and cars. In the East, the project begun in the Soviet Union twenty years earlier was continued, and the farmers were stripped of their land. The mass deportations began in earnest again, the cattle cars rolling northeastward with hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, many to be starved, frozen or worked to death. Whole categories of people were doomed: school principals, former government bureaucrats, former army officers all the way down to sergeants, policemen, train conductors, nuns, monks and many priests, shop owners, and any farmers rich enough to have had hired hands.

The Reds could sweep the countryside and hold it as long as they were present, but as soon as they left, the partisans came out of their bunkers again to assassinate the local Reds whose job it was to collect requisitions, police the streets and, in particular, check the myriad documents that the regime began to issue. These documents multiplied till they became like the strips used to wrap mummies, and with the same effect: the immobilization and entombment of the bodies of the inhabitants.

By now, Lukas was accustomed to sleeping outside day or night, in the rain or snow, to eating whatever he had foraged, from a fish found frozen in the ice to spring sorrel. He could sleep in the branches of a tree if he had to. He could shoot a slayer dead at a hundred metres, if he had the right weapon, or blend so thoroughly into the landscape that a Red could pass right by him and not notice he was there.

Since the death of his brother, Lukas had learned to bury all feelings as deeply as possible, although they sometimes rose up and clutched at his throat. Tears ambushed him when he was alone on sentry duty or scouting the fields for roving bands of slayers. These eruptions did not relieve his sense of loss, or help him in any way to come to terms with his new life. They only made him feel worse, and he did all he could to keep his untamed emotions buried.

He struggled with this project of turning himself into an automaton. On the one hand, he did not want to think about his lost brother, whose body was never found, and he did not want to humanize his enemies, because those kinds of feelings would make him weak in the work he must do. On the other hand, if he had no emotions at all, he would not love his parents or his country or any-one else. He began to understand poor Ungurys a little better now. He had been taciturn in the extreme, but his sister, Elena, was warm. Ungurys must have shared some of this warmth until his life in the partisans hardened him. And yet it was strange that love of country should make one a killer, that love should lead to its opposite.

The longer the partisans lived in the countryside, the more feral they became; a bookbinder, a teacher or a carpenter ceased to be any of those people in the forest and became another creature instead.

The genus
Partisan
adapted and differentiated according to the places where the fighters found themselves. Flint's band belonged in the species of
Field Partisans
. It consisted of foxes that ran along the roadsides, among the brambles and through woodlots to dart into the fields and granaries when opportunities presented themselves. Visiting farmhouses at night, they knocked on the shutters to ask for food and news of slayer squads and Cheka interior army forces. If their luck was bad, the field partisans found their enemies on the other side of the shutters.

When the Cheka interior army hunted them with hounds, the field partisans dabbed their shoes with lamp oil to throw off the dogs, and slunk into thickets or underground bunkers, some cavernous and others no bigger than burrows. They built hideaways whose entrances were halfway down wells, under woodpiles or haystacks, or right out in the open fields. They fought viciously when cornered.

Field partisans ate better than the other species because they ventured out among people so often, but sometimes they did not return from their sorties. Their bodies joined masses of carcasses thrown into the marketplaces, shoeless and bloody, heaped up like Red trophies of the hunt.

Flint's band was attending a parliament held in the forest, an attempt to forge an alliance among the last free beings in the land. It was safer for partisan bands to be free-standing units because they were less likely to be traced, but they also needed to know what the other bands were doing. Somewhere far away, Lozorius was reputed to be working to keep open the lines of communication among them, but no one was sure what he was doing or even if he was alive. He was like a miracle, more an article of faith than a fact.

The summit was hosted by the
Pine forest Partisans
, who carried themselves far less watchfully than their field cousins. The deep pine forests covered the poorest, sandy land in Lithuania, where farmsteads were few and the Cheka rarely dared to sweep. Whole forest counties remained untamed by the Reds, whose quislings slept together in fortified houses in towns by night, and went out by day only in armed bands.

Tanks could not pierce forests, and rocket flares did nothing to illuminate the deep shadows of the woods. As a result, these forest partisans held themselves more upright in stature. They were lively and good-natured by the massive bonfires they built at night, secure in their forest cover.

But for all their humour and easy-going nature, they were a hungry lot because there was so little food to feed them, and they had to rely more heavily on the few farmers nearby, who were not well fed themselves. Pine forest partisans foraged for wild strawberries and mushrooms, grazing on wild greens when they could find them.

The forest partisans were wood bison, a little slow and heedless, but well defended by their horns whenever they came under attack. Always slightly hungry, they forayed out in groups to strike at remote food warehouses or railway lines.

The
Bog Partisans
were yet another species, men who lived on secret islands in the swamps. The bogs were vast and deadly to those ignorant of the underwater bridges that the partisans had built. The bog partisans were beavers, industrious in their engineering. They hid in the reeds, kept boats among the bushes, and saved ammunition by leading their enemies into sinkholes of mud, where a fully armed Cheka soldier might descend into the bog to join bodies that had been resting there since the Iron Age.

But the bog partisans paid the same price for their security as the pine forest partisans, namely hunger. They fished when they could, cut down trees in which ravens had built nests, and snared whatever rabbits lived nearby. Their damp surroundings and lack of food made them pale and watchful. Persecuted by mosquitoes, they either grew indifferent to their bites or went mad.

The bog and forest partisans preyed on caravans heading east. Now that Germany was defeated, the Reds were stripping it to feed their own people. Disassembled German factories rolled by on trains, as did houses, including doors and windows and even nails, straightened by prisoners of war before being set in boxes. Food went the same way. No one thought too much about what the remaining Prussians would eat. They were going to be driven out of the country anyway, and if some died, there would be fewer to move.

At present the local partisans had robbed a food train of sugar, and sprinkled it on everything the other partisans had brought, from barley soup to cucumbers. A year later, when the sugar had all been eaten, they would regret the lack of partisan dentists, and cure themselves with pliers.

Lastly there were
Town Partisans
, but these were few. They lived legally, or semi-legally with false documents, and helped to bring word of army movements and deportations, as well as lists of traitors who had signed up to become slayers or Red functionaries. The city partisans were mice, secretive and silent, but susceptible to capture in the traps set for them.

Elena was a town partisan, an underground courier who had come into the realm of the forest partisans first in order to visit her brother and then to collect copies of the underground newspaper to circulate back in her hometown. Now that Ungurys was dead, her visits to the free realm of the countryside were coloured by melancholy.

She slowly became aware that her workplace lay in the heart of an experimental agronomical project, an attempt to uproot the native growth and to sow the land with seeds that made a new sort of person. But the uprooting was an ongoing problem. The native growth was stubborn. And she came to realize she was an ally in this project of uprooting, or, if not an ally, then at least a functionary in the apparatus of destruction.

She would have to get out. She hated them all, from the affable but slovenly Gedrius, who was to be avoided in the cloakroom, to her roommate, the born-again Komsomol girl. It amused her sometimes that so many important officials of the new regime did not know they had an enemy in their midst, the quiet woman working the abacus and adding columns of numbers.

At first she had enjoyed the thought that her brother fought against these people in the forest. After his death, her loathing of the functionaries grew so much that she knew she wouldn't be able to disguise it much longer.

Elena had very large brown eyes and was aware that men found her eyes attractive, but she usually masked them with unnecessary glasses when she was at work. In any case, she did not normally look up very much, because her workplace was full of wolves that could tear her apart. Even Antanas Snieckus, the chairman of the Lithuanian Communist Party and a hard-core Stalinist if ever there was one, the man who had deported his own brother to Siberia in 1940, the man whose own mother fled Lithuania in 1944 before he returned with the Reds—even he had paused to look at Elena's eyes during an official visit.

Now she was sorry she had not taken the opportunity to kill him.

Elena's gentleness and simplicity were fading, and she was transforming into something different, hardening around the lips. She kept her shoulders square and wore a working woman's business suit and carried a leather satchel, altogether like a secretary on her way to work.

The partisan newspaper that Elena was supposed to pick up was three days late due to a lack of ink for the rotary printer, and the parliament of partisans was four days late because the bog partisans had had to make it through two separate swarmings of Chekists.

The parliament gathered in a forest meadow with a few trees inside the clearing, and in the shade of one of these Lukas was running off the last of the newspapers and laying them out in the sun to dry. He worked with the radio on a stump beside him, listening to the BBC, much of which he could now understand after a winter and spring of study with the American farmer. Nearby on the grass sat Ignacas in a jacket with a ripped collar and only one button. He had a switch in his hand and was idly whipping it back and forth in the air to keep off the flies. The BBC announcer said something in a voice slightly more inflected than the usual monotone.

“What did he say now?” asked Ignacas.

“Nothing much.”

“But what nothing in particular?”

“They were announcing the scores of the British football games.”

Ignacas sighed, partially in resignation and partially in envy. There were no football games in this part of Europe, not even high school against high school. The football coach might have been deported to Siberia, a child's parents might have fled to the West, and countless others had simply disappeared. Ignacas wished he could disappear as well.

He was hopelessly inept and never sent out on missions. He was not a good writer, dithering over his sentences too much to be of any use on the partisan newspaper. Worst of all, he was perpetually hungry and had been reprimanded once for stealing food from the stores. One more such incident and he might get court-martialled, which could lead to only two possible results: a further reprimand or execution by firing squad. And yet he considered himself a patriot.